Organ dedication and percussion quartet highlight music offerings

The Vicedomini organ in Anabel Taylor Hall is being dedicated with a series of concerts, beginning tonight. University Photography

Last summer Cornell acquired a historic Neapolitan organ at auction in San Francisco. Built by Augustus Vicedomini in 1746, the instrument is one of only a few to have been removed from Italy before the passage of that country's historic landmark legislation. Now housed in Anabel Taylor Chapel, Vicedomini's organ is an excellent example of the long tradition of Italian organ building.

A series of three dedicatory recitals this semester, all at 8 p.m., will feature three different organists, accompanied by instruments and singers, in a wide variety of repertoire.

Tonight, Feb. 1, David Yearsley, assistant professor of music, with violinist Brian Brooks, a doctoral student in musicology, will perform a program of Italian keyboard and chamber works of the 17th and early 18th centuries, including concertos by George Frideric Handel and Antonio Vivaldi. The first half features Yearsley and Brooks playing both solo organ pieces and sonatas for violin and organ by a myriad of Italian composers, including Frescobaldi. They are joined by violinist Wiebke Thormälen, violist Thomas Irvine and cellist Heidi Hoffman for concertos by Handel and Vivaldi and sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti following intermission.

The Vicedomini Organ Series continues Wednesday, March 14. University Organist Annette Richards, with guest soprano Andrea Folan and friends, will perform a program of music from across Europe, including madrigals and madrigal intabulations, and pieces by Frescobaldi, Sweelinck and Peter Philips. This concert also will feature a newly commissioned organ work by Cornell Professor Roberto Sierra.

The third program, on Thursday, March 29, will feature a recital by acclaimed Swedish organist Hans Davidsson, who recently was appointed professor of organ at the Eastman School of Music; he will perform works by Weckmann and Froberger.

The Talujon Percussion Quartet will perform Feb. 3 at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall.

The Department of Music also brings the Talujon Percussion Quartet to campus this weekend. Described in The New York Times as an ensemble possessing an "edgy, unflagging energy," Talujon Percussion Quartet will present a concert of works by living composers Saturday, Feb. 3, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall.

Funded, in part, through a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts, the concert features works by Gene Pritsker, Christian Wolf, Cornell alumnus Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski and Talujon. Pritsker's Cancer Ward takes its title from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel of the same name, which is about a hospital in the mid-20th-century Soviet Union. Wolf's Merce, written for the percussion ensemble of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, is a tribute to Merce Cunningham.

Part I of Steve Reich's Drumming, scored for small tuned drums, begins with one player playing a pattern, who is then joined by a second drummer. First they are in unison, but one player gradually speeds up so that he is one beat ahead of the other, putting them one beat out of phase. They maintain this relationship for a while, which produces new patterns; these become the basis for the third and fourth players' parts, each remaining one beat away from the other.

Talujon then presents Fear of Dancing, an improvisation. Other than its use of certain unspoken shared musical vocabularies and a somewhat fixed setup, this piece is free of any predetermined form or content. The program closes with Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together, a minimalist work written in 1972 for narrator and instruments. The text is composed of eight sentences from a letter by Sam Melville (a political prisoner killed in the 1971 Attica prison riots), first narrated in an additive and then in a deductive progression. Members of Ensemble X join Talujon for this closing work.