Virko Baley, conductor, composer and pianist, is the first American ever to be awarded the coveted Taras Shevchenko Prize in music (1996). He began his music training in Germany, continuing it in the United States at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music (now California Institute of the Arts). Mr. Baley is currently principal guest conductor and artistic advisor of the Kiev Camerata in Kiev, Ukraine. Other guest conducting appearances have included the St. Petersburg and Moscow Philharmonic Orchestras, Kiev Opera Orchestra, Orquesta Filarmonicas de la UNAM of Mexico City, the Winnipeg and Delaware Symphonies, Lexington Philharmonic, Cleveland Chamber Orchestra and the Washington Square Music Festival. He was also founder and Music Director of the Las Vegas Chamber Players and the Nevada Symphony Orchestra. A highly respected composer, Mr. Baley has received grants and commissions from numerous organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Project 1OOO and the Winnipeg Symphony, Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, Nevada Symphony, New Juilliard Ensemble, Continuum, and from individual artists. In 1989, Mr. Baley co-produced and composed the music for the film, Swan Lake: The Zone, which won two top awards at Cannes, the first Ukrainian film ever to receive a prize there. Another feature film, A Prayer for Mazepa, for which he also wrote the music, received its first screening last February at the Berlin International Film Festival. Virko Baley is currently Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Piano Concerto No. 1 was commissioned by Dr. Robert Belliveau and is dedicated to his wife, the painter, Rita Deanin Abbey. It was written for two different pianists, the Ukrainian Mykola Suk and the American Robert Taub. The first performance of the revised version was given on October 2, 1993 in Kiev, Ukraine as part of the International Kiev Music Fest 93 Festival. The pianist was Elissa Stutz. The concerto is a series of reflections on paintings by Rita Deanin Abbey that deal with images of the desert and the river. Each movement is a musical reflection on her work as a whole, and on individual works, which I found particularly inspiring. Parts of the concerto also use materials found in my Nocturnal No. 6 for piano and the "Chinese Nightingale" movement from a clarinet and piano piece of mine entitled "Sculptured Birds". This reworking of materials has, of late, become something of a preoccupation for me, but it is one with many precedents in music of the past. The Introitus, an extended piano solo, is a tone poem, which might perhaps seem to belong to some primordial stream of being. It is a recollection of the origin of sound, now as lost to memory, as is Charles Foster Kane's sled. The pianist gradually learns to navigate in this particular sound-space and learns to give shape to the various aural ghosts and demons that congregate within the various patterns. The resultant cacophony becomes a battleground between piano and percussion instruments that makes way for the entrance of the full orchestra and the beginning of the second movement, Nocturnals.
The central part of the Noctlurnals movement is an orchestral reworking and considerable expansion of Nocturnal No. 6 for piano solo (1988). As a pianist, I have had the pleasure of performing Memo 2 for piano solo by Bernard Rands, a British-American composer. It is a work that exists in two distinct versions: as a solo piano piece and as a brilliant concerto movement entitled "Mesalliance" for piano and chamber orchestra. After writing the solo Nocturnal, I realized that within its structure there hid another, orchestral one that, rather than competing with it, supplied additional information and propelled the piece into new territories. The concept remained the same: a dramatization of a single monodic line by means of continual variation and troping. The single line unfolds through different sections, each with its own climax and repose, each an attempt to find the correct inward sensibility -- and each followed by its own resonance into silence. The Nocturnals is made up of 3 sections: introduction and two Nocturnals (the second acting as an extended coda is an instrumental reworking of the poem "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" by William Wordsworth that I set to music originally in 1959). The introduction, which begins as the orchestral culmination of the Introitus, almost immediately introduces a motive that will not be fully heard again until the third movement, where it becomes an orchestral counterpoint to the pianistic perpetuum mobile. The first Nocturnal begins with a duet between piano and harp and what follows is a series of "variations" that reflect the diversity I found in Rita Abbey's work. Nocturnal s ends with a fade-out performed around the piano line by percussion, harp, celesta and bassoon. Out of the ensuing silence the piano begins the second Nocturnal, an aria and a musical tribute to the lyrical side of Abbey's talent.
The third movement, "Suddenly, they take wing," is as much inspired by Lennie Tristano as by the work of Abbey. It is a multi-layered rhythmic and melodic tribute to that highly expressive and dynamic period of American jazz, bebop. It is here, that suddenly, "they take wing", the pianist making references to "The Chinese Nightingale", from "Sculptured Birds". The section builds to a ferocious climax over which part of the orchestra recalls the melody that was first heard in the introduction to the second movement. It is a musical expression inspired by a series of twenty-five full color plates executed in watercolor, ink and crayon which Rita Deanin Abbey created after a boat trip down that greatest of western rivers, the Colorado. This work, together with her poetic commentary, was described by Frank Waters as "a kaleidoscope of poetic images, sensual impressions and deeply felt meanings".
She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love; A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! - Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and oh, The difference to me! (William Wordsworth)