Sunday, January 25, 2015, 7pm Hertz Hall San Francisco Contemporary Music Players Steven Schick, Artistic Director

Project TenFourteen

PROGRAM

Agata Zubel (b. 1978 ) where to* (2014) World Première

Steven Schick, conductor Agata Zubel, soprano Tod Brody, flute Peter Josheff, Dale Wolford, saxophone Brad Hogarth, Dave Ridge, Peter Wahrhaftig, tuba Nick Woodbury, percussion Richard Worn,

Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934) Variations from the Golden Mountain (2014) United States Première

Nicolas Hodges, piano

Birtwistle The Axe Manual (2000)

Nicolas Hodges, piano Steven Schick, percussion

INTERMISSION

CAL PERFORMANCES 15 PROGRAM

Birtwistle Gigue Machine (2011 )

Nicolas Hodges, piano

Du Yu n (b. 1977) Quatrain: Slow Portraits iii* (2014) World Première

Kyle Bruckmann, Alicia Telford, horn William Winant, percussion David Tanenbaum, guitar Meredith Clark, harp Jennifer Curtis, Stephen Harrison,

* Project TenFourteen commission

Project TenFourteen is series of four programs featuring world premières simultaneously commissioned from ten distinctive composers, all challenged to reflect upon and address the human condition, common to us all.

Project TenFourteen is dedicated to the memory and celebration of Lee Hyla.

Agata Zubel’s participation in this concert is supported, in part, by the Polish Cultural Institute.

Audio streams of the TenFourteen commisioned works will be available on www.sfcmp.org approximately two weeks after the concert. Visit tenfourteen.com for further exploration of archival content and evolving commentary stimulated by Project TenFourteen.

Cal Performances’ – season is sponsored by Wells Fargo.

PLAYBILL ORCHESTRA ROSTER

SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS

Tod Brody flute Kyle Bruckmann oboe Sarah Rathke oboe Jeff Anderle clarinet Peter Josheff clarinet Bill Kalinkos clarinet Lawrence Ragent horn Hall Goff trombone Peter Wahrhaftig tuba Karen Gottlieb harp David Tanenbaum guitar Kate Campbell piano William Winant percussion Daniel Kennedy percussion Christopher Froh percussion Roy Malan violin Graeme Jennings violin Susan Freier violin Nanci Severance Stephen Harrison cello Richard Worn bass

Steven Schick Artistic Director Rozella Kennedy Executive Director

Adam Fong Project Manager Luis Escareño Administrative Manager Jon Yu Production Manager Brenna Noonan Media Coordinator Travis Andrews & Andrew Meyerson Ministers of Fun

CAL PERFORMANCES PROGRAM NOTES

PROJECT TENFOURTEEN THE MUSIC

HY SHOULD WE MAKE new music when Agata Zubel (b. CKIJ) Wthere is so much great older music? where to (DBCF) I have been asked this question more than once, usually following the première of a chal - Polish composer Agata Zubel was a percus - lenging new work. The knee-jerk response is sionist before concentrating, as a performer, that exploration is good in any field, so why on voice. Both have led her to infuse her com - not also in music?. However, that answer rings positions with exoticisms of sound that could false. With every innovation in technology, emerge only from the experience of its commerce, or transportation, the future is cre - creation. The colorful world of the percussion ated and the past is jettisoned. But as we mu - battery opened Zubel’s imagination to sicians make new music, we hang on to the extended possibilities of traditionally past. Doctors no longer use leeches, but art constrained instruments, allowing her to con - lovers still gain much from Beethoven. ceive an extended range of acoustic imagery At the San Francisco Contemporary Music for, for example, violin, flute, chamber Players, we acknowledge the unique historical ensemble, orchestra. power of music by weaving important works In where to , a contrabass aria establishes a from the recent past among the premièeres of rhythmic profile and articulative range (from our TenFourteen season. In our season-open - unpitched to pitched, percussive to melodic) ing concert, we heard an early piano piece of that informs the music for the ensemble. This George Crumb, and later in the year, we will coalesces into asymmetrical, nervous rhyth - present modernist masterpieces by Berio, mic unisons, leavened by silence. Aggressive Nono, and Varèse. In tonight’s concert, we will music broadly alternates with sustained con - hear three recent works by the masterful trapuntal passages. Both come together in Harrison Birstwistle. Birtwistle’s strong sense chaotic intensity, or dissipate into near silence. of ritual and his fascination with slowly mor - The end of the piece—a new beginning—is a phing rhythmic ostinatos, often makes his deus ex machina , a melismatic wordless so - music sound more recent than it really is. prano luring the wind instruments back to I hope his music will provide a meaningful mysterious lyricism. frame for the premières by Du Yun and About her work, Zubel writes: “Culture de - Agata Zubel. veloped at various paces on different conti - At best, the present evocatively folds evoca - nents, in different periods and directions. tively back on the past. Perhaps Birtwistle’s pi - People met other people, and after that their oneering ideas will still sound current, and world —knowledge, emotions, and music— maybe Du Yun and Agata Zubel, to the extent could never be the same. Man’s return to the that they are rooted in fertile history, will origins has never been possible, and yet those carry with them traces of past lives. This origins are something that man has always brings us to one reason I care about new hoped to understand. In this way, synergy music: The past is vivid and alive in my life. gives rise to deconstruction, and development Therefore, it seems like the least we can do for makes it possible to look sideways…and back. future generations is to make, today, the music This is also the case with my music, which, that will become the historically powerful art as it develops in time, adds new seconds while of the future. hoping to understand the minutes that came before.” Steven Schick

PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES

Harrison Birtwistle (b. CKEF) its unhurried, but compressed and focused, ex - Variations on the Golden Mountain (DBCF) ploration of highly constrained musical material The Axe Manual (DBBB) are philosophically modeled on Bach’s approach. Gigue Machine (DBCC) In its layering of independent (but related) lines in different speeds, we can readily hear in Golden One of the world’s great composers, Sir Mountain (note in particular its concluding Harrison Birtwistle is known for his unparal - episode) a kinship with Gigue Machine . leled dramatic sense, not only in his acclaimed, innovative operatic works but also in his Du Yun (b. CKII) instrumental music. A major preoccupation of Quatrain: Slow Portraits iii (DBCF) his aesthetic philosophy is the possibility of re - versing, deleting, foreshortening, lengthening, All of Du Yun’s work connects to an operatic, and otherwise manipulating our perception of theatrical sensibility. Her Quatrain: Slow passing time. Several solo piano works, from Portraits iii , commissioned for Project Précis (1960 ) through the significant Harrison’s TenFourteen, continues a series that began as Clocks (1998 ) and Gigue Machine (2011 ), ex - a sound installation accompanying visual artist plore this with special focus. Gigue Machine and David Michalek’s Portraits in Dramatic Time Variations from the Golden Mountain (2014 ) for the 2011 Lincoln Center Festival. Du Yun’s were both composed for the phenomenal Slow Portraits pieces, which can be performed English pianist Nicolas Hodges. with or without film, are musical analogs of The Axe Manual (2000 ) was composed for Michalek’s high-resolution, cinema-sized pro - pianist Emanuel Ax and percussionist Evelyn jections of super slow motion images in which Glennie. Composed in a fast-slow-fast arch actors’ small physical gestures are amplified by form, it combines percussion and piano into a their extension in time. The composer’s aim in metainstrument. Phrases and passages for Quatrain is “to investigate how each rhyme of piano with vibraphone or marimba fuse into the aural phrase translates to a physical ges - new tone colors unavailable from the individ - ture; and how a group of microscopic kinesics ual instruments; the piano’s essentially form their larger-than-life impact…. The cre - percussive nature is enhanced in combination ator, the performers, the narrative, and the with unpitched drums; and the complex scenery have become seductress, to lure the overtones of pitched metallic percussion am - audience into another world.” plifies the piano’s metallic strings and frame. Quatrain is essentially four “stanzas,” each Gigue Machine ’s title—like many of preceded by an interlude, the stanzas suggest - Birtwistle’s—refers to the friction between inex - ing a series of variations. The sonic reality of orable mechanical time versus human, flexible, the musical gestures requires the ensemble to dance-oriented time. Correspondences and react as one vibrant organism, even beyond divergences can be heard on several levels: con - traditional chamber music. Individual virtu - current contrasting tempos locally, but also sty - osity is required to create phrases of clear listically different swaths of music that can be rhythm and pitch, and also to negotiate glis - apprehended by mentally “zooming out,” taking sandi, microtones, and semi-improvised in the large picture. Hodges premièred music that blurs and defamiliarizes, like a Variations from the Golden Mountain just this well-known visual image, taken via technol - past September at Wigmore Hall in . ogy out of its wonted context, destabilized and The “Golden Mountain” is that Parnassus of strange. With a coming-together of the en - keyboard works, Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. semble near the end of the piece, marked “As Although, at nine minutes, Birtwistle’s piece if a wave,” comes a shock, like recognition. doesn’t pretend to the comprehensive scope of Bach’s, its alternation of contrasting episodes and Robert Kirzinger

CAL PERFORMANCES ABOUT THE ARTISTS

works by composers from around the world. SFCMP has been presented by leading cultural festivals and concert series in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the country.

Agata Zubel , born 1978 in Wrocław, Poland, is a Polish composer and singer. Zubel is a gradu - ate of Wrocław’s Karol Szymanowski High School of Music, where w e The San Francisco Contemporary Music i g she studied percussion r o Players (SFCMP), an ensemble of highly e

G and music theory, and

j e z skilled musicians, performs innovative new r the Karol Lipiński d n music. We nourish the creation and dissemi - A University of Music, nation of new work through high-quality mu - where she studied composition with Jan sical performances, commissions, and Wichrowski. She is a member of the Youth community outreach. We promote the music Circle of the Polish Composers’ Union and a of composers from across cultures and stylis - recipient of the Ministry of Culture and tic traditions who are creating a vast and vital National Heritage scholarship. In 2013, she 21st-century musical language. We seek to was honored by the International Music share these experiences with as many people Council International Rostrum of Composers as possible, both in and outside of traditional with Best Composition Title for Not I , which concert settings. she wrote for soprano, instrumental ensemble, SFCMP was founded by Jean-Louis LeRoux, and electronics. Currently, she teaches at the Marcella DeCray, and Charles Boone as “Bring Academy of Music in Wrocław, where she re - Your Own Pillow” on March 25, 1971, and in - ceived her Ph.D. in musical arts. corporated as a nonprofit on August 14, 1974. Throughout its history, SFCMP has been led by Harrison Birtwistle six Artistic Directors and six Executive was born in Accrington Directors with continuous authorization, sup - in the north of England port and fiscal oversight by a board of directors. in 1934, and studied In addition to programmatic innovation, our clarinet and composi - performances are rooted in artistic virtuosity. L tion at the Royal A P a

Our 22 core SF Contemporary Music Players n Manchester College of e r A are among the Bay Area’s leading musicians and / Music, making contact a l a l educators. They are active as soloists and cham - h with a highly talented C

a ber musicians and leaders of several dynamic y group of contempo - n a performance groups in California and beyond. H raries, including Peter SFCMP is the longest standing, continuously Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, John performing new music ensemble outside the Ogdon, and Elgar Howarth. In the mid-1960s , East Coast. Over its 43 seasons, SFCMP’s work his , together with Verses has greatly contributed to the art form and the for Ensembles and The Triumph of Time , firmly new music sector. We have performed more established Birtwistle as a leading voice in than 1,200 new works by 560 composers. British music. His lyric tragedy The Mask of Nearly 150 of these have been pre mières, and Orpheus was staged by English National Opera we have commissioned more than 80 new in 1986 . Large-scale works in the following

PLAYBILL ABOUT THE ARTISTS decade included the and The Center, RedCat, Kimmel Center, Shanghai Second Mrs. Kong , the concertos Endless Parade Symphony, Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, and for trumpet and Antiphonies for piano, and the Philharmonie Luxembourg. Her visual art - orchestral score . Works that pre - works have been shown at the Guangzhou Art mièred in the past decade include The Triennial, National Academy Museum (United Minotaur , written for the Royal Opera, Covent States), Sharjah Biennial (UAE), Auckland Garden, and his violin concerto for Christian Triennial (New Zealand), and Ullens Art Tetzlaff and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Center (Beijing). Birtwistle’s 80th birthday year in 2014 saw the première of Responses for piano and or - Born in London and chestra, touring internationally with Pierre- now based in Germany, Laurent Aimard as soloist. His many honors where he is a professor include the Grawemeyer Award for The Mask at the Musikhochschule of Orpheus , the Siemens Prize, and being made Stuttgart, Nicolas Hodges a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. approaches repertoire He was knighted in 1988 and was made a from the Classical era to e v e

Companion of Honour in 2001. He was r the pres ent with the g g r

Henry Purcell Professor of Music at King’s o same questing spirit. Mr. B

o c

College London and is currently Director of r Hodges has performed a

Composition at the M as concerto soloist in London. Harrison Birtwistle is published by with the major orchestras of the United States Boosey & Hawkes. and Europe, working with many of the world’s most acclaimed conductors. Closely associ - Du Yun , born and ated with works of , , raised in Shanghai, and Thomas Adès, he has premièred and China, is a composer, recorded pieces written for him by many com - performer and per - posers, including Georges Aperghis, Harrison formance artist who Birtwistle, Pascal Dusapin, Luca Francesconi, practices her works at Isabel Mundry, Wolfgang Rihm, Rebecca an artistic crossroads Saunders, and Salvatore Sciarrino. He has per - n o

of orchestral, chamber s formed as a recitalist in such venues as r e d

music, opera, theater, n Carnegie Hall, IRCAM, and Wigmore Hall, A

e s

cabaret, storytelling, i and at festivals including the BBC Proms, the n e

pop music, visual arts, D Lucerne Festival, and Tanglewood. He collab - and noise. She has received commissions from orates regularly with the , the Seattle Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Adrian Brendel, , Ilya Gringolts, Mann Center for the Performing Arts, Anssi Karttunen, and as a member of the Trio Whitney Museum, Berkeley Symphony, Accanto. Highlights of the 2014–2015 season Fromm Foundation, Chamber Music America, are the world première of Birtwistle’s Festivals für Neue Musik und aktuelle Kultur Variations from the Golden Mountain ; an (Switzerland), and ICE, among others. Selected SWR commissioned work by Simon venues at which performances of her work Steen-Andersen with SWR Sinfonieorchester have taken place include Festival d’Avignon, Freiburg Baden-Baden; and a world première Ultima Norway, Salle Playel Paris, Darmstadt, of a new Ivo Nilsson work with the Musica Nova Helsinki, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

CAL PERFORMANCES ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Percussionist, conduc - Festival. Among his acclaimed publications is tor, and author Steven a book, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Schick was born in Different Dreams , and numerous recordings of Iowa and raised in a contemporary percussion music, including a farming family. For 40 three-CD set of the complete percussion years, he has champi - music of Xenakis (Mode). Mode also released oned contemporary a companion recording on DVD of the early music by commis - percussion music of in sioning or premièring September 2014. more than 150 new Mr. Schick is Distinguished Professor of works. He was the Music at UC San Diego. He was named founding percussionist of the Bang on a Can Artistic Director of SFCMP in 2011. All-Stars (1992–2002) and served as Artistic Director of the Centre International de Percussion de Genève (2000–2005). Mr. Schick SFCMP’s 2014–2015 season is made possible by the is founder and Artistic Director of the percus - following institutions, among others: The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Amphion sion group red fish blue fish. Currently he is Foundation, The Clarence E. Heller Charitable Music Director of the La Jolla Symphony and Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Chorus in addition to serving as SFCMP’s Foundation, The Ann and Gordon Getty Artistic Director. In 2012, he became the first Foundation, The Instituto Italiano de Cultura of San Artist-in-Residence with the International Francisco, The James Irvine Foundation’s Exploring Contemporary Ensemble. Mr. Schick founded Engagement Fund, The Jebediah Foundation, The and is currently Artistic Director of “Roots Bernard Osher Foundation, Polish Cultural Institute and Rhizomes,” a summer course on contem - New York, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, The porary percussion music held at the Banff Ross McKee Foundation, The Phyllis C. Wattis Centre for the Arts. He maintains a lively Foundation, WESTAF, the Western States Arts Federation, and the National Endowment for the schedule of guest conducting, including ap - Arts, and The Zellerbach Family Foundation, as well pearances this season with the BBC Scottish as the essential generosity of individuals who make Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber a tax-deductible contribution to our 501(c)3 Orchestra, the Nova Chamber Ensemble, and organization , or who provide volunteer and/or the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble. Mr. Schick in-kind support. Find out more at sfcmp.org/sup - will be music director of the 2015 Ojai port. Thank you!

PLAYBILL