1114 IEIT liVE FESTIVIL 1994 NEXT WAVE COVEll AND POSTER AR11ST ROBERT MOS1tOwrrz •••I_lil , .1, lllE! II I E 1.lnII ImlEI 14. IS BAMBILL BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC Harvey Lichtenstein, President & Executive Producer THE BROOKLYN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Dennis Russell Davies, Principal Conductor Lukas Foss, Conductor Laureate 41st Season, 1994/95 MIRROR IMAGES in the BAM Opera House October 14, 15, 1994 PRE-CONCERT RECITAL at 7pm PHILIP GLASS Six Etudes Dennis Russell Davies, Piano (American premiere) BROOKLYN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA DENNIS RUSSELL DAVIES, Conductor MARGARET LENG TAN, Piano 8pm JOHN ZORN For Your Eyes Only (BPO Commission) CHEN YI Piano Concerto Margaret Leng Tan, Piano (BPO commission; premiere performance) - Intermission - PHILIP GLASS Symphony No.2 (BPO commission; premiere performance) Allegro Andante Allegro POST-CONCERT DIALOGUE with Chen Yi, Philip Glass, Dennis Russell Davies, and Joseph Horowitz Philip Glass' Symphony No.2 is commissioned by BPO with partial funding provided by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. Symphony No.2 composed by Philip Glass. Copyright 1994 Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc. THE STANLEY H. KAPLAN EDUCATIONAL CENTER ACOUSTICAL SHELL The Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Academy of Music gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley H. Kaplan, whose assistance made possible the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center Acoustic Shell. THE BROOKLYN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA IS THE RESIDENT ORCHESTRA OF BAM. _ MIRROR IMAGES _ mainly associate£! with opera; ballet. film. and experimentaltheatet~ the opportuni­ f,r to "think a\Jour tne tradition of &Ythphonic musk;/' Glass haSstateu. openeu "a new world ofmusic--and I am very much looking forward to what I will discover." Glass's Symphony No. 2 l1larksasecond chapter in asurprising and unpredictable journey of retrospection. 'Glass arrived ata timely musical aesthetic partly by rejecting trendshe sensed had expired, partly through research and travel-to North Africa, India, and the Himalayas. Joining his new Second Symphony on BFO's program are works by two other composers for whom East and West are merging mirror images. Chen Yi, born in China, now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.' Her Piano Concerto-like Glass', symphony, a BPO commission-is based 'on the popular Chinese folk'tune Bab:a1t" 'John Zorn's enthusiasms include Japan. In his music, the speed of juxtapo- sitioninirrors the pace andtexture of today's Tokyo. .......................................... John Zorn: For Your Eyes Only (1989) . John Zorn is the most prominent, active, wide variety of styles and often command­ and influential of the under-fifty generation ing an extensive knowledge of the standard of today's "downtown" composers. These repertoire (Zorn frequently uses performers musicians, not a "school" but a group of who play turntable, CD's, and samplers), friends and associates, frequently perform splits into sub-groups; a prompter calls for together in various combinations and share sudden jumps from one group to another, musical ideas and enthusiasms. The music with no transitional material. coming out of this scene is high on energy Zorn uses creative and startling juxtapo­ and humor, rigorously democratic and sitions, welding together sonic blocks to eclectic, and demands virtuosity and style r form a continuity which is closer to the flow from the performer. Militantly anti-institu­ of cinema, with its sudden jumps and cuts, tional (he dropped out of college after a year than the evolving, unfolding line of tradi­ and a half), Zorn is largely self-taught as a tional concert music. Modelling his tech- composer. His principal works have nique after Stravinsky's preference of static evolved from "open-form" compositions­ blocks over thematic development, Zorn game structures for improvisors-to fully demands that the orchestra jump from style written-out pieces for the concert hall. to style with lightning speed. The instru­ Two of the defining characteristics that mentation, rhythm, volume, and mood For Your Eyes Only shares with much of change quickly, brilliantly, and unceasingly. Zorn's recent music are quotation and jux­ An important subtext of the music lies, as it taposition. Both have their roots in the com­ were, "between the cracks," a layer of poser's earlier work, where an ensemble of meaning springing up from the way a new improvisers, accustomed to playing in a phrase or style casts light on the music I PROGRAM NOTES heard immediately before, the larger form of little or no variation, such as the single mea­ the piece emerging as a mosaic created not sure of Brahms heard in the piano less than from tiles but from snatches of different a minute into the piece, accompanied by a musics. Informed by modern technology, few stray notes in the bassoon and viola. Zorn's music is close in spirit to the way in More often, only hints of the original peek which rap music uses a fleeting sample of an through the surface of Zorn's recomposi­ old funk or jazz record to trigger the listen­ tion. A chord from Mozart alternates with er's memory. One feels the thumb of the a chord from Schoenberg. The low, bell-like composer placed at the ready on the TV's piano notes from Berg's Chamber Concerto remote control. call up a score for an as-yet-unseen film The compositional technique Zorn nair. The violin march from L'histoire du employs in For Your Eyes Only is similar to Soldat, coming out of and dissolving back that used in his work for solo piano, Carny, into bluegrass fiddling, is heard surrounded written two years later. Both pieces consist by new music played by Stravinsky's little primarily of three kinds of music: quota­ band. Occasionally only the instrumenta­ tions, textures, and genre snippets (i.e., boo­ tion of the original remains, such as the gie-woogie, country fiddling, cartoon sound­ dark trio for harp, tam-tam, and double tracks). The beginning of For Your Eyes bass borrowed from the Italian composer Only displays all three in rapid succession: Giacinto Scelsi or the brief flirtation with an opening convulsion borrowed from the unmistakable sound world of Boulez's Elliott Carter's Double Concerto (re-written Marteau sans Maitre called up by flute, as a palindrome), the whooshing texture of viola, and vibraphone. Much like James sliding string harmonics and pure wind Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, the references and blown through brass instruments, followed quotations, in so many disguises, fly by by a hair-raising cartoon blast and "tippie­ faster than most of us can catch. For Your toe" walking straight out of Saturday morn­ Eyes Only is a romp through the history of ing television. In the midst of this, a caden­ Western music, profoundly comic in its jux­ za for solo oboe telescopes all three styles. tapositions. -Steven Drury Zorn's music, however, is not mere col­ lage. Rather, Zorn has developed a process STEVEN DRURY will premiere John Zorn's of re-composition, whereby fragments of piano concerto, Piano Requia, this February previously existing music are heard through in Cologne, with Dennis Russell Davies con­ varying degrees of transformation. ducting. Sometimes the music is quoted baldly with ...................................................... Chen Yi: Piano Concerto . Chen Yi was born in 1953, in Guangzhou, personal risk, practicing violin with a mute China, into a family of physicians with a attached. At the age of fifteen she was sent firm interest in cultural activities. Accor­ to work in the countryside; there she played dingly, she began at the age of only three to traditional songs for her fellow-farmers on study both violin and piano, attaining sub­ the violin, interspersing the occasional stantial mastery by the time the Cultural Paganini caprice (never announced as such). Revolution descended. Even during that In 1970, when she was seventeen, she repressive era, however, she persevered in was called back to Beijing to serve as con­ the study of her instruments, at substantial certmaster and composer for the Beijing I _ PROGRAM NOTES _ Opera Company, a position that made it the larger part to the whole) and the possible to embark on a serious study of tra­ Fibonacci series (a succession of numbers ditional Chinese art music and music theory. achieved by perpetually adding two together Upon the re-establishment of the Chinese to make the next-1...1...2...3...5...8... school system in 1977, Chen enrolled in the 13 ...21 ...34, and so on - and which, as it Central Conservatory of Beijing to study happens, corresponds to such spatial rela­ both Western-style composition (with the tionships in nature as the proportions by school's British guest professor Alexander which a seashell curls or the arrangement of Goehr) and Chinese traditional music, petals in a flower). The composer subjects which involved frequent field trips to collect the Bahan melody to very substantial regional folksongs. These disparate manipulations, some according to serial pro­ threads-Chinese and Western-intertwine cedures. Chen's Piano Concerto is separated in all of her mature works, providing the­ by light years from a folksong suite. All the matic material, harmonies, structures, same, a Chinese flavor emerges from the rhythms, and timbres. In 1983, she became texture: glimpses of the tune's pentatonic the first Chinese composer to write a Viola flavor, grace notes and other ornamentation Concerto; three years later an entire evening reminiscent of traditional Chinese perfor­ of her compositions was presented in Beijing mance (and of specific traditional Chinese by a consortium of China's leading cultural instruments), an unusually colorful percus­ institutions. sion section that includes Beijing gongs both In 1986, Chen moved to New York to large and small. The orchestra itself is large, begin graduate study in composition at with triple winds and divided strings.