 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Music from Salem 25 East Main Street Cambridge, NY 12816 518.232.2347 privacy policy |
 |
Grand Canyon National Park Selected Artists - South Rim
- 2010 - 2011
Cellist Rhonda Rider is the February 2011 artist-in-residence.
Rhonda lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the Chair of Chamber Music and on the Cello Faculty at The Boston Conservatory and teaches doctoral candidates at Boston University. Rhonda also is Artist-in-Residence at Wellesley College with her piano trio Triple Helix. A founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Lydian Quartet, with whom she played for more than twenty years, Rhonda's chamber music and solo recordings have been nominated for Grammy Awards and cited as Critic's Choice in both the New York Times and Boston Globe. As a soloist she won the Concert Artists Guild Award, as well as an Aaron Copland Recording Grant. She has performed at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Corcoran Gallery, Wigmore Hall (London), Library of Congress, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has been a guest artist with both the Boston Chamber Music Society and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Chamber Music Series. During the summer months, she performs and teaches at Music from Salem (NY) and the Green Mountain Festival (VT). She serves as the cello coach for the Asian Youth Orchestra in Hong Kong.
Rhonda: "As a professional cellist, my life is filled with an extraordinary variety of music— masterpieces from the past as well as the present. Works by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are profoundly meaningful and I consider myself fortunate to live so closely with them. Another of my great joys is working with living composers. Having the opportunity to bring a new piece to life through the exploration of fresh ideas and innovative sound worlds is tremendously exciting and rewarding. For this project I have asked ten celebrated composers to write works inspired by Grand Canyon. Each person's experience of the canyon's grandeur, while profoundly personal, can also bring us in touch with the universality of nature and the human experience. The highly versatile sound of the cello is a wonderful medium for this project, singing at times like a human voice and at others like an ancient instrument from another world. Composed by exceptional musicians with unique perspectives from diverse backgrounds, these pieces will undoubtedly be beautiful, moving, and extraordinary—as is Grand Canyon itself."
While in residence Rhonda will present two performances—one for the public and one for local school children. The public performance will be an evening program held on a February 26th in celebration of Grand Canyon's 92nd anniversary of becoming a national park, and will feature both hallmarks of the cello repertoire as well as new work that Rhonda has commissioned specifically for this residency. The public school performance will focus on actively engaging the kids in answering: What does the Grand Canyon sound like to you?
Composers Yu-Hui Chang (Brandeis University); Marti Epstein (Boston Conservatory & Berklee College of Music); Howard Frazin (Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA); Laura Kaminsky (Symphony Space, NYC), John Kennedy (Santa Fe New Music); Jeffrey Mumford (Oberlin Conservatory); David Rakowski (Brandeis University); Jan Swafford (The Boston Conservatory); Andy Vores (The Boston Conservatory); Dalit Warshaw (The Boston Conservatory) will contribute to the performance programs. In studio Rhonda will pursue a rigorous rehearsal schedule and spend time outside, soaking up the Grand Canyon experience.
To learn more about the Grand Canyon Artists in Residence, click here
Have Cello Will Travel.
From Bach to Harvey
Boston Conservatory's Seully Hall was packed on Tuesday night for a recital by the formidable cellist Rhonda Rider.
RHONDA RIDER, cello
At: Boston Conservatory, Tuesday night
The turnout was no surprise given Rider's prominence and deep roots in the local community. She was a founding member of the Brandeis-based Lydian String Quartet for over two decades, and these days she plays with the Triple Helix Piano Trio, in residence at Wellesley College. She also teaches on the faculty of Boston Conservatory, which presented Tuesday's recital on its String Masters series.
The eclectic program seemed to aptly reflect Rider's wide-ranging musical sympathies. Music by Bach and Fauré (Op. 117) shared the first half with works by contemporary composers John Harbison and Jonathan Harvey. The second half was given over to Steve Reich's landmark 1988 work for string quartet "Different Trains." Pulling it all together was Rider's grounded presence, fluid delivery, and focused probing musicianship.
For her opening Bach selection, rather than choosing a traditional solo suite or even previewing the one she was due to perform this week at Emmanuel Church, Rider pulled out Bach's D-Major Viola da Gamba Sonata and gave it a lively and vividly contoured reading, sensitively partnered by pianist Judith Gordon.
From there she leapt over centuries to land at Harbison's 2006 work "Abu Ghraib," a series of haunting meditations on a dark hour in recent national history. Rider was compelling as she moved from the music's harshly dissonant passages, full of jabbing "wrong" notes, to moments of more searching, prayerful lyricism.
But the work that received the most arresting performance was Harvey's "Curve With Plateaux," a wild piece that exploits every inch of the instrument's expressive range in a journey that begins with earthy C-string rumblings and ascends dramatically to the very highest reaches of the cello. Rider rendered the stratospheric passagework with astonishing clarity but even more impressive was the way she made the music's strange gestural language come across as completely natural and organic, no less directly communicative than the sonata by Bach.
For "Different Trains," Rider was joined by two colleagues (violinist Sharan Leventhal and violist Mary Ruth Ray) and one Boston Conservatory student (violinist Cordelia Paw). You had to admire the cellist's impulse to include such an iconic work from the modern quartet literature on this program, but a great performance of this piece is tricky even for an established quartet to pull off, let alone an ensemble assembled for just one concert.
In short, Tuesday's performance was clear and effective but the music seldom felt as deeply internalized as it might have been. For lengthy stretches, the musicians seemed content merely to be playing accurately with the prerecorded tape rather than foregrounding their live performance as the main event with its own independent emotional core. Interestingly, the snippets of actual speech that Reich collected were given unusual prominence in the sonic mix, which had the effect of emphasizing the documentary aspects of this remarkable work of Holocaust memory.
The crowd gave the quartet a robust ovation, but Rider's fellow musicians at one point held back in the wings even as she protested, eventually giving up and taking a richly deserved solo bow.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
WGBH Classical Connections. Rhonda Rider's Cello
|
|
|