JANUARY 31, 2025 / 7:30 PM / MAURICE ABRAVANEL HALL
FEBRUARY 1, 2025 / 7:30 PM / MAURICE ABRAVANEL HALL
DAVID ROBERTSON , conductor
SYNERGY VOCALS , vocals
STEVE REICH STRAVINSKY
The Desert Music (48’)
SYNERGY VOCALS , vocals
INTERMISSION
Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (32’)
Part I: The Adoration of the Earth Part II: The Sacrifice
CREATIVE PARTNER SPONSOR
JOHN & MARCIA PRICE FAMILY FOUNDATION
For David Robertson’s bio, please see p. 51
Synergy Vocals
Synergy Vocals has been closely associated with the music of Steve Reich for almost 30 years. Specializing in close-microphone singing, the group has performed all over the world with ensembles including the Boston, Chicago, St Louis, New World, San Francisco and Vancouver Symphony orchestras, the Los Angeles and Brooklyn Philharmonic orchestras, Nexus, Steve Reich & Musicians, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, AskoǀSchönberg, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ictus, London Sinfonietta, the London Symphony Orchestra and all of the UK’s BBC orchestras. They have also collaborated with dance companies in London and Brussels.
World premières include Reich’s Three Tales, Daniel Variations, Traveler’s Prayer and Jacob’s Ladder, Steven Mackey’s Dreamhouse, Andriessen’s La Commedia, David Lang’s writing on water and Sir James MacMillan’s Since it was the day of Preparation…, as well as the UK première of Nono’s Prometeo. Synergy Vocals provided the chorus for Ravi Shankar’s opera Sukanya, and for Satya Hinduja’s Harmony of the Worlds project with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Their commercial recordings include Andriessen’s De Staat, Reich’s Proverb, Music for 18 Musicians and The Desert Music, John Adams’ Grand Pianola Music and Berio’s Sinfonia
Synergy Vocals is featured on a variety of film soundtracks and television signature tunes.
The Desert Music
Duration: 48 minutes in five sections.
THE COMPOSER – STEVE REICH (b. 1936) – Most biographies of Steve Reich include a quote from The Guardian critic Andrew Clements: “There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of music history and Steve Reich is one of them.” For listeners without a lot of experience with Reich’s music, this accurate pronouncement might require context. Reich was the leading figure in the Minimalism movement of the 1960s. He rejected the conventions of mid-century classical music by stripping away its harmonic, rhythmic, and structural complexities. In their place, Reich favored more simplified elements like static chord patterns, repeated rhythms and large-scale, nearly imperceptible phase shifts to create meditative experiences that occasionally last as long as a Romantic symphony. Not everyone followed him on this path, but nobody could ignore him.
THE HISTORY – The Desert Music (1983) for amplified voices and orchestra is a fully realized example of Reich’s musical philosophy. All his minimalist experiments found fruition here, as did his increasing willingness to reference big subjects through music. In his own commentary on the piece, Reich described it as a “setting of parts of poems by the American poet William Carlos Williams…The title is taken from Dr. Williams’ book of collected poems, The Desert Music. From this collection I chose parts of The Orchestra and Theocritus: IdylI – A version from the Greek From another collection I chose a small part of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” Steve Reich’s The Desert Music, which continued his interest during the 1980s in converting text fragments into longer than normal (for him anyhow) melodic segments, was an important personal statement on human conflict. “I have loved Dr. Williams’ poetry since I was 16 years old,” he wrote, “and picked up a copy of his long poem Patterson just because I was fascinated by the symmetry of his name – William Carlos Williams. I have continued reading his work to the present. I find Dr. Williams’ finest work to be his late poetry written between 1954 and his death in 1963 at age 80. It is from this period in the poet’s work that I have selected the texts for The Desert Music – a period after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Dr. Williams was acutely aware of the bomb and his words about it, in a poem about music entitled The Orchestra struck me as to the point: ‘Say to
them:/ Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant/ to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize/ them, he must either change them or perish.’” The Desert Music was commissioned by the West German Radio, Cologne and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1983, Gestapo war criminal Klaus Barbie was arrested in Bolivia, the final episode of M*A*S*H aired on CBS, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party won a landslide Parliamentary election, and Manuel Noriega became the de facto President of Panama.
THE CONNECTION – These performances represent the Utah Symphony premiere of Steve Reich’s The Desert Music
Le Sacre du printemps (“The Rite of Spring”)
Duration: 32 minutes in two parts (with a short pause).
THE COMPOSER – IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971) – By the second decade of the 20th century, Stravinsky was a big star. Two huge successes with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe –Firebird and Petrushka – had his name on the tips of every tongue in Paris and even elicited some respectful envy from Claude Debussy. Stravinsky, who was splitting time then between the French capital and Switzerland, had earned the right to suggest his own projects and take his own leaps. There were no limits, and these were heady times indeed for the young Russian composer and his audience as they sat at the premiere of his latest ballet in 1913. As they waited with a collectively held breath to see what was next for him, how could any of them know the spin of the Earth was about to reverse?
THE HISTORY – So much has already been written about the riot that erupted in the audience during the premiere of The Rite of Spring that it can be tempting to avoid the subject altogether now. Is the music famous because of its infamous debut or does it merit its place in music history based on the brilliantly groundbreaking new language from which it was created? Certainly, both. After all, the riot did happen, and it was the result of many factors. In addition to the shocking nature of the score, there was much for the conservative factions of the audience to deride in the
HISTORY
costumes and the pagan subject matter. Many were already angry at Nijinsky for his choreography of Debussy’s Jeux two weeks earlier and came loaded for bear. Some probably just wanted to yell at fussy rich people. Regardless of which axe a given section of the house was there to grind, once the protests (among them satirical calls for doctor and even a dentist) and the counter-protests (such as the suggestion by composer Florent Schmitt that the society ladies near him “shut up”) took hold, the music became essentially inaudible over the din. Critical success would follow in later performances and the tumult at the premiere was never repeated once the various partisans dispersed. The score, with its muscular, primordial fearlessness, was an undisputable masterpiece and everyone knew it. It’s easy to say now, from our distant vantage, that The Rite of Spring was the most important and influential work of the 20th century, because of course it was. But even by 1929 The
New York Times had proclaimed it as significant to its time “as Beethoven’s Ninth is to the 19th century.” In one stroke of compositional genius, Stravinsky turned every aspect of musical creativity on its head and effortlessly changed the course of musical thought forever. The riot was optional.
THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1913, civil war raged in Mexico, King George I was assassinated in Greece, the United States began parcel post service, and New York’s Grand Central Terminal was opened in February.
THE CONNECTION – The Rite of Spring is part of the regular repertory of the Utah Symphony, with no less than a dozen Masterworks performances since 1955. The most recent concerts were in 2019, under Thierry Fischer.
