OLLY, ALL YE, IN COME FREE SUNDAY APRIL 14, 2013 8:00 OLLY, ALL YE, IN COME FREE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: GIL ROSE SUNDAY APRIL 14, 2013 8:00 JORDAN HALL AT NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY 20122013 Presentation of Honorary Doctorate to Oliver Knussen by NEC President Tony Woodcock Introduction by NEC composition faculty and Score Board member Kati Agócs ORCHESTRAL SERIES JORDAN HALL The Midsummer Marriage AT NEW ENGLAND SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2012 — 7:30 CONSERVATORY OLIVER KNUSSEN Music for a Puppet Court (1983) composer: Michael Tippett Pre-concert talk hosted by Sara Heaton soprano | Julius Ahn tenor I. Puzzle I “Iste tenor ascendit” The Score Board David Kravitz baritone | Deborah Selig soprano II. Toyshop Music after “tris” one hour prior to concert Matthew DiBattista tenor | Joyce Castle mezzo-soprano (except The Midsummer III. Antiphon after “Iste tenor ascendit...” Marriage) Lynn Torgove mezzo-soprano | Robert Honeysucker baritone IV. Puzzle II “tris” subscriptions ALBERTO GINASTERA Harp Concerto (1956) available Voilà! Viola! Krysten Keches, harp FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2013 — 8:00 Winner of the 2012–13 BMOP/NEC Concerto Competition composers: Crockett | Jacob | Perle | Ung | Yi Wenting Kang viola | Lizhou Liu viola | I. Allegro giusto Susan Ung viola | Kate Vincent viola II. Molto moderato III. Liberamente capriccioso – Vivace Olly, All Ye, In Come Free INTERMISSION SUNDAY, APRIL 14 2013 — 8:00 MICHAEL GANDOLFI The Nature of Light (2012) *FREE CONCERT* New England premiere composers: Gandolfi | Ginastera | Knussen Laura Ardan, clarinet I. Waves (Anthem) Gen OrcXstrated II. Particles (Shape Shifter) FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2013 — 8:00 OLIVER KNUSSEN Symphony No. 2 (1971) composers: Bates | Norman | Ruo Sonja Tengblad, soprano I. Allegro – Scuro – Spettrale ALSO THIS SEASON II. ‘Die Ratten’ Adagio – Scorrevole Club Concerts III. ‘Edge’ Lentissimo 1/29/13, 3/12/13, 4/30/13 | tuesdays | 7:30pm IV. ‘An die Schwester’ Andante Experience brand new music in a back room setting. Club Café, Boston GIL ROSE, Conductor www.bmop.org BOSTON MODERN ORCHESTRA PROJECT 781.324.0396 TEXts 5 OLIVER KNUSSEN SYMPHONY NO. 2 I. Weisser Schlaf! White sleep! Aufflattern weisse Vögel am Nachtsaum. White birds fly off on the hem of night. Ihr mondverschlungnen Schatten! Their moon-wrapped shadows! Stone, stone, ferry me down there. Die Nacht tanzt The night dances allon über knöchernen Steg. Over the bone footbridge T INA T (from assorted poems of Trakl & Plath) Tonight’s PERFORMERS II. FLUTE PERCUSSION VIOLA Sarah Brady Craig McNutt Joan Ellersick DIE RATTEN THE RATS Jessica Lizak Nick Tolle Kate Vincent Im Hof scheint weiss der herbstliche Mond. In the yard the autumnal moon shines white. Bill Manley Noriko Hendon Vom Dachrand fallen phatastische Schatten. From the roof-edge fantastic shadows fall. OBOE Aaron Trant Emily Rideout Jennifer Slowik Mike Williams Ein Schweigen in leeren Fenstern wohnt; A silence dwells in empty windows; Laura Pardee CELLO Da tauchen leise herauf die Ratten Through which the rats dive softly upward HARP Rafael Popper-Keizer CLARINET Amanda Romano Nicole Cariglia Michael Norsworthy Und huschen pfeifend hier und dort And flit about squeaking here and there Katherine Kayaian Und ein gräulicher Dunsthauch wittert And a grey dust-haze lingers Jan Halloran GUITAR Amy Wensink Maarten Stragier Ihnen nach aus dem Abort, After them from the latrine, BASSOON BASS Den geisterhaft der Mondschein durchzittert Through which the moonlight shivers, spectral. Sebastian Chavez PIANO Scot Fitzsimmons Wren Saunders Linda Osborn Robert Lynam Und sie keifen vor Gier wie toll And they scramble in greed, as if mad HORN VIOLIN I Und erfüllen Haus and Scheunen, And overflow houses and sheds Kenneth Pope Alice Hallstrom Die von Korn und Früschten voll. Full of corn and fruit. Alyssa Daly Ethan Woods Melanie Auclair-Fortier Eisige Winde im Dunkel greinen. Icy winds groan in darkness. TRUMPET Oana Lacatus Eric Berlin Sarita Uranovsky Georg Trakl Richard Watson Deborah Boykan VIOLIN II III. Colleen Brannen EDGE Julia Cash Beth Abbate The woman is perfected Annegret Klaua Her dead Edward Wu Jodi Hagen Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity 6 Flows in the scrolls of her toga, 7 Her bare PROGRAM NOTES Feet seem to be saying: By Robert Kirzinger We have come so far, it is over. Oliver Knussen’s presence in the new music world over the past forty years resonates Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, far beyond his central work as a composer, significant as that continues to be. In fact One at each little his catalog is relatively small, but a very high percentage of that catalog holds a strong Pitcher of milk, now empty. place in the repertoire. The evident care with which Knussen approaches each new work, She has folded and the strong individuation of their expression, is an object lesson for composers who Them back into her body as petals might be tempted to turn out work after work without such concern for quality, just to Of a rose close when the garden get the work in. It’s not that Knussen composes sparingly; his own advice to the young composer is “write, write, write, write, write.” It’s that he takes time to examine every Stiffens and odours bleed note, harmony, timbre, rhythm, and each element’s performability, its pacing, its affect. From the sweet, deep throats of the night So there’s that, which is of course enough, but Knussen has seeded the new-music flower. clouds in many other ways, too. His public debut as a composer, at age fifteen, corresponded The moon has nothing to be sad about, to his public debut as a conductor, when he stepped in for an ailing colleague at the last Staring from her hood of bone. minute to lead the London Symphony Orchestra (where his father was a double bassist) She is used to this sort of thing. in his own Symphony No. 1. His conducting career has since kept pace with and at times Her blacks crackle and drag. overshadowed his work as a composer. He has built lasting relationships with such Sylvia Plath organizations as the London Sinfonietta, Cleveland Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Los IV. Angeles Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has been associated with the Aldeburgh Festival—founded by Benjamin Britten, one of Knussen’s early mentors—for AN DIE SCHWESTER TO THE SISTER nearly thirty years, first as artistic director and then as artist-in-residence. This past Wo du gehst wird Herbst und Abend, Where you go is Autumn and Evening, summer Aldeburgh celebrated Knussen’s 60th birthday year with new productions of Blaues Wild, das unter Bäumen tönt, A blue deer, that sounds under trees, the composer’s short operas composed in collaboration, Where the Wild Things Are and Einsamer Weiher am Abend. A lonely pond at evening. Higglety Pigglety Pop! In the U.S., the Tanglewood Festival has been literally a home away Leise der Flug der Vögel tönt, Softly sounds the flight of birds, from home, first when Knussen was Composition Fellow there in the early 1970s, working Die Schwermut über deinen Augenbogen. The anguish over your brow. with Gunther Schuller, then when he succeeded Schuller as director of new music activities Dein schmales Lächeln tönt. Your slight smiling sounds. and of the Festival of Contemporary Music from the mid-1980s to the mid ’90s, and as FCM director and faculty member many times since. Tanglewood marked the composer/ Gott hat deine Lider verbogen. God has altered the curve of your eyelids, conductor/teacher’s 60th with a concert performance of Higglety Pigglety Pop!, and he Sterne suchen nachts, Karfreitagskind, Stars seek at night, Good Friday’s child, was once again FCM director. (Knussen conducted the BSO this weekend in concerts of Deinen Stirnenbogen. Your forehead’s curve. his own music along with works of Miaskovsky and Mussorgsky.) Georg Trakl Tanglewood features prominently in tonight’s BMOP program. In 1970, Knussen spent the first of his two summers as a Tanglewood Fellow, while there working on his Second When you awoke, the bells in the village were ringing. Symphony, which was premiered in its complete form at Tanglewood the following summer. Through the eastern gate showed, silver, the rosy day. Returning to Tanglewood as a faculty member in the mid-1980s, he encountered a TMC Fellow just a few years his junior, Michael Gandolfi, whose work Knussen took up as a from Winternacht, Georg Trakl conductor, giving the younger composer’s career a significant boost. Now, a few more years down the road, Gandolfi is himself a longtime Tanglewood composition faculty member, along with his position here at the New England Conservatory, and his music is performed frequently throughout the U.S. BMOP has released a CD of his music, and Poems by Georg Trakl (1887–1914) by kind permission of Otto Muller Verlag, Salzburg. there’s another due this year. Perhaps most surprisingly, Alberto Ginastera also has a English translation by O.K. Tanglewood connection, having studied with Copland there in the 1940s. “Edge” by Silvia Plath (1932–1963) © 1963 by Ted Hughes and reprinted by permission 8 OLIVER KNUSSEN (b. 1952) fragmented answer to Gunther Schuller’s “Twittering Machine,” a pointillistic world of 9 Music for a Puppet Court (1972/1983) sparkling energy with only a few moments of clear correspondence to its source, “tris.” Symphony No. 2 (1971) In that movement (No. 4) one can hear the clear presence of multiple layers of musical time—the tubular bells play the four-note falling-scale figure of the theme in ever-increasing Oliver Knussen’s father was a double bassist in the London Symphony Orchestra, and it tempo, from eight quarter-notes, to seven, to six, etc.