Jeffery Meyer, Director of Orchestras, and the Ithaca College Chamber Orchestra (ICCO) will perform music by Vivaldi and Beethoven and feature the North American premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, a joint commission by the ICCO and the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic (St. PCP). Meyer, who is director of orchestras at Ithaca College, conducts both ensembles. Renowned pianist Ursula Oppens is soloist in the Kaminsky concerto. The concert at 8 p.m. in Ford Hall is free and open to the public. Kaminsky will be available to speak with composers 12/8 from 7-8:30pm and conduct a piano masterclass 12/9 from 5-6:30pm.
Meyer said, "It is an extraordinary opportunity to collaborate with Ursula Oppens, who is such a distinguished and important figure in American new music, as well as composer Laura Kaminsky, who wrote this concerto specifically for Oppens, the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic and the Ithaca College Chamber Orchestra."
Meyer was featured in a recent Ithaca Times article, highlighting the upcoming concert as well as the November 26th St. PCP and Oppens Concert which included the world premiere of a Kaminsky work and the Russian premiere of Chamber Concerto by Cornell’s Pulitzer prize-winning composer Steven Stucky.
A Special Season for Jeffery Meyer by Jane Dieckmann
It has been an exciting fall for one of Ithaca’s busiest musicians, conductor and pianist Jeffery Meyer. And the highlight is a concert this Saturday, December 10, by the Ithaca College Chamber Orchestra (ICCO), which includes music by Vivaldi and Beethoven and features the North American premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, a joint commission by the ICCO and the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic (St. PCP). Meyer, who is director of orchestras at Ithaca College, conducts both ensembles. Renowned pianist Ursula Oppens is soloist in the Kaminsky concerto. The concert at 8 p.m. in Ford Hall is free and open to the public.
Meyer hardly stops to take a breath these days. When we met last weekend, he had returned from conducting his St. PCP and Oppens in the world premiere of the Kaminsky work in a November 26 concert that presented also the Russian premiere of Chamber Concerto by Cornell’s Pulitzer prize-winning composer Steven Stucky. Both Stucky and Kaminsky were present. After returning home, on the following Tuesday evening Meyer conducted a concert of his IC Contemporary Chamber Ensemble and then on last Sunday afternoon an amazing program—the Ravel Concerto for the Left Hand with visiting Cornell pianist Xak Bjerken, Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (accompanied by projections of the relevant works), the world premiere of Notus (2011) by Jorge Grossman, newly appointed to IC’s composition faculty, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol.
In addition to this Saturday’s premiere event, composer Kaminsky and pianist Oppens, both in residence, will speak to IC composers from 7 to 8:30 Thursday evening in Room 2201 of the Whalen Center. Oppens holds a masterclass from 5 to 6:30 on Friday in the Hockett Recital Hall. Both events are open to the public. There is rehearsing to do. The chamber orchestra has already done considerable work on the new Kaminsky piece, and Meyer’s graduate assistant runs rehearsals when their conductor is away. All the ensembles under the leadership of Meyer, who is nationally recognized for imaginative programming, have been introduced to modern music from the get-go.
Jeffery Meyer, who is 39 in January, was born in Chicago. He started playing the violin in the school orchestra already in fourth grade. He continued on, but one day he went to a music festival and saw a lot of synthesizers there, keyboard and drum machines. He became very interested, bought a keyboard, asked a “hippy” guitar player to teach him how to play, and soon was performing in rock bands. He then decided he needed real piano lessons involving serious instruction. A piano was rented, and Meyer went to work with a “demanding, dynamic teacher.” In two years time he was auditioning at music schools. “I never regretted learning the violin,” he said, “as a conductor you have to be able to talk to the string players.” He went to Lawrence Conservatory in Wisconsin, majoring in performance and composition, and there he started conducting. In his fifth year, he performed three recitals, as pianist, composer, and conductor. But he wasn’t “much of a classical music fan.” His real interest was the modern idiom.
Meyer then studied for a DMA in Piano Performance at SUNY Stony Brook with Gilbert Kalish, who had “no prejudices about old and new music.” There he also took up leading a contemporary ensemble that had no faculty conductor. In 2001, having almost completed his DMA, he went to study piano in Berlin on a German academic exchange grant. Already then he was thinking of how to jump over into conducting. After a concert that a friend had set up for him in St. Petersburg fell through, the friend invited him to come any way; they’d put an orchestra together and do a concert. Meyer didn’t want this to be a one-time thing, however, and the idea evolved into creating an orchestra, one that would concentrate on new music, within the confines of a new music festival, and it would be a “progressive voice in a conservative climate.”
Thus the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic was formed in 2002 and has continued since then, getting better and better musicians each year, thanks mainly to the good work of its concert manager. The modern repertory, Meyer explains, is often difficult for the Russians, who have been brought up on very conventional music. Income is derived mainly from creating special projects, such as the Kaminsky commission. Last year he brought the string players from the St. PCP over to perform in the annual Wall to Wall festival at Symphony Space on New York’s Upper West Side. The artistic director of Symphony Space, incidentally, is composer Laura Kaminsky, who had decided to devote the 12-hour marathon to music from the Soviet era. Somehow everything becomes connected.
Meyer, now in his sixth year at Ithaca College, teaches conducting, directs the two orchestras and the contemporary ensemble. He gives private lessons and teaches a seminar for graduate conductors. He does all the programming for his ensembles, and schedules a handful of piano performances every year – including conducting his chamber orchestra in a Mozart concerto from the keyboard (“it was a little scary, but it feels good having your hands come back”) – and he always plays some chamber music with IC colleagues. He has also appeared with orchestras worldwide.
How does he do it all, one wonders? He says he is fast at learning scores. “The traveling helps, it gives me isolated study time.” He schedules the concerts in St. Petersburg during college breaks. The Kaminsky premiere concert, he pointed out, was on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Much of the work involving these concerts involves funding, grants, and writing applications. “It’s a beast,” he says. He confessed he gets a lot of help from colleagues (Kaminsky is “very good at it”), and that it does get easier. And successful too. The St. PCP won a 2011 Koussevitzky Library of Congress award to commission Kaminsky to write this concerto for pianist Ursula Oppens. Thus it was premiered in St. Petersburg at the 23rd International New Music Festival “Sound Ways.” When asked about it, Meyer explained that the work is “very rhapsodic, but abstract as well.” It has a free-flowing structure, in one movement, based on several motivic ideas, with a lot of interplay between the piano and individual soloists in the orchestra. It’s an “unusual and effective piece and Ursula really likes it, she thinks it has big Romantic gestures.” No, he had never met this pianist, known over the years for her championing of new music. As busy as Meyer this fall, she has performed in a Slovenian festival to honor American composer Elliott Carter, who has written many works for her, as well as played a bunch of concerts in New York honoring contemporary American composers. Years ago she became popular for her recording of Frederic Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated,” a powerful theme-and-variations work written for her. It performed here at last year’s Light in Winter Festival by Syau-Cheng Lai.
Meyer met Oppens in the elegant Grand Hotel Europe—as one of the St. PCP’s partners, it provides housing for visiting musicians. They had put her in the Emperor’s Suite, “two huge rooms with high ceilings,” and in one of them a grand piano. “She was very happy.” There the two spent considerable time working through the concerto. It’s “an exchange of ideas,” Meyer says, “and slowly the piece grows and takes shape with a lot of trial and error, and figuring out what works and what doesn’t.”
The concert in Russia was a great success, and Saturday’s event promises the same. Adding a baroque contrast to the program, IC faculty cellists Elizabeth Simkin and Heidi Hoffman will be soloists in Vivaldi’s Double Concerto, a special occasion for them as they last performed it together 20 years ago in Seattle’s youth symphony. In closing, Meyer leads a reduced orchestra of 35 players in Beethoven’s clean and crisp Symphony No. 8 in F major, Opus 93.
In fitting tribute to this creative musician, last August Meyer took third place in The American Prize in Orchestral Programming. And his IC Symphony Orchestra also received the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming. What caught the judges’ attention, Meyer admitted, was the orchestra’s outstanding performance of Stravinsky’s very challenging Rite of Spring. The “kids are really there with this music, they really understand it.” These awards wonderfully validate the ideas and efforts of someone who wants to engage his students in the music of our time and to promote it for all of us to understand and enjoy. Chapeau, Jeffery Meyer!
Concerts are free and open to the public. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodation should contact the School of Music at 607-274-3717.
