Hadley McCarroll – Pancultural! – Sunday, March 13 at 4 pm
PROGRAM NOTES AVAILABLE ONLINE HERE
Hadley McCarroll, piano
Pancultural!
Ludwig van Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 27 in E minor, Op. 90
Leoš Janáček selections from On an Overgrown Path
Reena Esmail Rang De Basant
B.P. Herrington How Come That Blood – seven variations and a canonic rhapsody on a local ballad West Coast Premiere
This new program embraces musical traditions found across our globe, spanning America, Germany, the Czech Republic, and India. Come be uplifted, challenged and inspired by the late piano music of Beethoven, be drawn into a fairy world of Janàček, and revel in the dark, exotic Hindustani sounds of riding young Indian-American composer Reena Esmail, whose work is inspired by the iconic Hindi film Rang De Basanti. The program also includes a world premiere by Texas-based composer B.P. Herrington’s How Come That Blood—Darmstadt meets Southern Gothic: “…an intriguing blend of common-man expression and formal acuity.” (The New York Sun)
Pianist Hadley McCarroll, hailed for her “… lively and exhilarating … pianism” (San Francisco Classical Voice) is a well-known collaborative/solo pianist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has performed in the United States, and internationally with, among others: Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet in Paris and New York, the Festival del Sole in Napa Valley, and Kronos Quartet violist Hank Dutt in San Francisco. For the past fifteen years she has been the pianist in the acclaimed cello/piano duo martha & monica, organizing several multi-day festivals of cello/piano music, including many premieres. Hadley has worked on the staff of the Royal Danish Opera, San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, and West Edge Opera. A long-time proponent of contemporary music, she appears frequently at the Center for New Music, with Composer’s Inc., Left Coast Ensemble, and Sonic Harvest. As pianist for the sfSoundGroup she has performed works by Berio, Ligeti, local composers Matt Ingalls, Gino Robair and Eric Ulman, and modern Italian masters with Ravinia Festival conductor John Kennedy. Hadley enjoys working with living composers, including John Harbison, Robert Greenberg, and Thomas Adès, and often premieres new works. Equally at home as a soloist, Hadley has given wide-ranging performances, including Carnival of the Animals (Santa Rosa Symphony), Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and in recitals featuring Carter, Beethoven, Ligeti, Liszt and Schumann. Hadley taught piano for nearly twenty years at the San Francisco Community Music Center, while maintaining her private studio since 1996. She is a sought-out competition adjudicator and panelist, and received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano performance from the University of Texas at Austin.
Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. Esmail’s work has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Kronos Quartet, Imani Winds, Richmond Symphony, Chicago Sinfonietta, San Francisco Girls Chorus, Juilliard415, and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Upcoming seasons include new work for Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Amherst College Choir and Orchestra, Santa Fe Pro Musica.
Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2023 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. Previously, she was named a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Music, and the 2019 Grand Prize Winner of the S & R Foundation’s Washington Award. Esmail was also a 2017-18 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow. She was the 2012 Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM’05) and the Yale School of Music. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers. Esmail is currently an Artistic Director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West.
Composer B.P. Herrington – “..an intriguing blend of common-man expression and formal acuity” (The New York Sun) – was born and raised in the Big Thicket of Texas, and his firmly music is rooted in the folk ballads and rural music of this unique region. His works have been performed by soprano Tony Arnold, conductor James Baker, Ensemble Linea, El Perro Andaluz, the London Sinfonietta, the Royal Academy Symphony Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, and the BBC Singers, in venues such as Rothko Chapel, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Carnegie Hall, and London’s Purcell Room.
Composition awards include the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, Morton Gould Award (ASCAP), Leo Kaplan Prize (ASCAP), First Music Award (New York Youth Symphony) and two composition awards from the Royal Academy of Music. He has twice been a finalist for the American Prize in composition for orchestra and wind ensemble; his music has been selected for performance at June in Buffalo (2013), Wellesley Composers Conference (2013), the Cleveland Composers Recording Institute (2013), Pharos Arts Festival in Cyprus (2012), the Soundscape Festival in Italy (2011), and the British Society for the Promotion of New Music..
Herrington earned a Ph.D. in music composition from the Royal Academy of Music, London, (on an Overseas Research Scholarship), where he studied with Simon Bainbridge. He has attended composition masterclasses with Brian Ferneyhough, Mario Davidovsky, Eric Chasalow, Melinda Wagner, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Karel Husa and Donald Erb. Herrington also attended masterclasses with Helmut Lachenmann, Beat Furrer and Georges Aperghis at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses in 2006. He taught for over 10 years at Sam Houston State University, and joined the faculty of Lone Star College-CyFair in 2008.