CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Making Music: Peter Eötvös

Zankel Hall
Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Peter Eötvös, Conductor and Pianist
Barbara Hannigan, Soprano
Brandon Ridenour, Double-Bell Trumpet
Ensemble ACJW
Jeremy Geffen, Series Moderator

PETER EÖTVÖS Shadows
PETER EÖTVÖS Encore (US Premiere)
PETER EÖTVÖS Octet plus (US Premiere)
PETER EÖTVÖS Psy for Flute, Cello, and Piano (US Premiere)
PETER EÖTVÖS Derwischtanz (US Premiere)
PETER EÖTVÖS Snatches of a Conversation

Celebrating Hungary is sponsored by Erste Group.

Program Notes:

PETER EÖTVÖS (b. 1944)
Shadows; Encore (US Premiere); Octet plus (US Premiere); Psy for Flute, Cello, and Piano (US Premiere); Derwischtanz (US Premiere); Snatches of a Conversation

As a composer, Eötvös is best known for his operas—Le Balcon, his setting of Genet’s play; his Angels in America based on the play by Tony Kushner; his Love and Other Demons based on the book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and his Chekhov adaptation Three Sisters—all of which continue to receive productions with major opera companies throughout the world, important contributions to the music theater repertoire. As a conductor, he is a major presence on the world musical stage, having led the Ensemble Intercontemporain from 1978 to 1990 (after conducting, at the invitation of Pierre Boulez, for IRCAM’s inaugural concert) as well as appearing with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw, the London Sinfonietta, and many others. His programming (and recorded catalogue) is in line with his own musical style, favoring the music of the vastly different composers Berio, Gruber, and Bartók, to name a few (though his recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, done in a stripped-down—and convention-rejecting, to be sure—version using a chamber orchestra juiced with well-placed amplification is as profound and well-heard as it is ideologically groundbreaking; no mere hat trick, but a serious and fascinating contribution to that composer’s wide-margined recorded legacy).
Tonight we honor Peter Eötvös, the composer of some truly remarkable and innovative chamber music. He treads ground similar to the 20th-centuries great high-modernist icons—the language is atonal a la Boulez, Ligeti, and Berio; is sometimes Webern-like in its pointillism; and is often redolent of Stockhausen in its adaptation of space and its interest in a dreamlike musical flow—but does so with his own verve and a palpable personal style. From this collection of smaller, more compact (read: intimate) works, we get a round picture of Eötvös as an artist: uncompromising, detailed, expansive, and rangy, capable of both the broad statement or the novel-in-a-sigh detail.
The original version of Shadows was written in 1996 for amplified flute and clarinet with orchestra, commissioned by Land Baden-Württemberg, but the scaled down version we hear tonight, written a year later, was performed by the Klangforum Wien in Budapest. The mode of thinking that dominates Shadows—the reimagining of both musical and actual space, the sparseness followed by dramatic musical interjections—is vintage Eötvös, a culmination of many a 20th-century trend mixed together in his own original way.
“In Shadows,” writes Nyffler, “sounds form objects in a space through which they move, stand out against each other, cast shadows, and become shadows themselves. The small orchestra is divided into four parts. Two groups of strings are placed on the left and right of the stage, forming a distanced stereophonic layer of sound. In front of them, on the left, is the woodwind section, and on the right the brass: both groups face away from the audience and with their backs to the center of the stage, where the protagonists of this ‘sound scenario’ are to be found: flute and clarinet.
“The first movement (‘breathless, rushed’) twice exposes a rising melody, which finally dissolves into background sounds. The virtuosic second movement, with its motoric rhythms, has an almost jokey character. The confessional third movement, however, moves further into the ‘realm of shadows.’ It begins with strings playing their lower registers in a ‘Funeral Dance’ (a traditional death ritual in Eötvös’s native land, Transylvania, but also in Indian and Asiatic cultures) before the music flows into a long, intimate dialogue between the two solo instruments, leading to a cadence subtly enveloped in the sound of the celesta and a few other instruments. Here again, as in the two first movements, the final word is had by the small drum and a closing hi-hat: the withdrawal of sound into the shadow realm of noise.”
Four of the works performed tonight are US Premieres. Encore, a short piece for string quartet, was written in 2005 for the Athena Quartet. Octet plus was written to commemorate the death of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who passed from this earth in 2008. The piece is scored for soprano, flute, clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, and two trombones, and the text comes from Samuel Beckett’s radio play Embers, a work as much revolutionary for its use of silence as drawn characters or even words, a long two-character dialogue with clearly written pauses. Of his solo clarinet piece Derwischtanz (Dervish Dance), the composer holds, “the harmony created by the three-fold playback is an accidental phenomenon.” This short work is an excerpt from Triangel, a larger free-form work from 1999.

When Eötvös was 17, in 1961, he wrote a piece about the universe—appropriately lofty for an adolescent not yet in full possession of his gifts. His work was about the Big Bang, the theory that the universe was created in a single explosion. Three decades later, the composer decided to look back on not only his juvenilia but on his own “psychouniverse” of that time, a sort of Proustian flash, an older person looking at his younger self through the mists of time. The searching, melodic piece—scored for flute, cello, and piano—carries, according to the composer, the “sedately short title Psy.”
Perhaps the most involved work on tonight’s program is Snatches of a Conversation from 2001, scored for a double-bell trumpet and ensemble (which includes a sampling keyboard, among other things). “Snatches,” Eötvös writes, “is as freely composed as an improvisation. A friendly conversation in a coffeehouse, snatches of clever conversation, full of irony ... and we trace our way between the tables ... The waiter is a double-bell trumpet ... The soloists do not improvise in this piece.”
—Daniel Felsenfeld

Daniel Felsenfeld is the author of eight books and hundreds of articles. He teaches at City College and lives in Brooklyn.

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Peter Eötvös, Conductor and Pianist
Composer, conductor and teacher: the Hungarian Peter Eötvös combines all three functions in one very high-profile career.

His music features regularly in the programs of orchestras, contemporary music ensembles, and festivals worldwide. As composer and conductor, Mr. Eötvös has led projects focusing on his work in centers all over the world. His most recent opera, Love and Other Demons, follows the lead of his Le Balcon, Angels in America, and Three Sisters by generating an ever-increasing number of new productions; and several major music theater commissions are due in the next few years.

Peter Eötvös is regularly invited as guest conductor by philharmonic orchestras worldwide, including those of Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and London. Since 1980, he has regularly appeared in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta; and in Paris with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Ensemble Intercontemporain.
Mr. Eötvös will begin as principal guest conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in the 2009–2010 season.

Equally important to Peter Eötvös are his teaching activities—especially his work at his own International Eötvös Institute and Foundation for young conductors and composers in Budapest.

Barbara Hannigan, Soprano

Brandon Ridenour, Double-Bell Trumpet

Ensemble ACJW
Ensemble ACJW is the performing arm 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. Ensemble ACJW performs at Carnegie Hall and The Juilliard School in addition to bringing performances and educational events to the Saratoga Springs community through a partnership with Skidmore College. The Ensemble comes together in different sizes and configurations, having the opportunity to play intimate chamber music as well as larger conducted chamber orchestra works.

The Academy is a two-year fellowship that provides the finest post-graduate musicians with performance opportunities, advanced musical training, intensive teaching instruction and experience, and the skills and values necessary for careers that combine musical excellence with education, community engagement, and advocacy. The program reflects the belief that the artist of tomorrow will require both the ability to perform at the highest level and the capacity to give back to the community, inspiring the next generation of musicians and music lovers.

The Academy was launched in January 2007. The fellows in the program were selected because of their extraordinary level of musicianship, deep commitment to education and community engagement, and leadership qualities. Fellows are graduates of leading music schools including The Curtis Institute of Music, Eastman School of Music, The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College The New School for Music, New England Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory, Stony Brook University, and Yale School of Music. Please visit acjw.org for more information about the program.

Jeremy Geffen, Series Moderator
Jeremy Geffen has served as Director of Artistic Planning for Carnegie Hall since March 2007. In this position, his responsibilities include program planning and development, as well as the creation of a wide range of audience education programs. Prior to his appointment at Carnegie Hall, Jeremy served as vice president of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra (2005–2007),
and artistic administrator of the New York Philharmonic (2000–2005). In addition, he worked for the Aspen Music Festival and School as associate artistic administrator from 1998 to 2000. During that time he also taught courses in music at Colorado Mountain College, hosted a weekly classical music radio show on KAJX, and became the Aspen Institute’s youngest ever moderator,
creating and leading the seminar, “The Marriage of Music and Ideas,” with Dr. Alberta Arthurs in February and March 2000. Jeremy currently serves on the Artistic Committee of the French
American Fund for Contemporary Music, as well as advisory entities for both the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s CMS Two and the Avery Fisher Career Grant. He also has served as an adjudicator for numerous auditions and competitions, including CMS Two auditions and the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. A native of Cape Town, South Africa,
Jeremy was raised in Newport Beach, California. While pursing a bachelor of music degree in viola performance at the University of Southern California, Jeremy developed problems with his right hand that led him away from performance and into artistic programming, which combines his curiosity for and love of the breadth of the classical repertoire, as well as the artists who bring that repertoire to life.