Pieces of Genius

PiecesLukas Foss of Genius New York New Music Ensemble with guests David Broome, Lois Martin, and Deborah Wong WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1644 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2016 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. Foss_1644_book.indd 1-2 8/22/16 5:06 PM During the 1980s and 1990s, Foss wrote several noteworthy compositions, including The Composer Elegy for Anne Frank, American Landscapes, two symphonies (no. 3 “Symphony of Sorrows” and no. 4 “Window to the Past), and two string quartets (nos. 4 and 5), Lukas Foss was born in Berlin on August 15, 1922. The Foss family fled Nazi while maintaining a high profile as a conductor and educator. He joined the faculty Germany in 1933, going first to Paris and then to the United States in 1937. Foss of Boston University in 1991, which would become the longest-running post of a graduated from the prestigious Curtis Institute in 1942, where he studied piano teaching career that also included stops at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Yale, and the with Isabelle Vengerova, composition with Rosario Scalero and Randall Thompson, Manhattan School of Music. In 2000, his contributions to American music were and conducting with Fritz Reiner. His training was supplemented by summers at honored by the Gold Medal for Music from the American Academy of Arts and the Berkshire Music Center under Serge Koussevitzky and by composition lessons Letters, to which he had been elected a member in 1962. He remained a practicing with Paul Hindemith at Yale. Foss’s first major composition, the 1944 cantata The musician into his eighties, writing several new works, conducting, and continuing Prairie, won the New York Music Critics Circle Award. Foss was the pianist of the to teach. After struggling with Parkinson’s disease in his final years, Foss died in Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1944 to 1950 before securing a fellowship at the New York on February 1, 2009 at the age of 86. With a number of recent live and American Academy in Rome for 1950-51, where he wrote his Piano Concerto no. recorded performances of his works, the last several years have shown that the music 2. Succeeding Arnold Schoenberg as Professor of Composition at UCLA in 1953, he created by his unique approach to composition is likely to endure. founded the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble there in 1957. Foss’s Time Cycle for soprano and orchestra (1959-60), which featured improvised interludes, earned him another New York Music Critics Circle Award. The Music Foss was appointed music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic in 1963, and the Twentieth century music is characterized by an extraordinary degree of diversity, a same year he established the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY diversity that was largely facilitated by technological innovation. New inventions such Buffalo, which became an important venue for the creation and performance of as phonograph recordings and radio provided access to an amount of music that was new music. Composers whose works were performed at the Center during Foss’s never before available, and the invention of electronic instruments created an entirely tenure included Henry Cowell, George Crumb, La Monte Young, and Luciano new palette of sounds. With more and more music competing for the public’s attention, Berio. After leaving Buffalo in 1970, Foss became music director of the Brooklyn composers were forced to respond by creating music that was novel in some obvious Philharmonic (1971-90), the Kol Israel Orchestra in Jerusalem (1972-76), and way, which led to unprecedented experimentation, new compositional techniques, the Milwaukee Symphony (1981-86). His conducting career was characterized by and fusion of musical styles. Even by the standards of the twentieth century, the original approaches to programming, such as the Meet the Moderns series of new music of Lukas Foss stands out for its variety. music performances and discussions with composers and the “marathon” concerts with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Among his important works of the 1960s and The German-born Foss, who arrived in the United States in 1937 at age 15, paradoxically 1970s are Baroque Variations, Curriculum Vitae, and American Cantata. began his compositional career as an Americanist with Copland-influenced works such Foss_1644_book.indd 3-4 8/22/16 5:06 PM as Symphony no. 1 and The Prairie (both 1944), the latter based on a poem by Carl F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on February 17, Sandburg. This early experience with cultural and artistic adaptation set the stage for 1987. The Tibetan word “tashi” can be translated as “good fortune.” Foss described Foss’s later absorption of a number of progressive compositional techniques, such as the compositional process for this work as both difficult and time-consuming: “I sat atonality, controlled improvisation, free forms, and indeterminacy. Some of the most there morning, noon, and night. My son said, ‘Dad, you’re just glued to that seat. I’ve important works of this era are Time Cycle (1959-60), Baroque Variations (1967), never seen you so single-minded.’ Well, what did I come up with after four months of and, included on this recording, Echoi (1961-63). With his compositions of the this ordeal? A seventeen-minute piece called Tashi. Seventeen minutes. I mean, the mid-1970s and beyond, Foss sought to reconcile the progressive and traditional amount of time and effort that goes into a piece of music is incredible.” aspects of his musical personality (the composer described his late work as an “amalgamation” of the middle period’s “wild, experimental style” with his earlier The first movement of Tashi, Lento, opens with a simple figure of harmonics and period). American Cantata (1976) was the first work of a later career distinguished pizzicato in the strings and a piano technique in which notes are played by one hand by compositions such as Renaissance Concerto (1985), Elegy for Anne Frank (1989), while the involved piano strings are muted with the other hand. This figure alternates and, featured on this CD, Tashi (1986) and Solo Observed (1982). with wide-ranging and rhythmically ambiguous clarinet lines, all of which serve to set up a beautiful whole-tone melody introduced by the violin. Frequent pauses create The New York New Music Ensemble’s Pieces of Genius by Lukas Foss presents three the impression of a sequence of related but quasi-independent sound events rather of Foss’s best chamber works in reverse chronological order of composition. The than traditional formal development. The overall effect of the movement communi- recording opens with the most recent work, Tashi, working its way backwards through cates a strong Eastern flavor, facilitated by its timbre, melodic material, and formal Solo Observed and concluding with Echoi. This presentation allows listeners to enjoy structure. An orchestrated version of Tashi, retitled Clarinet Concerto no. 2, would a musical narrative that begins at the end, with a work that represents the culmina- later be commissioned and premiered at Japan’s Suntory Hall on December 2, 1988 tion of more than forty years of compositional inquiry. The significance of Tashi’s during the artistic directorship of Toru Takemitsu. Listeners can easily hear why Foss assimilation of stylistic elements is then understood retrospectively through the thought this work, with the exotic yet accessible music of its first movement, was other two works, each more strongly associated with forward-looking compositional appropriate for the occasion. techniques than the last. The serialism and minimalism of Solo Observed provide an aesthetic bridge to the “wild experimentalism” of Echoi. Foss himself, who as a The interior movements of Tashi build on the work’s colorful opening. The second conductor was known for his innovative programming, would undoubtedly have movement, Allegro, is strongly reminiscent of a minuet and trio form, but with enough appreciated this approach to the recording of his music. departures from that standard framework to keep the listener guessing. The first section features rapid clarinet passagework, performed over a syncopated accompa- Tashi, a four-movement work for B-flat clarinet, piano, and string quartet, was com- niment in the context of frequent changes of time signature. The “trio” section, aside missioned by Carnegie Hall, the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, and the Abe from occasional bursts in the piano, is played by the strings alone. The interest here Fortas Memorial Fund. Written for the Tashi chamber music ensemble, the world is centered on an inventive harmonic progression and effective spacing of the heavily premiere was performed by members of the group with Foss on piano at the John chordal texture. The main clarinet theme then returns, but is interrupted by a piano Foss_1644_book.indd 5-6 8/22/16 5:06 PM interlude, representing an effective amount of textural, timbral, and structural variety In 1981, Foss composed Solo, his first work for solo piano in nearly three decades within the movement as a whole. (which is somewhat surprising given his career as a concert pianist). Foss would subsequently add various combinations of instruments to create three other versions Tashi’s third movement is divided into two contrasting segments, entitled “Free” and of the work: Toccata: Solo Transformed (for solo piano and large chamber orchestra), “Lento.” The first of these sections resembles a cadenza for the clarinet. Interpolated Solo Observed (for solo piano and small chamber orchestra), and included here, Solo between virtuoso clarinet lines, however, is material that recalls the very beginning of Observed (for solo piano and three accompanying instruments, on this recording the work, but this time with unsynchronized entrances and unspecified repetitions of cello, electric organ, and percussion).

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