Mauthausen Ast 168

SKU: HL.14020911

ISBN 9788759851227. International (more than one language).

SKU: PR.110418140

ISBN 9781491129432. UPC: 680160640379.

Matheson’s five-movement work is a setting of stained glass windows created by Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse for a rustic country church adjoining the Rockefeller estate near Sleepy Hollow on the Hudson River. Matheson’s suite draws from four Chagall windows: 1. Jeremiah, 2. Isaiah, 3. Crucifixion, 4. The Good Samaritan, and culminates with Matisse’s 5. The Rose.
In 1954, the Rockefeller family asked Henri Matisse to create a stained glass Rose Window for the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York as a memorial to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the great art patroness and a founder of the Museum of Modern Art. It was to be the artist’s last work. A few years later, Mrs. Rockefeller’s youngest son, David, acting on behalf of the family, commissioned Marc Chagall to create an entire series of stained glass windows to fill the rest of the small church resulting in the large, majestic “Good Samaritan” window and eight sublime smaller windows, each depicting a biblical figure or scene. In 2015, Premiere Commission commissioned James Matheson to compose WINDOWS to celebrate the centennial of the Union Church of Pocantico Hills and the 100th birthday of David Rockefeller. This deeply touching, epic cycle distills into music the intimate, often heart-rending, visions of Chagall as well as the powerful simplicity of Matisse’s modern design which utilizes the striking collage forms he employed in his final years. Matheson’s work also reflects the influence of Olivier Messiaen’s own theologically-inspired music. Like the French master, Matheson utilizes large-scale blocks of harmonies with organ-like sonorities to support and shift the music’s kaleidoscopic planes of color and set into relief the work’s piercing motifs and intricate patterns. The universal themes of love and sacrifice (“Jeremiah” and “Isaiah”), loss and altruism (“Crucifixion” and “The Good Samaritan”) and the jubilant celebration of life and nature (“The Rose”) are memorably portrayed in this poignant tribute to the human spirit.—Bruce Levingston.

SKU: PR.114418540

ISBN 9781491109779. UPC: 680160642052. 9x12 inches.

James Matheson's CAPRICCIO was composed for Jennifer Koh who premiered it as part of the 2016 NY Philharmonic Biennial. Playing against the expectations of flamboyant violin caprices, Matheson's work is dramatically, even eerily quiet throughout its entirety and inspired by the arpeggiated preludes from Bach's suites. As in the Bach preludes, Matheson's study in motivically-phrased 16th notes has no marked tempo, offering performers a vastly broad spectrum to express this quiet exploration. For advanced violinists.

SKU: PR.416414230

ISBN 9781598066630. UPC: 680160602087. 9x12 inches.

Colonnade is James Matheson’s intriguing response to the Albany Symphony’s commission to create a work inspired by the NY State Board of Education Building, designed by the renowned architect Rafael Guastavino. Matheson explains that “A colonnade acts as a metaphor for the tension between knowledge and perception. The columns are the same height and equidistant from each other; while the mind understands this fully, there exists no place from which one can perceive this – the columns always appear to be of uneven height and spacing. If one then adds motion to perspective, identical columns acquire elasticity, and begin to change kaleidoscopically – they shrink, grow, become closer, and then further apart.” This structural paradox is given musical life in the outer sections of Colonnade, while the long, arching middle section is inspired by the vaulted ceiling of one of the building’s largest rooms, enhancing the structure’s spacious openness and lightness.
Colonnade is inspired by Albany’s majestic New York State Board of Education Building, and written on a commission from the Albany Symphony Orchestra. It was an intriguing task, in part because in order to accept the commission I had to agree to write a work “inspired by” a building I had not yet seen. Thisproblem was compounded by the fact that, for me, the very notion of extra-musical inspiration is a complex one, particularly with respect to literary or visual sources. I generally find ideas and abstracted notions more generative of musical ideas than specific ones (a poem, an experience, a painting). So when I went to seeand tour the building, I sought to identify fundamental formal aspects of the building which I could process into musical ideas, and would then be linked to the building through a sense of formal relationship. In theend, two characteristics of the building stood out as noteworthy and undiminished by time (compared with, for instance, the building’s rotunda, which contains a series of quaintly outdated allegorical paintings): theexterior colonnade and a beautiful interior vaulted ceiling, designed by Rafael Guastavino.For me, a colonnade acts as a metaphor for the tension between knowledge and perception. We all know, for instance, that the columns are of the same height and are equidistant from each other. Nevertheless, while the mind understands this fully, it is also the case that there exists no place – no standpoint or viewpoint – anywhere in the universe – from which one can perceive this; the columns always appear to be of uneven height and spacing. If one then adds motion to perspective – a walk along the colonnade, for instance – the fixed, even, rigidly identical columns acquire elasticity, and begin to change kaleidoscopically – they shrink, grow, become closer, and then further apart. Further, the detail of the building’s façade behind the colonnadeshifts into and out of visibility, with different portions obscured by the columns from each vantage point. These considerations underlie the outer sections of Colonnade, in which a continuously repeated, continuously varied rising figure – suggestive of a column – dominates. The iterations of this elastic, evolvingfigure are interspersed with other music – suggestive of the building’s façade. The second feature of the building that caught my attention was the vaulted ceiling, designed by Guastavino,of one of the building’s largest rooms. The ceiling enhances the spaciousness of the room, giving it an openness and lightness that is quite captivating. The middle section of Colonnade has this openness at its core, and is dominated by long, arching lines that, to me, suggest the refined beauty of this ceiling.World premiere March 8, 2003; Albany Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Alan Miller.