Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor Giorgio Consolati, Flute Kady Evanyshyn
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Friday Evening, December 1, 2017, at 7:30 The Juilliard School presents AXIOM Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor Giorgio Consolati, Flute Kady Evanyshyn, Mezzo-soprano Tengku Irfan, Piano Khari Joyner, Cello LUCIANO BERIO (1925–2003) Sequenza I (1958) GIORGIO CONSOLATI, Flute Folk Songs (1965–67) Black Is the Color I Wonder as I Wander Loosin yelav Rossignolet du bois A la femminisca La donna ideale Ballo Motettu de tristura Malurous qu’o uno fenno Lo fiolaire Azerbaijan Love Song KADY EVANYSHYN, Mezzo-soprano Intermission BERIO Sequenza XIV (2002) KHARI JOYNER, Cello “points on the curve to find…” (1974) TENGKU IRFAN, Piano Performance time: approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes, including one intermission The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. Information regarding gifts to the school may be obtained from the Juilliard School Development Office, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6588; (212) 799-5000, ext. 278 (juilliard.edu/giving). Alice Tully Hall Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. Notes on the Program faith, in spite of it all, in the lingering pres- ence of the past. This gave his work a dis- by Matthew Mendez tinctly humanistic bent, and for all his experimental impulses, Berio’s relationship LUCIANO BERIO to the musical tradition was a cord that Born October 24, 1925, in Oneglia, Italy never would be cut. Died May 27, 2003, in Rome, Italy Sequenza I In 1968 during his tenure on the Juilliard One way Berio’s interest in networks of faculty, Luciano Berio wrote: “Every mean- meaning-making manifested itself was his ingful work can be considered an expres- predilection for open-ended series of sion of a doubt, an experimental step in a scores, as well as for works that literally poetic process, an acknowledgement of rewrote or overwrote previous ones—both the need continuously to modify, to reinter- means of honoring that imperative, “con- pret, to verify, to renounce forever the tinuously to modify, to reinterpret, to ver- comfortable utopia of a super-code that ify.” Best-known is Berio’s series of 14 would guarantee absolutely faultless com- solo Sequenzas, composed at intervals munication.” These words speak with over the course of almost a half-century, unusual directness to the core attitudes each for a different instrument (in one and beliefs that made up their author’s case, voice). Significantly, the first Sequenzas richly multilayered creative psychology. were among the founding documents of Like so many European composers of his the so-called “new virtuosity,” a label that generation, Berio’s worldview had been described the interchange between avant- shaped utterly by the events of the 1930s garde composers and soloists working and 1940s—in his case, growing up under actively to extend the range of techniques the shadow of the Mussolini regime, and playing methods available on their instru- which was “capable of actually falsifying ments. Among the most celebrated torch- spiritual reality.” As such, he always bearers for the new virtuosity was the remained deeply skeptical of the prospect American singer Cathy Berberian, Berio’s first of “absolutely faultless communication,” wife and the instigator of some of his most let alone the unproblematic embrace of memorable works (including Sequenza III). any utopian envisionings. Yet it was also Another was the Darmstadt stalwart typical of the man that he never rejected Severino Gazzelloni, the trailblazing flutist these notions out of hand, either: on the for whom Berio composed what became contrary, Berio was uniquely catholic- the very first entry in the series in 1958. minded, especially amid the 1950s mod- ernist milieu of the Darmstadt Summer Never one to unhesitatingly adopt any phi- Courses, of which he became a part. losophy, by the late 1950s Berio had aban- Indeed, Berio maintained a longstanding doned most of Darmstadt serialism’s more fascination (as some of the vocabulary in extreme, inflexible implications, and the the above citation indicates) for the pre- flute Sequenza was written against this cisely communicative fields of linguistics backdrop. What instead remained was and semiotics (the study of signs). It was something like a generalized series principle, this close attention to processes of meaning- a way of organizing 12-note linear—that is, making that lent his music much of its spe- sequence-like—pitch material. Decades cial texture: if its warp was that concern later, Berio explained that the piece had with contemporary “problems of commu- instead been structured according to a nication,” then its woof was Berio’s enduring scheme inflected by his study of linguistics. He spoke of four organizational parame- whole range of distant echoes and mem- ters: pitch, dynamics, duration, and the ories, […] a musical space inhabited by “morphological dimension,” which is “at the significant presence of absences and the service of the other three and is […] by the echo of absent presences. their rhetorical instrument.” Each parame- ter can be in a state of minimal, average, or Folk Songs maximal tension, and Berio made the pre- Among the constants of Berio’s career compositional decision that two or more of was a deep-rooted curiosity about vernac- the parameters would be at maximum ten- ular traditions from around the world. Berio sion at any given moment in the piece. The expert David Osmond-Smith hypothesizes melody line’s darting hyperactivity was the that this was a byproduct of his disgust at direct result of this decision, but so ardu- the way the fascists had weaponized sup- ous did Berio fear the music would be to posed folk art to engender a collective perform that he instead adopted a new sense of italianità during the 1920s and form of flexible, proportional notation to 1930s. Hence Berio’s interest lay instead give the flutist a freer hand. He later cre- in the broadening of horizons he thought ated a conventional version of the score, the study of traditional musics could but either way, he insisted, there would be encourage, if approached with the right “a feeling of instability, an openness which balance of deference and analytical detach- is part of the expressive quality of the work— ment. Here Berio’s humanistic colors a kind of ‘work-in-progress’ character.” showed, for if he had few illusions about the fallaciousness of “the pretense of total identi- Most of the Sequenzas challenged precon- fication” with alien cultures, that did not ceptions relating to the essence of their mean that common ground was not to be respective instruments, and so it was with sought, either. Drawing on musical ideas, the first. Hence the frantic density of the techniques, and materials native to those flute’s music reflected Berio’s “desperate other traditions could be “an act of aware- search for polyphony with the most ness and respect, of love, for cultural iden- monodic [single-lined] instrument in his- tities which can also tell us something tory.” Yet at the same time, this striving for about ourselves.” virtual polyphony—the illusion of multiple voices, provoked by sudden register Situated somewhere between arrange- shifts—brought Berio right back to the ment and creative recomposition, Berio’s instrument’s deep history: this very tech- Folk Songs was his most straightforward nique was already being employed cen- realization of those ideals. Written for turies ago, in works like J.S. Bach’s flute Cathy Berberian in 1963 and 1964, by Partita. Ever sensitive to the histories sed- which point their marriage was on the imented within instruments, Berio knew rocks, it was nevertheless tailor-made for this perfectly well, even if he also aspired her artistic persona. (Given the nature of to simultaneously transcend those histo- some of the texts, it has been speculated ries. As he confessed in 1993: that Berio wrote Folk Songs in a spirit of atonement.) Indeed, the selection of songs I am deeply fascinated by musical ideas was almost entirely a function of Berberian’s which manage to develop a polyphony of tastes and preferences: by that point, she different formations of meaning—ideas had been performing many of them in that do not reject the possibility of deal- recital—in one form or another—for some ing with specific and concrete instru- time. Positively dizzying is the sheer stylis- mental gestures which then set up a tic and linguistic variety of the songs, and after Berberian died, Berio would complain Most offbeat of all, however, is the final that only by using multiple vocalists could “Azerbaijan Love Song,” whose lyrics he achieve the effect she had once single- Berberian actually transcribed phoneme- handedly masterminded. In this sense, by-phoneme from a 78-rpm record she and there is a direct continuity between the Berio found on a visit to the Soviet Union. Folk Songs, which encourage the vocalist The result is said to be incomprehensible to range beyond the neutral, uninflected to Azeri speakers—a perverse conundrum delivery of classical singing, and Berio’s that surely excited Berio’s linguistic sensi- more abstract investigations of vocal tech- bilities. So much, then, for “absolutely nique, where he wanted to expand the faultless communication”—and yet the palette of sounds (hums, sighs, mutters) essential optimism expressed by Folk proper to the singing voice. Songs is that we must, and will, always try to communicate, anyway. The influence of Berio’s stint in America arguably shows in the first two songs, Sequenza XIV “Black Is the Color” and “I Wonder as I Berio never lost his fondness for “virtu- Wander.” While neither is technically a folk osos not only of the fingers but of the song—they were composed by the bal- mind,” and if anything, his final Sequenza ladeer John Jacob Niles, to traditional is as closely tied to the identity of the com- texts—both were associated with the missioning performer as any of his scores American folk revival of the 1950s and for Berberian.