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Bernard Rands's Impromptu No. 3 Debuts with Joel Fan

Nov. 01, 2017

Bernard Rands's <em>Impromptu No. 3</em> Debuts with Joel Fan

Performances featuring the music of Bernard Rands can be heard throughout the world this month, from the US to the UK and Norway. Among the performances is the world premiere of Rands’s Impromptu No. 3 with pianist Joel Fan at the Abrons Arts Center in New York on November 18.

Rands’s Impromptu No. 3, for solo piano, was commissioned by Joel Fan for the Open Source Music Festival. Each commissioned work for the festival draws on a major work from the past. In composing his latest solo piano work, Rands chose to take Elliott Carter’s Caténaires from Carter's Two Thoughts About the Piano as a starting point.

Rands’s haunting choral setting of James Joyce poems, Canti d’Amor, receives two performances in New York this month with C4 (the Choral Composer/Conductor Collective) at the DiMenna Center (November 9) and Our Lady of Mercy RC Church (November 11). The University of Sheffield in Rands’s hometown of Sheffield, UK, gives a performance of Tre Canzoni Senza Parole, for orchestra, on November 11, followed by the composer’s “…in the receding mist…” with the university’s New Music Ensemble on November 24

Closing out the month is a performance of Rands’s Canti del Sole with Tim Weiss leading tenor Magnus Staveland and the NOSO Sinfonietta at the Stormen Konserthus in Norway on November 23. Part of Rands’s lauded Canti Trilogy, a series of vocal works revolving around the celestial themes of sun, moon and eclipse, Canti del Sole won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and features a unique text setting from 14 different sources in all.


Rands has also been honored with an Honorary Doctorate from the State University of New York (SUNY). In honor of the occasion, the SUNY Center for 21st Century Music’s Slee Sinfonietta presented a portrait concert of the composer’s music on October 24.

For more information on Bernard Rands, visit schott-music.com.

Bernard Rands
Impromptu No. 3 (2017)
for solo piano
5’

Canti d’Amor (1991)
after “Chamber Music”
text (Eng) by James Joyce
for mixed choir (SSAATTBB)
22’

Tre Canzoni Senza Parole (1992)
for orchestra
2.afl.2.ca.3.bcl.2-4.3.3.1-timp.3perc-2hp-str
7’

“…in the receding mist…” (1988)
for flute, harp, violin and viola
10’

Canti del Sole (1984)
for tenor and orchestra
texts from Baudelaire, Celan, Huchel, Montale, Wilfred Owen, Quasimodo, Rimbaud, Sinisgalli, Dylan Thomas, Ungaretti and an anonymous poet of the 12th century
3.2.3.2-3.3.3.0-3perc-2hp.cel.pno.elec org-str
30’
version for chamber orchestra: fl(pic.afl).cl(Ebcl.bcl).tpt.2perc-pno-vn.va.vc

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