Program Book - CSO MusicNOW: Inspiring Voices

TWENTY-FIFTH SEASON CSO MUSIC NOW

Jessie Montgomery Mead Composer-in-Residence

Monday, February 20, 2023, at 7:00

Inspiring Voices

Musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Sameer Patel Conductor

Andrea Casarrubios Cello

golijov Mariel

Brant Taylor, cello

Cynthia Yeh, marimba

casarrubios Afilador

John Bruce Yeh, clarinet

Matous Michal, violin

Danny Lai, viola

Andrea Casarrubios, cello

World premiere, CSO MusicNOW commission

casarrubios Speechless

Andrea Casarrubios, cello

Cynthia Yeh, percussion

olivero Bashra’v

Jennifer Gunn, flute

John Bruce Yeh, clarinet

Tage Larsen, trumpet

Cynthia Yeh, percussion

Daniel Schlosberg, keyboards

Matous Michal, violin

Hermine Gagné, violin

Beatrice Chen, viola

Paula Kosower, cello

golijov Tenebrae

Matous Michal, Hermine Gagné, Gabriela Lara, first violins

Nancy Park, Mihaela Ionescu, Yin Shen, second violins

Danny Lai, Beatrice Chen, violas

Paula Kosower, Haley Slaugh, cellos

Robert Kassinger, bass

There will be no intermission.

Major support for CSO MusicNOW is generously provided by the Zell Family Foundation, the Sargent Family Foundation, the Sally Mead Hands Foundation, the Julian Family Foundation, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

osvaldo golijov

Born December 5, 1960; La Plata, Argentina

Mariel for Cello and Marimba (1999)

Osvaldo Golijov on Mariel

I wrote this piece in memory of my friend Mariel Sturbrin. I attempted to capture that short instant before grief, in which one learns of the sudden death of a friend who was full of life: a

single moment frozen forever in one’s memory that reverberates through the piece, among the waves and echoes of the Brazilian music that Mariel loved.

andrea casarrubios

Born February 19, 1988; San Esteban del Valle, Spain

Afilador for Clarinet, Viola, and Cello (2022)

Andrea Casarrubios on Afilador

We all keep certain sounds that decorate our childhood—whether it is the jingle of an icecream truck or, in my case, the whistle of an afilador—they resound perennially fresh in our memory. Those in Spanish-speaking countries are well acquainted with the immediately recognizable scales of an afilador. Playing a whistle or flute called a chiflo, the afilador bikes from town to town with their equipment attached to the handlebars, attending to the dull knives and razors of the residents.

I was born in a small village in the Tiétar Valley, surrounded by a mountain range in Spain called Sierra de Gredos. Until I was seven, I used to hear the sound of the knife sharpener every week. Although this profession has been disappearing, the afilador was for many generations part of the natural sound world of all of the villages in the valley. I have been living in the United States for almost half of my life now, but last year I was finally able to spend a whole month in my hometown. During a walk, I heard

the chiflo of the knife sharpener in the distance. I hadn’t heard one in twenty years. I found myself following the music through the streets, radiating with a sensation of intactness, a wholeness that now exists for me only in flashes of scent and sound.

In this quartet, the music begins with a breath of fresh air, seeking to float above everything earthbound, gathering perspective from a bird’s eye. The clarinet then starts imitating the distant melismas of a sharpener’s whistle. The afilador as a musical idea is intended to appear as a call to come back to presence; to snap out of our mental noise, and from there, perhaps, to be ushered immediately into memory and meaning. After the first iteration of the afilador theme, the music becomes almost like a mantra played by the strings, drifting through an intense ice storm where all the elements eventually align. The ending returns to the abundant color of the valley, and represents a transformation, turning tragedy and hardship into as much beauty and warmth as possible.

Speechless for Cello, Vibraphone, Cymbal, and Marimba (2015)

Andrea

Casarrubios

on Speechless

Written for Ensemble Connect, Speechless was born out of questioning what it means to have a voice. How do we use it? When? Are we understood when we speak? And what about when we don’t speak? In this work, the performers embark on a playful yet desperate—and sometimes contradictory—search.

At its core, it is an experience based on a non-verbal discussion between the inner voices

of one’s self. The music travels through ideas, impulses, memories, and it never visits the same place twice. It is a singular piece, as it was written from the end. The last section personifies equilibrium; it is the balance that one searches for instinctively in life. Having found the sounds of that equilibrium, the music was sculpted backwards, as if one held a finished painting and took off the layers until the first trace appeared.

betty olivero

Born May 16, 1954; Tel-Aviv, Israel

Bashra’v for Flute, Clarinet, Trumpet, Percussion, Piano/Celesta, and String Quartet (2004)

Betty Olivero on Bashra’v

Bashra’v is a suite form in Turkish and Arabic classical music. The piece takes its inspiration from various traditional tunes originating in the Arab-Jewish musical heritage. I tried to draw an imaginative-poetic “sound-world” of the antique Arab string and percussion instruments. Some of these instruments are rather limited and therefore, to the Western ear, their musical material seems melodically and harmonically “primitive.”

However, I personally find it incredibly rich in color and expression.

I did not seek these materials out of any scientific-musicological point of view. They served purely as a dramatic stimulus and as a point of reference. In the piece, these traditional melodies and texts undergo a thorough transformation, so profound as to make their original form unrecognizable at times, yet their spirit and highly charged dramatic potential remain untouched.

Tenebrae

(Version 1 for String Quartet, 2002; Version 2 for String Quartet, 2012; Version 3 for String Orchestra, 2022)

Osvaldo Golijov on Tenebrae

Tenebrae is based on François Couperin’s Leçons de ténèbres (Lessons of tenebrae, 1714), with text from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, written as

an acrostic: each verse starts with the following letter of the Hebrew alphabet, so the first verse starts with “Alef,” or “A,” the second with “Bet,” or “B,” and so forth.

osvaldo golijov

Couperin places an ornament or embellished fermata on the first letter of each sentence to highlight the acrostic nature of the piece; by this, I mean he makes a substantial melisma on the initial letter of each verse that he then sets to music, such a beautiful idea in terms of stopping time and then letting time flow. I realized while writing the piece that this is exactly like the feeling I had—and I think that the audience will have and, hopefully, also the players. Imagine

profiles

Osvaldo Golijov Composer

Osvaldo Golijov was born in La Plata, Argentina, in 1960, and lived in Jerusalem before immigrating to the United States in 1986. He is currently the composer-inresidence at the College of the Holy Cross. His works include the Saint Mark Passion; the opera Ainadamar; Azul, a cello concerto; The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, for clarinet and string quartet; the song cycles Ayre and Falling Out of Time; and the soundtracks to Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro and Youth Without Youth. His two most recent works are Um Dia Bom, premiered by Brooklyn Rider, and Ever Yours, premiered by the St Lawrence String Quartet and the Telegraph Quartet. He is currently working on the soundtrack to Coppola’s upcoming film Megalopolis.

Golijov served as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence from 2006 to 2010. The Orchestra performed music by Golijov for the first time at the Ravinia Festival in 2006, in Azul for Cello and Orchestra, with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist and Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducting. In February 2007, in Orchestra Hall, David Zinman conducted Last Round, a 1996 work for strings. Rose of the

that you were reading an illuminated medieval or Renaissance manuscript, where the first letter of each chapter is beautifully embellished and illuminated with filigrees and this and that.

This idea is something that has struck me. Why would these people create such a beautiful first letter for each chapter? It’s almost like a meditation, and then you go for it. It’s something I liked because I had never done it before.

Winds, commissioned by the Orchestra for the Silk Road Chicago project, was given its world premiere on April 12, 2007, with the Silk Road Ensemble under the direction of Harth-Bedoya. The first of many performances of his works on the MusicNOW series was Ayre with soprano Dawn Upshaw on June 4, 2007. In April 2011, Sidereus, an overture for small orchestra and a CSO co-commission in honor of Henry Fogel, executive director and president of the CSO Association from 1985 until 2003, received its first Chicago performances, with James Conlon conducting the CSO.

Cello

Spanish-born cellist and composer Andrea Casarrubios has played as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The winner of numerous international competitions and awards, Casarrubios has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Piatigorsky, Ravinia, and Verbier festivals. Her latest engagements include commissions and

PHOTOS: YONI GOLIJOV, SOPHIE ZHAI PHOTOGRAPHY

Andrea Casarrubios Composer,

concerts in Canada, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and the United States.

As a guest soloist at Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, Casarrubios performed her own concerto for cello and orchestra, MIRAGE. SEVEN, for solo cello, was commissioned by Thomas Mesa and performed at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, among other venues. Casarrubios was composer-in-residence at the Crescent City Chamber Music Festival from 2020 to 2022, and her compositions have been presented by organizations such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Sphinx Organization, Washington Performing Arts, Manhattan Chamber Players, the European Parliament, NPR, and the Spanish National Radio Orchestra.

A dedicated mentor, she has taught master classes at the Juilliard School, University of Southern California, Eastman School of Music, City University of New York, and Missouri State University, as well as at numerous festivals and institutions on tour. Her cello teachers have included Maria de Macedo, Lluís Claret, Amit Peled, Marcy Rosen, and Ralph Kirshbaum. She is an alumna of Ensemble Connect, and as part of her doctoral degree in New York, Casarrubios studied composition with John Corigliano.

Casarrubios’s album Caminante, released by Odradek Records, was chosen as one of the Best Classical Music Albums of 2019 by Australia’s ABC Classic.

Betty Olivero Composer

Betty Olivero is a contemporary Israeli composer, who has spent most of her career in Florence, Italy. She currently lives in Israel and is a full professor of composition at Bar-Ilan University.

Born in Tel-Aviv, Israel, Olivero studied at the Rubin Academy of Music, Tel Aviv University, and Bar-Ilan University with Itzhak Sadai and Leon

Schidlowsky, and at Yale University, where her teachers included Jacob Druckman and Bernard Rands. In 1982, a Leonard Bernstein Scholarship enabled her to work at Tanglewood with Luciano Berio, with whom she continued to study in Italy (1983–86).

Among numerous other awards, Olivero is a winner of the prestigious Emet Prize for Art, Science and Culture (2015), an Israeli prize awarded annually for excellence in academic and professional achievements that have far-reaching influence and make a significant contribution to society. In 2000, she received the Koussevitzky Award. Between 2004 and 2008, Olivero was composer-in-residence for the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

In Olivero’s works, traditional and ethnic music materials are processed using Western contemporary compositional techniques; traditional melodies and texts undergo processes of development, adaptation, transformation, assimilation, resetting, and recomposition to the point of assuming new forms in different contexts. These processes touch on wide and complex areas of contrast, such as East and West, holy and secular, traditional and new.

Olivero’s works are published by Universal Music Publishing Classical (Casa Ricordi Music Milan) in Italy, and the Israel Music Institute (IMI) in Israel. Her works have been recorded by ECM, Angel, Koch International, Ricordi, Plane, IMI, Beit Hatefutsoth, and Folkways.

Sameer Patel Conductor

Sameer Patel is the newly appointed artistic director of the San Diego Youth Symphony, a transformational organization that reaches more than 3,000 students in its community through its thirteen ensembles, El Sistema-inspired classroom programs, and early childhood music classes. He also served for six seasons as

associate conductor of the Sun Valley Music Festival and recently concluded an acclaimed tenure as associate conductor of the San Diego Symphony, where he reinvigorated the orchestra’s programming and connection with its community.

Recent performances include Puccini’s Tosca with Houston’s Opera in the Heights, as well as concerts with the orchestras of Toronto, St. Louis, Detroit, New Jersey, Sarasota, Phoenix, Grand Rapids, Sacramento, Toledo, New Hampshire, Bozeman, Savannah, Fresno, Knoxville, Alabama, Naples, Reading, and Jacksonville. He has also appeared with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Florida Orchestra, Pacific Symphony, Louisiana Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra,

and the Chicago Sinfonietta. Abroad, Patel has conducted performances with the Symphony Orchestra of Sanremo, the Orchestra Giovanile Italiana, and the Leipzig Symphony Orchestra.

With an unending enthusiasm for the music of our time, Patel has championed music by living composers such as Adam Schoenberg, Anna Clyne, Gabriela Lena Frank, Mason Bates, Ellen Reid, Hannah Lash, Tan Dun, and many others.

Patel’s impressive work has led to recognition from the Solti Foundation U.S., which granted him three consecutive Career Assistance Awards and an Elizabeth Buccheri Opera Residency with North Carolina Opera. Patel studied at the University of Michigan and furthered his training across Europe with some of the great conductors of our time.

Major support for CSO MusicNOW is generously provided by the Zell Family Foundation, the Sargent Family Foundation, the Sally Mead Hands Foundation, the Julian Family Foundation, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

A statement from the artist Donovan Foote

The music in this concert was described by CSO Mead Composer-in-Residence Jessie Montgomery as having atmospheric warmth. It brought to my mind the colors and feelings of an early spring sunset with all the settling energy of the first warm day of a year that will likely turn cold again. A cello comprised of percussion charts, with a glowing sun of chatoyant Sitka spruce with old varnish weathered by years of playing, form the focal point, set against a horizon of shapes reminiscent of musical notation and orchestral instruments.

Artwork available at symphonystore.com/musicnow