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Soviet-born Elena Kats-Chernin is one of Australia’s leading contemporary composers, and her dramatically vivid music combines strong rhythmic figures with elements of cabaret, tango, ragtime, and klezmer. Heaven is Closed is an "emotional journey" inspired by the despair of a son's incurable illness, coupled with a hint of eternal optimism. This quick, energetic, and rhythmically driven work will receive its U.S. Premiere today. Then Philip Glass will join you for his Cello Concerto, featuring soloist Wendy Sutter, a champion of contemporary works and once a member of the acclaimed Bang on a Can "All Stars." In this work the composer creates a haunting, beautifully poignant, and almost baroque experience for the audience. Composer Pierre Jalbert earned the 2001 BBC Masterprize for In Aeternam, selected from among more than 1,100 scores by a jury that included Marin Alsop. The piece was written as a memorial to Jalbert's niece who died at birth, and its Latin title means In Eternity. The final work of this season was written by George Walker, the first African-American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize and the only living composer-pianist to be inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. Under Maestra Alsop’s baton the Festival Orchestra will present the West Coast premiere of his Foils for Orchestra (Hommage à Saint George). A work in one movement, Foils suggests swords used in a fencing match and conjures up associations with the myth of Saint George and the Dragon as well as the exploits of the Chevalier de Saint George. Walker describes the music as "suggesting explosive clashes and a violent duel of thrusts and parrying. The victor emerges scarred, but triumphant."
"fearless playing and rich, mahogany tone" —San Francisco Classical Voice on cellist Wendy Sutter
Watch interviews with cellist Wendy Sutter and composer Philip Glass from the 2008 performance of Glass' Cello Concerto at the La Jolla Symphony.
Program Notes
Heaven is Closed (2000) - U.S. Premiere Elena Kats-Chernin (b. 1957)
Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Elena Kats-Chernin studied music at the Gnessin Musical College in Moscow before immigrating to Australia in 1975. After graduating from the New South Wales Conservatory of Music in 1981, she spent the next thirteen years in Germany studying with composer Helmut Lachenmann before returning to Sydney in 1994, where she now lives. She has composed extensively for dance, chamber ensemble and piano, including two piano concertos.
Heaven is Closed was commissioned by Symphony Australia for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra with assistance by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its Arts Funding and Advisory Body. It was introduced on March 13, 2000 at the Adelaide Town Hall in Adelaide, Australia, conducted by David Porcelijn. The composer has written the following note:
As the title suggests, Heaven is Closed has to do with trying to get an entry into heaven and somehow that is not possible. The piece came about as a kind of “resisting” response to one of my sons being taken ill with an illness that was unlikely to be cured. However at the same time there is a hint of optimism in this piece, as I intrinsically believe in the good outcome.
I started Heaven is Closed in Sydney on the New Year's Eve (2000), according to my superstition or ritual, if that is a better word, to start a new piece on that night, even if it was only a couple of bars. I like the idea that everyone goes partying while I do my own thing, so to speak. This is a leftover peculiarity from my days in Moscow when I lived in a student hostel with other students at the Gnessin College when I was fourteen years old. I remember how the sounds were coming out of all the rooms, piano, other instruments or singing, and as I had to get on with my homework for harmony or aural training or musicology, so I learned to disregard the noise around me. And with time cultivated this into the ritual of working on the New Year's Eve.
Heaven is Closed is quite a motoric piece with some ironic and lyrical moments. There are, of course, some obligatory “knocking on the door” parts as well. The piece does not have a clearly defined form; it is rather an emotional journey.
A guest composer at the 1990 and 2006 Cabrillo Festivals, Philip Glass is credited as one of the originators of “minimalism,” the musical movement developed during the 1960s in reaction to what was perceived as the increasing intellectualization and emotional distance of existing contemporary music. Along with fellow composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Glass favored a return to the most fundamental, or “minimal” elements of music: basic triadic harmonies, slow, simple modulations and repetitive, ostinato rhythmic patterns, giving their works a meditative, almost mesmerizing quality. Glass comments, “The search for the unique can lead to strange places. Taboos—the things we’re not supposed to do—are often the most interesting. In my case, musical materials are found among ordinary things, such as sequences and cadences. All that I threw out in 1965 I’ve gradually brought in again, making it my own.”
Glass’s first works were for the theater, culminating in his first opera, Einstein at the Beach, the first of a series of “portrait” operas including Satyagraha, Akhnaten and The Voyage, the latter commissioned in 1992 by the Metropolitan Opera to celebrate the voyage of Christopher Columbus. He has also written music for several Hollywood films. Cabrillo Festival performances include the “music-drama” The Photographer (1982), performed at the 2001 Festival, the Violin Concerto, performed at the 1988 (West Coast premiere) and 1996 Festivals, and the West Coast premieres of his Piano Concerto No. 2 (2004) in 2005 and the Symphony No. 8 (2005) in 2007, and the World Premiere of Life: A Journey Through Time (2006) in 2006.
The Cello Concerto was commissioned by William and Rebecca Krueger for cellist Julian Lloyd Webber’s fiftieth birthday and was introduced on October 21, 2001 at the Beijing Music Festival by Julian Lloyd Webber and the China Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yu Lang. Although Webber performed the Concerto twice more, in Auckland, New Zealand and Edinburgh, Scotland, as well as the recording, because of scheduling conflicts, Glass was unable to hear a live performance until 2008, when cellist Wendy Sutter performed the American premiere with the La Jolla Symphony Orchestra conducted by Steven Schick.
Cellist Wendy Sutter grew up in the musical world of traditional solo cello playing and studied with famed Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. She plays on a particularly fine instrument built in 1620. Sutter first met Glass in 2004 when she was performing with the Bang-on-a-Can All Stars in New York. She knew of his music, mainly his films and early works, but didn’t become familiar with his later pieces until she started to work with him. The two first collaborated on a film using voice and cello, which led in 2007 to Songs and Poems for solo cello, which Sutter will perform at Cabrillo Festival's 2010 Music in the Mountains concert.
The Cello Concerto incorporates some familiar elements of minimalism—repeated figures and ostinato patterns, rapid arpeggios—but overlays it with a solo line that places an emphasis on lyricism and harmonic invention. Wendy Sutter compares it to Schubert, with a similar type of flexibility, what she describes as “push-and-pull,” in the solo part. Set in the traditional three-movement concerto form, the Concerto opens with a repetitive figure in the solo cello against an orchestration of low instruments and percussion. The middle movement, slower in tempo, opens with low winds and brass before the cello enters with a lyric theme. Careful attention has been paid throughout to the balances between soloist and orchestra, a difficult task because of the range and timbre of the solo cello. Glass achieves this successfully with the use of sparse instrumentation, used largely to support and frame the solo part, allowing the latter to introduce the major thematic material.
Suggested recording: The Concerto Project, Vol. 1: Julian Lloyd Webber, cello, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz Orange Mountain Music B0002X4UBA
Pierre Jalbert was born in Manchester, New Hampshire into a family originally from Quebec, and grew up in northern Vermont. He did his undergraduate work at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and received a Ph.D. in Composition at the University of Pennsylvania studying with composer George Crumb. He has served as Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
Commissioned by the California Symphony Orchestra, In Aeternam was introduced on May 7, 2000 at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, California by the California Symphony conducted by Music Director Barry Jekowsky. The work has also been performed by many other orchestras, including the London Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Budapest Symphony, the Rhode Island Philharmonic, the San Antonio Symphony, and the Santa Rosa Symphony, and in 2001 was chosen as winner of the BBC’s International Masterprize Competition in London, England. Jalbert has written the following note:
This work was written as a memorial to my niece who died at birth. In it, my aim was to capture a range of emotions, from sorrow and grief to shock and despair. But it is also about life. The memory of hearing my own son’s heartbeat for the first time was still fresh in my mind and there is a heartbeat figure which appears in the second section of the work, played pizzicato by the basses and cellos very softly, then later very forcefully. The title is in Latin and means “In Eternity.”
Though in one continuous movement, this work contains three main sections. The first section, which is slow and lyrical in character, introduces a short thematic fragment played by the piccolo. This thematic idea is heard throughout the course of the work in different contexts. The second section, which is fast, frantic, and somewhat violent in character, transforms the opening fragment, first in the bass clarinet and woodwinds, then later in the brass. The third section brings back material from the first and the work concludes the way it began.
Foils for Orchestra (Hommage à Saint George)(2006) - West Coast Premiere George Walker (b. 1922)
Born in Washington, D.C., Walker is noted as a composer and pianist. After giving his debut concert at the age of 14, he won a four-year scholarship to Oberlin College and went on to study at the Curtis Institute of Music, the Eastman School of Music and the American Academy in Fontainebleau, France. His teachers include Nadia Boulanger, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Robert Casadesus, Clifford Curzon and Rudolf Serkin.
In 1953 Walker began to combine teaching with performing, serving on the faculties of Smith College, the University of Colorado, the Peabody Conservatory of Music, the University of Delaware, and Rutgers University, where he was Distinguished Professor until his retirement in 1972. His works include a number of orchestral works, a mass, a cantata and a concerto each for trombone, piano, violin, and cello, the latter commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for Lilacs for voice and orchestra, based on four Walt Whitman poems and commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Walker’s recent accomplishments include the world premiere of his Second Violin Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a performance of Da Camera earlier this year with the Queens Symphony and the Musica Reginae Trio, and the debut in March 2009 of the tenor vocal version of Lilacs, again with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Albany Records released a recording of his orchestral works in 2008 with Poland’s Sinfonia Varsovia under the direction of Ian Hobson. Scarecrow Press issued Walker’s autobiography late last year.
Foils for Orchestra (Hommage à Saint George) was commissioned by the Eastman School of Music with a grant from the Howard Hanson Institute of American Music. It was introduced under the direction of Neil Varon, Professor of Conducting and Ensembles, during the Eastman School’s alumni weekend in October 2006. Walker has provided the following note:
A work in one movement, the title suggests swords used in a fencing match—the opening octave, a pointed gesture. This title, embellished, conjures up associations that can be made to the myth of Saint George and the Dragon. After the opening measures, trumpets announce a three-note motive, E-flat—D—E-natural. Six measures later it appears in the strings and again in the trumpets. Much of the music creates tension, suggesting explosive clashes and a violent duel of thrusts and parrying. The victor emerges scarred, but triumphant.
Suggested recording: Sinfonia Varsovia conducted by Ian Hobson Albany Records B0035FTJF4
Photos (clockwise from left): Wendy Sutter (Jeppe Gudmundsen-Holmgreen), Mission San Juan Bautista (rr jones), Philip Glass, Elena Kats-Chernin (Koruna Schmidt-Mumm), Pierre Jalbert
Mission San Juan Bautista