Juilliard Orchestra Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor Jaewon Wee, Violin
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Thursday Evening, October 17, 2019, at 7:30 The Juilliard School presents Juilliard Orchestra Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor Jaewon Wee, Violin ANNA THORVALDSDÓTTIR (b. 1977) Metacosmos (2018) SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953) Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor (1935) Allegro moderato Andante assai Allegro, ben marcato JAEWON WEE, Violin Intermission BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945) Concerto for Orchestra (1944) Introduzione. Andante non troppo—Allegro vivace Presentando le coppie. Allegro scherzando Elegia. Andante non troppo Intermezzo interrotto. Allegretto Finale. Presto Performance time: approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, including an intermission The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium. Information regarding gifts to the school may be obtained from the Juilliard School Development Office, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6588; (212) 799-5000, ext. 278 (juilliard.edu/giving). Alice Tully Hall Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. soundscapes is on full display in Notes on the Program Metacosmos. Unfolding as a single move- by Thomas May ment that lasts about 14 minutes, the piece manifests this composer’s aesthetic of deep Metacosmos listening as well as a contemporary slant on ANNA THORVALDSDÓTTIR Romantic concept of “organic” unity as the Born: July 11, 1977, in Reykjavik, Iceland basis for musical creativity. Thorvaldsdóttir describes her composition as “an ecosys- The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir tem of materials that are carried from one emerged on the scene less than a decade performer—or performers—to the next ago (her debut album, Rhízo¯¯ma, appeared throughout the process of the work.” in 2011), but already she has become an internationally sought-after composer. She Beginning on a pedal E tone deep in was featured in a Composer Portrait con- the basses and contrabassoon (a half- cert at Columbia University’s Miller Theater step up from the Wagnerian genesis of in 2013 and in 2015 received the Kravis Das Rheingold), Metacosmos sustains a Emerging Composer Prize from the New sense of awe-filled vastness through its York Philharmonic—the second in that interplay of fore- and background, allowing award’s history. “Her uncompromising ap- lyrical tendrils to emerge. Immense energy proach to building soundscapes creates a courses through the piece, building but never visceral, pictorial aesthetic that is deeply expending itself in an all-encompassing connected to her Icelandic heritage,” re- climax. A gently mournful melody, folk-like marked Alan Gilbert, then the New York in its simplicity, takes shape against these Philharmonic’s music director, regarding roiling, deep currents. the choice of Thorvaldsdóttir. Thorvaldsdóttir offers this memorable in- The Kravis Prize culminated in the com- struction for the players with regard to mission by the New York Philharmonic of the sustained pitches that are a signature Metacosmos, the world premiere of which of her musical language: “Think of [one of Esa-Pekka Salonen led on April 4, 2018. these] as a fragile flower that you need to The Juilliard Orchestra had the honor of carry in your hands and walk the distance performing its U.K. premiere in July at the on a thin rope without dropping it or fall- BBC Proms (together with the players’ ing. It is a way of measuring time and no- peers from the Royal Academy of Music ticing the tiny changes that happen as you and under the baton of Edward Gardner). walk further along the same thin rope … ” The process is perhaps somewhat akin to Thorvaldsdóttir, who now makes her home Schoenberg’s idea of Klangfarbenmelodie, in London, was raised in a small town on the of textures themselves forming the southwestern coast of Iceland. After initial melodic interest. studies in her native country, she enrolled in the composition program at the Univer- The composer links her title, which sug- sity of California in San Diego, receiving her gests a “cosmos beyond,” not only to the Ph.D. there in 2011. She is composer-in- universe but to individual human experi- residence with the Iceland Symphony Or- ence as well. She explains her inspiration chestra. In May, the Gothenburg Symphony as involving “the speculative metaphor of Orchestra premiered her longest orchestral falling into a black hole—the unknown— score to date, AIO¯¯N, which she wrote to be with endless constellations and layers of performed either as an independent concert opposing forces connecting and communi- work or with choreography. cating with each other, expanding and con- tracting, projecting a struggle for power as Thorvaldsdóttir’s gift for channeling the re- the different sources pull on you and you sources of the orchestra into mesmerizing realize that you are being drawn into a force sense of homesickness may have blinded that is beyond your control.” Prokofiev to the perils he would have to navigate as a public cultural figure there. At the same time, Thorvaldsdóttir cautions He was further disarmed by the deceptively against hearing this metaphor in, say, the friendly treatment Communist authorities spirit of a Romantic tone poem. Her inspi- accorded him. The composer and his family ration, she writes, “is not something I am were given special privileges, including a trying to describe through the piece. To roomy Moscow apartment and permission me, the qualities of the music are first and foremost musical. When I am inspired by a to keep a blue Ford he had shipped over particular element or quality, it is because I from the U.S. Sporting his signature yellow perceive it as musically interesting, and the shoes and orange tie, Prokofiev struck a qualities I tend to be inspired by are often dapper figure in bold contrast to his com- structural, like proportion and flow, as well rades’ somber, drab attire. as relationships of balance between details within a larger structure, and how to move While living in the West, Prokofiev had culti- in perspective between the two—the de- vated the image of an arrogant enfant terri- tails and the unity of the whole.” ble, flirting with the fashionable avant-garde as he tried to earn his living as a concert Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63 pianist. Yet, little by little, he was reentering SERGEI PROKOFIEV the Soviet orbit in the period leading up to Born: April 23, 1891, in Sontsivka, Ukraine the Second Violin Concerto. His last com- Died: March 5, 1953, in Moscow mission for Western European audiences, the concerto was tailored for the French Each of Sergei Prokofiev’s two violin con- violinist Robert Soëtens, who had taken certos has a link with decisive moments part in the premiere of Prokofiev’s Sonata in his relationship to his native Russia. The for Two Violins. The composer’s cosmopol- Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 scuttled plans itan lifestyle of constant travel left its mark for the premiere of his precocious First on the creation of the Second Concerto. Concerto—it was eventually first heard in Prokofiev wrote it while shuttling between Paris in 1923—after which the composer Paris and resort towns in the Soviet Union, headed into voluntary exile. The Second and he even orchestrated the work in far- Violin Concerto dates from 1935, around away Baku. The Spanish tinge of the finale the time Prokofiev was weighing his de- (which calls for castanets) suggests a post- cision to return to Russia. Less than two card from Madrid, the city of its premiere. months after this work was premiered (in December of that year) came the notori- Yet even before he resettled in Moscow, ous denunciation by Soviet authorities of Prokofiev had been grappling with the is- Dmitri Shostakovich, Prokofiev’s younger sue of how to communicate with a larger colleague, for the allegedly “decadent” public—as opposed to addressing only a modernism of his runaway successful op- privileged elite. By 1934, he had formulat- era Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. ed a brief manifesto of his vision for a mu- sic centered on melody, with “simplicity” Prokofiev himself would face similar as its hallmark, but in which the simplicity charges a dozen years later, in 1948, when “should not be old-fashioned; it must be a he was one of several composers accused new simplicity.” This soon found expres- of writing music that was too “individualis- sion in his ballet music for Romeo and tic.” What made him risk the return to what Juliet and the present concerto, which he was now Stalin’s Soviet Union? A lingering composed side by side. The Second Violin Concerto thus tends to the percussion section an especially promi- be regarded as more “conservative” in de- nent role, including the aforementioned cas- meanor than the First. Even so, the solo vi- tanets, though he dispenses with timpani. olin starts off the work rather unconvention- The coda stages a fiery final display for the ally, without an orchestral introduction. The soloist, urged on by the orchestra. soloist intones a folklike theme that emerges from its lowest note: a lone, melancholy Concerto for Orchestra voice in the desert. The musicologist David BÉLA BARTÓK E. Schneider notes that, aside from exam- Born: March 25, 1881, in Sânnicolau Mare, ples by Gershwin and some English com- Romania posers, this is the first concerto “to begin Died: September 26, 1945, in New York City with a lyrical first theme after the First World War.… By the end of the 1930s lyricism While Prokofiev was able to return to his would come to occupy a primary position homeland—despite the negative conse- in a number of important concertos. Once quence he failed to foresee—Béla Bartók again … Prokofiev was in the vanguard.” headed into what would be permanent exile from his native Hungary early in the Second When the orchestra does enter, initially it is World War.