Rock.
Gospel.
Klezmer.
Vaudeville.
British folk songs.
Old-time country music.
Cleveland composer Paul Schoenfield has drawn on all these musical genres and many others, sometimes merging four or more in one piece.
For centuries, composers from Johannes Brahms to Leonard Bernstein have incorporated elements of popular music into their works, but few if any have been as willing to mix and match styles with such abandon.
“Paul’s music is, if not unique, certainly extremely unusual in its extraordinary range, and the consummate mastery which he brings to whatever he does,” said Jeffrey Kahane, the Colorado Symphony’s music director.
“He’s able to write music of deep, even gut-wrenching emotional depth and then literally turn on a dime and be completely joyous and hilarious, making you want to stamp your feet and laugh out loud.”
Two programs this week will feature Schoenfield’s music, beginning tonight at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Terwilliger-Cooperstock Duo joins Takács Quartet cellist András Fejér for a chamber concert devoted exclusively to the composer’s music.
The lineup, which includes Schoenfield’s popular piano trio, “Cafe Music,” mirrors that on an album the duo is scheduled to release next spring on Azica, a small Cleveland-based label that also produced its recording of Aaron Copland’s complete works for violin and piano.
In an unusual break from its typical orchestral repertoire, the Colorado Symphony will feature “Cafe Music” during a set of three performances later this week. The program will also include Franz Josef Haydn’s Symphony No. 99 and Brahms’ “Double Concerto.”
The featured performers will be Kahane, who is an internationally known pianist in addition to being a conductor, and the two concerto soloists – cellist Alisa Weilerstein and violinist Chee-Yun.
Schoenfield, a 58-year-old Detroit native, and his family moved to Cleveland seven years ago, after living for about five years in the Israeli city of Migdal Ha’emek near Haifa.
“I had to travel so much that my wife wanted to come back to the States,” he said. “We were looking for a city that had a good, thriving Jewish community and good Jewish education for our kids and a city we could both live in, and we chose Cleveland.”
Although he once enjoyed a thriving career as a pianist, playing with Music From Marlboro and touring Europe and South America, he has abandoned such performances to focus wholly on composition.
If Schoenfield cannot claim the name recognition of such celebrated colleagues as John Adams or Philip Glass, he is nonetheless a respected composer whose works have been performed by groups ranging from the Eroica Trio to New York Philharmonic.
He is completing a prestigious commission for the famed Juilliard School’s 100th anniversary celebration – a 30-minute gospel oratorio for chorus, orchestra and preacher.
From the first piece he composed as a 7-year-old until now, Schoenfield has almost always incorporated an array of folk idioms in his writing.
“I’ve been very interested always in folk music,” he said. “It’s people’s music from all cultures, and I let it inspire me freely.”
Although such an approach might seem to run the danger of sinking into pastiche, Andrew Cooperstock, chairman of the CU School of Music’s keyboard department, said that Schoenfield has used it to create a distinctive, cohesive sound.
“It’s not going from style to style,” Cooperstock said. “It’s a true synthesis of a number of styles into one.
“What I do think is amazing is how he can go back and forth, how he can write a very believable baroque-sounding partita with Jewish overtones and then he can do ‘Cafe Music’ with its jazziness.”
Although Schoenfield has written works of all kinds, from his “High-Rock Ballet” to “Four Motets,” his best known and most frequently performed work is “Cafe Music.”
The piece’s appeal derives not only from the popularity of the piano-trio combination in general but from its easy accessibility and the way it adroitly showcases each of the three instruments in an idiomatic, fun manner.
“Like most of Paul’s music,” Kahane said, ” ‘Cafe Music’ runs the gamut from ‘wild and crazy’ (it’s full of klezmer and jazz influences) to moments of heartbreaking tenderness.”
Schoenfield seems largely unfazed by a level of success many composers would envy.
“Thank God I have the work, and I’m able to make some bucks off it,” he said. “I just like being able to contribute to society. I think it’s an important thing.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
…
A Week of Schoenfield
Terwilliger-Cooperstock Duo and cellist András Fejér
Chamber music|Grusin Music Hall, Imig Music Building, University of Colorado at Boulder, 18th Street and Euclid Avenue; 7:30 tonight |FREE|303-492-8008 or colorado.edu/music
|Colorado Symphony, Jeffrey Kahane, pianist
and conductor
Orchestral and chamber music|Boettcher Concert Hall, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets; 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2:30 p.m. Sunday|$15-$65|303-623-7876 or coloradosymphony.org.
