PROGRAM NOTES Giya Kancheli – . . . À La Duduki

PROGRAM NOTES Giya Kancheli – . à la Duduki Giya Kancheli Born August 10, 1935, Tbilisi, Georgia, Russia. Currently resides in Antwerp, Belgium. à la Duduki Giya Kancheli left his native Georgia in 1991, and since then, as the political situation in Russia has become more complicated, he finds that his music has grown sadder and more tragic. He first moved to Berlin, expecting to stay only a year, but, with the new regime in Russia, he decided to remain there and make it his home. Then, in 1995, when he was appointed composer-in-residence of the Antwerp Orchestra, he settled in Belgium. Kancheli is recognized as one of the most important Russian artists since Shostakovich, a composer he greatly admires. In 1995, he told Gramophone, "I think the genius of Shostakovich is that from his tragedy he has made something that is so close to people in other countries—other continents even. It all depends on the artist. There are composers who have a lot of sadness, tragic lives maybe, but it doesn't touch many people." In that sense, Kancheli is Shostakovich's heir. In the last few years, his own stark, darkly spiritual, and often bleak music has suddenly found a large and devoted audience with a recorded-music buying public in this country that knows little of his life and the struggles of the Georgian people. Kancheli was born in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital and principal city; he studied and later taught at the conservatory there. For two decades, he also served as music director of the influential Rustaveli Theater. In the enforced cultural isolation of his homeland, he began to create his own distinctive and powerful compositional style in a small output written deliberately over many years. His major works include seven symphonies (usually very slow and often in just one movement), composed between 1967 and 1985, and the opera Music for the Living (1984), set in a world devastated by war and sung in English, Latin, Georgian, and ancient Sumerian. But Kancheli's musical personality isn't entirely solemn—in a 2003 interview with Gerard McBurney, creative director of the CSO's Beyond the Score, he said, "My love affair with music started not with Bach and Schubert, but with Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington . I fell inadvertently and forever in love with jazz." Kancheli's first dream, in fact, was to have his own big band. "My life unfolded differently. But my love of jazz remained forever." Kancheli's music was rarely heard in the United States, particularly during the "cultural freeze" of the 1980s. The breakthrough came in 1992, with the release in this country of a recording of his Vom Winde beweint (Mourned by the wind) for viola and orchestra. Since then, he has been embraced by a musical public that has become fed up with the esotericism of some contemporary music and was attracted first by the Zen-like calm, tonality, and spirituality of his music, and later by its unexpected power and depth. Like the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and his Polish colleague Henryk Górecki (two Eastern European mystical minimalists who have attracted cult followings), Kancheli now finds himself in great demand; he must work more quickly than before, and discovers that, even so, he cannot fill all his commissions. In recent years, Kancheli has turned away from writing symphonies. His latest compositions include works for various combinations of voices and instruments that he calls prayers—including Life without Christmas (a cycle of four pieces)— and Exile, a setting of texts by two Jewish poets, Paul Celan and Hans Sahl, who devoted their lives to exploring the meaning of exile, detailing its pain and unrest in ways that Kancheli understands only too well. Kancheli's music is sometimes unfairly linked with that of the minimalists because of its spartan textures, deliberate pace, and unashamed tonality. But as Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin wrote, "[Kancheli is] an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist—a restrained Vesuvius." Despite the austerity of his language and the slow tempos he favors, Kancheli's music is emotionally complicated and sometimes highly volatile. His materials are intentionally plain— often a single chord or phrase achieves great power within its context, like a sentence in a Raymond Carver short story, or a pencil line in an Agnes Martin painting. He combines instruments in unusual ways, but with the skill of a master colorist; sonority is a highly expressive device in this music. Sometimes Kancheli's titles also suggest deeper meaning—his Abii ne viderem (I turned away so as not to see) recalls in part his feelings about the situation in Georgia. But the minimalist tag will not go away, particularly since, with each work, Kancheli seems to need fewer notes to say what he wants—or, rather, he allows every phrase or gesture to carry greater expressive weight. "From piece to piece," he once said, "my language becomes simpler, and I can't do anything about it." Kancheli's scores derive much of their power from the dramatic contrast of force and tranquility—music of a measured gravity shot through with lightning flashes of great ferocity. The music covers enormous, emotionally varied terrain, like a flight over a vast landscape. As the late Russian composer Alfred Schnittke pointed out, "within a comparatively short span of time . we are able to live through a whole life or perceive a complete history." Because Kancheli's music exists only at the extremes of expression—tenderness and fragility on one hand, and furious explosion on the other—his works avoid a sense of musical "normalcy." They are the inevitable, ultimate reflection of the rootless existence of the exile, for whom the conventional image of an ordinary life is a heartbreaking fiction. Kancheli's 1995 work, . à la Duduki, takes its name from that of a wailing reed instrument from the Caucasus, and its very opening, with piercing arabesques from the woodwinds, suggests the ancient sounds Kancheli had in mind. More direct inspiration came from Karlen Avetisian, a trumpeter whose improvisatory style fascinated the composer. The work progresses as an exploration of sonorities, with subtle interplay between a brass quintet—the sounds of Kancheli's dream big band transformed—and full orchestra, including Kancheli's signature piano. The pacing and language are pure Kancheli: pages scarcely darkened by notes give way to massive climaxes; a passage marked ppp suddenly turns ffff. The duduki becomes a more specific reference near the end, when elaborate lines, particularly from the trumpets and horn, colored by tremolo and glissando, as well as free intonation and phrasing, are meant to recall the improvising character of the ancient instrument. Extremely quiet music, often hovering at the edge of silence, as well as silence itself, is an essential part of Kancheli's palette. "Silence can be of many kinds," Kancheli said. There's formal silence, there's intellectual silence, and there's silence that's accompanied by some sort of "letting go," some kind of attention, expectation. I strive toward this last kind of silence. I have a desire to turn that silence into music, so that it sounds in music, but at the time is perceived as silence. Vast pauses divide orchestral outbursts and halting phrases in the final pages of . à la Duduki. They are not mere breaks, but "inaudible" parts of the composition, as important as the sounds they separate—moments when silence becomes music—and the score asks that they are "not shorter than 7-8 seconds." Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. © by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reproduced; brief excerpts may be quoted if due acknowledgment is given to the author and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs and artists subject to change without notice. .

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