The Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival
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Jennifer Foster, Soprano, consistently earns critical praise as a vocal artist of great beauty, warmth, security and expressive ability. She made her operatic debut as Fiordiligi in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte with the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, and later toured nationally with the San Francisco Opera as Adele in Die Fledermaus. She has also been invited to appear with major international festivals including Santa Fe, Aspen, Aldeburgh (England), and Verbier (Switzerland). She has been a featured soloist with symphonies and choral groups in Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Florida and San Diego, among others. Jennifer has served as soloist at The First Church of Christ, Scientist, (The Mother Church), since 1997, and she can be heard each week on international shortwave and internet broadcasts, as well as on the CD Jubal-ation, produced by the Christian Science Publishing Society.

In 1914 Italian composer Ottorino Respighi created his setting for Shelley's 1816 poem "The Sunset." Based on a translation into the Italian by Rinaldo Ascoli, the work freely illustrates its haunting text through chromatically tinged harmonies and eloquent instrumental recapitulations. Italian translation below by Rinaldo Ascoli.

Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera stands as one of the leading creative personalities in 20th-century Latin American music. From his earliest works Ginastera sought to express a specifically Argentinean musical identity. He drew inspiration from Argentinean literature, especially 19th-century "gauchesco" folk tales eulogizing both the countryside and its wandering gauchos, stubborn horsemen who resisted civilization and progress.
Ginastera wrote his Opus 4 while he was still a student at the Conservatorio Nacional in Buenas Aires. His four "Cantos del Tucuman" (1938) are atmospheric settings of poems by the Argentinean writer Rafael Jijena Sanchez (1904-1977). A native of the colonial city of Tucuman, located in the mountainous northern region of Argentina, Jijena Sanchez conveyed the character of his rugged, remote homeland through his texts. The work was premiered in Buenos Aires by its dedicatee, the soprano Brigida Frias de Lopez Buchardo, and was awarded the Premio Nacional de Musica.
Although Ginastera does not directly quote folksong in the "Cantos," he models his rhythms and melodies on native Argentinean song and dance elements. The sparely accompanied, nostalgic melody of "Yo Naci en el valle" is based on a vernacular scale. The harp accompaniment in the pensive "Solita su Alma" suggests indigenous guitar figuration. Rhythmic patterns in the final song, reinforced by native drums, evoke the malambo, the rapid, foot-stomping dance of the gauchos. Throughout, hints of Falla and Stravinsky are heard in the work's asymmetric rhythms and colorful harmonies.

Joaquin Rodrigo was born in Spain and was blind from age 3. He studied composition in Paris and later in Germany during the Spanish Civil War. After his return to Madrid in 1939 he went on to become one of Spain's best-known composers. He wrote the "Cuatro Madrigales Amatorios" as presented here in 1947 and orchestrated them in the following year. Although almost always sung as a group, the four individual songs are not related by either text or mood.

A self-taught composer, Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) explored the colorful materials of both his native folk music tradition and Brazilian popular music to create a richly melodic national style. The second and third songs have a syllabic text that evoke the sounds of the peasants of Northern Brazil, representing a gamut of moods, celebrations and festivals to family feuds fought with knives and guns over property rights.

Born in Florence, Italy to Jewish parents, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco showed musical promise from a very early age. He was a published composer by age of 10 and continued piano and composition studies with some of the finest teachers of the time. In 1939, he fled rising anti-Semitism in Italy by moving with his wife and two sons to the United States. They soon settled in Los Angeles, where he became a sought-after as a composer of film scores and composition teacher to such notables as André Previn, John Williams, and Henry Mancini, among others. He continued to write concert music during his successful Hollywood career.
Probably best known for his long-time collaboration with world-renowned guitarist Andrés Segovia, and the remarkable output of now-standard repertoire for that instrument, Tedesco wrote for a wide variety of instruments including voice. These songs for singer and harp reflect his Jewish heritage, as well as his love of melody-not necessarily a common element in works from other serious composers of this period. The following quote from an interview with Tedesco nicely sums up his musical philosophy: "What I have sought to do, during my artistic evolution, has been to express myself with means always simpler and more direct, in a language always clearer and more precise."

In 1904 Pierre Aubry, a noted French journalist, was invited to lecture on the condition of the oppressed Greeks and Armenians in Turkey. Having decided to illustrate his discussion with authentic songs, he asked Ravel to provide piano accompaniments for them. Together they chose four songs from Hubert Pernot's collection, "Popular Songs from the Isle of Chio," and a fifth song, "Quel galant," from a group published in Constantinople. After a Greek friend had translated the lyrics for Ravel, he completed the harmonizations within a 36-hour period. The brief songs, all charming lyrics of love and courtship, are treated with simplicity and imagination. Ravel himself admired the songs and chose them as the first opus to offer to his lifelong publisher, Durand et Fils.

Afflicted with poor eyesight, French composer Maurice Delage learned to perform the most complex of works by ear. Open to the most innovative musical trends, Delage studied formally with Ravel and shared ideas with Stravinsky, who called him "an artist of the first order." In the spring of 1912 Delage accompanied his parents to India and Japan, where they owned shoe polish factories. Discovering that Hindu music "sent chills up the spine" for him, Delage listened incessantly and transcribed much of what he heard. He sought Western equivalents for these exotic sounds as he composed his Four Hindu Songs during 1912-13. Through subtle ornamentation, colorful glissandi, and alteration of conventional Western tunings, Delage achieved the microtonal shadings similar to those heard in his favorite recordings by Hindu artists Imrad Khan and Coimbatore Thayi, a master of closed-mouth singing.
The first and fourth songs are settings of stanzas by Hindu poet Bhartrihari. The second song, with words taken from a poem by Heine, projects a series of wordless arabesques in its latter half. The third song describes the birth of Buddha.

Cover art: Brenda Semanick • Program notes: Nancy Monsman • Design and art direction: GroundZero • Producer and Recording Engineer: Matthew Snyder

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