ITHACA COLLEGE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Dr. Ho-Yin Kwok, director
Daniel Adam Maltz, fortepiano
Brayden Reed, conga
The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) was a collaboration between Mozart and his friend and Masonic lodge brother, the singer-actor-writer-promoter-manager- theater owner (and patron saint of all show-business hyphenates) Emanuel Schikaneder. In 1791, Mozart composed a good deal of music for use in Schikaneder’s Freihaustheater in Vienna, culminating with the music for Schikaneder’s singspiel allegory about love and sacred rites. The Magic Fluteis a curious blend of the sublime and the silly, incorporating oblique references to rituals of the Masons. It was a considerable success and might have been the start of a whole new career for Mozart, had he not taken ill and died in the middle of its run.
Its overture is a fugal sonata movement of the sort that Mozart had composed for the finale of his “Jupiter” Symphony three years earlier. The impressive chords that open the overture (and return between the exposition and the development) are taken from Act I of the opera, where they signify the solemnity of the sacred temple. The tugging impulsiveness of the fugue subject (which is not taken from the opera) is caused by displaced accents: Mozart marks the downbeats soft and the upbeats loud, which is just the opposite of what players in his day would do as a matter of course.
Excerpted as concert music, the overture is unique in being Mozart’s only purely instrumental work that uses trombones. In the opera, the trombones convey grandeur and dignity in the temple scenes. They do much the same thing in the overture, but also lend an impressive weight to the orchestration in the fast sections—the closest the symphonic Mozart comes to a modern “brass section.”
- Program notes by Howard Posner
One of the difficulties in writing about Mozart is trying (in vain) to limit the word “great.” His symphonies from 26 to 41 are sometimes called his great symphonies, but of these, the final three have been accorded a special degree of greatness. (The great-great?) And one of these, No. 40, is known as the Great G Minor to distinguish it from No. 25, dubbed the Little G Minor. But does that mean that No. 25 is not great? Not really.
Helpfully, his No. 39 is in E-flat major, a key that Mozart specialists call bright and auspicious, though they wonder aloud why it is the least performed of the great-great final three. “[That] in itself is something of a puzzle,” insists the distinguished writer Phillip Huscher, “for it is no less a masterwork.” In fact, he notes, it is also the least studied of the three.
Musicologists love to speculate on how Mozart’s career might have progressed if he had lived beyond age 35, since his mastery and musical daring were only accelerating; his Symphonies No. 40 and 41 are full of astonishments. But the No. 39 is more modern in its refinements than its surprises. Its opening adagio is a model of restraint, adhering to strict sonata allegro form and opening onto an allegro that recalls the unfinished cadence we heard in the introduction (an effect that Charles Rosen calls “cinematic”—hardly an 18th-century adjective). The second movement, an andante, also adheres to convention, though it is remarkable for its combination of elegance and intense expressiveness.
The third movement, marked “menuetto,” is built around one of Mozart’s most admired minuets, and includes one of his beloved country dances. Finally, in the fourth movement, Mozart gives us a zesty moto perpetuo (“perpetual motion”) in which the second theme, fascinatingly, is actually the first theme in disguise. This may be the symphony’s most daring touch by a composer who, after all, was never at a loss for a melody.
- Program notes by Michael Clive
Another legacy of the 19th century, well underway by the end of Haydn's life and almost completely fixed by the time of Liszt's death in 1885, was the absolute distinction between the musical amateur and the musical professional. Haydn's published music was consumed for performance at home, by accomplished members of society. Even Chopin taught the daughters of the wealthy with his nocturnes and waltzes as sophisticated exercises. Mendelssohn too, straddled the line, but by the time of Liszt, composers were writing for a virtuoso professional elite, publishing scores only a handful could play.
Haydn's D-major Piano Concerto comes to us from a tradition that valued taste above virtuoso display. A look through the score shows the very minimum of dynamic and expressive indications in the solo part, the expectation being that the performer would already understand the style of the day, and that ornamentations and details of execution were properly entrusted to the soloist's imagination. András Schiff, in his performance, provides his own cadenzas (unaccompanied passages for the soloist to be heard in the first two movements of the concerto) in keeping with this tradition.
Of the 14 pieces for keyboard and orchestra in the generally accepted list of the composer's works, only three can confidently be authenticated as the work of Haydn, either by specific reference to the work in the composer's own musical notebook or by the appearance of a published score during the composer's lifetime, as is the case with this Concerto. The keyboard concerto did not play a large role in Haydn's output over a long career, and misattributions are likely in the murky area of posthumous publications.
The D major Concerto, however, was published in 1784 with a title page that proudly proclaimed it to be "the only Piano Concerto of Haydn which so far has appeared in print." The Concerto opens with a bright Vivace in the strings, quickly joined by the winds, and later by the piano's cheerful contributions. The second movement Adagio, scored primarily for strings alone in accompaniment of the piano, reminds us of Haydn's melodic adherence to an intrinsically vocal line - an elaborate melancholy aria for keyboard. The rousing final movement, headed Rondo all' Ungarese, actually finds its inspirations in a Croatian rather than a Hungarian folk-tune. But the popular musical craze for anything "Turkish" was not discriminating and anything originating even remotely east or south of Vienna satisfied a happy public.
- Program notes by Grant Hiroshima
Brayden Reed was one of my first students at Ithaca College—a freshman in the unfortunately discontinued “Intro to Music Technology” class. During this time, I let his fellow classmate and partner in crime Michael Mezzo borrow a silent brass mute/pickup for easily plugging his horn into guitar pedals. They subsequently asked me to write them a duo utilizing the technology. Later that semester, before we started working on writing the piece, they invited me to attend their joint freshman recital— featuring the Latin band in which they were members. Hearing and experiencing their love of that music played an influential part in the Duo I wrote and the crafting of the present three-movement composition.
At the end of the last school year, Brayden asked me about writing him a conga concerto. With the strong Latin music influence in mind, I agreed. Either in a dream or in that transitory state before or after sleep, I had the idea of a loud conga roll fading into a C#7sus chord (not a “sus” chord in Gen-Z lingo). That small fragment was large enough to inspire the piece’s foundational twelve-tone row. The entire matrix of possibilities is presented below:
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6e48t0257139
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Transposing the four-note C#7sus chord a tritone away generates another four pitches, leaving a four-note whole tone collection. Those 3 subsets are the basis of the first part of the first movement, which treats the row in a less literal manner. You can observe the numerous combinatorial opportunities presented in the row— a favorite technique of Anton Webern. Another admirer of Webern was Frank Zappa, whose influence is palpable in the piece along with Keith Emerson. Both are known for their rhythmic ingenuity, and that can be heard in the grueling rhythmic displays from the orchestra and conguero. The music then winds down to a calm precise statement of the twelve-tone row by glockenspiel, played with finger cymbals. While the following sections recall and transform some of the previous ideas, the ending of the piece goes in a completely different, but tangentially related, direction. My friend and former teacher Gabriel Bolaños, and the Monty Python “Buzz Aldrin” episode are important inspirations for such an approach.
The second movement, a bossa nova inspired by Herbie Hancock’s tune “Butterfly” (from Thrust), examines the row from a harmonic perspective. Over the years I discovered that one can layer different transpositions of the tone row on top of each other to create more dense chords. For example, layering p0/p5 creates Cm11-F#m11-A7(b5)-Ab7(b5)
The third movement, a salsa, is based on a video Greg Evans and I used to watch where Steve Gadd takes a jaw-dropping drum solo over montuno and then messes up the ending of the take. Aside from that Steve Gadd video, you can hear Frank Zappa’s “Trouble Every Day” from the “Roxy and Elsewhere” album and Rush’s “YYZ.” From a serial perspective, the montunos is the prime form of the row followed by its reverse. A few different transpositions follow and create a pseudo-blues.
In essence, the piece reframes the twelve-tone technique within Latin, jazz, and rhythmically-driven contexts.
Firstly, thank you so much to Brayden for having me write some of my favorite music thus far and for executing it at such a high level. I can’t even begin to express the fullness of my gratitude to Dr. Kwok and the Chamber Orchestra students for confidently executing such a demanding piece of music. Those students wouldn’t have had experience with such complex rhythmic and intervallic patterns if it weren’t for their exceptional tutelage from their music theory and performance professors.
- Program notes by Josh Oxford
Described by Classical Voice of North Carolina (CVNC) as an “impressive conductor…outstanding in his attention to detail and his command of the big picture”, Hong Kong-born conductor Ho-Yin Kwok is a three-time winner of The American Prize, 2021, winner of 2017-2018 Vincent C. LaGuardia, Jr. Conducting Competition and 2021 International Conductors Workshop and Competition. Recently concluded an 8-year tenure as Artistic Director and Conductor of the Mississippi Valley Orchestra, Kwok is the Director of Orchestras at Ithaca College, New York. He also serves as Music Director of Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra in Duluth, Minnesota.
Having established a nationwide reputation, Ho-Yin Kwok’s recent guest conducting engagements include the New World Symphony, the Syracuse Orchestra, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, Arapahoe Philharmonic, Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, Gwinnett Symphony Chamber Orchestra, Eastern Festival Orchestra, and Collegium Musicum Hong Kong. He also has been invited to serve as cover conductor for the Minnesota Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and Kansas City Symphony. In the 2025-2026 season, he will make his debut with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and Tucson Symphony Orchestra as well as conducting the season opener for Syracuse Orchestra at the Masterworks Series.
Daniel Adam Maltz is a fortepianist based in Vienna, Austria. He is the leading fortepianist of his generation, performing in 50+ cities per year as a sought-after soloist, director, and Lied accompanist. He is also an esteemed educator, visiting 60+ universities as a guest artist and clinician. Daniel specializes in Viennese Classicism — especially the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven — performed on the Viennese fortepianos of their time. He brings his expertise in the Viennese sound, culture, philosophies, and performance practices of the Classical era to his interpretations. Called “the foremost performer in the world of the fortepiano” (Aspen Daily News), critics say Maltz imbues “[Beethoven’s] tenderness, longing and frustration into the very notes" (Orlando Sentinel), “It was a privilege to hear an artist of this caliber” (Marblehead Current), and praise his “lavish but tasteful” playing (Classical Sonoma). He debuted at Carnegie Hall (Weill) at age 22. Daniel studied fortepiano performance at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna and the Royal Academy of Music in London. He refined his command of historical practices through private study with Ingomar Rainer. He also hosts Classical Cake, the podcast about Viennese classical music and culture.
Brayden Reed, at the time of writing this, is a senior performance major at Ithaca College with a specialization in percussion. He has had the opportunity of studying under Mike Truesdell and Conrad Alexander throughout his undergraduate career in the “gorges” town. Besides training in the classical percussion program, he has also found time for Latin percussion performance as he is a pivotal member of the IC Latin Ensemble, a founding member of Mesa Pa’ Seis, and has performed multiple times with the Jazz Vocal Ensemble at Ithaca College under John White.
His latest endeavor is “Conga Concerto,” written by Josh Oxford. Besides being the professor that taught him about music technology at eight in the morning his freshman year, Brayden has had the pleasure of working with Josh Oxford on many projects, all leading up to the commission of the concerto. Brayden cares deeply for Oxford, who he describes as one of his favorite people to work with. Oxford has had a massive impact on his performance style, often pushing Brayden to perform at a higher level by creating unique musical challenges for him to consider.
Raised on the beliefs of Don Skoog that music is performed to make people dance, the center of Brayden’s ideology on performance is community. Believing music to be an integral part of the human experience, he has found himself enamored with studying both anthropology and ethnomusicology. Out of respect to the instruments he performs, Brayden often researches the history and performance practices of the instruments before he considers playing even a single note, a practice taught to him by Skoog. His goal with the congas has and always will be to honor the tradition and culture that they are from, and to connect with an audience through dance-like feel and groove.
As for what the future holds– Brayden will be attending Indiana University as a graduate student in the performance program. Besides being ecstatic to be studying at the school he dreamed of attending as an undergraduate, he is also excited to be much closer to his hometown of Chicago, and to his grandmother who lives near the campus that he will be calling home this fall.
VIOLIN I
Marie Nemeth, concertmaster
Valerian Connor, assistant concertmaster
Maya Connolly
Marisol McDowell
Jonas Chen
Julia Chu
VIOLIN II
Mackenzie VanVoorhis, principal
Cristian Rodriguez, assistant principal
Kaitlyn Murray
Maxwell Lines
Naveen Tomlinson
Imogene Zybala
VIOLA
Zoe Galgoczy, principal
Breanna Antonio, assistant principal
Elijah Shenk
Sasha Narea
CELLO
Eli Jort, principal
Emilia Lyons, assistant principal
Tom Bowstead
Jonah Harley
Emily Donohue
DOUBLE BASS
Alexa Markowitz, principal
FLUTE
Tori Hollerbach, principal
Madi Connor
OBOE
Reid Canham, principal
Cole Trenkelbach
CLARINET/BASS CLARINET
Christian Laughlin, principal
Joseph Carrero
BASSOON/CONTRABASSOON
Dylan Frey, co-principal
Meg Moriarty, co-principal
Nearah Sanon
HORN
Eliza Ferrara, co-principal
Finny Keefe, co-principal
Madison Stolarski
TRUMPET
Juliet Arau, principal
Lizzy Carvell
TROMBONE
Gabriel Ramos, principal
Estelle Kamrass
BASS TROMBONE
Isiah Owens, principal
TIMPANI
Nicole Galicia, principal
Tommy Anzuini
PERCUSSION
Tommy Anzuini
Connor Thomas
KEYBOARD
Domo Ronsvale
BASS GUITAR
Nellie Cordi