Graduate Recital Program Notes:

Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Poem for Flute and Orchestra
Charles Griffes (1884-1920) was the director of music at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY from 1907–1920. He studied piano at a young age, to continue his education he moved to Berlin, where he studied piano, composition, and counterpoint at the Stern Conservatory.
Griffes’s early compositions were influenced to some degree by German Romanticism, especially German Lieder. He never reached atonality in his music-making, however, at the end of his career he adopted an abstract phase that many critics among them Paul Rosenfeld, and Nicolas Slonimsky acknowledged to be impressionist and orientalist.
The Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918) originally written for Georges Barrère demands high lyrical virtuosity from the performer. Technical aspects of performance all should serve to interpret the lyrical characteristic of the piece. Poem was first performed on November 16, 1919 by the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch with Georges Barrère as the flute soloist. The atmospheric opening is heard as a refrain throughout the work, there are sections of dense chromatic language, polymetric dance, and enlivening technique.

Henri Dutilleux, Sonatine for Flute and Piano
Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) French composer was appointed professor of composition at the École Normale de Musique in 1961, and at Paris conservatoire in 1970. His distinctive art, follows on directly from