You may want to begin tonight's journey by closing your eyes, inhaling, and imagining the Giant Dipper. That's exactly what Michael Shapiro did to write his new 4-minute work, Roller Coaster. His family's fearless infatuation with roller coasters led him to take the plunge, and tonight Maestra Marin Alsop leads the Festival Orchestra in its West Coast Premiere. Shapiro explains, "I took a deep breath and imagined a coaster’s sights and sounds, its shakes and thrusts, the taste of stomach in mouth, the ultimate rush...dropping quick, twisting about, rising, rising, rising, falling away, slow, slow, slow, FAST." Then Sean Hickey joins us for the World Premiere of his 2003 composition, Dalliance. After several years of writing primarily solo piano and chamber works, he wanted to compose a "short, extroverted piece" for full orchestra and Dalliance is the result. The composer leaves the interpretation of the title to his audience! Though Kevin Puts has often been composer-in-residence at the Festival, tonight he will make his debut as featured soloist in his own piano concerto, Night. According to The Los Angeles Times, "The solo writing is virtuosic,” and “before long, the pianist needs more hands than nature provides." Then one of America’s most respected composers, John Adams, returns to the Festival for the performance of City Noir. The final installment in a triptych of orchestral works that celebrate "the California experience, its landscape and its culture," City Noir was inspired by the ambience and mood of Hollywood 'noir' films of the late 40s and early 50s, and is an homage to the aesthetic of the era. LondonEvening Standard dubbed it a "dazzling showpiece."
“…a jazzy, gritty, sultry, and wonderfully inventive 35-minute symphony..." —Boston Globe on Adams' City Noir
(The night ends with a dessert reception for the entire audience and orchestra!
Watch an exclusive video of composer/pianist Kevin Puts discussing his concerto Night.
Watch an excerpt of the 2009 World Premiere of John Adams' City Noir by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel
Program Notes
Roller Coaster (2009) - West Coast Premiere Michael Shapiro (b. 1951)
Born into a musical family, Michael Shapiro studied composition with Elie Siegmeister, Vincent Persichetti, and Sir Malcolm Arnold and received a Master’s degree from The Juilliard School. Among his almost one hundred works in every medium, Shapiro's orchestral works include concertos each for harp, guitar, violin and cello, two operas, a symphony based on Pomes Penyeach of James Joyce, and a musical score to the classic 1931 film Frankenstein. Also the Music Director of The Chappaqua Orchestra in New York, he conducted the premiere of Roller Coaster on May 17, 2009 in a concert celebrating the orchestra’s fiftieth season. He has written the following note for Roller Coaster:
I live in a house full of roller coaster freaks.
When Marge suggested I write a work depicting a roller coaster ride, I was skeptical at the very least. But she was persistent. “It’ll be the length of an overture,” she said. “It’ll be exciting, fast, and loud. And my kids will really enjoy it.”
Boy, do her kids love roller coasters. Not just the Cyclone in Coney Island (where during one summer visit they went back on at least five times—at $7.50 a clip each!), but taking special trips across country to places like Cedar Point Park in Ohio (the highest roller coaster in the world is in Japan, but you can’t drive there from Chappaqua). The last time we came to Santa Cruz, her youngest, Corey, was too small to go on the Giant Dipper, but stood by and watched with a sad, envious expression as his big brothers scaled its classic thrills. Now he’s back, tall enough, and game to conquer the Dipper—and hear the Western premiere of my piece.
When I started Roller Coaster, I didn’t necessarily want to create just the sounds of an amusement park ride, but rather its experience, its feel. For someone like me who is petrified of coasters, this was a challenge. I took a deep breath and imagined a coaster’s sights and sounds, its shakes and thrusts, the taste of stomach in mouth, the ultimate rush (short of parachuting), dropping quick, twisting about, rising, rising, rising, falling away, slow, slow, slow, FAST.
What’s a composer to do?
You start to think of analogies, metaphors. Sayings come to mind, like “what goes up must come down.”
You ask yourself some questions. What does a coaster do? It starts low, goes high, slides down low again, several times high and low, twisting about in pretzel shapes. It’s slow and fast, fast and slow. It’s quiet and noisy. It’s over before you know it. Sometimes you jump on a coaster near a beach and the boardwalk (at least for this Brooklynite), and the weather’s hot and muggy, the smell of fried food hangs in the spray, sand scratches between your toes, the asphalt’s molten lava, and adrenaline is bursting through your ears, your temples pounding.
You think of musical equivalents. An orchestra has very low instruments like contrabasses and tubas and high ones like piccolos (and many others in between). Patterns come to mind, scales and arpeggios, glissandi, punched chords, and swinging riffs, speeding along in accelerating tempi, pulling back, phrases short and long, melodies languid and fleeting.
But all that’s not enough. How to get the feel? It can’t just be a musical recreation of the sounds of a coaster (“Honegger’s Pacific 231 does sound like a locomotive,” I thought). No, I need an emotional reason to write a piece. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Comparisons flood in. We all have our highs and lows. They’re sometimes emotional, more often these days they’re about money. No one’s immune from anxiety and depression. We scream and whisper, love and hate, have our extremes. Every day. There’s more meaning to this than only depicting a ride. For me, a musical work has to have hidden and mysterious depths and blazing highs.
And there’s the actual sensation of being on a coaster. In the Brooklyn of my youth, visiting Coney Island wasn’t only about going to the beach, but it was to visit Grandma Shapiro, eat at Nathan’s (we called them “franks,” not dogs), inhale that unique stink of sweat and lotion, and absorb the shock and thunder of the behemoth wooden coasters.
So we take Marge’s kids down to Brooklyn for their first ride on the Cyclone. And I listen to the cars racing down Shore Road, radios blasting Latino pop, “su del Subway, numero seis (!),” same old July sun glaring down, and the kids grab some bills and race off to the line, snaking their way past those grizzled guards who were there when I was a child, and pile into the front car. The crank, crank, cranking of the chains, and the long climb, and that first scream, it’s unmistakable, like the screeching high strings of Herrmann’s Psycho music, and the sweep of air blasting riders into another sphere. I see through the kids’ eyes, not just the track falling away ahead, but the sky and the sea, the green Atlantic, waves crashing far below.
Then the sounds of Roller Coaster are in my head, and I can’t wait to write it all down.
The Chappaqua Orchestra (conducted by the composer) introduced Roller Coaster in May 2009. It’s scored for a large orchestra with lots of percussion because to make an orchestra sound like a ride you need a lot of banging and clanking of wood and metal.
Dalliance(2003) - World Premiere Sean Hickey (b. 1970) Born in Detroit, Michigan, Sean Hickey grew up playing guitar and piano, and graduated with degrees in composition and theory from Wayne State University, where he studied with James Hartway, James Lentini and Leslie Bassett. Since moving to New York, he has been active as a performer and arranger. and currently serves as Composer-in-Residence of the Metro Chamber Orchestra. He has composed primarily for chamber ensemble; Dalliance is one of his few orchestral works. Hickey has written the following program note:
Composed in the spring of 2003, Dalliance was perhaps the last work composed without a specific performance in mind. After a few years of working primarily in the solo piano and chamber idioms, and finding some good success with performances in New York, I wanted to compose a short, extrovert piece for full orchestra. In one continuous movement of a broad ABA design, Dalliance is that work.
Written more or less in conjunction with the much more contemplative Sagesse for vocal soloists and orchestra, the piece begins with a confident salvo followed by dovetailing string parts, which in turn lead to a section where the woodwinds are spotlighted in more of a chamber music setting. Throughout the piece, a series of four heavily accented chords—somewhat reminiscent of William Schuman, a composer I admire greatly—are usually presented in the strings. A slower mid-section presents a broad, dramatic melody where these chords figure prominently again, though this time they lead to a pathos-laden full orchestral tutti. After a short brass tattoo and call from the timpani, this section seems to get swept into a fast 3/8 that reintroduces some material from the beginning, some of which parades by just slow enough for the ear to recollect its earlier appearance.
The only airing of this work was a hastily prepared Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra reading for an audience of one: the composer. I composed Dalliance with the hopeful possibility of a festival performance in mind. I am honored to have its premiere as part of the Cabrillo Festival under the expert leadership of Marin Alsop, a good friend whose every success I have followed for years, and who is such a great inspiration to me. I can think of no other musician in whose hands I’d rather leave this premiere. And as for the title of the piece, please make of it what you will.
Apart from the 2008 season, works by Kevin Puts have been featured annually on Cabrillo Festival programs since 2003, and he has been a Festival Guest Composer each time. In 2003 the Festival performed the West Coast premiere of his Symphony No. 2: Island of Innocence (2001), followed in 2004 by his Vespertine Symphonies (2004) and in 2005 by the West Coast premiere of River’s Rush (2004). In 2006 the Festival featured the West Coast premiere of his Percussion Concerto (2005) and in 2007, the world premiere of his Symphony No. 4. Last season saw the West Coast premiere of his Two Mountain Scenes (2009).
Night was commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which introduced the work in May 2007 with Music Director Jeffrey Kahane as soloist and conductor. Puts has written the following note:
I decided to call my new piano concerto Night after I decided to incorporate part of an earlier piece of mine called Three Nocturnes into the fabric of the tranquil second movement. This expression of unchallenged serenity comes after the first movement—entitled “Dies Irae” (Day of Wrath)—rises to a turbulent climax and gradually subsides. I imagined “day” as an evocation of today’s volatile world climate and perhaps a release of tensions therein, and “night” as a utopian escape from these horrors. While composing the mercurial third movement “Midnight Toccata,” I imagined the skitterings of night creatures in the forest.
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 many 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, Fearful Symmetries in 2001, Guide to Strange Places and Eros Piano in 2003, and in 2005, The Dharma at Big Sur, composed originally for the opening of the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. In 2008 the Festival performed the West Coast premiere of Adams’ Dr. Atomic Symphony, based on his most recent opera Dr. Atomic, introduced by the San Francisco Opera in 2006.
City Noir was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in association with the London Symphony Orchestra, Cité de la Musique and ZaterdagMatinée. It received its world premiere on October 8, 2009 with Music Director Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The following note includes the comments Adams wrote for the Los Angeles premiere:
City Noir is a symphony inspired by the peculiar ambience and mood of Los Angeles “noir” films, especially those produced in the late forties and early fifties. My music is an homage not necessarily to the film music of that period but rather to the overall aesthetic of the era. This symphony becomes the third in a triptych of orchestral works that have as their theme the California experience, its landscape and its culture. The two previous are The Dharma at Big Sur (also commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic) and El Dorado (commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony).
City Noir was first suggested by my reading the so-called “Dream” books by Kevin Starr, a brilliantly imagined, multi-volume cultural and social history of California. In the “Black Dahlia” chapter of his Embattled Dreams volume Starr chronicles the tenor and milieu of the late Forties and early Fifties as it was expressed in the sensational journalism of the era and in the dark, eerie chiaroscuro of the Hollywood films that have come to define the period sensibility for us: “...the underside of home-front and post-war Los Angeles stood revealed. Still, for all its shoddiness, the City of Angels possessed a certain sassy, savvy energy. It was, among other things, a Front Page kind of town where life was lived by many on the edge, and that made for good copy and good film noir.”
Those images and their surrounding aura whetted my appetite for an orchestral work that, while not necessarily referring to the soundtracks of those films, might nevertheless evoke a similar mood and feeling tone of the era. I was also stimulated by the notion that there indeed exists a bona fide genre of jazz-inflected symphonic music, a fundamentally American orchestral style and tradition that goes as back as far as the early 1920’s (although, truth to tell, it was a Frenchman, Darius Milhaud who was the first to realize its potential with his 1923 ballet La création du monde, a year before Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York).
The music of City Noir is in the form of a thirty-minute symphony. The formal and expressive weight of its three movements is distributed in pockets of high energy that are nested among areas of a more leisurely—one could even say “cinematic” – lyricism. The first movement, “The City and its Double,” opens with brief, powerful “wide screen” panorama that gives way to a murmuring dialogue between the double bass pizzicato and the scurrying figures in the woodwinds and keyboards. The steady tick of a jazz drummer impels this tense and nervous activity forward – a late-hour empty street scene, if you like. After a broad and lyrical melodic passage in the strings, the original scorrevole movement returns, charged with increasingly insistent impulse and building up steam until it peaks with a full-throttle orchestral tutti. A surging melody in the horns and celli punctuated by jabbing brass “bullets” brings the movement to a nearly chaotic climax before it suddenly collapses into shards and fragments, a sudden stasis that ushers in the second movement.
The title, “The City and its Double” is a backward glance to the French playwright Antonin Artaud, who in his writings is said to have “opposed the vitality of the viewer’s sensual experience against [a conventional concept of] theater as a contrived literary form.” Hence my “city” can be imagined not just as geographic place or even as a social nexus, but rather as a source of inexhaustible sensual experience. As a child watching the early days of television I remembered well the program that always ended with the familiar tag line, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one.”
As a relief to the frenzy of the first movement’s ending, “The Song is for You,” takes its time assembling itself. Gradually a melodic profile in the solo alto sax emerges from the surrounding pools of chromatically tinted sonorities. The melody yearns toward but keeps retreating from the archetypal “blue” note. But eventually the song finds full bloom in the voice of the solo trombone, a “talking” solo, in the manner of the great Ellington soloists Lawrence Brown and Britt Woodman (both, fittingly enough, Angelinos). The trombone music picks up motion and launches a brief passage of violent, centripetal energy, all focused on a short obsessive idea first stated by the sax. Once spent of its fuel, the movement returns to the quiet opening music, ending with pensive solos by the principal horn and viola.
“Boulevard Night” is a study in cinematic colors, sometimes, as in the moody “Chinatown” trumpet solo near the beginning, it is languorous and nocturnal; sometimes, as in the jerky stop-start coughing engine music in the staccato strings, it is animal and pulsing; and other times, as in the slinky, sinuous saxophone theme that keeps coming back, each time with an extra layer of stage makeup, it is in-your-face brash and uncouth. The music should have the slightly disorienting effect of a very crowded boulevard peopled with strange characters, like those of a David Lynch film—the kind who only come out very late on a very hot night.
