Sat.8.9 Riffs and Refrains

Saturday, August 9, 8:00pm Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
Tickets: $26-41

Matthew Cmiel: Sneak in a Window (World Premiere)
Mark Anthony Turnage: Riffs and Refrains (Bharat Chandra, clarinet) (U.S. Premiere)
John Corigliano: The Mannheim Rocket
John Adams: Doctor Atomic Symphony (West Coast Premiere)

PROGRAM NOTES:

Sneak in a Window (2008) (World Premiere)
Matthew Cmiel (b. 1989)

Matthew Cmiel was asked by Marin Alsop to compose a piece for the 2008 Cabrillo Festival. The result was Sneak in a Window, for which he has written the following notes:

"Pursue that which you are passionate about and pure and simply, never give up! If the front door is locked to you, go around the side and sneak in a window!" —Marin Alsop's advice to young people

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music has played an important role in my life. I first attended in 1999 when I was ten years old. Not only was that was when I decided I wanted to be a composer, but I have not missed a summer since. That first summer I fell in love with Leonard Bernstein's Mass (and its gorgeous “Sing, a simple song”), John Adams' The Chairman Dances (and its insane cross-rhythms), Christopher Rouse's Flute Concerto (and its glorious high trumpet D-natural) and Marin Alsop's conducting (Dancing? Jiving? Being awesome?). In subsequent years I attended not only as many concerts as possible, but also open rehearsals, the conductors/composers training workshops, lunch with the composers, pre- and post-concert talks, free family concerts, the creativity tent for kids and the street fair. In retrospect I think my parents were pretty indulgent but I do remember once missing the Music at the Mission concert and I complained for years. In fact, I still complain about missing it. For those curious, it was 2004, with Jennifer Higdon (who I now study with), Christopher Rouse, and James MacMillan. Hmph!

The Festival has always had the right “vibe” for me. I loved most of what was played, learned something from everything, and was introduced to some of my favorite composers. But slowly I came to the realization that Cabrillo was, in essence, the only place I heard music like this. I became dissatisfied with the programming in my community and in my local school orchestras. I longed to recreate the Cabrillo experience as an active participant. I remembered Marin’s advice and decided to start my own teenage contemporary music ensemble, which would perform music written by composers in the ensemble as well as music written since we were born by composers we loved, many of whom I first heard at Cabrillo. After a few years of giving concerts, I was invited to conduct that group, Formerly Known As Classical, as a guest performer at the Cabrillo Festival. It was literally a dream come true, which was capped by an invitation from Marin to write a piece for the Festival the following year.

Sneak in a Window is an homage to that wise advice about seizing whatever openings you can find and always moving towards your goals.

Not recorded

Riffs and Refrains for clarinet and orchestra (2003) (US Premiere)
Mark Anthony Turnage (b. 1960)

Born in Essex, British composer Mark Anthony Turnage began piano studies at age six. Recognized as a major musical talent, he studied composition with Oliver Knussen and John Lambert at the Royal College of Music in London, and with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. He won the Guinness Prize for his Night Dreams in 1981. Turnage was encouraged to write for the theater by German composer Hans Werner Henze, who was instrumental in the commissioning of Turnage’s first opera Greek for the Munich Biennale in 1989. His second opera, The Silver Tassie, based on an anti-war play by Irish author Sean O’Casey, was produced by the English National Opera in 2000.

Turnage was Composer-in-Residence for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 1993, and serves in the same capacity for the English National Opera and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. His first American commissioned work was On Opened Ground for viola and orchestra, introduced by the Cleveland Orchestra in 2002. Other recent works include A Man Descending for tenor saxophone and orchestra, composed in 2003 for Joe Lovano and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Scherzoid for the New York Philarmonic and the world premiere of A Relic of Memory. The Cabrillo Festival performed his Three Screaming Popes (1988) in 2005.

Riffs and Refrains was composed in 2003 and received its world premiere on March 3, 2003 in Bridgewater Hall, Manchester by Michael Collins, clarinet, with the Halle Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder. Turnage has written the following brief program note:

Riffs and Refrains was written for the clarinetist Michael Collins. I had wanted to write a piece for him for a long time, since we were students together at the Royal College of Music Junior Department. The work exploits his virtuosity and versatility, displaying wide leaps and swiftly changing registers in the first movement and an increasingly passionate lyricism in the slower second.

Not recorded

The Mannheim Rocket (2000)
John Corigliano (b. 1938)

The Mannheim Rocket was written, appropriately enough, for the City of Mannheim, Germany, which commissioned the work. It was introduced on March 26, 2001 by the Mannheim National Theater Orchestra conducted by Adam Fischer. Corigliano has written the following program note for The Mannheim Rocket:

I first heard the “Mannheim Rocket” in a music history course in my freshman year at college. The term was used to describe a musical technique perfected by the Mannheim Orchestra in the 18th century in which a rising figure (a scale or arpeggio) speeded up and grew louder as it rose higher and higher (hence the term “rocket”).

As a young music student however, my imagination construed a very different image—that of a giant 18th-century wedding-cake-rocket commandeered by the great Baron von Munchausen, and its marvelous journey to the heavens and back. It was this image that excited me when I was asked to write a work for the Mannheim Orchestra: I knew I had to recreate the rocket of my young imagination and travel with it through its adventure.

And so this ten-minute work begins with the scratch of a match and serpentine 12-tone fuse that sparkles with light and fire. The ignition leads to a slow heaving as the giant engine builds up steam. The “motor” of the rocket is a very low, very slow “Alberti bass”, the accompaniment pattern that has served as the motor of so many classical pieces.

To get started, I included a quote from one of the originators of the “Mannheim Rocket”, Johann Anton Wenzel Stamitz (1717-57). The stately opening of his Sinfonia in E-flat (La Melodia Germanica No. 3) uses a scalar “rocket” to lift our heavy structure and start it on its way. This is the first in a series of quotes as the rocket rises and moves faster and faster, climbing through more than two hundred years of German music, finally breaking though a glass ceiling to float serenely in heaven.

There the rocket and crew are serenaded by tranquil “Music of the Spheres”. But what comes up must come down, and with a return of the opening fuse-music, the descent begins. The rocket accelerates as flashes of the ascent—backwards—mark the fall. Just before the inevitable crash, Wagner tries to halt things, but the rocket is uncontrollable: even he cannot stop it. After a crunching meeting with terra firma, the slow heaving and Alberti-bass-motor die away as we hear a fleeting memory of heaven, and, finally, a coda composed of a “Mannheim Rocket.”

Suggested recording:
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Storgaards
Ondine B0001WBEIO

Doctor Atomic Symphony (2007) (West Coast Premiere)
John Adams (b. 1947)

John Adams has an extensive history with the Cabrillo Festival, reaching 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, The Chairman Dances in 1999, Guide to Strange Places and Eros Piano in 2003 and in 2005, The Dharma at Big Sur, one of Adams’ most recent works, composed for the opening of the new Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

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.

The Doctor Atomic Symphony is based on material from Adams’ most recent opera Doctor Atomic, about scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the first atomic bomb in 1945. The San Francisco Opera introduced the opera in 2006. Adams conduced the world premiere of the Doctor Atomic Symphony with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on August 21, 2007 at London’s Royal Albert Hall. He has provided the following notes about the piece:

The Doctor Atomic Symphony is cast in a sustained, 25-minute single-movement arch, not unlike the Sibelius Seventh Symphony, a work that has had an immense effect on Adams' compositional thinking. The opening, with its pounding timpani and Varèse-like jagged brass fanfares, conjures a devastated post-nuclear landscape. The frenzied "panic music" that follows comes from one of Act Two's feverish tableaux that evoke the fierce electrical storm that lashed the test site in the hours before the bomb's detonation. The ensuing music is taken from moments that describe the intense activity leading up to the test. One hears the US Army General Leslie Groves, here impersonated in the boorish trombone music, berating both the scientists and his military subordinates, music that gives way to the ritual "corn dance" of the local Tewa Indians. The symphony concludes with an instrumental treatment of the opera's most memorable moment, a setting (originally for baritone voice, here played by solo trumpet) of John Donne's holy sonnet, "Batter my heart, three person'd God". This is the poem that the physicist hero of the opera, J. Robert Oppenheimer, loved and that inspired him to name the desert test site "Trinity."

Reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com

Not recorded

Photo (L-R): Bharat Chandra, John Adams, and Matthew Cmiel.