Spring Faculty Recital

Thursday, September 4, 2025 | 11:00 AM

Florence Kopleff Recital Hall

The Inevitable Descent of Heaven (2003)

Paul Elwood | 1958-2025

dedicated to percussionist Stuart Gerber; premiered by Stuart Gerber, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, September 23, 2003.

Stuart Gerber, percussion

Lauded as having “consummate virtuosity” by The New York Times, percussionist Stuart Gerber has performed extensively throughout the US, Europe, Australia, and Mexico as a soloist and chamber musician.

Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola

Bohuslav Martinů | 1890-1959

I. Poco allegro

Although he had an insatiable musical curiosity, Martinů was not a successful student in his years at the Prague Conservatory. He was expelled from the Conservatory’s organ department in 1910 for “incorrigible negligence” and the following year failed in his first attempt to get a teaching credential. Martinů had been a prodigy on the violin and did play in the Czech Philharmonic in the early 1920s.

But his interest was always focused on composition. Martinů moved to Paris in 1923 to study with Albert Roussel and began a prolific period of composition in all forms and genres.

When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the opposition government appointed Martinů its cultural attaché in Paris, where the composer aided large numbers of refugee artists. He composed a Field Mass for the Free Czechoslovak Army Band and found his music proscribed in his homeland by the Nazis. When the fall of Paris became imminent, Martinů and his wife fled, first to what became Vichy France, then to Portugal, and eventually to the United States.

After the war, Martinů was offered a post as professor of composition at the reorganized Prague Conservatory. But while teaching at Tanglewood in the summer of 1946, he suffered a near-fatal fall from a balcony. He remained in the U.S. and spent most of 1947 recuperating and composing chamber music, beginning with the Three Madrigals. They were inspired by a performance of the Mozart Duos by his friends Joseph and Lilian Fuchs, the brother- sister duo to whom Martinu˚ dedicated the Madrigals (and another violin/viola Duo he composed in 1950).

The Three Madrigals share the imaginative textures, virtuoso interplay, and three-movement form of the Mozart Duos. The name suggests the further influence of English madrigals, which Martinů had first encountered in the 1920s and which were an enduring love of his. The sprung rhythms and free mix of polphony and chordal writing that were so characteristic of Martinu˚ ’s music are a legacy of those madrigals, as much as of the Bohemian and Moravian folk music that also resonates powerfully in this music.