|
|
American Composers Orchestra
The 2000-2001 season caps-off the American Composers Orchestra's three-year "20th Century Snapshots" Millennium survey with four thematic Sunday afternoon concerts at Carnegie Hall under the baton of Music Director Dennis Russell Davies. The concerts, "Pacifica" on Oct. 15, "Berlin 1931" on January 21, "Ellis Island to JFK" on March 18, and "Hollywood" on April 22, "bring together significant works, issues, and ideas of the 20th century, with new music that points the way for the 21st," according to Davies. The concerts span a century in which American music began to have worldwide impact, and during which American composers developed new techniques and a unique, identifiable, and powerful synthesis of cultures in their music. All told ACO's 2000-2001 season includes a dozen U.S. and World Premieres. Expanding on the themes of its Carnegie Hall series, ACO presents a range of performances around New York City, including its new "Composers Out Front" series at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater, featuring composer-performers integrating their diverse musical sources, including jazz, rock, popular, and world music. Featured in "Composers Out Front" are: Derek Bermel and Peace by Piece, Feb. 2; Jin Hi Kim: Komungo Around, March 9; and a Hollywood Cabaret with David Raksin on April 19. Other concert events include "Pacifica Mix," a concert of young Asian-American composers, Oct. 11 at The Japan Society; "Immigrant Voices," a choral program with the New York Concert Singers, March 11 at The New-York Historical Society; and "Hidden Hollywood," a program of chamber music by Hollywood composers, April 14 at the American Museum of the Moving Image. ACO's annual Whitaker New Music Reading Sessions, April 18, will introduce six premieres by the country's most promising composers, including new works combining the orchestra with electronics—part of the orchestra's newly launched Orchestra Technology Initiative.
"Pacifica" Melissa Hui and Chinary Ung are composers who view their composition as "musical quilt work." Hui's Common Ground was commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in 1994. It is a loud, hyper-kinetic fanfare, full of boisterous "sound objects" that jostle for attention and elbow for "air time". Her musical quilt is "a patchwork of inviolable musical entities whose diverse natures would be united, and by juxtaposition, strengthened, in a single integrated whole." Hui is currently an Assistant Professor of composition and theory at Stanford University. Chinary Ung was one of the first graduates of Cambodia's National Music Conservatory. His Inner Voices, commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and premiered by Davies, is inspired by the work of an old Cambodian woman who made quilts from collected scraps of cloth in all shapes and colors. The inherent artistry of the old woman's work became an organizing principle of Inner Voices. With overlapping colors, and ensemble groupings and superimposed musical ideas, the piece forms a "quilt of sound fragments," juxtaposing melodic lines, abstract sounds, and original material with Cambodian folk and dance music. Vietnamese-born composer P.Q. Phan left Vietnam in 1982 after six months in a Vietnamese jail cell for his political beliefs. He now teaches composition at Indiana University's School of Music at Bloomington, and last year won the coveted Prix de Rome. When the Worlds Mixed and Times Merged, commissioned by ACO for this Millennium celebration, with the support of the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, is a work at once celebratory and cautionary in its vision of the future in America. The piece was written in reaction to the July 4, 1999 shooting spree by Benjamin Smith, a member of a white supremacist group, who gunned-down non-whites and then took his own life, in a murderous rampage that extended from Illinois to Indiana. In the words of the composer, "the 'heartland,' where life is supposed to be simple, friendly, and promising, became a land of doubts and terrors to me." While the other composers on the program mirror the wave of Asian immigration to the U.S., Lou Harrison stands as one of this country's ground-breaking native-born adopters of Asian musical aesthetics. His Piano Concerto completed in 1985 and first performed by Keith Jarrett and ACO at Carnegie Hall, is infused with sounds from Harrison's world of the gamelan and casts the spell of the Orient with its emphasis on melody rather than harmonic development. The piano is specially tuned to produced perfect intervals of the fourth and fifth on the black keys while the white keys are tuned to just intonation. The famed Ursula Oppens, who has made a career of championing works by maverick composers, is the soloist. In the weeks leading up to "Pacifica," P.Q. Phan will be Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with ACO, a program of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer, that has placed eight composers in residencies with orchestras around the country this year. During the residency Phan will participate in a variety of educational, outreach, and performance activities that are part of ACO's yearlong exploration of immigration entitled Coming to America: Immigrant Sounds/Immigrant Voices. On Wednesday, October 11 at 8pm at the Japan Society, Mr. Phan and ACO present "Pacifica Mix," chamber music by emerging Asian-American composers including Mr. Phan, Dorothy Chang, Ushio Torikai, Joan Huang, Gi Nyoung Lee, and Kenji Bunch, whose backgrounds include Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan.
"Berlin
1931" Baltimore-born composer Adolph Weiss, a bassoonist with the New York Philharmonic under Mahler and the New York Symphony under Damrosch and a teacher of John Cage was a significant, although today less remembered, pioneer in the development of modern music. The first American to study with Schoenberg and learn twelve-tone technique, he created a personal style in his orchestral writing that incorporates jazz and tone-clusters (which he learned from Cowell). American Life was premiered on February 21, 1930 by the Orpheus-precursor, the Conductorless Orchestra of New York. Charles Ives, the great experimenter, worked on the landmark Three Places in New England from 1903-1914. Although it was the chamber version that Slonimsky premiered in 1931, the work did not receive its full orchestral premiere until the Ives centenary in 1974. It is the full orchestral version that ACO performs. The first movement is inspired by the monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens erected in Boston Common to commemorate Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the regiment of Negro soldiers he led in the Civil War. The second, Putnam's Camp, describes a child's Fourth of July fantasy set at the site of General Israel Putnam's winter quarters in which two bands enter from different sides of the park. The third movement, The Housatonic at Stockbridge, evokes an early morning walk with the mists rising from the river. Carl Ruggles' Men and Mountains boasts an aggressive use of dissonance and complex counterpoint. Ives is reported to have defended the eccentric Ruggles against audience boos and hisses with the retort, "You sissie, you don't realize that this is a piece of real strong masculine music." Henry Cowell's Synchrony was planned as a collaborative effort with Martha Graham, though it was never actually performed with dancers. Synchrony, which opens with a long trumpet solo, was intended to reflect a synthesis of the arts, with music, dance and stylized lighting, all autonomous but contributing to the total effect. The orchestral version eliminates portions relating to dance alone and enmeshes the musical elements of the work. Slominsky's fascination with and respect for Latin American music grew with his exposure and his many musicological explorations in South America and the Caribbean. Amadeo Roldán was one of two leading early-century Cuban composers (the other was Alejandro Garcia Caturla) that caught Slonimsky's attention. Slonimsky had conducted Roldán's percussion works in earlier concerts, and added the Suite from the ballet, La Rebambaramba, to round-out the Berlin program.
"From
Ellis Island to JFK" ACO audiences will be familiar with Tania León's work as she has served as ACO's Latin American music Advisor, and the guiding force behind Sonidos de las Américas, ACO's six annual festivals of music from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Cuba, that introduced music by nearly 100 contemporary Latin American composers. Ms. León's own music combines the sophisticated rhythms of her home country with rigorous and incisive harmonic and melodic development. She recently created a sensation in Europe with her opera, A Scourge of Hyacinths, developed in collaboration with Robert Wilson, which had ten performances by the Grand Theatre de Geneve in 1999, with more planned in Europe and Latin America. Her new work Horizons premieres at Tanglewood this summer. Jin Hi Kim's Eternal Rock is Ms. Kim's first orchestral commission. The work combines Eastern and Western instruments exploring a sound-world which crosses ethnic, national, stylistic, and ontological boundaries. Ms. Kim's music delves into the traditional Korean concept of "Living Tones" by which individual sounds evolve dynamically and timbrally over time, often including improvisational elements. Ms. Kim was trained as a traditional Komungo player, and she performs around the world. She is also co-developer of the world's only Electric Komungo and has co-created interactive multimedia pieces for that instrument and MIDI computer systems, presented at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery, The Japan Society, and The Kitchen. In advance of her orchestral premiere, Ms. Kim will perform a concert entitled Komungo Around on Friday, March 9, 2001 as part of ACO's Composers Out Front series at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater. That program will showcase Ms. Kim's acoustic and electric komungo, both solo and in collaboration with string quartet, jazz saxophone and bass. Born in Berlin, Lukas Foss was awarded the Gold Medal for Music of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May of 2000, recognizing his position as one of the 20th century's major musical figures. His Piano Concerto for the Left Hand was written for the program's soloist, Leon Fleisher, in 1994 on commission by the Boston Symphony for its Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert at Tanglewood. Fleisher, a foremost interpreter of piano left-hand literature, meets the many challenges posed by Foss in the three-movement work, especially in the fugal last movement which includes a cue for the orchestra to shout an homage from the composer to the pianist: "Here's to L.F from L.F." Rounding out the program is Arnold Schoenberg's landmark Variations for Orchestra, a work that marked his admission to the establishment. Charles Rosen writes " In Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31, we find [one of] the extreme points of Schoenberg's neoclassicism&ldots;and a composer who did not want the public to be aware of his use of traditional forms." This performance marks ACO's debut performance of the Schoenberg masterpiece.
"Hollywood" "Hollywood" features the suite from Psycho by Bernard Herrmann, one of Hollywood's most distinguished composers who wrote over forty scores for top directors during his career. Born in New York in 1911, Herrmann began his career there as a composer and conductor, forming a long association with the CBS Symphony. His score for Orson Welles radio play, The War of the Worlds, brought him to Hollywood to score Citizen Kane. From this first score to his last for Taxi Driver, his work for films (Fahrenheit 451, Obsession) evoke psychological nuance and dramatic tension. Psycho Suite, written for strings alone, mirrors the film's "black and white" image. The program pairs David Raksin, a prolific film composer, and Igor Stravinsky, whose compositions for Hollywood films ultimately resulted in works for the concert stage. Raksin's output includes music for 300 television shows and over 100 films. Raksin's featured work, The Bad and the Beautiful, as well as his most recorded work, Laura, reflect his origins in show music and jazz. After graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Raksin went to New York to work as a singer, musician and arranger. His arrangement of I Got Rhythm brought him to the attention of George Gershwin, and he worked steadily at Harms/Chappell until moving to Hollywood to assist Charlie Chaplin in scoring Modern Times. In addition to drawing from the full musical spectrum for his film scoring, Raksin orchestrated Stravinsky's Circus Polka for George Balanchine's choreography for dancing elephants. Stravinsky emigrated to California in 1940, and like his fellow Californian, Arnold Schoenberg, was interested in film but unsuccessful in, and probably temperamentally unsuited for, the medium. Stravinsky's Four Norwegian Moods was originally written for a film about resistance to the Nazi invasion of Norway, a project that was never completed. The work is based on a collection of Norwegian folk music Stravinsky found in a secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles, including three tunes arranged by Grieg. Rózsa and Tiomkin are among the most successful of the breed of film composers who were born and educated abroad and drew upon European folk idioms and symphonic forms in their music. Rózsa, born in Budapest in 1907 and educated at the Leipzig Conservatory, lived in Paris and London where he enjoyed a successful career writing music for director Sir Alexander Korda. Rózsa moved to Hollywood in 1940, receiving three Academy Awards for his film scores including one for the Hitchcock film Spellbound, which Rózsa later reworked into a piano concerto. In ACO's performance, pianist Scott Dunn is soloist. Tiomkin's score for cult classic The Thing with James Arness displayed his talent for orchestration and earned him one of his 23 nominations and four Academy awards, including two for High Noon for best score and best song (one of many top-ten singles). Born in St. Petersburg, he studied with Glazunov and earned degrees in law and music. A touring concert pianist, he introduced the works of Gershwin to Europe and moved to the U.S. in 1925. His early works were ballet scores for his wife's choreography. He began working in film in 1933, often with Frank Capra, and remained active in the movies until 1970. Composer Paul Chihara is one of the newer generation of Hollywood composers whose work has garnered equal acclaim in the concert hall as it has on the silver screen. Among Chihara's credits are such films as Prince of the City, Crossing Delancey, and The Morning After; as well as the ABC-TV series China Beach. He has been commissioned works for the Cleveland String Quartet, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New Japan Philharmonic. Chihara is currently Professor of Composition at UCLA, where he teaches film scoring, and serves as Music Supervisor at Buena Vista Studios.
Two additional programs complete ACO's
"Hollywood" celebration. A three-weekend series at the
American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens will focus on
the film composer's art, including screenings, talks with current
practitioners, and Hidden Hollywood, a concert featuring chamber
music by David Raksin and such Hollywood luminaries as Alex North,
Bernard Herrmann, Louis Gruenberg, George Antheil, and Erich
Korngold, on Saturday, April 14 at 2pm. And, one of Hollywood's grand
old men, David Raksin, will give a Hollywood Cabaret on Thursday,
April 19 at 8:30pm at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater, featuring his
new work Swing Low, Sweet Clarinet for clarinet and string quartet.
Pre-Concert Talks / Ticket Info Tickets for ACO's Carnegie Hall concerts are $46, $33, and $16, and discounted subscriptions are available. Tickets 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, 57th Street at 7th Ave. Tickets for ACO's "Composers Out Front" Series at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater are $20, and are available through TeleCharge at 212-239-6200, or at The Public Theater's box office at 425 Lafayette Street. Tickets for Oct. 11 "Pacifica Mix" are $15 ($10 for Japan Society members and ACO subscribers) and available at The Japan Society Box Office at 333 East 47th Street, or by phone at 212-752-3015.
About ACO Major support of the American Composers Orchestra is from Alliance Capital Management L.P., Mr. Thomas Buckner, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Fidelity Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, J.P. Morgan & Co., Virgil Thomson 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. The residency of composer P.Q. Phan is made possible through Music Alive, a residency program of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet The Composer. This national program is designed to provide orchestras with resources and tools to support their presentation of new music to the public and build support for new music within their institutions. Funding for Music Alive is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
|
# # # #
