CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Ensemble ACJW
The Academy — A Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute

Zankel Hall
Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 8:30 PM

Ensemble ACJW
James Conlon, Conductor

With Guest Artists:
Katherine Whyte, Soprano
Matthew Worth, Baritone

VARÈSE Octandre for Flute, Winds, and Brass
KRENEK "O Lacrymosa," Op. 48
KRENEK "Als ich damals am strand des meeres stand" from Jonny spielt auf
SCHULHOFF Die Wolkenpumpe, Op. 40
MILHAUD La création du monde, Op. 81
VARÈSE Intégrales
HINDEMITH Kammermusik No. 1, Op. 24

The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with the New York City Department of Education — is made possible by a leadership gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, The Kovner Foundation, Martha and Bob Lipp, The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Judith and Burton Resnick, Susan and Elihu Rose, and Mr. and Mrs. Lester S. Morse Jr., with additional support from the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, The Dana Foundation, Suki Sandler, Mr. and Mrs. Nicola Bulgari, Susan and Ed Forst, and The William Petschek Family.

Ensemble ACJW performances are supported, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Program Notes:

By Steven Ledbetter

Edgard Varèse Octandre
Born December 22, 1883, in Paris; died November 6, 1965, in New York.

Composed in Paris in 1923; Octandre was first performed at an International Composers Guild concert in New York on January 13, 1924, with E. Robert Schmitz conducting; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on December 6, 1962, with an unidentified ensemble conducted by Gunther Schuller.

Scoring: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, and double bass.

Varèse felt to an extreme degree the dissatisfaction of his age with the music of the past. His works of the 1920s and 1930s are more aggressively modern—with respect to strident dissonance, complex rhythm, freedom from developmental form, and elaborate percussion scoring—than anything else of the period, and even at this time he was looking toward the still-greater freedom he expected from the electronic medium.

Varèse was born in Paris, where he studied with Roussel at the Schola Cantorum and Widor at the Paris Conservatoire. Then he went to Berlin, where he came to know Busoni, Hofmannsthal, and Strauss. Almost all of his early works were accidentally destroyed by fire. But when he settled in New York late in 1915, he began the major period of his creative career. During the decade after 1918 he wrote six works for orchestra or chamber orchestra, using memories of the music that had impressed him in Europe—Debussy, the atonal Schoenberg, the Stravinsky of Petrushka and Le sacre—but exceeding his models in his quest for the new.

Varèse dedicated the score of Octandre to the conductor of the premiere, E. Robert Schmitz, a fellow immigrant from Paris and an enthusiastic colleague in presenting new music. Octandre is the botanical filler in a mathematical sandwich. Varèse’s previous and following works, Hyperprism and Intégrales, have titles from geometry and calculus, but octandria are plants whose flowers have eight stamens, just as this exotic musical bloom has eight members: one each of the orchestral woodwind and brass players plus double bass. It is unique among Varèse’s ensemble pieces in having no percussion instruments, which allows it to unfold with less of the febrile percussive activity that had marked Hyperprism. On the other hand, the concentration on pitched instruments gives Octandre a richness of thematic and motivic relationships not approached again until the much-later Déserts.

Another unusual feature of this score is its division into movements. There are three, but they do not follow any conventional pattern, nor are they greatly differentiated in tempo or character. Indeed, they allude to one another freely, and are best regarded as stages in the progressive development of a single idea, that of employing a soloist to introduce a “litany” of instrumental choirs, if one may borrow Stravinsky’s term in speaking of his structurally and expressively not dissimilar Symphonies of Wind Instruments.


ERNST KRENEK “Als ich damals,” from Jonny spielt auf; O Lacrymosa, Op. 48
Born August 23, 1900, in Vienna; died December 22, 1991, in Palm Springs, California.

Composed between February 9 and June 19, 1926, Jonny spielt auf received its world premiere in Leipzig on February 10, 1927, with Gustav Brecher conducting. Anita’s aria, “Als ich damals,” appears in Act I, scene 2; the aria receives its Carnegie Hall premiere at tonight’s performance.

Composed in 1926, O Lacrymosa received its first performance in Cologna on January 29, 1927, with Tiny Debüser, soprano, and Hermann Abendroth conducting; it receives its Carnegie Hall performance at tonight’s performance.

Scoring: soprano, 2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, and harp.

Ernst Krenek began his serious compositional studies at the age of 16 with Franz Schreker, whose text Linear Counterpoint made a lasting impression on the young composer both before and after his decision (about 1930) to adopt Schoenberg’s 12-tone system. A short-lived marriage to Anna Mahler, the daughter of the composer, introduced him into a significant artistic circle and led to his being the first composer to attempt a completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. At the same time he was writing operas and orchestral works.

The two vocal works to be performed here come from the same period of his life, and both illustrate the lyrical side of his art.

After his Second Symphony enjoyed a great success at its premiere in Kassel in 1923, he became a protégé of Werner Reinhart, who introduced him to Stravinsky and the poet Rilke.

Travel to Paris in 1925 brought Krenek into contact with Les Six, whose witty music was very different from the current Austrian and German traditions. Krenek decided to try something in that vein. Accepting an assistant’s position in the State Theater in Kassel, he composed incidental music for plays and occasionally conducted. He also began sketching a libretto about a black jazz musician in Paris. Hearing Duke Ellington’s music in a revue in Frankfurt that New Year’s Eve encouraged him further. The plot places Old World musicians such as the composer Max and the violinist Daniello in opposition to the New World music of the black jazz violinist Jonny. At the end, it is the New World that triumphs.

Jonny spielt auf enjoyed a sensational success for a few years—some 70 productions by 1930. The American premiere, at the Metropolitan Opera on January 19, 1929, aroused further furor because of the sexual freedoms enjoyed by several of the characters, and especially because of the relationship between the black violinist Jonny and the white chambermaid Yvonne. By the early 1930s politics doomed the opera in Europe were numbered, but before Krenek’s it began to find frequent revivals and to re-establish itself as a particularly lively remnant of the all-too-brief era of the Weimar Republic.

Early in Act I, the composer Max gives the score of his new opera to the soprano Anita, with whom he has fallen in love. Before she leaves for a performance in Paris, they run over the aria together, with Max at the piano.

It was on Easter, April 20, 1924, that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke met Krenek and several other musicians. Rilke described himself among this group as a “deaf mountain,” but he was very much attracted to a “climate of music” that developed. He soon wrote the three poems that make up O Lacrymosa and presented them to the composer with the heading “Trilogy, for future music by Ernst Krenek.” Krenek published the three songs in a version with piano accompaniment as his Op. 48 in 1926, dedicating it “To the poet, as a return gift.” The version heard here an expansion of the piano accompaniment for harp with sustained lines of woodwinds to make the accompaniment “sing” as well as the soprano.

The Latin title implies a liturgical text, whether excerpted from the Requiem Mass or connected to the weeping Virgin in the Stabat mater. But Rilke’s poem, though filled with references to tears, expresses a more immediate sorrow symbolized by rain, cold, change of seasons, and eventually the hope of a new spring.


ERWIN SCHULHOFF Die Wolkenpumpe, Op. 40
Born June 8, 1894, in Prague died August 18, 1942 in the Würzburg concentration camp.

Composed in 1922 to texts by Hans Arp, Die Wolkenpumpe receives its Carnegie Hall premiere at tonight’s performance.

Scoring: baritone soloist, E-flat clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, trumpet, and percussion for 3 players.

Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff received early encouragement from Antonín Dvoøák and began piano studies at the Prague Conservatory by the age of ten. Further studies took place at most of the major European conservatories—Vienna, Leipzig, and Cologne, not to mention work with Max Reger and briefly with Claude Debussy, as diverse a pair of teachers as one can imagine. When the war broke out in 1914, Schulhoff was conscripted into the Austrian army, serving on the Italian front. The experience motivated his energetic postwar disapproval of the militarism that had led to the catastrophe and to the breakdown of all the values he held dear, and this reaction in turn may have motivated his later espousal of the communist revolution in Russia (which he visited briefly in the 1930s) as a possible antidote to the National Socialism that had overwhelmed Germany.

Once out of uniform he sought feverishly for new musical ideas that would provide a path to the future. He was on the one hand an exponent of the new atonality developed by Schoenberg. For a time from 1919 he lived in Dresden and offered a series of concerts that presented new works of the Second Viennese School. And for four or five years he was also closely involved with the German Dadaists (a connection that led to the composition of Die Wolkenpumpe). Through the painter George Grosz he encountered recordings of American jazz, generating an enthusiasm that reveals itself in his music on and off for the next decade or so.

Schulhoff composed Die Wolkenpumpe (literally “The Cloud Pump,” though there is no apparent connection between the title and texts of the songs), to a Dadaist German text by Hans Arp (who also signed himself Jean Arp when writing in French), in 1922. The piece calls for a baritone voice, four wind instruments, and three percussionists, an ensemble that follows the tendency of the Dadaists to emphasize the jarring, the noisy, and the obstreperous. On the page it suggests a work possibly inspired by Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, though the vocal line is notated in normal pitches, not designated to be spoken on approximations of pitch, as in Sprechstimme. Schulhoff preceded the score with a text of his own, not set to music, identified as “Prologue” and referring in passing to several figures of Dada, but it is not clear whether he intended this to be performed with the music.

The poems are, if anything, even less susceptible to rational parsing than the poems in Schoenberg’s expressionist cycle about “moon-struck Pierrot”; they contain the kind of verbal music built of assonance and rhyme, but without grammatical connection of the words. Schulhoff left the piece in pencil draft; it was put into finished form by Eduard Douša in 1993. Evidently there were no performances before that date.

The sound world of the piece comes closest to that of jazz, given the choice of instruments; this is especially in the third song, which is filled with the dotted rhythms and occasional triplets that were the code for jazz in the popular music of the day, and which often served as a nose-thumbing response to the established culture.


DARIUS MILHAUD La création du monde, Op. 81
Born September 4, 1892, in Aix-en-Provence, France; died June 22, 1974 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Composed in 1923, La création du monde was given its first performance by the Ballet Suédois in Paris; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on December 11, 1958, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Scoring: 2 flutes and piccolo, oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, horn, 2 trumpets, trombone, piano, timpani, snare drum, metal block and wood block, cymbals, tambourine, bass drum and cymbal, and a string orchestra without violas (in the score the viola line is taken by an E-flat saxophone).

In the 1920s, Milhaud was indelibly influenced by American jazz, perhaps more profoundly than any other composer of the time. Most serious musicians of the 1920s in the US considered jazz a form of musical primitivism that was beneath contempt, a view that had as much to do with racism as with musical values. Milhaud’s memoirs, Notes Without Music, recall his first American visit when he told New York reporters that he was considerably influenced by American music. They asked whether he meant MacDowell or Carpenter and were nonplussed when he replied, “I mean jazz.”

Throughout his American stay, he soaked up as much music as he could find and purchased recordings in a Harlem shop. Back in France he resolved to use the new style in a chamber work. He had been scheduled to work with Fernand Léger and Blaise Cendrars on a ballet. They developed a scenario by Cendrars drawn from African folklore to tell a version of the creation. For the music, Milhaud said, “I adopted the same orchestra used in Harlem, 17 solo instruments, and I made wholesale use of the jazz style to convey a purely classical feeling.”

No one is likely to confuse Milhaud’s work with actual New Orleans jazz. The legato waves of melody at the opening come from a different musical world, though the saxophone adds a characteristic wail. But when the tempo speeds up into a rhythmic and bluesy fugue, the source of inspiration is beyond question. The ensuing sections return to the opening material and call up sultry lamenting melodies before breaking out in a still faster tempo with a four-bar rhythmic lick as an ostinato accompaniment, which builds to a kind of melodic free-for-all characteristic of New Orleans jazz. Earlier ideas—the sax’s opening melody, the fugue subject played tremolo on the flute—summarize the discourse in concluding this score, which remains one of the most successful examples of a rapprochement between symphony and jazz band ever written.


Edgard Varèse Intégrales
Composed in 1924–25, Intégrales was first performed at Aeolian Hall in New York on March 1, 1925, with Leopold Stokowski conducting; it received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on March 31, 1965, with the Contemporary Chamber Players conducted by Ralph Shapey.

Scoring: 2 flutes (both doubling piccolo), oboe, clarinet and E-flat clarinet, horn, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones (including bass and contrabass trombone), and 4 percussionists.

Few things irritated Edgard Varèse more than to be labeled a composer of experimental music. It was a label that was attached to him frequently, since his compositions invariably forced audiences to listen to unfamiliar sounds and to new sound combinations, organized in a manner disconcertingly different from those to which they were accustomed. As he once explained, “Of course, like all composers who have something new to say, I experiment, and have always experimented. But when I finally present a work it is not an experiment—it is a finished product. My experiments go into the wastepaper basket.”

He anticipated what we now hear in electronic music long before it was technically possible—especially the idea of the movement of sound-masses, in shifting planes—seeming to move around in space and colliding or passing through one another. He actually achieved this effect in his 1958 Poème électronique, composed for the Philips Radio Corporation’s pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair. But in fact he accomplished something astonishingly close to that effect in 1924 using only existing acoustical instruments in Intégrales. The same interest in the colliding masses of sound and their motion through the range of pitches (though not through space, since the instruments say put on the stage!) is evident here as in the Poème électronique. We might even say that Varèse had composed electronic music before there was such a thing!

The instrumental masses of Intégrales—especially the high woodwinds and the three trombones—often appear as “building blocks” rather than themes or harmonic elements in the conventional sense. The E-flat clarinet begins with an unaccompanied motivic idea (heard again in various guises throughout the piece); it is soon surrounded by a long-held high chord on the two piccolos and the B-flat clarinet and a long-held low chord on the three trombones. For much of the opening of the piece, the high chord and low chord remain unchanging; they drop out, to be attacked again later, but always at the same pitch. In between the high and low chords, which have thus become “solid” blocks of sound, the original motivic idea is repeated and extended on clarinet, trumpet, and horn. Only when the original “block” of material changes do we enter a second phase.

The best way to hear Intégrales for the first time is to listen for the collision and interplay of those blocks of sound—the instruments massed in groups as opposed to the solo instruments, the winds as opposed to the percussion groups. Note the passages for wind instruments without percussion, those for percussion instruments without winds, and the mixtures. Listen for the punctuation, the points in which one section comes to an end and generates something new; the clearest “periods” in the musical sentences are the long-held sonorities (usually in winds alone) that bring the activity briefly to a stop and serve simultaneously as the end of one passage and the beginning of the next.


PAUL HINDEMITH Kammermusik No. 1, Op. 24, No. 1
Born November 16, 1895, in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Germany; died December 28, 1963, in Frankfurt.

Composed in 1921, Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 1 was first performed at Carnegie Hall on December 29, 1940, with Egon Petri, piano, and the Orchestra of the New Friends of Music conducted by Fritz Stiedry.

The score calls for flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, accordion (or harmonium), percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, and double bass.

Paul Hindemith emerged right after the end of World War I as a symbol of the new in German music. In 1921 he became associated with a new music festival at Donaueschingen, near the Swiss-German border, finding it an amenable artistic home; soon, in fact, he was to become one of the festival’s organizers. Donaueschingen was committed to new music of an experimental sort, but not to any stylistic line. The first festivals were small, allowing the composers to get to know one another and their works well, and they were run in a spirit of free-wheeling camaraderie, with much emphasis on the new generation.

Hindemith’s seven large pieces with the generic title “Kammermusik” (“chamber music”), written between 1921 and 1928, were among the most advanced instrumental musical compositions of his time. (Schoenberg had not yet published his first completely 12-tone pieces.) Kammermusik No. 1, written for Donaueschingen in 1921, elevated him to an important place in the roll-call of adventurous modernists. The work mocks tradition in almost every respect. Though called “chamber music,” it is for a large ensemble of 12 instruments of highly diverse sound-character. Though intended for a live performance before an audience, Hindemith debunks the romantic tendency to celebrate the virtuoso performer by suggesting that all of the musicians sit out of sight of the public. The ensemble includes instruments rarely employed in chamber music but suspiciously familiar from jazz: accordion, trumpet, and percussion. He quotes a popular foxtrot of the day, by one Wilm-Wilm, in the final movement. And he even adds traditional “noise” effects—such as the use of a siren among the percussion instruments—which seemed to align him with the futurists and dada. No wonder the work caused a scandal at its premiere, and the experience was repeated at many early performances. Hindemith led a performance in Munich, home city of Richard Strauss and a bastion of musical conservatism, in 1923. In no time at all, Paul Hindemith had become a leader in the vanguard for new music. We tend to forget this, 70 years farther on, when Hindemith’s reputation has become, rather, that of a conservator, holding fast to the claims of tonality in the face of Schoenberg.

Almost the only thing traditional about Kammermusik No. 1 is its division into four movements. The first movement is unquestionably inspired by Petrushka; it grows out of several ostinato figures against which the flute, clarinet, and cello shriek out a sinuous, sustained line. The second movement epitomizes the “New Objectivity” in the steady rhythmic drive of the chugging rhythms that Hindemith learned from Bach. The third movement, an unlikely “Quartet” for flute, clarinet, and bassoon, plus a single note from the glockenspiel, never calls for all four performers to play at once. The last movement, was the part that always aroused catcalls and shouts. It is by far the longest movement in the score, and it never flags in energy or drive, with its basic fast march character turning into a foxtrot and ending—after all the hullabaloo—with a nose-thumbing series of pounding chords that are nothing more than a simple C-major triad!

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

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.

Ensemble ACJW
Featuring Fellows of The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall,
The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute in partnership with
the New York City Department of Education

The recipient of several awards, including the Ben Heppner Vocal Award and Jessye Norman Award, soprano Katherine Whyte has performed on opera and concert stages across her native Canada and the US. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut during the 2006–07 season as the First Elf in Richard Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena, and returns to the Met this season for Prokofiev’s The Gambler, as well as Le nozze di Figaro, Peter Grimes, Manon Lescaut, and War and Peace.

Ms. Whyte was a Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center in 2006 and returned in the summer of 2007, where she appeared as soprano soloist with the Mark Morris Dance Group in performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Seiji Ozawa Hall. She also performed Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzer in a chamber music recital and took part in master classes with James Levine. Ms. Whyte returns to the Berkshires in August, when she performs the Liebeslieder Waltzer with the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

Recent engagements have included Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro at the Banff Centre, Zerlina in Don Giovanni with the Summer Opera Lyric Theatre, Mozart’s Requiem with the New York Symphonic Ensemble, Bach’s Cantata No. 105 with the Toronto Bach Festival, and Messiah with Earl Haig Orchestra. She has also performed with the Scarborough Philharmonic, Aldeburgh Connection, Toronto Sinfonietta, and MacMillan Singers, and in recital at the Mountain View Festival of Song.

Ms. Whyte is a recent graduate of the Juilliard Opera Center, where she performed the role of Betty in the world premiere performance of Lowell Liebermann’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Additional roles at Juilliard included Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Esmerelda in The Bartered Bride, and Princesse in L’enfant et les Sortileges. Ms. Whyte holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the University of Toronto. She completed additional studies at the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies and the Stean’s Institute for Young Artists at the Ravinia Festival.

James Conlon, Conductor
One of today’s preeminent conductors, James Conlon has cultivated a vast symphonic, operatic, and choral repertoire and has developed enduring relationships with many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras and opera houses. Since his New York Philharmonic debut in 1974, Mr. Conlon has appeared as guest conductor with virtually every major North American and European orchestra and has been a frequent guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera for over 30 years. Mr. Conlon is Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera and of the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and has been Music Director of the Cincinnati May Festival since 1979. In addition, he has served as Principal Conductor of the Paris National Opera (1995 to 2004); General Music Director of the City of Cologne, Germany (1989 to 2002); and Music Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic (1983 to 1991).

This season at Los Angeles Opera, Mr. Conlon leads productions of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Janáček’s Jenůfa, Verdi’s Otello, and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He also conducts Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg and Viktor Ullmann’s Der zerbrochene Krug, the first operas of the Recovered Voices series, a multi-year project during which Mr. Conlon brings the music of composers suppressed by the Nazi regime to the Los Angeles Opera stage. He begins a two-year artist-in-residence at The Juilliard School, during which he will work with the school’s young artists in a cross-genre educational project consisting of performances, symposia, master classes, and coaching. Mr. Conlon also guest conducts the New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as the Orchestre National de France, L’Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, National Philharmonic of Russia, Munich Philharmonic, and the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale in Florence.

In an effort to raise public consciousness of works by composers whose lives and compositions were suppressed by the Nazi regime, Mr. Conlon has devoted himself to extensive programming of this music in North America and Europe. At both the Ravinia Festival and Los Angeles Opera, he continues to program works of these composers, and his residency at Juilliard will focus in part on the study and performance of these works.

Mr. Conlon has recorded for EMI, Sony Classical, Erato, Capriccio, Telarc, and Decca, and has won awards for his recordings of the works of Alexander Zemlinsky. PBS recently aired a series of six shows hosted by Mr. Conlon entitled Encore, part of an ongoing series of documentaries on his work with the finalists of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

Mr. Conlon is one of five first recipients of the Opera News Award, given in 2005 in recognition for distinguished achievement in opera. He received the Zemlinsky Prize for his efforts in bringing the composer’s music to international attention, and, in recognition for his efforts in championing the works of composers silenced by the Third Reich, Mr. Conlon received the Crystal Globe Award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2007. Mr. Conlon was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree by The Juilliard School in 2004. He was named an Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1996, and in 2004 was promoted to Commander. In 2002, Mr. Conlon received France’s highest distinction from the President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac—the Légion d’Honneur.

With Guest Artists:
Katherine Whyte, Soprano

Matthew Worth, Baritone