PROGRAM NOTES Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky Cello Concerto
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PROGRAM NOTES by Gerard McBurney Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky Born April 24, 1963, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Cello Concerto Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky began this cello concerto, on a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 2008 and finished it in 2010. The orchestra consists of two flutes and piccolo, three oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, harpsichord, and strings. Performance time is approximately twenty-five minutes. These are the world premiere performances of Yanov-Yanovsky’s Cello Concerto. Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky was born in 1963 in Tashkent. In those days, that ancient city was the most important town in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic; today, liberated from the Soviet Union, it is the capital of the newly independent Republic of Uzbekistan. Despite his Central Asian origins, the composer’s cultural roots, like those of many artists and intellectuals living in Tashkent in Soviet times, are entirely Russian and European. His father is a well-known composer and violinist, his mother a musicologist, and both taught for many years and with great distinction at the Tashkent Conservatory of Music. The young Dmitri grew up in a home filled with books and scores and recordings, and alive with curiosity. The education his parents gave him included a deep knowledge of the European classics, as well as a thorough acquaintance with twentieth-century musical modernism from Schoenberg to Stockhausen and beyond, which was remarkable anywhere in the Soviet Union at that time and all the more extraordinary in a city so very far from the traditional Soviet centers of Moscow and Leningrad. At the same time, the young composer was carefully raised to be culturally aware of the rich history and the Islamic culture of the place where he was born, and especially of the diverse musical, literary, and visual heritages of the peoples of Central Asia. The young Dmitri followed his parents into the Tashkent Conservatory, where he studied violin and composition, graduating in 1986. Soon afterwards, he moved on to the staff himself, teaching theory and composition for nearly two decades, and including many talented and successful younger composers among his pupils. Early in his career, he also began working in the theater and cinema, and to date he has composed more than fifty film scores and more than thirty scores for the stage. While still a student, Yanov-Yanovsky was lucky enough to be taken under the wings of two of the most important Soviet composers of our time, Edison Denisov and Alfred Schnittke, both of whom in those days lived in faraway Moscow. With their help, the young Tashkent composer made contact with the most interesting composers of his own age then working in the European part of the Soviet Union, and by the early 1990s with new friends and colleagues, composers, and performers in Europe and the United States. Yanov-Yanovsky's international reputation began in 1991, when his Lacrymosa for soprano and string quartet was a prize winner at the Fribourg International Festival of Sacred Music. This haunting work was first performed by American soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson with the UK–based Arditti Quartet, and it was subsequently performed and recorded by Dawn Upshaw with the Kronos Quartet. Since then, Yanov- Yanovsky’s music has been commissioned and performed by soloists and ensembles all over Europe and North America. His prolific output includes orchestral and chamber music and several works of music theater, including three settings of short plays by Samuel Beckett. A significant strand in Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s music reflects his fascination with the ancient musical traditions of Central Asia. For example, in his student years he taught himself to play the chang, a small Uzbek cimbalom, and, inspired by this, produced a series of pieces for western instruments which mimic the chang’s distinctive and delicately reverberant sound palette. He also has written music weaving live instrumental sounds around treated recordings of traditional singing from different parts of Uzbekistan. As a result of these interests, in the late 1990s, his music caught the attention of Yo-Yo Ma, who invited him to take part in the Silk Road Project. The intense collaboration of these two artists has produced a number of remarkable pieces, beginning with the chamber concerto for cello, ensemble, and tape, Night Music: Voice in the Leaves (2000), which was performed by Yo-Yo Ma and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the opening night of the 2006–2007 season. It was the experience of that occasion which led Yo-Yo Ma and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to commission a new concerto for cello and orchestra. The composer embarked on this ambitious new score late in 2008 and completed it, after a number of revisions, early in 2010. Yanov-Yanovsky began work on his first-ever cello concerto with two specific sounds in mind: the distinctive and inspiring playing of Yo-Yo Ma, and the equally distinctive and inspiring sound world of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (After listening to a rehearsal in Orchestra Hall in 2006, he turned to the present writer and whispered: ―They play like a great pianist plays the piano. It’s so unified. I’ve never heard an orchestra like this!‖) At first, he planned a work in several movements, completing the piece in that form some time in 2009, and then putting it aside so that he could return to it after a break and with a fresh mind. When he looked again, he decided immediately that the movements should flow seamlessly out of one another, with no breaks in between. The result is a single-movement archlike structure that falls into five clear sections. A still and quiet opening, in which the soloist unfolds a long and searching melody that climbs from the lowest depths into the heights, is followed by a wild motoric whirlwind, in which the orchestra seems to chase the soloist across a brutal landscape. A quite different kind of fast music follows, in which the cello soloist takes the lead, weaving an intricate web of virtuosic arpeggio figures and drawing the orchestra eventually—and almost against its will—into an entirely new acoustic landscape, a quiet place of dreamlike and surreal desolation where fragments of the past are scattered all around. In the final section of the concerto, the soloist takes an almost ritual role, gently persuading the whole orchestra into a long prayer-like incantation, in which the slow melody of the opening is revisited, but this time swathed in bells and the bittersweet triadic harmonies of the music of another age. In a private letter from February 2010 (here quoted with permission), Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky made some intriguing observations about what he felt that he was trying to achieve in this concerto: My idea was of a soloist to whom the orchestra brutally ―dictates‖ what and how to play, using old and worn-out orchestral clichés . But gradually the soloist turns round that ―musical past‖ and overcomes the orchestra’s ―dictatorship‖ . Everything in this concerto, including the harmonies of the very ending, flows directly from the music of the very opening bars . As I wrote this music, I kept thinking of a remark by the great poet Joseph Brodsky. Rebuking Marx for his famous dictum that ―Social being determines consciousness,‖ Brodsky observed: ―It is not being that determines consciousness, but the inevitability of not being.‖ For me, that is the epigraph of this concerto. Gerard McBurney is artistic programming advisor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. © Chicago Symphony Orchestra. All rights reserved. Program notes may be reproduced only in their entirety and with express written permission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to change without notice. .