Music about the beauty of place is the theme of "A Midsummer Night on the Green" concert on Saturday, August 3 as Green Music Festival Director Jeffrey Kahane and Van Cliburn gold medalist, Jon Nakamatsu, take their listeners to re-imagined landscapes.
The concert is the fourth musical event of the Green Music Festival season, now in its third year at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park. Gates open at 4 p.m. for picnicking and fine wines from Hanna Winery and Michel Schlumberger Wines by the campus lakes. The concert begins at 6 p.m.
Mr. Kahane will conduct the Santa Rosa Symphony orchestra in Gershwin's An American in Paris, Von Supp?'s Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna and Respighi's Pines of Rome. Guest pianist, Jon Nakamatsu, a gold medal winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, will join them for Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor, often referred to as "The Song of Norway."
Tickets are $5-48 and can be purchased by calling (707) 546-8742. Further information on the season can be found at www.greenmusicfestival.org.
A native of California, Jon Nakamatsu startled the international music scene in June,1997 when he was named the Gold Medalist of the Tenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He was the first American to have achieved this distinction since 1981. A former high school German teacher with several degrees from Stanford University, he became a popular hero overnight in the highly traditional medium of classical music.
His current season includes orchestral engagements, recitals and chamber music collaborations throughout the United States and Europe. His schedule has included debut performances in New York City?s Carnegie Hall, Washington D.C.?s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as well as in Chicago, London, Paris and Milan.
He has also performed with the Boston Pops, been a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and was a featured soloist with orchestras in Dallas, Dayton, Detroit, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Milwaukee, Rochester, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle.
Named Debut Artist of the Year (1998) by NPR's "Performance Today," Jon Nakamatsu has been profiled by "CBS Sunday Morning" and Reader's Digest magazine, and is featured in "Playing with Fire," a documentary about the Tenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, aired nationwide on PBS.
Jon Nakamatsu has studied privately since the age of six. In addition, he has pursued extensive studies in chamber music and musicology. Mr. Nakamatsu is a graduate of Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in German Studies and a master's degree in Education.
The Green Music Festival at Sonoma State University, a summer-long celebration of music, arts and ideas, presents a sizzling double bill concert on Sunday, August 4, featuring superstars of Cuban jazz and salsa, Gonzalo Rubalcalba and Albita ? delivering the soulful music of Cuba with total passion and full-on sizzle.
Bring a picnic, relax on the lakeside lawns, and take in the exciting sounds of jazz piano virtuoso Gonzalo Rubalcalba Then, put on your dancing slippers for salsa dancing on the green to rootsy Cuban Son singer Albita, the "Cuban diva" of Miami's South Beach club scene. Gates open at 2 p.m. for picnicking, fine wine and food.
Gonzalo Rubalcalba and his trio perform at 4 p.m. Dance instructors from Salsa.com lead the crowd in salsa dance lessons beginning at 5:30 p.m., to warm up for Albita's hot appearance at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $6?$35, available by calling (707) 546-8742. For information, see www.greenmusicfestival.org
GONZALO RUBALCABA
Composer/pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, nominated for three GRAMMY? awards this year, brings astonishing richness to his music, a blend of Afro-Cuban dance rhythms with jazz virtuosity and classical training.
A captivating performer, accomplished composer, and gifted player with amazing technique, Rubalcaba explores the orchestral potential of the grand piano, combining elements of 19th-century romanticism, Yoruba religious beats, swing, bebop, modal jazz and spontaneous improvisation. He embraces the full world of his Cuban musical roots, integrating folkloric strains with the vanguard of musical expression.
Rubalcaba was born in Havana in 1963 with musical greatness in his blood, his father a pianist (who helped introduce the "cha-cha-cha") and his grandfather a well-known danzon composer. He began piano lessons at age 8, and received classical music training at the Havana Institute of Fine Arts, where he earned a degree in musical composition.
An inventive musician and young prodigy, he quickly gained renown and began touring internationally in 1980. By the 1990s, he had strong ties to jazz giants including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Haden, Joe Lovano, and Jack Dejohnette. He met Haden in 1986 at the Havana Jazz Festival and was invited to appear with him and Paul Motian at the 1989 Montreal Jazz Festival, participating in what became known as the Montreal Tapes.
He made his breakthrough at the 1990 Montreux International Jazz Festival in Switzerland, again performing with Haden and Motian, where his appearance created a sensation and catapulted him into the consciousness of the international jazz audience.
Signed by Blue Note in 1990, Rubalcalba is now one of their top artists. He has toured extensively,appearing at prestigious festivals from Mount Fuji to Montreux to Jazz at Lincoln Center. Since 1996 Rubalcaba has lived in Florida.
ALBITA
Cuban Son singer-songwriter ALBITA is an international superstar whose soulful vocals are steeped in the poetry and rhythms of traditional Cuban music. The rootsy singer from Havana's La V?bora barrio became the toast of Miami through her shows at the Centro Vasco.
Albita continually explores the rich diverse history of Cuban musical forms, from smoky ballads to pulsing dance tunes. She has released seven distinctive albums (one in Cuba, two in Colombia, and four in the U.S.) that sound like no one else in American?or Cuban?music, and has just released her eighth, Hecho a Mano ("Hand Made," Silva Screen/Times Square).
Born in 1962, Albita Rodr?guez first learned music at home. Her parents were poetistas repentistas ?poetic improvisers?in the traditional Cuban country style of punto guajiro, who did comic duets in live performances, on radio and on television.
Albita feels a particular closeness with guajiro, the authentic Cuban music of her youth. The style of Son, which goes back to Cuba's fight for independence from Spain, combines African and European elements in a polyrhythmic indigenous musical art form?the basis of today's salsa.
Albita started writing songs as a small girl (seven years old), was given a guitar on her fifteenth birthday, and by sixteen was playing her own music. She grew up in Cuba at the beginning of the era of the nueva trova?the nationalist singer-songwriter movement that generated Cuba's biggest international stars of the 70s. And there was dance music, above all the son.
Her early music incorporated all these influences, taking the traditional song poetry of her parents as a basis, and the neglected heritage of guajira music. Self-taught, she learned by doing, spending her time with musicians and playing gigs wherever she could.
Albita left Cuba for Colombia, where Cuban guajira music is hugely popular, and stayed three years before moving to Miami in 1993. She began performing at the Centro Vasco restaurant and soon became a local legend, as nostalgic Cuban exiles rubbed shoulders with the beautiful people of South Beach crowding to hear her hip and sultry vocal style.
In the rush of celebrity that followed, Albita became not only a music star but a style icon, sought out by the South Beach jet set?Madonna, Quincy Jones and Gianni Versace? and performing all over Latin America, Europe, and the U.S., including at President Clinton's second Inaugural Ball.
With her new CD Hecho a Mano, Albita takes her place as a startlingly original singer-songwriter, with passionate, rhythmic interpretations of lyrics that come from deep down inside her remarkable life. Intimate and reflective, sexy and poetic, the album pulls together the different experiences of a lifetime, her clever and economical lyrics and compelling vocal style telling a complex story with few words and full emotion.
GREEN MUSIC FESTIVAL TICKETS & INFORMATION
The annual Green Music Festival, now in its third year, presents a summer-long program of music, arts and ideas in a beautiful wine country setting by the lakes at Sonoma State University. This year's festival, under the artistic leadership of Jeffrey Kahane, is focused around the theme, "On Common Ground: Evolving Landscapes in Music, Arts and Ideas," explored through concerts, lectures, programs for children and youth, and a special Ansel Adams Centennial Exhibition in the University Art Galllery. Buy tickets to two or more music events and enjoy a $3 discount per ticket!
All events take place at the Sonoma State University campus in Rohnert Park, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., 40 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Tickets are available at (707) 546-8742. For information, see www.greenmusicfestival.org.
Green Music Festival artistic director Jeffrey Kahane has invited the world-renowned Borromeo Quartet, passionate young cellist Alisa Weilerstein, the innovative horn master Richard Todd and the San Francisco Symphony?s principal violist, Geraldine Walther, to take the stage with him for the inaugural Chamber Music Series of the Green Music Festival at Sonoma State University on July 20-21.
The two chamber music concerts, called "Jeffrey Kahane and Friends, I and II" will be held in the Evert B. Person Theatre at 8 p.m. on Saturday, July 20 and at 4 p.m. on Sunday, July 21. Works by Brahms, Ravel, Haydn, Schubert and Shostakovich will be featured.
On Saturday, the Borromeo Quartet will perform Schubert's Quartetsatz in C Minor. Mr. Kahane will then join them for Shostakovich's Piano Quintet. The program will conclude with the Brahms Horn Trio in E Flat with Richard Todd, horn, Margaret Batjer, violin and Kahane at the piano.
Quickly establishing itself as one of the most important string quartets performing today, the Borromeo Quartet has been hailed by The New York Times as "outstanding" and the Boston Globe as "simply the best there is." Richard Todd has earned acclaim as one of the premier hornists of his generation. The principal hornist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Todd's style-hopping fluency and superb technique are redefining the way people think of the French horn. Margaret Batjer is widely respected nationally and internationally as a chamber musician and is concertmaster of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
On Sunday at the 4 p.m. concert, the Borromeo Quartet tackles Haydn's Op 76. No 2 Quartet. Alisa Weilerstein on cello joins Mr. Kahane and Ms. Batjer in Ravel's exquisite and dazzling Piano Trio in A Minor.
Weilerstein, at 20, has been performing publicly since she was 13 and has been compared to Jacqueline DuPre in her range of impassioned musicianship and natural virtuosity. She made a spectacular return appearance with the Santa Rosa Symphony last season. Geraldine Walther, the principal violist for the San Francisco Symphony and often called "the Bay Area's favorite violist" joins Weilerstein and the Borromeo Quartet for Brahms? glorious and joyous Sextet in G Major for the closing work.
Tickets are $15-$22 for each of the programs in the Chamber Music Series. For information, call (707) 546-8742 or visit the web site at www.greenmusicfestival.org.
The Chalone Wine Foundation and Sonoma State University's Wine Business Program have selected Reed Foster of Ravenswood Winery and David Stare of Dry Creek Vineyard as the first "Entrepreneur-in-Residence" instructors.
Both have long, successful careers in the wine industry, founding wineries and serving as community leaders along the way.
Foster and Stare will teach a course entitled, "Wine Entrepreneurship," which will instruct students on how to write a business plan for a wine-related business. They will also help students develop case studies and mentor local wine start-ups.
David Hehman, Director of Sonoma State University's Wine Business Program, says "We are excited to have two well-known industry veterans kicking-off our new program, which will enrich the student experience and help our faculty build stronger industry relationships."
Foster co-founded Ravenswood Winery, a nationally acclaimed Zinfandel producer, with Joel Peterson in 1976. He also co-founded the San Francisco Vintner's Club, serving as its president for six years and for another fifteen was an officer of the Draper & Esquin wine retail shop.
Foster holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Williams College and an M.B.A. from Harvard. He is currently a trustee and officer of the Woods Edge School in Oakland, CA.
Stare established Dry Creek Vineyard in 1972 after enrolling as a graduate student in enology and viticulture at the University of California at Davis. As a wine industry community leader, he has served as President of the Society of Blancs, the Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley and the Sonoma County Wineries Association. Stare holds a degree in Civil Engineering from M.I.T. and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University.
Chalone Wine Foundation, an organization that awards scholarships to students studying the art or science of wine or food and provides financial grants to wine-related nonprofit groups, is underwriting the Entrepreneur-in-Residence program.
Sonoma State's Wine Business Program is the first university curriculum to focus exclusively on the business dynamic within the wine industry.
For more information, please visit www.chalonewinefoundation.org and www.sonoma.edu/programs/winebiz
