Logan Canyon Winds -- and Friends -- in Concert at USU

Logan Canyon Winds, Utah State University’s faculty wind quintet, performs Monday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m. at the USU Performance Hall. The program features faculty and student colleagues of Logan Canyon Winds.

 

In addition to regular ensemble members Leslie Timmons (flute), Bonnie Schroeder (oboe), Nicholas Morrison (clarinet), Steve Park (horn) and Carolyn Bodily (bassoon), the quintet is joined by faculty guest artists Jon Gudmundson (saxophone), Jason Nicholson (percussion) and student members of the Caine Woodwind Quintet, Whitney Ecker (flute), Emily Sorensen (oboe), Sherstin Hamblin (clarinet), Brad Henrie (horn) and Troy Olson (bassoon).

 

“Logan Canyon Winds is thrilled to feature our colleagues and our students on this springtime program,” said clarinetist and Music Department faculty member Nicholas Morrison. “There’s something about performing together with our colleagues that reinforces the experience that brought us to teaching music in the first place, and there’s nothing like performing with our students. Playing side by side shows them that we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk of musical performance.”

 

Tickets for Monday’s performance, $8 general admission, are available at the Caine School of the Arts box office (caineschool.usu.edu) or at the door. USU and public school students are admitted without charge.

 

Monday’s program features works by the Hungarian Ferenc Farkas, Americans Bernhard Heiden and Richard Willis and Frenchman Jean Françaix.

 

Farkas’s Early Hungarian Dances is scored for woodwind quintet and features several popular folk dances from Hungary. The dances, quite simple in structure, call upon the quintet to blend expressive playing with a strong rhythmic pulse that mirrors the syllabic stress of the Hungarian language, Morrison said.

 

The second work on the program, Intrada by Bernhard Heiden, features faculty saxophonist Jon Gudmundson, director of jazz studies and associate professor of saxophone at Utah State University. Gudmundson holds degrees from Western Washington University, Indiana University and the University of Northern Colorado and has studied jazz with David Baker, Jerry Coker and Chuck Israels and saxophone with William Wicker, Julia Nolan and Roger Greenberg. He has performed with Donald Harrison, the Harry James Band, David Young, Aaron Neville, Roberta Flack, Connie Haines and many others.

 

In Intrada, the composer treats the saxophone more as an added color for the quintet than as a separate soloist, increasing the tonal variety and dynamic range, Morrison said. The emphasis is on blend and ensemble sound rather than technical showmanship.

 

Following the Heiden, Jason Nicholson, assistant professor of percussion, joins the quintet for Richard Willis’s Colloquy for Woodwind Quintet and Percussion.

 

Nicholson received a doctor of musical arts in percussion performance from the University of North Texas. From 2005-2008, he was a graduate teaching fellow in percussion at UNT where he taught applied lessons, percussion methods and percussion ensemble. Nicholson was also a featured soloist with both the Graduate Percussion Ensemble as well the Wind Symphony (under the direction of Eugene Corporan), performing at the 2006 PASIC (Percussive Arts Society) alongside Keiko Abe and the UNT percussion faculty. Nicholson has been an active performer in orchestral, jazz, chamber, solo, pop and world genres throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth, Miami and Charlotte metropolitan regions.

 

The April 12 performance of Colloquy is a technical tour-de-force for Nicholson, who is called on to play on more than a dozen different instruments during the piece, Morrison said. In addition to musicianship, the work demonstrates his athleticism.

 

Logan Canyon Winds closes the performance with the Seven Dances of Jean Françaix. Written as a ballet, the seven dances depict a puppet show in which the puppets enter, play house, fall in love, have a snack and end with a playful dance “of butterfly wings.” The pieces take the audience through a gamut of emotion and requires the utmost of expression and technique from the members of the musical ensemble, Morrison said.

 

 

Souce: USU Music Department