Live recording ROBIN DE RAAFF Melodies Unheard Radio Kamer Filharmonie | Orchestre de Picardie Het Gelders Orkest Doelen Ensemble | Raschèr Saxophone Quartet Emilio Pomárico | Arie van Beek | Antonello Manacorda Sophia Burgos soprano 1 ROBIN DE RAAFF Melodies Unheard Radio Kamer Filharmonie | Orchestre de Picardie Het Gelders Orkest Doelen Ensemble | Raschèr Saxophone Quartet Emilio Pomárico | Arie van Beek | Antonello Manacorda Sophia Burgos soprano ROBIN DE RAAFF (b. 1968) Consonance as a metaphor for community Symphony No. 2 “Two worlds colliding” for saxophone quartet What brings a composer to write a symphony in the twenty-first century? and orchestra And what meaning does a symphony have in this day and age? The Dutch [1] Movement I 7:45 composer Robin de Raaff has four symphonies to his name, and the end is [2] Movement II 8:15 not yet in sight, he says. Will De Raaff follow in the footsteps of tradition, [3] Transition-Movement III 7:31 or will he give the name, the form, a new meaning, a new direction? Symphony No. 1 “Tanglewood Tales” for large orchestra In ancient Greece, symphony simply meant ‘consonance’. In that sense, [4] Movement I (Untangled Tales) 8:03 everything that sounds together is a ‘symphony’. Not until the time of Haydn [5] Movement II (Entangled Tales) 9:01 and Mozart did the symphony become exclusively linked to a musical form [6] Coda 3:38 performed, at the very least, by a chamber orchestra. From this point of view, the symphony wrote illustrious history and became a form with deep roots in Symphony No. 4 “Melodies unheard” a symphony of songs the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So it is logical that in the twentieth for soprano (or mezzo) and orchestra on poems by Emily Dickinson century, a time when people sought new ways to move musical history forward, [7] I. How Still the Bells 6:41 they viewed the concept of a symphony with some reserve. And after World [8] II. Orchestral Interlude 4:47 War II, which left a gaping breach with the past, in the spirit of renewal and [9] III. Softened By Time’s Consummate Plush 3:48 reconstruction, the symphony was put overboard. Only a few lone souls, such [10] IV. The Farthest Thunder 4:42 as Shostakovich and Hartmann, persisted in writing symphonies, but the [11] V. The Nearest Dream Recedes, Unrealized 3:46 majority turned their backs on it, even while composers such as Anton Webern [12] VI. The Soul Selects Her Own Society 2:23 and Igor Stravinsky revealed in different ways that the symphony could have [13] VII. Musicians Wrestle Everywhere 6:52 a new meaning in the twentieth century. total time 77:20 It would take until the end of the twentieth century for this idea to be All works are live recordings taken seriously. For booklet with libretto, go to www.challengerecords.com/booklets/cc72762 4 5 Robin de Raaff was one such composer whose intriguing growth process Working from there, this led not only to a reinterpretation of the symphonic ultimately drove him towards the symphony. But anyone who is even slightly form, but also to the reinterpretation of a number of compositions. familiar with De Raaff’s work will not be surprised that his symphonies have little to do with the classical concept. Of course his love for composing was De Raaff’s Second and Fourth symphonies are the result of a reinterpretation of partly derived from the symphonies of composers such as Brahms, Mahler, works for a soloist or soloist group with accompaniment. It is a revision of the Shostakovich, Prokofiev and even Bernstein, but De Raaff was too much of a material reminiscent of the way in which Pierre Boulez – not accidently, one of constructivist to write a symphony in the classical sense of the word. He wrote his great examples – let Incises for piano grow into Sur incises for ensemble and pure music, notes that were guided by sequences, formulas, algorithms and how Luciano Berio recomposed a number of his Sequenzas into Chemins. whatnot to keep the composer’s intuitive mind clearly focused. The First Symphony, just like the Third, was conceived as an orchestral work Little by little, that noble orchestral work with its several movements found its from the outset. It started in 2007 with Entangled Tales, a commission for the way to his sound palette. At the same time, De Raaff became more and more Boston Symphony Orchestra and a work with which De Raaff underscored his convinced there was something to be gained in the concertante form, the ties with the Tanglewood Music Center, where he worked in 2000 as Senior orchestra and the soloist, the individual and the crowd. ‘The interesting thing Composition Fellow and where he regularly returns. for me is that, from the soloist’s point of view, you work from the inside out, and from the orchestral point of view, from the outside in’, De Raaff once said. Entangled Tales is an entirely personal impression from the moment the ‘The drama, the story arises from the point where they meet on that continuum.’ gates to the site are opened for the annual festival and the visitors, filled with expectation, storm the hillsides. 0{>Four years later he wrote Untangled Tales, Moreover, starting from that idea, it was no longer such a big step to large an impression of the empty festival site with the musicians here and there, orchestral groups, on their own or together with a soloist, in concert together. practising in cabins. These bits and pieces of music that emerge from the Because their sounding forth together is key in understanding De Raaff’s orchestral background play an important role in Entangled Tales. And so symphonies. He shies away from prescribed forms and developments, a De Raaff combined the two parts and added a coda, christening the work recapitulated theme followed by various movements with different characters. his First Symphony. ‘Both parts need each other, they bring one another in The symphony, the orchestral apparatus sounding together, telling its story balance,’ he has said about the logic of his First Symphony. Because even if for a period of at least 20 minutes, is what he took as his starting point. De Raaff brings previous works together, or ‘adapts’ them as he did in his 6 7 Fourth Symphony and other work, they must exhibit an understandable logic, This is in fact also the theme of his Fourth Symphony, which arose from his Emily they must tell a story. Dickinson Songs for mezzo-soprano and piano which he wrote in 2006. In all their hermetic and associative verse, Dickinson’s six poems always have daily In his Second Symphony, which started out in 2010 as a Concert for saxophone life, social circumstances and inner observations as their subject. They alternate quartet and orchestra, and in which he ultimately only adapted the introduction, between forms of self-chosen loneliness as in The Soul selects her own Society the story is almost an opera in itself. Since his opera Raaff (2004) De Raaff has or joy about the ‘harmony of spheres’ surrounding everyone who is open to composed more intuitively, and he treats the solo instruments in particular as them, as in the most recent song written specially for the International Vocal characters in his concerts. As he does in the Second Symphony. In the subtitle Competition, Musicians Wrestle Everywhere. Two worlds colliding, De Raaff presents the theme. The colliding worlds are heard not only in the conversation between the quartet and the orchestra, As if paying homage to Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, consisting but also between the individual and the group, the crowd. The solo saxophones of eleven songs for soprano, bass, string orchestra, percussion and celesta, pop up as a shadow of the orchestral instruments and then, freeing themselves, De Raaff combines the six songs in his Fourth Symphony, linking them with they form a cooperative block acting as one huge super saxophone, or else instrumental interludes and increasing the momentum, so that the whole is they are drowned out, becoming part of the orchestral mass. The strength not only an almost Boulezian explosion of original compositions, but also of the cooperating individuals looks ready to win out, but appearances are a more or less coherent story in which loneliness and ecstasy struggle for deceptive. In the end, the two worlds crash into each other and become a precedence in a beautiful cadence. single whole, forcefully or by chance, as if a cosmic spectrum has given birth to a unity. If only because this theme is inexhaustible, the end of the series of symphonies would seem to be not yet in sight. As soon as De Raaff sees an opportunity to And that is remarkable in De Raaff’s oeuvre. Although as a composer he must convert a work for a modest chamber music setting or a composition for a solo be completely solitary to create his work, in essence, his compositions are instrument versus the crowd into a concordance of a multitude of instruments, always about musical constellations that have a social counterpart in society. and can tell a story that has an equivalent in society, he will unleash his In that sense the word symphony, sounding together, is always related to powerfully structured fantasy on them. Seen in that light, the fact that he cooperation and empathy in De Raaff’s work. seems well on his way toward becoming perhaps the most important Dutch 8 9 symphonist of the twenty-first century is merely secondary. De Raaff follows his own path and writes his compositions on the basis of social commitment and inner need.