At a Glance
THE MUSIC
Anonymous folksongs, created “by the people” (an oversimplification to be sure), may be known, loved, and passed on by nearly all the members of a culture. More deliberately composed songs created by identifiable individuals may also catch the listener’s ear, because they express a range of fundamental human passions that touch the heart—from high-spirited revelry to profound lamentation.
Tonight’s program mixes several different kinds of songs across various categories: art song with folk song; very old (from the Renaissance) and brand new (a world premiere); and, in a special particularity, new songs expressing very old feelings of heart-wrenching loss, from Renaissance Polish culture to modern Polish children’s culture—new songs alert to the folk tradition.
Michael Ward-Bergeman and David Bruce met in November 2006 at a Carnegie Hall Professional Training Workshop for composers and singers directed by Dawn Upshaw and Osvaldo Golijov. During the course of the workshop, Ward-Bergeman and Bruce developed an artistic friendship, products of which are heard here tonight. Other works by Golijov and Renaissance songwriter John Dowland, plus anonymous songs of the American folk tradition, round out tonight’s program.
THE ARTISTS
DAWN UPSHAW
The four-time Grammy Award winner and diva of opera and concert repertoire returns to Carnegie Hall after her stellar performance in the Opening Night Gala in September.
EVAN HUGHES
The bass-baritone and winner of the Marilyn Horne Foundation Competition has performed title roles worldwide, from Le Nozze di Figaro to Golijov’s Ainadamar.
STEPHEN PRUTSMAN
A master of classical, jazz, and world music styles, Prutsman has collaborated with a wide variety of musical greats—from Yo-Yo Ma to Tom Waits.
MICHAEL WARD-BERGEMAN
The creator of the unusual hyper-accordion shows off the instrument on tonight’s world-premiere performance of his Treny.
ENSEMBLE ACJW
The finest post-graduate musicians comprise this ensemble of Academy fellows, who bring their musical prowess to new generation of musicians and music lovers.
JOHN DOWLAND (ca 1563–1626) (arr. Stephen Prutsman)Songs: Come again, sweet love doth now invite; Can she excuse my wrongs; Weep you no more, sad fountains; Now, O now I needs must part
John Dowland was one of the greatest lutenists of his time, and one of England’s greatest composers of song. Though many wonderful songs predate Dowland, it is not an overstatement to call him the earliest songwriter whose work remains known and loved today, beyond the realm of specialists.
Dowland’s songs, for which he wrote both words and accompaniment for lute, are both exquisite in their melodic grace and rich in harmonic expression. A considerable percentage of his work expresses sentiments of sadness, loss, tears, and farewells, possibly a reflection of his own psychic personality. His motto, “semper Dowland, semper dolens” (always Dowland, always lamenting), seems to be more than play on words—he probably pronounced the “ow” in his name as “oh.” In any case, his sorrowful songs predominate in both performance and his own arrangements for solo lute or instrumental accompaniment. Tonight, Dowland’s songs are arranged with piano accompaniment, a setting most often found in a modern song recital.
—Steven Ledbetter
OSVALDO GOLIJOV (b. 1960)Lúa Descolorida
Osvaldo Golijov is the heir to both the vibrant musical traditions of his native Argentina and the Russian-Jewish and Romanian-Jewish musical culture of his parents and grandparents—a heritage he has blended with academic training in 20th-century musical techniques. Not surprisingly, as a composer, Golijov has carved out an unprecedented position in the contemporary musical world. He has been open to ideas and gestures from many different traditions, finding in them approaches that touch basic human feelings. Golijov’s earliest works retained the tensions and dissonances that were common among his teachers. More recently, he has pursued what he calls the “roots and emanations of different musics,” drawing upon sound imagery from his own wide-ranging background.
Golijov first came to wide attention through his connection with the Kronos Quartet, who recommended that Dawn Upshaw commission a song from him. The result was their first collaboration, Three Songs (of which “
Lúa Descolorida”
is the second) for voice and piano in 1999, later expanded for chamber orchestra.
The text for
“Lúa Descolorida” comes from a poem, written in the language of the Spanish region of Galicia, by Spanish poet García Lorca’s beloved Rosalia de Castro. Golijov calls the song “a constellation of clearly defined symbols that affirm contradictory things at the same time,” explaining that it is “at once a slow-motion ride in a cosmic horse, an homage to Couperin’s melismas in his
Lessons of Tenebrae, and velvet bells coming from three different churches.”
Later, Golijov realized that the “Lúa Descolorida”’s mood of profound sadness, regret, and shame would fit perfectly in his “Passion According to St. Mark” for Peter response’s of thrice denying his discipleship of Jesus. He thus created an orchestral setting of the piece for strings, and inserted it into the full score of the Passion; the piece became an expressive capstone of that vivid and colorful score.
—Steven Ledbetter
MICHAEL WARD-BERGEMAN (b. 1970)Treny (
Laments)Jan Kochanowski lost his beloved young daughter Orszula in 1579. His loss moved him to create
Treny, one of the most important works of early Polish literature. The work went against literary conventions of the time; however, it is also strongly rooted in literary traditions that stretch back to Ancient Greece.
Treny is full of despair and darkness. The poem oscillates between recollections of Orszula and Jan’s helplessness in losing her daughter. Jan struggles with the seeming pointlessness of existence, the meaninglessness of life, the quest for wisdom, and suffering. His reflections are so intense that it is easy to overlook the fact that there is something beyond all of his deep, heartfelt cries into the darkness: the love of his nightingale daughter, and her song.
I’ve had the special privilege of performing with Dawn Upshaw many times over the past few years as accordionist for composer Osvaldo Golijov’s work
Ayre, which was written expressly for her. I never imagined that I would be in a position to compose a work for her. I met composer David Bruce at a Carnegie Hall Professional Training Workshop for young composers in 2007. We hit it off and exchanged a lot of information, most of it to do with folk music from around the world.
Toward the end of the workshop, David gave me his copy of Kochanowski’s
Treny (
Laments)
. I was inspired by the poem, and felt that I would do something musically with it. I had no idea what this project would be until a few weeks later, when I received a call from Mark Ludwig, director of the Terezín Chamber Music Foundation, who offered me a commission for Dawn Upshaw.
For me, this commission has been about continuing the search for the truth of the human spirit, and sharing these discoveries through music. I believe it is through life’s challenges that the truth about ourselves can be learned. We are all too aware of the atrocities of war, concentration camps, and death and suffering. The music and art created in the Terezín camp points us to a truth about ourselves that we can not deny—the truth that we are an inherently creative people, able to create beauty in the least beautiful situations, able to reap inspiring, healing, and transforming ideas from deep within ourselves, despite impossible circumstances. I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to be both a witness and participant in this journey along with my friend Dawn Upshaw, the other musicians performing the work, Mark Ludwig and the Terezín Chamber Music Foundation, and—most importantly—you, the listener.
I hope that my work reflects and resonates with our collective journey, and our journeys as individuals. There is suffering and loss in life, but these come to a definite end.
Beauty and Love are eternal.
—Michael Ward-Bergeman
DAVID BRUCE (b. 1970)Piosenki
British-American composer David Bruce studied with George Benjamin and Sir Harrison Birtwistle. He has been actively involved in opera, having composed two mini-operas and the full-length chamber opera
Push! (2006), which attracted wide attention. He met Michael Ward-Bergeman in November 2007, and shared with the composer his enthusiasm for folk music from all over the world. Bruce was particularly struck by the sound of the lagerphone, a percussion instrument derived from English folk dancing called “morris dancing,” in which the lagerphone is used rather like a sword. Bruce made his own lagerphone (roughly twice the length of the morris dance instrument, played mostly by pounding it into the floor) as one of the percussion instruments for
Piosenki.
“Piosenki” is a Polish word for songs, implying popular music, as opposed to
piesn, or art song. In his
Piosenki, Bruce has chosen a series of poems filled with images of childhood from the Polish poet Julian Tuwim, whose texts range from “playground rhymes” to a poem showing the four seasons as a cause of “consternation and misery.” Bruce notes that he “tried to select poems that would reflect this range of Tuwim’s rich, complex, and unpatronizing work,” interspersing it with four playground chants and closing off the whole “in celebratory fashion” with a playful rhyme.
Piosenki is not “children’s music,” but it is a lively and varied picture of childhood to be enjoyed by all ages.
The musical language of
Piosenki reflects folk traditions from all over Eastern Europe. Bruce’s conversations with Ward-Bergeman produced unusual folk instruments in some cases; “
Śmierdziel” (“Smelly”), for instance, uses three different instruments in which the player produces sounds of flatulence by rubbing the fingers along a string. The lagerphone that Bruce made himself appears in the final, celebratory piece.
—Steven Ledbetter
Steven Ledbetter, musicologist and program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998, writes and lectures widely on many aspects of classical music.
© 2008 The Carnegie Hall Corporation