SPOLETO FESTIVAL USA 2013 ADAMS / RAVEL/ BOULEZ / FRONTISPICE VASKS / CREDO John Kennedy, Conductor

June 3, 2013

PROGRAM NOTES All three works on this program highlight the power of music not merely as a reservoir of beauty but as a source of meaning and value in troubled times. With his breakthrough quasi-symphony Harmonielehre, reclaimed the contemporary American composer’s place in the concert hall. In the ultra-brief, enigmatic Frontispice, Ravel explored an audaciously creative sound world after witnessing the destruction of war. And Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks believes music should provide “food for the soul” more than ever in our troubled age. Both the Ravel and the Vasks compositions moreover continue Spoleto Festival USA’s tradition of giving American premieres and exploring the treasures of little-known repertory.

Harmonielehre (John Adams) Harmonielehre marks a major turning point not only in the career of leading American composer John Adams, but for the state of the art of contemporary orchestral composition in general. It’s a blazing, passionate affirmation that music by a living composer can still communicate directly, touching hearts and emotions without compromising artistic craftsmanship. In retrospect, Harmonielehre can now be viewed as heralding a kind of Renaissance among today’s American composers. Since its triumphant premiere in 1985 in San Francisco, Adams’s ambitious score has earned recognition as a genuine classic of the late 20th century–classic in the sense of Ezra Pound’s definition of literature as “news that stays news.”

Adams, still in his late 30s when he wrote this music, had come of age in the small-town of and at Harvard in the late 1960s. After completing his studies, he rejected the “normal” course for an aspiring composer, which was to find a niche in the establishment, or to trek off to Europe for further validation. His choice, instead, was to head West. Resettling in the Bay Area, Adams found an atmosphere unshackled by the self- consciousness and expectations of academic fashion: an ideal place where he could truly begin to search for his voice as a composer. Far-ranging experiments (including with and John Cagean happenings) eventually led to an early breakthrough which involved adapting some of the vocabulary of as part of his composer’s “toolkit” of expressive devices. More important than issues of specific techniques, though, is the human motivation underlying the whole enterprise of creating music, as Adams came to realize. He describes an epiphany in his memoir, , which clarified his aim as a composer. Listening to Wagner while driving in the dramatic landscape of the Sierra foothills, Adams recalls, “I said out loud, almost without thinking, ‘He cares.’” The power behind the individuality–and complexity of language–of the major composers who still speak to us generations later is that they “cared about …making the intensity of their emotions palpable to the listener.” Much of this thinking reached a culminating point when Adams set to work on his final project as the first-ever composer-in-residence at in the early 1980s. For Adams the title Harmonielehre–a German expression that can be simply translated as “harmony lesson” of “book of harmony” but that also suggests an entire theory of harmony and how it functions–evokes the fundamental crisis of 20th-century music and even the search for balance in psychological/spiritual matters. in fact used this title for an important music textbook he wrote in 1910–11. Schoenberg has often been “blamed” for the divorce between modern music and audiences because of the Pandora’s box he opened by subverting the traditional Western system of , with its centered pitches and recognizable melodies. Writing Harmonielehre, which lays out the basis of that system in extensive detail, was one way in which Schoenberg wrestled with these questions as he was setting out into the uncharted territory of complete atonality in his own music. As so often happens when it comes to a major creative advance, Adams found himself stalled and depressed as the deadline loomed. He recalls that Schoenberg, who had taken on stature as an ambivalent artistic father figure, appeared in one of several revealing dreams that ultimately shaped Harmonielehre itself. “Despite my respect for and even intimidation by the persona of Schoenberg,” writes Adams, “I felt it only honest to acknowledge that I profoundly disliked the sound of twelve-tone music.” The music he composed became a “statement of belief in the power of tonality at a time when I was uncertain about its future.” In this sense the overall trajectory of Harmonielehre represents “a psychic quest for harmony.” Like “genius” and “classic,” the word “symphonic” gets overused, but all three apply to Harmonielehre. Its symphonic dimension refers both to the ambitious scope of its three- part design and its masterfully integrated use of a very large to paint with a wide spectrum of colors, from intimate solo meditations to full-throttle tidal waves of sound. Adams shapes the first–and longest–movement as an arch form, framing the introspective center with surging, energetic music. The stark minor chords that launch Harmonielehre were inspired by another dream, in which Adams “watched a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket.” Adams notes that Harmonielehre “marries the developmental techniques of Minimalism with the harmonic and expressive world of fin de siècle late ,” which dominates the first movement’s middle part. The “shades of Mahler, Sibelius, and Debussy”–and even of young Schoenberg’s late-Romantic works–hover in this soundscape.

The slower second movement is titled “The Anfortas Wound” after the wounded medieval Grail knight (a character in Wagner’s Parsifal, where his name appears as Amfortas). He represents a Jungian archetype who “symbolize[s] a condition of sickness of the soul that curses it with a feeling of impotence and depression.” Minor- key harmonies and an air of lamentation establish the backdrop for a soaring solo . A reference to Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony–and by extension to a turning point in the golden age of Western tonality–is embedded in the second climax that shatters this music.

The final movement, “Meister Eckhardt & Quickie,” takes its title from a dream Adams had soon after his daughter Emily (nicknamed “Quackie”) was born, in which “she rides perched on the shoulder of the Medieval mystic Meister Eckhardt as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted on the high ceilings of old cathedrals.” References to a gentle lullaby yield to waves of ecstatic momentum in E-flat major–an oceanic cry of joy for the creativity that has been liberated.

Frontispice (Ravel/Boulez)

Maurice Ravel was at the height of his career when Schoenberg and his associates posed their challenges to basic musical structures that had been taken for granted for centuries. But the Great War seemed to undermine the foundation on which European civilization itself had been built. Ravel had been eager to enlist and served as a truck driver behind the lines, transporting ammunition under risky conditions. As he witnessed the nightmarish reality of the combat close-up, the sensitive composer soon came to realize that, as he put it, “the artist is not compatible with the warrior.” His discharge followed the death of his mother in 1917, which plunged Ravel into deep depression.

In 1918, the year of the Armistice, Ravel remained in a state of creative despair and managed to complete only one entirely new composition: Frontispice, a work which lasts less than two minutes. Several other works show the direct impact of the First World War: the neo-baroque piece Le Tombeau de Couperin (later orchestrated as a ballet), each of whose movements Ravel dedicated to a friend lost in battle, and the apocalyptic breakdown at the end of La Valse. Frontispice represents a more enigmatic response: it stands apart from the rest of Ravel’s oeuvre as a truly puzzling creation.

Frontispice first appeared in a magazine in 1919 as a “frontispiece” or a kind of decorative preface to a poem by the Paris-based Italian poet Ricciotto Canudo (1879– 1923), with whom Ravel had nearly collaborated on an about Saint Francis. Canudo, a friend of Apollinaire and an early theorist of the cinema, had written about his own experiences in the war (in the Balkan theater), and these poems were gathered in the collection S.P.503: Le poème du Vardar. The particular poem in question, “Sonate pour un jet d’eau,” indicates Canudo’s interest in the alliance between music and poetry and is enigmatic on its own terms, involving symbolic images of water and fire to interpret the poet’s war experience.

Among the many unusual aspects of Frontispice is Ravel’s original scoring for five hands playing on two . The composer had a deep interest in mathematics and the subtle design of mechanical objects. (His father had been a mechanical engineer who played a role in developing the automobile.) A theory promoted by the pianolist Rex Lawson contends that Frontispice originated as a suite of pieces for the player piano commissioned from several composers–though this doesn’t clarify the score’s known connections to the poetry of Canudo. The scholar Deborah Mawer has shown that numerology plays a role in Frontispice, as seen in the prevalence of the numbers three and five: three pianists and five hands, a score consisting of fifteen (3 X 5) measures written over five staves, and so on. (The “503” of Canudo’s title apparently refers to the postal code of the battle zone he writes about.)

Certainly five hands two pianos is an uneconomical repertory niche, so it’s not surprising that Frontispice is a rarely encountered secret. Even the brief original score remained an obscurity for decades. In 1987 Ravel’s compatriot , who carried aspects of Schoenberg’s work to a radical extreme through his development of , arranged this music for orchestra. Boulez’s status as one of the great orchestrators in itself shows his affinity with Ravel. Maestro John Kennedy points out that “Boulez does something brilliant with the piece through his use of a very large orchestral canvas.”

Frontispice seems densely packed with “events” that belie the score’s short duration, and Boulez’s orchestration underscores the “novel-in-a-sigh” intensity of each gesture in a way somewhat reminiscent of the music of . Starting with mysterious triplets, Frontispice introduces each of the five voices (or “hands”) as a blithely independent line that continues on its own plane until all five are going at once in a whirligig of parallel universes.

The repeat-note bass line anticipates Minimalist technique, while insistent chirping in the highest range foreshadows the work of French composer Olivier Messiaen and his preoccupation with transcribing the “real” sound of bird song (not pretty, stylized imitations). There really is no other piece in which Ravel is so audacious, flirting with a layered polytonality (different senses of key operating at the same time) as an alternative to pure atonality. Ravel seems to be leading us to the very edge of chaos before it all suddenly breaks off and gives way to a procession of solemn chords which then fade into infinite .

Credo (Vasks)

Music that is about more than itself, that addresses our experience in the world and fills an urgent need: this might be said to be the artistic credo of Pēteris Vasks, who is just a year older than John Adams. “My intention is to provide food for the soul,” declares the Latvian composer, “and this is what I preach in my works.” Vasks was actually born the son of a Baptist preacher –not exactly a privileged position in the Soviet Union, which then ruled Latvia and the other Baltic States and delegated to itself the right to set the moral tone for young composers to obey.

As was the case with other adventurously inclined artists of his generation throughout the Soviet Union, an independent streak set Vasks at odds with the establishment. Since he declined to resettle in the West, it wasn’t until after the Cold War that his music started to circulate widely abroad. Still, Vasks began his career early, playing double bass for several years with various Latvian ensembles. He explored various avant- garde techniques as a young composer (with a heavy dose of influence from contemporary Polish composers but also from the American George Crumb).

Eventually, much as the Minimalists had done, Vasks rediscovered untapped possibilities in the fertile ground of “old-fashioned” tonality. In fact aspects of Minimalism itself were absorbed by Vasks and several of his Eastern European colleagues, such as the Estonian Arvo Pärt and the Polish Henryk Górecki, to develop a vocabulary that could express spiritual longing and states of mystical awareness and transcendence. Similarly, they reevaluated the “roots” of folk traditions and archaic sacred music as an additional source for material.

Fellow Latvian , the world-famous violinist, helped win Vasks new audiences in the West by championing his violin Distant Light (1997). That work mingles a sense of personal revelations with a cosmic perspective, wrapping all this up in the familiar guise of an instrumental concerto. Vasks has composed extensively for orchestra, and the clarity and fervor of his writing reflect something of the choral tradition that is so vital in the Baltic region. Credo, for example, though entirely instrumental (it originated in 2009 as a commission by the Bremen Philharmonic in Germany), was in part envisioned as a “completion” of his monumental setting of the Mass for and orchestra. Composed during the millennium, the Mass had omitted the Credo movement. But in place of the theological pronouncements of the traditional Credo, Vasks describes the kind of belief he hoped to convey in this music: “We live in a time in which intolerance and hate between people, nations and religions is on the increase. Ideals and established values are pushed away by the cult of consumption. What should a composer do in such time? In my opinion you’ve got the possibility to promote harmony, the existence of ideals, and the power of love.” Central to that goal for Vasks is recognizing, along with economical and political concerns, the importance of our natural environment and the moral effects of its destruction. Credo isn’t programmatic in any 19th-century Romantic sense: it doesn’t aim to “illustrate” a prefabricated story line or to offer picturesque depictions of natural beauty. Rather, Vasks uses musical ideas to trace the contours of an emotional journey that each listener will respond to uniquely. “His harmonic language here is very traditional,” explains John Kennedy, “and he’s not at all abashed about giving voice to an intensely lyrical sensibility, which can be attached to extramusical values.” Kennedy goes on to note that Vasks’s straightforward treatment of tonality makes it easy to isolate particular themes and melodies. This treatment stands in fascinating contrast with Harmonielehre, in which “the harmony itself becomes the overall melodic form and structure.”

In a single-movement span lasting about 20 minutes, Credo follows a basic arch shape that emphasizes a sense of departure and return. The music begins with sustained notes. Like an awakening, warm woodwind sounds evoke a pastoral aura (another version of Copland’s open spaces, or perhaps of the innocent, “redeemed” nature of The Good Friday Spell from Wagner’s Parsifal). Where Adams–and Ravel’s Frontispice, for that matter–layers events on top of each other, crafting dense, eventful textures, Vasks essentially relies on the simplicity of single harmonized lines which hold our interest in their peculiar phrasings, the way they reach and even seem to breathe. The textures and orchestration change, the momentum heats up, and other related themes enter the landscape. An initial climax dissipates, and then, as more aggressive gestures are heard, Vasks carefully builds to the grand central climax at the heart of Credo.

So assured and radiant is this music that it seems the logical conclusion–what more could be said? But in his most surprising move, Vasks painstakingly pulls the camera back. He descends from this mountain height to reconsider the earlier music, touching it with a tentative melancholy. “There’s no pretense about his technique,” Kennedy explains. “For Vasks music is part of the ecosystem, part of the magic of life, the wonders of creation.”

Program notes © 2013 Thomas May