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Season 2020111111----2020202011112222 The Philadelphia Orchestra Sunday, May 1313,, at 3:00 27th Season of Chamber Music ConcertsConcerts————PerelmanPerelman Theater Takemitsu Rain Tree, for vibraphone and two marimbas Christopher Deviney Vibraphone Angela Zator Nelson Marimba Anthony Orlando Marimba Zivkovic Trio per uno, Op. 27, for percussion trio I. Meccanico II. Contemplativo III. Molto energico Christopher Deviney Percussion Angela Zator Nelson Percussion Anthony Orlando Percussion Ravel Alborada del gracioso, for two marimbas ChristopheChristopherr Deviney Marimba Angela Zator Nelson Marimba Intermission Janáček String Quartet No. 1 (“Kreutzer Sonata”) I. Adagio—Con moto II. Con moto III. Con moto—Vivo—Andante—Tempo I IV. Con moto—Adagio—Maestoso Noah Geller Violin Jennifer Haas Violin Renard Edwards Viola John Koen Cello Ravel String Quartet in F major I. Allegro moderato II. Assez vif, très rhythmé—Lent—Tempo I III. Très lent IV. Vif et agité Jennifer Haas Violin Noah Geller Violin Renard Edwards Viola John Koen Cello This program runs approximately 1 hour, 50 minutes. Rain Tree TTTōruTōru Takemitsu Born in Tokyo, October 8, 1930 Died there, February 20, 1996 The Oriental influence is not new in art music. Composers from Mozart to Debussy and, more recently, Olivier Messiaen, Henry Cowell, and John Cage often turned to Asia as an exotic alternative, or a corrective remedy, to the established traditions of European culture. But these were, of course, Western composers appropriating the gestures, textures, and sounds of Asian music. The first Asian composer to bridge the cross-cultural gap from the other direction was the Japanese musician Tōru Takemitsu, who paved the way for the later “New Wave” of Asian composers in the West during the 1980s and ’90s. While retaining its sense of “other”-ness, Takemitsu’s music was influenced by a number of Western musical styles including jazz and popular song. He also incorporated avant-garde procedures and, later, traditional Japanese music into a synthetic amalgam that honored both East and West. And in a kind of reverse homage, Takemitsu based his harmonic idiom largely on the music of Debussy and Messiaen, two of the composers who, in turn, were powerfully influenced by Asian musical practices. Added into the mix of Takemitsu’s musical language were some of Cage’s chance procedures and theories of silence and sound. Largely self-taught in his youth, Takemitsu’s musical training was interrupted by World War II. But it was while serving as part of a student relief organization during the latter years of the war that he first heard the French popular song “Parlez-moi d’amour,” an experience that convinced him music was his life’s calling. After the war he worked in the kitchen at an American military base, which gave him free access to a piano. Then, as his career developed through the 1950s, he aligned himself with a number of avant-garde groups of Japanese artists and musicians that consciously fostered new approaches to artistic performance and composition. The first of Takemitsu’s works to gain international attention was his Requiem for Strings from 1957, written to honor one of his music teachers, the composer Fumio Hayasaka. Stravinsky spoke glowingly of the Requiem after hearing it in 1958. Then Takemitsu’s scores began to be performed even more frequently in North America when his friend and compatriot Seiji Ozawa was appointed conductor of the Toronto Symphony. Film scores for the famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa further strengthened the composer’s reputation in both Japan and the West. Takemitsu wrote three musical works based on a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe titled Atama no ii, Ame no Ki (The Ingenious Rain Tree). In a passage from this novel, a tree is described as being so abundant with foliage that raindrops continue to fall from it for hours, long after the rain itself has stopped. Two of these compositions, Rain Tree Sketch (1982) and Rain Tree Sketch II (1992), both for piano solo, are among Takemitsu’s most frequently performed keyboard works. The first work in this trilogy is titled simply Rain Tree, and was composed in 1981 for three-person percussion ensemble consisting of vibraphone and two marimbas, with each performer also playing crotales. Gentle raindrops from the crotales open this single-movement piece, which then merges into the metallic sounds of the vibraphone. It evokes impressionistically both the randomness of individual raindrops and the overall textural consistency of the rain itself. Marimba ostinatos multiply as the “rain tree” of the title begins to shower down in droplets, slowing and pausing periodically but never ceasing entirely. The ostinatos gradually transform into rising scales and motifs, as if our gaze turns upward to see where the drops are falling from. In place of a predictable arching form with a climax and conclusion, the composer crafts a subtle ebb and flow of meditative sound. Marimba tremolos shimmer in the light, and the interdependent layering of water, light, and vision continues to the end, punctuated by glistening crotales effervescences. —Luke Howard Trio per uno Nebojša Živković Born in Sremska MitroMitrovica,vica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), July 5, 1962 Now living in Stuttgart Serbian composer and marimbist Nebojša Živković completed graduate studies in composition, theory, and percussion in Mannheim and Stuttgart, where he has lived since 1980. Since that time he has become one of the most performed composers of percussion music in the world today, with many of his works enjoying an international reputation as standards in the percussion repertory. Živković is one of the few musicians today who can honestly lay claim to being both a virtuoso performer and a renowned composer—a rare combination that harks back to the 19th-century traditions of Liszt and Paganini. Živković is perhaps best-known for his series of pieces written especially for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, including a concerto for percussion and orchestra ( The Concerto of the Mad Queen, from 2000), Born to beAT WILD (2001) for Glennie and trumpet virtuoso Håkan Hardenberger, and Quasi una sonata (2001) for piano and percussion, premiered by Glennie and pianist Emanuel Ax. Živković is also widely known for his Funny Mallets series of composition for younger players. The marimba is Živković’s preferred instrument, and it dominates his compositions. This makes his Trio per uno, composed in 1995, somewhat unusual in his oeuvre because it is written for a percussion ensemble that includes pitched percussion, but without the marimba. The title—Trio for One—refers to the sets of percussion instruments that are literally at the center of each performance of the piece. In each of the three movements, one percussion set is surrounded by the three performers who draw out the music from it. In the first movement (MeccanicoMeccanicoMeccanico), each of the three players surrounds a central bass drum, which is laid flat between them, and plays the drum with timbale sticks. Each performer also has Chinese gongs and a pair of bongos. The bass-drum dominates the first movement, beginning with a steady, energized pulse that expands into rimshots and elaborations on the gongs and bongos. Although there are no pitched instruments as such in this percussion set, it still produces a tremendous variety of registers, from the deep visceral thumping of the bass drum through the mid-range bongos, the high clacking of the rimshots and the clash of the gongs. The rhythms and precisely coordinated movements of the players suggest an elaborate primal ritual that merges archaic dance and musical performance. The second movement (ContemplativoContemplativoContemplativo), the longest of the three, is lyrical and meditative. The percussion set here includes a single vibraphone and a set of suspended crotales. Two players perform on the vibraphone, overlapping rhythmic patterns with arching motifs in quintuple meter. Against this gentle backdrop, the crotales sound out a pensive, exotic melody in cross-rhythms. For the finale (MoltoMolto energicoenergico), which returns to unpitched percussion, each player performs on snare drum and a pair of tom-toms. In this rapid-fire finale, the rhythmic patterns are often played in unison, but occasionally break up into complex cross-rhythms, propelling the Trio to its dynamic, virtuoso conclusion. —Luke Howard Alborada del gracioso Maurice Ravel Born in Ciboure, Lower Pyrenees, March 7, 1875 Died in Paris, December 28, 1937 By 1904 Ravel had already been forced to leave Gabriel Fauré’s composition class at the Paris Conservatory. “Audacious” works such as his String Quartet—today a cornerstone of the repertory—hardly stood him in good stead in a musical climate where formal instruction was still based on the arcane study of Renaissance polyphony. Finally he dropped out of the class altogether, becoming involved instead in a group of aesthetes who called themselves “Les Apaches”—a disparate collection of intellectuals who met to discuss art, literature, music, and history. It was at meetings of the “Apaches” that Ravel tried out his more daring piano works, often for audiences that included such imminent musicians as Manuel de Falla and Florent Schmitt. There his friend Ricardo Viñes first played Ravel’s 1904 collection of Miroirs for piano, two of which would later become concert favorites in the composer’s orchestral transcriptions: the painterly Une Barque sur l’océan and the complex, sun- splashed final piece, Alborada del gracioso, orchestrated in 1918. “The Miroirs form a collection of piano pieces that mark a rather considerable change in my harmonic evolution,” Ravel wrote in his 1928 autobiography. “This shift disconcerted musicians who until then had been thoroughly accustomed to my style.” These pieces differed from the composer’s earlier works in that they were informed less by form or logic than by color, light, and shade.

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