Botanica: Music for Oboe & English Horn

by Sara Fraker / Casey Robards

Exploring intersections between the human and botanical worlds, BOTANICA is a musical entry point into current conversations around environmental and social justice. The six pieces on the album are interrelated, in varying degrees, by threads of common themes and origins: spiritual ecology, poetic text, and resistance to injustice. All are highly expressive in their compositional language. All works are world premiere recordings, with the exception of the Pavel Haas Suite, a masterpiece of the oboe repertoire just beginning to gain full recognition.

Asha Srinivasan's Braiding is a ten-minute piece for oboe, electronics and natural sounds, inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Elegy for Oboe and Piano, also commissioned for this album, is one of Glen Roven's final compositions before his sudden passing in the summer of 2018. It ends poignantly with an original chorale in the style of Bach, haunted by fleeting oboe embellishments. This chorale finds echoes in Pavel Haas' persistent treatment of the Wenceslas chorale, the most enduring musical symbol of Czech nationalism. It is likely that Haas originally composed the Oboe Suite for tenor voice, with an anti-fascist text so dangerously political that he ultimately decided to give the vocal line to the oboe instead. The oboe melody is often recitative-like, tones shaped around the ghostly forms of secret, vanished syllables. In the Four Songs, composed in the Terezin concentration camp, the original bass voice is re-imagined as a solo English horn line. Musically, the Suite and the Songs are inextricably linked, making this new transcription for English horn and piano a natural fit. The Oboe Sonata by Soukup, though from a later era, retains the intensity of Czech post-tonal language. Godron's whimsical Suite Bucolique finds its home here among music rich with allusions to woodland trees and bamboo forests.



Sara Fraker is principal oboist of True Concord Voices & Orchestra and second oboist of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. As assistant professor of oboe at the Fred Fox School of Music, she devotes her energies equally to teaching a full oboe studio and maintaining an extensive performance schedule. Fraker is also oboist of the Arizona Wind Quintet. In the summer months, she is engaged as a faculty artist at the Bay View Music Festival in northern Michigan, where she teaches chamber music and performs with the Bay View Wind Quintet. Fraker has presented recitals and master classes across the United States and in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia and the Tohono O odham Nation. As a chamber and orchestral musician, she has recorded for Naxos, Toccata Classics, Summit Records, Reference Recordings, Analekta and Interlochen Public Radio. In 2017, she was awarded an Artist Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts for her Braiding commissioning project. She has appeared with the TSO as solo English horn in Quiet City, The Swan of Tuonela and Berlioz' Damnation of Faust.

Casey Robards is a pianist and vocal coach known for her artistry, versatility and sensitivity. She has given recitals with singers and instrumentalists throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Asia and Central and South America. Robards made her Carnegie Hall debut with baritone Christiaan Smith performing an original program of Top-40 pop songs sung in art song arrangements. She is entering her 12th season as a faculty artist at the Bay View Music Festival where she is the MainStage Opera Conductor, Head of the Collaborative Piano program, co-creator of a two-week vocal and collaborative piano intensive and coach/pianist for the American Spiritual Intensive program. Robards is currently on the faculty of the University of Illinois.