Michael Daugherty (B

Michael Daugherty (b. April 28, 1954 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa) Motown Metal

Kayoko Dan ends the season with two more selections from the engaging, concert-hall favorite Michael Daugherty. His early experience included playing keyboard for jazz, rock, and funk ensembles. He followed a path, via a Fulbright scholarship, into academia and music composition, but none of the early influences dissipated. It's all in there and audiences adore it.

Motown Metal (1994), for brass and percussion, is the Detroit of a glorious past. Just imagine the dragster at the beginning of the piece rocketing north on Woodward Avenue. Here is Mr. Daugherty's own description of Motown Metal:

The composition is inspired by the sounds and rhythms of industrial Detroit: city of automobile clamor and the sixties Motown sound. The composition highlights instruments made only of metal: four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, triangle, cymbal, gong, anvil, and brake drum. Motown Metal is an assembly line of ascending and descending glissandi and rapid chromatic scales, predominantly heard in the trombones. The tuba, glockenspiel, and anvil create a funky polyphony, while the trumpets and horns play big band staccato chords. I draw on my experience playing percussion in sixties soul music bands and drum and bugle corps to create brassy industrial- strength polyrhythms.

Antonio Vivaldi (b. March 4, 1678 in Venice; d. July 28, 1741 in Vienna) Concerto in B-flat Major, “La Notte” (Night), RV 501

Early details of Vivaldi's life show a child whose survival was in doubt. He was baptized immediately after birth and, apparently, dedicated at the same time to the priesthood by his mother. Growing up he became an excellent violinist, but health problems (probably asthma) deterred him from playing wind instruments. He did become a priest and remained one all his life. He began his studies at 16 and was ordained at 25, but he was soon excused, nominally for health reasons, from celebrating mass. We can assume his musical legacy was greater for it.

As a violin virtuoso, Vivaldi wrote much featuring the solo violin. However, Vivaldi had a long association with a remarkable orphanage in Venice. Boys learned a trade and left when they were fifteen. But girls studied music and the most gifted were retained as members of the orphanage's highly respected orchestra and choir. Thanks to these remarkable virtuosas, Vivaldi also wrote a lot for their instruments—including bassoon.

This bassoon concerto, subtitled “Night,” drew on subject matter Vivaldi featured in his operas written around the same time for the Teatro Sant'Angelo. Dreams were popular and the supernatural although the church censors tried to keep a lid on it. To the women playing it, its edginess must have delicious.

The first movement begins very slowly with deliberate figures. The continuation features lively triplets by the soloist. The second movement “Il Fantasmi” (Ghosts) is active and lively. “Il Sonno” (Sleep), and perchance to dream, is gentle, rather tame, but the bassoon's dark colors are a reminder of what lurks just out of reach.

The last movement, “Sorge l'Aurora” (Raise the Dawn), is a cheerful conclusion featuring running passage work for the soloist. Of all the movements, it most channels the Vivaldi brand, the movement only he could have written.

Michael Daugherty Dead Elvis

The bassoon is the link between the Vivaldi piece just heard and Dead Elvis. Daugherty writes about his work:

No rock-and-roll personality has inspired as much speculation, adulation, and impersonation as Elvis Presley (1935-77). In Dead Elvis (1993), the bassoon soloist is an Elvis impersonator accompanied by a chamber ensemble. It is more than a coincidence that Dead Elvis is scored for the same instrumentation as Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat (1918), in which a soldier sells his violin, and his soul, to the devil for a magic book. I offer a new spin on this Faustian scenario: a rock star sells out to Hollywood, Colonel Parker, and Las Vegas for wealth and fame. I use Dies irae, a medieval Latin chant for the Day of Judgment, as the principal musical theme in my composition to pose the question, is Elvis dead or alive beyond the grave of Graceland? In Dead Elvis we hear fast and slow fifties rock- and-roll ostinati in the double bass, violin, and bongos, while the bassoonist gyrates, double-tongues, and croons his way through variations of Dies irae. Elvis is part of American culture, history, and mythology, for better or for worse. If you want to understand America and all its riddles, sooner or later you will have to deal with (Dead) Elvis.

Gustav Mahler (b. July 7, 1860 in Kaliště, Bohemia; d. May 18, 1911 in Vienna) Symphony No. 5

When Mahler was growing up he faced an unspoken assumption that he would not base his musical success on anything so fickle as composing. Indeed he was very effective making opera successful both creatively and as a business calculation.

It is not surprising then that much of Mahler's early composition was vocal in one way or another. His first symphony quoted extensively from his Songs of a Wayfarer. His next three symphonies all contained singing, especially the luminous Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) that concluded the CSO's 2010-11 season. What is surprising is that he chose in Symphony No. 5 to write a “purer” symphony, no program or singing, where the instrumental form bore the structural load. It could be that the assurances in his life—he had plenty of conducting work, had happily adapted to a schedule of composing tirelessly during his summer holidays, his marriage to Alma was at its happiest—made him want to push himself. The end result is that, having created four symphonies whose acceptance was already slow, he created something very different that took far longer to become a concert staple. Even today, where nearly every trained musician has at least a grudging appreciation of Mahler, the average concertgoer will intuit Mahler or will not, and learning to appreciate a work like the 5th Symphony will be problematic if it doesn't come naturally.

The trumpet sounds to begin a deliberate funeral march. The midsection seems to open a vein and let grief well out. The stately procession resumes. At the end, the solo trumpet again, but briefly, bleak and desolate.

The second movement seems to lash out bitterly at the inexorable doom depicted in the first movement, but the cure is no better than the disease. Until near the end a mighty brass chorale begins with redemptive power—but no! It dissipates as quickly as it came and we add cruel trickery to the gloom that was all around us from the beginning.

For those of us who love Mahler, the scherzo is the movement the whole piece turns on. It is episodic, complex to follow, but there is dancing here. We are alive again.

The famous “Adagietto” serves as an introduction to the final movement. Despite its structural role, this movement has been excerpted many times and is the movement that most all concertgoers will recognize and relate to. Moviegoers will remember it as drenching the soundtrack of Death in Venice. The simple commenting figures of the harp and the soul-piercing melodies of strings alone are simply unforgettable.

The final movement is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Ground down, near death, we have been reborn. So much light and joy pervades the movement we are positively giddy at what we have survived and triumphed over. Near the end, the second movement's brass chorale returns, but this time, no trickery, it powers onward to a crashing conclusion that leaves us laughing and crying at the same time.