Nov 06 Prog RIGHT for Web.Qxd
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS David Milnes, Music Director Monday, 6 November 2006, 8 pm Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum Performers Tod Brody, flute Carey Bell, clarinet NEW PIANO NOW William Wohlmacher, bass clarinet Julie Steinberg, keyboard LUCA FRANCESCONI Encore/Da capo (1985/1995) Karen Rosenak, piano Graeme Jennings, violin Darcy Rindt, viola BRUNO MANTOVANI Jazz Connotation (1998) Stephen Harrison, cello OSCAR STRASNOY Exercices de Latinité (2002) Christopher Froh, percussion I. Cha-cha-cha II. Tango III. Tarantella This concert is made possible in part by the generous support of the Phyllis C. Wattis MAGNUS LINDBERG Etude (2001) Foundation. POUL RUDERS, Event Horizon (2001) Jay Gottlieb, piano Mr. Gottlieb’s piano recital is made possible by a generous grant from the Ross McKee Foundation. ~ INTERMISSION ~ The performance of music by Donatoni, Francesconi, and Scelsi is underwritten in part by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura.. MAURICE OHANA Free Counterpoints (1985) KAREN TANAKA Techno Etude no. 2 (2000) GIACINTO SCELSI Four Illustrations (1953) I. Vishnu sleeps; Saraszati plays the zither II. Vishnu as wild boar III. Rama IV. Krishna FRANCO DONATONI excerpts from Françoise - Variationen Steinway Piano provided by Sherman Clay Concert Event Services. (1983-96) Jay Gottlieb, piano LUCA FRANCESCONI Encore/Da capo (1985/1995) Program Notes A new venture by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players LUCA FRANCESCONI (B. 1956) uring a recent visit to California, in preparation for the pre- Falling miere of a piece commissioned by Oliver Knussen and the DLos Angeles Philharmonic, Luca Francesconi was heard to James Matheson’s say: “It is very important to find clear ideas, after all the complexity of 2007 Contemporary Insights, Vibra-Elufa the avant-garde, without giving up the fantastic power of everything in this century that just passed. It is important now, more and more, February 21 to use simple elements.” Few would describe Francesconi’s music as Wednesday,Julie Steinberg, piano; Roy Malan, violin;William Leighton Winant, Fong,percussion cello simple: on the contrary, it is highly refined in gesture. Musicologist Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 2007 Susanna Pasticci has pointed out that many of Francesconi’s works “follow labyrinthine routes in developing material on multiple levels,” April 29, yet his “clearly delineated textures...give the listener unmistakable Sunday, Meet the musicians points of reference.” As we shall hear tonight, this is music that both deserves and rewards repeated listening. Performances by leading musicians of contemporary music Informative talks on the music Francesconi's ideas about “simple elements” carry extra weight because the techniques and values of the European avant-garde were part of his training and remain part of his aesthetic. After studying Deepen your understanding and appreciation of new music composition from Azio Corghi at the Milan Conservatory, he worked Bring friends! Prepare yourselfEnjoy for the conversation upcoming concert over a glass of wine with both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, and was thus exposed to the most prestigious postwar voices of German and Italian composition. The fact that he studied with Stockhausen in Each Contemporary Insights event will focus on part of the program for Rome and with Berio at Tanglewood suggests the internationalism the following Monday’s subscription concert. Presenters and musicians that Francesconi has subsequently embraced. His career as composer will talk and answer questions about the music and the composer, illus- trating with musical examples. The complete featured work will be per- and conductor has taken him around the world and his music makes formed. its own global journey, incorporating in works like his 1984 Suite (for Wednesday, February 21, 2007, 7:30 - 9:00 pm orchestra, jazz quartet and percussion ensemble from Guinea) what Sunday, April 29, 2007, 4:00 - 5:30 pm. Pasticci calls “a polyphony of mixed idioms, ranging from Machaut to at Piedmont Piano Company, Stravinsky, orchestral writing to jazz or Italian folklore to African per- 660 Third Street between Townsend and Brannan. cussion.” As this Suite suggests, Francesconi is known for his playful http://www.piedmontpiano.com/ relationship with things past: he has written an opera about the color- Call (415) 278-9566 or email [email protected] to reserve a place. Seating is ful renaissance madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo and has made a suite for limited. Suggested donation: $10 per event. wind band out of Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo. His more abstract ruminations on remembered sounds can be heard in the cycle Quattro Studi sulla memoria (Memoria, Richiami II, Riti neurali, A fuoco), and this 5 year he was the featured composer at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, already considerable powers through the use of an electric violin. which took as its theme “Music and Memory.” While he describes his solo Respiro (1987) as “a ‘breathless’ struggle between two instruments: a trombone and a human body,” his later Like many who came under the influence of Stockhausen, Francesconi Animus (1995-96, realized at IRCAM for Benny Sluchin) complements has sought out or created institutions that foster research in new music the trombone with live electronics in a meditation on the dual mean- technologies. He founded the Agon center for electronic music in ings of its title, spirit and breath: “this animus, this essence, both Milan, and taught at IRCAM (Paris’s Institute de Recherche et physical and elusive, constitutes the material of dreams, and at the Coordination Acoustique/Musicale) in 1995. He has shown a particu- same time the material of the body: the breath.” lar interest in composing for radio, which seems to appeal to his desire for music that is “multimedia” in conception, yet purely sonic in real- Francesconi has won many international prizes including awards from ization. He often speaks of a “theater of the imagination,” and his Gaudeamus, Martin Codax, and the New Music Composers’ many operatic works bear out his preoccupation with the dramatic. In Competition, as well as the Guido d'Arezzo Prize and Darmstadt’s addition to four radio theater pieces for RAI (Radiotelevisione Kranichsteiner Musikpreis. In 1994 he was awarded the Siemens Italiana), his secular oratorio Sirene/Gespenster (Sirens/Ghosts) of 1996- Prize and the Prix Italia for his Ballata del rovescio del mondo (1994), a 97 counts among its co-commissioners, the West German, South radio opera with text by Fiori. His works have been commissioned by German, and Dutch state radios, as well as the ASKO ensemble and Ensemble InterContemporain, the ASKO ensemble, the Nieuw IRCAM. Of course, Francesconi has also written operatic works that Ensemble, Contrechamps, and the London Sinfonietta, among others. include important visual elements. Chief among these are the video- In addition to his year at IRCAM, Francesconi has taught at the opera Striàz (with images created by Milan’s Studio Azurro) and his Rotterdam and Strasbourg Conservatories and has been a guest com- more recent Ballata, based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the poser at the Akiyoshidai Festival in Japan, the Young Nordic Music Ancient Mariner (2002), with libretto by Umberto Fiori, the Milanese festival, Madrid’s Centro Reina Sofia, the University of Montreal, and poet and rock songwriter who has furnished texts for a number of San Francisco State University. He is currently an active conductor of Francesconi’s works. Commissioned and successfully premiered by the contemporary music and a Professor of composition at Milan Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Ballata plays with both time and Conservatory. space, involving flashbacks and the juxtaposition of eighteenth- and twenty-first century references, and using electronics (and an off-stage “gypsy”-style band) to locate sounds in different parts of the auditori- Encore/Da capo (1985/1995) um. for flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, vibraphone/marimba/glockenspiel, acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes piano, violin, viola, and cello Though many of his works include electronics, the physicality of per- formance remains at the heart of Francesconi’s oeuvre. Perhaps this At first glance, the title of Francesconi’s ensemble work might seem can be traced to his experiences as a pianist and conductor, or to his redundant: encore (“again” or “once more”) and da capo (literally teacher Berio’s tendency to push solo performers into uncharted “from the top”). In fact, the apparent duplication is meaningful in waters. In 2004, Francesconi completed a concerto for Anssi more than one way. First, Encore/Da capo constitutes a revisiting of Karttunen that was inspired by his love of the cello, an instrument the older Da capo (1985-86), also for nine instruments. Second, and that he calls “bellissimo e crudele” (most beautiful and cruel). In Riti perhaps more intriguing, the dual title plays on the meanings and Neurali (1991), written for violinist Irvine Arditti, the composer pits motivations for musical repetition. The concert-goers’ enthusiastic the soloist’s rhapsodic and sometimes violent lines against a chamber “encore!” invites the exact repetition of something already perfected. ensemble, and in the more recent Body Electric, he augments Arditti’s The older instruction “da capo” suggests a more creative reprise, 6 7 either in rehearsal (“take it from the top”) or in the moment of per- the French government, Radio France, the Orchestre de Paris, formance, as in the baroque “da capo aria,” whose return to the open- Ensemble InterContemporain, Cologne Radio, and others, winning ing stanza both allowed and required the decoration and embellish- him prizes at the Stuttgart and Gaudeamus Competitions, an award ment of material already heard. In Francesconi’s hands, repetition from the UNESCO International Composers’ Tribune, scholarships involves reveling in the familiar and hearing things anew. Tonight’s from the Academie des Beaux-Arts and the Nadia and Lili Boulanger performance amplifies this productive ambiguity by bringing Foundation, the Grand Prix from the French Recording Academy, and Encore/Da capo back at the end of the program.