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ACO
Goes "Underground" Connecting ACO kicks-off its second season "underground" with provocative music that explores the relationship between music and visual arts.
MICHAEL
DAUGHERTY: Fire and Blood (New York Premiere)
Tickets: $20 & $32
American Composers Orchestra opens its concert season on November 17, 2004 at 7:30pm in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, with the second concert in its groundbreaking new concert series, Orchestra Underground. Challenging conventional notions about symphonic music and the concert experience itself, this installment of Orchestra Underground explores the far-reaching impact of the visual arts on music. The event features the world premiere of Randall Woolf's multimedia Women at an Exhibition, created in collaboration with independent filmmakers Mary Harron and John C. Walsh; the New York premiere of Michael Daugherty's powerful Fire and Blood, inspired by Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry" murals, with violin soloist Ida Kavafian; Morton Feldman's De Kooning, and selections from Stephen Sondheim's poignant Sunday in the Park with George. The concert offers a special focus on the varied and unexpected ways in which composers have been influenced not only by the finished works of visual artists, but also by their creative process and the limitless potential for the two disciplines to inspire and influence each other. Contrasting themes of alienation-depicting through music the emotional struggle of the self-absorbed painter in Sunday in the Park with George-with those of connection, collaboration and inspiration, as in the works of Morton Feldman, Michael Daugherty, and Randall Woolf, the program provides a compelling look at the interdependent aspects of the vast and continually evolving landscapes of music and visual art.
Michael Daugherty: Fire and Blood (New York Premiere)
The music is in three movements: Volcano, which responds to the fiery furnaces of Rivera's imagination through the explosive interplay between violinist and orchestra; River Rouge, which depicts through dissonant and haunting melodies the passion and suffering of Rivera's wife, the artist Frida Khalo; and Assembly Line, which portrays the violinist as factory worker and the orchestra as machine, with a final collaborative interplay of percussion, brass and strings. Ida Kavafian, violin
Randall
Woolf: Women at an Exhibition (World Premiere, new version)
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Wednesday,
November 17, 2004 at 7:30 pm
Michael
Daugherty's Fire
and Blood lives
up to its billing as a smoldering concerto for violin and orchestra
from a composer known for his embrace of irony and pop icons.
Violinist Ida Kavafian, who debuted the work at its world premiere
with the Detroit Symphony last year, reprises her performance in this
New York premiere. The piece takes its inspiration from four large
walls at the Detroit Institute of Arts painted by the Mexican
modernist artist Diego Rivera in 1932. Commissioned by Edsel Ford to
paint a mural representing the automobile industry in Detroit, it was
Rivera himself who predicted the possibility of turning his murals
into music, after returning from a tour of the Ford Factories:
"In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his
factories where metals were shaped into tools for men's service. It
was a new music, waiting for the composer&ldots;to give it
communicable form."
Ida
Kavafian's vast repertoire and impressive versatility have gained
her a unique position in the music world. Internationally acclaimed
as one of the few artists to excel on violin as well as viola, she
has appeared as a soloist with leading orchestras both nationally and
internationally, including the orchestras of New York, Boston,
Pittsburgh, Detroit, Saint Louis, Montreal, Minnesota, Metropolitan
(Tokyo), Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, and London. She has also performed
with her sister, violinist Ani Kavafian, with the symphonies of
Colorado, Tucson, San Antonio, and Chattanooga. Together they have
recorded the music of Mozart and Sarasate on the Nonesuch label. Her
commitment to contemporary music has led to many world premieres by
composers as varied as Toru Takemitsu, who wrote a concerto for her,
and jazz greats Chick Corea and Wynton Marsalis, with whom she has
toured and recorded. She has also toured and recorded with the
Guarneri String Quartet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center,
of which she is an Artist Member, and was the violinist of the
renowned Beaux Arts Trio for six years, during which time they were
named "Ensemble of the Year" by Musical America and
received a 1998 Grammy nomination.![Philip Strickmaker, Untitled [group of women in fancy hats], around 1893-1898, gelatin silver print on cardboard, 4 1/4 x 6 1/2 in., Collection of the Akron Art Museum, gift of Barbara Tannenbaum](/images/strickmaker_women_72dpi.jpg)
Randall
Woolf is a "downtown" composer whose compositions combine
traditional orchestral instruments, digital processing, electric
guitar, electronic and acoustic drumsets and text, creating a richly
varied and genre-bending fusion of elements both ancient and
futuristic. Women
at an Exhibition was
commissioned by the Akron Art Museum. Woolf began planning the piece
by choosing works from the museum's collection. When a friend
observed that Woolf had chosen mostly images of women, he decided to
present his work as a constantly shifting, open-ended statement about
women&ldots;how they are seen by men, by society, by each other, and
how they see themselves, without ever settling into one point of
view. Woolf then assembled a digital soundtrack created from the
sounds of women singing in diverse genres, from country and western,
to new wave rock, to renaissance madrigals to accompany the
orchestra. ACO's performance marks the world premiere of a new
version of the piece for small orchestra.
Collaborating
with Woolf in the creation of Women at an Exhibition are filmmakers
Mary Harron and John C. Walsh, who produced a video that amplified
and extended Woolf's open-ended ideas about women's roles. "Randy
came to us with about two dozen images he liked from the museum's
collection, and asked that we edit them to his score. We began and
proceeded on a strictly intuitive basis. We played with juxtaposing
different images, doing varied camera moves on them. What became the
content of the shot depended on the particular camera movement and
the extent to which the image was obvious from the outset or revealed
slowly by pulling out. We tried to let the mood and tempo of the
score be our guide," says Walsh.
Morton
Feldman's strongest influence came from 1950's New York painters,
many of whom became good friends, such as Robert Rauschenberg,
Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko. Of
Willem De Kooning's work Feldman noted, "It was fascinating to
watch De Kooning paint: When you look at his pictures, they all look
very, very fast, but he paints very slowly&ldots; In slow
motion&ldots; I just couldn't believe it. Very slow, but it looked
vary fast." Feldman's friendship and fascination with the
painter led director Hans Namuth to approach the composer to create
the score for Willem De Kooning, The Painter, a documentary Namuth
completed in 1963. Scored for horns, drums, piano, violin and
violoncello, the music is a study in contrasted, well-coordinated
chords and a free sequence of individual sounds, that works alone or
in the context of the film.