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about

"Capriccio" began as a response to the work of Hans Hofmann, the influential German-American artist and teacher. Hofmann’s best-known work is abstract, with great slabs of paint of simple shapes and lines that seldom represent anything directly, and the finest of these paintings are charged with intense emotion that is difficult to describe. Hofmann was clearly aware of the expressivity in his abstract art, giving his paintings evocative titles that demonstrate a poetic sensibility I found as irresistible as the images themselves. As much as I responded to Hofmann’s visual art when composing "Capriccio," I also responded to these titles; I began to think of them as verbal frames to my musical canvas.

"Capriccio" is in three movements, borrowing their titles from Hofmann’s paintings. The first movement, "Lonely Journey," begins as a ponderous funeral march and is transformed as it traverses an imagined musical landscape. The second movement, "Pénombres du Soir (Evening Twilight)," is, like Hofmann’s painting, all about transitions between states. It begins with a shimmering, fragile texture and a sort of grotesque aria before transitioning into a scherzo - a flight of fancy that could have arisen in the space between waking and sleeping. The final movement, "Bacchanale-Phantasmagoria," takes its title from two paintings. The "Bacchanale" is a scene of wild revelry, loosely drawn from Balkan dance music. The music gets wilder and wilder leading to the brief "Phantasmagoria" that concludes the piece; in the final moments the music becomes a fever dream of all the images in the piece, finally collapsing into ecstatic exhaustion.

Capriccio was commissioned by Hub New Music and Peabody Essex Museum in celebration of the museum's Han Hofmann Exhibition “The Nature of Abstraction.” Premiere December 2019 at PEM (Salem, MA).

credits

released November 19, 2021

Composer
Michael Ippolito

Musicians
Hub New Music
Michael Avitabile, Flute
Nicholas Brown, Clarinet
Alyssa Wang, Violin
Jesse Christeson, Cello

Credits
Producer: Shauna Barravecchio
Recording Engineer: Christopher Moretti
Assistant Engineer: John Weston
Editing: Shauna Barravecchio
Mixing: Christopher Moretti
Mastering: Jesse Lewis

Design
Laura Grey

Recorded at Futura Productions, Roslindale, MA on June 28-29, 2021

This recording was made possible through funding from the Research Enhancement Program, Texas State University

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all rights reserved

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Hub New Music Detroit, Michigan

Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music is a “prime mover of piping hot 21st century repertoire” (Washington Post). Founded in 2013, Hub has commissioned dozens of new works for its distinctive ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. Hub’s “nimble quartet of winds and strings” (NPR) actively collaborates with today’s most celebrated composers. ... more

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