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Their Music Take Wings
Art-school faculty's piano trios gain national recognition,performances
Journal File Photo
Kenneth Frazelle wrote Piano Trio for pianist Jeffrey Kahane, who performed it at a music festival in Palo Alto, Calif., earlier this month.
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Published: August 17, 2008
Two members of the composing faculty at the UNC School of the Arts have been busy this summer. Lawrence Dillon and Kenneth Frazelle have had new compositions accepted by leading organizations.
Unlike his students, Dillon hasn't competed for a composition prize in many years. But he made an exception last year, hoping for luck in the Land of Lincoln.
This past July, Dillon became one of three people to win the first composer competition sponsored by the Ravinia Festival near Chicago. He had submitted The Better Angels of Our Nature, which, like the other winning entries, is a piano trio with narration inspired by the words of Abraham Lincoln. The piano trio, which became popular in the 18th century, consists of a piano, a violin and a cello. "I always thought he was one of the great figures in our history," Dillon said. "But (after writing Angels) I have an even greater respect for what a good man he was -- not just a great leader but a really thoughtful and interesting and good person."
Ravinia, the summer home of the famed Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is the oldest music festival in the United States. Welz Kaufmann, Ravinia's president and chief executive, said in a statement that the Ravinia Festival Composer Competition aimed "to celebrate (Lincoln's) birthday by letting today's composers comment on our fluid understanding of this legendary man."
The Lincoln birth centennial is next year. To help celebrate that milestone, the Lincoln Trio, ensemble-in-residence at the Music Institute of Chicago, will perform Angels at several sites in Illinois, along with the competition's other winning pieces -- James Crowley's From the Earth and Eric Sawyer's Lincoln's Two Americas. At this point, a narrator has not been cast, Ravinia officials said last week.
After the Lincoln Trio performances, one of the three works will be selected for an East Coast tour featuring violinist Miriam Fried and musicians from Ravinia's Steans Institute for Young Artists, which trains gifted young musicians who are on the verge of professional careers. Fried is known to local audiences; she plays first violin in the Mendelssohn String Quartet, which was once in residence at the UNC School of the Arts.
Dillon said that he wrote Angels to illustrate three aspects of Lincoln's character, namely "his integrity, his sense of humor and his poetic vision." In addition:
"I love … combining spoken text and music," Dillon said. "I just think that the rhythm of spoken language is so musical. But at the same time, it's very ambiguous. It's not something you can pin down easily."
Before writing Angels, Dillon read a comprehensive volume of Lincoln's correspondence and speeches, plowing through "a lot of dullness" in correspondence on the way to "pockets of these really brilliant things."
Themes soon began to suggest themselves, and Dillon eventually selected excerpts from two letters and two speeches.
Each movement in Angels looks at a different side of Lincoln. For example, the first movement, titled "Integrity," is based on a letter that Lincoln wrote in 1836, when he was still in the Illinois state legislature.
"It's just so beautiful what he says to this fellow, who's trying to protect Lincoln's good name," Dillon said. "He says, ‘Don't try to protect my good name. That's not your job. Your job is to serve the people. If you have something bad to say about me, say it.'
"It seems it was just smoke and mirrors. It wasn't something Lincoln did or said. The guy was just trying to smear Lincoln's name. Lincoln said, ‘You can say anything about it. If it's true that's my problem. You can't betray the people. You can't hide things.' It's so inspiring to see a leader who has the self-confidence to value truth over loyalty."
Dillon isn't the only local composer who has contributed music to the literature for piano trio.
Kenneth Frazelle, who also teaches composition at the UNC School of the Arts, wrote a piano trio for Music@Menlo, a chamber-music festival and institute in California.
The trio is called Piano Trio. It was written for the esteemed pianist Jeffrey Kahane, who performed it Aug. 7 and 8 in St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, Calif. Kahane's partners in the performance were violinist Joseph Swensen and cellist Andres Diaz.
A press release describes Piano Trio as exploring "different elemental images" in three movements.
A movement called "Of Water" features a "murky, undulating quality." "Unto Dust" can be likened to "a fleeting, elegiac collage." And "Into Light" emerges as a "non-stop presto."
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.
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