James Ehnes & Owen Pallett
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James Ehnes Owen Pallett JAMES EHNES & OWEN PALLETT 12 CONCERT PROGRAM Harry Stafylakis Wednesday, March 8, 2017 Shadows Radiant: Sesquie for Canada’s 150th 8:00pm (TSO PREMIÈRE/TSO CO-COMMISSION) Aaron Jay Kernis Peter Oundjian Violin Concerto conductor & host (WORLD PREMIÈRE/TSO CO-COMMISSION) André de Ridder I. Chaconne conductor II. Ballad: Poco adagio, lyrical and floating III. Toccatini: Presto, with energy James Ehnes violin Intermission Daniel Okulitch Owen Pallett bass-baritone Songs From An Island (WORLD PREMIÈRE/TSO COMMISSION) I. Introduction: → II. Transformer III. Paragon of Order IV. The Sound of the Engine Nico Muhly Mixed Messages The New Creations Festival is Please note that this Canada Mosaic performance is being recorded for generously supported by online release at TSO.CA/CanadaMosaic. David G. Broadhurst. PRE-CONCERT (7:15pm) IN THE Performance by Element Choir, led by Christine Duncan NORTH LOBBY Element Choir is an improvising choir, whose cinematic approach to group vocalizing presents both tonal and non-tonal material in a constantly evolving and “in the moment” sonic environment. INTERMISSION Join TSO Composer Advisor Gary Kulesha in conversation with composer Aaron Jay Kernis and violinist James Ehnes. POST-CONCERT Performance by Prince Nifty: intergalactic unsettled liminalist pop 13 THE DETAILS Harry Stafylakis Shadows Radiant: Sesquie for Canada’s 150th (TSO PREMIÈRE/TSO CO-COMMISSION) Born: Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Dec 15, 1982 2 Composed: 2016 min A troubling question: how to celebrate the history of a nation—any nation—without acknowledging the proverbial skeletons in ABOUT THE COMPOSER its closet? The same light that we shine on Harry Stafylakis is a our most noble thoughts and deeds radiates Canadian-American shadows behind those very accomplishments; composer based and the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. in New York City. He is the Winnipeg Perhaps, then, it is only right to celebrate Symphony Orchestra’s genuinely, with a healthy dose of self-reflection, Composer-in- humility, and a hint of mourning. Residence and Program note by the composer co-curator of the Winnipeg New Music Festival. His works have been performed Shadows Radiant: Sesquie for Canada’s 150th by Harry by the American Composers Orchestra, Stafylakis is a TSO Co-commission with the Winnipeg Spokane Symphony, Stamford Symphony, Symphony Orchestra, which gave the World Première in Winnipeg on January 13, 2017. Victoria Symphony, McGill Chamber Orchestra, ICE, Mivos Quartet, Quatuor Bozzini, Nouveau Classical Project, mise-en, Lorelei Ensemble, and American Modern Ensemble, and have been featured at the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Aspen Music Festival, New Music on the Point, June in Buffalo, York Guitar Festival, Cluster, and Guitare Montréal. Awards include the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein Award, four SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and NYSCA. Stafylakis holds a Bachelor of Music from McGill University. He is a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and lectures at the City College of New York. 14 Aaron Jay Kernis Violin Concerto (WORLD PREMIÈRE/TSO CO-COMMISSION) 25 Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, Jan 15, 1960 min Composed: 2016 Out of an unexpected 2007 commission from only returns to its opening dramatic statement the BBC in London came my first collaboration at the movement’s end. with James Ehnes, Two Movements (with “Ballad” is the songful, jazz/French-tinged lyrical Bells), a piece that he has played many times middle movement with an angular, wrenching and recorded, and soon after followed the centre. The language of Two Movements (with enthusiastic request from him to write a Bells) returns here with hints of the blues and the concerto. A life in music is indeed a journey, influence of composer Olivier Messiaen, an idol often going in directions one least expects, and of mine. in this case leads to today and this big new work. Finally, the energy of “Toccatini” closes the piece. This concerto, for James Ehnes, is formed out A toccata is a virtuoso, fast “touch-piece” from of the essential three-movement form that many the Baroque period. I thought this would be a bedrock concertos of the past are built: 1) the tiny or teeny toccata, and the idea of creating largest, most searching argument, followed by 2) a new martini—the Toccatini—helped get me the shorter, slower, lyrical utterance, and ending through the post-US election torpor. This is a with 3) the even shorter fast, zippy, often hair- not-atypical Kernis-ian mashup—bits of jazz, raisingly difficult closer. hints of Stravinsky/Messiaen, machine music, But here, there is much that differs from the and wild virtuoso strings of notes all over the past. The first movement, “Chaconne”, comes violin give James ever more chances to show his remotely out of the Baroque form: a set of mettle and showcase his great ability to shape variations over a repeated series of chords. many thousands of notes with flair and joy. This is the most dramatically charged and Program note by the composer changeable movement, with the downward melody/chord progression in the violin being Violin Concerto by Aaron Jay Kernis is a TSO the basis of all that follows. This theme is Co-commission with the Seattle, Dallas, and constantly varied in character and colour, and Melbourne symphony orchestras. ABOUT THE COMPOSER Winner of the coveted Grawemeyer Award, Nemmers Prize, and one of the youngest composers ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Aaron Jay Kernis’s works have been heard in the world’s major music capitals performed by many of America’s foremost performers and institutions. Recently named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kernis directs the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab and Workshop and teaches composition at Yale School of Music. 15 THE DETAILS Owen Pallett Songs From An Island (WORLD PREMIÈRE/TSO COMMISSION) 15 Born: Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, Sep 7, 1979 min Composed: 2016 This is the first of four parts of a longer song cycle for singer and orchestra. The cycle ABOUT THE COMPOSER concerns an ex-farmer who washes up in a port town, and his descent into hedonism and 2017 New Creations subsequent spiritual awakening. Festival Curator Owen Pallett is a composer, I wrote these songs first on guitar and piano. violinist, keyboardist, I wrote them to be fairly consistently bi-tonal, and vocalist. His violin- pairing melodies with keys they don’t belong looping live project in—not as an obfuscating manoeuvre, but spawned several as a method of creating a constant feeling records under the moniker Final Fantasy, of transience and instability, and also as a including 2006’s He Poos Clouds, which compositional representation of queerness. won the Polaris Music Prize. He currently Then, I took these songs and orchestrated makes universally acclaimed records under them. My goal was to present these songs in his own name, including 2010’s Heartland, the broadest possible strokes, with enormous and most recently, In Conflict. gestures, spaces, and silences. I drew inspiration Pallett has written string, brass, and from Miles Davis, Gérard Grisey, Györgi Ligeti, orchestral arrangements for numerous and the band Cluster. The arrangements are bands. He has scored several films, permeated with a repetitiousness and a stillness including Richard Kelly’s The Box and The to achieve, hopefully, a sense of transcendence. New York Times Magazine’s Emmy I jokingly have been referring to this song cycle Award–winning Fourteen Actors Acting. as “my no-content piece”, because the writing Owen recently completed the film scores got simpler and simpler with every edit. for Anton Corbijn’s Life and M Blash’s The Program note by the composer Wait, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the original score of Commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra with financial support from the Government of Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her. Pallett’s violin Canada for performance during the 150th Anniversary concerto written for Pekka Kuusisto, of Confederation of Canada, March 2017. co-commissioned by the Barbican and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, was performed as part of the 2013 New Creations Festival. He has also composed works for CBC Radio, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Luminato Festival, and the Ecstatic Music Festival. 16 Text by Owen Pallett I. Introduction: → II. Transformer Every time I sing, you say that I’m gaslighting, falsifying a private Thermidor. Your love was a warm wind, and me an empty sail, I collapse to the kitchen floor. When I wish I was never born, my mother tells me I wasn’t born so much as excreted. But this emptiness is a gift, I’m free to write the future, an empty man undefeated. I think I’ve found the cure: make sure you’re living a quarter of your waking life in the present, and the rest I’ll spend remembering scorching our feet on the sand and the tires of our bikes on wet cement. We were sparklers in the night, and even now your resting face cannot conceal the light. Your love was a warm wind as the world you left it falls away and an island rises into sight. III. Paragon of Order Rage up the street, a dog on a leash. Men try to corner me to get a piece. You don’t need to ask, you got it wrong. A child of a broken home can love anyone. And the unblinking eye that keeps track of our shit, it will look to the left when kids get lit. My muscles softened since I washed up here, when I traded the scythe for a cig and a bottle of beer.