Bernard Rands International Contemporary Ensemble Anthony Roth Costanzo, Countertenor Nicholas Masterson, Oboe Ryan Muncy, Saxophone Christian Knapp, Conductor
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Miller Theatre at Columbia University 2014-15 | 26th Season Composer Portraits Bernard Rands International Contemporary Ensemble Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor Nicholas Masterson, oboe Ryan Muncy, saxophone Christian Knapp, conductor Thursday, November 13, 8:00 p.m. From the Executive Director This November at Miller is all about vitality. Cyrus Chestnut is an absolute genius on the piano. I’ve heard him perform at Miller for many years now—long before I became Executive Director—and it’s always a special thrill to hear his stunning improvisations and unique style on our Steinway and in our hall, where each flourish sings. It’s also an absolute joy to welcome Anthony Roth Costanzo to our stage for the first time. The stars aligned to make this Composer Portrait possible: Bernard Rands was completing a new work, ICE expressed great interest in working with him, and Mr. Costanzo had an opening in his schedule—this concert could not have come together more perfectly. New York Polyphony returns on November 15 with a program to brighten the winter, featuring luxurious works from the Spanish Renaissance. It’s been an ongoing delight to work with this ensemble and to see the acclaim that they’ve garnered since their Miller Theatre debut in 2010. Last year, we commissioned a new piece for them, a work by composer Andrew Smith titled Nowell: Arise and Wake. They premiered it at a snowy concert presented by Miller last December, and the piece is now being highlighted on their album, Sing thee Nowell. I feel lucky to follow the accomplishments of the talented musicians we work with here, and if you’ve been coming to Miller over the years, you may feel the same way. New York Polyphony and ICE are both ensembles who we’ve been rooting for throughout the years, and been fortunate to see thrive. So it is fitting that this month we introduce another ambitious ensemble to the Miller stage, as the new music quartet loadbang makes their debut at a Pop-Up Concert on November 18. The unique instrumentation of this group (baritone voice, bass clarinet, trumpet, and trombone) speaks to the type of inquisitive music-making that I absolutely love, and that is central to our mission. All of this month’s musical offerings share an enthusiasm and warmth. Whichever of these performances resonates most with you, I hope it brings you joy. Melissa Smey Executive Director Miller Theatre at Columbia University 2014-15 | 26th Season Composer Portraits Thursday, November 13, 8:00 p.m. Bernard Rands International Contemporary Ensemble Christian Knapp, conductor Bernard Rands (b. 1934) déjà (1972) Memo 6 (1998) Ryan Muncy, alto saxophone Concertino (1996) Nicholas Masterson, oboe INTERMISSION Onstage discussion with Bernard Rands and Claire Chase Folk Songs (2014) New York premiere 1. Missus Murphy’s Chowder 2. The Water is Wide 3. Mi Hamaca 4. Dafydd y Garreg Wen 5. On Ilkley Moor Baht ’At 6. I Died for Love 7. Über d’ Alma 8. Ar Hyd y Nos 9. La Vera Sorrentina Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor This program runs approximately two hours, including intermission. Major support for Composer Portraits is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. Please note that photography and the use of recording devices are not permitted. Remember to turn off all cellular phones and pagers before tonight’s performance begins. Miller Theatre is ADA accessible. Large print programs are available upon request. For more information or to arrange accommodations, please call 212-854-7799. About the Program Introduction “I put myself in touch with an area of myself that I would not otherwise be in touch with, and when I offer my music to an audience, I offer them the same opportunity to be in touch with an area of themselves that they wouldn’t otherwise be. That, for me, is the main role of music of all kinds.” —Bernard Rands There is a very simple Bernard Rands story, that of the European modernist who moved to the U.S. in his early forties and became an American poetic romantic. Like most very simple stories, though, it is only half-true. Even in the early 1960s, when Rands was fresh from studies with Luciano Berio and fully associated with the avant-garde, his sense was of sound as a fluid, sensuous, evocative medium, while his more recent music by no means conceals the fissures and excitations of his earlier work. Moreover, his development has been part of a general evolution in contemporary music, away from abstraction and towards a re-engagement with traditional discourse. He is the same man and the same musician he always was, throughout an output that now stretches back more than half a century: cultivated, searching, generous, captivating. Born in Sheffield, in northern England, whose regional accent left its soft trace in his speaking voice, he studied music, philosophy, and literature at the University of Wales at Bangor. Then came the Italian sun: studies in Rome with Roman Vlad (1958-59), in Florence with Luigi Dallapiccola (1959-60), and in Milan with Berio (1962-63). Unlike his northern English contemporaries Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, Rands began to make his way in a continental European context. His first published compositions were written for the Darmstadt summer courses: Actions for Six for Bruno Maderna to conduct in 1963, and Espressione IV for the Kontarsky duo pianists to play two years later. Also at Darmstadt came his encounter with Pierre Boulez, through whom his music was to be introduced to British audiences, with the première of Wildtrack 1 in 1969 with Boulez conducting the BBC Symphony. It was at this point that Rands moved into a new gear creatively, with more large-scale pieces, the first of hisMemos for solo performers, and the glimmerings of a Vincent van Gogh opera, a project not completed until almost forty years later. However, just when he had become solidly established in Britain, as a composer and as a member of the country’s most progressive composition faculty at the University of York, he moved to U.C.S.D., where he taught for a decade from 1975 to 1985, transferring thereafter to Harvard. The U.S. environment was not entirely new—he had spent two years as a Harkness Fellow in 1966-68 at Princeton and Urbana—but his arrival, now permanent, and coinciding with a period of uncertainty in new music, brought a hiatus. He returned to full compositional vitality at the start of the 1980s, notably with song cycles on poems of the moon (Canti lunatici, 1980) and sun (Canti del sole, 1983-84), of which the latter won him a Pulitzer Prize. Le Tambourin (1984), a pair of suites for large orchestra based on paintings or drawings by Van Gogh, was introduced by the Philadelphia Orchestra and has been presented widely. Its success helped win him a position as composer-in-residence at Philadelphia (1989-96) as well as commissions from other major orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Symphony, 1995), the Chicago Symphony (apókryphos, 2002), the New York Philharmonic (Chains Like the Sea, 2008), and the Boston Symphony (Piano Concerto, 2014, written for Jonathan Biss). Meanwhile, he has gone on producing solo and chamber music, with three string quartets and a sequence of pieces based on Beckett poems in the latter category. déjà (1972) This is the program’s most distant image, of Rands back in England, more than forty years ago. It was a time of growing freedom and experiment, in music as in other spheres of life, and déjà, meaning “already” in French, belongs to that time, while also sending signals to our own. In particular, the piece participates in a venture to reimagine chamber music, both by giving individual musicians choices and by altering the balance in rehearsals, away from questions of how to realize a defined score to those of how to deal with some more or less malleable material. Passages that are fully written out alternate with repetitions of a “chorus” that allows a lot of room for the players, separately and together, to come up with their own solutions. All the notes are provided, and they are the same each time: a bunch of melodies—some highly constrained, others moving more freely—and a staccato flurry. What will change from one appearance to the next are the dimensions About the Program of speed (faster), dynamic level (louder), and duration (longer), in accordance with the composer’s instructions, and also matters of texture and interaction determined by the performers. At the limits, any of these choruses could be a solo break. A quasi-fugal invention would also be possible, or a free-for-all. The piece begins with a short fantasy on middle D, to which the piano, entering last, adds other notes. From here the free sections are interleaved with a short cello solo accompanied by piano, percussion, and viola, a jittery ensemble section, and another, of rotating fragments changing in dynamic profile. A short, low solo for alto flute, with piano and percussion, then gives way to a culmination, again of rotating patterns, waning into silence. Scored for a Pierrot lunaire quintet (flute, clarinet, viola, cello, and piano) plus percussion, the piece parallels the Concertino in length, and perhaps other resemblances will appear, as well as the differences. Memo 6 for alto saxophone (1998) In a series of solo pieces he began in 1971, Rands has taken up the challenge of Berio’s Sequenzas with affectionate admiration and adroitness, responding to particular instruments and also to particular performers—in this case, John Sampen.