College Choirs Will Introduce Commissioned Piece at Spring Concerts Saturday and Sunday

The College Choirs will perform their spring concerts, including portions of a new piece written on commission by Maxim Vladimiroff, 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at the Williams Center for the Arts.

Free and open to the public, the events are sponsored by the music department.

The choir will sing portions of Vladimiroff’s “Three Poems by Jay Parini,” based on works by Lafayette graduate Jay Parini ’70. The commission is part of a long-term choir effort to collect and record music that connects to Lafayette College or the Marquis de Lafayette.

An acclaimed poet, novelist, and biographer, Parini gained international recognition early in his career when a critical study, Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic, published in 1979, was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize. Another biography, Robert Frost: A Life, received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize as the best work of nonfiction for 2000. Parini selected Lafayette’s Skillman Library to be the repository of his papers.

Vladimiroff has written for the Lafayette College Choirs twice before and was named the first honorary choir member in 2002. He studied with Gilbert at University of California-Irvine.

“Parini and Vladimiroff both seem to specialize in interpreting and translating nature,” says Nina Gilbert, director of choral activities. “Parini’s poems describe waterfalls and stars, and compare them to human characteristics. Vladimiroff takes Parini’s words and expresses them in choral textures — you hear the musical equivalent of rushing water, distant stars, and so forth.”

“Max visited us last week and compared composing music to creating works in other arts,’ she adds. “With, say, a sculpture or a painting or even a poem, the work is complete when the artist is finished. But with a piece of music, the performers create the work.”

Other pieces on the choir program highlight the Parini/Vladimiroff set by sharing some features with it.

“The complaining English madrigal, ‘Weep, O Mine Eyes,’ for example, has long, overlapping notes,” says Gilbert. “Max had that style in mind when he wrote ‘A Girl in June’ (part of the Parini piece). The Russian anthem ‘Slava,’ by Dmitri Bortniansky, has the spacious Russian-cathedral quality that we hear in some of Max’s music.”

Gilbert holds a doctorate in musical arts from Stanford University, a master’s in music from Indiana University, and a bachelor’s in music from Princeton University. Before coming to Lafayette, she was lecturer in the department of music at the University of California-Irvine and served in a variety of roles. She also taught at Hamilton, Ferrum, and Wabash Colleges, the Hartt School of the University of Hartford, and Westminster Choir College of Rider University. She has numerous choral arrangements and editions in print and is associate editor of Choral Journal. She offers commentaries on choral topics for the “Performance Today” show on National Public Radio.

Vladimiroff was born in Sochi, Russia in 1968. He was influenced musically by his father, a concert pianist with interests in jazz and improvisation. Vladimiroff majored in piano at the Gnessin College of Music in Moscow in the mid-’80s, where he also studied jazz and graduated with honors. He left Russia in 1991 to pursue jazz — “the only kind of improvised music I knew” — and earned his masters of fine arts degree in music composition at the University of California-Irvine. Gilbert coached him there as he composed a piece for the university women’s choir. Gilbert also coached Vladimiroff as he wrote “Nature Loves This Rhyme So Well: Seasons in the Journals of Thoreau” for Lafayette.

Vladimiroff’s works have been premiered by members of the New York New Music Ensemble, the Flux Quartet, and others. He has won prizes from the National Association of Composers USA and the Lili Boulanger Foundation, which provided a scholarship to study at the Schola Cantorum in Paris.