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CARL VINE (b. 1954)
Piano Sonata No.
Composer, pianist, conductor, and entrepre-
neur Carl Vine has been a ubiquitous gure in
Australian music for the past four decades. Vine
rst achieved widespread attention in his native
country as a rehearsal pianist, accompanist, and
composer for the Dance Company of New South
Wales (later, Sydney Dance Company). With
trombonist Simone de Haan, Vine co-founded
the contemporary music ensemble Flederman,
which premiered and recorded countless scores
by Australian composers during its -year ex-
istence (
– ). He has been resident com-
poser with London Contemporary Dance
e-
atre, New South Wales State Conservatorium,
Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Western
Australian University, and he has served as a
lecturer in electronic music composition at the
Queensland Conservatorium of Music.
His extensive composition catalogue includes
eight symphonies, concertos, dance scores,
lm and television soundtracks, electronic
works, solo songs, and choral pieces, not to men-
tion music for the Flag Hand-Over Ceremony
at the
Atlanta Olympics. Vine has been
artistic director of Musica Viva Australia since
, and six years later he expanded his duties
to include oversight of the Huntington Estate
Music Festival, Australia’s most prestigious and
successful annual chamber music festival.
e
Governor-General of Australia appointed Vine
an O cer of Australia in
.
Vine dedicated his Piano Sonata No. to Mi-
chael Kieran Harvey, who relates the work’s
two-movement structure and “intense rhythmic
drive and building-up layers of resonance” to
Elliott Carter’s
piano sonata. “ ese layers
are sometimes delicate and modal, achieving
a ‘pointed’ polyphony by the use of complex
cross-rhythm, at other times being granite-like
in density, creating waves of sound which propel
the music irresistibly towards its climax.” Ex-
treme tempo and character contrast undergird
both movements. Slow, atmospheric material
surrounds dramatic, almost frenzied, writing in
the rst movement, while the second opposes a
rapid
moto perpetuo
with a more restrained key-
board chorale.
Sydney Dance Company commissioned Vine’s
Piano Sonata No. in
. With choreography
by Graeme Murphy, the company gave the rst
dance performance at Drama
eatre in the
Sydney Opera House in May
.
FRANZ LISZT (1811–86)
Réminiscences de Don Juan
Liszt was not only an unrivaled piano virtuoso
and imaginative composer, but also a proli c
author of transcriptions and paraphrases of his
own works and those of other composers. By
recasting orchestral and operatic scores, solo
songs and choral pieces for one or two pianos,
Liszt created a sizable corpus of music for pri-
vate salon performance.
Transcriptions were merely piano reductions of
the original music, but the paraphrases required
a reinterpretation of the model.
ese rework-
ings of operatic excerpts were typically titled
réminiscences
or fantasies.
Réminiscences de Don
Juan
is based on excerpts from Mozart’s opera
Don Giovanni
. Liszt composed this paraphrase
in Berlin in
and dedicated the work to King
Christian VIII of Denmark.
–Program notes ©
Todd E. Sullivan
DOMINIC CHELI,
piano
Beginning his musical training in Saint Louis,
pianist Dominic Cheli has earned a bachelor’s
degree from the Manhattan School of Music and
a master’s from Yale; he is currently pursuing an
Artist Diploma at the Colburn School, studying
with Fabio Bidini. His mentors have also includ-
ed Peter Frankl, André-Michel Schub, and Sylvia
Rosenberg. e native Missourian won both the
Music Academy of the West Concerto Competi-
tion and the Concert Artists Guild Competition
in
and will make his Carnegie Hall debut
this coming season on the CAG Series in its
Weill Recital Hall. He is also scheduled to make
his Walt Disney Hall concerto debut later this
season under the baton of Valery Gergiev.
is
past season, Cheli performed Rachmanino ’s
Second Piano Concerto with the Northwest
German Philharmonic and Mozart’s Two-Piano
Concerto, .
, in collaboration with Schub
and the Virginia Symphony at the Virginia Arts
Festival on a program celebrating Schub, and he
gave recitals at Steinway Hall in Beverly Hills
and New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival. His
concert credits have also included Beethoven’s
Fourth Piano Concerto with the Metropolitan
Orchestra of Saint Louis as well as performances
at Merkin Concert Hall, Santa Barbara’s Grana-
da
eatre, and Saint Louis’s Sheldon Concert
Hall, and he has engagements with the DuPage
Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Princeton
Symphony, and Symphony Orchestra of Great
Falls planned for the coming season. Last sum-
mer, Cheli released his debut CD on the Naxos
label, featuring music by Muzio Clementi, and
he subsequently appeared on WQXR radio’s
McGraw Hill Financial Young Artists Showcase,
having previously performed on NPR’s
From the
Top
. Dominic Cheli is making his Ravinia debut.
Carl Vine
(photo: Keith Saunders)
Daguerreotype of Franz Liszt
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