The Arditti String Quartet Irvine Arditti and David Alberman, Violinists Garth Knox, Violist Rohan De Saram, Cellist with Ursula Oppens, Pianist
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UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY The Arditti String Quartet Irvine Arditti and David Alberman, Violinists Garth Knox, Violist Rohan de Saram, Cellist with Ursula Oppens, Pianist Saturday Evening, November 21, 1992, at 8:00 Rackham Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan PROGRAM One Atmosphere (for Ursula) for piano quintet .......Julius Hemphill Kottos for solo cello.................................................lannis Xenakis String Trio for violin, viola, and cello ................ Sofia Gubaidulina INTERMISSION Duo for Violin and Piano ..........................................Elliott Carter Officium Breve, Op. 28, for string quartet ................Gyorgy Kurtag In Memoriam Andrae Szervansky 1. Largo 2. Piu Andante 3. Sostenuto, quasi justo 4. Grave, molto sostenuto; quasi doppio piu lento-calando al fine 5. Presto 6. Molto agitato (canon a 4) 7. Sehr Fliessend (canon a 4); free, after last movement of Webern's 2nd Cantata, Op. 31 8. Lento 9. Lento 10. Sehr Fliessend 11. Sostenuto 12. Sostenuto, quasi justo 13. Sostenuto, con slacio 14. Disperato, vivo 15. Larghetto Last Spring for piano quintet ................................ Bun Ching Lam The Arditti String Quartet is represented by Latitude 45, Montreal. Ursula Oppens is represented by Colbert Artists Management Inc., New York. The Arditti String Quartet records for Disques Montaigne. FIFTEENTH CONCERT OF THE 1 14TH SEASON 3OTH ANNUAL CHAMBER ARTS SERIES PROGRAM NOTES One Atmosphere (for Ursula) (1992) Kottos for solo cello (1977) Julius Hemphill (b. 1938) lannis Xenakis (b. 1922) Julius Hemphill split his attention Born in Romania of Greek parents, between music and sports while growing up in Xenakis was studying engineering in Greece when the fertile musical environment of Fort Worth, he joined the Greek resistance against the Nazis in Texas. He picked up experience playing in blues 1941. His involvement in armed conflict in 1945 bands and jazz groups and began focusing on his left him blind in one eye. Two years later he musical career in earnest after moving to St. settled in Paris and became a French citizen. In Louis in 1966, following a stint in the Army. Paris he began composing in earnest under the Two years later, he played an integral role in inspiration of Olivier Messiaen. He continued to developing the Black Artists Group, an pursue an interest in engineering, and after interdisciplinary collective that also included meeting Le Corbusier, he worked in close future World Saxophone Quartet members collaboration with the famous architect. His twin Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett. pursuits of composition and architecture have led He moved to New York in 1973, and in him to devise a highly complex musical theory 1976, as a founding member and principal founded on abstract, mathematical principles as composer/arranger for the World Saxophone well as an institute dedicated to further research in Quartet (also including David Murray, Oliver music theory. Lake and Hamiet Bluiett), Hemphill continued His startling early works, such as Metastasis his dance on the edge of free jazz. Hemphill's (1954) and Pithoprafeta (1956), display his performances with the WSQ can be heard on penchant for shifting masses of sound "a World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington and brilliantly iridescent web of glissandos moving at Dances and Ballads (Elektra/Nonesuch) and different speeds," in the words of Michel Rhythm & Blues (Elektra/Musician). Philippot. Those works, and Kottos as well, show A prodigious composer who writes Xenakis's penchant for giving his works Greek stunning, shimmering sonorities, he is as titles, suggesting his link to ancient Greek comfortable writing for full orchestra as he is for concepts. his Big Band, and he is frequently sought after Xenakis writes: by librettists, writers, and choreographers for Kottos was written as the required piece for collaboration. One commission destined for the International Violincello Competition, which international exposure is The Last Supper at Uncle was held during the International Meeting of Tom's Cabin: The Promised Land, for the Contemporary Art (Recontres Internationales d'Art choreographer Bill T. Jones and featuring the Contemporain) at La Rochelle, France, in 1977. Julius Hemphill Sextet. Another dance Kottos is a quite difficult work, but a work collaboration, Long Tongues: A Saxophone Opera which has shown that the level of young received its world premiere in Washington, D.C. violincellists today is perfectly capable of in 1989. mastering the necessary technique and of Hemphill's new work, One Atmosphere (for expressing the musicality. Ursula), was commissioned by the Composers' "Kottos" is the name of one of the hundred- Forum with funds provided by the New York armed Giants that Zeus fought and defeated: State Council on the Arts. allusion to the fury and the virtuosity necessary to the performance of this piece. String Trio for violin, viola, and cello reflections of the trees in the water, and the (1988) rippled light cast upward on the boughs, and he Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931) makes of it all a single 'picture.'. This sense of response to the natural world and to natural, The daughter of a Tartar Muslim simple truths, and of honest awe in what occurs father and a Russian Jewish mother with Roman 'merely in living as and where we live,' give to Catholic ancestors, Sofia Gubaidulina once Carter's music its strength. I cannot understand claimed that "I am the place where East and West those who hear in it mere calculation and needless meet." difficulty." In a 1988 interview, Gubaidulina recalled a Born in New York City, Elliott Carter studied day in her youth when she walked into a field and composition at Harvard as an extracurricular prayed, "Lord, make me a composer and I will activity. He was taught harmony and counterpoint endure whatever you want me to suffer." Her by Walter Piston, choral composition by A. T. prayer was answered. After earning a degree in Davison and, for a short while, composition by piano at Kazan Conservatory, she began studying Gustav Hoist, a visiting professor at Harvard. He composition at the Moscow Conservatory, where subsequently spent three years in Paris studying she graduated in 1959. In recent years her music with Nadia Boulanger. Carter spent several has enjoyed wider recognition, thanks to the summers in Europe where he came under the break-up of the Soviet Union and several visits to influence of Schoenberg, Berg, Webem, and the United States. Her catalog now includes several Scriabin. dozen works. He has received many honors and awards, On her String Trio, Gubaidulina writes: including Pulitzer Prizes for both the Second and This work, in three pans, is principally Third String Quartets, the Prix de Rome, and the concerned with the relationships between the Sibelius Medal for music. three instruments, which represent three Carter writes: characters who reveal their individual wills. The The Duo for Violin and Piano derives its tripartite division of the piece serves to illustrate character and expression from the contrast three different relationships between them. In the between its two very dissimilar instruments the first part all three act "in concert." In the second, bow-stroked violin and the key-struck piano. The the violin and cello function as a duo, while the mercurial violin music, at times intense and viola, has contrasting material. The third part, dramatic, at other light and fanciful, constantly which is a kind of coda, sees all three acting on changes its pace and tone of expression; the piano their own, each with different materials, plays long stretches of music of consistent (translated by Jessy Kaner) character and is much more regular both in rhythm and in style. The piano makes extensive use of the pedal to mask one sonority with another Duo for Violin and Piano (1973-74) and then gradually to uncover the second as in Elliott Carter (b. 1908) the very first measures. In fact, the long opening .Andrew Porter, commenting on section for the piano forms a quiet, almost icy New York music in the London Financial Times, background to the varied and dramatic violin, has written: "Although Carter's scores look so which seems to fight passionately against the formidably cerebral, the analogues that drift piano. After this beginning, the music is joined through my mind afterwards when I try to seamlessly until the end. describe their effect come from the natural world. In the course of the work, the violin focuses . After the Duo, the image rose of a flowing river on one aspect of its part after another and often and the wind-stirred forest on its bank. They do on two or more aspects at a time playing in a not share or exchange identities, but the beholder rubato, rhythmically irregular style, while the perceives both at once, and also the broken piano constantly plays regular beats, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Toward the end, while the German Radio in Cologne. It was premiered in violin is involved in a very fast impassioned music, 1989 at the Witten Festival by the Auryn Quartet. the piano becomes more and more detached, Officium Breve typifies the brevity, eclecticism, playing a series of regular rhythmic patterns, each and autobiographical nature of Kurtag's music. The successfully slower than the previous one. As the piece is made up of 15 concise movements, and piano reaches a point of extreme slowness, the the whole work lasts less than 15 minutes. Kurtag violin is heard increasingly alone, isolating for a is an exquisite miniaturist in a way that owes much few measures at a time the various elements of its to the terse style of Webern. part, with the quiet and more lyrical aspects given Inspired by similar attempts by Szervansky, more prominence than previously. Kurtag is also eclectic in the way he has tried to The general form is quite different from that synthesize twelve-tone music with Hungarian of the music I wrote up to 1950.