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CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Ensemble ACJW
The Academy — A Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute
Weill Recital Hall
Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Ensemble ACJW
Kojiro Umezaki, Shakuhachi
Hu Jianbing, Sheng
Gabriela Martinez, Piano
Michael Mizrahi, Piano
James Michael Deitz, Percussion
Jared Soldiviero, Percussion
Joanna Kaczorowska, Violin
Meena Bhasin, Viola
Julia MacLaine, Cello
Kristoffer Saebo, Bass
DEBUSSY Estampes
ANGEL LAM Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain
COLIN McPHEE COLIN McPHEE Balinese Ceremonial Music
CHRISTOPHER ADLER Music for a Royal Palace
RAVEL Piano Trio
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.
This partnership and Carnegie Hall commissions in the 2007-2008 season are made possible, in part, by a grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
Ensemble ACJW performances are supported, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
Program Notes:
By Steven Ledbetter
CLAUDE DEBUSSY Estampes
Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye, France; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.
Debussy assembled the three movements of Estampes in 1903, though the last one, Jardins sous la pluie, was composed as early as 1894. The work received its first complete Carnegie Hall performance on October 27, 1943, with Claudio Arrau, piano; the first performance at Carnegie Hall of any part of Estampes took place on January 14, 1908, with Ernest Schelling, who performed La soirée dans Grenade.
Claude Debussy may well have been the most influential composer for the piano in the 20th century. A superb pianist, he wrote for his instrument most of his life. His Estampes (“Prints,” 1903) reveals much new thinking about the piano and music in general and shows Debussy drawing upon a wide range of stylistic resources and projecting them with titles that imply a visual element. Pagodes (“Pagodas”) is a reflection on the harmonic style of the Javanese gamelan that had so fascinated him when he heard it at the Paris international exposition in 1889. Parallel movement of parts, including the forbidden fifths, evokes an Asian element, but the touch and sonority of the piano play an even more important role.
The second movement, La soirée dans Grenade (“Evening in Grenada”) does the same sort of thing for Spanish music, especially with the habanera which ranges over the whole keyboard and astonishes the listener with its textural and dynamic variety In Jardins sous la pluie (“gardens in the rain”) Debussy applies (in his own way) a lesson learned from Wagner’s Parsifal about creating long stretches that move harmonically without suggesting any definite key—and does so within the context of a perpetuo moto that provides a powerful musical impression of the familiar visual image of falling rain.
ANGEL LAM Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain
Born in Hong Kong; later moved to Los Angeles.
Composed in 2006 on a commission from the Carnegie Hall Corporation presented jointly by The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, Yo-Yo Ma Silk Road Project, and the Tanglewood Music Center of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain was first performed at Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood on September 13, 2006, and repeated three days later in Zankel Hall.
Scoring: shakuhachi, violin, cello, double bass, marimba, and percussion.
Angel Lam began her musical studies in her native Hong Kong; she is now a doctoral candidate at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where her teachers have included Christopher Theofanidis, Ezra Laderman, and Aaron Jay Kernis. Her music combines a subtle and precise evocation of traditional Chinese sound elements in formal compositions of delicate color. Already she has been recognized by awards, and has twice received an emerging artist commission from Carnegie Hall.
In addition to conceiving the notes that make up her scores, she also writes poems and narratives that are allied to the musical composition itself. This is particularly the case with Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain, which is an artistic response to her memory of the death of her grandmother, when she was five years old.
This piece is dedicated to a memory of my grandmother.
Thirty minutes passed but Grandma still hadn’t arrived. My kindergarten class sat on top of a hill, overlooking a narrow street with a muddy pedestrian pathway alongside traffic. It was another hot summer day; the aggressive sun seemed to slow time but activated the scenery in front of me. Trees moved in the heat like monsters stretching their palms; pedestrians walked slowly, dragged by their long shadows.
Suddenly, it rained, but the sun still shone. I decided to run home. I was only five. I sprinted down that busy street; people were shouting behind me, like low-pitched murmurings of ancient emperors. The sounding of horns screamed sharply with long mystic tails . . .
When a distant temple bell drummed, I saw Grandma—her peaceful smile, and an air of gracefulness that is memorable to this day. This time she seemed bigger . . . when I reached out to touch her, she floated through me and I turned around, the sun shone directly into my eyes, and Grandma disappeared into the core of the afternoon sun. The evening sun suddenly closed, and rain stopped.
When I got home, everybody was crying, but I did not cry. I went to my little desk and started a letter:
Dear Grandma …
COLIN McPHEE Balinese Ceremonial Music
Born March 15, 1900, in Montreal, Canada; died January 7, 1964, in Los Angeles
Balinese Ceremonial Music was composed over several years beginning in 1934; two of the pieces (Pemoengkah and Gambangan) were performed in concerts of Balinese music that McPhee gave in New York and Mexico City in 1936. Taboeh Teloe was completed in Bali in 1938. The set of three pieces was published with the present title in 1940. It is dedicated to anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Colin McPhee’s career began as so many others have, with instruction at a major conservatory (Peabody, in his case) and further work in Europe (Paris). In the 1920s he was active in New York’s new-music world. But all that changed when he heard recordings of the Balinese gamelan. Inspired by the sound and the extraordinary rhythmic variety, he traveled to Bali in 1931 and lived there, with only brief visits to the US and Mexico, until 1938. He studied the music of Bali both as a scholar and as a composer, and later wrote what is still the principal treatise on the subject of Balinese music, as well as vivid personal account of his years there (A House in Bali). For most Westerners, and especially for Western musicians, McPhee can be said to have put Bali on the map. Even today visitors will hear or read much about him in their guidebooks.
Balinese Ceremonial Music consists of three of his transcriptions for two pianos. When they were published in 1940, they immediately aroused interest among composers, including Benjamin Britten (who recorded the work with McPhee) and Béla Bartók (who performed it with his wife at Amherst College in 1944).
The transcriptions offered the opportunity to hear Balinese music to people who were unable to travel to the small, distant island. McPhee offered to the performer advice as to how pianists might achieve an effect as close as possible to that of the original gamelan ensemble:
It is difficult to convey by words an impression of the strange beauty of sound from these instruments. Sweet, yet acid, soft, yet metallic . . . The music must be played lightly and transparently, not expressively, with just enough pedal to attain a good legato.
Not only did these three pieces offer an opportunity for experiencing a distant, and different culture, but they also played a role in inspiring one of the most significant developments in our own music as precursors of the development of minimalism about two decades later.
CHRISTOPHER ADLER Music for a Royal Palace
Composed in 2006 on a commission from the Carnegie Hall Corporation presented jointly by The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, and the Tanglewood Music Center of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Music for a Royal Palace was first performed by members of the Silk Road Project at Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood on September 13, 2006, and repeated four days later in Zankel Hall.
Scoring: sheng (traditional Chinese mouth organ), viola, marimba, and 1 to 3 percussionists.
Christopher Adler studied mathematics and music composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then received master’s and doctoral degrees at Duke University. His composition teachers have included Scott Lindroth, Stephen Jaffe, Sidney Corbett, and Evan Ziporyn, but a great deal of his musical sensibility comes from many years of study in Thailand and around Southeast Asia. He now teaches at the University of California at San Diego and performs widely with new music ensembles and in improvisational settings.
Music for a Royal Palace was inspired by a 17th-century Thai palace that was rebuilt in the middle of the 19th century for King Rama IV, who enthusiastically blended the traditional elements of the older palace with new architectural and decorative ideas coming from Europe. This juxtaposition reflects, in a quite direct way, Adler’s own musical blending of Asian and American perspectives and of Asian instruments with those traditionally used in classical music. He explains some of the elements of this fusion in his comment on the piece:
Music for a Royal Palace is both for and about the Bang Pa-In Palace, a musical reflection of the multiethnic stylistic juxtaposition, and an imaginary tribute to a moment in time now frozen as a museum. The ensemble of Chinese and Western instruments performs a traditional Thai composition in Chinese style, arranged from my contemporary Western perspective and framed by original music which is informed by my music for Western instruments and the Lao mouth organ, khaen. The hidden presence of the khaen, which has contributed to my style of writing for the sheng, is fitting as the ethnic Lao provide labor for the Thai nation but are traditionally marginalized and their influence is conspicuously absent from palace architecture.
The last half of the work is a set of variations on Jin khim lek, a composition by the early 19th-century Thai composer Mi Duriyangkul based on a melody he heard played by a Chinese performer on the khim (dulcimer).
MAURICE RAVEL Piano Trio in A Minor
Born March 7, l875, in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France; died December 28, 1937, in Paris.
Begun in early 1914 and completed on August 29, Ravel’s Piano Trio was first performed in Paris in January 1915; it received its first Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on December 30, 1927, with the Compinsky Trio: Sara Compinsky, piano; Manuel Compinsky, violin; and Alexander Compinsky, cello.
Ravel spent most of the winter of 1913–14 in his Basque homeland. The Basque country must have seemed exceptionally peaceful after the raucous reception of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring shortly before Ravel left Paris, and he remained there to devote himself to a piano trio that he had contemplated writing since 1908. He finished the first movement by the end of March, but could not find his way into the rest of the work and even told a friend that he was getting disgusted with it. The impetus to finish came when Germany declared war on France in August. Composition became the means by which Ravel sought oblivion from the horrors that were inevitable.
After being turned down for the army for his small stature, he wrote to a friend, “So as not to think of all this, I am working—yes, working with the sureness and lucidity of a madman.” and in just under four weeks, by August 29, 1914, he had completed the entire score of the trio.
For all the haste with which it was finished, and despite Ravel’s distraught mind during the composition of the last part, the Trio remains a remarkable solid, well-shaped work, one of the composer’s most serious large-scale pieces (and it most assuredly is a large-scale work, despite the fact that it is only for three instruments and not for an orchestra).
The opening Modéré presents a theme written in 8/8 time with the melody consistently disposed into a 3+2+3 pattern that Ravel identified as “Basque in color.” The second movement is exotic: Pantoum refers to a verse form borrowed by such French Romantic poets as Victor Hugo from Malayan poetry. What connection it has with Ravel’s music is a mystery. The movement serves, in any case, as the scherzo of the work, playing off a rhythmic string figure colored by the insertion of pizzicatos throughout and a simple legato theme that serves as the foil to the rhythmic motive.
The Passacaille derives its shape from the Baroque form in which an ostinato melody or harmonic progression is repeated over and over as the skeleton background for a set of variations. Ravel’s approach to the form is, not surprisingly, a good deal freer than that of those Baroque composers who employed it, but the pattern is there to provide the framework for this wonderfully tranquil movement.
By contrast the Animé of the finale offers gorgeous splashes of instrumental color in a masterly display of brilliant writing for each of the instruments—long trills in the strings serving as a foil for dense chords in the piano in a triumphant close.
Copyright © 2008 by 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.
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