Part 2 GOBLIN MARKET 6 Scene 1 [10.56] AARON JAY KERNIS “Early in the morning, when the first cock crowed his warning” 7 Scene 2 – Presto [6.00] “Laughed every goblin when they spied her peeping” Goblin Market (1995) 8 Scene 3 – With movement – exuberant [7.46] Part 1 “She cried, ‘Laura’, up the garden” 1 Introduction – Misterioso [1.54] 9 Epilogue – Moderato [2.40] 2 Scene 1 – With energy [1.52] “Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry” 0 Invisible Mosaic II (1988) [20.11] 3 Scene 2 – Tranquil [4.49] “Evening by evening among the brookside rushes” Total timings: [66.42] 4 Scene 3 – Slowly, with swagger [3.52] “One set his basket down, one reared his plate” 5 Scene 4 – Meno [6.42] THE NEW PROFESSIONALS “Lizzie met her at the gate full of wise upbraidings” MARY KING NARRATOR REBECCA MILLER CONDUCTOR www.signumrecords.com AARON JAY KERNIS Kernis has been literally showered with commissions and Still Movement with Hymn for violin, viola eating of the goblins’ proffered fruits there Goblin Market for many of America’s leading performers, including (or clarinet), cello and piano. are clear parallels with the Biblical story of Invisible Mosaic II the sopranos Renee Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, Eve, the serpent and the forbidden fruit; her violinists such as Joshua Bell, Pamela Frank Kernis has been described as a true Postmodernist hunger for more of the fruit and her decline As one of the youngest composers ever to be and James Ehnes, the pianists Christopher composer. Certainly he is notable for the wildly when denied it seems like a metaphor for drug awarded the Pulitzer Prize (in 1998, for his 2nd O’Riley and Anne Marie MacDermott and guitarists catholic range of influences that he acknowledges, addiction. Lizzie’s ordeal in being drenched string quartet musica instrumentalis), and also David Tanenbaum and Sharon Isbin. He has from Gertrude Stein to hip-hop and rap, to with the juice of the fruit, and Laura’s licking the 2002 winner of the internationally-esteemed also received commissions from the New York the European symphonic tradition and the it from her skin, have sensual overtones far Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition (for Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra (for impressionism of Debussy and Ravel. Coming at variance with mid-Victorian repression, Coloured Field, a work for cor anglais or cello the inauguration of its new home at the Kimmel to find his voice in the 1980s and 90s, he seems though the eventual happy ending seems to with orchestra), Aaron Jay Kernis is among the Center), the Rose Center for Earth and Space at to have taken everything that was in the air satisfy the moral demands of the time. most successful American composers working New York’s American Museum of Natural History, around him to synthesize from it a distinctive, today. His has been a remarkable, if not the San Francisco and Seattle Symphonies, colourful and emotionally communicative music. Kernis composed his setting in 1994-5, supersonic, career trajectory. Born in Philadelphia, the Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center Great accompanying the (preferably female) narrator and at first self-taught, he later studied with Performers Series, American Public Radio, the So far, Kernis has not written an opera: but with an ensemble consisting of five woodwind some of the most respected names in American Los Angeles and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, one work has been singled out, since its first players (three of them doubling on various music – among others, John Adams in San the Aspen Music Festival, the BBC Proms and performance, as showing he has remarkable instruments), horn, trumpet, piano, four strings Francisco, Charles Wuorinen at the Manhattan the Walt Disney Company (this is not an operatic potential. This is Goblin Market, a (violin, viola, cello, bass) and a very large School of Music and Morton Subotnick, Bernard exhaustive list). His works have been performed setting for narrator and large ensemble of percussion ensemble wielded by two players. Rands and Jacob Druckman at Yale. frequently around the world and many have Christina Rossetti’s poem of the same name, It was a commission from the Birmingham been released on disc. Among the principal written in 1859 and first published in 1862. Contemporary Music Group jointly devised with Early in his career he was already garnering compositions in his multitudinous list of works This haunting, enigmatic and highly suggestive Trestle Theatre Company and Writer/Director national acclaim for his dream of the morning sky are musica celestis for string orchestra, Lament poem was one that Rossetti herself warned Toby Wilsher, the Trestle’s Artistic Director. (premiered by the New York Philharmonic when and Prayer for violin and string orchestra, ‘was not suitable for children’, though she Kernis has written that he envisaged no specific he was only 23), his first symphony (Symphony in Symphony of Meditations (Symphony #3) for later changed her mind on this. Its sensuously staging for his work, but the world premiere – Waves, 1989) and the Second Symphony (1991, vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra, Newly over-ripe and indeed sexual imagery, within which was staged, with masks and mimes – set inspired by the tragedy of the First Gulf War), Drawn Sky for orchestra, 100 Greatest Dance the framework of what seems a dark fairy-tale the story in a contemporary dystopia, with the but his reputation could be said to have gone Hits for guitar and string quartet, Two about sisterly love, gives it a resonance that sisters as hungry beggars and the goblins as nova with the Pulitzer and Grawemeyer awards. Movements (with Bells) for violin and piano challenges any simple interpretation. In Laura’s ghostly barrow-boys in a deserted fruit and - 4 - - 5 - vegetable warehouse: rather far from Rossetti’s is at some time a soloist, and every conceivable evokes the way Laura is inhibited and robbed of large structure through the patterning and sense-bewitching pastoral setting. This took combination of instruments is used to support, strength by the goblins’ deadly fruits. layering of tiny fragments. While Invisible place in London in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, undercut, or illustrate Rossetti’s text, producing Mosaic I is scored for only four instruments, and London on 12 January 1995 with Mary King as a work which is a tour-de-force of vivid Goblin Market is also a memorial piece: it Invisible Mosaic III for full orchestra, Invisible narrator and the BCMG conducted by Daniel orchestration and theatrical narration. bears the dedication ‘in memory of David Huntley’. Mosaic II, composed between October 1987 Harding. Later in January the staged production Huntley (1948-1994), head of promotion at the and February 1988 in California and New York, went on tour throughout the UK; the work was In scoring Goblin Market, Kernis has used music publishers Boosey & Hawkes in New York, and premiered in Paris by the Ensemble later presented in concert, without staging, at specific instruments as analogues of particular was an engaging personality and in his Intercontemporain, conducted by Kent Nagano, the 1996 Huddersfield Contemporary Music characters in the poem. For example the curious, lifetime one of the most intelligent and amiable requires a large chamber ensemble of 17 Festival and subsequently in the US. reckless, sensual Laura is embodied by the advocates for contemporary music in the USA. players – four woodwind, four brass, piano viola, with its initial long, rising line. The role His interests and friendships, on both sides of (doubling celesta), harp, string quintet and Kernis divides his setting into two parts, arranged of her sister Lizzie, who saves her by undergoing the Atlantic, extended far beyond the Boosey two percussionists who play a wide variety of in scenes like a stage work, and prefaces the the ordeal at the hands of the goblins, is taken & Hawkes catalogue, and his early death was instruments including vibraphone, marimba, whole with a Misterioso scene-setting introduction by the violin. The goblins themselves are often felt as a grave loss throughout the American gongs, drums, chimes, cymbals, tom-toms, whose evocative languor immediately defines represented by the woodwind section, with new music community. Many composers wrote wood block, thunder sheet, anvil and a canister an atmosphere between dream and fairy-tale motivic material imbued with semitones and pieces in his memory, and Kernis had already filled with sand. (with already some dark undertones) and shows trills: single woodwind colours delineate their contributed a short piece that was played at the composer’s skill at making his small ensemble animalistic qualities (‘the cat-faced purred, the his memorial service. The work begins with a raucous, heterophonic sound like a full orchestra. The jazzy, angular rat-faced spoke a word of welcome’). In addition, toccata in constantly changing metres for the opening of the first scene then shows that Kernis and following in the grand tradition of Romantic Kernis has composed three works with the full ensemble marked meccanico, filling the can write in quite another style. In fact, as the music-drama from Wagner on, Kernis employs title Invisible Mosaic, all within a short time of entire available register with furious activity. tale unfolds – the narrator’s part is strictly a network of leitmotifs (leading motives - one another, and traces them to the experience This is interrupted by staccato, leggiero writing notated rhythmically – the music continually melodies or strongly characterized short elements) of viewing the magnificent late-Roman mosaics for high woodwind and pitched percussion, with reveals new aspects, new colours, new to represent the recurring characters, events of the churches of Ravenna when he was flourishes from solo celesta. The toccata resumes, strategies.