The ASO Plays NYC's Famed Carnegie Hall on May 10, 2012!
Spring for Music Performance, Carnegie Hall
Thursday, May 10, 2012 | 7:30 p.m.
Justin Brown, Conductor
Quattro Mani, Piano Duo
LANSKY Shapeshifters
DORMAN Astrolatry
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7
PROGRAM NOTES:
Avner Dorman Astrolatry
Avner Dorman's "Astrolatry" premiered in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 25, 2011, with Justin Brown conducting the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. It is scored for piccolo, flute, two oboes, two clarinets (second doubling on E-flat clarinet), two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two tenor trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (including crotales, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, suspended cymbals, claves, shakers, brake, snare and bass drums, tom-toms, claves, shakers and drum sticks), piano, harp and strings.
Israeli composer Avner Dorman's music draws from a highly cosmopolitan range of influences and styles, yet he has a strong compositional voice of his own. Born in 1975, he grew up in Tel Aviv, the son of a bassoonist in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and began composing and experimenting with sound at a young age. A New York Times profile in 2011 mentioned Dorman's early experiments with electronic music as a nine-year-old, using walkie-talkies. Among his scores is a Concerto for Violin and Rock Band, written in 1998 for his progressive-rock group Innovation. At 25 he became the youngest composer ever to win Israel's prestigious Prime Minister's Prize. After studies in composition and physics at Tel Aviv University, Dorman moved to the U.S. to study at the Juilliard School (with John Corigliano) and now teaches at Gettysburg University in Pennsylvania.
In recent years Dorman's music has been performed not just by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra but by the New York, Los Angeles and Munich Philharmonics and by orchestras from Chicago to Vienna. As the Alabama Symphony's composer-in-residence during the 2010-11 season, his music was performed across the season and included two world premieres.
In an interview just before the first performance of "Astrolatry," the composer had this to say:
While I was writing Astrolatry, I spent more time outside of large cities than ever before in my life. More than anything else, I found myself in awe of nature in a way I never felt before. Lightning, rain, winds, and the night sky were so much larger and more impressive than they are in the city; and for the first time in my life, I could truly understand why ancient peoples worshipped the stars. The piece begins with the sky, as it appears when one first looks up at night: complete darkness. Then, one by one, stars begin to reveal themselves, and as the pupils of the eye widen, more and more stars and constellations appear, and we notice colors, interactions and motion.
The first section of the composition is a dance of the revelations of the stars. Some are isolated; some come in groups; some are pretty and naïve; and some are filled with motion and conflict. Towards the end of the section, the southern star appears, calming the celestial objects with a soft tango and leading the section to its culmination in a peaceful and full-lit sky.
A swift falling gesture figuratively drops us back to earth where the worship of the stars is about to take place. A steady quarter note beat played by low drums propels the ritual. (Though the narrative deals with prehistory, musically the ritual takes its beat from genres of electronica such as techno.) The steady beat builds up the ecstasy of the ritual, only halted by the entrance of the tribe's leader (in the Marimba). The leader, through the repetition of a simple melody in 5/8 over the 4/4 beat, brings the worshippers to catharsis.
Just before the piece ends, we all stop for a moment and take one last look at the cosmos, admiring its beauty and mystery.
Paul Lansky Shapeshifters
Paul Lansky's early musical studies were at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. He subsequently attended Queens College, where he studied composition with George Perle and Hugo Weisgall, and Princeton University, where he worked with Milton Babbitt, Earl Kim and others. He played French horn with the Dorian Wind Quintet in 1966-67. He has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1969, where he is now William Shubael Conant Professor of Music. Until the mid-1990s, most of Lansky's composition concentrated on computer music, and he became recognized as one of the pioneers in the field. In 2002, he received a lifetime achievement award from SEAMUS (the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States). In 2000 he was the subject of a documentary, My Cinema for the Ears, which was made for European Television's ARTE network and directed by Uli Aumueller. He has received awards and commissions from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim, Koussevitsky and Fromm Foundations, Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest, ASCAP and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.
Lansky's recent instrumental music eschews attempts to "break new ground"; instead he approaches tonality and harmony in a new way, referencing various musical traditions from the range of music history. Many of his works relate to jazz and popular music, and interestingly, Radiohead used a sample from Lansky's first computer piece, "mild und leise," as a basis for their 2000 song Idioteque.
Lansky has provided notes for Shapeshifters:
Shapeshifters, for two pianos and orchestra, was commissioned by the Alabama Symphony and Justin Brown for the wonderful piano duo Quattro Mani, Susan Grace and Alice Rybak. It is in four movements: "At Any Moment," "Florid Counterpoint," "Confused and Dazed," and "Topology," and is about 27 minutes long. The title, Shapeshifters, denotes a kind of homage to music's ability to change and morph itself in uncanny and unusual ways. The idea was inspired while composing a moment about two-thirds of the way through the first movement when an interruption of a sudden B minor chord changes everything in horns and strings. What had been a good day is now overcast and gloomy, like that phone call out of the blue telling you something you may not have wanted to hear. In the other movements shapeshifting occurs in different ways. In the second movement twisting contrapuntal lines evolve into a kind of Spanish lament. In the third movement the music exhibits a kind of collage mentality, switching back and forth between different kinds of materials rather than evolving a thematic idea. In the final movement, "Topology," the music evolves from a kind of frenetic and percussive texture to full-blown dance music. Shapeshifters is not a concerto in the romantic tradition. Here the pianos move back and forth between being articulate soloists and being members of the orchestra. At heart, however, all I really care about is that the listeners and performers enjoy themselves, and that the music speaks for itself. (Copyright Susan Halpern)
Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 7
By the time Beethoven composed his Seventh Symphony in 1811-12, deafness had put an end to his virtuoso concert career as a pianist. He had now lived in Vienna for nearly two decades, had survived two occupations by the French, and was among the city's best-known personalities. The Seventh was heard for the first time on December 8, 1813, when it appeared on a benefit program for Austrian and allied veterans. Sharing the bill was Beethoven's even more wildly successful (though now forgotten) novelty piece "Wellington's Victory," which celebrated the routing of Napoleon's brother Joseph and his forces in Spain. For the concert, Beethoven also orchestrated a piece that he had originally written for panharmonicon, the automatic-band extravaganza invented by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (best remembered for his innovative patents on the metronome).
The initial audience for the Seventh thus likely associated its outsize exuberance with the sense of impending triumph over Napoleon's once seemingly invincible power; after years of disruptive warfare, a lasting peace was finally on the horizon. In one of music history's more remarkable ironies, the Seventh comes at the close of what is often termed Beethoven's "heroic" period, which the "Eroica" Symphony—a work inevitably linked with the composer's contradictory attitudes toward Napoleon—had launched.
When Beethoven actually composed the Seventh, however, Napoleon was at the height of his power (though his disastrous invasion of Russia would follow that summer). Some have suggested a more intimate inspiration for the intensely joyful energy that pervades so much of this score—and of the Eighth Symphony, which soon followed and is of the same vintage. The identity of the "Immortal Beloved" to whom Beethoven addressed his passionate, heartfelt declaration of love in a letter (dated only July 6 and 7) remains a matter of debate, but there are persuasive arguments for 1812 as the year of this document—which would place this confessional moment just a few months after completion of the Seventh. As with his many other emotional entanglements, Beethoven's pursuit of the Immortal Beloved would end in frustration, yet at least for a time he seems to have held onto the real possibility for a lasting intimacy. "There was no tint of amorous charade here," observes biographer Maynard Solomon. "Beethoven, for the first and as far as we know the only time in his life, had found a woman whom he loved and who fully reciprocated his love."
In any case, the Seventh is one of Beethoven's most abstract, "absolute" compositions—in the sense that is very much about the power of music itself. The dominant role played by obsessive rhythms and the determined neutrality of most the thematic material—scalar patterns or outlines of the common chord—suggest a focus on music's primal elements, through which Beethoven builds his immense, epic architecture. The scale of the introduction to the first movement, for example, is unprecedented; at the end of it, he atomizes the sense of pulse and then builds it up again into the engine of the Vivace to come (the accompanying crescendo that suddenly grows quiet as we enter the first movement proper is only one of the many surprises that lie in store).
Yet beneath the dynamic push of the rhythm, at crucial moments Beethoven writes dogged, static drones deep in the bass: the grinding tension between the two becomes especially electrifying in the coda. (Carl Maria von Weber famously compared this passage to the musings of a madman.) The drone, which carries connotations of outdoor, rustic celebration, plays an important role in the symphony and literally grounds the sense of epic festivity that is clearly present in the driving rhythms.
A number of famous descriptions of this music allude to images of a Dionysian experience; some of Beethoven's contemporaries even wondered whether he had been drunk while composing it. Solomon writes that the Seventh seems to tap into an archetype. Its celebratory spirit suggests "the carnival or festival, which from time immemorial has temporarily lifted the burden of perpetual subjugation to the prevailing social and natural order by periodically suspending all customary privileges, norms, and imperatives."
That doesn't preclude the sense of melancholy which comes to the fore in the Allegretto—not a slow movement per se, though its tempo is a reprieve from the speed of the surrounding movements. The variations on the main theme add new layers of orchestration, anticipating a similar strategy in the orchestral introduction of the "joy" theme in the Ninth's finale.
Along with its rhythmic profile, the Seventh is a symphony of harmonic jolts. Robert Simpson's elegant study of the Beethoven symphonies points out that the long introduction had already claimed the territory of F and C major as significant subsidiary keys for this work in A major. "The three tonal protagonists, A, C, and F," writes Simpson, "seem more like dimensions than keys" and contribute to the feeling of epic expanse. The Scherzo, for example, whisks us into F major and then deviates back in a sharp direction with its proud trio in D (to which A is the dominant). Thus, Simpson notes, "only the most furious vehemence can reinstate A as the rightful tonic" for the finale, which begins with hammering chords. (Their power anticipates the beginning of the "Hammerklavier" Piano Sonata.)
With the driving, sometimes terrifying fury of his finale, Beethoven takes the classical symphony into unchartered territory. The coda's maelstrom evokes the seismic tension between stasis and motion from the first movement, intensifying it even further. Wagner's description of the Seventh as "the apotheosis of the dance" has become ubiquitous, but he touches more closely on the music's psychological impact—which, he points out, it shares with the Eighth—when he writes that is effect is one of "emancipation from all guilt, just as the aftereffect is the feeling of Paradise forfeited, with which we return to the phenomenal world." © Thomas May
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