Jeffrey Milarsky, Music Director and Conductor Hanlin Chen, Clarinet Lisa Sung, Viola Libby Sokolowski, Soprano Kyle Miller, Baritone
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Friday Evening, November 1, 2019, at 7:30 The Juilliard School presents AXIOM Jeffrey Milarsky, Music Director and Conductor Hanlin Chen, Clarinet Lisa Sung, Viola Libby Sokolowski, Soprano Kyle Miller, Baritone IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882–1971) Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (1918) Sempre piano e molto tranquillo: quarter (crotchet) = 52 Quarter (crotchet) = 168 Quarter (crotchet) = 160 HANLIN CHEN, Clarinet STRAVINSKY Three Japanese Lyrics (1912–13) Akahito Mazatsumi Tsaraïuki LIBBY SOKOLOWSKI, Soprano TORU TAKEMITSU (1930–96) Archipelago S. (1994) Intermission STRAVINSKY Élégie for Solo Viola (1944) LISA SUNG, Viola STRAVINSKY Pribaoutki (1914) Kornílo (Uncle Armand) Natashka (The Oven) Polkovnik (The Colonel) Starets i zayats (The Old Man and the Hare) KYLE MILLER, Baritone HARRISON BIRTWISTLE (b. 1934) Silbury Air (1977) Performance time: approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes, including an intermission The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. Information regarding gifts to the school may be obtained from the Juilliard School Development Office, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6588; (212) 799-5000, ext. 278 (juilliard.edu/giving). Alice Tully Hall Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. Notes on the Program a single melody instrument. No mere scraps by Matthew Mendez from the workbench, today they are corner- stones of the clarinet literature. Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet IGOR STRAVINSKY Towards the end of his Swiss years, Born: June 17, 1882, Lomonosov, Russia Stravinsky began taking cues from the Died: April 6, 1971, New York City sounds of ragtime and early jazz, which became all the rage in Europe’s capitals In the early 1960s, Venezuelan left-wing in- after the Armistice. There has long been surgents hatched a plot to kidnap a major speculation that the Three Pieces were public figure in hopes that the ensuing prompted by an encounter with the playing media coverage would draw international of the legendary clarinetist-saxophonist attention to their cause. Though they ended Sidney Bechet. Although Richard Taruskin, up abducting a soccer star, their original the leading English-language Stravinsky choice was a rather more unlikely figure— expert, has discounted this hypothesis, Igor Stravinsky, then on tour in Caracas. That what is clear is that the Three Pieces are a the rebels even considered Stravinsky a suit- characteristic refraction of what their com- able target speaks volumes about his cultural poser took to be more or less authentic standing then. A man who helped change African-American sources. Hence it may the course of concert music multiple times be possible to hear the first piece, as reed- during a long career that took him from tsa- ist Kenneth Radnofsky does, as a blues-in- rist St. Petersburg and roaring-’20s Paris to spired call-and-response, between the the Los Angeles of Hollywood’s Golden Age, clarinet’s matte low register and its higher Stravinsky was virtually synonymous in the throat register. By contrast, the whirligig public imagination with “modern composer.” second piece is a slice of what Taruskin And for good reason: Perhaps no single fig- calls “instrumental prosody,” featuring the ure after 1900 had a more enduring impact sorts of flexible, irregular rhythms preva- on the subsequent course of new music. To lent in Stravinsky’s Swiss-period works. As be sure, Stravinsky was also a mythomaniac for the concluding piece, for the brighter self-publicizer, given to inflating his achieve- B-flat clarinet, it orbits continuously ments, but his continuing influence remains around a handful of tiny melodic cells, undisputable, even pervading the sound of splitting the difference between the riff- some of today’s popular music. based forms of early jazz and the “mod- ular” rhythmic techniques Stravinsky first Conceived during the closing days of the developed in his pre-1914 scores. First World War, the Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet were composed in Switzerland, Three Japanese Lyrics where Stravinsky lived in exile until 1920 STRAVINSKY (due first to the European conflict, then the Bolshevik Revolution). They were a token “An interesting experiment, but one that of gratitude for the financial support of the violated every canon of Russian taste,” great music patron and amateur clarinetist writes Taruskin of the domestic response Werner Reinhart, without which Stravinsky to Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics, likely would not have composed his land- composed in late 1912 and 1913 as work mark L’Histoire du soldat. Brief as they are, on The Rite of Spring was winding down. the Three Pieces see Stravinsky exploring Nor, for that matter, have these com- new concepts with all his usual conscien- pact songs for voice and small chamber tiousness, under the constraint of writing for ensemble failed to arouse their share of perplexity abroad, with Western commenta- Also reflectingjaponiste attitudes was the tors long wondering at their perceived lack of decision to title each song after the author “Russianness.” Yet such a narrow view of of its respective poem—something hard the ways “Russianness” can be expressed to imagine Stravinsky doing with Russo- musically overlooks the historical back- European writers. (Adding insult to injury, drop against which Stravinsky composed Stravinsky misspelled two of the poets’ them—a time when the memory of Imperial names.) Setting an eighth-century waka by Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo- the traveling court poet Yamabe no Akahito, Japanese War of 1904-5 was still fresh. the tantalizingly brief, incantatory “Akahito” is cut from the same cloth as the Rite’s Stravinsky’s Lyrics have typically been more placid passages. On the other hand, imputed to the lingering influence of turn- “Masatzumi” (the correct spelling is of-the-century French japonisme, with its “Masazumi”) begins with a substantial vogue for all things Japanese (real or imag- instrumental introduction, its darting ges- ined). Later on, Stravinsky highlighted the tures inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s stimulus of his Parisian composer friends, Pierrot lunaire, which Stravinsky heard Maurice Ravel and Maurice Delage, al- soon after its premiere. Finally, “Tsaraïu- though it would be a mistake to assume ki” uses a text by the tenth-century writer Stravinsky simply borrowed from the “Ori- Ki no Tsurayuki, to sparer effect than its sib- entalist” tropes of French Impressionism. lings, with less “instrumental jewelry,” to The arts in Russia had their own longstand- borrow Stravinsky’s felicitous phrase. ing traditions of japonisme, which retained their fascination during, and even after, the Archipelago S. Russo-Japanese conflict. Stravinsky would TORU TAKEMITSU have been well aware of these currents via Born: October 8, 1930, Tokyo his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov—though the Died: February 20, 1996, Tokyo pupil’s brand of Russianist japonisme was a far cry from that of the mentor. “My music is composed as if fragments were thrown together unstructured, as in dreams,” A setting of Russian translations of three Toru Takemitsu once explained. “You go to classical waka, long Japan’s most presti- a far place and suddenly find yourself back gious poetic genre, the Lyrics followed a home without having noticed the return.” highly premeditated compositional con- These lines, so typical of their author’s poetic ceit. Unusually, Stravinsky set his texts— sensibility, say much about Japan’s most all treating the coming of spring—in such successful compositional export in the post- a way that their metrical stresses would war years. For one, they describe the gently not correspond with the music’s rhythmic episodic, stream-of-consciousness manner stresses. The idea was that the two would so often favored by the prolific Takemitsu. cancel each other out, thereby emulating In this, the resolutely nondevelopmental what Stravinsky called “the unique linear scores of Claude Debussy were an early perspective of Japanese declamation.” and enduring stimulus—although there was Though the conceit very much rested on a always something uniquely ironic about this caricature of spoken Japanese, subsequent fact. After all, Debussy had been a product Stravinsky works would cultivate similar of japonisme, and his formal approach bor- “estrangements” of Russian prosody, rowed from Japanese expressive princi- until it became his default way of setting ples, as they were then understood in the all languages. West. Yet Takemitsu long refused to engage with the “real thing,” the rich traditions of authentic Japanese classical music: for him, on from the 1960s international avant-garde: they evoked memories of the country’s instrumental spatialization and nontraditional wartime past, when they were used as na- seating arrangements. The 21 players of tionalist propaganda. Indeed, Takemitsu’s Archipelago S. are therefore divided into five breakthrough work, 1957’s Requiem for entities—two heterogeneous onstage sep- Strings—made famous through Stravinsky’s tets flanking a central brass quintet, and in the intercession—is arguably “Western” back of the hall, a pair of offstage clarinets. through and through. But in a complex loop In this way, Takemitsu fashions instrumental of exchange typical of cultural diffusion islands that indeed “call out to each other,” in a globalizing century, it was ultimately with the concert space, its ambience, and via Western models just like Debussy’s— even the audience members its “watery” themselves projections of European fanta- medium. The islands’ calls take various sies about Japan—that Takemitsu came to guises, from hushed brass musings and a kind of rapprochement with the native tra- lonely woodwind echoes, to the occasional ditions he once rejected, thus “finding him- passionate lapping of full ensemble sound. self back home without having noticed the Resonating throughout, though, is a descend- return,” in a different sense. ing figure first offered by one of the clarinets (its last three notes were a signature motive While Takemitsu never tired of comparing his in Takemitsu’s water-themed pieces).