Rose Chancler

Pianist 

Rose Chancler is a frequent performer as soloist, collaborative artist, and teacher. She has played hundreds of concerts across America, including performances in over thirty states. Currently, Rose is focused on performing chamber music and presenting concerts in NY State’s Adirondack Park as a founding member and Artistic Director of the dynamic series Piano by Nature in Elizabethtown, NY. Farther out, she also performs with UK marimbist Jane Boxall as a part of the unique ensemble Ricochet Duo. This duo performs regularly throughout the US, with notable concerts including the NYS Presenters Network Artist Roster Showcase at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, the Flynn Center in Burlington, VT, and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, among many. Rose has also enjoyed a long collaborative association with virtuoso double bassist Volkan Orhon, with performances including BassEurope recitals in Prague, Czech Republic, the Friends of Chamber music series in Tucson, Concert Artists Guild in Pittsburgh, and the American String Teachers Association’s convention spotlight concert in Louisville, KY. Her collaboration with Orhon has also resulted in two highly-acclaimed CD releases of violin and cello masterworks on the Centaur label. Rose has performed the North American premieres for both of the Concertos for Contrabass written by South American virtuoso Andres Martin, with the composer as soloist, and she has also performed with bass luminaries Esra Gul, Guisseppe Ettorre, Jeffery Turner, Linda McKnight, Han Han Cho, and many others in a multitude of International String Bass conventions in Ithaca, NY, Fort Collins, CO, Rochester, NY, San Francisco, CA, Oklahoma City, OK, and Penn State at State College, PA.

Closer to home, Rose enjoys performing as a member of Metamusic with SUNY Plattsburgh faculty members Dan Gordon and Marilyn Reynolds, focusing on regional concerts which present well-written and less-heard original music for saxophone, violin, and piano. To date, Metamusic has toured locations in New York, Texas, and most recently, throughout Finland. Rose has also performed yearly collaborations with violinist Linda Rosenthal and others through the Lake Placid Chamber Music Seminar, and many additional chamber music performances with a variety of artists and instruments including cellist Jeffrey Solow, saxophonist Harvey Pittel, flutist Carol Wincenc, Broadway’s George Hearn, and more.

Rose has held teaching positions at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and the University of Iowa School of Music. She has been a faculty accompanist and coach at the Chautauqua Institution for many years, and also the acclaimed Meadowmount School of Music. She has served on the faculty of Plattsburgh State University of New York, and now maintains a private studio in Westport, NY. Rose holds a bachelor’s degree in Piano Performance from the University of Texas at  Austin, and master’s and doctoral degrees in Piano Performance and Literature from the Eastman School in Rochester, N.Y

Jennifer Moore

Pianist

Jennifer Moore, pianist, is currently the PreK-12 Music Teacher for the Willsboro Central School District in northern New York. She holds an MFA in Piano Performance from Purchase College, SUNY, a MM degree in Music Education from the Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam and is currently a DMA candidate in Music Education at Boston University. She has also attended the Choral Institute at Oxford as both an Associate (2017) and Full Conductor (2019) where she studied conducting with James Jordan, James Whitbourn, Steven Pilkington and the Westminster Williamson Voices.

Jennifer has a broad range of performance experience as a pianist, chorister and conductor. She studied vocal accompanying with Steven Blier, Dennis Helmrich, Hans Broekman, JJ Penna and Dalton Baldwin. Performances have brought her to Lincoln Center as a member of the Westminster Symphonic Choir with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of both Joseph Flummerfelt and maestro Kurt Masur, UNESCO in Paris, France, the Chicago Cultural Center, Northwestern University as a studio assistant for William Warfield and as accompanist for the Young Artists Program at the Chicago Lyric Opera.

An active performer in the northern Adirondack region, Jennifer and her duo partner, Dr. Rose Chancler, recently performed at the Depot Theater in Westport, NY with veteran actor and director, Kenney Green, at the Middlebury Town Hall Theater with Broadway legend, George Hearn and at Piano By Nature in Elizabethtown, NY with WCS Theater Educator, Derrick Hopkins.  Jennifer can often be heard in our robust regional community and school musical theater productions as pianist, music director and conductor. She also serves as the organist and choir director at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Essex, the Board of Directors for Piano By Nature Concert Series. She was honored as a recipient of the 2019 Women of Distinction as a Community Leader by the Girl Scouts of Northeastern New York and was invited to be recognized as one of “Crane’s Women in Music Education” at the Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam.

This concert was featured in Lake Champlain Weekly: “The Sounds of Solace” by Benjamin Pomerance (Dec. 2, 2020).
Click to enlarge or read here.

Notes on the Program

“Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.”
― David Whyte

Well-Tempered Clavier of JS Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach is often fondly referred to as “Papa Bach’ by pianists around the world due to his important contribution to the catalogue of works written for keyboard. Pianist Hans von Bülow summed this topic up nicely calling The Well-Tempered Clavier the “Old Testament” of music and the Beethoven Sonatas the “New Testament”.

Much has been said and written about Bach’s two important books of keyboard music, written in 1722, and 1742 respectively. The Well-Tempered Clavier comprises 2 sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 keys- 48 in all. In the early 18th-century tuning was not standardized like the equal-temperament we have today, so composers mostly wrote in a smaller subset of keys to avoid the meantone tuning disparities called ‘wolf-tones’. As a performer himself, Bach was known to have been very particular when tuning his own instruments, and could certainly play in all keys, so by writing the WTC he seemed to be advocating for utilization of a more inclusive type of tuning which would make all 24 keys available in the public realm.

He wrote the WTC as a teaching work and also for performers, himself being an accomplished virtuoso on different keyboard instruments of the time, including harpsichord, clavichord, organ, and others. The newly-invented fortepiano, which eventually became the modern piano, had yet to be widely distributed, although it is reported that JS Bach had an opportunity to play one later in his life. The preludes and fugues in both books of the WTC contain a variety of writing styles, both strict and free, and have fugues between three and five voices in complexity. Each prelude and fugue grouping is meant to be performed as one entity- not separately, and each book covers all 24 keys, starting with C Major, moving to the parallel C Minor, D Major, D Minor etc.

Since these works were not written for the modern piano, much must be considered to gain an informed and meaningful interpretation. The original urtext scores have almost no information regarding dynamics, fingerings, or phrasing, allowing both freedom and limitation in the study of these works. The keyboard instruments of the day also had no pedals, and articulation choices for the modern performer play an exceedingly important role when viewed through the lens of the past. Listening to a variety of interpretations will add to the information and also the questions, never hearing the same piece played the same way. The modern performer has much to understand about Bach and the world that he lived in, and even as much continues to be discovered regarding performance practices in his era, the process of acquiring new understanding will continue to fascinate and the music will surely continue to endure.

JS Bach’s Preludes and Fugues can be seen as the highest musical form of Baroque craftsmanship, detail, and harmonic organization. On the postscript of the Well-Tempered Clavier the phrase “Soli Deo Gloria” (For the Glory of God) was penned, indicating both Bach’s inner devotion as well as his spiritual connection to the very act of composition. Roughly one hundred years later Frederick Chopin, stirred by Bach’s work, composed his Opus 28 Preludes, creating a new humanistic and poetic language. His musical works became distilled reflections of the inner psyche, utilizing fresh harmonic landscapes and chromatic intricacies which some say, have allowed a glimpse into the very depths of the human soul.

In 1838, the pianist/composer Frederick Chopin travelled to Mallorca, living with the poet George Sand, studying Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) and composing his own music. This was a very difficult year for both of them, but Chopin kept to his studies and compositional work, finally publishing his Opus 28 Preludes in 1839. He was known to admire Bach’s form and harmony greatly but did not use the WTC as a mere template, instead used it as a jumping-off point. In Chopin’s set there is one Prelude in each major and minor key just like Bach’s WTC, but Chopin’s are ordered according to both major/minor key connections and the circle of fifths: C Major/a-Minor, G-Major/e-Minor, etc. Chopin also chose to utilize only the Prelude format for his set of 24 pieces, establishing highly chromatic crystallization of individual works with almost atmospheric intents. Additionally, unlike Bach’s, these 24 miniatures (almost half under a minute long) can stand alone in performance as harmonically rich and emotionally substantial works of art.

Chopin’s contemporary, Robert Schumann, likened the Preludes to “eagle’s feathers, all strangely intermingled. But in every piece, we find his own hand-Frederic Chopin wrote it. One recognizes him in his pauses, in his impetuous respiration. He is the boldest, the proudest, poet-soul of his time.”  And the Chopin scholar, Jeremy Nicholas sums it up well, writing that “Even on their own, the 24 Preludes would have ensured Chopin’s claim to immortality”. In spite of their brevity – and, sometimes, technical ease – they are by no means simple pieces. From the sight-readable to the transcendental, all impart a significant musical idea and take a true virtuoso to render well.”

In addition to the famous 24 Preludes of Frederick Chopin, there is another single Opus 45 Prelude, written in 1841 and thought by some to be an extension of Chopin’s opus 28 set. This piece is longer in scope and harkens to an improvisatory world of glimmering harmonic shifts of color and light. It presents an atmospheric world of great beauty with a minimum of material and a perfectly balanced texture.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) is a most important 20th-Century composer, leaving behind a legacy as pianist, organist, teacher, composer, and ornithologist. At the age of 11 years, he attended the Paris Conservatory as a star pupil of organ and piano, receiving prizes in counterpoint, fugue, piano accompaniment, improvisation, history of music, and composition, later becoming a professor of harmony and composition. He was a devout Catholic, playing organ in the same church from 1931-1992, and writing a great number of compositions with deeply religious themes. He was inspired by Gregorian Chant and ancient Greek and Indian rhythms, eventually inventing his own scales called ‘modes of limited transposition’ and writing two treatises illustrating his unique musical aesthetic of organizing aspects of time, rhythm, color, cyclic themes, and birdsong. His unusual approach to teaching developed a great number of innovative and successful composers, including musical giants Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and William Albright, among many. Messiaen had myriad influences on his compositional style but was particularly drawn to the study of birdsong stating that “nature offers an exhaustible treasure of colours and sounds, forms and rhythms, an unequalled model of total development and perpetual variation, nature is the supreme resource!”

Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus (Twenty Visions of the Baby Jesus)
This 2-hour solo piano work contains twenty musical contemplations on the life of the baby Jesus and was written in 1944 for the pianist Yvonne Loriad (who eventually became Messaien’s wife). The piece is highly organized, and several themes appear throughout that are used to unify the work, including the Theme of God, the Theme of Mystical Love, the Theme of the Stars and Cross, and the Theme of Chords.

No. 11, Première communion de la vierge (The Virgin’s First Communion)
Première communion de la Vierge is the eleventh piece in the cycle. As such, it is typically heard after an interval, in order to allow some recovery time from the ecstatic virtuosity of the tenth piece, the Regard de l’Esprit de joie. This piece is utterly different. It is an essay in stillness, both of the Virgin, and of ourselves, as we contemplate the mystery of the word made flesh. In the period between the Annunciation and the Nativity, the Virgin contemplates in adoration the child within: the child yet to be born. The music grows from four slow chords, the theme of God, transfigured with flickering light and birdsong. Later in the piece, the chords become more rhythmic and animated: Mary’s Magnificat begins, at first hesitatingly, and with more than a hint of jazz. The outburst of joy eventually subsides, and we hear, low in the bass, the rapid heartbeats of the child. At the end we return to stillness and expectation. (With acknowledgement and thanks to Timothy Hone).

French composer, César Franck (1822-1890), composed the Prelude, Fugue, Variation Op. 18 between 1860-1862 as part of a larger six-movement set of pieces for Grand Orgue that was later published in 1868 in celebration of the new Cavaillé-Coll organ. Originally set for solo organ, Franck later transcribed it for two pianos and then for piano and harmonium (which he performed with composer Vincent D’Indy in 1874). This music, dedicated to Camille Saint-Saëns, celebrates the French symphonic organ style, is grounded in a classical sensibility that honors the clarity of musical form, and also pays homage to Bach with a baroque-style fugue as the centerpiece of the movement.

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) is recognized as one of the most characteristically “English” composers of his generation. Having lost his father before turning eight, his three brothers and a dear teacher in WWI, Finzi’s early life was marked by deep sadness and loss. A gift for music was recognized and fostered in those early years. Because of this, he was immersed in the English choir school tradition where he learned to sing, play piano and organ, and compose. Finzi also found great solace in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Christina Rosetti, setting many of their texts to music. His art song compositions are among the most celebrated works of this genre.

After having studied at York Minster, Finzi moved to London in 1925 and was warmly welcomed into the musical society by Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. As his reputation as a composer grew, a debut of his choral works was planned for the 1939 Three Choirs Festival which would have introduced him to the world as a major composer. However, the festival had to be delayed due to the outbreak of WWII. In 1951, Finzi was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease and suffered illnesses that kept him from being able to sustain the demands of such an active career. Finzi fell seriously ill during a weekend hiking trip with Vaughan Williams in 1956 and died in Oxford that same weekend.

The Ecologue Op. 10 for piano and strings was intended to be a movement of a larger multi-movement piano concerto that was never finished. Finzi began writing the movement in the 1920s and eventually completed this piece as an independent work but it was never performed or published during his lifetime. The term ecologue means “a short poem, especially a pastoral dialogue” or in more archaic terms, a “conversation between shepherds.”  The music is lush, restful, melancholic, and tender. The contrapuntal writing offers a nod of admiration and respect to the early Renaissance choral composers that Finzi would have been so well acquainted with as a chorister in the English tradition. The Ecologue Op. 10 is a piece of profound beauty and deep solace that “gently mists the eyes and unlocks years of quietly folded feeling” (W. O’Hare).