22-24 APRIL 2020
VOYAGE THROUGH AMERICA WITH PEKKA KUUSISTO –––––
2019/2020 PROGRAMME NOTE SCO.ORG.UK
Kindly supported by
SCO AMERICA
WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR –––––
STRAVINSKY (1882–1971) Concerto in E-flat ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ (1937–38) Tempo giusto Allegretto Con moto
NICO MUHLY (b.1981) Shrink (Concerto for Violin and Strings) UK Premiere (2019) (Co-commissioned by Australian Chamber Orchestra, Melbourne Recital Centre, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra with the kind support of the MCO Foundation and Scottish Chamber Orchestra)
BRYCE DESSNER (b.1976) Ornament and Crime (2015) BARBER (1910–1981) Adagio for Strings (1936) COPLAND (1900–1990) Appalachian Spring: Suite (1944)
––––– What makes music American? A simple answer, of course, is that it’s music written by an American composer. But that’s a bit of a cop-out. Is there something within music itself that can give it a particular nationality? Something about its harmonies, its textures, its form and shape, or even its spirit and mood? It’s a vexed question – along with anything that attempts to assign attributes of race, gender, nationality or anything else to art. And yet it’s a question that’s perplexed composers and thinkers – many of them American – for many decades. And it’s a particular issue for American music, for the simple reason that classical music as we know it is pretty much a European invention, with threads of professional, amateur and church performances slowly winding together in 19th-century concert halls and recital salons to provide us with the concert-going culture we know today. There’s long been a question of how to weave something distinctively American from those strands, so that US music isn’t simply an import of European manners and heritage. You could reasonably argue that with the advent of minimalism in the 1960s and 1970s, America found an answer in a style whose guiding principles come naturally from free-thinking US experimentalism rather than from the inward-looking intricacies of the European avant-garde. Looking more broadly, jazz and rock, too, are styles with their roots embedded firmly in the rich soil of the USA. But from the early 20th century, many American composers actively looked for what might make their own music distinctive. Aaron Copland and Roger
Sessions held an influential set of concerts in New York from 1928 to 1931 with the principal aim of discovering and promoting new US music. Pianist and arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge had similar intentions in endowing a foundation at the Library of Congress to commission and perform new works by US composers – one of which was Copland’s Appalachian Spring, in 1944, which closes tonight’s concert. Even Leonard Bernstein cared so much about the issue that he devoted the second of his famous Young People’s Concerts to the question (it comes second only to the most fundamental question of them all, ‘What does music mean?’). There is, you might think, nothing much American about tonight’s opening music, Stravinsky’s Concerto in E flat, named ‘Dumbarton Oaks’. But at least in its genesis, it’s American through and through. Former US diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his art collector wife Mildred Barnes acquired a historic estate in Washington, DC, in 1920, hiring an architect to remodel and enlarge the mansion, which they named Dumbarton Oaks. (They bequeathed it to Harvard University in 1940, an institution it still forms part of, and it even hosted a 1944 conference that laid the groundworks for what would become the United Nations.) Bliss and Barnes were wealthy and generous supporters of the arts, and had met Stravinsky in 1937, when he’d visited the US to conduct the premiere of his ballet Jeu de cartes. That year was the couple’s 30th wedding anniversary, and they requested a new work from Stravinsky to celebrate the occasion. What the composer came up with – after a lengthy immersion in the music of
Igor Stravinsky
Bach, he said – is a piece that melds the Baroque and the contemporary, clothing Stravinsky’s unmistakable rhythmic and harmonic quirks into the formal garb of a Baroque concerto grosso, albeit one whose soloists are constantly shifting, so that almost all of the work’s 15 players gets their moment in the spotlight. Dumbarton Oaks, as it’s universally called, is an intimate, witty work that has all the bustle of a Baroque concerto, even if its repeating basslines, its shifting rhythms and its stuttering syncopations are pure Stravinsky. In three short movements, joined together by slow, chordal passages, it progresses from a bustling opening to a graceful second movement, ending with a finale whose determined tread slowly morphs into something far more buoyant. Dumbarton Oaks has another claim to being an (almost) American work. Just
Nico Muhly
Bryce Dessner
a year after its premiere, Stravinsky moved from Paris to New York, then Massachusetts, and finally settled
the final, a tiny set of anxious intervals between unisons and fourths. The overall structure suggests an intensifying focus
in Hollywood in 1941. He became a naturalised US citizen in 1945.
on these small building-blocks, a process which is reflected in the speed of each movement. The first proceeds quickly, becomes aggressive, and dissolves into small fragments. The second movement is slow and taut, with a looped sequence of chords whose character becomes increasingly thick and heavy. The last movement is fast, nervous, and scattered, with occasional giant unisons coming in and out of focus. Shrink is dedicated to Pekka Kuusisto".
We jump right to the present day for tonight’s next piece. New York-based Nico Muhly worked as Philip Glass’s editor and assistant for several years, and has clearly learnt much from minimalism, but his genre-straddling music takes in pop (he’s worked with Björk and Sufjan Stevens, among many others) alongside opera (with premieres at ENO and the Met) and everything in between. He writes of his violin concerto Shrink: "Shrink (Concerto for Violin and Strings) is in three movements. Each movement obsesses over certain intervals: the
Similarly straddling the worlds of rock and classical music is Bryce Dessner, guitarist in rock group The National, as well as a composer of works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Kronos Quartet, among
first, ninths; the second, sevenths; and
many other high-profile ensembles. He
wrote his solo violin work Ornament and Crime for Pekka Kuusisto in 2015. We leap back in time again for the concert’s two closing works. And there can be few more famous pieces of American music than Samuel Barber’s Adagio, dubbed ‘the world’s saddest music’, and indeed indelibly associated with moments of great emotion and upheaval. It was played at the funerals of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and Grace Kelly (among many others), and Jackie Kennedy arranged for Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra to play it to an empty hall following the assassination of her husband in 1963, a recording of which became the unofficial anthem of the nation’s grief during the following weeks. It began, however, and of course still exists as the slow movement of Barber’s Op 11 String Quartet, where it separates two outer movements of great energy and complexity. It was conductor Arturo Toscanini who thought the Adagio would make a fine orchestral work, requesting one from the 26-year-old composer, and premiering it with the National Symphony Orchestra on a radio broadcast in 1938. In an America still reeling from the Great Depression, and with Europe hurtling ever closer to war, the heart-on-sleeve emotion of Barber’s Adagio came at just the right moment to capture and console the public consciousness.
COPLAND HAD EXPLORED AN ANGULAR, DISSONANT MODERNISM EARLIER IN HIS CAREER, BUT GUIDED BY HIS SOCIAL CONSCIENCE, TURNED TOWARDS A SIMPLER, MORE DIRECT AND MORE IMMEDIATELY ACCESSIBLE STYLE FROM THE LATE 1930S, IN MUSIC THAT HE HOPED WOULD SPEAK DIRECTLY TO LISTENERS, AND CELEBRATE THE BEST OF AMERICAN HISTORY AND VALUES –––––
simpler, more direct and more immediately accessible style from the late 1930s, in music that he hoped would speak directly to listeners, and celebrate the best of American history and values. Just think of the stirring Fanfare for a Common Man (which makes a reappearance in the finale of his questing Third Symphony), or the hijinks of Billy the Kid or Rodeo, or indeed the touching nobility of his Lincoln Portrait.
With Copland’s Appalachian Spring, however, we return to our opening question. Following studies in Paris with the influential Nadia Boulanger, Copland had explored an angular, dissonant modernism earlier in his career, but guided
Most famous of the lot, however, is Appalachian Spring, which Copland wrote in 1943 and 1944 following a request from choreographer and dancer Martha Graham in 1942 for a ballet ‘with an American theme’. Her idea for a scenario couldn’t have been simpler: a rural Pennsylvania community, two young newlyweds, a visiting preacher, and a few wise lessons dispensed by an older settler.
by his social conscience, turned towards a
It’s a generic-sounding story in which
Samuel Barber
Aaron Copland
hardly anything happens, with characters that are little more than archetypes, and yet Appalachian Spring conjures a truly
flows’. And Copland also admitted to a certain regret at including the score’s most famous tune, the Shaker hymn ‘Simple
moving parable about American values, pioneers conquering a new land, strength, determination and resilience.
Gifts’, probably better known to Brits as ‘Lord of the Dance’, saying: “My research evidently was not very thorough, since I did not realise that there have never been Shaker settlements in rural Pennsylvania!”
The work received its final title only shortly prior to its premiere, before which time Copland had simply called it ‘Ballet for Martha’, which remains its subtitle. And that last-minute naming inadvertently caused a couple of ironies. Copland admitted to being amused later in life when commentators remarked on how well he’d captured the Appalachians in springtime. Yes, there’s plenty of freshness and a sense of promise and new life in his music, but the ‘spring’ of the title actually refers to a source of water: Graham took the title from a poem by Hart Crane that clearly refers to ‘wat’ry webs of upper
He was aware, too, that his music’s simplicity and sincerity may end up tipping over into empty nostalgia or even mawkishness, writing late in his life: “I have often admonished orchestras, professional and otherwise, not to get too sweet or too sentimental with it.” Nevertheless, with its wide-open sounds, its hope, expectation and childlike joy, Appalachian Spring is one of classical music’s rare works of unfettered optimism – which itself is surely a spirit that captures the best of America. ©David Kettle
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