Chamber Orchestra Music by Composers from Ireland and the US
Frank Corcoran Variations on Myself
Max Lifchitz, conductor
The North/South Chamber Orchestra
Tuesday, March 12 at 8 PM
Christ & St Stephen’s Church
120 West 69th St (bet Bway & Columbus), NYC
http:www.northsouthmusic.org
North/South Consonance, Inc. continues its 33rd consecutive season of free-admission concerts on Tuesday evening March 12.
The GRAMMY nominated North/South Chamber Orchestra under the direction of its founder Max Lifchitz will premiere five works especially written for the occasion by composers representing a wide variety of styles and hailing from Ireland and throughout the US.
The concert will start at 8 PM and will take place at the auditorium of Christ & St. Stephen’s Church (120 West 69th St – between Broadway and Columbus) on Manhattan’s West Side.
The event will feature the first performance of ” Variations on Myself ” by the noted Irish composer Frank Corcoran.
A founding member of Aosdána – Ireland’s state-sponsored academy of creative artists – Corcoran was born in Tipperary in 1944 and completed his musical education in Berlin under the supervision of Boris Blacher.
His Two Unholy Haikus won the Sean Ó Riada Award at the 2012 Cork International Choral Festival and the First Prize in the 2013 International Federation of Choral Music.
Several of his orchestral and choral works are available on recordings issued by, among others, the NAXOS, Col-Legno, and Caprice labels. For almost thirty years he taught composition and theory in the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg, Germany.
Corcoran first visited the US in 1989 as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Wisconsin.
Subsequently, he has been invited to lecture at Indiana University, CalArts, Harvard University, Boston College, New York University and Princeton.
As basis for his recently completed work, Variations on Myself, Corcoran employs a melodic theme derived from
the pitches suggested by the composer’s name: F-D-C#-Eb-C-A.
Melodic and harmonic materials are generated by mutating these pitches while strict metrical writing of the
strings contrasts with undulating lines in the wind instruments often moving at their own speed.