The Glenn Korff School of Music presents a “Celebration of Victoria Bond” on Monday, Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m. in Kimball Recital Hall.
The concert is free and open to the public. It will also be live webcast. Visit https://music.unl.edu/webcasts the day of the concert for the link.
The concert celebrates the work of composer Bond and the release of Marguerite Scribante Professor of Piano Paul Barnes’ latest CD, “Illumination: Piano Works of Victoria Bond” on Albany Records.
Bond leads a multifaceted career as composer, conductor, lecturer, and artistic director of Cutting Edge Concerts. Her compositions have been praised by The New York Times as “powerful, stylistically varied and technically demanding,” and her conducting has been called “impassioned” by the Wall Street Journal and “full of energy and fervor” by The New York Times. Bond has composed eight operas, six ballets, two piano concertos and orchestral, chamber, choral and keyboard compositions.
Bond is also one of the featured guests at the Nebraska Music Teachers State Conference, which will be hosted by the Glenn Korff School of Music from Oct. 21-22.
The “Celebration of Victoria Bond” will include performances of Bond’s works by Barnes and several of his graduate students.
Madeline Rogers (DMA 2021) and DMA graduate student Florencia Zuloaga will perform Bond’s piano concerto “Black Light,” which Barnes originally recorded in 1997.
Graduate student Christian Johnson and baritone Trey Meyer (D.M.A. 2021; M.M. 2018) will then give the world premiere of “From an Antique Land.”
The final work on the program will be Barnes performing “Illuminations on Byzantine Chant,” representing more than 20 years of creative collaboration between Bond and Barnes. The piece includes “Potirion Sotiriu” (1999), “Simeron Kremate” (2019) and “Enite ton Kyrion” (2021).
“The ‘Black Light’ concerto, which is Victoria’s very first piano concerto, was the first recording project that I did as a very young faculty member here in the Glenn Korff School of Music,” Barnes said. “That’s when I wrote my first grants, and it turned out to be a spectacularly fun project. During that project Victoria found out that I was also this Greek Orthodox chanter. I chanted ‘Potirion Sotiriu,’ which is a very beautiful communion hymn, and she ended up writing a piece for me, and it’s the first movement of ‘Illuminations.’”
Barnes said his own work inspires the work that his students do.
“In many cases, they use my work as a springboard for their own research,” Barnes said. “Madeline was very interested in Victoria’s music, so her doctoral document was on the Beethoven connections in her ‘Black Light’ piano concerto. She ended up performing it on her lecture-recital. My wonderful student, Florencia, who is this year’s Glenn Korff Distinguished Graduate Scholar, played the orchestra part. And then Christian has been working with baritone Trey Meyer. Victoria had this wonderful song cycle and added the final song about listening to a symphony of Beethoven, and because of that, it will be a world premiere performance. It’s a great way to showcase my work with Victoria and some of our absolute best students.”
Barnes said Bond’s music is “wonderfully pianistic.”
“She has a relatively traditional approach to musical form, but it fits the piano like a glove,” Barnes said. “She’s always interested in exploring these new areas, and for her, Byzantine chant was a brand-new area that she had never explored. And she has this wonderful concert series, Cutting Edge Concerts, in New York that I’ve played on probably seven or eight times. She’s got everything going for her. She’s a wonderful conductor, and she’s an incredible composer and organizer. She’s a perfect role model, I think, to expose to our UNL students.”
Barnes’ CD “Illumination” includes “Illuminations on Byzantine Chant” for solo piano; “Ancient Keys” for piano and orchestra; “Black Light” for piano and orchestra; and Byzantine Chant, chanted by Barnes.
The CD was recorded in June in Kimball Recital Hall. Assistant Professor of Composition and Emerging Media and Digital Arts Tom Larson served as sound engineer.