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

Zankel Hall
Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 7:00 PM

Ensemble ACJW
Pablo Heras-Casado, Conductor

BACH Orchestral Suite No. 4
CAVALLI (arr. Jacob Druckman) Delizie contente che l'alme beate
DRUCKMAN Delizie contente che l’alme beate
MAURICIO KAGEL "East" from The Compass Pieces
THOMAS ADÈS Chamber Symphony, Op. 2
ELLIOTT CARTER Asko Concerto

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

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Orchestral Suite No. 4 in D Major, BWV 1069
Born March 21, 1685, in Eisenach, Germany; died July 28, 1750, in Leipzig, Germany.

Probably composed during his Cöthen period (1717–23), Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 4 received its Carnegie Hall premiere on February 13, 1958, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Rafael Kubelik.

The numbering of Bach’s four orchestral suites is conventional; it has no connection whatsoever with their order of composition. The term “suite” is also a modern convention, used to describe a composition consisting of a series of dance movements that follow one another in succession. Bach himself called these works after their first and largest component, a grand French overture, a genre that originated in the ballet overtures of Lully in the 1650s and quickly spread throughout Europe to be used as a festive musical introduction for operas, ballets, and suites.

The ouverture connects a slow opening section, marked by dotted rhythms and harmonic suspensions, to a fast section that is lightly fugal in character. Occasionally—as here—the slower opening section returns briefly at the end. In this particular case, Bach later turned the movement into an overture for a Christmas cantata (No. 110) performed in Leipzig in 1725. Though not part of the original conception, the Christmas designation perfectly captures the festive mood of the score, with its separate choirs of oboes and strings, to which a choir of trumpets provides brilliant punctuation, turning later into joyous participation.

The dances in the Fourth Suite hint at a strongly French influence at this particular time, including a selection of court dances such as the bourrée and the gavotte. The suite concludes with a lively and brilliant movement headed Réjouissance (“rejoicing”); this is not the name of a dance, simply an indication of mood. If there was any specific occasion for Bach’s joyous conclusion, it has been lost to us.

FRANCESCO CAVALLI Delizie contente che l’alme beate (arr. Jacob Druckman)
Born February 14, 1602, in Crema; died January 14, 1676, in Venice.

JACOB DRUCKMAN Delizie contente che l’alme beate, after Francesco Cavalli
Born June 26, 1928, in Philadelphia; died May 24, 1996, in New Haven.

Composed in 1973 and dedicated the score to the memory of Bruno Maderna, Druckman’s Delizie contente che l’alme beate received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 7, 1985, with the Quintet of the Americas: Lauren Weiss, flute; Matthew Sullivan, oboe; Joseph Stone, clarinet; Jorge Morera, bassoon; Barbara Oldham, French horn; and Bryan Rulon, electronics.

Like the other composers of his generation, Jacob Druckman grew up at a time when serious music had also to be very complicated, yet he was always interested in the vividness and color of the musical world of Debussy and Stravinsky, as well as such late-Romantic figures as Mahler and Ravel (and he was a brilliant master of orchestral color, just as those earlier masters had been). He was also involved with the music of the 17th-century composer Francesco Cavalli, whose 1649 opera Il Giasone (“Jason”), dealing with the mythical story of Jason and Medea, contained an aria that forms the basis and inspiration of his 1973 composition for woodwind quintet and tape, the title of which is that of the aria itself. The full text of its opening sentence may be translated, “O you delights and joys that bless the soul, do not desert me.” Of the piece, the composer has written:

The work deals with an insistent memory, that of the Cavalli aria, which hovers just beyond the edge of conscious recognition throughout most of the piece. At six minutes into the 11-minute work, the Cavalli aria is pulled into focus by the tape and is engaged and dealt with by the live players. The sounds on the tape are made of a mixture of live and electronic sources; the origin of the live (or “concrete”) sounds was primarily the woodwind quintet.

MAURICIO KAGEL “East” from The Compass Pieces
Born December 24, 1931, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

“East” was the first of a series of works under the overall title The Compass Pieces, composed between 1988 and 1994 on a commission from West German Radio, WDR Cologne. “East” was first performed on June 4, 1989, in Aachen during the Rhine Music Festival by the Salonorchester Cölln conducted by Koenrad Ellergiers. Tonight’s performance marks the Carnegie Hall premiere of this work.

Mauricio Kagel’s creative output ranges far beyond music in the narrow sense of the term. He has worked in both acoustic and electronic media, and has created films and plays as well as musical compositions, which range from pure concert works in more-or-less traditional genres to elaborate music-theater pieces. Kagel has investigated the possibilities of each of the separate media in which he works and the ways in which ideas or forms may be transferred from one to the other. His films can be viewed as musical compositions. Similarly the concert pieces contain some inherent “dramatic” quality in the relationship of the instruments and players to one another or in actions that the players take rather than the notes they play.

The title Compass Pieces refers to the German word for the diagram behind the needle of a compass, identifying the four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—and the four intermediate directions—northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. Kagel gave this title to a group of eight pieces for salon orchestra that he composed between 1988 and 1994, each bearing the title of one of the eight cardinal or secondary directions.

Titles like “North” and “South” and so on usually imply some kind of travelogue, an image based on the composer’s travel experiences—or what he might expect it to signify to his audience. Kagel’s compass points are strikingly different from what we normally expect because his orientation begins in the southern hemisphere, in his native Argentina. And, in any case, he is not aiming to write a colorful tourist guide. The composer’s own description is delightfully quirky:

Which East?

Neither the Near nor the Far one, but the diffuse region ante portas, which starts around the rivers Oder and Nysa, and ends … where?

If I may treat geographical fact with a fairly broad brush, then the scenario for my piece is located somewhere between Trans-Carpathia and the Gulf of Finland: I am sitting in a third-class coach in one of those legendary trains that run back and forth between Kishinev and Ivano-Frankovsk [etc.] The other travelers include a group of musicians that looks as if it had just jumped out of a gilded photo album. They start playing for me. The rolling landscape calls for appropriate performance practice: the melodic fragments and typical rhythms change even quicker than the villages that jerkily flash by.

For sure: in my private musical cosmology, the East always scores a bonus.

THOMAS ADÈS Chamber Symphony, Op. 2
Born March 1, 1971, in London.

Composed in 1990, Chamber Symphony was first performed the following year at the Cambridge Festival of Contemporary Music with the composer at the podium. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Zankel Hall on March 29, 2008, with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Thomas Adès.

From a country that has seen a surprising number of composers making their mark at a surprisingly young age—from Benjamin Britten to Oliver Knussen and George Benjamin—Thomas Adès (pronounced ADD-iss) is the latest example, and one whose work in just a handful of years marked him as a brilliant talent whose every new composition is now eagerly awaited by the musical world.

The Chamber Symphony had already been heard when its composer was but 19 years old, and it revealed an extraordinary ear for color modeled roughly after Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony (that is, both works call for 15 instruments, but Adès makes slightly different choices). Like the Schoenberg work, the four basic movements of the Adès Chamber Concerto are fused into a single large movement in a fast–slow–very fast–slow pattern (again, similar in principle, to Schoenberg, but different in detail). He first thought of the work as a concerto for basset clarinet, a lower-pitched clarinet that was the instrument for which Mozart composed his concerto. But as he composed, he says, “the accompanying chamber ensemble became infected with the personality of the solo instrument, until the whole group represented in my mind a super-basset-clarinet with strings and a constant rhythm section.”

During the course of the four linked movements, the character of the music is sometimes jazzy, swinging against a straight rhythmic background, sometimes mysterious, with different instruments playing independent roles, with contrasting levels and types of activity. Sometimes it seems as if centrifugal force will scatter all in different directions, but just then Adès brings everything together again for a fuller sonority and a more unified statement. Occasionally other instruments take over the lead from the basset clarinet. The trombone plays a contemplative role in the slow movement; the scherzo-like third movement builds to a climax, bursts, and collapses into the slow finale, “a serene overview of the preceding music, as if from a great height.”
ELLIOTT CARTER Asko Concerto
Born December 11, 1908, in New York City.

Elliott Carter composed the Asko Concerto in 1999–2000 for the Amsterdam-based Asko Ensemble, which gave the work’s first performance on April 26, 2000, under the direction of Oliver Knussen. The work received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Weill Recital Hall on April 24, 2002, with the composer at the podium.

Now just a few months short of his 100th birthday, Elliott Carter is one of America’s musical treasures. As befits a composer who started rather slowly and carefully, finding his own unique voice as he entered his 40s, Carter has become, if anything, more prolific as he has grown older, continuing to surprise the musical world with the originality and fecundity of his invention.

An important characteristic of Carter’s mature music has been his sense of each instrument as a character in a kind of ongoing drama. Different instruments retain their own personalities, like very different characters in a play, who oppose one another in fundamental ways but must, in the end, find a way to coexist.

These approaches are also characteristic of the recent Asko Concerto, of which the composer has written:

My Asko Concerto for 16 players features each one of them participating in one of the following groups—two trios, two duos, a quintet, or a solo. These six sections are framed by the entire group playing together. Although the music is in lighthearted mood, each soloistic section approaches ensemble playing in a different spirit.
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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

Pablo Heras-Casado, Conductor
Though only 30 years old, the Spanish-born Pablo Heras-Casado already enjoys a multifaceted conducting career of unusual breadth and variety. The assistant conductor to Sylvain Cambreling at the Opéra National de Paris, he has worked on projects as diverse as Berg’s Wozzeck, Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, and Verdi’s Ernani with Renato Palumbo at Deutsche Oper Berli. He has also conducted the Spanish premiere of Respighi’s La bella dormente at the Opera House in Bilbao. Mr. Heras-Casado will be conducting the last performance of the Robert Carsen production of Le nozze di Figaro at the Opéra de Bordeaux. In 2010, he will make his debut at New York City Opera.

Since his teenage years, he has also earned a reputation for conducting performances of neglected repertoire from the 17th and 18th centuries. With a background including choral conducting studies with Harry Christophers and master classes with Christopher Hogwood, Mr. Heras-Casado is founder and music director of the Compañía Teatro del Príncipe. He has worked with and founded chamber choirs including Capella Exaudi and La Cantoría, with which he won the Gran Premio Nacional de Canto Coral award in 2004. In recent years, Mr. Heras-Casado has also studied with Peter Eötvös and has worked with the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt (International Composers Seminar with Hanspeter Kyburz). He was immensely successful at the 2007 Lucerne Festival, where a jury headed by Pierre Boulez unanimously awarded him first prize in the festival conducting competition; at the festival, he was also selected by Boulez and Peter Eötvös for the festival performance of Stockhausen’s Gruppen. Mr. Heras-Casado will perform Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître and Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel at Opéra Bastille with Hilary Summers and soloists of the Opéra National de Paris in October 2008.

Mr. Heras-Casado’s international career is rapidly developing: he has been invited for guest appearances with orchestras including the Luxembourg Philharmonic, Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa, Orchestre National de Lyon, Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine, Orchestre National d’Ile de France, and Collegium Noveum Zurich. During 2008–09, Mr. Heras-Casado will make his own full debut at the Opéra National de Paris conducting the world premiere of Marc-Olivier Dupin’s ballet Les enfants du paradis and will return to the Opéra National de Bordeaux with a new production of Offenbach’s La Périchole.

Mr. Heras-Casado complemented his musical education with the study of art history at the University of Granada. In 2000, he was awarded second prize at the National Competition for Young Conductors with the Principado de Asturias Symphony Orchestra and, in 2002, received a scholarship from the Richard Wagner Foundation to attend master classes in choral conducting as part of the Festival junger Künstler in Bayreuth. Mr. Heras-Casado was also one of only three conductors selected to participate in a project led by Daniel Barenboim together with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 2004.

Mr. Heras-Casado’s world premiere recordings include Eleanor Alberga’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, and Zarzuela’s La fontana del placer for Música Antigua Aranjuez Ediciones / Harmonia Mundi. He has also recorded Spanish contemporary music with the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Spain, and Spanish choral music with the Europa Chor Akademie.