Concerts: Fearful Symmetries

Fearful Symmetries (1988)
John Adams (b. 1947)

John Adams has an extensive history with the Cabrillo Music Festival, extending back to 1988 when the Festival Orchestra performed The Chairman Dances, adapted from Adams' opera Nixon in China, under Dennis Russell Davies. Adams served as guest music director of the Festival in 1991 and has had several works performed subsequently, including Harmonium for chorus and orchestra in 1994 and the Violin Concerto in 1995; the latter also won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. Additional Festival performances of Adams' works include Lollapalooza in 1997 and The Chairman Dances in 1999.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in Vermont and New Hampshire. After graduating from Harvard University in 1971, he spent ten years teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Between 1979 and 1985, at the invitation of music director Edo de Waart, he became composer-in-residence of the San Francisco Symphony. In 1988, he was named creative chair of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, a position he held for three years. In 1995, he served as music director of the Ojai Music Festival in Southern California.

Adams' early works were considered purely minimalist, but he subsequently developed an original style combining elements of minimalism with a unique form of neo-romanticism. Recent works include the Chamber Symphony (1993), Slonimsky's Earbox (1996), the clarinet concerto Gnarly Buttons (1996), the piano concerto Century Rolls (1997), Naïve and Sentimental Music (1999) and the oratorio El Niño (2000).

Fearful Symmetries was commissioned by the Orchestra of St. Luke's and was introduced in October 1988 at Avery Fisher Hall in New York under the direction of the composer. It is dedicated to the Orchestra and its director, Michael Feldman. The title comes from the famous poem by William Blake: "Tyger, tyger, burning bright/In the forests of the night,/What Immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" Adams has written the following note:

In the spring of 1988, shortly after the first series of Nixon in China performances in the United States and Europe, I began thinking about a new work for orchestra. Working in the almost too beautiful confines of the American Academy in Rome, I found that ideas were slow to arrive. When they did make an appearance I was surprised to see that they were in much the same vein as the Nixon music. Apparently I had more to say in that particular style, although this time it would be purely instrumental music, and the sound would be largely dictated by the Nixon orchestra, a kind of mutated big band, heavy on brass, winds, synthesizer and saxophones. To this ensemble, I added for Fearful Symmetries a keyboard sampler playing sampled percussion sounds, two horns and a bassoon. Otherwise the ensemble is identical to that called for in the opera.

The music is, as the title suggests, almost maddeningly symmetrical. Four- and eight-bar phrases line up end to end, each articulated by blazingly obvious harmonic changes and an insistent chugging pulse. The familial resemblance to the opening minutes of The Chairman Dances is unmistakable, but in Fearful Symmetries the gestures are more emphatic and the music is more closely allied to pop and minimalist rock. It's clearly an example of what I call my "traveling music," music that gives the impression of continuous movement over a shifting landscape. In this piece, however, a cityscape is doubtless the more appropriate analogy as the sound has a distinctly urban feel.

It is for sure a seriously aerobic piece, a Pantagruel boogie with a thrusting, grinding beat that governs at least two-thirds of its length. Partly for this reason, it's become my most choreographed work, with over a dozen different versions, including those by the Royal Ballet and the New York City Ballet, in current use. What appeals to me most about the piece is the timbre: it mixes the weight and bravura of a big band with the glittering, synthetic sheen of techno pop (sampler and synthesizer) and the facility and finesse of a symphony orchestra.

Suggested recording:
Orchestra of St. Luke's conducted by John Adams
Nonesuch NON 79218

Fanfare Ritmico (1999-2000)
Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Jennifer Higdon is active as a freelance composer. Recently named 1999 Pew Fellow in the Arts, she is also a recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her orchestral work, Shine, was named Best New Piece of the Year in USA Today's Top Picks in Classical Music for 1996. Her works are recorded on 10 discs, including recent releases on CRI and the Crystal label. Her works wissahickon poeTrees, My True Love's Hair, rapid.fire, Sing, Sing, and Deep In The Night, will all be released in the coming fall on separate labels. Upcoming commissions include works for the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, eighth blackbird, the Verdehr Trio, and the Van Cliburn Competition. Higdon currently teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She has written the following comments:

Fanfare Ritmico celebrates the rhythm and speed (tempo) of life. Writing this work on the eve of the move into the new Millennium, I found myself reflecting on how all things have quickened as time has progressed. Our lives now move at speeds much greater than what I believe anyone could have ever imagined in years past. Everyone follows the beat of his own drummer, and those drummers are beating faster and faster on many different levels.

As we move along day to day, rhythm plays an integral part of our lives, from the individual heartbeat to the lightning speed of our computers. This fanfare celebrates that rhythmic motion, of man and machine, and the energy that permeates every moment of our being in the new century.

Fanfare Ritmico was commissioned by the Womens' Philharmonic as part of The Fanfares Project, the largest commission in history of new works by women composers, and was introduced last spring by the Womens' Philharmonic. The Fanfares Project, a series of ten orchestral works, is presented in partnership with the American Composers Orchestra and the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra.

Support for this work was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Irvine Foundation, AT&T, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the California Arts Council and hundreds of individuals across the United States.

Not recorded

Violin Concerto (1991)
Christopher Rouse (b. 1949)

Christopher Rouse has become practically a fixture at the Cabrillo Music Festival. Since 1993, his works have been featured every year except 1996, and he was a guest composer in 1994, 1998, and again last year. Works performed at the Festival include Iscariot in 1993, Rotae Passionis and the Trombone Concerto in 1994, Gorgon in 1995, Ogoun Badagris and Ku-Ka-Ilimoku in 1997, Symphony No. 2 in 1998, the Flute Concerto in 1999, and Der gerettete Alberich and the Symphony No. 1 last year. Almost all have been West Coast premieres.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Rouse graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory and Cornell University, numbering among his principal teachers George Crumb and Karel Husa. Currently professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music, since 1997 he has also taught composition at the Juilliard School.

Rouse's Trombone Concerto won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1993. His most recent works include Kabir Padavali (1999), an orchestral song cycle commissioned for soprano Dawn Upshaw by the Minnesota Orchestra; Seeing (1999), a piano concerto composed for pianist Emmanuel Ax and the New York Philharmonic; Concert de Gaudi (2000), a concerto for guitarist Sharon Isbin, commissioned by the NDR Symphony Orchestra of Hamburg and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra; and the Clarinet Concerto (2001) for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and soloist Larry Combs.

Rouse has written the following comments about the Violin Concerto:

I completed my Violin Concerto on August 18, 1991 in Fairport, New York. It was composed for and dedicated to Cho-Liang Lin via a commission from the Aspen Music Festival, funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

I have long been drawn to the two-movement concerto form as exemplified by Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 1 and I resolved to structure my own concerto with a generally similar architecture. The opening movement is an elegiac barcarolle that begins with the soloist alone, then gradually joined by the other first desk strings from the orchestra until a quartet has been formed. The "rocking motion" which typifies the bacarolle intensifies following the sudden entrance of the entire orchestra as the solo violin weaves an increasingly florid line over it. The movement's central section offers a contrast through a seemingly heightened metabolic rate (although the fundamental tempo remains unchanged). This is followed by an extended passage for soloist and orchestral strings which gradually lowers the musical metabolism again before yielding to an altered recapitulation of material heard earlier in the movement. The movement concludes with a somewhat spectral passage featuring the soloist accompanied by timpani and plucked low strings, with occasional interjections from harp and celeste.

The second movement, a toccata, follows without pause and requires enormous virtuosity of the soloist. It is cast in a rondo form (A-B-A-C-A) and is characterized by a more colorful orchestration as well as by its often extremely quick tempi. Most of the important musical material is presented in the A sections, with the B and C sections furnishing variations on it, the former being a rather fast, capricious waltz and the latter a breathlessly racing prestissimo. An interpolated reminiscence of the barcarolle delays the appearance of the final A section and this, in turn, gives way to a perpetual motion cadenza which makes extraordinary demands on the soloist's technique. A few bars of orchestral coda bring the concerto to a close.

As I was working on the piece, I became increasingly aware that it was conceived very much in the grand manner of romantic concerti from Brahms to Szymanowski and, as a result, felt little need to exploit various, even mildly unusual performing techniques. The entire approach to the handling of the solo part was derived from this tradition, and virtuoso display music (toccata) seems "romantic" in retrospect. The language of the concerto is, of course, more dissonant than that found in 19th-century counterparts, though there are areas of traditional tonality in my concerto, and an overall orientation of C minor (first movement) and D minor (second movement) is detectable. I also find this to be one of my more "objective" compositions, lacking as it does any stated or unstated program, though I hope that the use of a term such as "objective" will not lead the listener to conclude that my aim was an inexpressive one.

Not recorded