The world premiere of a chamber opera by Utah composer Steve Roens and the Utah premiere of a unique compositional blend of Klezmer and Argentinian tango musical sensibilities will open the summer Intermezzo Chamber Music Series, which begins June 30.
Roens’ Look Both Ways, a chamber opera in eight scenes, with libretto by Utah writer Katharine Coles, will feature three singers and a chamber orchestra led by Jared Oaks. The singers will be Emily Nelson, soprano (Miriam); Christopher Puckett, tenor (Walter) and Cheryl Hart, mezzo soprano (Mandy).
Coles’ libretto springs from the story of her grandparents, Walter Link and Miriam Wollaeger, both geologists living in Wisconsin who set out in the 1920s to find oil reserves. The first phase of their work takes them to Colombia, where no women are working in the explorations. Walter is busy while Miriam stays behind in the city raising three children and eventually learning Spanish so she can take up teaching but doing everything other than what she was trained to do.
Coles, a University of Utah professor, wrote her grandmother’s biography, Look Both Ways, which was published in 2022. In an interview published elsewhere, Coles explained how she learned about her grandmother’s past. “When I was in college, we corresponded regularly and she began to send me poems she had written as a young woman,” she recalled. “These hinted at a more romantic life than I had suspected. When I visited her, we would go through old photos together and I would get her to label them. It was only much later, when my mother and uncles were clearing out her house and I asked for the letters and journals that I realized how much material there was.” Coles described her grandmother as, “quite brilliant (she spoke five languages fluently, was an accomplished athlete and musician, and was one of the first women to complete a degree in geology at the University of Wisconsin). She was romantic. She was charming and vivacious. And she was full of rage.“
Roens, who says his harmonic language has “evolved and devolved” in terms of its influence from Second Viennese School composers such as Anton Webern and Alban Berg, studied with the late Seymour Shifrin during his graduate student days at Brandeis University. Named in the 1970s by Time magazine as one of the generation’s most significant composers, Shifrin, according to writer Paul Horsley, was known “for a hard-edged chromaticism, which often crosses over into atonality and even serialism, but which is tempered by a consistent and intelligent use of forms and periodic phrase-structures familiar to most listeners.” This bit of creative inheritance has mattered in Roens’ life as composer and teacher. “The music is beautiful, difficult, and instructive,” Oaks said, about the score for the opera. “You have to let it wash over you. It’s not just about notes but characters, timbres, and textures. I believe that studying this work has sharpened my skills as a musician.”
Roens, an emeritus faculty member in The University of Utah’s school of music, has collaborated previously with Coles and has received numerous commissions, including three from the NOVA Chamber Music Series. In 2022, he was one of four composers commissioned by pianist Jason Hardink to write a world premiere piece for the Concord/Revisited project, which celebrated the centenary of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata. Roens composed a 17-minute single movement piece with five sections for Promontories, which also epitomized his inspirational connections to literature as part of his music writing. For instance, one literary anchor he used for the work was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satire The Celestial Railroad, which became an example of a riff of rapier wit on the utter sanctimonious tone of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
The June 30 concert (7:30 p.m., at the Vieve Gore Concert Hall at Westminster University) will also feature Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind by Osvaldo Golijov (born 1960), scored for Klezmer clarinet and string quartet. The music, which echoes the aesthetics of Bela Bartók and George Enescu, is inspired by the story of Isaac the Blind, a celebrated rabbi from Provence known for his Cabbalistic underpinnings. The music in the piece, which the composer dedicated to his great-grandfather, has been described variously, respective to its five movements, as incorporating a “celestial accordion,” a cantor song, Klezmer dance and meditations. Performing will be Erin Voellinger, clarinet; Lynn Rosen and Hasse Borup, violins; Erin Kipp, viola and Louis-Philippe Robillard, cello.
The remainder of Intermezzo’s summer season is filled with robust and muscular works from the chamber music literature. The July 7 and July 14 concerts feature string sextets by Brahms, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg. The Schoenberg warhorse, Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht), composed in 1899, highlights the July 7 concert. The July 14 concert will feature Agathe, Brahms’ second string sextet which the composer completed at the age of 32 in 1864, and references the only woman that he was betrothed to during his life. Also on the program will be Capriccio, which Strauss completed in 1942 and served as the music opener to the opera of the same name, which happens to be about the creative process of opera.
The musicians for both concerts are exceptional, as usual. The July 7 concert will feature William Hagen and Laura Ha, violins; Whittney Sjögren and John T. Posadas, violas, and Lauren Posey and Pegsoon Whang, cellos. For July 14, the string sextets will be performed by Lun Jiang and Erin David, violins; Joel Gibbs and Emily Brown, violas and Pegsoon Whang and Hannah Holland Thomas, cellos.
Closing out the season will be two concerts highlighting distinguished well-known gems from the chamber music repertoire. The July 21 concert will feature Puccini’s gorgeous Chrysanthemums (written in 1890 in honor of Amadeo di Savoia, a former King of Spain), one of Haydn’s greatest string quartets (The Sunrise) and Brahms’ Second String Quartet. The Aug. 4 season closer is an all-Brahms offering featuring two clarinet sonatas and a trio for clarinet, cello and piano.
Intermezzo concerts will be at the Vieve Gore Concert Hall at Westminster University. For more information on season subscriptions and tickets as well as events throughout the year, see the Intermezzo website. Visitors also are invited to subscribe for a nominal monthly fee to Intermezzo’s Patreom Channel,