Untitled, As a Huge Symphonic Movement, Or Perhaps a Single-Movement Symphony Like the Sibelius Seventh

Brooklyn Academy of Music Brooklyn Philharmonic 45th Season 1998-99 Bruce C. Ratner Chairman of the Board Robert C. Rosenberg Chairman of the Board Harvey Lichtenstein President and Executive Producer Craig G. Matthews, President Robert Spano, Music Director Lukas Foss, Conductor Laureate present & Running time: BAM Opera House approximately two November 13 & 14, 1998 at 8pm hours and five minutes. There will be one Brooklyn Philharmonic intermission. Conductor Robert Spano New York Virtuoso Singers Director Harold Rosenbaum Elliott Carter Allegro scorrevole (New York premiere) 1908- PAUSE Luciano Berio Sinfonia 1925- I 11-0 King III-In ruhig fliessender Bewegung IV V INTERMISSION John Adams Harmonielehre 1947- Part I Pa rt II The Anfortas Wou nd Part III Meister Eckhardt and Quackie Baldwin is the ottical piano of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The Brooklyn Philharmonic and BAM gratefully acknowledge Mr. and Mrs. Stanley H. Kaplan, whose generous support made possible the Stanley H. Kaplan Education Center Acoustical Shell. Allegro scorrevole gleaming and noble, ornate, somewhat blooming, Elliott Carter (b.1908) and fresh." In the composer's words, Il[The piece] consists primarily of a continuous flow of soft Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was born on December 11, rapid passages that move over the entire range 1908, in New York, where he now lives. He wrote of the sound spectrum, and here and there form Allegro scorrevole in 1996, on commission from into thematic material. Against this is a lyrical The Cleveland Orchestra. It is the third piece of idea also developed throughout, sometimes an orchestral triptych that also includes Partita slowing down to hesitantly separated notes and (1993) and Adagio tenebroso (1994). The at other times tightly joined together to form Cleveland Orchestra presented the world premiere intensely expressive Iines."-Peter Laki (reprint of Allegro scorrevole. The tri ptych was fi rst per ed with permission of the Cleveland Orchestra) formed as a set by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Oliver Knussen in 1995. The work is ded Sinfonia icated to the Cleveland Orchestra and to Oliver Luciano Berio (b. 1925) Knussen. Running approximately 15 minutes in performance, Carter's score calls for three flutes Luciano Berio was born on October 24, 1925 in (second and third double piccolos), two oboes, Oneglia (now Imperia), Italy. He now lives in english horn, two clarinets (second doubling on Radicondoli, a province of Siena, Italy. The original small clarinet in E flat), bass clarinet, two bas version of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia , composed in soons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, 1968, was fi rst performed on October 10 of that three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (vibra year by the New York Philharmonic and The phone, marimba, glockenspiel, xylophone, bongos, Swingle Singers, under the direction of the com snare drum, tom-tom, woodblocks, metal blocks, poser. The 1969 version, expanded from four to temple blocks, suspended cymbals, cowbells, guiro, five sections, was performed in New York for the bass drum, snare drum), harp, piano and strings. first time on October 8, 1970 by the same forces under Leonard Bernstein. The published score Elliott Carter has long had a reputation of being carries the inscription: IlWritten for (and commis a Ildifficult" composer-a reputation borne out sioned by) the New York Philharmonic and dedi by the often dauntingly complex metrical problems cated to Leonard Bernstein." The work is scored found in many of his works. But complexity is for three flutes and piccolo, four clarinets, two never an end in itself with Carter. It is, rather, oboes and English horn, alto saxophone and tenor the outward manifestation of something more saxophone, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four profou nd-something that David Sch iff has well horns, three trombones, tuba, percussion (timpani, put into words in the opening chapter of his book, glockenspiel, marimba, vibraphone, tam-tams, The Music of Elliott Carter (London, 1983), snare drums, bass drums, cymbals, sizzle cymbals, IlElliott Carter makes music out of simultaneous tambourines, wood-blocks, bongos, guiros, frusta, oppositions.... He is not interested in reconciling grelots, castanets and triangles), harp, piano, them, as a romantic composer would be; nor electric organ, electric harpsichord, strings (with does he choose to ignore them. He delights in one solo violin and violins divided into three sec them. HighIy cha rged contrasts provoke his tions) and eight singers. imagination, inspiring patterns of unprecedented complexity, as when two webs of plucked tones Luciano Berio's music displays a constant obses mesh in a dizzying, hallucinatory gauze." sion with language and the many possibilities by which language can be presented in a musical The word scorrevole (the accent is on the second context. Fragmentation into phonetic sounds, syllable) in the title of the new work means emblematic quotations, traditional vocalism and Ilflowing, fluent" in Italian. The adjective applies anti-academic (or pop) vocalism, musical, physical to the piece from the very beginning, with its and semantic gesture: these are some of the fleeting, leggiero (light) runs for woodwind and many devices the composer has used in his muted strings. This airy material is eventually scores. In Sinfonia, the texts are taken from a complemented by something more Ilbeautiful, number of sources, including Claude Levi-Strauss' Le Cru et Ie cuit (The Raw and the Cooked), Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable, Joyce, revolutionary slogans, recorded conversation and the name Martin Luther King. But as the composer notes, "The treatment of the vocal part in the first, second, fourth and fifth sections of Sinfonia is similar in that the text is not immediately perceivable as such. The words and their com ponents undergo a musical analysis which is integral to the total structure of voice and instruments together. The fact that the varying degree of percep tibility of the text at different moments is a part of the musical structure is the reason why the words and phrases used are not given in the program. The experience of 'not quite hearing,' then, is to be conceived as essential to the nature of the work itself." Also significant in this work is the parallel musical device of quotation typified by the third movement, about which Berio admitted at the time of the premiere, "To use a cliche-it is perhaps the most experimental I have ever written." In this section, Berio uses a movement from Mahler's Second Symphony as a container for numerous musical references, from Bach, Beethoven and Brahms to Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio himself. Again, the composer's words are revelatory, "If I were to describe the presence of Mahler's scherzo in Sinfonia, the image that comes most spontaneously to mind is that of a river going through a constantly changing landscape, sometimes going under ground and emerging in another, altogether different place, sometimes very evident in its journey, sometimes disappearing completely, present as a fully recognizable form or as small details lost in the surrounding host of musical presences." Harmonielehre John Adams (b. 1947) John Coolidge Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 15, 1947 and now lives in Berkeley, California. He began working on Harmonielehre in February 1984, though nothing that actually made its way into the complet ed score was wdtten before October of that year. The work was finished in March 1985 and first performed in the 21st of that month by the San Francisco Symphony, Edo de Waart conducting. Adams was then in his fourth and final year as the San Francisco Symphony's first composer-in-residence. The score calls for four flutes (three doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), four clarinets (two doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, two marimbas, vibraphone, xylophone, tubular bells, crotales (played both with mallets and a bow), glockenspiel, high and low suspended cymbals, sizzle cymbal, small crash cymbals, bell tree, two tam tams, two triangles, bass drum, two harps, piano (sometimes four hands), celesta and strings (with violins divided into four sections and violas and cellos each into two). In the thirteen and a half years since John Adams bounded onto the Davies Symphony Hall stage in San Francisco to acknowledge the tumultuous applause that greeted the premier of Harmonielehre, he has risen from being known nationally as an interesting "younger" composer to become an internationally renowned and acclaimed composer whose orchestral works are performed more often than any other American composer. Harmonielehre turned out to be the resolution of a major and, for a time, paralyzing compo sition crisis in Adams's life. His seminal minimalist works of the late seven ties, typified by Phrygian Gates and Common Tones in Simple Time, were, as he described them, "almost rigorously pure in [their] modal, diatonic expression." Indeed, his turning point resulted from his self-description as "a minimalist who is bored with minimalism." The crisis was broken when Adams had a dream in which he saw himself "driving over the... Bay Bridge and looking out saw a huge tanker in the bay. It was an image of immense power and gravity and mass. And while I was observing the tanker, it sud denly took off like a rocket ship with an enormous force of levitation ...When I woke up the next morning, the image of those huge chords [with which the piece begins] came to me, and the piece was off like an explosion." The resultant work takes a large step in the direction of a more chromatic style, and the long periods of harmonic stasis in his earlier scores have largely, if not entirely, given way to music with a more pronounced sense of motion and punctuation. The work itself is in three parts, the first of which accounts for a little more than half the work.

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