Composer Richard Festinger's Then and Now includes five chamber works for various instrumentations, featuring Collage New Music, Cygnus Ensemble, Windscape, Calefax Reed Quintet, and other accomplished performers. Festinger's aesthetic springs from the pitch centered modernists of the late 20th century, but is also informed by his background studying jazz with such luminaries as Gary Burton, shaping his music not so much in terms of feel or expression, but in the way in which he approaches harmony and motivic development.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 58:36 | |||
| 01 | Invocation | Invocation | Calefax Reed Quintet | 10:28 |
| 02 | To a Pilgrim | To a Pilgrim | Alan R. Kay, bass clarinet, Michael Nicolas, cello | 9:29 |
| 03 | Hidden Spring | Hidden Spring | Cygnus, John Ferrari, conductor | 14:18 |
Il était une fois... |
||||
| Collage New Music | ||||
| 04 | I. Moderato | I. Moderato | 6:56 | |
| 05 | II. Andante | II. Andante | 6:38 | |
| 06 | III. Allegro | III. Allegro | 4:24 | |
Windsongs |
||||
| Windscape | ||||
| 07 | I. Presto energico | I. Presto energico | 1:36 | |
| 08 | II. Lento | II. Lento | 2:50 | |
| 09 | III. Allegro | III. Allegro | 1:57 | |
Richard Festinger’s finely crafted music contains a disarmingly attractive range of expressive characters, from contrapuntally driven dialogue to coloristic orchestration to dry wit. A protégé of influential modernist composer Andrew Imbrie, Festinger also has a background as jazz guitarist and studied with legendary vibraphonist Gary Burton and trumpeter Herb Pomeroy. These influences seem to have manifested themselves less in a stylistic footprint, though Festinger’s chosen vocabulary certainly identifies itself as late Modernism, and more in the kind of rigorous approach to pitch relationships that one would find in both disciplines. Throughout there is a cogent logic to how Festinger develops ideas that retains an organic sense of evolution, as if the musical ideas are allowed to stretch out and find their own way. His ear for instrumental texture is apparent in the varying sonic profiles of the works for different ensembles included in this collection of his chamber works.
Invocation for reed quintet was composed in 1991 for the Dutch based Calefax Reed Ensemble. The work begins with an introspective opening, with the alto saxophone and clarinet alternating fluid, inquisitive phrases. The other three instruments join gradually, spinning lithe, delicate lines in an accumulating texture. An energetic section follows with darting gestures and punctuating affirmations, reinforcing the contrapuntal interplay that lies at the heart of its conception. Lush chords provide the backdrop for a poignant oboe solo midway through the work, which navigates through vigorous and subdued passages before closing with a dramatic phrase in unison rhythm.
Read MoreThe bass clarinet and cello duo, To a Pilgrim, is dedicated to Festinger’s influential mentor, Andrew Imbrie. Not unlike Invocation, Festinger animates instrumental characters through a lively dialogue that is made all the more transparent by the piece’s lean instrumentation. In the piece’s opening, we hear the two instruments carving out their respective roles, with the cello particularly staking out wide registral and timbral territory with trills, tremolos, and harmonics. The bass clarinet traces sloping figures, occasionally sounding more fragmentary utterances. In a quasi-hocketed passage in the middle of the piece, the two instruments ricochet off each other with off-kilter syncopated bursts before embarking on a series of brief canons exploring strict intervallic relationships. The work returns to the primordial, murky harmonies from which it began.
Hidden Spring, written for the mixed ensemble group Cygnus (flute/alto flute, oboe/English horn, violin, cello, guitar, and guitar/mandolin), allows its unique instrumentation to lead the piece’s evolution, reveling in its shimmering textures and hybrid timbral possibilities. Festinger draws on his background as a guitarist to write quite effectively for the plucked strings pairing, often intertwining long lines between the two to create a kind of spatialized, expanded guitar. The two winds and two strings are also often paired, lending the work quasi-antiphonal moments. If Invocation and To a Pilgrim were primarily driven by line, counterpoint, and dialogue, Hidden Spring seems to prioritize color, mining arrivals and instrumental combinations for their unique sonic characteristics. Brilliant passagework and punctuated splashes of harmony enliven the piece as it ebbs and flows between mischievous dexterity and thoughtful reflection.
Il était une fois… for piano trio was written for the 50th anniversary of the impactful Boston based Collage New Music. Two annunciatory gestures open the “Moderato,” a sonata form movement that toggles between restless interplay between the instruments, and pathos-laden passages featuring the string instruments in turn. “Missing material” from the recapitulation of the exposition in the first movement finds its way into the “Andante,” serving as its germinal seed. String phrases develop a rhetorical architecture as the piano encircles their intensification with chordal commentary. A delicate violin and cello passage acts as the bridge to a mournfully lyrical section over watery piano accompaniment. The trio’s final “Allegro” begins with frisky, charged material before floating into a more settled section with fluid piano arpeggios and a string line in unison rhythm. The movement progresses as a push and pull between these characters, angular versus rolling.
The short three movement work for woodwind quintet, Windsongs, is the lightest piece on the recording, playfully utilizing the virtuosic capacities of the San Francisco based Windscape, the group for whom the piece was written. “Presto energico” features a moto perpetuo string of swooping sixteenth notes that pass through the instruments of the ensemble, colored and commented upon with brief sustains, melodic fragments, and jaunty interjections. The velvety chord voicings that dominate the second movement “Lento” appear as sound color objects, inflected by subtle appoggiatura type figures and sinewy, connective lines. The flute first breaks the hypnotic texture with nervous bird call fragments before the oboe plays a heroic cadenza and leading to a haunting final sonority. The final “Allegro” further reinforces the work’s quirky character, featuring darting figures, anxious trills, and jumpy accents.
– Dan Lippel
Invocation recorded December 13, 2020 at Waalse Kerk Haarlem, Netherlands
Oliver Boekhoorn, audio engineer
To a Pilgrim recorded November 1, 2021 at Dreamflower Acoustic, West Center Church, Bronxville NY Jeremy Tressler, engineer
Richard Festinger, producer
Hidden Spring recorded October 25, 2023 at Oktaven Studio, Mt. Vernon, NY
Ryan Streber, engineer and producer
Il était une fois... recorded March 13, 2023 at Futura Productions, Roslindale, Massachusetts Frank Cunningham, engineer
Richard Festinger, producer
Windsongs recorded November 25, 2014 at LeFrak Hall, Queens College, Queens, NY Da-Hong Seeto, engineer and producer
Mastered by Ryan Streber, Oktaven Audio
Design, layout & typography: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
All works published by Wildcat Canyon Music Press (ASCAP) except Windsongs, published by C.F. Peters (Henmar Press, ASCAP)
Richard Festinger has been a prominent and highly regarded figure in American contemporary music since the early 1980’s. An early interest in jazz in the 1970’s took him to Boston, where he worked with Gary Burton, Herb Pomeroy and Mick Goodrick at the Berklee School of Music, and he subsequently led his own groups as a jazz performer in the San Francisco Bay area before studying composition with Andrew Imbrie at the University of California in Berkeley.
Festinger’s work as a composer, comprising more than 80 compositions across a wide variety of genres, has been widely recognized for its elegance and emotive power. Frank J. Oteri, writing for the 2011 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, describes Festinger’s music as “notable for its combination of propulsive energy with an impeccable sense of poise and balance.” In his article on Festinger’s recordings in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Joshua Levine writes of Festinger’s work as “vibrant, skillfully wrought... intellectually and viscerally compelling music.” WQXR Radio has called him “an American master.”
The numerous awards and honors that have accrued to him include major commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund for music, the Argosy and Barlow Foundations, the Philadelphia Music Project, and the American Composers Forum. He is a recipient of the George Ladd Grand Prix de Paris, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters has twice recognized his work, with both the Walter Hinrichsen Award and an Academy Recording Award.
Some notable recent commissions include his String Quartet No. 3 (2015), commissioned by the Serge Koussevitzky Foundation for the Afiara Quartet; Cummings Settings (2016), written for the Resonant Bodies Festival in New York; the song cycle Careless Love (2017) written for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players; Icarus in Flight (2018), commissioned by the Climate Music Project for the Telegraph String Quartet; the cantata for chorus and chamber orchestra Worlds Apart (2020), written for the Boston Cantata Singers; and his String Quartet No. 5 (2021).
A longtime resident of Northern California, in 1985 Festinger founded the well-known San Francisco based contemporary music ensemble Earplay, which he continues to direct. In 1990 he joined the music faculty of San Francisco State University as professor of music theory and composition, and served from 2010 to 2018 as Artistic Director of the Morrison Artists Series, San Francisco’s longest established presenter of professional chamber music concerts. He serves on the boards of Earplay, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Irving M. Klein International String Competition, and the League of Composers/International Society for Contemporary music. More recordings of his works are available on the Bridge, Centaur, CRI, CRS and Naxos International labels.
Calefax is a close-knit ensemble of five reed players united by a shared passion. For thirty-five years they have been acclaimed in the Netherlands and abroad for their virtuosic playing, brilliant arrangements and innovative stage presentation. They are the inventors of a completely new genre: the reed quintet. They provide inspiration to young wind players from all over the world who follow in their footsteps. Calefax can be defined as a classical ensemble with a pop mentality. Calefax takes an adventurous approach to presenting its programs, and has an astonishingly varied repertoire ranging from 1100 to the present day. They perform their own arrangements and newly commissioned compositions for the combination of oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bass clarinet and bassoon. Calefax is open to the influence of world music, jazz and improvisation as a result of countless international tours and collaborations with all kinds of musicians.
https://calefax.nl/en/Praised by the New York Times for his “spell- binding” performances and “infectious enthusiasm and panache”, Alan R. Kay is Co-Principal Clarinetist and a former Artistic Director of Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and serves as Principal Clarinet with New York’s Riverside Symphony and the Little Orchestra Society. He also performs as principal with the American Symphony and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Mr. Kay is a founding member of Windscape, and appears regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He teaches at the Manhattan School of Music, The Juilliard School and Stony Brook University. His arrangements for wind quintet are available at Trevco Music Publishing and International Opus.
A “long-admired figure on the New York scene,” (The New Yorker), cellist Michael Nicolas enjoys a diverse career as chamber musician, soloist, recording artist, and improvisor. He is the cellist of the intrepid and genre-defying string quartet Brooklyn Rider, which has drawn praise from classical, world music, and rock critics alike. As a member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), he has worked with countless composers from around the world, premiering and recording dozens of new works. Another group, Third Sound, which Michael helped found, made its debut with an historic residency at the 2015 Havana Contemporary Music Festival, in Cuba. His solo album Transitions is available on the Sono Luminus record label.
With its pairs of plucked strings, bowed strings and woodwinds, Cygnus has a precedent in the Elizabethan “broken consort”. The members — Tara Helen O’Connor, flute; James Austin Smith, oboe; William Anderson and Oren Fader, classical and electric guitars/mandolin/banjo; Calvin Wiersma, violin; Natasha Brofsky, violoncello — are all virtuoso players with a great wealth of experience with some of our most cherished musical institutions, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Players.
Cygnus is one of the most intriguing new music ensembles to have emerged in recent years. With its mixed instrumentation Cygnus offers the present day composer a bold new spectrum of colorful combinations to write for. Given the ensemble’s devotion to commissioning new repertoire from a stylistically broad range of composers, combined with the virtuosity with which these pieces are performed, Cygnus presents a consistently exotic and entertaining listening experience.
http://www.cygnusensemble.com/Active in classical, jazz, pop, Broadway, film, television, dance music, the avant-garde, and multimedia, John Ferrari appears on dozens of recordings as percussionist and conductor. He is a founding member of the Naumburg Award winning New Millennium Ensemble, a regular guest artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Chamber Music Northwest, and has been a member of Meridian Arts Ensemble since 1993. Mr. Ferrari has also appeared and/or recorded with organizations such as Bang On A Can All-Stars, Da Capo Chamber Players, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Orpheus Chamber Players, Riverside Symphony, Cygnus and many others. He teaches at William Paterson University, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Elisabeth Morrow School.
Praised by the Boston Musical Intelligencer as “among the finest artists of contemporary (or any other) music,” the musicians of Collage New Music include some of the most outstanding instrumentalists and singers skilled in the musical intricacies, technical virtuosity, and emotional depth that new music requires. The ensemble includes some of the East Coast’s finest musicians, including members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the area’s extraordinary freelance community. Collage’s five decades of compelling music-making have placed it as a leader among adventurous ensembles that nurture the vital intersection of composer, performer, and listener. The ensemble’s repertoire, both wide and deep, reaches from classical twentieth century works, to extraordinary less-known older works, and to marvelous, brand-new creations of American composers. Its diverse programs include solo repertoire, music for larger ensembles, theatrical works, fully-staged chamber operas, and music with extensive electronics.
Created in 1994 by five eminent woodwind soloists, Windscape has won a unique place for itself as a vibrant, ever-evolving group of musical individualists, which has delighted audiences throughout North America. Windscape’s innovative programs and accompanying presentations are created to take listeners on a musical and historical world tour, evoking through music and engaging commentary vivid cultural landscapes of different times and places.
As Artists-in-Residence at the Manhattan School of Music, the members of Windscape are master teachers, imparting not only the craft of instrumental virtuosity, but also presenting a distinctive concert series hailed for its creative energy and musical curiosity. The series offers the perfect setting for the ensemble to devise new, sometimes startling programs and to experiment with new arrangements and repertoire combinations.
Then and Now collects five chamber works by Richard Festinger dating from the past two decades. Amid the shatterings of classical convention that have characterized the 20th and 21st centuries, Festinger’s work has remained stubbornly tonal and chromatic. He composes melodies, builds harmonies, and writes in phrases – all in a distinctive and, based on these selections, a very likable voice.
“Invocation” (2019) for woodwind quintet features masterful counterpoint and smooth if not always standard harmonic shifts. The five voices of the Calefax Reed Ensemble – oboe, clarinet, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, and bassoon – converse and coalesce, expressively singing and gently sparring. One feels that there’s not a single wasted or inessential note in this compelling piece’s 10-and-a-half minutes. Though fully abstract, it feels like a narrative, almost is if it were a film score.
Remarkably, the five timbres meld so smoothly that I’m reminded of a string quartet (or quintet) where all instruments hail from the same family. The next piece combines voices from very unrelated families. Festinger composed “To a Pilgrim” some 18 years earlier, but it’s easily recognizable as from the same pen, this time writing for the unusual combination of bass clarinet and cello.
The two instruments sometimes wind phrases around each other; at other times, one sustains background tones while the other spins swirls of melody. Often they move from their lower to their upper registers together, creating interesting timbral commentary. The writing is so active and engaging that during some passages I could almost have sworn there were at least three instruments playing. At a climax in the sixth minute their exchange becomes so heated that they have to stop and breathe, before returning in a more subdued mode and finally trailing off in uncertain harmony.
Festinger’s experience as a jazz guitarist no doubt informs the longer piece “Hidden Spring,” composed for six players on nine instruments including two guitars and a mandolin. At times the music has an improvisatory flavor suggesting jazz lurking in the background. But its sustained intensity evidences a keenly intentional drive. Woodwinds and strings create smooth textures as the guitars deftly intertwine.
The fascinating three-movement Il était une fois… harks back to tradition, both in its instrumentation (piano trio) and its first movement’s partial adherence to sonata form. The slow but active second movement builds on a cello theme from the first that’s worked into interesting interplay between cello and violin, while the piano supports with clouds of related chords. A creepy crescendo subsides to a spacious restatement of some of the earlier angular leaps, as jazzy piano chords slowly propelling haunting melodies from the violin and cello.
A choppy start to the third movement leads to gritty string duets over coruscating arpeggios and scale fragments from the piano. A feeling of nervous unsteadiness prevails. In all these works Festinger can leave your ears happy while your nervous system remains unsettled.
The earliest composition comes last. Windsongs (1996) shows in three compressed movements how Festinger’s essential methods and sensibility haven’t changed over the intervening years. The woodwind quintet City Winds motors through the tiny first movement, passing sixteenth-note figures hurriedly from one to another. Awkward dissonances convey a series of quizzical statements in the slow movement, the flute finally rising from the harmonic foundation to pull the whole ensemble into a final chord with all instruments widely separated in pitch, an uneasy resolution. The closing “Allegro” seems to gather all of the composer’s signatures and inclinations into a playful not-quite-two-minutes.
David Hoose in his liner notes sums it up better than I could: “Remarkable — and admirable — is the consistency of [Festinger’s] musical language, even as none of the five compositions sounds like any of the others.” A lot of contemporary music comes my way, and rarely do I hear a collection as appealing as this one, full of interesting ideas and curiously beautiful sounds.
The five works on this album also demonstrate the tremendous skills of the musicians and ensembles the composer has worked with over the years. Without their superb realizations this music wouldn’t sound half as good.
— Jon Sobel, 5.23.2025
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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