New Juilliard Ensemble Behind every Juilliard artist is all of Juilliard —including you. With hundreds of dance, drama, and music performances, Juilliard is a wonderful place. When you join one of our membership programs, you become a part of this singular and celebrated community. by Claudio Papapietro Photo of cellist Khari Joyner Become a member for as little as $250 Join with a gift starting at $1,250 and and receive exclusive benefits, including enjoy VIP privileges, including • Advance access to tickets through • All Association benefits Member Presales • Concierge ticket service by telephone • 50% discount on ticket purchases and email • Invitations to special • Invitations to behind-the-scenes events members-only gatherings • Access to master classes, performance previews, and rehearsal observations (212) 799-5000, ext. 303 [email protected] juilliard.edu The Juilliard School presents New Juilliard Ensemble Joel Sachs, Founding Director and Conductor Vivian Yau, Soprano Tuesday, November 7, 2017, 7:30pm Bruno Walter Orchestral Studio, Room 309 MAURICIO From Die Stücke der Windrose (1988–94) KAGEL Südosten (1991) (1931–2008) Süden (1989) U.S. Premieres Intermission GIYA Exile (1993–94) KANCHELI Einmal, da hörte ich ihn (Paul Celan) (b. 1935) Zähle die Mandeln (Paul Celan) Psalm (Paul Celan) Exil (Hans Sahl) Psalm 23 (Old Testament) Vivian Yau, Soprano Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. 1 Cover photo by Nan Melville Notes on the Program by Joel Sachs "Südosten" and "Süden" from Die Stücke der Windrose MAURICIO KAGEL Argentina has produced two of the seminal figures of unconventional Mauricio Kagel post-war music, Mario Davidovsky, who became a New Yorker after years at Harvard, and Mauricio Kagel, one of the primary instigators of Born: new ideas in Europe. Buenos Aires, Argentina, The unconventional Kagel household—Jewish and leftist, a dangerous in 1931 combination during the Perón dictatorship—must have influenced their son’s thinking. His musical training included music theory, voice, Died: conducting, piano, cello, and organ (but not composition, in which he was Cologne, Germany, self-taught), as well as philosophy and literature. At 18 he became advisor in 2008 to a new-music group in Buenos Aires, and soon began to compose, challenging himself to write in a style that violated Perón’s mandated neo-classicism. He also conducted, helped found a cinematheque, and was film and photography editor of an avant-garde journal. His decisive opportunity arrived in 1957 when a grant from the German Academic Exchange Commission allowed him to study in Cologne, a major hub of the industrial Rhineland and major center of European new music thanks to its excellent conservatory and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), the non-commercial radio and television center that has been a breeding ground for experimental performing arts. By the time Kagel arrived, WDR had become a pioneer in electronic music, hosting one of the world’s first synthesizer studios under the direction of Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen, making Cologne a mecca for performers and composers, some of whom—especially Stockhausen —were determined to destroy the old bourgeois aesthetic which they regarded as part of the root of Nazi culture. Cologne rapidly embraced Kagel, who became an insider by virtue of being an outsider. He studied at the summer course in Darmstadt, which presented the newest musical ideas, and soon began lecturing there; he conducted new music concerts and began traveling, visiting the U.S., where his music roiled many critics. In 1964–65 he served as visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, another hotbed of musical innovation. In 1969 he became director of the Cologne Conservatory’s Institute for New Music. Five years later he was appointed director of new-music-theater at the school. Kagel lectured internationally, conducted, and produced films and radio plays. Numerous prizes and honors included France’s Order of Arts and Letters. His publishers include Universal Edition (Vienna) and Litolff/Peters. Kagel’s work defies a brief summary because he embraced virtually all of the possibilities inherent in the music of the 20th century. Some compositions are fully written out; others employ graphic notation and 2 aleatoric procedures. Theatrical elements, whether in the foreground or not, are a common thread. Not striving to combine many arts in a joint effort, he preferred to transplant modes of thinking from one art to another. Yet he retained his devotion to the western tradition, to which he paid tribute in compositions whose irony does not dampen their respect for the past. Even the underlying tonal structure of his later works did not render them at all reactionary. All of Mauricio Kagel’s creative efforts display the mind of an immensely witty, urbane gentleman with a love for the absurd. Like those of many South Americans, his creations often have surreal or Dadaist qualities perfectly suited to artistic cross- fertilization. The eight compositions called Stücke der Windrose, (Compass Points Pieces) written between 1988 and 1994 and scored for salon orchestra, are named for the eight points of the compass and bear references to various parts of the world. They can be played separately or in any combination. After considerable difficulty choosing among them, I felt that “Südosten” (1991) and “Suden” (1989) make a nice pair. Kagel described “Southeast” as stretching from the Caribbean to the Amazon. “South” refers to Europe south of the Alps, which Kagel evokes with what he called “an unambiguous tarantella.” Both pieces receive their U.S. premieres tonight. Exil GIYA KANCHELI Giya Kancheli, the only Georgian composer with an international Giya Kancheli reputation, was educated at the Tbilisi Conservatory, whose faculty he joined in 1972. Originally also a jazz performer and film composer, he Born: directed the music department of the distinguished Rustaveli Theater Tbilisi, Georgia, for two decades (one of the most important theatrical institutions in in 1935 the former Soviet Union), received important state prizes for his music and served on the board of the Georgian Composers’ Union. In the early 1990s, however, he and his family moved to Berlin to escape the post-Soviet chaos that devastated large sections of Tbilisi. A short-term appointment as composer in residence to the Royal Flemish Philharmonic brought them to Antwerp, where he and his wife Lula still make their home in a neighborhood that, other than them, is almost entirely orthodox Jewish. Although his music is not yet well known in the U.S., its frequent performances in Europe allow the couple to live on commissions and royalties from performances and broadcasts that result from the strong new-music culture at many European radio stations, and from his prolific output of music for small ensembles and chamber orchestras after an earlier career writing for immense orchestras. His most recent pieces are Nu.Mu.Zu for orchestra (2015) and a piano trio (2016); he is now 3 Notes on the Program (Continued) finishing Maternal Alphabet, for narrator, children’s choir, and chamber orchestra, and working on a concerto for wind quintet and orchestra. His music is distinguished by its extreme quiet and spaciousness, and the sudden intrusion of almost violent outbursts. It is published by Sikorski and Belaieff. My association with Kancheli’s Exil and the Kanchelis began in 1993. Having gotten to know the couple through mutual Muscovite friends, I enjoyed a wonderful visit with them while in Berlin for a Continuum concert shortly after our Salzburg performance of Daytime Prayers. At that time, Cheryl Seltzer and I were researching a program of music from the Caucasus for a forthcoming Continuum concert in Bonn. I told the composer that we were stymied by the fact that he had not yet written much chamber music. (The large scoring of Daytime Prayers would not have been practical in Bonn.) As it happened, on the same night as our Berlin concert, Kancheli had the premiere of a new work in a local church. To our amazement, he rushed to our concert hall following the premiere of the piece, a setting of Psalm 23, which happened to be perfectly scored for our Bonn concert. We gave its American premiere in November 1993. Not long afterward, during a visit to New York, the composer revealed that he had extended Psalm 23 into a large cycle of songs about exile. The new version enabled us to give an entire concert of his music at Alice Tully Hall on February 25, 1995. That occasion was the second performance of Exil; the premiere had taken place in Italy the previous summer. Exil is a personal reflection on the composer’s own displacement from Georgia, through the words of Psalm 23 and its eternal expression of God’s protection to those who are alone, and through two poets whose lives were torn apart by Nazism: the Jewish Romanian Paul Celan (who was forced into slave labor) and the Jewish German Hans Sahl (who spent much of the war in New York). Exil is a magnificent distillation of Kancheli’s style—unadorned by superfluous ornament, unhurried, sparse of texture to the point that every slight change, every infrequent dissonance, assumes remarkable power. Above all, it displays Kancheli’s unfailing ear for the lyric line. Through it one hears his interest in music from the period before Bach through the present, and although the material rarely reflects the latest techniques, it is also in no way a recycling of the past but a fresh expression of timeless values. With the composer’s permission, Exil is performed with Psalm 23 at the end rather than the beginning, as Continuum did in his presence at the U.S.