MUSIC FOR VOICE CYCLES, MASHUPS, AND MACHINIC RHAPSODIES Andrew Cyr — Artistic Director/Conductor October 21 & 23, 2012 | (le) Poisson Rouge metropolisensemble.org ON THE PROGRAM Hector Berlioz: Les Nuits d’Ete** six re-imaginations for chamber ensemble, electronics (V), and voice — world premiere featuring soprano Kiera Duffy I: Villanelle (Vivian Fung) II: Le Spectre de la Rose (Ryan Francis) III: Sur les Lagunes (Caroline Shaw) IV: Absence (Brad Balliett) V: Air: Morbidly Tender (Au Cimetière) (Nicholas Britell) VI: L’Ile Inconnue (Sayo Kosugi) - PAUSE - David Babin (arr. Clovis Labarrière): Why Birds** selected rhapsodies from an opera-in-progress — world premiere featuring David Babin and BabX - PAUSE - Mohammed Fairouz: Audenesque* for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra — world premiere featuring mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey I. In Memory of W.B. Yeats II. III. IV. Audenesque * Commission by ROKI for Kate Lindsey and Metropolis Ensemble ** Metropolis Ensemble commissions Generous support for Music for Voice has been provided by The June K Wu Artist Fund, Meet the Composer, NYSCA, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Foundation, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music. The commission for Mohammed Fairouz’s Audenesque was made possible through the generous support of Reach Out Kansas Inc. (James Zakoura, General Director; Anissa Gardner Walz, Managing Director). “Renderings” concert at Orensanz Center in September 2011 WELCOME TO MUSIC FOR VOICE from Andrew Cyr, Artistic Director Welcome to what is our 15th concert appearance here at (le) Poisson Rouge!! Metropolis Ensemble first performed here in the summer of 2008 prior to their official opening and since that time, (le) Poisson Rouge has provided our emerging organization a place to call home. In addition to being one of the most innovative, artist-friendly venues in the country, (le) Poisson Rouge is also a meeting-point for music-lovers of many genre to co-mingle and as such, is the perfect setting for tonight’s program. I hope you enjoy the show and thank you for all your support! ABOUT METROPOLIS ENSEMBLE Metropolis Ensemble is a professional chamber orchestra and ensemble dedicated to making classical music in its most contemporary forms. Founded and led by Grammy-nominated conductor Andrew Cyr, Metropolis Ensemble gathers today’s most outstanding emerging composers and young performing artists to produce innovative concert experiences. Founded in 2006, Metropolis Ensemble has commissioned and premiered 90 works of music from a dynamic mix of composers and has appeared at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival, The Wordless Music Series, Celebrate Brooklyn, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, (Le) Poisson Rouge, and The Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 2011, Metropolis Ensemble’s first studio album featuring the music of Avner Dorman was awarded a Grammy nomination. Their second studio album, featuring the music of Vivian Fung with soloists Kristin Lee and Conor Hanick, was recorded at Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall and was released on Naxos’ newest imprint Canadian Classics this October. Later this season, Metropolis Ensemble will perform its first opera in a full-scale production of David Bruce’s new “The Firework-Maker’s Daughter” based on the Philip Pullman novel in collaboration with Royal Opera House of London II, The Opera Group, Opera North, and The New Victory Theatre here in New York. Recognizing that New York City’s cultural organizations have the enormous potential to make a special contribution to the quality of life of the city’s school children, Metropolis Ensemble is equally devoted to educating a new generation of composers, musicians and listeners, through its innovated education-outreach program, Youth Works, currently working throughout our season at 4 sites across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and The Bronx. Join the community at metropolisensemble.org PROGRAM NOTES Hector Berlioz: Les Nuits d’Ete Notes BY JOHN Mangum, LOS Angeles Philharmonic For somebody who wrote so much about his own and others’ music, Berlioz had surprisingly little to say about Les nuits d’Ete. There is no mention of it, for example, in his Memoirs, nor does his correspondence refer to the songs. Only one of the songs is dated - “Villanelle,” March 23, 1840. Two of them, “Absence” and “Le spectre de la rose,” were part of a concert program advertised for November 1840, but the performance never took place. The six songs were published in their original version, for high voice and piano, during the summer of 1841. Berlioz orchestrated “Absence” in 1843, planning to include it on his concert programs in Germany, and did the same with “Le spectre de la rose” for a concert in Gotha in February 1856. A Swiss music publisher who happened to be at that concert asked Berlioz, through an intermediary (Peter Cornelius, the composer of the opera The Barber of Baghdad and one of Berlioz’ most ardent champions in Germany), to orchestrate the remaining songs; the composer agreed and the songs were published, in a version for soloists and orchestra, before the end of the year. So that’s what we know about Les nuits d’Ete. The fact that the songs emerged from their composer at a moment when so many conflicting trajectories in both his personal and professional life collided makes his silence about them all the more frustrating. By 1840, it had become apparent to both Berlioz and his wife, the actress Harriet Smithson, that their marriage had come, in David Cairns’ words, to a “symbolic end.” Smithson’s physical and emotional state had been sinking ever-downward since her marriage to Berlioz in 1833 - she was often ill, hardly ever went out, had few friends, and could not speak French well enough to fully participate in her husband’s social world of composers, writers, and artists. The assuredness and self-reliance of the woman who had conquered Paris with her Shakespeare performances more than a decade earlier had been replaced by the depression and isolation of a wife frustrated by the sacrifices that she had made for her marriage. Berlioz continued to love her, but not with the love of a man inflamed with passion for his muse. As his letters, especially those to his sisters, make clear, he had come to feel sorry for her more than anything else. It was at this nadir of marital bliss that Berlioz probably met his future wife, Marie Recio. A soprano herself, Recio appeared frequently with Berlioz at his concerts, and one of her favorites was “Absence,” which she sang for the first time during his tour of Germany in 1843, first in its version for piano and voice, and then in Berlioz’ orchestration. She became his regular compan- ion, and, as a result of this affair with Marie, Berlioz separated from Harriet in 1844; their marriage ended with Harriet’s death in 1854, which left the composer free to marry Marie. The final bit of context that helps illuminate Les nuits d’Ete comes not from Berlioz’s personal, but from his professional, life. His critics continually lambasted him for the extravagance of his performing forces; the critic Paul Scudo wrote, for example, “M. Berlioz hardly ever writes for anything less than huge vocal or instrumental forces; he aims at the grand effect; he un- leashes every piercing sound at the same time because he doesn’t know how to prepare or control an idea, or how to bring it to a conclusion. The orchestra that Beethoven used is not enough for him; to display itself in all its power, his genius not only requires all known musical instruments - the ones that have been invented for 50 years - but also has to get its hands on all these ill-formed experiments which the music industry turns out every day, and with which they try to revive our blunted senses.” This explains, to some extent, why Berlioz might have been enthusiastic about preparing an orchestral version of Les nuits d’Ete. With their gentle, intimate musical language, the songs lend themselves to the nuanced sort of large-scale chamber mu- sic Berlioz produced in the orchestral version, itself the perfect rejoinder to detractors such as Scudo. In addition, Berlioz had little knowledge of the piano (he played the guitar), and the piano part for the songs in their original version is not among the most natural ever composed. In Les nuits d’Ete, Berlioz selected six poems from the volume La comedie de la mort (The com- edy of death) by his close friend Theophile Gautier (1811-72). The poems consider love from different angles, but loss of love permeates them all. When performed as a cycle, the songs convey this loss all the more strongly, not just as individual compo- sitions touched by melancholy, but as a coherent conception, one where the longed-for “always” of the first song, “Villanelle,” becomes unattainable in the last one, “L’ile inconnue.” Berlioz’ rapturous, idealistic love for Harriet had faded - the breeze had blown his ship on a course far from one leading to the “always” of his youthful dreams. Vivian Fung: Villanelle NOTES BY VIVIAN FUNG Villanelle is divided into three verses, and Berlioz composed very similar music for each of them. I considered the repeats as an opportunity to vary the orchestration, beginning modestly and then interjecting more contemporary reactions, including clusters, wrong-key arpeggios, and a slight minimalist tinge to repeated chords. In all cases, I kept the arrangement light to aid the singer, as well as to retain the sprightly nature of the poem. Ryan Francis: Le Spectre de la Rose NOTES BY RYAN FRANCIS When Metropolis Ensemble approached me about re-imagining one of the songs from Berlioz’s Les Nuits D’ete, I immediately jumped at the opportunity, as I felt that such a project was very much in line with some of the concepts I have been exploring for the past several years, and particular, the idea of intertextuality in music.