Sun.8.3 Haimovitz Recital
Sunday, August 3, 8:00pm Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
Ned Rorem: After Reading Shakespeare
Osvaldo Golijov: Omaramor
David Sanford: Seventh Avenue Kaddish
Gilles Tremblay: Cèdres en voiles
PROGRAM NOTES:
After Reading Shakespeare, nine movements for cello alone (1980)
Ned Rorem (b. 1923)
Ned Rorem, who turns eighty-five this year, is noted not only for his music, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976, but also for his writing, which includes five volumes of diaries, lectures and criticism. Born in Indiana, he studied music at Northwestern University beginning in 1940, as well as the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School, where he received an M.A. degree in 1948. From 1949 to 1958 he lived in France, then returned to New York, where he lives today.
Rorem’s works include three symphonies, four piano concertos, ten operas and numerous chamber works. His particular talent for lyricism has also resulted in more than 500 songs. His most recent opera is Our Town, introduced in 2007, based on the well-known Thornton Wilder play.
Composed in 1980, After Reading Shakespeare was introduced by cellist Sharon Robinson (for whom it was written) on March 15, 1981 at New York’s Alice Tully Hall. Rorem has written the following notes:
There is little a composer can say about his music that the music can’t say better, except how it came to be.
The present work results from a commission by Sharon Robinson [cellist of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio] to whom it is admiringly dedicated. She and I had often spoken about the possibility of something for cello and piano. But when Sharon’s request became formal last spring, something for solo cello seemed more necessary: more flattering to the instrument itself (why must strings forever share the limelight when they can be complete in themselves?), and more of a novelty to me as I’d already produced a great deal of chamber music featuring cello.
The individual titles were not fixed notions around which I framed the music; they emerged—as titles for non-vocal pieces so often do—during the composition. Yes, I was reading Shakespeare last July (the month when when the piece was accomplished, mainly in Nantucket). Yet the experience did not so much inspire the music itself as provide a cohesive program upon which the music might be formalized, and thus intellectually grasped, by the listener. Indeed, some of the titles were added after the fact, as when parents christen their children. In this sense my suite is remote from the “abstract” cello suites of Bach.
Suggested recording:
After Reading Shakespeare
Matt Haimovitz, cello
Oxingale Records B000VBIF00
Omaramor (1991)
Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960)
Born in La Plata, Argentina, Grammy-nominated composer Osvaldo Golijov was raised surrounded by chamber and classical music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the new tango of Astor Piazzolla. Moving to the United States in 1986, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, studying with George Crumb. He has received commissions from organizations including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, the Spoleto USA, Schleswig-Holstein and Oregon Bach festivals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet. Golijov's many awards include those given by Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently an Associate Professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Golijov produced one of his most significant works in 2000, as part of a project celebrating the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach, in which four composers (Sofia Gubaidulina, Tan Dun, Wolfgang Rihm and Golijov) were asked to write a Passion along the lines of Bach’s St. Matthew or St. John Passions. Golijov responded with La Pasión según San Marcos (The Passion According to St. Mark). His most recent major work is his first opera Ainadamar, introduced in 2005 by the Santa Fe Opera.
Commissioned by the Omar del Carlo Tanglewood Fellowship (the title combines the name “Omar” with the Spanish word “amor” or “love”), Omaramor was composed in 1991 and introduced on November 11, 1991 by cellist Michal Schmidt at the Painted Bride Arts Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Golijov has written the following notes for Omaramor:
Carlos Gardel, the mythical tango singer, was young, handsome, and at the pinnacle of his popularity when the plane that was carrying him to a concert crashed and he died in 1935. But for all the people on the sidewalks of Buenos Aires listening to Gardel's songs that accident is irrelevant, because they will tell you, “Today Gardel is singing better than yesterday, and tomorrow he will sing better than today.”
Gardel sings:
The day I'll see you again
My Beloved Buenos Aires
Oblivion will end,
There will be no more pain.
Omaramor is a fantasy on "My Beloved Buenos Aires": the cello walks, melancholy at times and rough at others, over the harmonic progression of the song as if the chords were the streets of the city. In the midst of this wandering, the melody of the immortal song is unveiled.
Suggested recording:
Anthem
Matt Haimovitz, cello
Artemis Classics B0000AQS6F
Seventh Avenue Kaddish (2002)
David Sanford (b. 1963)
Matt Haimovitz commissioned Seventh Avenue Kaddish for solo cello for his 2002 9/11 memorial performance at CBGB's in New York. It was subsequently performed throughout the cellist's 50-state ANTHEM tour, and recorded on the Oxingale disc of the same name along with ten other works by American composers. Haimovitz has also performed and recorded the work as a duo with jazz drummer Mark Raynes (Live at the Knitting Factory, on Oxingale Records), delving further into the Coltrane influence via the saxophonist's Interstellar Space duets with drummer Rashied Ali. Sanford has written the following notes:
The four movements of Seventh Avenue Kaddish follow the overall form of John Coltrane's album A Love Supreme, and the soloist expresses simultaneously the point of view of a jazz visionary, a street musician, a cantor, and/or a concert cellist. They share the perhaps incorrect sense that the musician's only tenable position in the face of catastrophic events is to soldier on as entertainers and/or "professional mourners".
Seventh Avenue Kaddish places the cellist near ground zero, playing on the streets of New York as buildings collapse, debris blinds, dust suffocates. Yet the street musician continues to wail because that is all he can do. The form of Seventh Avenue Kaddish is inspired by the four parts of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme:
"Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm."
I certainly felt a sense of confusion and guilt when I was musically paralyzed for days following 9/11. Nothing made sense, least of all the role of art in the midst of chaos. But the power of music transcends when, with a piece like Seventh Avenue Kaddish, you can explore areas of the mind and heart that you would not dare to enter alone.
Suggested recordings:
Anthem
Matt Haimovitz, cello
Artemis Classics B0000AQS6F
Live at the Knitting Factory
Matt Haimovitz, cello, with the Pittsburgh Collective
Oxingale Records B000KQF7O8
Cèdres en voiles (Thrène pour le Liban) (1989)
Gilles Tremblay (b. 1932)
Born in Quebec, Canada, Gilles Tremblay was educated at the Montreal Conservatory and the Paris Conservatory, where he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen and one of the first electronic instruments, the ondes martinot, with its inventor Maurice Martinot. He taught composition and analysis at the Montreal Conservatory from 1962 until his retirement in 1998.
Tremblay’s compositions include nine orchestral works, including a concerto each for flute, cello and viola, the latter completed in 2002. He has also written a considerable amount of chamber music, mostly for winds and percussion. His music is described as having “great subtlety of rhythm and texture . . . The form is frequently mosaic-like, the sections marked by sharp contrasts of pitch, dynamic and density. Although static in detail, the music has great mobility in the duration and pacing of segments.”
Tremblay wrote Cèdres et voiles (Thrène pour le Liban) (“Cedars and Sails (Threnody for Lebanon)”) for solo cello in 1989, and has written the following notes:
Cèdres en voiles is a threnody, a lament, as it is still in many countries, especially in the Middle East and in Greece. If “Cedars” evokes Lebanon, the French word “voiles” is associated with two meanings: mourning (veils, sorrow), and hope (sail, wind, energy).
The quarter-tones, easily playable on the cello, are widely used through a long ascent on double strings. It forms the main motive, toward almost unbearable limits, with hoarse timbres and gratings. Two other motives interrupt this progression: a laconic rhythm like an implacable march, and the introduction of natural harmonics, very soft and ethereal, becoming more and more important.
After a trance-like sequence on one note (an open D), the climax of the threnody is followed by a last introduction of harmonics: an echo of the Gregorian Resurrection Alleluia. Thus the word “voiles” (here “sails”) takes its hopeful meaning, the one of transmitting through the mast the strength of the wind.
This work was written at the request of my son Emmanuel, to whom it is dedicated.
Not recorded
Photos (L-R): Cabrillo Festival stage scene (r.r.jones); Matt Haimovitz (Amber Davis); Mason Bates (Lydia Danmiller)
|
