Magnus Lindberg the Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-In-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, 2009-12

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Magnus Lindberg the Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-In-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, 2009-12 Magnus Lindberg The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, 2009-12 EXPO · Piano Concerto No. 2 · Al largo New York Philharmonic Alan Gilbert, Conductor Yefim Bronfman, Piano Magnus Lindberg The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, 2009-12 EXPO · Piano Concerto No. 2 · Al largo New York Philharmonic Alan Gilbert, Conductor Yefim Bronfman, Piano eXPO (2009) for orchestra . 10:08 Piano Concerto no. 2 (2011-12). .28:39 1st movement – ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 11:49 2nd movement – ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 8:43 3rd movement ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 8:07 al largo (2009-10) for orchestra . .23:43 Total 62:32 Global Sponsor Credit Suisse is the Global Sponsor of the New York Philharmonic Breguet is the Exclusive Timepiece of the New York Philharmonic Major support for the commissioning of EXPO, Al largo, and the Piano Concerto No. 2 by the Francis Goelet Fund Yefim Bronfman’s appearance is made possible through the Hedwig van Ameringen Guest Artists Endowment Fund Dacapo is supported by the Danish Arts Council Committee for Music MAGNUS LINDBERG 3 The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-residence When Alan Gilbert became Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in September 2009, one of his cornerstone initiatives was to establish The Marie-Josée Kravis Compos- er-in-Residence. The post was made possible by a generous gift from Henry R. Kravis in honor of his wife, Marie-Josée. The couple had already been instrumental in supporting the Orchestra’s commissioning of new works by leading composers. The first appointed to this two-year post was Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. The collaboration was so rewarding that his tenure was extended to a third season, conclud- ing with his appearances as one of three conductors leading Stockhausen’s Gruppen at Philharmonic 360, the exploration of the impact of space on music that was performed at Park Avenue Armory in June 2012. “Magnus Lindberg is a brilliant musician; his portfolio is incredibly wide and deep,” Alan Gilbert said at the time of Lindberg’s appointment. “Not only will he be writing music for us, but he will also serve as an advocate for all the contemporary music we do, and we want him to become part of the fabric of the Orchestra and someone whom the audience really gets to know well over the years that he’s in residence.” The very first notes that Alan Gilbert conducted as Music Director were by Lindberg— EXPO (2009), the composer’s first New York Philharmonic commission. TheAssociated Press wrote of the performance: “With the crack of a whip and a blast of fresh air, a new era has begun for the nation’s oldest orchestra.” The Orchestra reprised the work on Asian and European tours and played more Lindberg over the first season of his residency, which concluded with his second Philharmonic commission, Al largo (2009-10). That piece was described by The New York Times as “a lushly colorful, bril liantly orchestrated, teeming, intriguing yet baffling work.” Other highlights of Lindberg’s tenure included the New York Premiere of Kraft (1985), one of his breakthrough pieces; the U.S. Premiere of his Clarinet Concerto at Carnegie Hall; performances of his Feria (1995-97) in New York and in Europe; and the World Pre- miere of Souvenir (in memoriam Gérard Grisey), premiered on CONTACT!, the Philharmon- ic’s new-music series, which Lindberg curated for three years, beginning with its inception. 4 The final work Lindberg created for the Philharmonic was his Piano Concerto No. 2 (2011-12), with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist in the World Premiere in New York and on performances on the CALIFORNIA 2012 tour. The New York Times wrote: “The concerto has great stylistic diversity: elusive atonal stretches; writing for the piano that evokes the spiky style of Stockhausen one moment and the voluptuous colors of Ravel the next.” Alan Gilbert agreed, quickly deciding to bring it back during the Orchestra’s 2013-14 sea- son, with performances in New York and Asia and with Mr. Bronfman (the Philharmon- ic’s Mary and James G. Wallach Artist-in-Residence that year) again as soloist. As Magnus Lindberg approached the end of his three-year journey with the New York Philharmonic, he shared his impressions of the musicians who had been his colleagues: “There is no difference between the way they play traditional music and new music. They see them as complements to each other. Alan Gilbert has found that his approach to conducting, his approach to repertoire, can include the whole history of Western music, including the music of our time.” 5 Magnus Lindberg by Ilkka Oramo According to Luciano Berio (Remembering the Future, 2006) the musical development of the last few decades has postulated an opposition between two kinds of musicians, one empirical and the other systematic, “an opposition between the composer as bricoleur and the composer as scientist.” The former takes whatever is at hand as a starting point and proceeds using inductive reasoning, whereas the latter “starts with a preconceived idea, and follows an all-embracing strategy.” Magnus Lindberg (born 1958) was of the latter kind in his apprentice years at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where he first attended Einojuhani Rautavaara’s and then Paavo Heininen’s composition class in the latter part of the 1970s. His leading idea was to create an all-embracing strategy for every single composition—an idea that had its roots in the aesthetics of the 1950s, in the thinking of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Milton Babbitt. Having an all-embracing strategy for a work to be created means that once the rules are set, the piece writes itself, as it were. This is a deductive strategy of composition, and the result is a piece that is the only one of its kind—instead of being an instance of a genre, a type, or a class. Therefore it must have a proper name; generic names, such as symphony, sonata or concerto, are out of the question. Lindberg’s first totally structured piece was a wind quintet that, characteristically enough, remained virtual, existing in essence but not in actual fact. Another example of this aesthetic is a piece for cello solo, Espressione I (1978), in which everything—pitch, rhythm, timbre, dynamics and articula- tion—changes from note to note. The piece proved to be unplayable—until the cellist Anssi Karttunen arranged it for two cellos. In its most rigid form, the systematic, deduc- tive way of composition proved to be a dead end. Berio’s two types, composer as bricoleur and composer as scientist, are ideal types. In practice, a balance must be achieved between them, between the inductive and the deductive way of composition. Lindberg encountered the inductive way at Franco Dona- toni’s summer course in Siena in 1979. Donatoni’s method of teaching was peculiar. First 6 thing in the morning he went to the blackboard and started exploring permutations. He took a fragment from somewhere, for instance from Schoenberg, and developed out of it a system of transformations in order to show how to deal with elementary musical mate- rial. “His radically different approach was a stimulating shock for me,” Lindberg told Peter Szendy in 1993. Donatoni’s “radically different approach” was nothing else than bricolage. Bricolage, by definition, is something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available. In this practice Lindberg encountered an otherness that swerved his thinking from a previous course and set his imagination free. He immediately began to write a quintet for flute, clarinet, piano, violin and cello, Quintetto dell’estate, the score of which is dated July 24, 1979 in Siena and that he considers his de facto opus 1. In this piece he used, for the first time, an inductive method of composition. He designed a number of musical objects he called models. A model is “a situation defined in relation to several parameters.” Models are flexible. They tolerate a certain amount of variation without losing identity. The shape of a model is fixed, but its details are open. Models can grow or decrease, stretch or shrink. Music based on models has one drawback, though: discontinuity. As models are closed entities, a way must be found to tie them together, to interlock the brick-like material into a continuous flow of music. Here Lindberg could rely on another source of inspiration that was rather unexpected, Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, a symphony in one movement with remarkable organic continuity properties. Another experience that made Lindberg rethink his former basic assumptions came from theater. In 1980 he was asked to write music to Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Molière, or the Cabal of the Devout (1929). Bulgakov was one of his favorite writers because of his technique of parallel development of independent stories. While all of Lindberg’s preceding works had been extremely unified in style and expression, this one is based on contrasts. Different kinds of music are put next to each other (as in much ofStra vinsky), and a drama unfolds that is as clear as if the story with parallel developments was told in words. 7 In April 1981 Lindberg was reflecting on the future direction of his music and wrote down some ideas in his diary. In the focus of his interest were “problems of rhythm, me- ter and time-space.” He was dreaming of a new kind of “kinetic art.” Thinking in param- eters had to be reconsidered: music should be liberated from handling pure parameters such as pitch and rhythm. Instead, a network of complex fusions of parameters should be created.
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