Delirium Musicum - Opening Nights by Opening Nights

F L O R I D A S TAT E UNIVERSIT Y DELIRIUM MUSICUM JANUARY 18, 2024

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FROM THE DIRECTOR

pening Nights at Florida State University is excited to bring the very best performing arts, music, dance, comedy, literature and visual arts to our campus and community. The second half of the 2023–24 season features critically acclaimed, award-winning artists and something for everyone in your family to love. Rock n’ roll legend Elvis Costello and the Imposters will kick off Tallahassee’s bicentennial year at Ruby Diamond Concert Hall. The season continues with Canadian guitar maestro Jesse Cook and his flamenco jazz fusion style, followed by contemporary chamber orchestra Delirium Musicum. Legendary astrophysicist Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson wraps up the month. February will feature performances with classical crossover artists Sons of Serendip at Turner Auditorium, followed by the show stopping Simon & Garfunkel Story. Dance enthusiasts will be delighted by Complexions Contemporary Ballet and the world- renowned Vienna Boys Choir. The Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra and Opening Nights will celebrate the music of the Beatles. And if that weren’t enough, GRAMMY® nominated Ruthie Foster will deliver a Texas blues show you do not want to miss. In March, the lineup continues with the best in music and stage beginning with Pink Martini, featuring China Forbes. Jazz at Lincoln Center takes center stage at The Moon with Sing and Swing, featuring renowned jazz artists Bria Skonberg and Benny Benack. Stage and screen legend Mandy Patinkin and award- winning author Jesmyn Ward will also perform. Emerging bluegrass artists Damn Tall

Building will put on a show at Goodwood Museum and Gardens. Finally, April brings multiple collaborations for the visual arts, music education, community outreach and family programs. The month kicks off with seven-time Grammy® Award winner Terence Blanchard with the E-Collective and the Turtle Island Quartet, a special partnership event with the FSU College of Music. April continues with our annual collaboration with the Chain of Parks Art Festival. Dean Mitchell is the featured artist this year. A partnership with Word of South will bring Rising Appalachia to town for a free community concert. Opening Nights will conclude its 2023–24 season with the iconic folk duo Indigo Girls on May 1. I cannot think of a better time and opportunity to become a member of Opening Nights and to show your support of our mission to present exceptional artists. These performances create a thriving cultural life in our community and create priceless educational experiences on campus and throughout the community. Ask any Opening Nights associate about these philanthropic opportunities. Thank you for sharing our season with us. We look forward to many more outstanding performances coming your way in 2024, Tallahassee’s bicentennial year.

Jennifer Wright Director, Opening Nights at FSU OPENINGNIGH T S .F SU.ED U | 5

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UPCOMING PERFORMANCES Florida State University Richard McCullough President

JANUARY

Opening Nights Staff

18 Delirium Musicum

Jennifer Wright Director

Contemporary Chamber Music

24 Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson: “A Cosmic Perspective”

Allison Jordan Development Director Grace Atkins Program & Operations Manager Brad Lister Business & Patron Services Manager Calla MacNamara Education & Engagement Manager Noelle Enright Marketing & Communications Associate Amanda Cole Senior Marketing Designer, University Marketing Rodney H. Johnson Director of Digital Design & UX, University Marketing

Speaker

FEBRUARY 1

Sons of Serendip

The Simon & Garfunkel Story

PRISM

Eric Friall, Chair

14 Complexions

Contemporary Ballet

Dance

17 Classical Mystery Tour:

A Tribute to The Beatles with Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra

Susan Stratton, Secretary

Symphony, Rock

Kathleen Daly Brooke Hallock Nan Nagy Tom Nelson Florida State University Partners Office of the President College of Fine Arts College of Music English Department

University Band

Choral

Gus Corbella, Immediate-Past Chair

Heather Mitchell

Broadway Style Tribute

12 The Vienna Boys Choir

Opening Nights Development Council Ron Sachs, Vice Chair

Contemporary Classical Crossover

29 Ruthie Foster Blues

MARCH 2

iLUMINATE

Pink Martini with China Forbes

Family, Educational

World, Orchestra

Challenger Learning Center FAMU-FSU College of Engineering University Relations University Communications

Cover photo by Josh S. Rose

OPENINGNIGH T S .F SU.ED U | 7

Herb & Mary Jervis Congratulations Opening Nights for fostering the Arts in Tallahassee for the past 25 years. The students, faculty, and staff of FSU and the citizens of north Florida have been enriched by your efforts. We eagerly await what the next 25 years will bring.

Proud to partner with Opening Nights to provide cultural Opening Nights, Opening Doors isopportunities a partner programfor of the Boys Prime Meridian Bank,and FSU Opening Nights, and the Boys and Girls Club of the Big Bend Girls Clubs of the Big Bend. Now in its third year, the program provides on-campus experiences for Club members to inspire a vision of future opportunities in the areas of engineering, nursing, hospitality, and (coming media W Asoon) LMA R T .and C Othe M arts.

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OPENINGNIGH T S .F SU.ED U | 11

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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18 Opperman Music Hall • 7:30 PM

Delirium Musicum Delirium Musicum is about inspiring audiences with ecstatic, impassioned music making. The musicians who make up Delirium Musicum are devoted to making sure that each concert is an immediate, visceral experience for their audiences. Their dedicated, impassioned performances grab hold of concert-goers’ emotions and don’t let go. It’s awe-inspiring, from the first moment that a bow is drawn across a string until the very last note. Continued on pg. 19

“ The young, globetrotting musicians of Delirium Musicum, full of energy ... bring the necessary tension to these tempestuous ‘Seasons.’” —Diapason (France)

OPENINGNIGH T S .F SU.ED U | 1 7

TALLAHASSEE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

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COME JOURNEY WITH US!

Something Wicked This Way Comes By Ray Bradbury When the carnival comes to town, two boys unearth the terrifying and horrible secrets that lurk within Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and learn the consequences of wishes, as a sinister and evil force is at work in Green Town, Illinois.

October 12-14 at 8 p.m. October 20 & 21 at 8 p.m. October 22 at 2 p.m.

The Shape of Things By Neil Labute A young student drifts into an ever-changing relationship with an art major while his best friend’s engagement crumbles, unleashing a drama that peels back the skin of two modern-day relationships.

November 16-18 at 8 p.m. December 1 & 2 at 8 p.m. December 3 at 2 p.m.

Legally Blonde Book by Heather Hach Music and Lyrics By Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin The ultimate tribute to girl power, Legally Blonde will take you from the UCLA sorority house to the Harvard halls of justice with the timely coming-of-age story of Broadway’s brightest heroine.

April 4-6 at 8 p.m. April 12 & 13 at 8 p.m. April 14 at 2 p.m.

TCC.FL.EDU/THEATRETCC | THEATRETCC@TCC.FL.EDU

Delirium Musicum Continued from pg. 17

WINNER, 2023 GLOBAL MUSIC AWARDS SILVER MEDAL FOR “OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT” WINNER OF THREE 2023 AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARDS, San Francisco Classical Voice: Best Orchestral Performance l Best Chamber Ensemble l Best New Music Ensemble

PROGRAM

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)/Max Richter (b.1966) Summer, from The Four Seasons Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a Largo Allegro molto Allegretto Largo Largo - Intermission Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout I. Toyos II. Tarqueada III. Himno de Zampoñas IV. Chasqui VI. Coqueteos Francesco Saverio Geminiani (1687-1762) (arr. Michi Wiancko) La Follia Variations

THE MUSICIANS: ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Etienne Gara VIOLINS Etienne Gara Tiffany Chang Evan Hjort Sheng-Ching Hsu Mann-Wen Lo Misha Vayman Yezu Woo VIOLAS Jing Peng Luther Warren Cellos: Stella Cho Javier Iglesias Martin BASS Ryan Baird Keyboard: Nathan Ben-Yehuda ARTISTIC DIRECTOR French-born violinist Etienne Gara has performed extensively worldwide in some of the most renowned venues, including recurring international appearances at Itzhak Perlman's Chamber Music Festival. Dedicated to crossing musical boundaries, he appeared on Leonard Cohen’s last album, collaborated with Benjamin Millepied and the LA Dance Project, founded the award-winning Sunset OPENINGNIGH T S .F SU.ED U | 19

Chris & Beth Corum

Dr. Cynthia Tie & Dr. David Pascoe northfloridaderm.com 850.402.9444

Club Trio, which combined violin with flamenco and electric guitar in arrangements of great classical repertoire, and created Sketches of Miles, a multi-stylistic exploration inspired by the work of Miles Davis. Newly named Artist-in-Residence at The Soraya, he has held the same position since 2019 at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute where he recorded his French Recital CD on the Leonora Jackson Stradivarius from 1714.

PROGRAM NOTES

Max Richter — Vivaldi Recomposed — A 10th Anniversary Re-visit In a bold move characteristic of his boundarypushing career, Max Richter has brought the quartet of Baroque concertos firmly into the 21st century. Famed for his minimalist postclassical approach, incorporating electronica and found sounds, Richter controversially discarded most of Vivaldi's score. Likening his work to that of a sculptor, Richter says he picked his favorite bits of the score and reshaped them into new objects, layering and looping familiar fragments to reinvigorate a work diminished by overuse in elevators, TV ads and as telephone holding music. "I only kept about 25 per cent of the notes but there's Vivaldi DNA in all of it," Richter says. "I kept the gestures and shapes, the textures and dynamics. There are bits of Vivaldi and bits of me daydreaming about the original, thinking aloud about it." First released in Germany in 2012, Vivaldi Recomposed is the fifth in Deutsche Grammophon's innovative series of collaborations between iconic musicians of the past and present. What Max Richter has achieved, though, with Vivaldi Recomposed, is no mere arrangement—he has absorbed Vivaldi's Four Seasons into his own musical bloodstream.

SHOSTAKOVICH Dmitri Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony is an arrangement made by Rudolf Barshai of

the composer's eighth string quartet. Written in Dresden in July 1960, Shostakovich’s eighth string quartet is one of the most searing works of autobiographical self-indictment in 20th century music, cunningly disguised as a musical warmemorial. Written in 1960 after Shostakovich had caved in to mounting pressure and agreed to join the Communist Party and when his self-respect was at its lowest ebb, the composer wrote to musicologist Isaak Glikman: "I was thinking about the fact that if I die sometime or other, it's pretty unlikely that someone will write a work in my memory. So I decided to write such a work myself... The quartet makes use of themes from my works and the revolutionary song Tormented by Grievous Bondage. My own themes are the following: from the 1st Symphony, the 8th Symphony, the Piano Trio, the [First] Cello Concerto and Lady Macbeth. There are also hints of Wagner (the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung) and Tchaikovsky (the second subject of the first movement of the 6th Symphony). Oh yes! ...and there's also a theme from my 10th Symphony. The pseudotragedy of this quartet is such that when I wrote it my tears flowed abundantly..." Officially, the quartet was dedicated "to the victims of fascism and war" and widely accepted, by the apparatchiks and the general public, as a lament for Russian and Soviet losses in the “Great Patriotic War" against the Germans. Gerard McBurney has described the work as "the epitome of clandestine artistic activity... Perhaps the overpowering grief the music expresses was so intoxicating that no-one stopped to ask what the composer was really grieving for." The Quartet is in five movements played without pause. Its most important landmark, and primary building block, is a four-note theme built on an abbreviation of the OPENINGNIGH T S .F SU.ED U | 2 1

Law Office of Linda P. Bailey, P.A.

Janet R. Thornton

composer’s name, DSCH, which becomes D–E-flat–C–B in German nomenclature. Shostakovich had used it as a theme previously, notably in his Tenth Symphony. The Quartet begins by introducing this fournote motif fugally. It is followed by a theme (in the first violin and viola) from the introduction of his First Symphony, the work that first brought him to national prominence. The two themes are part of a loose rondo-like structure that also includes a descending theme in the first violin that refers to his Fifth Symphony, the work that restored him to favor in 1937 after official attacks had endangered his career, if not his life. The elegiac mood of the first movement is shattered by the following Allegro molto, a Blitzkrieg out of which several versions of the DSCH theme, in varying note lengths, emerge. At a climactic moment in midmovement, the violins wail out a theme from Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, which was written in 1944. In a less controversial portion of Testimony that may express much of his artistic creed, Shostakovich called this a “Jewish” theme, saying: “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me... it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality... is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.” The third movement is a spooky little waltzrondo in G minor or major—the violin’s melody (the DSCH motif ) continually sounds a B natural (the distinguishing note in a G-major scale) against the B-flat (which distinguishes the G-minor scale) in the viola’s accompaniment. This feeling of knowing that there is a key but not knowing what it is, far more unsettling than being in no key at all, is a hallmark of Shostakovich’s style. The third section of the rondo goes into duple time and

introduces the march-like principal theme of the First Cello Concerto, composed the previous year. The movement dies away in a recapitulation of its themes, with the Cello Concerto’s five-note motif and three-note martial accompaniment heard last. The first violin, left alone for a few bars, elongates it, at which point the other instruments begin the fourth movement by transforming the three-note accompaniment into an ominous banging that interrupts equally ominous soundings of a new theme. It has been suggested that the banging represents gunfire, and the pianissimo droning of the first violin represents distant aircraft. That droning becomes the first four notes of the dies irae from the Catholic requiem mass (not coincidentally, these are the DSCH notes in a different order), followed immediately by the lower three instruments sounding a Russian funeral anthem (“Tormented by the weight of bondage, you glorify death with honor”). The banging transformation of the Cello Concerto theme comes again; then the violins, over droning low Cs in the cello and viola, play a Russian revolutionary song (“Languishing in prison”). This is followed by a melody, in the cello’s upper range, of an aria from Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (this work was the immediate trigger for the first official criticism of Shostakovich, which turned out to be the first of many state crackdowns on artists). After a last fateful banging of the Cello Concerto themes, the first violin sounds the dies irae beginning again, turns it into the DSCH theme, out of which is built the fugal elegy that is the fifth movement. —Howard Posner

FRANK

Gabriela Lena Frank paints a picture vivid with Andean legends (“leyendas”). Walking about, following the Andes (the longest continental mountain range on this earth) would take you across several borders, OPENINGNIGH T S .F SU.ED U | 2 3

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those of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. But the borders Frank is concerned with are much more complex to navigate: those between cultures and races. She has said of her work: “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout draws inspiration from the idea of mestizaje [the mixing of races] as envisioned by Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, where cultures can coexist without the subjugation of one by another. As such, this piece mixes elements from the western classical and Andean folk music traditions.” Frank herself is the product of mixed elements, a Chinese/Peruvian mother and a Lithuanian/Jewish father. Her tapestry of sound, woven together from far-flung threads and patterns from a variety of traditions, vibrantly speaks with a foreign, and yet familiar, accent. “Toyos” and “Tarqueda” represent two traditional Andean wind instruments, the panpipes and tarka, respectively. “Himno de Zampoñas” is described by the composer as featuring another type of panpipe, the zampoña, that sounds with “a fundamental tone blown flatly so that overtones ring out on top.” Zampoña ensembles often play using a technique of bouncing the melody from one player to another to create the melodic line (a kind of pointillist surround-sound), known as “hocket” in medieval European music. The following movement introduces a legendary figure, the chasqui, a sprinter who would run across the mountains to deliver messages from village to village. The final movement, “Coqueteos,” depicts a love song.

GEMINIANI/WIANCKO

All of the arts since the beginning of time have drawn upon the works of previous artists for inspiration, reinterpretation, and as an inspirational repository of materials for new visions. The various approaches to this in music are myriad. A simple melody, chord progressions, a bass line, or even the whole weft of a complete composition can be the

basis for new works. This is true from the first polyphonic compositions of the Middle Ages right up to jazz artists playing variations over, say, Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.” Composers of the Baroque period in music of the 17th and 18th centuries were particularly fond of variations composed to familiar tunes or bass lines. La Follia—perhaps the most renowned of them—is a simple chord progression and melody used by over 150 composers over the centuries as the basis for variations. (A Spanish dictionary from 1611 defines “folia” as meaning “mad” or “emptyheaded”). The names are all familiar: Corelli, Handel, Bach, and even Rachmaninoff. One of the most popular of all these many uses of it was La Follia Variations by the Italian violin virtuoso and composer, Francesco Geminiani. A student of Scarlatti and Corelli, he is known for his concerto grossi and works for solo violin, as well as his treatise on violin playing. He spent most of his adult life in the British isles. As a student of Corelli, he redid some of his teacher’s violin sonatas into concerto grossos, one of which, Concerto Grosso No. 12, “La Follia,” is the basis for Wiancko’s “re-imagining.” Michi Wiancko is a gifted young violin virtuoso, composer, and arranger, whose talent and imagination have catapulted her into the upper echelon of the country’s musical scene. While at first Wiancko’s arrangement seems to just echo the 18th century Geminiani, gradually we hear her moving into sonic territory from later centuries. As we approach the last variants, she slyly integrates modern, lush harmonies, and even a Latin-flavored dance, dazzling us with an apparently infinite number of musical ideas. Tempos vary, an array of Baroque dance rhythms parade, innumerable melodies and counter-melodies beguile, and the bass line constantly changes guises. Textures never remain the same. It’s a refreshing re-examination of an old musical friend. New wine in old bottles, so to speak. OPENINGNIGH T S .F SU.ED U | 25

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