CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Daniel Barenboim
Members of the Staatskapelle Berlin

Zankel Hall
Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Daniel Barenboim, Piano
Members of the Staatskapelle Berlin
·· Gregor Witt, Oboe
·· Matthias Glander, Clarinet
·· Ignacio García, Horn
·· Holger Straube, Bassoon
·· Claudius Popp, Cello
·· Torsten Schönfeld, Timpani
·· Dominic Oelze, Marimba

ELLIOTT CARTER Selections from Eight Pieces for Four Timpani
ELLIOTT CARTER Cello Sonata
ELLIOTT CARTER Figment V for Marimba
ELLIOTT CARTER Quintet for Piano and Winds

Perspectives: Daniel Barenboim

Program is approximately 1 hour, 24 minutes, including one intermission.

Carnegie Hall's celebration of Elliott Carter's centenary is funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Program Notes:

ELLIOTT CARTER (b. 1908) Selections from Eight Pieces for Timpani; Cello Sonata; Figment V for Marimba; Quintet for Piano and Winds

Selections from Eight Pieces for Timpani Carter composed six of these eight studies in 1949 to explore ways of modulating tempos and manipulating four-note chords (hence the four timpani). After an initial hearing, however, the composer chose to publish only two of the six pieces; the others circulated as photocopies of the manuscript. In 1966, Carter was convinced to revise all six and add two more to create an “anthology,” as musicologist David Schiff describes the work: the Eight Pieces were published in 1968 and dedicated to the percussionists who championed it. Each has its own distinct character; these pieces are akin to etudes in that they concentrate on particular technical challenges in performance and composition. The composer himself has described each and named the musician to whom the piece is dedicated.

The first in this set, the Saeta is dedicated to Al Howard. It is an Andalusian song of improvisatory character sung during an outdoor religious procession, usually at Easter, said to be the descendent of a rain ceremony during which a saeta (“arrow”) was shot into the clouds to release the rain. In the fifth piece of the group, the Improvisation (dedicated to Paul Price), the opening phrase furnishes materials for numerous variations with constant changes of speed.The last piece heard tonight, but the seventh of the Eight Pieces, is Canaries, dedicated to Raymond DesRoches. This dance of the XVI and XVII centuries, ancestor of the gigue, was supposedly imported from the “wild men” of the Canary Islands; here, its 6/8 time with lilting dotted rhythms are fragmented and developed.

Cello Sonata
The Cello Sonata dates from 1948, relatively early in Carter’s long career. Born and raised in New York City, Carter came under the tutelage of the American icon (and iconoclast) Charles Ives before going to Harvard, where he earned degrees in English and music. He was already committed to a certain path: Having heard the New York premiere of Stravinsky’s shattering Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) in 1924, Carter wanted to be a modernist—and Harvard was notthe place to do that.

As the composer recalls, “[The] Harvard music department at that time was entirely devoted to teaching church organists how to work, and it was pretty hard for them to find anything [worthwhile] about modern music—they didn’t like it and didn’t feel it belonged anywhere. And at that point, I decided I’d better study English literature.” Following in the footsteps of so many American composers, including Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, Carter continued his studies in Paris with noted pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He was inspired by the likes of Copland to mine the vein of accessible Americana in his earliest works, but just after World War II, Carter developed a new style all his own more in keeping with the tough-minded, scientific modernism of the age and his own modernist sensibility.

The Cello Sonata exemplifies Carter’s mature style and showcases some of his characteristic techniques, chief among them the calculus of musical rhythms known as “metrical modulation” (basically, a proportional change in tempo that unsettles any sense of a stable pulse). The sonata also showcases what would become some of Carter’s characteristic techniques, a watershed piece that marks a major shift in Carter’s oeuvre.

Composed for Bernard Greenhouse, it was the work in which Carter proclaimed himself a modernist. In a recent interview with NPR, Carter explained the problem with that proclamation. “The Cello Sonata was extremely modern at that time,” the composer says. “I could not get it published. And Bernard Greenhouse and his pianist played the first performance at Town Hall, and they were covered with sweat. It was so upsetting and so disturbing—we had hardly anybody in the audience. If they heard what I write now, they would run out of the hall screaming, I suppose.”

For all of the complicated proportional relations and rhythmic complexities in Carter’s music, however, there is a deep-seated humanity, with the message to preserve individuality and to explore our subjective experience of time. Everyone knows that an hour is not simply 60 minutes; it can fly by or drag on endlessly. The opening of the Cello Sonata captures this difference between psychological time (the unending hour) and chronometric time (one hour is one hour is one hour). The piano plods along mechanically and percussively, ticking like a clock, which the cello plays a long, expressive, and seemingly improvised melody. The composer explains that the “extreme disassociation between the two [instruments] is neither a matter of random[ness] or indifference but [is] to be heard as having an intense, almost fateful character.”

The second Vivace movement takes up this same rhythmic distinction, but now with reference to jazz. The jazzy scherzo owes much to the example of Claude Debussy. “It makes explicit the undercurrent of jazz technique suggested in the previous movement,” Carter writes, “by the freely performed melody against a strict rhythm.” The end of the final Allegro movement, full of proportional tempo changes, returns to the beginning of the first movement but reverses the roles of cello and piano. This looping back from end to beginning was inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which famously begins with the end of sentence started by the last line.

Figment V for MarimbaPercussionist Simon Boyar gave the world premiere performance of Figment V for Marimba on May 2, 2009, at New York University. Carter penned the piece as a birthday gift for his grandson, Alexander, who has an interest in percussion instruments. (One wonders: What if he had been attracted to the electric guitar?) All five figments are written for solo instruments, and all are gifts from the composer; the first four are addressed to performers. The first (1994) and second (2001) are for solo cello; the first was written for cellist Thomas Demenga to perform on Carter’s 85th birthday concert in Basel, and second for Fred Sherry—and, indirectly, Carter’s early mentor, composer Charles Ives. Subtitled “Remembering Mr. Ives,” Figment II also recalls bits of the Thoreau movement of Ives’s Concord Sonata, published some 80 years earlier in 1921. Figment III, for double bass, was written in 2007 for bassist Don Palma; Figment IV was composed that same year for violist Samuel Rhodes of the Juilliard Quartet. About the work addressed to him, Rhodes has written, “I was totally and overwhelmingly surprised to receive it. It is the fourth in a series of works for solo lower string instruments.” The pattern breaks with Figment V, however, as Carter jumps out of the string section and into the percussion pit.
Each work in the group exploits the potential of the given instrument and honored performer, exploring what is idiomatic to both music and musician. At the same time that Carter capitalizes on all available performing resources, he limits himself compositionally; as is characteristic of his later works, he has pared down his vocabulary to focus on the transformations of pitches and chords, developing their union rather than their diversity.

Quintet for Piano and Winds

Of his Quintet for Piano and Winds, Carter writes,

When I accepted the commission by Heinz Holliger and Köln Musik to write this quintet for these remarkable performers, the thought of the masterpiece by Mozart for this combination led me to consider very seriously its range of expressive possibilities. To heighten the dialectic interplay between the instruments, I decided to treat the group as having three contrasting elements: piano, horn, and trio of woodwinds. Each is assigned its own musical vocabulary and its own type of expressivity and character, derived from its instrumental capabilities. Thus, the interplay of commentary, answer, humorous detail, ironic, supportive of self-effacing were considered as part of the musical thought and expression. Although the quintet is in one continuous movement, there are frequent changes of mood, sometimes within one instrument’s part, at other times by groups.

The five players in the quintet are divided into three groups, with each instrument in this musical comedy playing a distinct part. The piano is serious and dramatic, the winds silly and nervous, the horn lyrical. Beneath all the good humor on the surface is a complicated pre-compositional plan that establishes a complex rhythmic and harmonic framework. The piano prefers triplets (groups of three notes) and the jagged interval of a seventh; the horn tends toward quintuplets (groups of five). The form is equally abstruse.

Yet the play of textures is easily appreciated, as is the idiomatic instrumental writing. The piano plays up its percussive nature, for example, while the winds tend to twitter, and everyone takes a turn playing solo. The music is consistently fast, but for a more languorous, less dense section toward the middle of the piece.

—Elizabeth Bergman
© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Daniel Barenboim, Piano
Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942. He received his first piano lessons at age five, and was first taught by his mother. Later, he studied under his father, who would remain his only piano teacher. He gave his first public concert when he was seven. In 1952, he moved with his parents to Israel.

In 1954, Daniel Barenboim began his recording career as a pianist. In the 1960s, he recorded Beethoven’s piano concertos with Otto Klemperer, Brahms’s piano concertos with Sir John Barbirolli, and Mozart’s piano concertos with the English Chamber Orchestra as both pianist and conductor.

Since his conducting debut in 1967 in London with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim has been in great demand with leading orchestras around the world. Between 1975 and 1989, he was chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris. He gave his debut as opera conductor at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973 with Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

From 1991 to 2006, Barenboim was music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1992, he became General Music Director of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. In opera and on the concert stage, Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin have acquired a large repertoire of complete symphonic works. Barenboim also continues to focus on contemporary music.
In 1999, Barenboim and Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said founded the West-Eastern Divan Workshop, which brings together young musicians from Israel and the Arab countries every summer to play music together. In the 2007–2008 season, Daniel Barenboim began a close relationship with the Teatro alla Scala in Milan as Maestro Scaligero, where he conducts opera and concert performances, and plays in chamber music concerts.

Barenboim has published several books, including the autobiography A Life in Music and Parallels and Paradoxes, co-written with Edward Said. In fall 2007, his La Musica sveglia il tempo was published in Italy. He published Dialoghi su musica e teatro. Tristano e Isotta. with Patrice Chéreau in December 2008. Visit danielbarenboim.com for more information.

Members of the Staatskapelle Berlin
·· Gregor Witt, Oboe
·· Matthias Glander, Clarinet
·· Ignacio García, Horn
·· Holger Straube, Bassoon
·· Claudius Popp, Cello
·· Torsten Schönfeld, Timpani
·· Dominic Oelze, Marimba