Boston University Symphony Orchestra & Symphonic Chorus
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Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Music presents Boston University Symphony Orchestra & Symphonic Chorus David Hoose, conductor Edgard Varèse: Hyperprism Percy Grainger: The Warriors (Boston Premiere) Carl Orff:Carmina Burnana Symphony Hall Lynn Eustis, soprano Christopher MacRae, tenor Boston James Demler, baritone November 19, 2012 with Boston Children’s Chorus Nearly60 60 years after Stokowski and BU ledYears the East Coast Premiere of Carmina Burana, join BU for this historic night. RESILIENCE Founded in 1872, the School of Music combines the intimacy and intensity of conservatory training with a broadly-based, traditional liberal arts education at the undergraduate level and intense coursework at the graduate level. The school offers degrees in performance, conducting, composition and theory, musicology, music education, collaborative piano, historical performance, as well as a certificate program in its Opera Institute, and artist and performance diplomas. Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized private research university with more than 32,000 students participating in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs. BU consists of 17 colleges and schools along with a number of multidisciplinary centers and institutes which are central to the school’s research and teaching mission. The Boston University College of Fine Arts was created in 1954 to bring together the School of Music, the School of Theatre, and the School of Visual Arts. The University’s vision was to create a community of artists in a conservatory-style school offering professional training in the arts to both undergraduate and graduate students, complemented by a liberal arts curriculum for undergraduate students. Since those early days, education at the College of Fine Arts has begun on the BU campus and extended into the city of Boston, a rich center of cultural, artistic, and intellectual activity. This concert is being webcast live on the School of Music website and will be rebroadcast on the School of Music’s Virtual Concert Hall: bu.edu/cfa/music/virtual-concert-hall Symphony Hall rules prohibit the use of all cell phones, pagers, cameras, and recording devices. Thank you for your cooperation. Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Music Boston University Symphony Orchestra and Symphonic Chorus with Boston Children’s Chorus David Hoose, conductor Monday, November 19, 2012, 8pm The 32nd concert in the 2012 –13 season Symphony Hall Edgard Varèse Hyperprism (1883–1965) Percy Grainger The Warriors—Music to an Imaginary Ballet (1882–1961) Sangwook Cho, assistant conductor Konstantin Dobroykov, assistant conductor ~Intermission~ Carl Orff Carmina Burana—Cantiones profanae (1895–1982) Fortuna imperatrix mundi O Fortuna Fortune plango vulnera I. Primo vere Veris leta facies Omnia sol temperat Ecce gratum Uf dem anger Tanz Floret silva nobilis Chramer, gip die varwe mir Reie—Swaz hie gat umbe Were diu werlt alle min II. In taberna Estuans interius Cignus ustus cantat: Olim lacus colueram Ego sum abbas In taberna quando sumus III. Cour d’amours Amor volat undique Dies, nox et omnia Stetit puella Circa mea pectora Si puer cum puellula Veni, veni, venias In trutina Tempus est iocundum Dulcissime Blanziflor et Helena Ave formosissima Fortuna imperatrix mundi O Fortuna Lynn Eustis, soprano Christopher MacRae, tenor James Demler, baritone 1 PROGRAM NOTES by David Hoose Hyperprism Edgard Varèse When I was a freshman at music school, I got drafted into the orchestra to play ninth horn in a performance of Edgard Varèse’s Arcana. Varèse was to come to the school as part of a residency and celebration of his music, but he died only a couple of weeks before the festival. Although I never met this man of whom I had only recently heard, the experience of playing and hearing the fifteen-minuteArcana rattled my musical horizons. It didn’t breathe like any music I knew. It convulsed and exploded into shards of crystals, “different shapes or groups of sounds constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces.”1 As a young composer, I had just begun to listen to Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and this was an entirely different thing, closer to Stravinsky than Schoenberg, but really close to neither. And it wasn’t even new music: at that time, Arcana was more than forty years old. This wild music struck me as an utterly fresh way of thinking about music. Although I now know a great deal more music than I did when I was eighteen, Varèse’s voice still sounds as fresh as anything I’ve ever heard. He wrote, “Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression.”2 Its means were certainly unexpected, and—wow—did it pulsate with life. Later that same school year, the Oberlin Wind Ensemble took Varèse’s even more far- reaching Déserts, for winds, percussion, and electronic tape, on a concert tour of small towns in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. After the first couple of evenings of unsure boos and tepid applause, the conductor began introducing the piece by inviting the listeners not to worry too much about what they were hearing, not to try to figure it out, and not to judge it. He counseled in his cheery voice, “Just let the music wash over you.” Kenneth Moore’s permission helped, and those audiences responded with much more enthusiasm. And his counsel may still be apt. One person’s fresh is another’s alien, better observed than befriended. After that introduction to Varèse’s world, I assumed I’d hear much more of his music, but I didn’t. It turns out that he wasn’t prolific, and only fourteen works were ever published. And almost all of these were for non-standard combinations of instruments that continue to make them difficult and expensive to program.Arcana , like his other astounding orchestral work, Amériques, is for gargantuan orchestra; one composition, Ecuatorial, is scored for choir of low bass voices, brass, piano, organ, two Ondes Martinots, and a bevy of percussion; most of his music includes no strings (he hated vibrato); and one of his most important works, Ionisation, is for thirteen percussionists alone. Only the solo flute piece, Density 21.5, and Octandre (which the Boston University Wind Ensemble will perform later this season) are really practical. Consequently, Varèse’s music has been heard less by audiences than by composers, many of whose own voices can be traced directly back to his ground-breaking work. These composers, including Luciano Berio, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Mario Davidovsky, Olivier Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Krzystof Penderecki, and Frank Zappa (one of the most enthusiastic advocates), heard in Varèse’s music a new path, a 2 “liberation of sound,” and many of today’s composers continue to be influenced by this music. Very few of Varèse’s compositions are long, and one of the shortest is Hyperprism. Violence dominates its brief span, especially in the percussion outbursts and the extreme registers of the wind instruments. Piccolo and little clarinet screeches pit against the trombone growls and percussion convulsions. The tenor trombone leads with oratorical hysteria, and the two woodwinds respond, first separately and shackled together. Suddenly everything quiets, and ominous percussion thumps suggest that what has come before was simply introductory, and that the piece is just about to really begin. Affirming that impression, the three horns cry out heroically, but the other instruments cut them off with a terrifying sustained chord, the percussion build thunderously, and the piece abruptly stops. The large shape of Varèse’s music frequently surprises, but Hyperprism is one of the most startling, its ritual halted before it has completely established itself. I am certain Varèse would not have thought of it this way, but this music may sound like an introduction to something else. What that something else is could be most anything, as long as it’s fresh. Hyperprism is scored for flute (doubling piccolo), E-flat clarinet, two trumpets, three horns, two trombones, and ten percussionists who preside over a large collection of instruments—sleigh bells, Indian drum, lion’s roar, anvil, tambourine, slap stick, bass drum, snare drum, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, ratchets, triangle, Chinese blocks, tam-tam, and a favorite of the composer’s, the siren. Varèse composed Hyperprism between 1923 and 1924, nearly ninety years ago. The Warriors—Music to an Imaginary Ballet Percy Grainger As succinct as Edgard Varèse’s catalogue is, Percy Grainger’s is voluminous. John Bird’s biography of Grainger3 takes twenty-one pages to list his more than 1,200 original compositions. Grainger, like Bartók and Vaughan Williams, was devoted to collecting, transcribing, and cataloguing the creativity of indigenous music, so many of these compositions are his highly creative takes on folk-songs, some for voices and some for instrumental ensemble. But there are also many original works for chorus, for wind ensemble (Grainger, a spectacular and very well-known pianist, also spent two years during the First World War playing saxophone and oboe in a military band), and for piano. He composed only twelve original works for orchestra, the largest of which—in every sense—is The Warriors. Like much in Grainger’s life, The Warriors is surrounded by some mystery. Why does this music, often upbeat and dizzying, have such a violent title? The conductor Thomas Beecham had approached Grainger to discuss a possible ballet score for the Diaghilev Company, but Beecham seems never to have followed through with a scenario. Nonetheless, Grainger proceeded to compose his twenty-minute score. He disliked later attempts to retrofit it as a ballet. Some people contended that the music was in response to the First World War, but Grainger insisted that it could not have been, claiming to have begun it in 1912.