In Which an Inscription Is Erased but Leaves a Trace Monday, February 27, 2012 • 8:00 Pm • Herbst Theatre
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San Francisco Contemporary Music Players Steven Schick, Artistic Director Zone 3: in which an inscription is erased but leaves a trace Monday, February 27, 2012 • 8:00 pm • Herbst Theatre LUIGI DALLAPICCOLA Piccola Musica Notturna (A Little Night Music) (1954, 1961) Approximate duration: 8 minutes MICHELLE LOU paralipomena (2012) World Premiere, commissioned by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players Approximate duration: 8 minutes SALVATORE SCIARRINO Le Voci Sottovetro (The Voices Behind Glass) (1998) Elaborations on Carlo Gesualdo of Venice, for voice and ensemble with readings from the letters of Torquato Tasso I. Gagliarda del Principe di Venosa (Galliard of the Prince of Venosa) Tasso: To Girolamo Mercuriale, Padova II. Tu m’uccidi, o crudele (You kill me, o cruel one) Tasso: To Maurizio Cataneo, Rome III. Canzon francese del Principe (French Canzona of the Prince) Tasso: To Giovan Battista Cavallara IV. Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (Pitifully, I die of my pain) Mary Bonhag, soprano; Luciano Chessa, readings Approximate duration: 26 minutes Intermission PASCAL DUSAPIN Comoedia (1992) Mary Bonhag, soprano Approximate duration: 10 minutes IANNIS XENAKIS Palimpsest (1979) Approximate duration: 12 minutes The Performers Steven Schick, conductor Mary Bonhag, soprano Tod Brody, flute Sarah Rathke, oboe (Sciarrino, Dusapin) Kyle Bruckmann, oboe (Dallapiccola, Lou, Xenakis) Peter Josheff, clarinet (Sciarrino, Dusapin) Bill Kalinkos, clarinet (Dallapiccola, Lou, Xenakis) Rebekah Heller, bassoon We dedicate this concert to the memory of Marcella DeCray (1925- Lawrence Ragent, horn 2011), co-founder, former Executive Director, and longime harpist of Adam Luftman, trumpet the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Eric Zivian, piano (Sciarrino) Cory Smythe, piano (Xenakis) A remembrance of Marcella DeCray by ensemble member Roy Malan, who worked closely with DeCray for many years as a member of the San Karen Rosenak, celesta Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the San Francisco Ballet, and William Winant, percussion (Sciarrino) the Telluride Chamber Music Festival: Christopher Froh, percussion (Xenakis) Karen Gottlieb, harp Students at the Curtis Institute in the early 1960’s were admitted Roy Malan, violin I (Sciarrino, Dusapin) free to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s matinees. From our seats we Graeme Jennings, violin I (Dallapiccola, Lou, Xenakis) enjoyed a ringside view of the musicians and I was always struck Hrabba Atladottir, violin II (Xenakis) by Marcella’s commanding presence. How could I have imagined Nanci Severance, viola (Sciarrino, Xenakis) that, shortly following my graduation, I would have the privilege of Roxann Jacobson, viola (Dallapiccola, Lou, Dusapin) making music with her on the concert stage and in the orchestral pit Mary Artmann, cello for more than two decades? Richard Worn, bass Marcella searched indefatigably for worthwhile new music for her own Luciano Chessa, readings and the Contemporary Music Players’ repertoire. Her persona in the Robert Shumaker, recording engineer group combined scintillating charm with a disarming directness and practicality. Her incomparable artistry was enhanced by her noble 2 deportment. There was nothing quite as grand as Marcella onstage with her harp, especially when she joined colleagues for chamber Please join us in the lower lounge music summers in Telluride, Colorado’s little opera house. for a reception after the concert. At some point during our years in the San Francisco Ballet pit a ballet 2 was programmed that involved our playing the Thais ‘Meditation’ together while a debauched party scene was taking place onstage. This concert is sponsored in part by grants from The dancers were required to become increasingly loud in their The Ross McKee Foundation and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. dissolute laughter until not a note we were playing could be heard. I’ll never forget Marcella’s total focus: as she finished playing she raised her head and hands heavenward just as if we were performing in Carnegie Hall. Roy Malan 2 SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS 3 LUIGI DALLAPICCOLA (1904-1975) his own Ulisse some twenty-five years later. Dallapiccola’s most ambitious dramatic work is Il Prigioniero, which reflects the influence of Berg in For a significant number of contemporary music lovers, the music its idiosyncratic treatment of its twelve-tone rows and in its gritty and of Luigi Dallapiccola is nearly perfect. Though he himself made no such psychologically rich subject matter. Though the opera is set during the claim, his music does provide a rare and elegant balance of quintessentially Spanish Inquisition, there is little doubt that Dallapiccola meant to reflect twentieth-century traits: a blending of Italianate lyricism and structural on the more contemporary conflicts that he himself had endured. Later in sophistication, a commitment to political expression that does not abandon life, advising students on selecting an operatic libretto in 1967, he offered intellectual rigor, and a deep respect for musical traditions of the past that an admonishment that resonates much more generally: “Memory, memory, also aims for new freedoms and new horizons. and again memory. Take careful notice of everything around you: none of As British musicologist John C. G. Waterhouse once observed, “The you can know a priori how important your brief notes might be to your seeds of Dallapiccola’s intense concern for liberty were sown early.” Born later work.” in disputed territory between Italy and Austria, he and his family were interned in Graz, Austria at the close of World War I; some twenty years Dallapiccola, Piccola Musica Notturna (1954, 1961) later the racial repression of Italian and German fascism forced him into for flute, oboe, Bb clarinet, harp, celesta, violin, viola, and cello seclusion with his Jewish wife. Small wonder that three of his most famous For Mozart, “a little night music” evoked good times: evening parties scores are the opera Il Prigioniero (The prisoner) (1944-48), the Canti de and serenades. How different is the noctural world of Dallapiccola. While prigionia (Songs of imprisonment) (1938-41), and Canti de liberazione it may partake of the dreamy qualities present in the piano Nocturnes (Songs of liberation) (1951-55). He even named his daughter Annalibera of Frederic Chopin, or even the midnight intensity of Wagner’s Tristan, and, in the manner of J. S. Bach’s “Notebook for Anna Magdalena,” Dallapiccola’s Piccola musica notturna exhales the distinctively twentieth- lent her name to an album of keyboard pieces. In fact, Dallapiccola was century timbres of Béla Bartók (who developed an entire “night music” a professional caliber pianist, and he worked from 1934-67 as a piano style of his own), and the moonlit madness of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, instructor, primarily at the Florence Conservatory. even drawing some of its pitch material from Pierrot’s eighth song, “Nacht” Dallapiccola’s reputation rests in part on his status as the first composer (Night). Unusually for Dallapiccola, the score is prefaced by a poem: outside of Arnold Schoenberg’s immediate purview to adopt and adapt Antonio Machado’s Noche de Verano (Summer Night), depicting a peaceful principles of that composer’s twelve-tone technique, in which all twelve evening stroll. pitches of the chromatic scale are presented in permutations of a carefully Originally written in 1954 as a short orchestral piece, commissioned ordered “row” or “series.” Though he had been thunderstruck by an April and premiered by Hermann Scherchen at a festival in Hanover, Piccolo 1924 performance of Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot lunaire, circumstances musica notturna was arranged in 1961 for chamber ensemble of eight prevented a closer association with the Second Viennese School. Instead, instruments and has become famous in this more transparent, ethereal as he wrote to music historian Hans Nathan in 1957: “due to the political version. Like most of the composer’s mature works, it relies on the twelve- circumstances, I had no contact with the masters of dodecaphony, the tone techniques explicated by Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, in this case idea of confronting its problems seemed to me to be an adventure. For using materials drawn from two related rows, each saturated with major and those who chose to follow this path, it took more than thirty years, and in minor thirds, eschewing the more pointed dissonances of the half-step and the absence of books explaining the system, it was possible to make many tritone. In part for these reasons, Dallapiccola’s is a tremendously allusive mistakes, and yet at the same time to discover, purely by chance, something score, a chiaroscuro play of light and shadow, uncanny, yet imperturbable. new. It was necessary, more than anything else, to have faith in one’s own instinct rather than in written or spoken rules.” Like Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg, Dallapiccola found his most ambitious expressive outlet in opera and other vocal music. Like Salvatore Sciarrino, he was inspired by the musical monuments of the Italian past, particularly by the madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo, as can be heard in his Cori di Michelangelo Buonarroti il giovane (1933-36), and by the opera Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria, attributed to Claudio Monteverdi, which Dallapiccola adapted in the early 1940s and took as a point of departure for 4 SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS 5 MICHELLE LOU (b. 1975) finalist in the Finale Composition Competition she is composing a new piece for the JACK Quartet, and she is also completing commissions for In thinking about her recent scores, composer Michelle Lou invokes violinist Graeme Jennings and Ensemble Elision. a “process of discovery,” a “sense of archaeology,” and even a “mythology” of sound and relationship to tradition. Tonight we will hear Lou’s creative Lou, paralipomena (2012) response to Luigi Dallapiccola’s Piccola musica notturna, one which she for flute, oboe, Bb clarinet, harp, celesta, violin, viola, and violoncello describes as a play of shadows and silence, affirmative connections and The composer writes: “paralipomena was commissioned by negative space.