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

Weill Recital Hall
Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 7:00 PM

Ensemble ACJW
Erin Lesser, Flute
Gabriela Martinez, Piano
Michael Mizrahi, Piano
Andrew Beer, Violin
Angelia Cho, Violin
Owen Dalby, Violin
Joanna Marie Frankel, Violin
Joanna Kaczorowska, Violin
Meena M. Bhasin, Viola
Leah Swann, Viola
Claire Bryant, Cello
Julia MacLaine, Cello
Caitlin Sullivan, Cello
Kristoffer Saebo, Bass

OSVALDO GOLIJOV Last Round
GEORGE CRUMB Vox Balaenae
DVOŘÁK Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81

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 Irving Harris Foundation, 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

OSVALDO GOLIJOV Last Round
Born December 5, 1960, in La Plata, Argentina; now lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Golijov composed Last Round in 1996 in memory of Astor Piazzolla on a commission from Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, which gave the first performance, under the direction of Stefan Asbury, on October 25, 1996, in Adrian Boult Hall, Birmingham, UK. It received its US premiere in Weill Recital Hall on March 4, 1998, with the ACO Chamber Orchestra with Paul Lustig, conductor.

Scoring: 4 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, and double bass.

Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov studied with Gerardo Gandini and later with Mark Kopytman at the Rubin Academy of Jerusalem and with Franco Donatoni at Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. In 1986, Golijov came to the US, where he earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania; his teachers there included George Crumb, Richard Wernick, and Jay Reise. He was a Fellow in composition at the Tanglewood Music Center in 1990, where he studied with Lukas Foss and Oliver Knussen.

In recent years, Golijov has been exploring what he calls the “roots and emanations of different musics,” drawing up sound imagery from his own wide-ranging background, including Jewish folk traditions, tango, and other Latin American genres. These often become the starting point for his writing, though they appear in his work in different stages of transformation, turning into something else entirely or even disappearing altogether, though remaining as the basic ground for the varied textures and musical “behaviors” in his compositions.

Golijov came to wide attention first through his connection with the Kronos Quartet, who performed original works, commissioned arrangements, and recorded his impressive quintet for clarinet and string quartet, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. La Pasión segun San Marcos (The Passion according to St. Mark), commissioned as an homage to J.S. Bach for the year 2000, the 250th anniversary of his death, has enjoyed a remarkable success on three continents. It retells the story of the Crucifixion in the form of Latin-American revolutionary street theater, with an inclusive musical language ranging from plainsong to Latin popular dance styles, vibrant energy, and an entirely original approach to many parts of the story that have long become treated in conventional ways. Such work highlights the independence of his voice and vision.

About Last Round, Golijov says:
Astor Piazzolla, the last great Tango composer, was at the peak of his creativity when a stroke killed him ten years ago. He left us, in the words of the old tango, “without saying good-bye,” and on that day the musical face of Buenos Aires was abruptly frozen. The creation of that face had started 100 years ago from the unlikely combination of African rhythms underlying gauchos’ couplets, sung in the style of Sicilian canzonettas over an accompanying Andalucian guitar …

Piazzolla’s bandoneón was able to condense all the symbols of tango. The eroticism of legs and torsos in the dance was reduced to the intricate patterns of his virtuoso fingers … The melancholy nature of the singer’s voice was transposed to the breathing of the bandoneón’s continuous opening and closing. The macho attitude of the tangueros was reflected in his pose on stage: standing upright, chest forward, right leg on a stool, the bandoneón on top of it, by turns being raised, battered, caressed.

I composed Last Round (the title is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar) as an imaginary chance for Piazzolla’s spirit to fight one more time. The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneón. There are two movements: the first represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument; and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh (it is actually a fantasy over the refrain of the song “My Beloved Buenos Aires,” composed by the legendary Carlos Gardel in the 1930s). But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other, separated by the focal bass, with violins and violas standing up as in the traditional tango orchestras. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in criss-crossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.


GEORGE CRUMB Vox Balaenae
Born in October 24, 1929, Charleston, West Virginia; now living in Philadelphia.

Crumb composed Vox Balaenae in 1971 for the New York Camerata, which gave the first performance at the Library of Congress on March 17, 1972. It received its US premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on November 27, 1974, with the Da Capa Chamber Players.

Scoring: a trio consisting of flute, violin, and cello, each of which is to be electrically amplified.

George Crumb grew up in a musical family and learned from childhood to play the clarinet and piano. He took his undergraduate degree in composition at Mason College of Music and Fine Arts in his native Charleston, then went to the University of Illinois for his master’s degree. Crumb earned his doctorate at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Ross Lee Finney, who, after his father, became his strongest musical influence. From 1965 until his retirement, Crumb was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Among many awards, he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for Echoes of Time and the River.

Few living composers write music that is as readily identified to its creator as George Crumb. His music has continually been marked by an extraordinarily refined ear for color and astonishing inventiveness in the creation of sounds, as Crumb often uses novel methods of tone production, occasionally with amplification to pick up delicate overtones that might otherwise be lost. Much of his music has been programmatic, often drawing on a zodiacal cycle, number symbolism, or such quasi-dramatic elements as masked performers, to serve the cause of musical illustration with vivid sounds, ranging from the sweet and delicate to the threshold of pain.

Many of Crumb’s works, including Vox Balaenae (“The Voice of the Whale”), make use of overtly theatrical elements: the players may need to wear masks; to move around on the platform in specifically defined ways; to interact with one another or with the audience the way an actor does, rather than to remain firmly fixed in a seat with their eyes on the printed part. Very often, the dramatic element comes through the use of ritualistic gestures that suggest the operation of primordial myths.

Vox Balaenae was inspired by the eerily beautiful singing of humpback whales, recorded by oceanographers for the first time in the 1960s. Crumb heard a tape of this “singing” in 1969, and it strongly shaped his image of the piece, which “can be performed under a deep-blue stage lighting, if desired” to enhance the effect of hearing something that comes from the depths of the ocean, the ever-ongoing quality of which is suggested in the composer’s evocative movement titles. It is a work that draws the listener in to its brilliantly colored evocations of whale song (each of the instruments has its own way of imitating these sounds), and the dark-blue light that the composer calls for generates the sensation that the entire audience and the performers are living, breathing, and hearing this music somewhere in the ocean’s depths.

In the book Profile of a Composer: George Crumb, the composer says:

The form of Vox Balaenae is a simple three-part design, consisting of a prologue, a set of variations named after the geological eras, and an epilogue.

The opening Vocalise (marked in the score: “wildly fantastic, grotesque”) is a kind of cadenza for the flutist, who simultaneously plays his instrument and sings into it. This combination of instrumental and vocal sound produces an eerie, surreal timbre, not unlike the sounds of the humpback whale. The conclusion of the cadenza is announced by a parody of the opening measures of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.

The Sea-Theme (“solemn, with calm majesty”) is presented by the cello (in harmonics), accompanied by dark, fateful chords of strummed piano strings. The following sequence of variations begins with the haunting sea-gull cries of the Archeozoic (“timeless, inchoate”) and, gradually increasing in intensity, reaches a strident climax in the Cenozoic (“dramatic, with a feeling of destiny”). The emergence of man in the Cenozoic era is symbolized by a partial restatement of the Zarathustra reference.

The concluding Sea-Nocturne (“serene, pure, transfigured”) is an elaboration of the Sea-Theme. The piece is couched in the “luminous” tonality of B major, and there are shimmering sounds of antique cymbals (played alternately by the cellist and flutist). In composing the Sea-Nocturne, I wanted to suggest “a larger rhythm of nature” and a sense of suspension in time. The concluding gesture of the work is a gradually dying series of repetitions of a ten-note figure. In concert performance, the last figure is to be played “in pantomime” (to suggest a diminuendo beyond the threshold of hearing!).


ANTONÍN DVOØÁK Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81
Born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague; died May 1, 1904 in Prague.

Composed between August 18 and October 3, 1887, the Piano Quintet was first performed in Prague on January 6, 1888. It received its US premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on March 3, 1939, with Rudolf Serkin, piano; Busch Quartet; Adolf Busch and Goesta Andreasson, violins; Karl Doktor, viola; and Hermann Busch, cello.

Dvoøák had written a piano quintet in A major (which he called Op. 5) in the late summer of 1872. It was performed that November in Prague, but the composer himself was dissatisfied with it and destroyed his copy of the score. Fifteen years later, he had second thoughts, and asked the impresario of the concert to send him his own copy, which still survived, in order that he might attempt a revision. Though he made drastic changes, Dvoøák still did not find the improvement great enough to induce him to offer the work to a publisher. Instead, he decided to start over from scratch rather than waste further time on his juvenilia; a few months later, he began his second Piano Quintet in A Major, an incomparably greater work. It was composed during six weeks in one of the happiest periods of his life, when he was living at home in Vysoká and writing in his best nationalistic vein.

The most obvious nationalistic Czech element in the score is the second movement, labeled dumka—a term that Dvoøák is responsible for introducing into musical terminology, although he could hardly define it precisely (or perhaps did not care to try). He used it a few years later as an overall title for the Dumky Trio, Opus 90; while that piece was still in manuscript, Dvoøák played it through in New York with two of his colleagues from the National Conservatory of Music. The cellist on that occasion was Victor Herbert, who later recalled: “We liked the composition immensely and I asked him what ‘Dumbka’ [sic] meant in Bohemia. He thought for a while, shook his head, and said to our surprise: ‘It means nothing—what does it mean?’” Grove’s Dictionary defines dumka (plural, dumky) as a Ukrainian word meaning “lament,” usually used in music for a slow expressive movement containing a number of short contrasting sections (not all of them lugubrious).

Actually, the variety of moods in the Quintet ranges as widely as anything in Dvoøák’s output. Although the Quintet as a whole is in the major mode, the first theme in the Allegro turns almost immediately from A major to A minor, and the second theme (first heard in the viola) is a pensive tune in C-sharp minor. The closing measures are assertive, but they do not entirely outweigh the grave character of much of the movement. We are thus prepared for the melancholy of the Dumka, in F-sharp minor, that follows. A slow figure on the piano, decorated by tremolos to suggest folk improvisation, precedes and follows the main theme heard in the viola. This alternates with a contrasting lighter section in the major mode and later with a vivace contrast, but the main lamenting theme keeps recurring throughout.

The Scherzo is called a furiant by Dvoøák, but it lacks the characteristic rhythmic shift (two bars of 3/4 fusing to form one of 3/2) of the genuine furiant; rather, Dvoøák’s is a waltz tinged with Bohemian accents. The middle section is haunted by ghostly recollections of the main tune. The finale is more outgoing, with echoes of folk dances throughout and a vigorous, satisfying conclusion.


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.