Sqwonk grew out of a joint concert that Jeff Anderle and Jon Russell did together in the spring of 2005. The concert featured mostly solo bass clarinet works, and a few bass clarinet duos as well. We enjoyed playing together so much, that we decided to make the duo into a regular group and called ourselves Sqwonk. Since then, we have performed at a wide variety of venues in the San Francisco Bay Area, from clubs to churches to concert halls, including the Revolution Café, the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, Old First Church, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In the fall of 2006, we received a grant from San Francisco Conservatory to help fund our first CD, which features new works composed for us by Ian Dicke, Damon Waitkus, and Jon Russell, as well as our arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in d minor.

Harriet March Page has pursued a life-long obsession with the arts: as actor, singer, writer, director, producer. Reeling off the decades, the 1970's was grand opera in and about San Francisco Bay Area; 1980's acting in plays and musicals with the Los Altos Conservatory Theatre; 1990's, writing and performing autobiographical monologues in San Francisco and producing monthly Sunday-Salons; and the 2000's, directing and producing as Artistic Director for Goat Hall Productions San Francisco Cabaret Opera on Potrero Hill, whose mission is presenting contemporary opera in English and premiering new opera theater by Bay Area composers in a cabaret setting. March Page is very happy to be a part of SFCCO, singing an orchestrated version of four songs from "The Wind God" part of a larger autobiographical work written by her with music composed by Mark Alburger which they like to call "Harriet's Verdian Ring".

Clifton Romig is a former member of Opera San Jose's resident artist program and a regular with the San Francisco Opera working as an extra chorister and most recently, as a soloist in Verdi's Macbeth. He performs regularly with Bay Area opera companies such as Berkeley Opera, West Bay Opera, Pocket Opera, North Bay Opera and Festival Opera. His most recent collaboration with Lisa Scola Prosek was the premier of her opera Belfagor at the Thick House in San Francisco this past June. This April he will join Opera San Jose for their production of Mozart's Magic Flute, singing the role of "The Speaker" and in June he will again join Lisa Scola Prosek for her new opera, "Trap Door". He performs regularly with Savoy Express, a nationally touring Gilbert and Sullivan revue and recently joined the cast of Oh, Mr Sousa!, a tribute to the life and music of "The March King", John Phillip Sousa. Mr. Romig received his Masters in Music from Indiana University and is a former member of the Santa Fe Opera apprentice program.

Maria Mikheyenko, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, is actively involved in bringing Russian repertoire to audiences of all backgrounds. Ms. Mikheyenko's opera roles include Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Lucy in The Telephone (Bay Area Summer Opera Theatre Institute), Ida in Die Fledermaus (Bay Shore Lyric Opera), La Poãsie in Les Arts Florissants (Opera Lafayette), Drusilla in L'incoronazione di Poppea (BASOTI), Second Woman and First Witch in Dido & Aeneas, Second Lady in Die Zauberflöte, (which marked Ms.Mikheyenko's European debut), Second Touriòre in Puccini's Suor Angelica, (Berkeley Opera), and Saffi in Johann Strauss' operetta, Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron), with the Austrian American Mozart Academy in Salzburg. In the world of contemporary opera, she has portrayed a wide range of fascinating characters. In Tom Dean's White Darkness, with Oakland Opera Theater, Ms. Mikheyenko sang the role of Mary Ann White (wife of Dan White - who in 1978 murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk). She has also had the opportunity to premiere three roles written for her, in two operas by Bay Area composer Lisa Scola Prosek: Salai (Leonardo da Vinci's lifelong servant and pupil) in Leonardo's Notebooks, and Lucifer and Onesta Donati (a wealthy Florentine socialite) in Machiavelli's Belfagor. Ms. Mikheyenko has been a guest artist with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, the Fortnightly Music Club of Palo Alto, and on the national radio show West Coast Live with host Sedge Thomson.

The Wind God (libretto by Harriet March Page), Alburger's ninth opera, is a minimalist boatful of Giusseppi Verdi's Rigoletto, with Rigoletto, with stowaways from Satie's Gnossiennes,Debussy's La Mer, John Williams Jaws, the pop standard "You Made Me Do It", cowboy songs, "Three Blind Mice" , tangos, a certain sinister-creepy chromaticism, Pink Floyd's "Money", Rossini's Barber of Seville, generic blues, Shostakovich song cycles, Stravinsky's The Flood, Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde and Peter Grimes, the hymn tune "Lord Jesus Think on Me", and vaudeville ditties.

After premiering the outer two movements in 2005, the SFCCO will now premier the inner two movements of my third symphony: Symphony No. 3 "The Shadows of Japanese Children." It is based my string quartet with the same title completed in 1993. "The Shadows of Japanese Children" is a four-movement work based on Japanese music. A book found in a used bookstore in Dallas, Unforgettable Fire, inspired it. Atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki filled this book with drawings and stories. Many were about children turned into ash statues ­ their shadows burned on the ground. This work is dedicated to those children. The first movement (premiered in 2005), Shadows Playing on the Ground, makes use of a melody in a Japanese classical piece by Kengyo Fujinaga called "Yachiyo Jishi" (1741-1744). The second movement, Where has the Shadow’s Father Gone?, is based on the lullaby "Ora No Omboko". The third movement, The Mountain of One Thousand Good Fortunes is Ablaze!, is based on the folk song "Sempuku-yama". The titles of the second and third movements are based on the lyrics of the original folk song. The fourth movement (premiered in 2005), In the Fallen Sun only Shadows Remain, makes use of two more folk melodies "Hora Nero Nen Nero" & "Toryanse". The title of this movement and the first movement come from lines in the beginning of Unforgettable Fire.

"Carmilla" is a famous vampire story by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu. Written in the 1860's, it predates the Bram Stroker "Dracula" by several decades. While the sensationalist aspects predominate in many modern re-tellings (e.g. The Hammer Horror Karnstein trilogy), the story fascinates and holds with the richness and depth of its psychological insights. In the musical excerpt presented, Laura, is thrilled to have a new friend (Carmilla) at her lonely home, a "schloss" in Styria, where she lives with her retired British father and a few servants. She tries in vain to get Carmilla to answer some basic questions about her life and origins. Carmilla replies evasively, with strangely effusive and dark images, and with the ultimate message: "trust me!" The music has lyrical lines set in a highly chromatic and dissonant texture, to suggest both the dark and seductive undertones in the story. Ideally, this piece will become a part of a larger song cycle, with narration, that will set the complete story.

The Jungle was written to feature solo jazz trumpet with a groovin' chamber orchestra, and is meant to evoke the jungle, whether it be Amazonian, urban, or in our minds.

Selections from the Opera Trap Door The new Opera "Trap Door" , commissioned by The Lab, explores various issues surrounding the soldiers fighting in Iraq today.

Dream Morphine
In the scene in which we hear Dream Morphine, a soldier is administered the huge dose of morphine after being wounded out in the field. While the nurse, named Maria, gives out the injections, the soldiers sings,
"I never thought that I would be
a ship that's floating out to sea
and this my bed's my little ship
with all I need within it.
O happy when the Southern skies
float like a dream before my eyes
and all the while I drift along
the Southern skies
will be my song."

100K
In the opera, this song is sung by the independent contractors who populate the Operating Bases of the war in Iraq. They rejoice in their salary (six figures, they are fond of saying) while the underpaid soldiers must protect them. The contractor's gleefully sing, "Honor and Justice can wear pretty thin
Flutter like angels on the head of a pin.
A hundred thousand
I'd rather make a Hundred Thousand!"

My basic idea when I conceived of the Duo Bass Clarinet Concerto was Heavy Metal meets the German early nineteenth century composer Carl Maria von Weber. The first music I really fell in love with as a teenager was Guns N' Roses, Metallica, and other hard rock and heavy metal bands. More recently, for the past year and a half, I have been a member of the Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet, which channels the spirit and power of heavy metal through the deep sonorities of four bass clarinets. I know Weber’s music largely from practicing his clarinet concertos extensively as in high school and college, and I have always enjoyed the over-the-top virtuosity and flashiness of these pieces. In pondering a duo bass clarinet concerto, it seemed logical (to me) to try to combine the heaviness and raw power of heavy metal with the dancing virtuosity and lyricism of Weber's concertos. The resulting piece doesn’t necessarily borrow explicitly from either heavy metal or Weber, but the underlying spirit of the work comes from the combination of these two sources. The resulting piece is in one movement, but with three distinct sections roughly corresponding to the traditional fast-slow-fast three movements of a classical concerto. The first section, after a slow introduction, is groovy and dancey, with the bass clarinets establishing grooves and then taking off on virtuosic excursions as the orchestra takes on the grooves. The second, slower section features a soaring melody in sweet thirds in the bass clarinets over undulating chords in the strings. After a cadenza, the third section brings back the groove from the beginning, with much virtuosic ornamentation by the bass clarinets building into a climactic ending.