Many thanks to Kristina Stamper at the CSU Stanislaus School of the Arts for creating this wonderful poster for my upcoming recital. You can watch the concert live (Feb. 21, 7:30pm Pacific) on the web right here.
Download the full concert program.
Two weeks from today, I’ll be giving my first faculty recital at California State University, Stanislaus. I joined the faculty there last fall, and this will be my first official performance at the school. Two of my colleagues there, Jeannine Dennis and Daniel Davies, will perform with me, along with friends/colleagues from Sacramento State and University of the Pacific. The program is a bit of an odd one. There’s not a particular theme — it’s simply a collection of pieces I wanted to play and people with whom I wanted to collaborate. Four of the pieces are 20th or 21st century duos, three of which are by living composers. This preponderance of newness is offset a bit by one of my favorite Vivaldi concerti.
The details:
Thursday, February 21, 7:30pm
Snider Recital Hall, CSU Stanislaus, Turlock, CA (map)
$12 general admission; $8 students/seniors/faculty (buy tickets)
Stephen Blumberg — Desert Rains for clarinet and bassoon
Pierre Max Dubois — Petite Suite for flute and bassoon
Bruce Reiprich — When the Pines Sleep it is Autumn for two bassoons
Antonio Vivaldi — Concerto in G Minor, RV 495
Gernot Wolfgang — Common Ground for cello and bassoon
With:
Daniel Davies, cello
Jeannine Dennis, flute
Nicolasa Kuster, bassoon
Sandra McPherson, clarinet
Faythe Vollrath, harpsichord
Today begins an exciting semester full of bassoon events at Sacramento State. Most events are free, and all are open to the public. We’ve got student performances, guest artists, a masterclass or two, and I’m playing both a baroque concerto and two programs of new and recent music. See the Music Department Calendar for parking and ticket information and other details.
Taylor Haugland with John Cozza, piano
Junior Recital
Thursday, February 28, 4pm (Capistrano Hall Room 151, free)
Junior Performace/Music Education major Taylor Haugland will perform works by Camille Saint-Saëns, Carl Maria von Weber, Jean Daniel Braun, and Carl Nielsen.
Brett Van Gansbeke, baroque bassoon
Guest Artist Recital and Masterclass
Thursday, March 14, 4pm (Capistrano Hall Room 151, free)
Brett Van Gansbeke holds the Doctor of Music degree from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where he studied with one of the world’s preeminent Baroque bassoonists, Michael McCraw. Dr. Van Gansbeke will perform a short recital of works by Baroque composers, and then work with Sac State bassoonists in a masterclass format.
Scott Pool, bassoon and Steven Caplan, oboe with Natsuki Fukusawa, piano and Robin Fisher, soprano
Guest Artist Recital
Tuesday, April 2, 7:30pm (Capistrano Music Recital Hall, $10 general, $7 senior, $5 student)
Guests Scott Pool (Assistant Professor of Bassoon, University of Texas at Arlington) and Stephen Caplan (Professor of Oboe, University of Nevada Las Vegas) are joined by pianist Natsuki Fukusawa and soprano Robin Fisher in a recital of works by Rachmaninov, Sunny Knable, Jenni Brandon, Miguel del Aguila, and others.
TuBassoon (Julian Dixon, tuba and David A. Wells, bassoon)
U-Nite at the Crocker Art Museum
Thursday, April 11, 5-9pm (216 O Street, Sacramento, CA, free with museum admission or Sac State ID)
This low-down duo will perform numerous short works as part of an evening of music, dance, theater, photography, design, art, film, and poetry at the Crocker Art Museum.
Ohne Name (Dana Jessen and David A. Wells, bassoons)
Faculty/Guest Artist Recital
Thursday, April 25, 4pm (Capistrano Hall Room 151, free)
Ohne Name performs 20th and 21st century repertoire written or adapted for two bassoons. This concert will include works by Igor Stravinsky, Sofia Gubaidulina, Marc Mellits, and William Davis.
Sac State Bassoon Studio Recital with John Cozza, piano
Tuesday, May 7, 8pm (Capistrano Music Recital Hall, free)
Featuring individual performances by the members of the bassoon studio plus the antics of the Sac State Bassoon Quartet.
David A. Wells with Camerata Capistrano, under the direction of Lorna Peters
Vivaldi’s Bassoon Concerto in G Minor, RV 495
Sunday, May 12, 4pm (Capistrano Hall Room 151, $10 general, $7 senior, $5 student)
Antonio Vivaldi wrote a staggering 39 concertos for bassoon, of which 37 exist in complete form. The Concerto in G minor (RV 495) is one of the most intense of these, and displays the composer’s masterful grasp of both the technical virtuosity and emotional depth attainable on the bassoon. Other works TBA.
2012 FeNAM Poster (larger image/pdf)
On Friday, November 9, I’ll be giving a recital as part of Sacramento State’s 35th annual Festival of New American Music. The festival itself runs from November 1 until November 10 and includes numerous concerts, master classes, composer’s forums, and performances in local schools. Augusta Read Thomas is this year’s keynote speaker, and other guests include Third Coast Percussion, Citywater, Calliope Duo, JACK Quartet, Travis Brass, Allen Vizzuti, and Rootstock Percussion. And amazingly, all the events are free and open to the public. See the poster at right for the full schedule.
The idea for this concert came to me last year. While planning for my April recital, I realized that I had a whole stack of recent music by American composers that I wanted to perform. So, I set much of that aside for this fall. In its now final form my program consists of five pieces, which I think do a good job of demonstrating the wide variety of music that has recently been written for bassoon. Four of the five pieces were written in the last five years; the “old standard” of the program is André Previn’s Sonata, published way back in 1999. I’m excited to be playing works by three composers who I know personally, and to be giving the premiere of a work by one of them, my Sac State colleague Stephen Blumberg. My recital (and many of the other FeNAM concerts) will be broadcast live via the school’s Livestream Channel.
The details:
Festival Ensemble: David A. Wells, bassoon and friends
FeNAM 2012
Friday, November 9, 8pm
Capistrano Hall, Sacramento State (map)
Stephen Blumberg — Desert Rains for clarinet and bassoon (World Premiere)
David Dies — Kai-‘r/xhqt(i)s (West Coast Premiere)
André Previn — Sonata for Bassoon and Piano
Erik Spangler — a firefly in the belly for bassoon and electronics (West Coast Premiere)
Gernot Wolfgang — Low Agenda
With:
John Cozza, piano
Thomas Derthick, bass
Sandra Moats McPherson, clarinet
I just got back from a wonderful week in Oxford, Ohio for the 2012 International Double Reed Society conference. This was my third IDRS conference, and the first one at which I actually performed. The events took place at Miami University, and our hosts were Miami faculty members Andrea Ridilla (oboe) and Christin Schillinger (bassoon).
Jazz Night with Michael Rabinowitz
The five days of the conference were at once exhaustingly long and all too brief. I tried to pack as many concerts, masterclasses, and presentations as possible into each day. But as with most conferences, there were usually multiple things going on simultaneously, and I couldn’t make it to everything I would have liked to see. But some of the highlights of the conference for me were (in no particular order) the top-notch evening concert performances by Jeff Lyman, Martin Kuuskmann, and Damian Montano; recitals by Saxton Rose, Maya Stone, Scott Pool, Carolyn Beck, Richard Ramey, Michael Burns, and the UGA faculty (Reid Messich and Amy Marinello Pollard); lectures by Richard Lottridge, James Kopp, Terry Ewell, and Richard Meek; and both a masterclass and jazz night with Michael Rabinowitz. (I’m sure I’ve left some people out — my apologies!)
Performing When the Pines Sleep it is Autumn.
Photo Courtesy of IDRS 2012
On Tuesday morning, I performed André Previn’s Sonata for Bassoon and Piano with Gabriel Sanchez, a very capable pianist who I’d only met the day before. Then on Wednesday, Nicolasa Kuster and I presented a program of bassoon duos: Music for Two Bassoons by Alexandros Kalogeras, When the Pines Sleep it is Autumn by Bruce Reiprich (a world premiere!), and the second movement of Francisco Mignone’s Sonata No. 1 para dois fagotes. Although both performances were in a kind of out-of-the-way venue, we had decent-sized and enthusiastic audiences each day. In addition to these two official performances, I had the great pleasure of going on stage at the end of Michael Rabinowitz’s jazz masterclass and trading choruses and fours on “Cantaloupe Island” with Michael, my friend Trent Jacobs, and seven or eight other improvising bassoonists.
Mini ASU Reunion — with Ingrid Hagan,
Ben Yingst, and Christin Schillinger
Aside from the official conference events, it’s always great to reconnect with old friends, colleagues, and teachers, and also to make new friends. Whereas at last year’s conference in Tempe, I mostly saw friends from UW-Madison, this year I ran into people from my other two schools. Representing FSU were my conference roomie Brett van Gansbeke (who has just launched The Orchestral Bassoon) and Joe Volk. The ASU contingent was a bit larger, including Ingrid Hagan (who played beautifully in the Gillet-Fox Competition), Ben Yingst, Ashley Haney, and conference host Christin Schillinger.
As always, the plethora of vendors provided ample opportunity for shopping and trying out new instruments. I played most of the historical bassoons offered by Wolf along with modern instruments by Gebruder Moennig. I stopped by the Légère booth to have some adjustments made to my new synthetic bassoon reed. I browsed the wares of many other vendors, wishing I had more money to blow on tools, accessories, and music. My only actual purchases were books: James Kopp’s new history of the bassoon, a catalog of the bassoon collection of the late great British bassoonist William Waterhouse, and a catalog of instructional materials for bassoon up to 1900, assembled by Waterhouse and edited by Kopp.
Playing Duets in the Dayton Airport
My trip home was somewhat of an ordeal, with an 8-hour delay in Dayton and an unplanned overnight stay in Denver. But while languishing in the airport I made some new double reed friends. With the help of a borrowed laptop and IMSLP, a couple of us even played a bit of Mozart’s Sonata for bassoon and cello, K. 292. As soon as we started playing, the whole gate area went quiet, and we got a hearty round of applause when we finished. When we finally reboarded the plane, a few people thanked us for playing — had we known the reception would be so warm, we would’ve gotten our instruments out hours earlier.
After being home for a couple of days, I’m finally recovered, and am already looking forward to next year. The 2013 conference is just around the corner, at the University of Redlands in Southern California!
