William Bennett was soloist in the first performances of the Oboe Concerto by John Harbison, with the San Francisco Symphony, Herbert Blomstedt conducting, on December 3, 4, and 5, 1992. A feature article on Mr. Bennett and this new work
appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 1. It is reprinted here with permission.

Notes on the concerto by the composer and soloist are reprinted here, from the San Francisco Symphony's program book, with permission.
Copyright 1993

When he joined the San Francisco Symphony as associate principal oboe in 1979, William Bennett was 22, the youngest player in the game.

By 1987, after a series of strenuous tests set by music director Herbert Blomstedt, Bennett was named principal oboe -next to the concertmaster, the most important post in the symphony orchestra. His engaging personality, his dulcet tone and his probing musicianship did not go unnoticed nationally. By 1990, the Boston Symphony was trying to lure away San Francisco's top reed player.

The tow-headed Bennett, who looks like a 13-year-old kid in his formal concert gear, notes that when an organization as venerable as the Boston Symphony is on your tail, your current employers may be moved to sweeten the pot.

"Peter Pastreich (the San Francisco I phony's executive director) asked what they could do to keep me happy. The possibilities are limited because you are a team player, but maestro Blomstedt has been great about encouraging his principals to do solo work."

Besides soloing, the most satisfying thing that can happen to an orchestral musician is to have a new piece made for him. So when Pastreich dangled the prospect of commissioning a new work for oboe for a world premiere, Bennett forgot about Boston.

Besides, he had recently married and moved to Oakland, where his wife is a radiologist at Kaiser
Permanente Hospital.

Bennett's first choice for a composer was Pulitzer Prize-winner John Harbison, whose Second Symphony was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in 1987.

"I'm partial to atonal music, and I love the jazz idiom," he said of Harbison's work.

Commissions are notoriously tricky to consummate, but Harbison knew Bennett's work and the two collaborated enthusiastically.

The new Oboe Concerto has its first performance at 2 p.m. Thursday at a regular subscription concert conducted by Blomstedt. It also will be featured on the 1993 New YorkEuropean tour and Bennett will record it for London Records.

Bennett is from New Haven, Conn., where his father, an amateur clarinetist, teaches physics at Yale University. Young Bill automatically picked up his father's instrument. "But when I was about 10, my older sister started playing oboe in (the school) band. She's a lot smarter than I am, and in about three weeks she realized that the reeds are too much of a hassle, so I inherited
her oboe."

Bennett, who has a degree from Yale and also studied briefly at Juilliard, admits that "music always touched me, but I didn't respond specifically to the oboe until I was in junior high and heard a recording of the Cleveland Orchestra playing Brahms."

"Their oboist was Marc Lifschey (later principal oboe in San Francisco). I started collecting his records and, after I graduated, it seemed natural to emigrate to San Francisco."

Bennett played alongside his idol for a half dozen years until Lifschey retired in 1985.

Now one of the symphony's "old guys," Bennett is on the committee to choose players to advise management on a new music director after Blomstedt steps down in 1995. Normally laid back, Bennett leans forward intensely to discuss his "collegial" relations with the maestro.

"I was Blomstedt's first important appointment. We went through a long and, for both of us, stressful trial period. It was so important that he make the right decision. I owe him everything. He's been incredibly supportive-, he gave me solo opportunities, like the Strauss (last season's performance of Richard Strauss' Oboe Concerto), and now the commission."

Bennett declares himself "very, very happy with the finished piece."

"it has the twin influences of jazz and baroque music." He grins broadly. "And it is very hard to play!

You are one in 100 in a symphony orchestra, and you don't expect this to happen too many times. Everybody in the group deserves such a chance, and this might be my first and last time. So naturally I wanted the great 20th-century oboe concerto.

"The pressure on the composer was enormous, but as far as I'm concerned, he delivered!"

William Bennett is the Principal Oboist of the San Francisco Symphony and occupant of the Edo de Waart Chair, a position he has heldsince September 1987, when he was appointed to the post by Music Director Herbert Blomstedt. Mr. Bennett joined the Orchestra in 1979 as Associate Principal to Marc Lifschey. A regular soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, his most recent solo appearance here was in March 1992, when he performed Jean Francaix's The Flower Clock with Eduardo Mata conducting. Other notable appearances include performances of Richard Strauss's Oboe Concerto with Hugh Wolff in 1991, the Bach Double Concerto for Oboe and Violin with Iona Brown in 1990, and, in 1989, the Mozart Oboe Concerto with Jean-Pierre Rampal on the podium.

During the past thirteen years, Mr. Bennett has appeared frequently in solo recital, concerto, chamber, and orchestral engagements throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Far East. He has performed at the Marlboro Festival, the Festival D'Inverno in Sao Paolo, the Aspen Festival, and the Berkshire Music Center. At the invitation of Seiji Ozawa, Mr. Bennett has substituted for the Principal Oboe of the Boston Symphony in concerts at Tanglewood, Symphony Hall in Boston, and Carnegie Hall. In August of 1991, he returned as soloist and woodwind coach with the Asian Youth Orchestra for a tour of Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and the People's Republic of China.

Mr. Bennett is also an active soloist in the Bay Area and Northern California. In November of 1991, he joined Michael Morgan and the Fresno Philharmonic for performances of oboe concertos by Bellini and Martinu. Kent Nagano has invited him to make his debut as a soloist with the Berkeley Symphony in June 1993, in the Vaughan Williams Oboe Concerto and Takemitsu's Gemeaux. He will collaborate with Asher Raboy and the Napa Valley Symphony in March of 1994.

Mr. Bennett is an honor graduate of Yale University. He studied oboe with Robert Bloom at Yale and at The Juilliard School of Music.

John Harbison was born in Orange, New Jersey, on 20 December 1938. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, though he spends as much time as possible composing at his mother-in-law's farm at Token Creek, Wisconsin. The genesis of his Oboe Concerto is described in his own and William Bennett's notes below. The work was commissioned for William Bennett by the San Francisco Symphony through the generosity of Mrs. Paul L. Wattis, with additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and these are the first performances. The orchestra consists of two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two clarinets
(bass clarinet doubles alto saxophone), three bassoons (third doubles contrabassoon), two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion consisting of tubular bells, xylophone, tam-tam, suspended cymbals, glockenspiel, gong, crash cymbals, vibraphone, snare drum, triangle, temple blocks, three woodblocks, marimba, harp, and strings.

In brief - John Harbison grew up at Princeton, where his father was a renowned and now legendary history professor. John played the piano and started to invent pieces of his own as a young boy, and at twelve he started a jazz band. After undergraduate work at Harvard, he studied at Princeton, where Roger Sessions and Earl Kim made great impact on him. Harvard
also granted him a fellowship that sent him to Berlin for study in composition with Boris Blacher and conducting with Hanns-Martin Schneidt. He has been active in performance ever since, conducting many organizations in the Boston-Cambridge area, in Los Angeles, Tanglewood, and elsewhere. He has taught at Reed College and the California Institute for the Arts, and for many years now he has been Professor of Music at M.I.T. His writings about music include the article on Sessions in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music and program notes, including several for the San Francisco Symphony, on repertory from the seventeenth century to the day before yesterday.

Harbison has been composer-in-residence to the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His Flight into Egypt was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He has received commissions from, among others, the Atlanta Symphony, the Boston Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Oboe Concerto is
his second San Francisco Symphony commission; the first was his Symphony No. 2, introduced by Herbert Blomstedt in May 1987 and taken on the Orchestra's Asian tour in 1988.

We asked the composer and soloist for some words on the new concerto. Their responses follow.

This Oboe Concerto was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for its Principal Oboist, William Bennett. I was fortunate to be able to trade ideas about the piece with him from the beginning, to listen to his playing, and to have the benefit of his reactions to my ideas, both verbally and from his taped playing of the sketches. I found it fascinating to hear one of his own
compositions, a set of lighthearted and quirky variations on Mendelssohn's Wedding March, which gave me additional clues to his playing style and personality.

In my view, the orchestra has two leaders, the concertmaster and the principal oboist. There exist concertos which seem to be designed for a concertmaster, like the Stravinsky Concerto or the Haydn Concertante, where the soloist plays a great deal with small groups of his or her colleagues. In Baroque concertos, such as the Bach Double or the Brandenburgs, the soloist even plays along in some of the tutti passages, as if to underline the common origins of soloist and section player. This Oboe Concerto gradually evolves toward this collective ideal. At the end, soloist, concertino groups, and the orchestra as a whole aspire to a clear and calm unity.

Virtuosity is central to all concertos. This piece unites the moments of the greatest technical bravado with the moments of greatest formal importance and expressiveness. In place of cadenzas, each movement has a passage where the soloist takes over and drives the action to its conclusion. At certain points, there occurs an orchestral sonority quite different from that of the
typical concerto orchestra. It is closer to the earliest big jazz bands of the twenties or thirties. I have been fascinated by the true masters of American orchestration -Don Redmond, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, and Duke Ellington. The first movement draws on the big bands' unusual solo combinations with muted trumpet and tuba while the last movement employs the jazz tradition of "call and response" - statements traded between reeds and brass.

To continue the story behind the piece, I am glad to be able to turn our introduction over to my collaborator, William Bennett.

- John Harbison

In the program note for his Oboe Concerto, John Harbison has outlined a piece that gradually brings the soloist into "clear and calm unity" with all the disparate sections that make up the orchestra. He also reminds us that the oboe is traditionally a "leading" member of one of those disparate sections. In fact, during a typical, late twentieth-century subscription season, the
principal oboist and all the other "leaders" in a major symphony orchestra have their hands full with forty weeks of section playing. A standard concert may provide the principal players with a few adrenaline-choked moments of solo glory, but most of their attention is given to tricky ensemble passages and the delicate work of accompanying other voices, often those of guest
artists.

It is a popular notion that all orchestral musicians covet the career of the traveling concerto soloist, so it may come as a surprise to the audience that standing up at the front of the stage is not for everyone. (There are even times when the people doing it may feel it's not for them, either!) It is, however, a very different kind of performing experience and provides a different
kind of a challenge, and if your number comes up, you want it to count! And if someone decides to commission a concerto for you, you want it to count big-time. So in November of 1990, when the San Francisco Symphony decided to commission an oboe concerto for me, I asked them to contact John Harbison.

I first learned about John Harbison more than ten years ago from Steve Paulson, our Principal Bassoonist (a composer himself and one of the Symphony's most active musical explorers.) When Davies Symphony Hall was built in 1980, Steve put together a woodwind quintet for an afternoon test of the new building's potential for chamber music. Thus the Caselli Ensemble
was born (so named for the obscure, nineteenthcentury woodwind composer Frederico Caselli and, coincidentally, for our rehearsals at Steve's former home on Caselli Avenue in San
Francisco). For three years, I joined Steve and Symphony members Dave Breeden (clarinet), Bob Ward (horn), and Leone Buyse (flute, now a member of the Boston Symphony) for a series of Sunday afternoon concerts at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.

One of our favorite pieces was John Harbison's then freshly minted Wind Quintet.[1] Steve had heard a tape of an early performance of the piece and had express-mail ordered a new set of parts from New York. It was an expensive, blueprinted photo copy of a handwritten score, and I remember the paper still reeked of ammonia at our first performance. Of course, it's not
that unusual for woodwind quintet music to reek, and, like many performers (and listeners), I had been conditioned to approach new music with a curious mixture of hope and dread, so I was thrilled when the first notes wafted through the room. Harbison had taken a very problematic texture and crafted a virtuosic tour-de-force that was practically orchestral in its scope. The parts were perfectly tailored to the character and the technical demands of the individual instruments. In addition, the Quintet boasted a touching, lyric sensibility and a unique, jazzinfluenced rhythmic vitality that I found impossible to resist. Needless to say, I was hooked, and I have looked forward to new Harbison ever since.[2]

The Symphony administration was in obvious agreement with me, because they already had a plum Harbison commission on the back burner and were reluctant to relinquish a purely orchestral work for an oboe concerto. Instead, I was given some tapes of two or three other leading composers and asked to consider a commission for one of them. While I listened, mysterious things were happening.

In December, I heard a rumor from an oboist in New York that John Harbison was writing a concerto for me. In January, I heard the same bit of gossip from one of my own colleagues in San Francisco. Unable to contain my curiosity, I wrote to John and asked if there was any truth to the stories. He wrote back and informed me that he had been working very hard to get his
publisher to accept an oboe piece. Later that week, I learned that the Symphony's negotiations were complete and the concerto was going to happen.

Ah, be careful of what you wish for! Panic set in. What if it's already finished? What if I can't play it? I thought of the anecdote concerning the Schoenberg Violin Concerto and the frustrated soloist, Jascha Heifetz, who claimed that it would take a left hand with six fingers to execute the manuscript. In a chilling reply worthy of a Charles Addams cartoon, Schoenberg replied: "I'll wait!" Terrified, I called John and asked if he would consider entertaining my thoughts about the concerto. He said it had been a while since he had collaborated with an instrumentalist on a piece; but, kindly, he too agreed to wait. (Besides, he told me that he had a string quartet to finish first). In the meantime, he asked me to find out if anyone in the clarinet section was comfortable playing alto sax. He said he was interested in exploring the "jazz potential" of the oboe.

This piqued my curiosity, and I set about trying to imagine what he had in mind. My first thoughts were quite fevered. I had a vision of an oboist joining the orchestra in the manner that singers fronted big bands a la 1940's radio (there is a popular myth among oboe players that the former principal of a major American orchestra fashioned his solo style on the croonings of Frank
Sinatra). I even wondered if the concerto would have anything in common with the bebop abstractions of Elliott Carter's contribution to the repertory. I tried to picture Heinz Holliger performing at the Cotton Club with Duke Ellington. What kind of a concerto would match those hallucinations?

In May of 1991, 1 finished a long letter to John in which I outlined my playing limitations and wrote down every single thing I could think of regarding the commission. I included my comments about most of the solo repertory and, wherever possible, I furnished him with tape recordings of my performances. I also supplied him with sheet music to a couple of pieces by Antonio
Pasculli (Le Api and the Variations on Donizetti's La Favorita), a little-known Sicilian virtuoso who toured Europe in the 1860s playing a gold-keyed oboe.[3] In addition, as John mentioned in his program note, I included a set of fifteen solo variations on Mendelssohn's Wedding March that I had written in 1990-to perform at a cousin's wedding. The variations were intended to provide background music for a reception, so they are fairly inoffensive and straightforward. But I was a one-man band on that occasion, and I think the element that appealed to John about the piece was the notion that the oboe could provide harmony for itself by pitting one register against another (a device also favored by Pasculli, and, indeed, by John Harbison himself in his 1979 oboe piece Amazing Grace).

I suggested a larger orchestra than one is accustomed to hearing in an oboe concerto, acknowledging the fact that the oboe can get wiped out if the forces aren't managed discreetly. It was my hope that the concerto would also function as a showcase for the orchestra, presenting the different sections in pastel shades as they highlight the solo line. Finally, I put in a request for one of John's trademark, apocalyptic swing numbers.

When John received my letter, he told me that we weren't "far apart." He said that the only aspect of the piece that I might not anticipate would be its structural relationship to Bach cantatas. I thought of the seven-movement cantatas that take forty minutes to perform and decided that it was time to get out of John's way. We didn't correspond for several months.

In December of 1991, John wrote to inform me that he was finishing the piano score. His card included a tantalizing postscript: "Ear candy it has!" The package arrived in January of 1992. Seeing the finished concerto was a strange experience. Imagine a first visit to an exotic country that you've only glimpsed through postcards. Then imagine that on your first day there
you bump into your exact double on a crowded street corner. And just as the spark of recognition lights in your eyes, you lose each other in the crowd. That's how I felt. Everything that John and I had talked about was there: the Bach cantatas, the extremely active and brilliantly colored orchestral palette, Antonio Pasculli, even the Cotton Club (although it had apparently
relocated to New Orleans during the summer). But the time for abstract daydreams was over. The concerto was real. It had focus now, and it was time to start dealing with the specific problems of performing the piece.

Early in this essay, I mentioned the conflicting feelings that new music can bring up. I was not just writing about "contemporary" or .avant-garde" music. I was referring to music that is not completely familiar to us, and I only use the term "familiar" because I can't think of a more accurate one. In fact, all music is familiar. The clock radio goes off in the morning and we catch the last two minutes of a dark, symphonic work that we've never heard before. It must be Tchaikovsky? Maybe Borodin? No. It's too dissonant. Early Stravinsky? The announcer tells us it was Scriabin. Well, at least we knew it was Russian.

(But how did we know?) Sitting in rush hour traffic, we skim through the dial and light upon a hot new pop release. OK. It's obviously U2. And they're ripping off Jimi Hendrix. But the bass line is pure Motown. Anyone could have written that! (Or could anyone?)

The point is, a new piece comes out of the collective unconscious and creates expectations all by itself. A composer pulls an idea out of the ether and tries to organize it on paper. Hundreds of years of structural principles narrow its scope immediately. A performer becomes involved and imposes further boundaries. When the piece is finally ready for presentation, it has been
defined and re-defined a thousand times. There are movement titles, metronome markings, bowings and articulations, balances, conducting patterns. But there's still something wild and untamed about the music, and that something is the listener.

Ultimately, this is a commission for everyone here. What you bring to this music is very important and will direct its course for years to come. With that in mind, I want to leave you with one more defining point. As you listen to this whole program, ask yourself what kind of music, old and new, you expect to hear. What kind of music are you willing to hear?

-William Bennett

The San Francisco Chronicle's music critic, Robert Commanday, wrote:

In leading from one of its aces, principal oboe William Bennett, the San Francisco Symphony had the right idea for yesterday's program, but John Harbison's Oboe Concerto - commissioned for him by the symphony - just wasn't a suit strong enough to back him up. While Harbison doesn't have much in the way of promising musical ideas, he surely knows how to stretch them out to make that abundantly evident.

The concerto that Bennett and music director Herbert Blomstedt introduced was easy enough listening, dedicated as it is to keeping Bennett and his inventive and expressive playing in the forefront. But easy isn't necessarily a virtue. There's a lot of selvage under him in the opening Aria movement where he goes singing away like a lark innocent of the drabness below. The oboe picks up on a kind of modern Bachishness (after Stravinsky) early in the piece. Harbison introduces a treatment of orchestral choirs in the manner of the "Big Band" style, but
softly here, the reeds first. He will open this up in the fuller, swingier manner (after Bernstein) in the third movement Fantasia.

The middle movement is a Passacaglia which aims at an evenly unfolding continuity, the successive "stanzas" marked by subtle color shifts for the pulsing chords in the accompaniment.

Etudes and Exercises

Without significant change in character in the orchestra's music, variation occurred melodically in the oboe part and that was not enough. To be sure, Bennett played it splendidly as I am sure he plays oboe etudes and exercises for practice. Just such mechanical make-work was the subject of one long stretch. Harbison's notes and an essay by Bennett in the program described
the extensive preliminary discussion between the two and the soloist's suggestions and input. That might explain the conventionally oboistic nature of the piece that doesn't really stretch the instrument or anyone's imagination.

The Harbison concerto will be performed in Carnegie Hall, New York, on March 9; in Frankfurt on March 14; Vienna on March 17; Hamburg on March 19; Copenhagen on March 22; and London on March 24.

Mark Weiger, Assistant Professor of Oboe at the University of Iowa and Principal Oboe with the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra, is a member of the Iowa Woodwind Quintet, the New Hampshire Music Festival, and Bear Lake Music Festival (UT). He is the founder and director of the Double Reed Ensemble of Iowa which has recorded for the CRS label.

In January 1993, Weiger presented solo recitals, lectures, and master classes in Vancouver and Victoria, BC, Canada, and in Seattle and Bellingham,

Washington, and Portland, Oregon. He performed the Lalliet Carnival of Venice, Porsch Nocturne for English horn and piano, Soderlundh Concertino, Schreck Sonata, Britten Temporal Variations and Insect Pieces. Lecture topics included "Trust: A Process for Discovery in Learning and Teaching," "Reading Reeds," and "Becoming Your Own Soloist."

In February 1993, Weiger performed Michael Daugherty's Little Firecracker for solo oboe and chamber ensemble. In March, he performed the Bach Double Concerto with Doris Preucil at the Preucil School of Music in Iowa and the Verroust 4th Solo de Concert arranged for solo oboe and wind ensemble with Leroy Anderson's Bugler's Holiday for three oboes and band. For the
latter, he was assisted by Andrea Gullickson, Oboe Instructor at Northeast Missouri State University, and Debra Hawk-Burt, the Oboe Instructor at Coe College in Iowa. Later in March, he and Ray Still, principal oboe with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, performed the Albinoni Concerto Op. 9, No. 9 for two oboes and the Vivaldi Concerto in d minor (P.302) for two oboes with the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra.

Carol Padgham Albrecht presented a faculty recital on February 18, 1993 at the Lionel Hampton School of Music, University of Idaho. Her program included the Sonata for Oboe and Piano by Herbert Howells and the Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano by Francis Poulenc. She was assisted by pianist Sandra Mauchley and bassoonist Ronald Klimko.

Marc Fink presented a faculty recital on January 23, 1993 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His program opened with Mozart's Serenade No. 11 in Eb, K. 375 and continued with Antal Dorati's Cinq Pieces, and the Sonata, Op. 166 by Saint-Saens. Assisting artists included Todd Welbourne, pianist and the members of Madison's Mozart Wind Band: Marc Fink
and Anna Hendrickson, oboes, Linda Bartley and James Smith, clarinets, Nancy Becknell and David Felcyn, horns, Richard Lottridge and Lori Wooden, bassoons.

The second half of the program included Reflections for solo oboe d'amore by John Stevens (premiered by Mr. Fink at the I.D.R.S. Frankfurt conference in August, 1992); Sonata da Chiesa for oboe d'amore and organ by Frank Martin; and the Quatuor for English horn and strings by Jean Francaix. Assisting artists were John Chappell Stowe, organist, and Eugene Purdue, violin;
Sally Chisholm, viola; and Karl Lavine, violoncello.

Riccardo Bricchi, first oboist of the Orchestra Sinfonica Abruzzese, in Italy, was soloist with the orchestra in four performances of the Mozart Concerto in C Major, K. 314 in April and May of 1992. Marco Zuccarini was the conductor.

In the February, 1993, issue of CD Review, the motion picture soundtrack recording, Malcolm X, is reviewed by Steve Korte. Terence Blanchard's score is warmly received, "but the most moving moment is the solo oboe performance of Blair Tindall of the "Assassination" theme."

Sarah Watkins performed the Mozart Quartet, K. 370 with the Takacs Quartet in Washington, D.C. at the Concoran Gallery on March 19, and again on March 20 for the College Concert Society in College Park, Maryland. On April 24 she will perform Ivan Erod's Vox Lucis for baritone, oboe and orchestra with her husband, John Shirley-Quirk, in Vienna's Musikverein.

Readers of the New Yorker are enjoying the work of Paul Griffiths, the magazine's new music critic. In one of his first columns, he refers to the ubiquitous Heinz Holliger.

Operatic and symphonic doings have, as usual, started ahead of the new-music ensembles, and the city has had to wait for Speculum Musicae to bring forward what was only a partial performance of Elliott Carter's latest work, "Trilogy, " for oboe and harp. I heard the first complete account, which was given in June by the dedicatees, Heinz and Ursula Holliger, at thePontino Festival, above what used to be the Pontine Marshes, south of Rome. The three items can be played separately -"Bariolage" as a harp solo, "Inner Song" as an oboe solo, "Immer neu" as a duo - but they fit together both practically and poetically: practically in that the solos can gain occasional pedal-tone interventions when the other instrument is available; poetically in that the pieces link up to form a commentary on, or demonstration of, a-passage from one of Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus." "Bariolage " is "a play of pure forces" - what Rilke earlier in the sonnet refers to as existence remaining "enchanted for us" - and for Carter they turn out to be surprisingly diatonic forces, though that may be in the nature of the instrument. "Inner Song," where "words give out into the inexpressible, " is a tremendous blow for the oboist: an almost seamless quasiimprovisation, wandering through the registers with hardy stealth and assurance. Finally, "Immer neu" is a release into dialogue: what is "ever new" for Rilke is music, which "builds out of the most tremulous stones her divinely consecrated house."

Also new from Carter, and also due to Heinz Holliger, is a Quintet for Piano and Winds, which had its first performances last month in Cologne and London. Mr. Holliger has been striving to increase the repertory for this combination, which appears to have been pioneered by Mozart, in his E-flat Quintet K.452, and used again, in a spirit of companionate rivalry, only by Beethoven among major composers.

End notes

[1] The Caselli Ensemble was reconstituted (with flutist Tim Day) for a 1988 Chamber Music West Concert honoring John Harbison.

[2] The San Francisco Symphony has performed the Mirabai Songs, the Music for Eighteen Winds, and the Second Symphony (also a Symphony commission). If you are interested in hearing more, I would suggest the First Symphony, Ulysses' Bow, and the
Overture Remembering Gatsby for starters.

[3] Michael Steinberg has said he cannot find any mention of Pasculli in the reference books, "not even the big fat Italian ones."

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