c o t a P n o d n a r B Saturday, April 7, 2018, 8pm Zellerbach Hall Seattle Symphony Ludovic Morlot, conductor PROGRAM John Luther ADAMS (b. 1953) Become Desert (California Premiere) with the voices of Volti; Robert Geary, artistic director Become Desert was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony with the generous support of Dale and Leslie Chihuly. INTERMISSION Jean SIBELIUS (1865 –1957) Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43 Allegretto Tempo andante, ma rubato Vivacissimo— Finale: Allegro moderato This project is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Cal Performances’ 2017 –18 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. PROGRAM NOTES Desert Music into sound. The music evolves slowly and Among the highlights of Ludovic Morlot’s seamlessly, without episodic events or drama. It tenure as music director of the Seattle Sym- requires, and induces, a contemplative form of phony was the 2013 premiere of John Luther listening. Adams’ Become Ocean . Com missioned by the orchestra, this composition presented a large- John Luther Adams scale sonic environment inspired by and mod - Become Desert (California Premiere) eled on patterns of oceanic tides, currents, Scored for five separate ensembles: Choir I – four and waves. The piece gained quick recognition flutes; four oboes; four clarinets; four bassoons; for its accomplished craftsmanship and novel crotales. Choir II – eight horns; chimes. Choir III – premise. “The music unfolds in the sonic four trumpets; four trombones; chimes. Choir IV – equivalent of waves,” wrote Anthony Tomma - mixed chorus; handbells. Choir V – percussion; sini, head music critic of the New York Times , four harps; strings. after the orchestra performed it at Carnegie Among the paradoxes that define civilization Hall, “with … oscillating figures, rippling riffs, in the early 21st century, perhaps none is more spiraling motifs, pulsating rhythms.” Tom ma - striking than the growing reverence for the sini added that a listener “must enter into a ru - natural world, and acknowledgement of our minative state to experience this work on its dependence on it, even as environmental crises own terms.” deepen across the planet. Nearly half a century The Seattle Symphony will perform Become has passed since the first Earth Day observance Ocean in Zellerbach Hall tomorrow afternoon. marked the beginning of modern ecological This evening, we hear the California premiere consciousness and activism. Today, as nature is of a sequel to that work. Become Desert com - relentlessly degraded by human activity, three pletes a trilogy with Become River and Become in four Americans say that environmental pro - Ocean . (Adams composed Become River in tection is an important issue for them. 2010 for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The new environmental awareness has, in - interrupting his work on Become Ocean to do evitably, found its way into the arts. British so.) The composer, who spent four decades sculptor Richard Long, for instance, has turned in Alaska before relocating to the desert of from conventional sculptural materials and Mexico, has declared himself “highly suspicious procedures in favor of rearranging branches, of political art.” Nevertheless, he writes in a stones, and other natural substances found in preface to Become Desert : “Living in Alaska for situ to form temporary outdoor sculptures. much of my life, I’ve experienced first-hand the Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan has accelerating effects of anthropogenic climate created disturbing images that bring home the change on the tundra, the forest, the glaciers, reality and cost of nature’s despoiling. the plants, animals, and people of the Far Among today’s creative musicians, none em - North. Living in this desert by the sea, I’ve pon - bodies the new environmental consciousness dered from a new perspective the melting of the more than John Luther Adams. For some four polar ice and the rising of the seas. And now decades, this American composer has made the I’m considering more deeply Chateaubriand’s sounds and processes of nature the source and observation: ‘Forests precede civilizations, and subject of his work. Birdsongs, winds, the boom deserts follow…. ’” of ice breaking in the Alaskan wilderness, the Anyone who has spent time in a southern electrical fields that produce the aurora bore - desert knows that light is a constant and alis—these and much more have found their imposing presence throughout the day. It shim - way into his music. A milestone in Adams’ ca - mers, glares, sometimes softens. It can reveal reer came in 2013, when the Seattle Symphony, the beauty of wide vistas and small details; under the direction of Ludovic Morlot, gave the it can be nearly blinding. And it is constantly first performances of Become Ocean , a large changing. Become Desert renders desert light orchestral piece it had commissioned. The work B PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES attracted widespread notice and garnered the rhetoric—or, more accurately, lack of it. The Pulitzer Prize for music composition in 2014. composition is neither a picturesque tone paint - With the success of Become Ocean , the or - ing of a desert scene nor a musical narrative chestra commissioned Adams to write another of a desert journey. Nor does it offer vivid composition, one that turns out to be a com - epi sodes, dramatic gestures, or intimations of panion piece of sorts. This commission, which human tragedy, triumph, or jest. Rather, it pres - the New York Philharmonic and San Diego ents a sonic environment in which to immerse Symphony have joined in tendering, coincided oneself. From the start, that environment is with a major alteration in the composer’s cir - enveloped by sustained tones, played by the on - cumstances. Since the 1970s Adams had lived stage string section, that expand from a single in Alaska, where the landscape and weather pitch to form open, widely spaced chords, a provided a frequent source of inspiration for his luminous wash of sound at volumes that range music. But having entered his seventh decade, from quiet to barely audible. Gradually the he felt ready for a change. Accordingly, he left other ensembles join in, altering and enriching his adopted home state and now divides his the sonic hue, much as daylight changes with time between New York and the Sonoran desert the rising position of the sun. No less gradually, of northwest Mexico. the music expands in volume and harmonic The latter location inspired his second com - complexion, becoming a dense roar midway position written for the Seattle Symphony. “I through its 40-minute duration. Then, in near- used to say that if I ever left the tundra it would palindromic fashion, it reverses direction, slowly be for the desert,” Adams observes. “Now, some thinning and subsiding until it reaches the sin - 40 years after first coming to Alaska, I’ve finally gle tone on which it began. made that move. As I’ve begun to learn the Clearly, such music requires a different kind landforms, the light, the weather, the plants, and of attention than that we usually bring to the the birds, I’ve dreamed of music that echoes concert hall. A hint as to what this might be lies this extraordinary landscape.” The music thus in a short poem by the Mexican writer Octavio dreamed is Become Desert . Paz, which Adams has inscribed as a preface to Though sonically quite different from the the score of Become Desert . One line reads, in earlier work, Become Desert shares two impor - English translation: “Close your eyes and listen tant traits with Become Ocean . First is its con - to the singing of the light.” ception as music for several ensembles that are distinct yet part of a larger whole. Adams has Jean Sibelius divided the orchestra for Become Desert into Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43 five ensembles, each with its own palette of Scored for pairs of woodwinds; four horns; three sounds, and each stationed in a separate loca - trumpets; three trombones; tuba; timpani; strings. tion. (The composer notes that the physical The music of Jean Sibelius has waxed and placement of instruments is a fundamental waned in popularity over the last century. element of this piece.) One ensemble, made up Although he worked through the 1920s, Fin - of strings, harps, and percussion, is stationed on land’s great composer never adopted the inno - stage. The remaining four groups are placed vations or the spirit of the modernist revolution at different spots around the auditorium. One that reshaped music after 1900. As a result, his of these ensembles consists largely of voices, work inevitably was caught up in the polemical which Adams, following a modern tradition battles over modernism versus Romanticism that is now more than a century old, uses as that raged for much of the 20th century. During though they were instruments rather than to his lifetime, Sibelius enjoyed inter national ac - convey a text. Their singing intones just one claim amounting, in some quarters, to adula - single-syllable word: luz , Spanish for “light.” tion. But following his death, in 1957, his star The other unusual aspect Become Desert was partially eclipsed by the growing apprecia - shares with Become Ocean concerns its musical tion of the early modernists, and the frequency 6 PROGRAM NOTES with which his compositions were performed noted that he composed his Second Symphony fell sharply. not by some nordic fjord but in Italy, during Today it is possible to view Sibelius in a more a sojourn there in the winter of 1901–02. objective light, and the past three decades The symphony opens with eight measures of have seen a significant revival of interest in his throbbing chords. These function as a motivic music: new recorded cycles of the complete thread binding the first movement: they ac - symphonies, increasingly frequent perform - company both the pastoral first theme, an - ances of his works, and praise from a new gen - nounced by the oboes and clarinets (and eration of composers.