Marthanne Dorminy-Gardner—June 14, 2003

Santa Fe New Music presented the Santa Fe debut of the extraordinary Marthanne Dorminy-Gardner on June 14, 2003. This recital, the first in SFNM's "Spotlight On..." concerts featuring some of the many nationally and internationally renowned musicians and composers making their home in Santa Fe, took place on Saturday, June 14, 2003 at 8:00 pm at the Santuario de Guadalupe in Santa Fe.

Marthanne Dorminy-Gardner, professionally known as Marthanne Verbit, has enjoyed an illustrious career for more than twenty years, performing and recording the music of Twentieth Century masters. A pianist of great skill, passion, and personality, Ms. Dorminy-Gardner has won critical praise for her interpretation of futurist and early Twentieth Century masterworks. She has performed at Alice Tully and Merkin Halls in New York City, and Wigmore Hall in London. She has made numerous appearances at colleges and universities as well as in concert halls throughout the country. Among her honors were invitations to participate in both the Library of Congress and the New York Philharmonic concerts and seminars celebrating the centenary of George Gershwin's birth.

Ms. Dorminy-Gardner studied at Eastman School of Music with Armand Basile and with Martin Canin at Julliard. She holds a Master's Degree from Boston University where she studied with Bela Nagy. Her recordings are available on the Albany record label. The program included:

Notes on the Program

Three Slavs. Three Americans. Six composers, most of whom played the piano better than passably. The Slavs, Szymanowski, Ornstein and Scriabin, offer piano writing that is rich and warm from the first two decades of the 20th Century. The three Americans, Antheil, Heitzeg and Fennimore, offer an antidote to the Slavs: lean and cool compared to the Slavic Stroganoff.

Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) was born into an aristocratic family of landowners in the Ukraine. The manor house was always filled with writers, singers and friends including the pianists Artur Rubinstein and Henryk Neuhaus. Sadly, revolutionaries burned the house down with all its treasures during the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is no wonder that Szymanowski's music is imbued with an intense longing for a past happiness never again to be known by him, or by those he remembered so well. He spent much of his life after the Russian Revolution in Warsaw where for many years he was head of the Warsaw Conservatory. His extensive international travels and performances as pianist and conductor of his music secured his reputation as the most important Polish composer since Chopin.

The Etude in B-flat minor, Op. 4 no. 3 owes a debt to both Chopin (the C-sharp minor etude, op. 25) and Scriabin (the B-flat minor etude near the end of this program.) Paderewski first made this poignant and passionate study world-famous, and Artur Rubinstein and Jan Smeterlin performed it extensively.

Szymanowski's study and deep love of the Polish countryside are distilled in his five volumes of Mazurkas, Op. 50. After 1922, he seemed to retrieve his Polish spirit and musical identity by living in Zakopane among the highlanders of the Tatra mountains. The mazurkas are rich with a kind of bagpipe open fifth and are inspired by the buoyant highland tunes of the region. Unlike the Chopin mazurkas, which look westward to the Parisian ballrooms with nostalgic dance melodies, Szymanowski's look eastward.

George Antheil (1900-1959), the self-styled "bad boy of music," was a brash, charming young man from Trenton, New Jersey who had an itch to be famous or infamous. He may not have cared which, until later in life when he wanted to be accepted by the reigning musical establishment in the United States.

Antheil's 1921 Airplane Sonata was written for his first European tour as a pianist. Here the airplane is used as a symbol of the future because it was the most important machine. In this little piece, the young composer included everything modern that he knew: Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, jazz and at one point, a stride bass. The "motor rhythms" became a signature for his music, and the Paris premiere of his Ballet mécanique of a few years later turned out to be his ticket to both fame and infamy.

Leo Ornstein (1892-2002) was the opposite of George Antheil: he was a recluse for most of his life and did not care about promoting his music. Born in Kremenchug, Russia, he received his early piano training in the Liszt-Rubinstein tradition at the Petrograd Conservatory. A pupil of Russian virtuoso Josef Hofmann, he gave his New York debut in the year the Titanic was launched and gained his reputation as a futurist dazzling the critics with music, including his own, at the frontier of composition. Filling concert halls of the States, Europe and South America, he played with a frenzy that threatened to damage the mechanism of his piano and left members of the audience in a state of shock. He renounced the concert platform in 1930, saying he hated to practice and he hated the tyranny of concert life.

Over the years I had many jolly phone calls and much correspondence with this uncommonly kind man. We came close to meeting at various performances, but always at the last minute he decided to stay at home away from the crowd. It was probably the secret of his longevity. Mr. Ornstein composed his eighth piano sonata when he was 97. He died February 24, 2002 at the remarkable age of 109.

The 4th Piano Sonata was written in 1919 and it is strongly seasoned with the dominant flavor of the time: late Scriabin. The first movement is essentially lyrical with a section that I call "Claire de Luneski." The second movement has a hint of a Borodin waltz; the third movement recalls the synagogue chants Ornstein heard as a boy from his father, a cantor. Both the second and third movements are hypnotic, incense-burning music, filled with perfumed harmonies that evoke a sense of hidden pleasures and vices. The fourth movement is a dervish dance—a stomp, in fact.

Joseph Fennimore (b. 1940), recipient of a Rockefeller Grant as well as composition and performance awards, has composed works in all forms, with an emphasis on piano and chamber music. A virtuoso pianist, who, like Ornstein, abandoned a distinguished career at age 34 in order to compose, Fennimore's last composition teacher was Virgil Thomson. From 1972 to 1977 Fennimore founded and directed an American music series in New York City ("Hear America First") during which time works by over 200 American composers were performed at Carnegie Recital Hall.

Joseph Fennimore's music has been performed by the New York City Ballet, Ravinia, Tanglewood and Almeida festivals and broadcast worldwide. A recent chamber work, entitled Sea of Sand, received its premiere at Lincoln Center in the Fall of 2002 by the Queen's Chamber Band. His latest commission for the same ensemble is scheduled for a New York premiere in May, 2003.

An Old Soft Shoe, written in 1984, evokes a picture of a tipsy hobo in tie and tattered tails. The emotional resonance of the dance suggests the appearance of better times. When the piece opens, the tune sounds so familiar that you catch yourself in wondering exactly where you heard it before. Is it the "Third Man" theme? "Tea for Two"? Some older blues piece? Then you realize that it is none of them but all of them. The composer has distilled the essence of the style and cast the whole in a rondo form, laced with variations. This music sings and dances, colored by a romantic individualism.

Steve Heitzeg (b. 1959) is known for his orchestral and chamber works written in celebration of the natural world. In addition to concert and film music, Heitzeg composes "ecoscores" (intimate works with inventive musical syntax) that seek to honor the beauty and rights of nature. Recently he received a regional Emmy for his original score for the public television documentary "Death of the Dream: Farmhouses in the Heartland." Born and raised on a dairy farm in southern Minnesota, Heitzeg now lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Sandhill Crane (Migration Variations) continues a long tradition of keyboard works depicting birdsong and nature. The piece opens with the migratory theme followed by a set of seven variations, each depicting either the actual migration of the Sandhill crane or paying tribute to a particular composer or nature writer. Variation 2, "Night in the Wetlands" is in memory of Olivier Messiaen. "Platte River Waltz" evokes the cranes' ballet-like mating dance at this bird sanctuary along the banks of the river. There are variations in memory of Aaron Copland, John Cage and the nature writer Rachel Carson. The last variation, "Great Migration Ritual", is marked 'wild and mysterious' and attempts to capture the beating of thousands of wings as the cranes take flight.

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whose music stretched harmony prodigiously, influenced composers throughout the 20th Century. His unique idealism as expressed in his vision of a universal transformation of the world through Art may seem naïve today; however, his early death prevented his fervent millennial hopes from being dimmed by World War I and its aftermath.

The mystical style that came to dominate Scriabin's later music is heard in Two Danses, Op. 73. These two pieces were sketches for Scriabin's never-realized grandiose opus, "Mysterium." In the first, "Guirlandes," the music trembles and seems to fragment into shattered crystals. The second dance, "Flammes Sombres," is exemplary of Scriabin's demonic moods. One can imagine the swirling skirt of a dancer fanning the flames of a crackling fire.

The twelve resplendent Etudes Op. 8 have been called the brightest gems of Scriabin's early period. The Etude in d-sharp minor exists in two versions. Scriabin couldn't decide which he preferred and sent both to his publisher, Belaieff. Rimsky-Korsakov was the dominant voice in the Belaieff Publishing House, and he decided to print the version he liked which was more in keeping with his idea of a "warhorse." In addition to harmonic changes, the alternate version is marked piano at the end. My own preference depends on the weather.

— Marthanne Dorminy-Gardner