School Notes: School of Music
September/October 2011

Norfolk Festival

The Yale Summer School of Music/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival celebrated another summer of education and performance. The season opened June 12 with a gala appearance by the renowned King’s Singers. The pianist Jeremy Denk, who has earned exceptional acclaim for his recent recording Jeremy Denk Plays Ives, performed Ives’s “Concord” Sonata. (Ives, a lifelong Connecticut resident, was a member of the Yale College Class of 1898.) For the first time, dancers took the stage in the historic Music Shed: Full Force Dance Theater performed original choreography to Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, conducted by faculty member Ransom Wilson. The 2011 season closed with another stellar guest ensemble, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra with music director Nicholas McGegan. The festival also continued its decades-long tradition of providing professional, intensive training to gifted young musicians in three programs: the New Music Workshop, the Chamber Music Session, and the Chamber Choir and Choral Conducting Workshop.

New York Series Features Walton Opera

A highlight of the upcoming Yale in New York concert series will be a performance of William Walton’s The Bear, a one-act opera based on a Chekhov short story. William Boughton, a Walton expert and music director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, will conduct the performances, which will also feature singers from Yale Opera and members of the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale. The autograph sketches of The Bear, along with nearly all of Walton’s original manuscripts, reside in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library as part of the Frederick R. Koch Collection.

San Francisco Opera Premieres Work by YSM Faculty

San Francisco Opera will present the premiere of Heart of a Soldier, a new opera by faculty composer Chris Theofanidis ’94MusAM, ’97MusAD, with libretto by Donna DiNovelli. The premiere takes place on September 10; the work was commissioned to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Heart of a Soldier, based on the book of the same name by Pulitzer Prize–winning author James B. Stewart, tells the story of Rick Rescorla, who successfully evacuated Morgan Stanley’s 2,700 employees from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Wanting to look for others in the building, he went back in and was killed when the tower collapsed. Baritone Thomas Hampson will sing the role of Rick Rescorla, and Patrick Summers will conduct the performances at War Memorial Opera House.