Robert Xavier Rodríguez will conduct pianist Jeff Lankov,
bass-baritone George Cordes, mezzo-soprano Dana Ayers and
the Musica Nova ensemble in a celebration of the music of Leonard Bernstein. The evening will feature a concert performance of the opera Trouble in Tahiti.

Musica Nova
Music of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was the first American conductor to become the music director of a major American symphony orchestra, and he was the first American in the field of classical music to become an international superstar. He was a complete musician: composer, conductor and concert pianist; plus, he had a special genius for explaining complicated musical ideas in simple words. A charismatic and sometimes controversial media personality, he was a tremendous force for public awareness of classical music. Through his widely televised Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, he was an inspiration to the millions of baby-boomers who tuned in to his broadcasts as children.

Bernstein's music was ahead of its time. Between the 1950's and 90's, audiences for classical and popular music were growing increasingly polarized and alienated from each other. Bernstein brought the two together. Continuing the tradition of Gershwin, Weill and Copland, Bernstein effectively integrated jazz, Broadway and other popular forms into his concert music and created a unique synthesis of the two worlds. The result is that his music continues to be performed and admired across widely disparate musical circles.
Tonight's All-Bernstein Concert begins with "Masque," a short, brilliant and fiendishly difficult scherzo for piano solo with harp, celesta, contrabass and percussion from the six-movement symphony Age of Anxiety (1949). Age of Anxiety was based on a poem by W. H. Auden. The Masque depicts four lonely people, one female and three male, who meet in a bar. They are, as the composer puts it, "nervous, sentimental, self-satisfied, vociferous." After several drinks, they go to the woman's apartment and are „determined to have a party, each one afraid of spoiling the others' fun by admitting that he should be home in bed. The party ends in anti-climax. Boston critic Cyrus Durgin described the Masque as "the finest single movement in the American idiom and feeling. . . a triumph of rhythmic interplay, subtle and unexpected accents, a marvelous distillation of the movement of jazz."

" Four Episodes" from West Side Story (1957) are instrumental dances from Bernstein's widely-acknowledged masterpiece, which was a fusion of Latin rhythms and the musical language of Broadway in a context of operatic and balletic complexity. West Side Story represented a landmark collaboration of talents: story by William Shakespeare, book by Arthur Laurent, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and choreography by Jerome Robbins. The show ran for over 1000 performances on Broadway, and the Variety review of the 1961 film version called the work "a beautifully-mounted, impressive, emotion-ridden and violent musical (with a) stark approach to a raging social problem...The Romeo and Juliet theme, propounded against the seething background of rival and bitterly-hating youthful Puerto Rican and (Anglo-)American gangs on the upper West Side of Manhattan, makes for both a savage and tender admixture of romance and war-to-the-death." The dances will be performed tonight in a new trio arrangement by Jeff Lankov.

The Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1942) was Bernstein's first published work, written shortly after his studies at Harvard and Curtis. Since the clarinet itself began its life in the 18th century as a relative newcomer to the august company of the other, more established instruments of the orchestra (not unlike the present position of the saxophone), it was appropriate that Bernstein should have chosen the clarinet for his own personal stylistic journey over the bridge between the worlds of classical and popular music. While strongly influenced by Hindemith and classical models, the compact 10-minute score is a fascinating example of the young composer‚s discovery of his own irreverent compositional voice: sometimes gentle and lyrical, sometimes more raucous, especially in the jazzy 5/8 finale, marked giocoso, un poco crudo.

Bernstein stated that the one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti (1952) "was my first experiment in the field that engaged my interest enormously, namely, the point, based on my conviction that the true, nourishing, fertile, alive, vital American roots were in the American musical comedy, and that serious work could grow out of this (genre)." Bernstein began Trouble in Tahiti while he was living in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He was fond of the work, and he later incorporated it into his full-length 1983 opera A Quiet Place, based on the same two central characters, who were, by some accounts, based on Bernstein's own parents (including the actual name of the composer's father, Sam). In Trouble in Tahiti, Sam and Dinah are, in the composer's words, "an unhappily married suburban couple∑. We see this couple together and apart at various points in the day in the course of seven scenes, and we see how deeply unhappy they are, with each other and with themselves, and how much romantic longing they have for whatever it was they did have at the beginning and seem to have lost. The two central characters are joined by a trio: what the composer calls "a Greek Chorus, born of the radio commercial." They ironically punctuate the action of the story from time to time as they sing of "the glories of suburban life."

UTD's Musica Nova ensemble, directed by Robert Xavier Rodríguez, performs music for small ensembles, plus multi-media and theater works of all periods. UTD students and faculty join professional musicians and members of the community. Musica Nova guest artists have included members of the Dallas Symphony and Dallas Opera Orchestra and singers from the New York City Opera and Metropolitan Opera. Music for past Musica Nova concerts has ranged from Medieval and Renaissance dances and motets to standard repertoire to experimental mixed-media works written for and/or developed by the ensemble. Concerts have included an evening of jigs, an evening of tangos, French cabaret and mariachi songs, chamber opera, ballet and a fully staged commedia dell'arte pantomime.

Robert Xavier Rodríguez
Music by Robert Xavier Rodríguez has been performed by such organizations as the New York City Opera, Dallas Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Vienna Schauspielhaus, the Israel, Mexico City, and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras, the Louisville and Cleveland Orchestras and the Baltimore, Houston, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, National, Boston, and Chicago Symphonies. Rodríguez has served as Composer-in-Residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony, and the Dallas Symphony. Eleven CDs featuring his music have been recorded, and his more than 100 works are published exclusively by G. Schirmer. He is a Professor at UTD.
A full biography is available at: http://www.schirmer.com/composers/rodriguez/bio.html