Program

Performers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Program Notes

La Terra Impareggiabileo

I encountered the work of the Sicilian poet and Nobel laureate Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) in the mid 1990s while living in Milan. Having been at an impasse with my composition for almost a year, I began setting to music one of the poems (what turned out to be the last of ten songs), and the challenge of responding to its extreme concentration offered me a new way of working.
     La Terra Impareggiabile evolved slowly between other projects and the final cycle – two books, each of five songs - was completed in 2018. All of them are closely interlinked musically and poetically, and taken together, they trace a trajectory through life to death.
     In the first song the poet, poignantly aware his time running out, utters words of love that had previously eluded him. The perfect fifth in the piano (the notes D and G) and opening vocal line become a sort of refrain that appears every three numbers (at the start of songs I, IV, VII and X), at a slower speed each time. E la tua veste è bianca and Ho una bella fanciulla are a pair of contrasting love songs: one sensuous and sultry and the other (one of Quasimodo’s Sappho translations) a bouncy interlude in which the words become fragmented and assembled out of order, like text on strips of papyrus wrapped in different ways. The sharply contrasting sections of Fatta buio ed altezza evoke respectively intense light and intense darkness, while the refuge to birds of the night described in the next poem (Rifugio d’uccelli notturni) is a gnarled pine which stands on high, listening intently to the abyss.
     La Terra Impareggiabile is dedicated to my teacher, Jeremy Dale Roberts.

 

London-born composer Richard Causton has been described as 'one of the most courageous and uncompromising artists working today'. His relentless pursuit of the ‘right sound’ has led him to the creation of new instruments, such as the microtonally-tuned bells constructed for his BBC commission Ik zeg: NU (I say: NOW) or the electromagnetic preparation of the piano built for his most recent piece for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.
     Causton has been commissioned by ensembles such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken, London Sinfonietta, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Britten Sinfonia and the Nash Ensemble and his music has been recorded widely.
     In 1997 Causton was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled him to study in Milan with Franco Donatoni. Other distinctions include First Prize in the Third International ‘Nuove Sincronie’ Composition Competition, a British Composer Award and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award.
     Richard Causton is currently Reader in Composition at the University of Cambridge (a tenured position equivalent to Full Professor in the US) and a Fellow in Music at King’s College, Cambridge. He recently became an Honorary Patron of the Centre for Young Musicians, an organisation which provides a musical education for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

 

John Harbison

MiraBai Songs

Mirabai’s ecstatic religious poetry was written in sixteenth-century India. When she was twenty-seven, her husband was killed in a war. She left her family compound, wrote her poems to Krishna, the Dark One, and sang and danced them in the streets. Originally written for voice and piano, this version of Mirabai Songs was made for practical reasons: the new music ensemble thrives, the voice and piano duo is disappearing.

Texts by Mirabai, 16-century Indian mystic poet, Translated by Robert Bly

I. It's True I Went to the Market
My friend, I went to the market and bought the Dark One.
You claim by night, I claim by day.
Actually, I was beating a drum all the time I was burying him.
You say I gave too much, I say too little.
Actually, I put him on a scale before I bought him.
What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels.
Mirabai says: The Dark One is my husband now.
Be with me when I lie down; you promised me this in an earlier life.

II. All I Was Doing Was Breathing
Something has reached out and taken in the beams of my eyes.
There is a longing, it is for his body, for every hair of that dark body.
All I was doing was being, and the Dancing Energy came by my house.
His face looks curiously like the moon, I saw it from the side, smiling.
My family says: "Don't ever see him again!" And imply things in a low voice.
But my eyes have their own life: they laugh at rules, and know whose they are.
I believe I can bear on my shoulders whatever you want to say of me.
Mira says: Without the energy that moves mountains, how am I to live?

III. Why Mira Can't Come Back to Her Old House
The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira's body; all the other colors washed out.
Making love with the Dark One and eating little, those are my pearls and my carnelians.
Meditation beads and the forehead streak, these are my scarves and my rings.
That's enough feminine wiles for me. My teacher taught me this.
Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.
I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.
I don't steal money. I don't hit anyone. What will you charge me with?
I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.

IV. Where Did You Go?
Where did you go, Holy One, after you left my body?
Your flame jumped to the wick, and then you disappeared and left the lamp alone.
You put the boat into the surf, and then walked inland, leaving the boat in an ocean of parting. Mira says: Tell me when you will come to meet me

V. The Clouds
When I saw the dark clouds, I wept, O Dark One, I wept at the dark clouds.
Black clouds soared up, and took some yellow along; rain did fall, some rain fell long.
There was water east of the house, west of the house; fields all green.
The one I love lives past those fields; rain has fallen on my body, on my hair,
as I wait in the open door for him.
The Energy that holds up mountains is the energy Mirabai bows down to.
He lives century after century, and the test I set for him he has passed.

VI. Don’t Go, Don’t Go.
Don’t go, don’t go. I touch your soles. I’m sold to you.
No one knows where to find the Bhakti path, show me where to go.
I would like my own body to turn into a heap of incense and sandalwood
and you set a torch to it.
When I’ve fallen down to gray ashes, smear me on your shoulders and chest.
Mira says: You who lift the mountains, I have some light, I want to mingle it with yours.
 

One of America's most distinguished artistic figures, John Harbison is recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize. He has composed music for most of America's premiere musical institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
     Harbison's concert music catalog is anchored by three operas, seven symphonies, twelve concerti, a ballet, six string quartets, numerous song cycles and chamber works, and a large body of sacred music that includes cantatas, motets, and the orchestral-choral works Four Psalms, Requiem and Abraham.
     Recent works include Psalm 116 (Chanticleer), String Quartet No. 6 (Lark, Fromm Players at Tanglewood, and Telegraph Quartet), Presences (cello and string quintet), A Bag of Tales, (codas for piano), The Cross of Snow (in versions for viols with countertenor, and string quartet with mezzo-soprano), The Nine Rasas (clarinet, viola, and piano), and Painting the Floors Blue (for violinist Jennifer Koh). Harbison's opera The Great Gatsby, a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, was recently revived at Semperoper Dresden, after the European premiere there of a new production following performances in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Aspen, Boston, and Tanglewood.
     Harbison was President of the Copland Fund for fifteen years, and a trustee of the American Academy in Rome. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a Trustee of the Bogliasco Foundation.

 

Gerald Finzi

Let Us Garlands Bring, op. 18

Finzi’s, Let us garlands bring, Op 18, comprises settings of five Shakespearean songs and bears the inscription ‘For Ralph Vaughan Williams on his birthday Oct. 12th 1942’. Performed first in the version for baritone and piano by Robert Irwin and Howard Ferguson on that day at a National Gallery lunchtime concert. Most of the songs were recent creations, composed between 1938 and 1942, but the emotional centre of the collection, Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, was written in 1929.
     Feste’s second song in Twelfth Night, Come away, come away death, is a powerful lament where Finzi’s attention to salient words—the falling seventh to ‘death’, and the tantalizingly protracted melisma on ‘weep’ are but two fine examples—is exemplary, as is the freedom of the phraseology. There is also a lugubrious intensity in Finzi’s choice deployment of ‘jarring’ dissonance which is skillfully integrated with melodious, yet at times angular vocal lines. Who is Silvia?, from Two Gentlemen of Verona, is a charming ditty in ternary form. For the first three lines of each verse Finzi opts for transparent simplicity in his use of periodic (two-bar) phrases, but in the last two lines (which are effectively fused) this regularity is deftly subverted. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, from Cymbeline, a meditation on the passing of time, on growing old and the dissipation of life’s fears in death, the great leveler, inspired Finzi to one of his most profound creations. The song, a sophisticated and controlled essay in sustained vocal writing, using the simplest of rhythmic and harmonic means, has a pathos (notably in the final, ethereal stanza) which rivals Dies natalis and the best of his Hardy songs. The remaining two songs of the collection, O Mistress Mine (Twelfth Night) and It was a lover and his lass (As you like it) provide lighter relief. The ‘troubadourish’ (to use Finzi’s own description) O Mistress Mine has a poise made all the more enchanting by the distinctive ‘thrummed’ guitar-like accompaniment and two-part quasi-Baroque dialogue of the upper strings (derived from the same texture in ‘The Rapture’ of Dies natalis). It was a lover and his lass is characterized by a syncopated accompaniment pattern (so much beloved of the composer) which lends the song an invigorating sense of well-being and happiness. Only briefly does a grey cloud appear in the third verse, when, for a moment only, there is a sense of regret (‘How that life was but a flower in springtime’). But this is soon dispelled by the jubilation of the last verse replete with ecstatic coda. –Jeremy Dibble

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) is a well-known British composer who, along with Vaughn Williams and Britten, carved out the musical language reflective of mid-century Britain. In 1930 Finzi gained a teaching appointment at the Royal Academy of Music. After the second world war, he began to receive a series of important commissions, namely a Clarinet Concerto (1948-49) and his masterpiece ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (1938-50), for tenor, chorus and orchestra. A commission from Sir John Barbirolli for the 1955 Cheltenham Festival brought forth the Cello Concerto (1951-52, 54-55), Finzi’s most ambitious, purely instrumental work. His oeuvre, extending to more than 100 songs for soloist or choir, firmly establishes him as one of the most popular 20th-century British composers.

 

Kate Soper

The Ultimate Poem is Abstract

The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract began, as a lot of pieces do, with a vague musical notion – can I, a singer, be subsumed into an abstract musical texture? – and some even vaguer conceptual notions – what is an abstract musical texture anyway? Does it have an opposite? And if so, which is more “authentic”? Many texts were scrutinized in the effort to figure out what, exactly, I was trying to say, but ultimately only Wallace Stevens’ remained intact. The voice within this poem, like the voice of the soprano within the ensemble (and perhaps like the nattering voice inside the composer’s head), can describe, can question, can categorize – but ultimately longs most of all, with only occasional flickering success, to experience. –Kate Soper

 

Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as "a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power" and by The New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style." A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (The Virgil Thomson and Goddard Lieberson awards and the Charles Ives Scholarship), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Chamber Music America, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, the Music Theory Society of New York State, and ASCAP, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, and Yarn/Wire. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Civitella Raineri Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood, Royaumont, and Domaine Forget, among others.
     Soper is a co-director and performer for Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She teaches composition and electronic music at Smith College.