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Ensemble 20+ Michael Lewanski, Conductor Wednesday, October 11, 2017 • 8:00 P.M. ENSEMBLE 20+ Michael Lewanski, conductor DePaul Concert Hall 800 West Belden Avenue • Chicago Wednesday, October 11, 2017 • 8:00 P.M. DePaul Concert Hall ENSEMBLE 20+ Michael Lewanski, conductor Lis Pearse, narrator PROGRAM Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) Composition No. 3: Benedictus, qui venit (1975) Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) Symphony No. 5, Amen (1990) Lis Pearse, narrator Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931) Quattro (1971) Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) Io for ensemble and live electronics (1987) ENSEMBLE 20+ • OCTOBER 11, 2017 PROGRAM NOTES Galina Ustvolskaya Composition No. 3: Benedictus, qui venit Duration: 10 Minutes Composition No. 3, Benedictus, qui venit, is the third piece in Ustvolskaya’s 1970s series of Compositions. Composed in 1974-75, the “Benedictus” maintains the highly unusual instrumentation of her other Compositions, this time offsetting groups of flutes and bassoons with less polyphonic interplay than in the “Dona Nobis Pacem.” As in Composition No. 1, the words to the subtitle “Benedictus, qui venit’ have been borrowed from one of the most sacred moments of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox services. According to her second husband, Konstantin Bagrenin, Ustvolskaya considered a church or a temple to be the ideal space for performing of her music. When the representatives of the Hamburg State Opera Ballet visited her home to ask for permission to use her Compositions in a ballet, Ustvolskaya refused their proposal. Her choice reveals an unbending character and a commitment to a traditional understanding of sacred music. Yet in Ustvolskaya’s Composition No. 3, the monolithic idée fixe calls to mind the organization of military units preparing for war. Passed between choirs of bassoons and flutes, the four quarter-note idée fixe penetrates every moment of this piece. Whereas the tone clusters played by the instrument choirs may alter, Ustvolskaya’s monochromatic rhythm marches onward punctuated at times by the piano’s arrhythmic punch. — Emily Erken ENSEMBLE 20+ • OCTOBER 11, 2017 PROGRAM NOTES Galina Ustvolskaya Symphony No. 5, Amen Duration: 10 Minutes At one point in her Fifth Symphony, Galina Ustvolskaya instructs the violin to play its phrase like “a voice from under the ground.” Wondering what she might hear beneath the soil, one would do well to remember that Ustvolskaya had spent her entire life in that three-named city of Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg, and hence endured Russia’s “terrible years,” in which invasion and purges saw millions of citizens disappear in unspeakable ways. One might think of Ustvolskaya’s five symphonies in the way that Shostakovich allegedly thought of his fifteen: as “tombstones.” Hers are, however, almost the inversion of Shostakovich’s: all single movements, all relatively short, only the first for a typical orchestral ensemble—another kind of “Leningrad Symphony” (as Shostakovich’s Seventh was famously known), all performing in their own recalcitrant way the same tortured work of remembering and giving voice to indescribable catastrophe. The reciter of the Fifth Symphony (in the form of a single wooden cube)— declaims the Lord’s Prayer, a task for which she is instructed to dress as if in mourning— “in all black,” and without jewelry. Likewise, she is to speak “with inner emotion.” The image of a eulogy comes to mind, its speaker steeling herself more out of duty than distance. So Ustvolskaya’s Fifth Symphony is, like her Fourth, brazenly antisymphonic. It has no complex network of developing themes, but rather only four or so distinct musical “blocks,” stamped, as if by machine, out of the hardest material. Plangent, angular, and not quite polytonal, these ruminative blocks present themselves with hypnotic inevitability, remaining utterly discrete— simply giving way to the next. An immensely preparatory atmosphere descends. Only when the flesh is reduced to absolute zero, Ustvolskaya seems to say, when all fades into darkness, can the spirit begin to grieve. The grayness is a fusion of violent hues, awaiting imminent release. —Seth Brodsky ENSEMBLE 20+ • OCTOBER 11, 2017 PROGRAM NOTES TEXT Otche nash! Sushchii na nebesakh! Our father who art in heaven! Da sviatitsya imya Tvoe; Hallowed be thy name. Da priidet Tsarstvie Tvoe! Thy kingdom come Da budet volya Tvoya I na zemle, kak i na Thy will be done on earth as it is in nebe. heaven. Otche Nash! Our Father! Otche! Otche! Otche nash! Father! Father! Our Father! Kleb nash nasushchnyi Give us this day our daily bread. Dam nam na sej den’. And forgive us our trespasses, Prosti nam dolgi nashi, And forgive us our trespasses, Prosti nam dolgi nashi. And forgive us our trespasses, Prosti nam dolgi nashi, As we forgive them that trespasses Kak I my proshchaem dolshnakam against us. nashim. Our father! Otche nash! Otche! Otche! Father! Father! Our father! Otche nash! And lead us not into temptation, Ne vvedi nas v iskushenye, But deliver us from evil. No izbavi nas ot lukavogo, And lead us not into temptation, Ne vvedi nas v iskushenie, But deliver us from evil. No isbavi nas ot lukavogo. Our father! Otche Nash! Father! Father! Our father! Otche! Otche! Otche nash! For thine is the kingdom, Tvie est’ Tsarstvo I sila I slava voveki! The power and the glory, Amin’. Forever and ever! Amen! ENSEMBLE 20+ • OCTOBER 11, 2017 PROGRAM NOTES A note on performing Ustvolskaya’ music from an interview by Nomi Epstein with Reinbert de Leeuw, the Dutch pianist/conductor who championed Ustvolskaya’s music in the West: If there was one word which would describe her music it would be ‘espressivissimo.’ (as expressive as possible.) A performer of Ustvolskaya’s music must be totally loyal to what she has written in the score. Sometimes it is very, very, very hard to play exactly as written. You must observe all dynamic markings, even the ones that are loud, very loud. To play this music, you need a lot of power. It is very intense. Ustvolskaya said that her music had nothing to do with any other music. Under Stalin, she was, of course, very isolated, and she went on with her work with this isolation, on her own path. She never talked about other composers, not even Shostakovich, who was a great admirer of her music. She didn’t want to be compared with others: Her music was outside of musical history. She did not she speak about her own music. This isolation was part of her aesthetic- Radicalism and isolationist to a fault. She believed her music should speak for itself. ‘My music has nothing to do with anything/anyone else.’ It’s difficult for us to imagine the time and circumstances within which she lived. But these circumstances, and her own reality seeps very deeply into her music. Her language is so personal to her experience, and it is far from everything around her. She was very critical of performances of her music and was very rarely happy with them. To this she believed that performances should never be compromised. All performances should carry this message: UNCOMPROMISING. Her music should always be played with the utmost intensity. Performances must emphasize her very radical language. She writes for a constant intensity. Every note is urgent. Performers must emphasize this urgency. Sofia Gubaidulina Quattro Duration: 12 Minutes Writes Stuart Jeffries: One day in 1973, Sofia Gubaidulina was attacked in the lift of her Moscow apartment building. The man started to strangle her. The composer thought grimly that this was the end and, if so, her chief regret was that she would never complete the bassoon concerto on which she’d been ENSEMBLE 20+ • OCTOBER 11, 2017 PROGRAM NOTES working. “I’m not afraid of death but of violence,” she told her biographer later. She got exasperated with her attacker. “Why so slow?” she asked. Amazingly, the words scared him off. Gubaidulina writes music that has nothing to lose. A deeply religious person in a society (the Soviet Union) that was officially atheistic, a woman in a “man’s profession,” an artist who went mostly unperformed in her time, she felt, quite simply, that she could write what she wanted. She took, apparently, the advice given to her by Dmitri Shostakovich, who said, when she played for him the symphony she had written for her final composition exam: “My wish for you is that you should continue on your own incorrect path.” (“Incorrect,” it should be noted, was a dangerous euphemism in official Soviet discourse.) Quattro (simply, “four”), written two years before her near-death encounter, displays precisely the sort of musical courage one would expect from such a person. It is is a series of musical conversations: a trombone duet, an angry quartet, a trumpet duet, a section of four soloists, a trombone cadenza, an alleatoric fragment, an inconclusive finish. Dialogues, soliloquies, outbursts, mania, disappointment appear in the pitch material, but are also acted out by the players. It is highly personal music by a person who had good reason to think it might never get played; let us feel lucky that what we suppose her suspicion to have been has been proven incorrect. Io was composed for the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. It would seem to be located at something of a boundary-point in the composer’s development: Io is a synthesis of earlier experiences, above all Lichtbogen and Jardin Secret II, and at the same time it points the way forward. The greatest difference between this and many of Saariaho’s earlier compositions lies in Io’s complexity. Linear processes are no longer necessarily laid out only in sequence, but also in parallel. The simultaneous strata are built up as it were of transparencies placed one on top of the other, ultimately forming a new coherent figure.
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