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Wednesday,
October 8, 2003 at 8pm
Carnegie Hall
  
"Different
Trains"
Steven
Sloane, conductor
James
Stubbs, trumpet
JOHN
ADAMS: Christian Zeal and Activity
CHARLES WUORINEN: Grand Bamboula
ANNA WEESNER: Still Things Move
(New York Premiere)
IRVING FINE: Serious Song: A Lament
for String Orchestra
ALAN HOVHANESS: The Holy City,
op. 218
STEVE REICH: Different Trains
(Version for String Orchestra and pre-recorded tape)
(New York Premiere)
Tickets are
$15, $34, & $42. Call CarnegieCharge:
212-247-7800
Pre-concert
discussion, moderated by ACO Artistic Director Robert Beaser, is free
to all ticket holders and begins at 7:00 pm.
“Different
Trains” Arrive at Carnegie Hall for ACO Season Opener October
8
Steve Reich’s Different Trains
in NY premiere. Musical departures by Charles Wuorinen, Anna Weesner,
John Adams, Irving Fine & Alan Hovhaness.
ACO’s
season opens on Wednesday, October 8, 2003 at 8pm at Carnegie Hall,
with a program that features the long-awaited New York premiere of Steve
Reich’s Different Trains, an evocative musical landscape
for string orchestra and pre-recorded tape. Also on the program is the
New York premiere of Anna Weesner’s Still Things Move,
works by John Adams and Charles Wuorinen, as well as Irving Fine’s
rarely performed Serious Song: Lament for String Orchestra
and Alan Hovhaness’ haunting The Holy City.
The concert offers a dramatic, intimate, and diverse musical experience
exploring the emotional range of music for string instruments—alone,
with other instruments, and with electronic tape—with sonorities
ranging from mystical to gritty to somber, and rhythms from minimalist
to mechanical and dance-inspired. The program also contrasts music by
some of today’s leading composers, from the prototype minimalist
Steve Reich to serialist stalwart Charles Wuorinen.
Steve
Reich’s Different Trains
 Steve
Reich’s Different Trains was originally scored for string
quartet and performed by the Kronos Quartet in 1988. The piece builds
upon the composer’s technique of using recorded speech to generate
musical material for the instrumental parts. The idea for Different
Trains is drawn from the composer’s childhood, when he traversed
the country by train, traveling between Los Angeles and New York to
visit his parents during the years 1939 – 1942. In reflection,
these train trips are contrasted with the very different trains that
were bringing Jews in Europe to concentration camps during that time.
 The
music is for string orchestra, without double basses, and electronic
tape with which the composer recorded sounds of trains from the 1930’s
and 40’s, interviews with holocaust survivors, and a retired train
Pullman porter. In a process Reich continues to use in his music, the
rhythms and inflections of the recorded speech form the basis for the
recurring motives played by the strings.
Anna
Weesner’s Still Things Move in NY Premiere
Anna
Weesner’s Still Things Move plays on the double entendre
of the word “still” in the title, suggesting both that something
fixed is brought into motion and that in spite of stillness, things
do move. The work is in three continuous movements, subtitled “Wish,”
“Sport,” and “History.” Anna Weesner studied
at Yale and Cornell and now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is the 2003 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, as well an
ASCAP young composer award, with residencies at the MacDowell Colony
and Wellesley Composers Conference. Her music has been performed by
Dawn Upshaw, Richard Goode, the Cassatt Quartet, Metamorphosen Chamber
Orchestra, and Orchestra 2001, among others.
Music
by John Adams and Charles Wuorinen
Opening
the concert is Christian Zeal and Activity, an early work by
John Adams. Scored for orchestra and electronic tape, the composer calls
the piece a “mixture of the serene, almost stationary homophonies
of the hymn, contrasted with the gritty, active sound of the human voice…
a subconscious reenactment of the scenario of Ives’ Unanswered
Question.”
Charles Wuorinen’s Grand Bamboula is a string orchestra
piece dating from 1970. One of four works by Wuorinen carrying the title
“Bamboula,” these pieces owe their titles to composer/pianist
Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who appropriated the moniker from a Creole
dance. In keeping with its inspiration, Wuorinen’s Grand Bamboula
is energetic, extroverted, and celebratory, with a harmonic and technical
rigor that have justifiably earned Wuorinen the reputation as one of
America’s most influential thinkers and uncompromising musical
practitioners.
Serious
Strings Plus: Irving Fine and Alan Hovhaness
Irving
Fine was a close colleague of Aaron Copland, who said that Fine’s
music “wins us over through its keenly conceived sonorities and
its fully expressive content… elegance, style, finish, and a convincing
continuity.” Though his music is not often performed, Fine is
a composer’s composer, with a small output that reveals him to
be a perfectionist. Fine’s Serious Song: Lament for String
Orchestra dates from 1955—an austere and pristine long-lined
work with a taught harmonic sense and a lyric romantic tinge.
Alan Hovhaness was an enigmatic composer with a taste for exotic influences
and a mystical orientation. The Holy City, like many of this
composer’s best works, is hauntingly simple. Scored for trumpet,
harp, and strings in multiple divisions, the nine-minute work will feature
ACO co-principal trumpet James
Stubbs.
About
Steven Sloane, Music Director
Steven
Sloane is one of the most adventurous and innovative conductors to have
emerged in recent years. Through his work with orchestras, festivals,
choruses, and opera companies across Europe and in America, Mr. Sloane
has won acclaim for his compelling programming, theatrical flair, and
impressive technique. His passion for unusual repertoire, interest in
eclectic juxtapositions of music of divergent eras and styles, commitment
to contemporary works, and willingness to challenge convention have
established Mr. Sloane as a bold champion of the future of concert music.
[find out more...]
About
ACO
Founded
in 1977, American Composers Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world
dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation, and promulgation
of music by American composers. [find
out more...]
Tickets and Information
“Different
Trains” is October 8, 2003 at 8pm in Carnegie Hall. Tickets are
$15, $34, and $42 and may be purchased through CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800,
by visiting Carnegie Hall’s website at www.carnegiehall.org,
or at the Carnegie Hall box office on 57th Street at 7th Ave. The concert
is preceded by a discussion (free to ticket-holders) with the living
composers featured on the program, moderated by ACO’s Artistic
Director Robert Beaser, at 7:00pm.
Major
support of American Composers Orchestra is from Alliance Capital Management
L.P., Amphion Foundation, ASCAP, The Bagby Foundation for the Musical
Arts, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Bodman Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation,
BMI Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Citigroup Foundation,
Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Edward T. Cone Foundation, Consolidated
Edison, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable
Trust, Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Fidelity Foundation, Ann and
Gordon Getty Foundation, The Estate of Francis Goelet, Horace W. Goldsmith
Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, The Hauser Foundation, Henfield
Foundation, Victor Herbert Foundation, Geoffrey Hughes Foundation, Christian
Humann Foundation, Jephson Educational Trust, The Jerome Foundation,
Helen Sperry Lea Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, Meet the Composer,
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JPMorganChase, National Academy of Recording
Arts & Sciences Foundation, The New York Times Co. Foundation, Josephine
Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fan
Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Virgil Thomson Foundation,
Oakleigh L. Thorne Foundation, and The Helen F. Whitaker Fund. ACO programs
are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency,
and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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