Let there be enlightenment: Hsu to close 50-year CU career with a 'Creation'

After 50 years as a member of the Cornell music faculty, John Hsu is going out with a bang -- a Big Bang, of sorts.

Professor John Hsu will celebrate his retirement from Cornell with a performance of Haydn's "The Creation," March 12 at Ithaca College. Photo by George Riordan

Hsu, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor of Music at Cornell, will conduct a one-of-a-kind performance of Joseph Haydn's masterpiece "The Creation," Saturday, March 12, at 8 p.m. in Ford Hall at Ithaca College. James Webster, Goldwin Smith Professor of Music at Cornell, will deliver a pre-concert lecture at 7:15 p.m. in the Iger Lecture Hall, Room 2105, at the James Whalen Center for Music at IC.

Admission to the concert is $15, with student tickets at $8 (reserved seating). Tickets can be purchased through the ticket center at Clinton House in person or by phone (273-4497), at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office (in person only) or online at http://www.IthacaEvents.com or from a link on the Department of Music's concert calendar at http://www.arts.cornell.edu/music/concerts.html.

The collaborative performance marks the occasion of Hsu's retirement from Cornell after 50 years of teaching, performing and conducting. In order to present the monumental work, Hsu marshaled the forces of a 53-piece "Creation Festival Orchestra," summoning players from the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, Syracuse Symphony and Binghamton Philharmonic, among others. Soprano Judith Kellock, associate professor of music at Cornell, tenor David Parks of Ithaca College and baritone Richard Lalli of Yale Univeristy narrate the work in the roles of archangels Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael, respectively. Kellock and Lalli also perform the roles of Adam and Eve in Part III of the work.

The orchestra and vocalists will be performing from a remarkable edition of The Creation (Oxford University Press, 1995) arranged by A. Peter Brown, the late professor of music at Indiana University.

"Professor Brown provided much new information about how the piece was performed in Haydn's time based on original orchestral and vocal parts used for the first performances in Vienna as well as accounts of those performances," says Hsu. "What this new edition reveals is a far more descriptive and cohesive work than I had heard in previous performances and imagined [when] reading other editions of the score."

Hsu joined the Cornell music faculty in 1955, teaching cello and viola da gamba, as well as music theory, music history and performance. As a conductor he has led the Cornell Collegium Musicum, the Cornell Chamber Orchestra, the Cornell Symphony Orchestra and the Sage Chapel Choir.

Hsu is artistic director emeritus of the Aston Magna Foundation for Music and the Humanities, founder of the Apollo Ensemble (a period-instrument chamber orchestra) and a world-renowned player of the viola da gamba and baryton. As an instrumentalist and conductor, he has recorded award-winning CDs and toured throughout the United States and Europe. In May 2000, Hsu was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the government of France and its Ministry of Culture for his extensive research on the music of French composer Marin Marais.

Hsu looks forward with great anticipation to the musical collaboration culminating in the March 12 performance, when he hopes that he and his forces "will discover and realize a truly dramatic and imaginative 'Creation.'"

Haydn (1732-1809) composed "The Creation" late in his career, between 1796 and 1798. The story of the creation as told in his oratorio is adapted primarily from three sources: the Biblical chapters Genesis and Psalms, and Milton's Paradise Lost.

According to Webster, the work's overall structure is strong and clear and falls into three parts: Parts I and II are based on the biblical six days of creation, while the somewhat shorter Part III describes Adam and Eve in Paradise. "'The Creation' is a quintessential late-Enlightenment work, which originated in a conservative but optimistic context of belief in rational understanding and human progress," Webster said.

The concert is funded in part with a grant from the Dallas Morse Coors Foundation.