BRATTLEBORO — When Juno Orchestra performed “(3)Zenith!,” featuring Sibelius, Haydn, and Mozart” in June of 2022 at Persons Auditorium on the former Marlboro College campus to a standing ovation from a full house, it was presumed to be its final, farewell concert.
So much can happen in a year.
Juno was gone. However, by the grace of a major foundation's generosity, Juno is back.
According to founder/director, cellist Zon Eastes, Juno was conceived and run as a five-year project starting in 2017 to explore new works and oft-overlooked extant compositions.
When Covid shutdowns imperiled the lively arts, the ensemble maintained an audience online with innovative, collaborative programming. They called on the talents of a range of area artists, from performers at the New England Center for Circus Arts to the Vermont Jazz Center Director Eugene Uman.
As the pandemic's shroud lifted, the ensemble reassembled live to complete its final phases, culminating in its swan song, which Eastes called “a big success, a wonderful concert.”
The following day, out of the blue, he was approached “by someone I've known for many years but who's not really been involved” in music locally. Having lived in Brattleboro but now working in New York, the friend asked if Eastes would continue creating with Juno, if funded.
The result: an opportunity to carry on, thanks to the Bay & Paul Foundations (BPF) of New York City.
Eastes speaks with passion about Juno and its rebirth.
“Juno is all about exploration and engagement,” he said. “Whether it be delving into a lesser known, amazing Haydn symphony or commissioning a new piece of music from a gifted composer, Juno finds a remarkable opportunity to go deeper.”
A portion of BPF's grant has already been made to the Brattleboro Music Center (BMC), where Juno had been in residency for its duration.
The two-pronged initiative will both empower Juno Orchestra, under Eastes's leadership, to move into the future and will create a plan to secure the BMC archive, which includes seven decades of recordings and materials from the New England Bach Festival and many performances at the BMC since the 1950s.
Juno Orchestra is now to be tucked under the BMC's umbrella. Though it had been housed there, it was “always separate but close to our hearts,” explains BMC Executive Director Mary Greene.
“Bringing Juno into the BMC family was part of the critical thinking facilitated by Bay & Paul Foundations,” she says.
With this mutually beneficial framework, Juno is now secure in ongoing exploration of worthy compositions and in upholding its reputation for excellence.
“It's different now that Juno has the prospect of becoming an ongoing ensemble of the BMC,” Eastes adds. “There's security in that when choosing repertoire and assembling the best players possible.”
“We're adding to the strength of our region's creative sector's well-being, too,” notes Eastes, the agent representing the Southern Vermont Creative Zone within the Vermont Arts Council's Vermont Creative Network, an effort to study and strategize about the economic impact of the arts and the creative sector in the state.
Homage to the power of women
Wasting no time to reboot, Eastes and Juno are in rehearsal now for a concert Sunday, April 30, at 4 p.m. at the BMC.
“Heaven's Borders” will feature exclusively works of women composers to honor the Roman goddess Juno, the namesake of the ensemble, and as a homage to the power of women.
Eastes puts forth that women are rarely recognized enough in many realms - composing being among them. Going forward, in fact, Juno's focus will be on music of women, and following this event, Juno begins work on five concerts for its next season.
Composers in the April 30 performance include Libby Croad, a London-based composer, arranger, and violinist who studied violin and composition at the Royal Academy of Music and whose compositions have been performed on BBC Radio and Television. Her Suite for String Orchestra was first performed by the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra and broadcast on Classic FM.
Hot on the new composers' scene, Jessie Montgomery has been affiliated, since 1999, with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players.
A two-time laureate of the annual Sphinx Competition and awarded its highest honor, Montgomery has received numerous grants and awards. With degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University, she maintains an active schedule as a violinist and is a graduate fellow in music composition at Princeton University and a professor of violin and composition at The New School.
Of Strum, her work that Juno will perform, Montgomery describes it as “the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006.”
She says that “the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum, I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out.”
Strum, which draws on “American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement,” has what Montgomery describes as “a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”
Bulgarian-born Dobrinka Tabakova has lived in London since she was 11. With a degree from Guildhall School of Music and Drama and a doctorate in composition from King's College London, she was appointed in 2017 as composer-in-residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra. Other residencies have included Truro Cathedral, MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, Davos Festival, and Off the Beaten Path, a festival in the Bulgarian Rhodope Mountains.
Tabakova's Organum Light takes its inspiration from medieval chant, conjoining melody and harmony. As the artist describes, the music is “complicated by the fact that towards the start and end of the piece there's a dronal quality.”
According to Eastes, “From a melodic perspective, there's a distinct sense running through [it] that the players are physically linked, bound together, such that when one moves, they all move, in an act of tutti traction hinged as to create a mixture of parallel and contrary motion.”
The late Polish composer and violinist Grażyna Bacewicz was born in 1909 and studied in Warsaw and Paris before serving as principal violinist of the Polish Radio Orchestra. Following World War II, which had disrupted her career, she supported herself entirely through composing.
Her Concerto for String Orchestra on the April Juno program is “well worth exploring,” Eastes says. “[It is] beautifully crafted, vital, and passionate [...] utilizing forms and melodic elements from the Baroque and Classical eras in tandem with contemporary rhythms and harmonies.”
Finally, the upcoming Juno program features Barbara Strozzi. Born in 1619, the Italian composer and singer of the Baroque period published eight volumes of her own music, and had more secular music in print than any other composer of the era.
“Strozzi produced a remarkable amount of music without any support from the church and with no consistent patronage from the nobility,” Eastes notes.
Current research reveals that Strozzi did not compose much sacred music. But from one piece, composed of 14 motets for solo singer and accompaniment, Juno will present two of the motets in arrangements created by Dana Maiben, baroque music specialist and Juno violinist.
This last composer holds a bit of a special place in Eastes' Brattleboro history.
“When I came here in 1982, all the rooms in the former BMC home were named after composers,” he says. “I taught cello in the Barbara Strozzi room. She was one militant woman!”
All pieces are for string orchestra exclusively; some new faces in the ensemble will be among familiar professional instrumentalists from throughout the region, including soprano solo Junko Watanabe, who will appear for the works by Strozzi.
Eastes notes another inspiration for the upcoming concert.
He's intrigued by the current exploration now underway by Juno, also the namesake for “a solar-powered NASA spacecraft that spans the width of a basketball court and makes long, looping orbits around giant planet Jupiter,” he says. “In keeping with Juno Orchestra's inclination toward innovation in performance, NASA-provided images will play a part in the April 30 concert.”