By Grant North
The Oberlin Sinfonietta will perform its final free concert of the 2023-2024 academic year in Warner Concert Hall on Thursday May 2nd at 7:30pm. Led by Timothy Weiss, this ensemble traditionally plays a wide array of pieces from the Classical era to the contemporary with straightforward instrumentation. The Sinfonietta often aims for variety throughout their scheduled performances across the academic year.
On Thursday, new works from composer Wesley Horner and Conservatory student composer Graham Lazorchak make up the majority of the program. The concert also highlights pieces from faculty composers Stephen Hartke and Jesse Jones. Guest performances include Professor of Voice Timothy LeFebvre singing in Horner’s “Three Songs for Baritone and Orchestra,” and mandolinist Jacob Jolliff in Jones’s “Tune Book.”
Composed of Conservatory performance majors, the Sinfonietta represents the best the school has to offer. Its sibling, the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble (CME), will present its final on-campus performance of the school year on May 1st before traveling to NYC to perform at the Roulette Intermedium as part of the annual Long Play Festival.
Both Hartke and Jones are Rome Prize and Guggenheim fellowship winners with doctoral degrees in music composition. Jones’s has performed internationally from London to St. Petersburg, and has been commissioned by the Juilliard String Quartet, the English Symphony Orchestra, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Tanglewood Music Center.
Jones’s new composition “Tune Book” is a 5-movement, 25-minute mandolin concerto, based on folky melodies Jones has archived over several years of mandolin noodling at home. “Not many mandolin concertos come from the world of bluegrass,” said Jones. “Usually a concert composer writes parts for mandolin without knowing the intricacies of the instrument.”
Jones is also a member of the recently formed bluegrass group EZRA, which includes Jacob “Jake” Jolliff. “He was a prodigious mandolin player even at a young age,” Jones recalled. “We met at a bluegrass festival in Oregon. He thought it was cool that both of our initials and birthdays were the same.”
They would reunite 20 years later when Jolliff came to Oberlin to perform with his pre-EZRA ensemble. This began a collaboration that currently spans three albums and multiple concerts. When asked what he wanted audiences to take away from the performance, Jones replied: “First and foremost, I want them to see how awesome Jake is.” He went on to say how the concerto is meant to show the virtuosity of the player, but “Tune Book’ was not designed to be cerebral. Above all else, the objective was fun for the performers and for the audience.
Hartke has had a long and illustrious career—- beginning at Yale, he would eventually earn a spot as a faculty member at the Universidade de São Paulo and later USC. Some of his most famous works include the 2008 opera “The Greater Good” based on the short story Boule de Suif taking place after the Franco-Prussian War. For this he won a Charles Ives Opera Prize.
Speaking of awards, Hartke earned a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for his 2013 piece “Meanwhile – Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays.” On Thursday, the Sinfonietta will perform “The Rose of the Winds (1998)” for string octet— written for the Angel Fire chamber music festival in Taos, New Mexico. Expect to be transported on a musical journey through the dry and spacious landscapes of the “Land of Enchantment.”
World premieres of Wesley Horner’s “Three Songs for Baritone and Orchestra” and Graham Lazorchak’s “Letters for Lili” supply the benchmark of new talent at Oberlin. The final Sinfonietta concert will be filled to the brim with new music of different genres and is a must watch for audiences with eclectic tastes.
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