24 Preludes & Fugues by Composer Larry Bell To Receive New York Premiere at Merkin Concert Hall March 16, 2020

Four noted pianists—Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta, Maja Tremiszewska, Jennifer Elowsky-Fox, and John McDonald—will present the New York premiere performance of internationally lauded American composer Larry Bell’s 24 Preludes & Fugues at Merkin Concert Hall Monday evening, March 16, 2020, at 7:30 p.m. Completed in 2019, this tour-de-force composition is slated for a world premiere the week before, Sunday afternoon, March 8, 2020, 4:00 p.m. at the First Church Boston. In the venerable tradition of previous composers, Bell has drawn inspiration from the great master of counterpoint, Johann Sebastian Bach, to create a contemporary iteration of the prelude and fugue format. The work’s duration is slightly longer than two hours; each pianist will perform six preludes and fugues.

  “Virtually everyone who has attempted to write art music or study classical piano since 1722, the year of the completion of J. S. Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, Book I, has been influenced by this magisterial work,” writes Bell. “The structure of Chopin’s 24 Preludes owes much to the WTC as do the 48 Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich. Schumann and Mendelssohn’s preludes and fugues have had the greatest influence on my own efforts.”

Larry Thomas Bell                 Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, in each major and minor key, op. 156

Single tickets are $25.00 ($15 for students/seniors) and are available for purchase in person through the Merkin Hall Box Office at 129 West 67^th Street, by phone at (212) 501-3330, or online at http://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/

“[Composer Larry Bell] speaks concisely as well as authoritatively,” wrote Thomas Willis of The Chicago Tribune, “Each of his thematic units possesses the emotional force and precision control of major talent.” Larry Bell has been the recipient of the Rome Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Charles Ives Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other awards. “He has a gift for melody, a sense of wit and a feeling for continuity.”  —The Boston Globe. 

Bell’s orchestral music has been performed by the Atlanta Symphony, Seattle Symphony, RAI Orchestra of Rome, Juilliard Philharmonia, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Ruse Philharmonia (Bulgaria), Boston Civic Symphony, Hopkins Symphony Orchestra, University of Miami Symphony, and the Boston Landmarks Orchestra. His chamber music has been played by ensembles such as the Borromeo String Quartet, ÖENM (Salzburg Mozarteum), the Boston Chamber Music Society, Speculum Musicae, St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, North/South Consonance, and Music Today, as well as at festivals in Ravinia, Aspen, Valencia, Pontino, San Salvador, Portugal, Moscow, Ljubljana, Australia, New Zealand, Edinburg, Zagreb, and the Boston Early Music Festival fringe concerts. The Juilliard String Quartet premiered Bell’s First String Quartet written when the composer was twenty-one. Fifty-five of his 163 pieces have been commercially recorded.

Bell’s music has been commissioned and performed by a distinguished array of musicians including cellists Eric Bartlett, Joel Krosnick, and Andrés Dìaz, violinist Ayano Ninomiya, pianists Sara Davis Buechner and Jonathan Bass, soprano D’Anna Fortunato, and conductors Jorge Mester, Gerard Schwarz, Gil Rose, and Benjamin Zander. As a pianist, he has given recitals throughout the United States, as well as in Italy, Austria, and Japan. Bell received his DMA from The Juilliard School, working in composition with Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions, in solfège with Renée Longy, piano with Joseph Bloch and with Joseph Rollino privately in Rome. Larry Bell has taught at The Juilliard School, the Boston Conservatory, the New England Conservatory of Music, and the Berklee College of Music. Visit his website at http://www.larrybellmusic.com/

Pianist Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta has appeared as soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States, Peru, and Mexico. As a winner of Artists International Young Musicians Auditions, she was presented in two solo recitals at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. Of her debut, The New York Times called her “a thoughtful musician; her playing was full of intelligence and poetry… a pianist well worth hearing.” Rodríguez-Peralta has performed at Alice Tully Hall in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Seiji Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood, and on the Dame Myra Hess Concert Series in Chicago and Los Angeles. She has also given recitals throughout Peru under the auspices of the American Embassy. As a chamber musician, she frequently performs with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her recordings include Teresa Carreño: Solo Piano and Chamber Works and her collaboration with cellist Luis Leguía in Music for Cello and Piano from Latin America. She is also featured on Just in Time, Here and Now, devoted to new American music.

Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta holds a Bachelor of Music from Temple University, a Master of Music from The Catholic University of America, and a Post-Graduate Diploma from The Juilliard School. Her teachers include Maryan Filar, Ney Salgado, and Beveridge Webster, and while at Juilliard she was the teaching assistant of Vincent Persichetti. She is currently the Chair of the Music Department of Middlesex Community College in Bedford and Lowell, MA, and Director of A World of Music Concert Series.

A native of Poland, pianist Maja Tremiszewska holds a doctorate degree in Collaborative Piano from Boston University and B.A. and M.M. in Piano Performance from Gdansk Academy of Music in Poland. As a freelance musician, she has performed in various venues, among them Jordan Hall, Berklee Performance Center, Goethe Institute, and Ozawa Hall in Lenox, MA. In 2005, she won first prize at the First International Chamber Music Competition of New England and consequently performed at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. During her studies at Boston University, she has frequently performed with its orchestras as an orchestral keyboardist and as a soloist.

Tremiszewska presented Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G at the Tsai Performance Center, as a winner of the University Concerto Competition. An Emerging Artist for Boston Lyric Opera, Maja Tremiszewska served as a rehearsal pianist for their production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and performed recitatives on harpsichord for the same production at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theater. She was a rehearsal pianist and performed in the world premiere of Larry Bell’s opera Holy Ghosts http://holyghoststheopera.com/ She collaborated with MetroWest Opera, Guerilla Opera, Boston Opera Collaborative, and the North End Music and Performing Arts Center. Tremiszewska is a scholarship and fellowship recipient of the Aspen Music Festival Opera Center, Miami Music Festival, Chicago Summer Opera, Fontainebleau School of the Arts, and Bowdoin Summer Music Festival. Tremiszewska currently serves as a staff pianist for the Boston Conservatory at Berklee opera department. Visit her website at http://www.majatremiszewska.com/

Pianist Jennifer Elowsky-Fox has performed for many years in Boston where her exciting performances have brought audiences to their feet. A devoted friend to her contemporaries, she has championed composers and engaged fellow musicians with whom she has performed. As a professor at the Berklee College of Music, Elowsky-Fox has worked with outstanding musicians. She is as comfortable performing the works of Brahms as she is playing works by Marti Epstein. On the centennial of the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, she and Bell performed the two-piano version of the piece at both Berklee and the New England Conservatory of Music.

Her work as an educator has led Elowsky-Fox to develop a unique system of piano technique for developing pianistic ease and expression. Her own teachers have included Barbara Dixon, Ben Pasternak, and Seymour Bernstein. She has received degrees in piano performance from Central Michigan University and Boston University.

Jennifer Elowsky-Fox has recorded two CDs: Pictures and Images, a solo piano CD featuring Janácek, Debussy, William Bolcom, and Stephen Halloran, and Fox and Friends with music by Janácek, Halloran, Glinka, and Poulenc. Ron Haroutunian, Heidi Braun-Hill, Jan Halloran, and Barbara LaFitte also appear on the CD. Elowsky-Fox continues her work with Janácek on an upcoming recording, On an Overgrown Path. She will be performing Schumann’s Liederkreis, op. 39, with singer Kathleen Flynn. With her husband Dan Fox, of Morningside Music Studios in Arlington, MA, the couple are raising two children, Madeline and Jonathan.   

Recently described as “the New England master of the short piece,” John McDonald is a composer who tries to play the piano and a pianist who tries to compose. He is Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Music Studies at Tufts University, where he teaches composition, theory, and performance. His output concentrates on vocal, chamber, and solo instrumental works, and includes interdisciplinary experiments. Before arriving at Tufts in 1990, he taught at Boston University, the Longy School of Music, M.I.T., and the Rivers Conservatory. He was the Music Teachers National Association Composer of the Year in 2007 and served as the Valentine Visiting Professor of Music at Amherst College in 2016–2017. John McDonald earned four degrees, including a DMA, from Yale University and the Yale School of Music.

McDonald’s research interests include composition and new music pedagogy; intermedia collaboration involving composing and performing; solo and chamber music composition, performance, and recording; writing new music for young and non-professional performers; music applications for visual art and science; and advocacy of new and overlooked composers through research and performance. His book, Stirring Up the Music: The Life, Works, and Influence of Composer T(homas) J(efferson) Anderson, is forthcoming from Borik Press.

Notes on Larry Bell’s 24 Preludes and Fugues by the Composer:

My Preludes and Fugues started as another work, Mass A6 (2018), op. 147; its Agnus Dei is almost identical to the Fugue in f minor. Later, I used the same fugue in a work for organ and added a virtuosic fantasia as a prelude. Only after writing a Prelude and Fugue in F major did I find the courage to write the other 22 preludes and fugues. Most of these works were written in January 2019 during a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

As was the case of Bach’s WTC, Book 1, I intended these pieces “for the use and benefit of inquisitive young musicians and for the special diversion of those already well versed in this study” (Bach’s words). It helped to have started in the middle of the chromatic scale with the key of f minor so that each piece above and below could be as different as possible in character and dramatic pacing. In addition, I drew on Bach’s metric variety by frequently alternating my preludes and fugues between duple and triple meters.

Each of the fugues was written first and their preludes were fashioned from motives derived from the fugue’s subject. The preludes range in character and structure: improvisational fantasias, binary form scherzos, song forms, toccatas, a canon at the octave, and nocturnes interrupted by rapid figuration in imitation. The fugues also vary considerably from one another in character and speed, but, according to traditional practice, each contains imitation of the subject at the fifth.

The most interesting element of these pieces for me is the use of mirror harmony; this uses the notes D and G# as points that symmetrically split the keyboard. Of the harmonic techniques employed in these pieces, the pervasive use of mirror harmony gives them a unique sound.

Lastly, each of the 24 Preludes and Fugues is self-contained, but, as in Bach, the dramatic pacing of the entire work is designed to culminate in the final prelude and fugue in b minor.

For further information, please contact Hemsing Associates at (212) 772-1132 or visit www.hemsingpr.com.
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