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Symphony No. 1 (1986)
Although he conceived both his first and second symphonies almost
simultaneously in the summer of 1984, Rouse actually composed them about ten
years apart. The Second Symphony, commissioned and first performed by the
Houston Symphony Orchestra under Christof Eschenbach, was given its West
Coast premiere by the Cabrillo Music Festival in 1998.
Dedicated to his friend, composer John Harbison, Rouses' Symphony No. 1 was
commissioned in 1984 by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and its music
director, David Zinman. Completed on August 26, 1986 in Indianapolis,
Indiana, it was introduced in Baltimore in January 1988 and won the 1988
Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Rouse has written the following comments
about the symphony:
My first symphony was composed for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, whose
composer-in-residence I was from 1986 to 1988 under the auspices of the Meet
the Composer Residencies Program.
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The initial impetus for the work came through the desire to use in a new context an excerpt for strings which I had composed in 1976 (the Music commencing at measure 219 of the symphony score). Though this music had originally been composed in response to a dream, I came to associate it with the Pieta and to refer to it frequently by that name. It was not until I began the actual manual composition of the symphony that I realized it to be something of a companion work to my 1984 Gorgon [given its West Coast premiere at the 1995 Cabrillo Music Festival]. At first glance, however, the differences between these two scores might seem to outweigh the similarities. Gorgon is an astringently dissonant, entirely fast-paced orchestral showpiece, while the symphony is cast in the form of a single-movement adagio of considerable proportions, whose overall language is largely tonal in its orientation. Both, however, are works of the blackest night, with Gorgon'sexorcistic rage here replaced by a mood more somber, even tragic, in tone. Both works, moreover, concern themselves with a series of human issues which have increasingly occupied my thoughts over recent years. In a sense, Gorgon and my first symphony are a kind of yin and yang, very different responses to essentially the same stimuli. In my Symphony No. 1, I have attempted to pay conscious homage to many of those I especially admire as composers of adagios-- Shostakovich, Sibelius, Hartmann, Pettersson and Schuman, for example -- but only one is recognizably quoted (the famous opening theme from the second movement of Bruckner's Symphony No. 7, played both in the original and here by a quartet of Wagner tubas).
Suggested recording: • Program notes by Lawrence Duckles  |
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