PROGRAM NOTES, continued. William Goldberg has spent a lifetime teaching piano and writing music in New York and in Maine, and has been active in both the Long Island Composers' Alliance and the Maine Composers' Forum. Virelai de Machaut is a hat-tip to the poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (1300-77) based on his song "Si je The Great Cranberry Island Library souspire." (One of three song types dominating 14th-century French music, the virelai was originally a triple-rhythm dance in the form ABBA) Goldberg has set a number of poems by friends from Long Island, including presents a Harold Sieglbaum (An Outing) and Ruth Walty, who wrote her first verses last year at the age of 94 (Autumnal, second-prize winner at the 1994 Maine song competition jointly sponsored by the Lillian Nordica Homestead and the Farmington Bicentennial Commission). Recital Georg Friederich Händel, thanks to his connections with the Elector of Hanover who became George I, lost an umlaut and gained immortality as the most celebrated composer of his adopted England Handel's sound is the quintessence of "common practice," solidly rational and ordered by rules which by still define (explicitly or by instinct) what we think of as "normal" music. The legend that Handel wrote The Messiah in less than a month has the ring of truth: He composed rapidly and with apparent ease, and his output was enormous, including oratorios, concerti and operas in the prevailing Italian style William Goldberg, piano (such as Semele, whose famous aria, "Where'er You Walk," is on this program). Handel was also a prolific composer for keyboard, including two chaconnes and in G major, the shorter of which will be performed here. The French chaconne (Italian ciaccona) was originally a slow dance in 3/4 which lent itself so well to theme-and-variations treatment that the term became synonymous with Italian Nick Humez, tenor-baritone passacaglia and English ground This one, published in 1721, has 21 variations Nick Humez, born in 1948, has enjoyed an eclectic career as silversmith, writert, back-of-the-book indexer, volunteer arts administrator, singer and com- poser. He lives in Portland, where he reviews concerts for the Press Herald and writes the weekly "Classical Beat" column for the Maine Sunday Telegram. Even an indifferent pianist plays in the shadow of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Humez is six preludes and fugues short of his own "48." Prelude XIII pays homage to Scott Joplin's rag-waltz, Elite Syncopations, while Prelude Great Cranberry Island Church XXXII derives its title from the last line of the Te Deum, used as its fugue subject Great-Aunt Elisabeth's Love Song is a setting of a poem by Elisabeth Thursday, July 6, 1995, 7:30 p.m. Story Gleason, whose brother Harold, a long-time resident of Ellsworth, was Humez grandfather; From "In a Garret," on verses by Elizabeth Akers Allen, shared third prize at last year's Nordica song contest. *