Doric String Quartet Peter Oundjian
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DORIC STRING QUARTET ROYAL SCOTTISH NATIONAL ORCHESTRA PETER OUNDJIAN John Adams, Los Angeles, February 1999 © Betty Freeman / Lebrecht Music & Arts Photo Library John Adams (b. 1947) Absolute Jest (2011, revised 2012)* 25:15 for String Quartet and Orchestra Dedicated to my friends Brent Assink, John Goldman, and Michael Tilson Thomas 1 = 100 – Poco più mosso – Tranquillo (lo stesso tempo = 100) – Tranquillo = 98 – 10:35 2 Presto = 130 – Lo stesso tempo – = 97 – = 127 – Tranquillo = 116 – = 87 – = 116 – 3:36 3 Lo stesso tempo ( = 116) – = 87 – = 87 – 1:08 4 Meno mosso = 80 – = 76 Moderato e tranquillo – = 116 – 3:20 5 Vivacissimo (Lo stesso tempo = 116) – 1:56 6 Prestissimo = 116 – = 88 – = 102 – = 60 4:40 3 Naive and Sentimental Music (1997 – 98) 45:57 for Orchestra For Esa-Pekka Sean Shibe steel-string guitar 7 I Naive and Sentimental Music. = 92 – = 108 – = 116 – = 66 – = 132 – = c. 98 – = c. 145 – Agitato – = 152 – = 132 – = 144 18:45 8 II Mother of the Man. Very calm = 72 – = 60 – = 120 – = 72 – = 110 – = 72 15:45 9 III Chain to the Rhythm. = 92 – = 96 – = 72 – = 100 11:17 TT 71:25 Doric String Quartet* Alex Redington violin Jonathan Stone violin Hélène Clément viola John Myerscough cello Royal Scottish National Orchestra Maya Iwabuchi leader Peter Oundjian The members of the Doric String Quartet perform using a set of classical bows by Luis Emilio Rodriguez Carrington. 4 Gerard Collett Photography Gerard Doric String Quartet John Adams: Naive and Sentimental Music / Absolute Jest Naive and Sentimental Music ‘Compelling, original and assured, it is John Adams (b. 1947) dedicated Naive and music hardly representative of its title, Sentimental Music to Esa-Pekka Salonen, at least in the modern sense of naive or who conducted the first performance, with sentimental’, wrote the music critic Mark the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on 19 February Swed in his Los Angeles Times review of 1999 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the rapturously received premiere. (‘The the Music Center of Los Angeles County. audience responded with thunder’, he Written for a large orchestra including six reported: ‘This is music people want to hear percussionists, keyboard sampler, and and should hear...’) Adams’s titles are indeed amplified steel-string guitar, the piece was sometimes puzzling, and in this instance co-commissioned by the Ensemble Modern Adams himself commented that he used Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, these two terms ‘knowing that they may at and Sydney Symphony Orchestra. The first be misunderstood’. But he had precise, dedication to Salonen, who also conducted historically informed meanings in mind: the work’s first recording (made for the words are to be taken in the way that Nonesuch in 2002), was significant: Adams Friedrich Schiller intended them in his essay felt that Salonen led a ‘bipolar’ musical life, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung since as both conductor and composer he (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry), first ‘experiences daily the jarring collisions of published in 1795. For Schiller, all poets fell public and private, of extrovert and introvert, into one of two distinct categories. ‘Naïve’ and the harsh divisions between one’s inner poets (a group which he felt included Homer and outer lives’. Such contrasts and clashes and Shakespeare) described their subjects lie at the very heart of Adams’s sweepingly simply and without engaging intellectually symphonic piece, which has also been used with them. By contrast, more modern, as the basis for a ballet (staged by New York ‘sentimental’ poets based their work on City Ballet in 2009, with choreography by their own feelings and thinking about their Peter Martins). subjects. Adams felt that this dichotomy 6 was admirably paraphrased by Isaiah Berlin, often accompanied by guitar, harps, and piano. who wrote of ‘those who are not conscious of Adams explained that the movement’s any rift between themselves and their milieu, extremely simple diatonic tune that or within themselves; and those who are so leaves the nest and ventures out into the conscious’. Furthermore, Berlin pointed out wide world like a Dickens child has its that ‘sentimental’ writing involved an element predecessors in several earlier pieces of of nostalgia for the ‘vanished, harmonious mine: the ‘Chorus of Exiled Palestinians’ world which some call nature’. from The Death of Klinghoffer [1991] and, In his own programme note on the work, more recently, the final movement of my Adams recognises that the ‘painfully acute clarinet concerto, Gnarly Buttons [1996], self-awareness’ of modern creative artists ‘Put Your Loving Arms Around Me’. has ensured that ‘the possibility for any The second movement (‘Mother of the Man’) truly “naive” art to exist in our ferociously was inspired by Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque art-historical and self-conscious times is (1909), an orchestral piece depicting a lullaby virtually nil’. But he also explained that this sung by an adult as he stands by his mother’s score nonetheless was an attempt to allow coffin; this image for Adams perfectly his own naive compositional voice to emerge, encapsulated the longing for a lost innocence even if most of us would regard sophisticated at the heart of sentimental art, while at the orchestral music as essentially sentimental same time Busoni’s title suggested the in nature: he argues (on the contrary) that conflict between naïve and sentimental because orchestral composition has for him aesthetics. The first performance of the always been ‘a natural and spontaneous Berceuse was given in New York in 1911 under gesture’, he is ‘at home’ with this medium in the baton of Mahler, a composer whom (along a manner broadly comparable to the spirit of with Ravel) Adams singled out for his attempt Schiller’s naive writers. to reclaim the emotional state of childhood The work falls into three movements, again in musical terms. Finally, ‘Chain to the (on his own admission) because such tripartite Rhythm’ is an accomplished essay in musical structures felt to Adams like something of a momentum entirely typical of Adams’s post- comfort zone. The gradually accelerating first minimalist dynamism, playfully exploring movement, its title replicating that of the piece fragmentary motifs and delighting in alluring as a whole, is melody-based, its ‘naïve’ theme percussive timbres. 7 Absolute Jest Stravinsky. Although today Pulcinella is one Commissioned by the San Francisco of the Russian composer’s most popular Symphony to celebrate its centenary, works, the idiosyncratic reworking of music Absolute Jest is a large-scale scherzo for by Pergolesi was controversial in its time, amplified string quartet and orchestra, and even displeased the very impresario who inspired by the music of Beethoven. The work had commissioned it: Sergey Diaghilev of was first performed on 15 March 2012 (as part the Ballets Russes, who reportedly trampled of the ‘American Mavericks’ series) at Davies on Picasso’s set designs for the ballet and, Hall, San Francisco, by the St Lawrence on hearing the eccentric arrangements String Quartet under the orchestra’s music by Stravinsky of the baroque material, director, Michael Tilson Thomas. (The score ‘went about for a long time with a look that is dedicated to Tilson Thomas, and also suggested “The Offended Eighteenth Century”’ to the orchestra’s executive director and (as the composer recalled). Stravinsky, who president, Brent Assink and John Goldman had not previously known Pergolesi’s music, respectively.) After the premiere, Adams had in fact regarded the whole project as was concerned that the work suffered from ‘deranged’ when it was first suggested to him. what he termed ‘sensory and expressive Adams, by contrast, was quick to point out overload’, particularly in its opening section, that his own love for Beethoven’s music had so he composed an entirely new first part been deep and lifelong, and in consequence (amounting to some 400 bars of fresh music) his creative response to it in Absolute Jest was and the revised version of the score was ‘a totally spontaneous act’. In an interview first heard on 1 December 2012, on which given at the time of the first performance, occasion the composer conducted the New Adams recalled that he had initially conceived World Symphony in Miami Beach, with the the piece for orchestra alone, but he had same soloists. added the quartet of soloists in order to The central concept for the piece – the emphasise a ‘hyperspace rate’ of virtuosity writing of a work heavily based on material which the orchestra alone could not by another composer – was directly adequately convey. suggested to Adams by hearing Tilson The bulk of the Beethoven material heard Thomas conduct the concert suite from in the piece comes (not surprisingly) from the the neoclassical ballet Pulcinella (1919) by string quartets, though there are references to 8 other works, too. The rejected opening section cue from the famously pulsating repeated was based on the scherzo of the C sharp harmony which opens the Waldstein Sonata minor Quartet, Op. 131, his soloists taking the (Piano Sonata No. 21 in C, Op. 53). The ending music through what Adams called ‘a series is particularly striking, as the music abruptly of strange permutations’. The replacement fizzles out on an understated flourish (in free opening instead sets up a dynamic time) from cowbells, piano, and harp, the two compound-time pulse in which there are last tuned to the archaic mean-tone scale and plentiful iterations of the descending-octave sounding like the last exhausted gasp of a motif of the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony distant antique fortepiano. (a movement which features a boldly original What does the title mean? Typically for solo use of the timpani to articulate its snappy Adams, it is both obscure and ambiguous. dotted rhythm); here there are also allusions ‘Absolute’ music is of course music in the to material from the Hammerklavier (Piano abstract, without a narrative programme, Sonata No.