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Then Maestra Alsop will lead the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in the West Coast Premieres of two major works by Mark-Anthony Turnage: Chicago Remains, a celebrated piece inspired by the Windy City and which, according to The Chicago Tribune, “captures the true grit of our town;” and Drowned Out, a work which stemmed from Turnage’s four-year period as Composer-in-Association with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle, and was inspired by Lord of the Flies author William Golding's later novel Pincher Martin.
(A Talkback Session with Marin Alsop, guest artists, and composers follows the concert.)
Program Notes
<<rewind<< (2005, rev. 2006) - West Coast Premiere
Anna Clyne (b. 1980)
Anna Clyne is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music; part of her artistic statement reads, “Inspired by visual images and physical movement, my intention is to create music that complements and interacts with other art-forms, and that impacts performers and audiences alike.”
Born in London, Great Britain, Clyne received a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and a Masters degree from the Manhattan School of Music. Recent commissions include works for Carnegie Hall and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This fall she begins a two-year residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
<< rewind << was introduced at the J.C.Borden Auditorium, New York in 2005 by the Manhattan School of Music Composers Orchestra led by conductor David Gilbert. Selected for the American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Readings, it was conducted by George Manahan at the Miller Theater, New York in 2006, with a subsequent performance by the Minnesota Orchestra under Music Director Osmo Vänskä at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, Minnesota the same year. Upcoming performances of the work include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with conductor Ricardo Muti. The composer has provided the following note:
<< rewind << is inspired by the image of analog videotape rapidly scrolling backwards with fleeting moments of skipping, freezing and warping. The original version, for orchestra and tape, was composed in 2005 for choreographer and Artistic Director of Hysterica Dance Company, Kitty McNamee. A distinct characteristic of McNamee’s work is its striking and innovative use of physical gestures and movements that recur throughout the course of a piece to build and bind its narrative structure. This use of repetitive gestures is utilized in the musical language and structure of << rewind <<.
Not recorded
Percussion Concerto (2005)
Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)
Percussion Concerto was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The commission was made possible with support from The Philadelphia Music Project (an artistic initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, administered by The University of the Arts), and by a generous gift from LDI, Ltd. and the Lacy Foundation. It was introduced on November 25, 2005 with Colin Currie as soloist and the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Christoph Eschenbach. Written for Colin Currie, the work is dedicated to him. Higdon has written the following note:
The 20th century saw the development of the percussion section grow as no other section in the orchestra. Both the music and the performers grew in visibility as well as in capability. And while the form of the concerto wasn’t the least bit new in the century, the appearance and growth of the percussion concerto as a genre exploded during the later half of the century.
My Percussion Concerto follows the normal relationship of a dialogue between soloist and orchestra. In this work, however, there is an additional relationship with the soloist interacting extensively with the percussion section. The ability of performers has grown to such an extent that it has become possible to have sections within the orchestra interact at the same level as the soloist.
When writing a concerto I think of two things: the particular soloist for whom I am writing and the nature of the solo instrument. In the case of percussion, this means a large battery of instruments, from vibraphone and marimba (the favorite instrument of soloist Colin Currie), to non-pitched smaller instruments (brake-drum, wood blocks, Peking Opera gong), and to the drums themselves. Not only does a percussionist have to perfect playing all of these instruments, he must also make hundreds of decisions regarding the use of sticks and mallets, as there is an infinite variety of possibilities from which to choose. Not to mention the choreography of the movement of the player: where most performers do not have to concern themselves with movement across the stage during a performance, a percussion soloist must have every move memorized. No other instrumentalist has such a large number of variables to challenge and master.
This work begins with the sound of the marimba, as Colin early on informed me that he has a fondness for this instrument. I wanted the opening to be exquisitely quiet and serene, with the focus on the soloist. Then the percussion section enters, mimicking the gestures of the soloist. Only after this dialogue has been established does the orchestra enter. There is significant interplay between the soloist and the orchestra, with a fairly beefy accompaniment in the orchestral part, but at various times the music comes back down to the sound of the soloist and the percussion section playing together, without orchestra.
Eventually, the music moves through a slow lyrical section, which requires simultaneous bowing and mallet playing by the soloist, and then a return to the fast section, where a cadenza ensues with both the soloist and the percussion section. A dramatic close to the cadenza leads back to the orchestra’s opening material and the eventual conclusion of the work.
Suggested recording:
Colin Currie, soloist, London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop
London Philharmonic B001GG7DRU
This recording won a Grammy Award in January 2010 for “Best Contemporary Classical Composition”
Chicago Remains (2007) - West Coast Premiere
Mark-Anthony Turnage (b. 1960)
Chicago Remains was co-commissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the Edward F. Schmidt Family Commissioning Fund and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and is dedicated to the memory of Sergei and Natalia Koussevitzky. The title page is inscribed to the memory of Sir John Drummond, a brilliant British arts administrator who died in 2006. Principal Conductor Bernard Haitink conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the premiere on October 25, 2007. The following note was written by program annotator Phillip Huscher and is reprinted with the permission of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra:
Chicago Remains began to take shape, in a sense, the day Turnage viewed Chicago from a riverboat cruise. Staring at the gleaming skyscrapers that now line the Chicago River, Turnage knew that those images, and the strong modernism of Chicago’s architecture, would somehow become the essence of the work he was planning to compose. As Turnage continued to explore the city, reading its history, studying its architecture, checking out its blues clubs and gospel choirs, Chicago Remains became his tribute to the life force of the city and to Chicago’s powers of reinvention. Turnage’s titles often refer to a work’s generating impulse, and Chicago Remains is no exception: it juxtaposes the image of thriving, modern-day Chicago with the memory of the fire of 1871 that devastated the city in thirty-six hours, destroyed three-and-a-half square miles, leveled more than 18,000 buildings, and killed some three hundred people.
The sense of Chicago as a place of renewal and promise was already in Turnages’s mind when he began to read the poems Carl Sandburg wrote after the latter moved to Chicago in 1913. He was particularly drawn to the most famous of the poems, “Chicago”—it begins with the oft-quoted line, “Hog Butcher for the World”—which was first published in 1914 in the Chicago-based Poetry magazine and won Sandburg the Levinson Prize that year. Turnage was struck by the tough grandeur of the city that Sandburg described, and that became a signpost for the sonorities and blueprint of the score that he was writing.
When Turnage learned that Principal Conductor Bernard Haitink would conduct the premiere of his new piece, he began to think of the grandeur of the Bruckner symphonies Haitink has long championed. As a result, Chicago Remains became subtly influenced by the epic chords and chorales that unfold over vast spans in Bruckner’s music. Turnage acknowledges that this aspect of the piece is also a reflection of stately succession of great columns of steel and glass that passed before his eyes as he cruised along the Chicago River—the monumentality of the city’s architecture, the “frozen music” of its cityscape.
While Haitink was in Chicago in May 2007, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago read through Chicago Remains; afterwards, Turnage returned to his score, making countless changes in detail, but very few in actual structure. The piece unfolds in one large paragraph of intense, vividly etched incidents. From the gray, melancholy opening stretch to the shattering chords that slice through its textures near the end, the score is infused with the grit and energy—the “smoke and steel” as Sandburg put it in his ode to industrialism—of a great city.
Not recorded
Drowned Out (1992-93) - West Coast Premiere
Mark-Anthony Turnage
Drowned Out was written as the final composition of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s four years as Composer-in-Residence with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which introduced the work at the Royal Hall in Nottingham, Britain on October 20, 1993 under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle. The following note was written by Colin Matthews and is reprinted with his gracious permission:
The titles that Mark-Anthony Turnage has given to his works are rarely less than flamboyant—Three Screaming Popes, On All Fours, Are You Sure?—but it shouldn’t be assumed that these works are, as a consequence, programmatic. Rather like Takemitsu, who was almost unable to compose until the (equally colourful) title had been found, Turnage imposes the title as something that enhances the way the music is perceived, but at the same time distances it by avoiding any specific imagery in the music. It would, after all, be absurd to think that his orchestral Three Screaming Popes of 1989 was a direct attempt at a musical portrayal of Francis Bacon’s three paintings, which in any case are not, of course, telling a story so much as depicting a state of mind, and a pretty extreme one at that. The surreal and disturbing world of Bacon is not directly paralleled in the music: the relationship is an abstract one, where Turnage is attempting a musical equivalent to Bacon’s technique. Although the paintings provided a starting point, all that really matters is that the music should, in the composer’s words, share something of “the colouristic intensity and emotional immediacy of the paintings.”
So although it helps to explain the title, it would be misleading to put too much emphasis on a starting point that gave Mark-Anthony Turnage the impetus for Drowned Out—William Golding’s novel, Pincher Martin. The book is the nightmare vision of a drowning man, with a devastatingly unexpected conclusion. While the ending of Drowned Out is certainly unforeseen and violent, what the piece shares with the novel is principally its sinister and hallucinatory character, which Turnage achieves with a mixture of music that is broodingly rhapsodic and brutally dynamic. His major achievement is to have created from this literary source something that is completely new and self-sufficient.
Drowned Out lasts a little over twenty minutes, in a single span of music. Beginning with sombre textures, marked “slow and submerged,” the yearning string textures expand and then retract, and this pattern is repeated throughout the long slow introductory section, with a gradual build-up of intensity, suddenly released into music of buoyant vitality. Once momentum has been achieved the music rarely looks back—a typical tempo direction is “no let-up,” and this might stand for the whole of the big central section where any slackening of tempo is matched by an increase of tension. When the music is eventually allowed to relax, the marking is, again characteristically, “subdued but menacing,” and there is no genuine release until the fierce climax, prefaced by the work’s only brief bar silence. The passionate intensity of the opening is now redoubled, culminating in a deep, grinding dissonance that echoes across the orchestra as, tentatively at first, a solo clarinet offers a lyrical alternative. But the menace has not gone away, and the work ends in anguished darkness.
Suggested recording:
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle
EMI Import B00000DNT8
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