TAKEMITSU & THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE FEATURING THIRD COAST PERCUSSION

Friday, May 17, 2024 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, May 18, 2024 at 7:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

Third Coast Percussion with John Corkill, guest percussionist

Milwaukee Symphony Women’s Chorus

Cheryl Frazes Hill, director

PROGRAM

PAUL DUKAS

Fanfare pour précéder La Péri [Fanfare to precede La Péri]

TŌRU TAKEMITSU

From me flows what you call Time for Percussion Ensemble and Orchestra

I. Introduction

II. Entrance of the Soloists

III. A Breath of Air

IV. Premonition

V. Plateau

VI. Curved Horizon

VII. The Wind Blows

VII. Premonition

IX. Mirage

X. Waving Wind Horse

XI. The Promised Land

XII. Life’s Joys and Sorrows

XIII. A Prayer

Third Coast Percussion with John Corkill

INTERMISSION

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Nocturnes, L. 91

I. Nuages [Clouds]

II. Fêtes [Festivals]

III. Sirènes [Sirens]

Milwaukee Symphony Women’s Chorus

PAUL DUKAS

L’apprenti sorcier [The Sorcerer’s Apprentice]

The 2023.24 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION. Takemitsu & The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is supported by the JAPAN FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, and TRAVEL WISCONSIN.

The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Guest Artist Biographies

THIRD COAST PERCUSSION

With nearly two decades of spellbinding performances to its name, Chicago-based quartet Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore) is the first percussion ensemble to win a Grammy Award. Also nominated for a Grammy as a composer collective, TCP recasts the classical musical experience with a brilliantly varied sonic palette, crafting music to “push percussion in new directions, blurring musical boundaries and beguiling new listeners” (NPR). The ensemble celebrates its 20th anniversary in the 2025 season, having blossomed from percussion students who met in 2005 at Northwestern University into a thriving nonprofit organization. TCP’s 2023 album Between Breaths has been nominated under Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance in the 2024 Grammy Awards.

With their eclectic taste and approachable sensibility, TCP has been praised for the “rare power” (The Washington Post) and “inspirational sense of fun and curiosity” (Minnesota Star-Tribune) of tours across the U.S. and four continents. The ensemble’s recordings include 17 feature albums and appearances on 14 additional releases, including its Grammy Award-winning recording of Steve Reich’s works for percussion. It has commissioned and premiered new works from such artists as Augusta Read Thomas, Philip Glass, Missy Mazzoli, David T. Little, Danny Elfman, and Jlin – whose TCP commission Perspective was a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Connecting with audiences through talks, play-alongs, educational programs, and mobile apps, TCP has also produced collaborative art alongside engineers, architects, and musicians of all genres. They collaborate with numerous Chicago-based civic and cultural institutions, teach thousands of students through educational partnerships, and maintain multi-year collaborations with Chicago-based composers. The quartet also serves as ensemble-in-residence at Denison University in Ohio.

JOHN CORKILL

Percussionist John Corkill is a passionate advocate for the development, process, and creation of new artistic works that provide accessibility to the public at large. This has led to his involvement in several creative capacities, such as founding the multidisciplinary ensemble Beyond This Point, in addition to serving as a member of the University of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble, an ensemble-in-residence at the University’s Center for Contemporary Composition. Similarly, Corkill has collaborated with many of today’s leading chamber ensembles such as Third Coast Percussion, Eighth Blackbird, Spektral Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Arx Duo, and Ensemble Dal Niente. He recently finished his tenure as the curator for Fulcrum Point New Project’s Discoveries and Aux In concert series that promote meaningful conversations and inquiry between composers, performers, and listeners. Corkill has also appeared on the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW series, as well as the Chamber Music Northwest, Norfolk, and Yellow Barn festivals. He currently serves as a lecturer of percussion at the University of Chicago and the Percussion Ensemble director at Loyola University Chicago. Corkill received a Bachelor of Music degree from Northwestern University, where he graduated cum laude, and a Master of Music degree from the Yale University School of Music. His teachers include Robert van Sice, Michael Burritt, and James Ross.

Photo Credit Saverio Truglia

Program notes by Elaine Schmidt

PAUL DUKAS

Born 1 October 1865; Paris, France

Died 17 May 1935; Paris, France

Fanfare pour précéder La Péri

[Fanfare to precede La Péri]

Composed: February – March 1912

First performance: 22 April 1912; Paul Dukas, conductor; Orchestre Lamoureux

Last MSO performance: 23 January 2016; Christopher Seaman, conductor

Instrumentation: 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba

Approximate duration: 3 minutes

French composer, teacher, and music critic Paul Dukas is something of an enigma in the music world. Although musicians today routinely pronounce his name du-KAH, he insisted that it should be pronounced du-KASS. Growing up in a prosperous family, Dukas showed little interest in music until he was a teenager, which some historians tie to losing his mother, who was an accomplished pianist, when he was a young child. When he did begin to show an interest in music, it was composition, not playing an instrument or singing, that appealed to him. Dukas attended the Paris Conservatory, where he became close friends with fellow student and future composer Claude Debussy. He was an extremely self-critical person, which led him to hide many of his compositions and to destroy many others. As a result, we know him as a composer from just 12 surviving compositions.

Dukas was best known in his time as a respected music critic who wrote with a deep understanding of music. He was also a well-respected and somewhat-feared teacher, whose composition students at the Paris Conservatory included Maurice Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, and Walter Piston.

The last major work Dukas completed before his retirement from composition at age 47 was a ballet, or in his words, “a symphonic poem for dance,” entitled La Péri. He was commissioned to write the ballet, which is based on a Persian folk tale about a man who travels to the ends of the earth in his search for immortality, for Serge Diaghilev’s famous Ballet Russes. Dukas wrote the ballet in 1911, creating the fanfare to precede it in 1912. Curiously, the brassy fanfare is not related in any way to the music of the ballet for which it was written, prompting some scholars to refer to it as a “musical call to order.”

TŌRU TAKEMITSU

Born 8 October 1930; Hongō, Tokyo, Japan

Died 20 February 1996; Minato, Tokyo, Japan

From me flows what you call Time

Composed: 1990

First performance: 19 October 1990; Seiji Ozawa, conductor; Nexus Percussion Ensemble; Boston Symphony Orchestra

Last MSO performance: 30 January 1993; Zdeněk Mácal, conductor; Nexus Percussion Ensemble

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (2nd doubling on piccolo, 3rd doubling on piccolo and alto flute); 3 oboes (2nd doubling on oboe d’amore, 3rd doubling on English horn); 4 clarinets (2nd doubling on E-flat clarinet, 3rd doubling on bass clarinet, 4th doubling on contrabass clarinet); 3 bassoons (3rd doubling on contrabassoon); 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; 2 harps; celeste; strings

Approximate duration: 31 minutes

Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu wrote From me flows what you call Time at age 59, which would prove to be rather late in his life. He died just six years later at age 65. The piece, which was commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Foundation for the iconic hall’s 1991 centennial celebration, represents the music that flowed through the hall during its first century of concerts. It features five percussionists playing a battery of instruments ranging from the familiar to some seldom-heard instruments borrowed from global music, including a Tibetan singing bowl resting resonantly on a timpani. The piece is considered one of Takemitsu’s finest late works.

Listen closely to the five-note flute passage that opens the piece, as you will hear various instruments repeat it over the course of the performance. The piece contains several extended improvisations from the solo percussionists, as well as the sound of the oboe d’amore, an unusual voice in the modern orchestra, as it is borrowed from the music of the Baroque era.

The piece’s title comes from the poem “Clear Blue Water,” written by Takemitsu’s friend, Japanese poet Makoto Ōoka, about ascending the Furka Pass in the magical high country of the Swiss Alps.

Summer trip to Switzerland: in our bellies, sausages eaten on the Zermatt terrace, foot of the Matterhorn, slowly turns into heat: 1000 calories each.

As we climb up and up the Furka Pass, my eyes suddenly are perforated by a billion particles of heavenly blue: across the valley a giant mountain rampart: The Glacier.

Swinging up its snowcrowned sky-blue fist, that ancient water spirit shouts: “From me flows what you call Time.”

Down from that colossal mass of shining ice flows the majestic River Rhone.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Born 22 August 1862; Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France

Died 25 March 1918; Paris, France

Nocturnes, L. 91

Composed: 1892 – 1899

First performance: 27 October 1901; Camille Chevillard, conductor; Orchestre Lamoureux

Last MSO performance: 6 April 1995; Neal Gittleman, conductor; Milwaukee Symphony Women’s Chorus

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubling on piccolo); 2 oboes; English horn; 2 clarinets; 3 bassoons; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; timpani; percussion (cymbals, military drum); 2 harps; strings

Approximate duration: 25 minutes

French composer Claude Debussy, who was among the first of the Impressionist composers, was strongly opposed to the term as applied to music. Yet he used the term “impressions” to describe his own music, seemingly opening the door for others to do the same. In his program notes for his Nocturnes, he tied the piece to the definition of the Impressionist movement in art, writing, “It [the word “nocturnes”] is not meant to designate the usual form of the Nocturne, but rather all the various impressions and the special effects of light that the word suggests.” Debussy’s Nocturnes contains three movements that use musical light and shadow to offer musical impressions of clouds, festivals, and sirens — the very definition of Impressionism. He wrote program notes for the three Nocturnes, explaining:

“Nuages” (Clouds) renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in gray tones lightly tinged with white.

“Fêtes” (Festivals) gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling, fantastic vision), which passes through the festival scene and becomes merged in it. But the background remains resistantly the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm.

“Sirènes” (Sirens) depicts the sea and its countless rhythms and presently, amongst the waves silvered by the moonlight, is heard the mysterious song of the Sirens as they laugh and pass on.

Given his rejection of the musical term Impressionism, it’s interesting that most of Debussy’s works were impressions of works of art or various scenes. Although Nocturnes premiered in 1900 and may have been a retooling of an earlier piece that’s now lost, Debussy reworked details of its musical impressions for the rest of his life.

PAUL DUKAS

Born 1 October 1865; Paris, France

Died 17 May 1935; Paris, France

L’apprenti sorcier [The Sorcerer’s Apprentice]

Composed: 1896 – 1897

First performance: 18 May 1897; Paul Dukas, conductor; Société nationale de musique

Last MSO performance: 2 May 2015; Cristian Măcelaru, conductor

Instrumentation: 2 flutes; piccolo; 2 oboes; 2 clarinets; bass clarinet; 3 bassoons; contrabassoon; 4 horns; 4 trumpets; 3 trombones; timpani; percussion (bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, suspended cymbals, triangle); harp; strings

Approximate duration: 12 minutes

Paul Dukas was fairly crippled as a composer by his deeply self-critical nature. Believing his works were not worthy of being performed or heard, he destroyed many of his pieces — both completed and in-progress ones. But one of the 12 pieces he did not destroy, his 1897 symphonic tone poem, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, caught the attention of the public in the first years of its existence. It was inspired by the 1797 poem of the same name by German author and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose biographies usually begin today with the words, “the greatest and most influential writer in the German language.”

Many writers have told the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, who is left alone in the sorcerer’s workroom one night to tidy up and tries to use sorcery to make the task easier. The apprentice casts a spell to make a broom do his work for him, but the broom spills a bucket of water on the floor. When the apprentice tries to destroy the broom, it divides into two brooms, and then the brooms divide again and again, and the situation quickly gets completely out of hand. The sorcerer eventually comes back and sets things to rights, using the opportunity to teach the apprentice a lesson in some versions of the story, and getting angry and throwing the apprentice out in other versions.

Inspired by Goethe’s telling of the story, Dukas wrote a completely engrossing, terrifically colorful piece, which in very short order became one of the most-often-played pieces of the modern era. In 1940, Disney’s animated film, Fantasia, included the Dukas piece with Mickey Mouse in the title role. Don’t worry if your mind goes to images of Fantasia as you listen to the piece — you won’t be alone.