Brooklyn Academy of Music 1997 Next Wave Festival ••• •• • •••••• ••• • • • • Julio Galan, Rado, 1996, oil on canvas, 39 if," x 31 '/2" After Mahler Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra PHILIP MORRIS BAM 1997 Next Wave Festival is sponsored by COM PAN I [S INC. Brooklyn Academy of Music Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra Bruce C. Ratner 44th Season 1997-98 Chairman of the Board Robert Spano, Music Director Harvey Lichtenstein Lukas Foss, Conductor Laureate President and Executive Producer Joseph Horowitz, Executive Producer George Nashak, Executive Director present Running time: BAM Opera House approximately October 31 and November 1, 1997 one hour and forty-five minutes 7pm including one Pre-concert presentation intermission with Sofia Gubaidulina, Maya Pritsker and Joseph Horowitz 8pm Robert Spano, conductor Claude Vivier Zipangu (New York premiere) Gustav Mahler Adagio from Symphony No. 10 Interm ission Sofia Gubaidulina Stimmen... verstummen (New York premiere) The November 1 post-concert reception in the BAMcafe is sponsored by Independence Savings Bank. Baldwin is the official piano of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. The organ is provided courtesy of Allen Organ Studios, ·Inc. BAM thanks the Theater Development Fund for supporting this presentation. The BPO and BAM gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley H. Kaplan, whose assistance made possible the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center Acoustical Shell. This weekend we present two pieces I was determined to bring to New York: Sofia Gubaidulina's Stimmen. .. verstummen and Claude Vivier's Zipangu. These works represent two of the most distinctive and emotionally charged voices in contemporary music. Vivier is an important North American composer only now being discovered, one who considered Mahler a key inspiration. Gubaidulina's embattled spiritual strivings are Mahlerian in scope. The larger topic of Mahler's influence then suggested itself for our Saturday afternoon Interplay-in particular, his crucial influence on Shostakovich and, less directly, on the important Russian composers who followed, including Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, and Valentin Silvestrov. We open our 1997-98 season with music that speaks to our time. -Robert Spano, Music Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra Vivier: Zipangu Claude Vivier's Zipangu is music of an uncompromising strangeness, by a composer whose life was strange. Born in Montreal in 1948, he was placed in an orphanage at birth-a circumstance, he wrote, that allowed him "to make up my origins as I wished, pretend to speak in strange languages." (The vocal music Vivier composed after 1972 in fact utilized an invented language.) He studied in Montreal, then with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. In 1976 and 1977, he traveled in the Middle East and Asia, and there encountered a variety of influences that helped him focus an original style in which (as in much non-Western music) melody, not harmony or counterpoint, matters most. Vivier had finished some forty works when he was killed in Paris in 1983. He had been composing a piece titled Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul?; in the last passage he set, the narrator is murdered by a young man who pulls out a dagger and "thrusts it right into the heart." Vivier's real-life assailant was a nineteen­ year-old man wielding a knife; there were forty-five stab wounds. The fear and lure of death loomed large for Vivier. He drank heavily, and had many male love partners. He once reported, "Mahler is perhaps the musician to whom I feel closest-an exacerbated sensibility, schmaltz, and at the same time profound desire for purity, and for a purity that's almost libidinal." Addressing another core aspect of Vivier's creative personality, the critic Paul Griffiths adds, "Vivier thought that music in the Western classical tradition was conditioned by the conventional attributes of maleness: determination, purposefulness, independence. Gay music would be different. It would hover; it would glisten. It would be the music of angels." Zipangu, composed in 1980, is a fourteen-minute work for two groups of strings: six violins (on the left) and a violin, three violas, two cellos, and double bass (on the right). The score requires a range of playing techniques, including "granular sound" produced by exaggerated bow pressure; irregular, accelerating, or decelerating tremolos; and harmonics of unspecified pitch. According to the composer, "Zipangu was the name given to Japan during the time of Marco Polo. Building around a melody, I explore different aspects of color in this piece. I have tried to veil my harmonic structures by using different bow techniques ... In this way melody becomes 'color,' grows lighter and slowly returns to as though purified and solitary." Vivier criticized "the insignificance of people who are unwilling to explore new territory, the Zipangus of the inner planets." The inner-planetary music of Photo, Dan Rest Zipangu is solemn, ritualistic, and superbly exotic. Vivier had planned to integrate a number of related works, including Lonely Child, Bouchara, and Prologue pour un Marco Polo, into a Marco Polo opera "about explorers and dreamers." Zipangu too, is linked to the opera by its thematic material. All four works are recorded by Reinbert de Leeuw and his Schoenberg Ensemble on a 1996 Philips CD (454231-2). -Joseph Horowitz Executive Producer, Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra Mahler: Adagio from The last photograph of Gustav Mahler was taken aboard ship on his final Symphony No. 10 crossing from New York to Europe in spring, 1911. Fatally ill, thin and hag­ gard, he fixes the camera with weariness and unutterable disgust. Months later, Mahler died in Vienna. "When I took my farewell of his mortal remains," his friend Alfred Roller reported, "his features still bore traces of the suffer­ ing of his final death struggle." But Kurt Moll's death mask shows a differ­ ent, triumphant Mahler. In death, Mahler actually appeared transfigured. Mahler was obsessed with death. More than any other musical motif, the funeral march permeates his symphonies. Two, the Second and Eighth, set texts describing'an experience of posthumous transcendence. His songs include, amazingly, a set "for Dead Children"-which Mahler subsequently believed contributed to the death of his daughter Maria. In place of a Ninth Symphony, rivaling Beethoven, he composed The Song of the Earth, with its Nirvana-like "Farewell." A Ninth Symphony, now unavoidable, was completed in 1910; its finale, a grieving Adagio, dissolves into the silence of the grave. Mahler next undertook yet another valedictory statement: tempting fate (and Mahler was nothing if not superstitious), a Tenth Symphony exceeding Beethoven's canonized allotment of nine. He died having nearly finished movements one and three, and leaving an un-orchestrated "short score" for the remaining two scherzos and finale. The opening Adagio, which we hear at these concerts, is-like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony or Bruckner's Ninth-one of music's great torsos. It limns yet another passage into death-one contradicting the Ninth Symphony's grim trajectory, and anticipating the beatific death mask shortly to come. Three themes permeate the Tenth Symphony's 25-minute Adagio. First, opening the work, a song for unaccompanied violas recalling the famous English horn solo signifying the existential void of Tristan und Isolde, Act III. This wandering tune, tonally adrift, settles magically into F-sharp major to launch a melody marked "softly but very warmly"-the movement's ineffable keynote of striving ascent. Theme three is an impetuous variant of these longer-breathed materials, percolating with trills and pizzicato chords. The three themes intertwine with seeming spontaneity. One of the movement's memorable features, in fact, is an interweaving of the violins so pervasive that two first-violin parts seem to vie toward new altitudes of expression. In the absence of a strongly defined sonata form, Mahler creates a singular pivotal event: a sudden organ-like chorale, ablaze with sound-"an opening of the portals," writes the British annotator Jeremy Noble, "a transition from this life to another." There ensue episodes of heaped dissonance unique in Mahler. These lift to reveal a final, rarefied revisitation of the three themes. Beside this autobiographical rendering of Death and Transfiguration, Richard Strauss' tone poem seems a cartoon. Mahler: Adagio from Mahler never finished orchestrating this last Adagio. The present performances Symphony No. 10 use the 1972 edition prepared under the supervision of Deryck Cooke, who continued adds various woodwind and brass lines doubling (and therefore reinforcing) existing parts. Cooke's edition also includes the remaining four movements, of which the slow finale re-consolidates the serene close of movement one and so suggests, in Cooke's words, Ila renewed belief in life and a calm accepta nce of the end." Is the reconstructed five-movement Tenth Symphony viable in performance? Opinions differ. Leonard Bernstein, for one, remained convinced that "Mahler could never have finished the whole symphony, even if he had lived." It could be argued that the Tenth's pregnant ambiguities are more Mahlerian than any finished statement could be. Its radiant coda notwithstanding, the Adagio lacks closure; the harmonic and emotional undertow of its dissonant crisis remains tangible. And Mahler himself is tangibly, crucially ambivalent. He bids the nineteenth century a lingering, loving farewell. He enters the twentieth century tortuously, both bravely and fearfully. He is a poet of nostalgia and a prophet of doom. His range of influence is revealingly contradictory: Berg, Schonberg, Webern, Britten, Shostakovich are all composers deeply beholden to his style or mindset. A terminal Romantic, he spoke to composers seeking an antidote to Romantic inflation. In Soviet Russia, his morbidity, his death­ marches, his penchant for the terse and spare helped shape a dominant idiom -the topic of this weekend's Saturday afternoon Interplay. -Joseph Horowitz Gubaidulina: She is one of the most unusual people I have ever known.