Axe ’Em, Jacks!
NACOGDOCHES, Texas - The Stephen F. Austin State University College of Fine Arts and School of Music will present the Silver Keys Trio in a recital at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in Cole Concert Hall on the SFA campus.
The trio includes School of Music faculty Dr. Christina Guenther, flute, and Dr. Geneva Fung, piano, along with bassoonist Dr. Susan Nelson, a former SFA faculty member who is now assistant professor of bassoon at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Working together at SFA from 2010-2012 led to a fast friendship and many musical collaborations among these musicians, and the trio has been performing together ever since, according to trio member Guenther.
The upcoming program will feature "I Might Speak" by Kyle Hovatter, Trio for Flute, Bassoon and Piano by Michael Schachter and "Mountain Roads" by Chelsea Williamson.
The Silver Keys Trio commissioned Hovatter to compose for the trio's instrumentation at a time when the composer and his wife had just begun to expect a new daughter.
"I swung between exhaustive fragility and terrifying elation and still do with Alice now here and born," Hovatter said. "The text that makes up the movement titles has become my much needed mantra, as anything I do, from parenting to music, is destined to fail without love. My deepest thanks go to the virtuosic Silver Keys Trio for organizing the commissioning consortium that brought about this seven-movement piece."
Schachter's music draws from "an eclectic brew of influences including jazz and New Orleans, Renaissance polyphony, Jewish liturgy and klezmer, and South Indian classical music," Guenther explains. Trio for Flute, Bassoon and Piano was commissioned by the Aurea Silva Trio for their Midwestern performance circuit in 2014 and for inclusion on their forthcoming studio release.
"The piece is a sort of study in threes; three instruments, three movements, each movement featuring one instrument as a soloist, and so forth," Schachter said of the work. "The first movement is a sort of macabre waltz, like the French fin-de-siecle had been decomposing in decadence all this time. The second movement is a somber dirge, and it features one of my favorite tunes I've written. The final movement is a delicate, precise whirling dervish, like fine clockwork at warp speed."
"Mountain Roads" is Williamson's three-movement musical picture of "the beautiful and awe-inspiring roads winding through the mountains of Colorado," she said.
The concert is part of the School of Music's Cole Performing Arts Series. Tickets are $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and $3 for students and youth. For tickets or more information, call the SFA Fine Arts Box Office at (936) 468-6407 or visit http://www.finearts.sfasu.edu/.