Jaap Van Zweden Conductor Measha Brueggergosman Soprano John Luther Adams Dark Waves Mahler Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn
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Program One hUndRed TWenTieTh SeaSOn Chicago symphony orchestra riccardo muti Music director Pierre Boulez helen Regenstein Conductor emeritus Yo-Yo ma Judson and Joyce green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, October 28, 2010, at 8:00 Friday, October 29, 2010, at 8:00 Jaap van Zweden Conductor measha Brueggergosman Soprano John Luther adams Dark Waves First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances mahler Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn Rheinlegendchen Verlorne Müh’! Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen Urlicht MeaSha BRUeggeRgOSMan IntermIssIon shostakovich Symphony no. 8 in C Minor, Op. 65 adagio—allegro non troppo—adagio allegretto allegro non troppo— Largo— allegretto ComEd Classical Tapestry is sponsored by ComEd. This program is part of the citywide festival The Soviet Arts Experience. Steinway is the official piano of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Comments By PhiLLiP hUSCheR John Luther adams Born January 23, 1953, Meridian, Mississippi. Dark Waves for orchestra and electronic sounds n the 1980s, John Luther Adams, a Southern boy who moved IAdams played timpani in the to Alaska in 1978 at the age of Fairbanks Symphony, which twenty-five, has come to cherish. was led by composer-conductor He remembers flying out of Alaska Gordon Wright; they became close one morning and looking down friends, at one point living near over Mount Hayes, “and all at each other in the Alaskan wilder- once I was overcome by the intense ness. In February 2007, Wright love that I have for this place— was supposed to pick Adams up at an almost erotic feeling about the Anchorage airport; when he those mountains.” didn’t show, Adams called Wright’s Most of Adams’s works, from neighbors, who found his body the haunting Qilyaun for four bass lying under the birch tree outside drums played last March on a his cabin. A few days later, the MusicNOW concert—the thunder- Anchorage Symphony played the ous seismic waves of the drums premiere of Dark Waves, a powerful coming from the four corners of work for orchestra and electronics the concert hall—to the recent that Adams decided to dedicate Dark Waves, the work for orchestra to Wright. In its majesty, weight, and electronics performed this and raw simplicity, Dark Waves is a week, convey the powerful and vast twenty-first-century counterpart to landscape of Alaska. Nearly all his the music by Bruckner that Adams mature compositions, including The and Wright once listened to as they Place Where You Go to Listen, the drove into the Alaskan mountains. sound-and-light installation piece Like much of Adams’s work, it is he wrote after flying over the peaks also a portrait of a landscape that of the Alaska Range, are attempts ComPosed InstrumentatIon drum, suspended cymbal, 2007 two piccolos, two oboes, two orchestra bells, vibraphones, These are the Chicago clarinets and bass clarinet, strings, electronics Symphony Orchestra’s first two bassoons and contra- performances of music by bassoon, two horns, two ApproxImate John Luther adams trumpets, three trombones PerformanCe tIme and tuba, celesta, piano, bass 12 minutes 2 “to hear the unheard,” as Adams work.” Adams found that point, and puts it, “to somehow transpose the beginning in the 1990s, he started music that is just beyond the reach to assemble a catalog of unique and of our ears into audible vibrations.” unforgettable compositions. Adams John Luther Adams first came to has since become known as one of music as a drummer in rock bands. music’s few original thinkers and It was a line by visionary French- genuine experimentalists. born composer Edgard Varèse— In April, Adams was awarded “The present-day composer refuses the Nemmers Prize in Music to die!”—that he spotted on the Composition by the Henry and jacket of Frank Zappa’s album Freak Leigh Bienen School of Music at Out! that inspired him to delve Northwestern University—a highly deeper into a world of music he distinguished honor that previously didn’t know. After finding out who has gone to Kaija Saariaho, Oliver Varèse was (and how to pronounce Knussen, and, yes, the other John his name), he began to listen to a Adams. Unaccustomed to such variety of post-WWII composers, high-profile attention—although including György Ligeti and John his music has often been honored— Cage. In 1971, Adams moved to Adams at first couldn’t bring him- Los Angeles, where he studied at self to read the e-mail telling him CalArts with the composer James of the award. (Finally, he asked his Tenney. He was strongly attracted wife Cindy to read it.) “In the days to the outsiders and classic eccen- that followed, I struggled to absorb trics Harry Partch, who made the impact of this lightning bolt,” his own instruments from found Adams later wrote. “For most of my objects; Conlon Nancarrow, who musical life, I’ve worked in relative wrote oddball pieces for player isolation. And I’ve always thought piano; Lou Harrison, whose music of myself as a musical outsider. The evoked the Indonesian gamelan; Nemmers Prize is a heartening sign and Morton Feldman of the that my music seems to resonate unearthly quiet, glacial musical ‘out there’ in the larger world.” If landscapes. And finally, after a long such mainstream distinction under- fallow period—during which, ironi- mines Adams’s outsider status, cally, his friend, the California-born he knows he’s in good company: John (Nixon in China) Adams Nancarrow, Meredith Monk, and was becoming a household name, Ornette Coleman all have received leading to frequent and sometimes MacArthur grants, and Steve Reich amusing cases of mistaken iden- and David Lang have won Pulitzer tity—he discovered the music he prizes. “No matter where it comes alone was meant to write. “Richard from, no matter what it sounds like, Serra,” Adams says, speaking of when we make music and listen one of the visual artists he admires, with open ears,” Adams continues, “talks about the point at which all “we’re all insiders. Amid the vitality your influences are assimilated and and diversity of music today, maybe then your work can come out of the there are no more outsiders.” 3 he composer comments on They breathe. They play at different TDark Waves: speeds. They ride the waves. Together, the orchestra and the In recent years, I’ve composed electronics evoke a vast rolling sea. in mixed media, combining Waves of perfect fifths rise and fall electronic sounds with acoustic in tempo relationships of 3, 5, and instruments, both solos and small 7. At the central moment, these ensembles. But Dark Waves is the waves crest together in a tsunami first time I’ve mixed electronics of sound encompassing all twelve with the complex sonorities of the chromatic tones and the full range symphony orchestra. of the orchestra. I began with an impossible As I composed Dark Waves, I orchestra—large choirs of virtual pondered the ominous events of our instruments, with no musicians, no times: terrorism and war, intensify- articulation, and no breathing— ing storms and wildfires, the melt- sculpting layer upon layer into ing of the polar ice and the rising of expansive waves of sound. Then I the seas. Yet, even in the presence added the human element. of our deepening fears, we find The musicians of the real orches- ourselves immersed in the mysteri- tra impart depth and texture, shim- ous beauty of this world. Amid mer and substance to the electronic the turbulent waves, we may still sounds. They give the music life. find the light, the wisdom, and the Their instruments speak in different courage we need to pass through ways. They change bow directions. this darkness of our own making. 4 gustav mahler Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia. Died May 18, 1911, Vienna, Austria. songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn n 1806, the year Napoleon mouth to mouth,” and that they Icrushed the Prussian army at Jena, would be returned “to the people, two young poets in Heidelberg, in the course of time, glorified and Achim von Arnim and Clemens filled with new life.” von Brentano (close friends who It was not long before some of would soon become brothers-in- Germany’s greatest composers, law), published the first volume of including Carl Maria von Weber, Des Knaben Wunderhorn. A collec- Felix Mendelssohn, and Robert tion of old German folk poems (the Schumann, set several of these title, The Youth’s Magic Horn, comes poems to music, giving Des Knaben from the first poem in the book), Wunderhorn a new life beyond even Des Knaben Wunderhorn reminded what Goethe envisioned. It was the German people of their great Weber’s own worn copy of Des heritage at a time when the country Knaben Wunderhorn that Gustav desperately needed a strong sense Mahler discovered one day many of national identity. The collection, years later, in the Leipzig home of quickly followed by two more vol- the composer’s grandson Karl, with umes, was dedicated to Germany’s whose wife Marion Mahler had greatest living poet, Goethe, who been carrying on a passionate affair. correctly predicted that these Mahler had known Des Knaben simple texts would “gradually be Wunderhorn since childhood, but carried from ear to ear and from the chance encounter with it that ComPosed as soloist and Frederick and contrabassoon, four This week’s selections: 1892 Stock conducting horns, two trumpets, to 1898 percussion, harp, strings most reCent fIrst Performed Cso PerformanCe ApproxImate individually and in various Selections, October 5, PerformanCe tIme groups, under the com- 2006, with Matthias goerne 17 minutes poser’s direction at different as soloist and Paavo times throughout his career Järvi conducting Cso reCordIng Selections, 1970, with fIrst Cso InstrumentatIon yvonne Minton as soloist PerformanCe two flutes and two piccolos, and georg Solti conducting Selections, January 11, two oboes and english horn, for London 1929, with Claire dux two clarinets, two bassoons 5 day in 1887 seems to have taken symphonies and songs was inter- hold of him in a powerful way— woven in a way unprecedented in and suggested a new direction for music.