Program Notes: Stories in Time

PROGRAM MAURICE RAVEL Suite (5 pièces enfantines) from Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty)

Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb)

Laideronnette, Impératrice des pagodes (Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas) Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast) Le Jardin féerique (The Enchanted Garden) TORU TAKEMITSU From me flows what you call Time STEVEN SCHICK

Introduction

Entrance of the Soloists

A Breath of Air

Friday, January 26 | 8PM Sunday, January 28 | 2PM

Premonition

Curved Horizon

STORIES IN TIME

The Wind Blows

A Jacobs Masterworks Concert conductor Steven Schick

Plateau

Premonition Mirage

Waving Wind Horse

The Promised land

Life's Joys and Sorrows

A Prayer

See page 11 for Steven Schick biography

Aiyun Huang, percussion

percussion Aiyun Huang percussion Gregory Cohen percussion Andrew Watkins percussion Erin Douglas Dowrey percussion Ryan J. DiLisi

Gregory Cohen, percussion

Andrew Watkins, percussion

Erin Douglas Dowrey, percussion

Ryan J. DiLisi, percussion

INTERMISSION MISSY MAZZOLI

All performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall

River Rouge Transfiguration BÉLA BARTÓK Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19 The approximate running time for this program, including intermission, is one hour and fifty minutes.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS The ever-evolving AIYUN HUANG enjoys a musical life as soloist, chamber musician, researcher, teacher and producer. She was the First Prize and the Audience Award winner at the Geneva International Music Competition in 2002. Her past highlights include performances at the Victoria Hall in Geneva, Weill Recital Hall in New York, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra’s Green Umbrella Series, LACMA Concert Series, Holland Festival, Agora Festival in Paris, Banff Arts Festival, 7éme Biennale d’Art Contemporaine de Lyon, Vancouver New Music Festival, CBC Radio, La Jolla Summerfest, Scotia Festival, Cool Drummings, Montreal New Music Festival, Centro Nacional Di Las Artes in Mexico City and National Concert Hall and Theater in Taipei. She is a founding member of Canadian trio Toca Loca with pianists Gregory Oh and Simon Docking. Since 2011 she has been performing with Musicians from soundSCAPE with soprano Tony Arnolds and pianist Thomas Rosenkranz. Her recent highlights include concerto appearances with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and L’Orchestre Suisse Romande. Aiyun has commissioned and championed over 100 works in the last two decades working with composers internationally.

She is a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology in Montreal. In 2012, Mode Records released Save Percussion Theater featuring Aiyun Huang and friends documenting important theatrical works in the percussion repertoire. Aiyun’s research focuses on the cross-pollination between science and music from the performer’s perspective.

Her current research project “Memory in Motion” focuses on the understanding of memory in percussion ensemble playing.

In May 2013 Ms. Huang co-hosted Random Walk: Music of Xenakis and Beyond with Canada’s leading research institutions: Perimeter Institute, the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences and Institute for Quantum Computing.

In 2013 she produced Music from soundSCAPE on New Focus Recording and upcoming release include disc on Naxos Record featuring Canadian Composer Chris Harman’s percussion and keyboard music produced by Aiyun.

Born in Kaohsiung, a southern city of Taiwan, Aiyun Huang holds a Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto. Her teachers included Steven Schick, Russell Hartenberger, Gaston Sylvestre, Robin Engelman, Bob Becker and Francois Bedel. Between 2004 and 2006 she was a Faculty Fellow at UCSD. She currently holds the position of Associate Professor in Percussion at the Schulich

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School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She regularly teaches and performs in summer festivals including the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, soundSCAPE Festival in the Italian Alps and Roots and Rhizomes at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She is a proud endorser of Sabian, Yamaha Canada and Innovative Percussion. n

GREGORY COHEN joined the San Diego Symphony Orchestra as Principal Percussionist in October 2008 after serving as acting principal for the previous season. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Mr. Cohen received his Bachelor of Music degree in percussion performance from Boston University and his Master of Music degree from the New England Conservatory, also in percussion performance. Prior to his work with the SDSO, Mr. Cohen was privileged to work and train at several music festivals, including the Tanglewood Music Center, the National Repertory Orchestra, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and the National Orchestral Institute.

Mr. Cohen has performed with such notable orchestras as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony, the Pacific Symphony and the Kansas City Symphony. Throughout his career he has played for many conductors including Jahja Ling, James Levine, Kurt Masur, Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, Robert Spano, Seiji Ozawa and David Robertson. He has travelled across the Atlantic to perform in renowned halls such as the Konzerthaus in Berlin and the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Mr. Cohen has performed all of over the United States, including Carnegie Hall.

As a graduate student of the New England Conservatory, Mr. Cohen gave a solo recital in Boston’s Jordan Hall. He has recorded on Telarc, Reference Recordings, Albany Records and Mode Records labels, and he is a Zildjian orchestral artist.

In addition to his work at the SDSO, Mr. Cohen became a studio faculty member at San Diego State University in the fall of 2009.

He also maintains an active private percussion studio in San Diego. His students have won numerous competitions and have achieved many accolades.

In his spare time, Gregory Cohen enjoys cooking new recipes with his wife, Courtney, and sailing the fine waters of San Diego Bay. n

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A native of Champaign, IL, San Diego Symphony Orchestra percussionist and Assistant Principal Timpani ANDREW WATKINS began his studies at the age of 12. He completed his Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with William Moersch and Ricardo Flores, and he went on to receive his Master of Music degree at the Chicago College of Performing Arts under the tutelage of Ed Harrison and Vadim Karpinos. He furthered his post-graduate education at the New England Conservatory with Will Hudgins and later at Lynn University with Ted Atkatz.

Praised by the San Diego Union-Tribune for showing “a remarkable degree of both subtlety and insistence… an uncanny sense of when to power forward…and when to hold back,” RYAN J. DILISI was appointed Principal Timpanist of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra in October 2010. Prior to joining the SDSO, Mr. DiLisi held the position of Principal Timpanist of Symphony in C and Assistant Timpanist of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. Additional performance highlights include appearances with the Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New World Symphony.

During his studies, Mr. Watkins was a participant at the Tanglewood Music Center in 2007 and the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra in 2009. Previous to San Diego, his professional appearances include the Chicago Symphony, Chicago Lyric Opera, Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra and New World Symphony. Mr. Watkins joined the San Diego Symphony Orchestra in February of 2010 and has since performed with the orchestra and other local ensembles such as Art of Élan and Luscious Noise. n

Mr. DiLisi’s musicality and dramatic style have shaped him into an exciting soloist. At the age of 17 Mr. DiLisi won the Albert M. Greenfield Competition, which led to solo performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Additionally, he has performed as a soloist with the New England Conservatory Percussion and Wind Ensembles, the San Diego State University Wind Ensemble and, most recently, with the San Diego Symphony, a performance that the San Diego Union-Tribune summed up as “extraordinary.”

A native of Buffalo, New York, ERIN DOUGLAS DOWREY began his music studies in percussion at the age of four. After studying with Mark Hodges for nine years, he attended Carnegie Mellon University for his Bachelor of Music degree. While in Pittsburgh, he studied with Jeremy Branson, Paul Evans and Chris Allen. While at Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Dowrey was the winner of the concerto competition in 2010, and he performed Anders Koppel’s Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra No. 1.

Following his time at Carnegie Mellon, he attended Temple University for his Master’s degree, studying under Alan Abel and Chris Deviney.

Prior to his appointment with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra in 2013, Mr. Dowrey attended the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2012 and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in 2013. He has also performed with the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Erie Philharmonic, the West Virginia Symphony and Symphony in C. Erin Dowrey’s other honors include 2nd Place and 3rd Place in the Atlanta Snare Drum Competition in 2010 and 2011 respectively, as well as 1st Prize Absolute in the Italy Percussion Competition (Snare Drum division group B) in 2011. n

A native of Southern New Jersey, Mr. DiLisi began his formal studies with Don Liuzzi, Principal Timpanist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. DiLisi earned his Bachelor of Music degree (studying under Will Hudgins of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) from the New England Conservatory of Music.

Following his roots, Mr. DiLisi returned to Philadelphia to earn his Master of Music degree from the Boyer College of Music at Temple University under the mentorship of Alan Abel and Angela Nelson, both Philadelphia Orchestra percussionists.

In his free time, Ryan DiLisi enjoys cooking, watching Italian soccer and spending time with his wife Katie. n

ABOUT THE MUSIC Suite (5 pièces enfantines) from Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) MAURICE RAVEL Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrennes Died December 28, 1937, Paris Ravel was a very strange mixture as a person. A man of enormous sophistication and intelligence, he nevertheless felt throughout his life a stinging longing for the world of the child: he collected toys and was fascinated by the illustrations in children’s books. Not surprisingly, he made friends easily with children and sometimes abandoned the adults at parties to go off and play games with their children.

Ravel’s fascination with the world of the child found expression in his

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art: he wrote music for children to hear (such as his opera L’Enfant et les Sortileges) and music for them to play. His Ma Mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”) for piano-four hands dates from 1908. Ravel wrote it for Jean and Mimi Godebski, aged eight and ten, the son and daughter of some of his friends, though it was two other children – aged seven and ten – who played the premiere in Paris in 1910. Each of the five movements was inspired by a scene from an old French fairy tale; the suite, however, should be understood as a collection of five separate scenes rather than as a connected whole. In an oft-quoted remark, Ravel described his aim and his technique in this music: “My intention of awaking the poetry of childhood in these pieces naturally led me to simplify my style and thin out my writing.” This may be music for children to hear – and for very talented children to play – but it is also music for adults: it evokes the freshness and magic of something long in the past. In 1911 Ravel orchestrated Ma Mère l’Oye, slightly expanding the music in the process.

As soon as I had chosen the number five as the principal motif of the work, I immediately recalled the Tibetan “Wind Horse” (rlungria). The “Wind Horse” is a custom observed by the highland nomads of Tibet when they migrate in search of new land. Used like divination during a ceremony, it consists of five cloth streamers, each a different color, strung up on a rope, and allowed to wave in the wind. Blown by the seasonal winds, the myriad wind-horses then point out the way the nomads must take to find the location of their new life.

The very gentle Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty depicts the graceful dance of the attendants around the sleeping Princess Florine. Tom Thumb tells of one of the most famous figures in children’s tales – the little boy who leaves a trail of breadcrumbs behind in the woods, only to become lost when birds eat the crumbs. The music itself seems to wander forlornly as the lost boy searches for the path; high above him, the birds who ate his crumbs cry out tauntingly. Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas tells the story of the empress who is made ugly by a spell, only to be transformed to beauty at the end. When she steps into her bath in the garden, bells burst out in happy peals. Ravel’s use of the pentatonic scale – the music is played mostly on the black keys – evokes an exotic atmosphere.

Conversations of Beauty and the Beast brings another classic tale. Ravel depicts Beauty with a gentle waltz, Beast with a lumpish, growling theme in the contrabassoon’s low register. A delicate glissando depicts his transformation, and Ravel skillfully combines the music of both characters. The Enchanted Garden brings the suite to a happily-ever-after ending. The opening – for strings alone – is simple, almost chaste, but gradually the music assumes a broad, heroic character and – decorated with brilliant runs – drives to a noble close in shining C Major. n

Though this is a concerto, audiences should not look for the brilliance and extroversion that are normally part of concerto form. The orchestra is divided in unusual ways, with the woodwinds set at a distance behind the violins, the brass set at a distance behind the lower strings; the five soloists are themselves separated and stationed at various points within the orchestra. Takemitsu has called this “an orchestral work in which the orchestra, like nature, surrounds us limitlessly, and out of that limitlessness the soloists materialize in limited forms such as earth, wind, water and fire, then once again dissolve into limitless nature.”

From me flows what you call Time TORU TAKEMITSU Born October 8, 1930, Tokyo Died February 20, 1996, Tokyo From me flows what you call Time, a concerto for five percussionists and orchestra, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the percussion ensemble NEXUS to mark the hundredth anniversary of the opening of that hall. The Boston Symphony and NEXUS gave the premiere in Carnegie Hall on October 19, 1990.

In his program note at the time of the premiere, Takemitsu said that he “suddenly imagined 100 years of time flowing through this man-made space, so full of special meaning, called Carnegie Hall. It was as if I could hear the Hall murmuring from the numberless cracks between the layers of those years, ‘From me flows what you call Time.’ Thus, the ‘me’ in the title is meant to be ‘Carnegie Hall,’ not the composer.”

But if the notion of 100 years was important to the creation of this music, a different number gave it shape. The number five dominates this music: it was written for five soloists, the principal theme has five notes, that theme spans a perfect fifth and so on. Takemitsu noted an even more important influence of the number five, and it is worth quoting him at length:

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The five colors of the cloth streamers – white, blue, red, yellow, green – have separate meanings and are the same as the colors emitted by the five Buddhas who sit at the center of a mandala. Blue is the color of water, red of fire, yellow of the earth, green of the wind, and white, as the color created by the other four, signifies the sky, the air, the heavens, and finally “nothingness.”

That last note is important because it points to the fact that while this music plays out over a 30-minute span, it really exists outside time.

Western audiences have almost taken for granted that music should be teleological, or end-oriented – we conceive of music as based on conflict and resolution. Takemitsu, however, did not, and in an oft-quoted remark he has compared his music to the experience of walking through a Japanese garden: there is no direct path and no end, and instead one is free to wander, to pause, and to experience without the need to be getting someplace.

Takemitsu has said that “the ruling emotion” of From me flows what you call Time is “prayer,” and he has divided the work into 13 brief sections, which are listed on the program page. Listeners should use these titles only as a general guide. This is not descriptive music, nor is there a dramatic progression across the span of these movements. This is music to be enjoyed at the moment it is happening – and for its connection to something outside time. n

River Rouge Transfiguration MISSY MAZZOLI Born October 27, 1980, Lansdale, Pennsylvania Described by The New York Times as “one of the most consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York,” Missy Mazzoli is certainly one of today’s most successful young composers from any part of this country. Trained at the Yale School of Music, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and Boston University, Mazzoli has had works performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Kronos Quartet, Emanuel Ax, Jennifer Koh and many other performers. She has had particular success with her three operas, which have been produced by such companies as the New York City Opera, Los Angeles Opera and Opera Philadelphia. Those operas are Song from the Uproar (2012), Breaking the Waves (2016) and Proving Up, the latter of which will be premiered this month by the Washington National Opera. A pianist, Mazzoli leads and tours with the new music

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ensemble Victoire and currently teaches at the Mannes College of Music in New York City.

Mazzoli’s River Rouge Transfiguration was premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on May 13, 2013, under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. The composer has prepared a program note, which is reprinted with the kind permission of G. Schirmer, Inc.: “…all around me and above me as far as the sky, the heavy, composite, muffled roar of torrents of machines, hard wheels obstinately turning, grinding, groaning, always on the point of breaking down but never breaking down."

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, from Journey to the End of the Night I first fell in love with Detroit while on tour with my band, Victoire, in 2010. When I returned home to New York I dove into early Detroit techno from the late eighties, Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night and early 20th century photographs by Charles Sheeler, who documented Detroit’s River Rouge Plant in 1927 through a beautiful, angular photo series. In my research I was struck by how often the landscape of Detroit inspired a kind of religious awe, with writers from every decade of the last century comparing the city’s factories to cathedrals and altars, and Vanity Fair even dubbing Detroit “America’s Mecca” in 1928. In Mark Binelli’s recent book Detroit City Is the Place to Be, he even describes a particular Sheeler photograph, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, as evoking “neither grit nor noise but instead an almost tabernacular grace. The smokestacks in the background look like the pipes of a massive church organ, the titular conveyor belts forming the shape of what is unmistakably a giant cross.” This image, of the River Rouge Plant as a massive pipe organ, was the initial inspiration for River Rouge Transfiguration. This is music about the transformation of grit and noise (here represented by the percussion, piano, harp and pizzicato strings) into something massive, resonant and unexpected. The “grit” is again and again folded into string and brass chorales that collide with each other, collapse and rise over and over again.

River Rouge Transfiguration was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony in honor of Elaine Lebenbom. Thank you to the Detroit Symphony, Leonard Slatkin, Erik Ronmark, Rebecca Zook, Farnoosh Fathi, Katy Tucker and Mark Binelli. (—Missy Mazzoli) n

Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19 BÉLA BARTÓK Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklos, Hungary Died September 26, 1945, New York City No other work looms quite as large in Bartók’s career as The Miraculous Mandarin, and none of his other works caused him so much trouble. From the time he encountered Melchior Lengyel’s story in January 1917, Bartók worked on this music for almost ten years – the most time he spent on a single work – before it was produced on the stage. Yet that premiere in Cologne in November 1926 was a catastrophe. The audience jeered, the press was savage, the Catholic Church protested and the mayor of Cologne – Konrad Adenauer (decades later the first Chancellor of West Germany) – called the conductor into his office, ripped into him for programing “such a dirty piece,” and blocked any further performances.

Efforts to produce The Miraculous Mandarin in Budapest in 1931 – to commemorate Bartók’s fiftieth birthday – ran into such opposition that the whole idea had to be canceled.

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The reasons for such furious opposition are obvious. The Miraculous Mandarin tells a story that would annihilate audiences even today, when almost anything is acceptable on stage. The composer himself left a concise summary: “Three apaches force a beautiful girl to lure men into their den so that they can rob them. The first is a poor youth, the second is not better off, but the third, however, is a wealthy Chinese. He is a good catch, and the girl entertains him by dancing. The Mandarin’s desire is aroused, he is inflamed with passion, but the girl shrinks from him in horror. The apaches attack him, rob him, smother him in a quilt, stab him with a sword – but their violence is of no avail. They cannot cope with the Mandarin who continues to look at the girl with love and longing in his eyes. Finally feminine instinct helps, and the girl satisfies the Mandarin’s desire; only then does he collapse and die.”

This tale could not be more squalid or explicit, and so Bartók’s reactions to it catch us by surprise. He called it “marvelously beautiful,” and on another occasion exclaimed “how beautiful the story is.” Bartók saw it as a moral tale: beneath the lurid surface, it is an allegory of the collision of good and evil and of the ultimate triumph of good. The evil is clear: the three thugs – always portrayed by noisy, abrasive music – represent modern urban society. They are money-mad, violent and destructive; they have corrupted the girl (innocence) to do their bidding. Into this setting comes something otherworldly, powerful and incomprehensible: the mandarin (it was not so crucial that he be Chinese as that he be different – in one of Lengyel’s early versions this figure was a deformed dwarf). The mandarin represents an unstoppable life force beyond the comprehension of the thugs. Only the girl comes to understand his true essence, and she redeems the mandarin and herself through passion.

The Miraculous Mandarin is usually classified as a ballet, but Bartók insisted that it was not. In a letter to his publisher, Bartók complained: “I see that [Universal Edition] is advertising Mandarin as a ballet. I have to observe that this work is less a ballet than a pantomime, since only two dances actually occur in it.” And later he wrote: “the piece must not be turned into a ballet-show; it is intended as a pantomime, after all.” For Bartók, the emphasis was on action rather than on dance, and his music depicts that action with raw power. Some have heard the influence of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring here, others the music of Schoenberg (which Bartók had discovered after World War I), but The Miraculous Mandarin actually sounds like Bartók in every measure: brilliant, hard-edged, rhythmic, powerful. It has been observed that a stage performance needs no choreographer, since every action – every gesture – is clear from the music.

Onstage, The Miraculous Mandarin lasts half an hour, but the Suite consists of about the first two-thirds of the complete score. (Bartók made two brief cuts and provided an ending for concert performances.)

From its first instant, this music is unsettling. Second violins swirl up and down over a “wrong” interval (octave plus a half-step), and the din of the industrialized urban setting arrives in a blast of auto-horns. Bartók was very proud of this beginning and described it in a letter to his wife: “an awful clamor, clatter, stampeding and blowing of horns: I lead the highly respectable listener from the crowded streets of a metropolis into an apaches’ den.” Each of the girl’s seductive lures in the window, depicted by clarinets, nets a prospective client. First, a shabby rake (Bartók’s original scenario quoted above reverses the sequence of the first two johns) enters to the sound of trombone glissandos and then is graphically thrown down the stairs by the thugs. The second lure brings a reticent young man (solo oboe), and the girl dances shyly for him before he too is found to be penniless and cast down the stairs.

But the third lure brings the mandarin, who makes a magnificent entrance: the orchestra “shivers” in terror as the lower brass stamp out an “oriental-sounding” theme and the acid chords that mark his arrival in

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the room. A moment of stunned silence follows. Terrified, the girl begins to dance for him, and her waltz gradually becomes more animated. When the mandarin tries to embrace her, she flees in terror, and he chases her around the room. This music, the most violent in The Miraculous Mandarin, is a furious fugue, and at the climax of the chase – just before the thugs leap out to seize the mandarin – Bartók rips the Suite to a sudden close on three brutal chords.

The Miraculous Mandarin has never found much success on the stage – its lurid events simply overwhelm its redemptive subtext. But the Suite Bartók drew from it – full of exhilarating energy, color and sheer sonic punch – has become one of his most popular works in the concert hall. n

-Program notes by Eric Bromberger

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Performance History

by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist Robert Shaw led the San Diego Symphony's initial performance of Ravel's exquisite Mother Goose Suite in the summer season of 1953. Since then, it has been programmed by the orchestra eight times, most recently when Yoav Talmi directed it in the 1990-91 season. Peter Erős introduced Bartók's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin to San Diego Symphony audiences in the 1976-77 season. It has also been conducted here by Yoav Talmi during the 1990-91 season. The only other performance of this work by the orchestra was the most recent one, in the 2004-05 season, under the direction of Jahja Ling. The two other pieces on this program,

by Toru Takemitsu (From me flows what you call Time) and Missy Mazzoli (River Rouge Transfiguration), are being heard at these concerts for the first time. n

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