April 16 benefit concert

Owed a musical debt, ALEA faces a financial one

By David J. Craig

ALEA III has been an oasis for up-and-coming composers and lovers of contemporary music in the Boston area for more than 20 years. In a music scene where young artists' work often ends up stranded on the page instead of being performed in the concert hall, the ensemble has given exposure to more than a few composers struggling to find an audience.

Now ALEA III -- which is funded by BU, the Greek Ministry of Culture, and private donations -- needs help. Because of political developments in Greece that have made funding less reliable, the group may be operating in the red by the end of the current concert season, according to its founder and director, SFA Professor Theodore Antoniou. To bolster the group's finances, ALEA III will host a fundraiser on Sunday, April 16, at the Tsai Performance Center.

"This is a very important event for us," says Antoniou. "We're looking at a rather big debt this year."

The fundraiser will include a music program conducted by Gunther Schuller and Antoniou, featuring pianists Anthony di Bonaventura and Lukas Foss and violinist Roman Totenberg, among others. Schuller, the former president of the New England Conservatory of Music, is a prominent composer, conductor, and music historian; di Bonaventura, an SFA professor of music, has performed solo recitals at the most prestigious concert halls around the world and released recordings for Columbia and RCA. Foss, also an SFA professor of music, has been one of America's most famous composers for the past 60 years, and Totenberg, an SFA professor emeritus, has performed with the world's leading orchestras and held recitals at the White House, Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Library of Congress, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Carnegie Hall.

The music on April 16 will range from Tchaikovsky to Wieniawski to Ravel, and the period from Scarlatti to Milhaud to new work by Julian Wachner, a School of Theology assistant professor and organist and choirmaster at Marsh Chapel. BU Chancellor John Silber will speak at the event, as will His Eminence Metropolitan Methodios of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Boston, Consul General of Greece George Chatzimichelakis, and soprano and former SFA Dean Emerita Phyllis Curtin.

Theodore Antoniou, an SFA professor and director of the new music ensemble ALEA III, will conduct a performance with Gunther Schuller April 16 at the Tsai Performance Center to raise funds for his group. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

"I'll be performing Copland's Blues," Foss says. "And then I'll be accompanying Totenberg on a piece of my own, Holiday, which I think will be wonderful."

Antoniou, a native of Greece, who studied voice, violin, and composition in Athens, founded ALEA III in 1979, a year after arriving at BU to teach composiition. He did so, he says, out of determination to liven up what he considered a restrictive music scene.

"My feeling has always been that academia and the music world are very limited in some ways," he says. "And I believe many musicians have talent before they're known. After graduating, when they're starting their careers, that's the time when they need opportunities. While in college, you can easily get your work performed, but when you're on your own, trying to get established in the outside world, it is very difficult."

Alea is a Greek word meaning to wander, and in Latin the word means dice. A new music ensemble in Spain in the 1960s was the first to incorporate the word in its title; Antoniou founded ALEA II at Stanford University in 1969. "To wander and be restless -- that is the spirit I have always been after," he says.

By bringing together professional musicians with some of his best students at SFA and at the Tanglewood Institute, Antoniou quickly established ALEA III as one of Boston's most important new music ensembles. Because of the group's subsidies, it has been able to bypass the box office considerations that affect the programming of other groups. Partly as a result, about half of the 1,000 pieces ALEA III has performed over the years have been written by composers age 40 and younger.

Some of those composers have gone on to impressive careers -- ALEA III was one of the first groups to perform a piece, in 1982, by the late Stephen Albert, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985. He was killed in a car accident in 1992, at the age of 51. And Michalis Economou (SFA'99,'01), a 24-year-old unknown when his Ealo o Adis won ALEA III's annual competition in 1998, was recently commissioned to write a chamber piece that will be performed April 19 at Carnegie Hall's Weiss Hall.

ALEA III, which usually performs with between 15 and 25 players, has gained visibility in recent years. Its Millennium Project, a series of concerts launched 10 years ago partly to celebrate the music of each of the last 10 decades, has consistently received favorable reviews. And last November the group traveled to Russia to perform a program featuring music by BU-affiliated composers in St. Petersburg's famous Small Philharmonic Hall. Recently, ALEA III was invited to perform in Olympia, Greece, as part of a celebration for the 2000 Summer Olympics.

All the while, the group has included a vast variety of pieces, as well as focusing on a large amount of new music. "New music is not a way of creating very large audiences," says Antoniou. "But I'm not here to entertain people. I want to educate, to introduce people to things that are not routine or part of the common language: to enter into something they might not understand at first."

Some audiences and critics, not surprisingly, find the unsettling nature of some of ALEA III's programs difficult to appreciate. Foss couldn't disagree more wholeheartedly with such criticism. "Programs are not supposed to be easy," he says. "The more challenging, the better. You can never have too much variety or too much modern music.

"The strength of Antoniou's programs is that they are never jaded, never commercial, never politically correct," Foss continues, "but always fresh and about the music itself."

Currently, Antoniou is planning a series of concerts for ALEA III to take place next year, based on what he calls "the dynamic way that music from different parts of the world crawls into one another and aesthetically clashes." The concerts will feature the work of young composers who embrace world music in a postmodern fashion, he says.

The ALEA III fundraiser will take place at 7 p.m., Sunday, April 16, at the Tsai Performance Center, at 685 Commonwealth Ave. Also scheduled to perform are pianists Alison Both, Maria Clodes Jaguaribe, an SFA assistant professor, Konstantinos Papadakis (SFA'00), and Horia Mihail (SFA'99); violinists Yuri Mazurkevich, an SFA professor, and his wife, Dana, and Peter Zazofsky, an SFA associate professor; baritone Stephen Salters (SFA'91,'94); clarinetist Ethan Sloane, an SFA professor; bassist Ed Barker; soprano Margarita Syngeniotou; cellist Karen Kaderavek; and harpist Judy Saiki. Tickets, at $50, are tax deductible. Advance reservations are requested. For more information, call 353-7294 or 353-3340.