Riccardo Muti Conductor Yo-Yo Ma Cello Bates the B-Sides Schumann
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Program ONe HuNdRed TWeNTIeTH SeASON Chicago Symphony orchestra riccardo muti Music director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor emeritus Yo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, May 12, 2011, at 8:00 Friday, May 13, 2011, at 1:30 Saturday, May 14, 2011, at 8:00 riccardo muti Conductor Yo-Yo ma Cello Bates The B-Sides Broom of the System Aerosol Melody (Hanalei) Gemini in the Solar Wind— Temescal Noir— Warehouse Medicine These are the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Schumann Cello Concerto in A Minor, Op. 129 Not too fast— Slow— Very lively YO-YO MA IntermISSIon Strauss Aus Italien, Op. 16 In the Country Amid the Ruins of Rome On the Shores of Sorrento Neapolitan Folk Life These concerts are generously sponsored by Alexandra and John Nichols, Cindy Sargent, and the Zell Family Foundation. Maestro Muti and the musicians of the CSO have graciously contributed their services for Saturday evening’s Pension Benefit Concert. Maestro Muti’s 2011 Spring Residency is supported in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Steinway is the official piano of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts CommentS BY PHILLIP HuSCHeR mason Bates Born January 23, 1977, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The B-Sides n March 20, some 1.8 million Mason Bates is already recog- Opeople watched the YouTube nized as one of the signal com- Symphony Orchestra concert that posers of our still young century. featured Mason Bates’s Mothership, He first gained the kind of wide the new piece he composed for exposure composers rarely ever that ensemble, which has stretched achieve in April 2009, when the the definition of the orchestra first YouTube Symphony Orchestra, with its novel online audition in its highly publicized Carnegie process and huge laptop follow- Hall debut concert, played the final ing. (Eugene Izotov, the CSO’s section of The B-Sides with Bates principal oboe, traveled to Sydney, performing electronica in the middle Australia, where the 2011 YouTube of the orchestra, as he does in these Symphony project took place, to performances of the complete work be one of the orchestra’s coaches this week in Chicago. Bates prefers and mentors and to perform in the the term electronica (which word- concert.) Since then, an estimated processing programs automatically 30 million viewers have seen the change to electronic) to electronic performance, a number which was music, because, as he says, “the all but unimaginable as recently as, trajectory of almost every classical well, March 20. (It is now the most composer into electronics has been watched lived music concert on the through computer music.” That is Internet, according to YouTube.) not Bates’s story. ComPoSed InStrumentatIon woodblocks, castanets, 2009 two flutes and piccolo, two snare drum, bass drum, oboes and english horn, two glockenspiel, marimba, FIrSt PerFormanCe clarinets, e-flat clarinet and vibraphone, djembe, large May 20, 2009, San Francisco bass clarinet, two bassoons broom, typewriter, oil These are the first Chicago and contrabassoon, four drum), harp, piano, celesta, Symphony Orchestra horns, three trumpets, strings, electronica performances three trombones and tuba, timpani, percussion aPProxImate (suspended and crash PerFormanCe tIme cymbals, triangles, sand- 20 minutes paper blocks, tambourine, 2 After a relatively normal musical genre-mixing that they would get upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, both sides of the equation right.” In which included piano lessons Bates’s recent scores, the fusion is and singing in the choir, Bates so natural and the use of electronics studied composition and English so integral and unforced that the literature in the Columbia–Juilliard “electronica” tag seems irrelevant. Exchange program. He worked In works like The B-Sides, Bates with David Del Tredici (his Final reveals his love of the grand orches- Alice was a hit of the Solti era in tral tradition of the late nineteenth Chicago) and John Corigliano and early twentieth centuries as (the CSO’s first-ever composer- well as his innate disregard for in-residence), and then moved to stylistic boundaries. “I like mixing the Bay Area in 2001 to enroll in it up,” Bates once said, “But I am a the Ph.D. program at Berkeley’s classical composer—there is a level Center for New Music and Audio of focus at a classical concert that Technologies. His career, like his my music needs.” Last season, when music, is a singular mix of old- the Chicago Symphony played world establishment and New Age Bates’s music for the first time, culture: he has been lavished with the mix was bigger than ever: his big-league honors, from institutions Music from Underground Spaces was such as the American Academy in danced here in Orchestra Hall by Rome and the American Academy Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in for Arts and Letters (an award a work choreographed by Alejandro that “acknowledges the composer Cerrudo as Deep Down Dos. who has arrived at his or her own The idea for The B-Sides voice”), and he has also spent many originated two years ago with the nights as a DJ, spinning and mixing suggestion that Bates write a set at dance clubs in San Francisco, of pieces that focus on texture New York City, Berlin, and Rome. and sonority—something akin Initially, Bates made a name to Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for for himself for the thoughtful Orchestra (which the CSO intro- and engaging ways he merged the duced to the U. S. nearly a century classical and electronic sides of ago). “Since my music had largely his background, beginning with gone in the other direction—large Omnivorous Furniture, premiered works that bathed the listener in at Disney Hall in Los Angeles in immersive experiences—the idea 2004. With that and the works that intrigued me,” Bates recalled. The quickly followed, Bates seemed result was this suite of “off-kilter uniquely equipped to create an symphonic pieces,” as Bates calls organic mix of different kinds of them, that he named The B-Sides. music that had nothing to do with “Like the forgotten bands from the fads or gimmicky cross-culturalism. flipside of an old piece of vinyl, The As composer and critic Kyle Gann B-Sides offers brief landings on a put it, “Eventually, someone was variety of peculiar planets, unified bound to grow up so immersed in by a focus on fluorescent orchestral 3 sonorities and the morphing the vastness and mystery of rhythms of electronica.” Bates space, deliriously unhooking describes the itinerary: from the spacecraft to drift away blissfully. The first stop is the dusky, circuit-board landscape of His final vision of the coast Broom of the System. To the of Northern California drops ticking of a future clock, our us down close to home. The broom—brought to life by initial grit of Temescal Noir, sandpaper blocks and, at one like the Oakland neighbor- point, an actual broom—qui- hood of the title, eventually etly and anonymously keeps shows its subtle charm in hazy, everything running, like a jazz-tinged hues. Unbothered chimney sweep in a huge by electronics, this movement machine. The title is from receives some industrious help a short-story collection by in the rhythm department by David Foster Wallace, though a typewriter and oil drum. At one could place the fairylike its end, the broom returns in broom in Borges’s Anthology of a cameo, again altering the Fantastic Zoology. tempo, and this propels us into Warehouse Medicine. A hom- The ensuing Aerosol Melody age to techno’s birthplace—the (Hanalei) blooms on the empty warehouses of Detroit— north shore of Kauai, where the final stop on The B-Sides a gentle, bending melody gives no quarter. Huge brass evaporates at cadence points. swells and out-of-tune pizzicati Djembe and springy pizzicati emulate some of the visceral populate the strange fauna of sonorities of techno, and on this purely acoustic movement, this pounding note The B-Sides inspired by several trips with bows out. the Fleishhacker family. The lazy string glissandi ultimately put the movement, beachside, to sleep. Gemini in the Solar Wind is a re-imagination of the first A profile of Mason Bates begins on American spacewalk, using page 26. actual communication samples On May 13, at 9:00 p.m. Mason Bates from the 1965 Gemini IV will curate Mercury Soul, an event in partnership with Redmoon Theater that voyage provided by NASA. In is being described as a “cross between this retelling, clips of words, a twenty-first–century salon and a club phrases, and static from the party,” in which live music from CSO original are rearranged to musicians is interspersed with DJ sets show Ed White, seduced by of electronica. 4 robert Schumann Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Saxony, Germany. Died July 29, 1856, Endenich, near Bonn, Germany. Cello Concerto in a minor, op. 129 ometime in 1832, after injuring and continued to push him to try Shis right hand while practic- different genres and to move in ing the piano with a contraption new directions. designed to strengthen his fingers, On September 1, 1850, Robert, Robert Schumann took up the Clara, and their six children moved cello. It would never become his from Dresden to Düsseldorf, where instrument—even after his hand Robert was to succeed Ferdinand was so crippled that he had to give Hiller as conductor of the local up the piano for good. He never music society. At first, life seemed studied the cello sufficiently to uncommonly pleasant—more perform in public, and he wrote “easygoing” than in Dresden, as very little music for it.