A Far Cry, April 16, 2019

oneppo chamber music series David Shifrin, artistic director

A Far Cry

Tuesday, April 16, 2019 | 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Robert Blocker, Dean

Program Arvo Pärt b. 1935

Silouan’s Song (1991)

Iannis Xenakis 1922–2001

Aroura (1971)

Aaron Jay Kernis b. 1960

Musica Celestis (1990)

intermission

Béla Bartók 1881–1945

Divertimento for String Orchestra, Sz. 113 I. Allegro non troppo II. Molto adagio III. Allegro assai

Osvaldo Golijov b. 1960

Tenebrae (2002)

A FAR CRY Violin Abigail Hong+ Alex Fortes Jae Cosmos Lee Janny Joo* Jesse Irons Megumi Lewis Robyn Bollinger Sonya Chun* Yuan Yuan* Zenas Hsu

Viola bass Caitlin Lynch Karl Doty Frank Shaw* Kris Saebo* Jason Fisher Sarah Darling Cello * Guest Crier Karen Ouzounian + NEC Fellow Lev Mamuya+ Michael Unterman Rafael Popper-Keizer

As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

Artist Profile Since its founding in 2007, the three-time Grammy-nominated string orchestra A Far Cry has developed a distinct approach to music-making, with playing and programming that encourage risk-taking and exploration for both player and audience.

This year, A Far Cry was selected as Boston’s 2018 best classical ensemble by The Improper Bostonian, with one of its albums ranking at the top of Billboard’s Traditional Classical Chart. The self-conducted orchestra is a democracy in which decisions are made collectively and leadership rotates among the players (“Criers”). This structure has led to thoughtful and innovative programming, and impactful collaborations with celebrated performers and composers. Boston Musical Intelligencer describes the group: “In its first decade, this conductor-free ensemble has earned and sustained a reputation for top-drawer playing, engrossing programming, and outstanding guest artists.”

A Far Cry’s omnivorous approach has led to collaborations with artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Simone Dinnerstein, Roomful of Teeth, the Silk Road Ensemble, Vijay Iyer, and David Krakauer. A Far Cry’s twelfth season in 2018-19 includes nine Boston-area concerts as part of the group’s own series, and three pairs of concerts as part of A Far Cry’s longstanding residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. New projects include commissions from composers Jessica Meyer and Grammy-nominated oudist/composer Mehmet Ali Sanlikol. In May, A Far Cry will also collaborate with Boston’s Lorelei Ensemble in a new work by Syrian- American composer Kareem Roustom focusing on the women of the Odyssey.

Recent tour highlights include two new commissioning projects: Philip Glass’ third piano concerto with soloist Simone Dinnerstein, and The Blue Hour, “a gorgeous and remarkably unified work” (Washington Post) written by a collaborative of five leading female composers – Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider – and featuring Grammy-winning singer Luciana Souza. Continuing with the ongoing success of the recent album, Circles, which debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Traditional Classical Chart, A Far Cry and pianist Simone Dinnerstein perform on the road, followed by a return to Boston to perform a new realization of Bach’s Goldberg Variations this February 2019.

A Far Cry’s Crier Records launched auspiciously in 2014 with the Grammy-nominated album Dreams and Prayers. The label’s second release, Law of Mosaics, was included on many 2014 Top 10 lists, notably from New Yorker music critic Alex Ross and WQXR’s Q2 Music, which named A Far Cry one of the “ImaginationGrabbing, Trailblazing Artists of 2014.” In September 2018, Crier Records released A Far Cry’s Visions and Variations, which recently received two Grammy nominations in the categories of Best Engineered Album (Classical) and Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance (Classical).

Maintaining their strong roots in the community, the Criers live and work in Boston, rehearsing at their storefront office in Jamaica Plain and fulfilling the role of Chamber Orchestra-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. A Far Cry is dedicated to passing on the spirit of collaborativelyempowered music to the next generation,

Artist Profile, cont. and works closely with local students through educational partnerships with the New England Conservatory and Project STEP.

Program Notes

by Kathryn J. Allwine Bacasmot Silouan’s Song Pärt The Estonian Arvo Pärt had compositional beginnings in serialism and atonality, which earned him an official slap on the wrist from the Soviet government. That, however, was not the catalyst for his change of style. After taking time to reevaluate his compositional methods in the late 1970s, along with studying Bach, Gregorian chant, and Russian Orthodox sacred music, Pärt arrived at a new compositional philosophy that he called “tintinnabulation” (“bells”). He explained: “Tintinnabulation is like this. Here, I am alone in silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played... I build with the most primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation.”

Tintinnabuli, the ringing/sound of bells, alludes to the mathematical division of a note’s sound wave into the overtone series – the basis of Western music theory and its harmonic progressions – which is heard in the chaotic timbre of a ringing bell.

Essentially, if you strike a single note, you are not just hearing that note but an entire sequence working together. Thus, when you hear A-natural, you also sympathetically hear other tones from the A scale in a sequence of 5ths, 4ths, 3rds, and so on: A, E, A, C-sharp, E, etc.—a musical universe orbiting a single note.

Silouan’s Song is named for the monk St. Silouan, reflecting Pärt’s personal devotion to the Russian Orthodox Church. In the music, you hear aspects of tintinnabulation, the simple revolution and contemplation of a select sequence of notes, buffered intermittently by silence, and a subtext of yearning for spiritual renewal.

Aroura xenakis Some artists bring to the world a very particular style of creative energy. They are skillful not only in producing works of art, but on a grander scale, fabricating entire parallel, metaphysical universes. Hieronymus Bosch and Franz Kafka are examples. Iannis Xenakis was amongst them.

Xenakis, however, had a unique perspective.

He had experience building actual physical structures, too, as he went to work for famed French architect Le Corbusier whilst residing as a Greek refugee in Paris during World War II. The City of Light also gave him Olivier Messiaen as a composition teacher.

Trying to explain Xenakis briefly is difficult.

The Reader’s Digest guide to Xenakis could be titled, Xenakis: Wagnerian Techniques on Steroids. Replace terminology like leitmotif with “set” and sliding chord transitions with

“pitch time transformation” and off you go.

The result might sound like total chaos on the surface, but the supporting theories on which the entire musical structure is built are exquisitely elegant. A newspaper article once aptly described the music of Xenakis as “craggily, joyously elemental music” that “turned collections of pitches and rhythms and instruments into a force of nature.” Music critic Alex Ross described Xenakis’ process as “looking at the orchestra as a scientist looks at a gas cloud.” In other words, what’s happening is far beyond the outer limits of traditional music theory.

Architecture, mathematics, disregard of traditional tonal systems, and a consuming obsession with pitch time dimensions translated into music in the mind of Xenakis.

His ideas emerge on paper as excruciatingly complex works, dense with layer after layer of scientific and philosophical properties.

Aroura (sometimes spelled Arura) is preoccupied with “sonorous textures” of the earth, sound, and other scientific and natural phenomena. Throughout the music, these various textures are expressed through an assortment of traditional and extended instrumental techniques including a wide range of dynamics, pizzicato, ricochet, glissando and harmonic glissando, tremolo, and scratching, to name a few.

Musica Celestis Kernis Medieval music theorists believed the universe, in its mathematical purity, vibrated with a kind of “music.” There were three types: musica universalis, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis, that descended in levels of perfection.

The concept is beautiful. Followed through, its logical conclusion is that everything is music – including you and me. The act of composing music is then something like ripping open the fabric of our universe, grasping the edges with your hands and stepping through to participate in an ongoing concert. Musica Celestis (“heavenly music”) takes that principle as its inspiration, as well as the music of the 10th century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen.

Kernis says the work “follows a simple, spacious melody and harmonic pattern through a number of variations (like a passacaglia) and modulations, and is framed by an introduction and codas.”

Within the overarching harmonic progression of the piece there is tucked inside an implied harmonic progression that traverses the endless interlocking relationships of every key signature by the interval of a 5th . Using that circle, it tosses a lasso out into space, catching the infinite within the small confines of measures dotted with notes.

Divertimento for Strings Bartók Bartók was in the twilight of his life when Paul Sacher (1906–1999), founder of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, approached him with the commission for a new work, which emerged in the space of just fifteen days as the Divertimento for Strings. By definition, divertimenti are meant to be somewhat casual in nature. To some degree, that holds true as a description for this piece, but just as the creeping shadow of war continued to haunt Europe, the “night music” (a term apparently approved of by

Program Notes, cont.

Bartók as a descriptor for his compositions with a shaded quality) of the middle movement seeps under the door frames of the outer movements adding a jolting chill.

Germany invaded Poland just after Bartók fulfilled this commission.

Contrasts abound. Dance-like qualities sit next to morose melodies; folk idioms and raw shifting meters are juxtaposed with the polish of a Baroque concerto grosso, pitting a small group (concertino) against the whole (ripieno). Multi-voiced fugues inject order into chaos. It’s music that’s trying to live up to its title, acting as a not-soserious diversion from a world about to be turned upside down, injecting the hope of first light into threatening darkness. The intense whirling energy of the final movement seems to clench its fists and grit its teeth with determination toward that end.

In a poignant turn of events, the composer who put so much effort into documenting the folk music of his native Hungary and integrating it into his work was forced to leave for New York City, and watch from across the water as his homeland sided with Germany. This was the last piece he wrote in Europe. He would die of leukemia in the United States.

Tenebrae Golijov Golijov explains: “I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York,

where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it ‘from afar,’ the music would probably offer a ‘beautiful’ surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops...

The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground.”

Namesake to Golijov’s composition are the three Tenebrae (Latin for “darkness”) services, on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday of Holy Week in the Christian faith. Each night begins in light and ends in shadow as fifteen ceremonial candles are extinguished one by one following the reading of each Psalm. Eventually all candles in the church are put out and the congregation is engulfed in utter darkness – save for the light of one candle representing hope. The people then dismiss into the night.

The tension of the shadows sustain this haunting music in mid-air, caught between darkness and light, their metaphorical doubles of despair and hope in prolonged meditation.

Kathryn J. Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/ harpsichordist, musicologist, music & cultural critic, and freelance writer. She is a graduate of New England Conservatory, and writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.

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Upcoming Events apr 24 Lunchtime Chamber Music School of Music students perform a midday chamber music program.

12:30 pm. | Morse Recital Hall

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Performances by the winners of the Yale School of Music’s annual Chamber Music Competition.

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7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $15, Students $7 may 9 Guitar Chamber Music

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