CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The MET Chamber Ensemble

Weill Recital Hall
Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 5:00 PM

The MET Chamber Ensemble
James Levine, Artistic Director and Conductor
Judith Bettina, Soprano
Susan Narucki, Soprano
Sasha Cooke, Mezzo-Soprano
Elliott Carter, Soldier
Milton Babbitt, Devil
John Harbison, Narrator

ELLIOTT CARTER Tempo e tempi
HARBISON North and South
MILTON BABBITT The Head of the Bed
STRAVINSKY Histoire du soldat

Program Notes:

By David Hamilton

ELLIOTT CARTER Tempo e tempi, for soprano and ensembleBorn December 11, 1908, in New York City.

Tempo e tempi, a setting of poems by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti, was composed in 1998 and 1999, and first performed on May 24, 2000, in Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, by Lucy Shelton and members of the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Oliver Knussen. The US premiere took place at Weill Recital Hall on December 12, 2000, sung by Lucy Shelton with the Ensemble Sospeso.

Scoring: oboe (doubling English horn), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), violin, and cello.
In 1976, Elliott Carter returned to the composition of vocal music for the first time in nearly 30 years, with A Mirror on Which to Dwell (to poetry of Elizabeth Bishop) and he has not neglected the potential of the genre, up to the powerful Distances of Sleep, a setting poems by Wallace Stevens that premiered in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall this past October. Not only a further exploration of music’s power to enhance and illuminate poetry, Tempo e tempi (1998) also renders thanks to Italy, its art, and its artists as sources of inspiration, as Carter noted in writing about the music’s genesis:

"Fascination with Italian music, literature, and visual arts has grown ever since my mother took me to Rome in around 1924. This song-cycle is a small gesture of gratitude to Italian culture and its musicians that have shown such an interest in my work.

A few years ago Raffaele Pozzi (one of the directors of the Pontino Festival, which dedicated two of its manifestations to my work) sent me the two poems of Montale included in this cycle, asking me if I would set them. The first, Tempo e tempi, pleased its Italian audience so much that I was encouraged to set others. Using the instrumentation of the first (oboe, clarinet, violin, and cello), I chose poems by Ungaretti and Quasimodo, each referring to the passage of time."

The eight songs, ranging in length from a half-minute to three-and-a-half minutes, are each distinctively scored, and are dedicated to Italian friends and some admired performers.

I. Tempo e tempi (Time and Times; Montale), for soprano, violin, English horn, and bass clarinet; “for Raffaele Pozzi.” As Carter describes the poem, “Montale speaks of time in terms of parallel paths ‘that rarely intersect.’ When these paths do cross, the observer experiences their intersections as a single moment, negating their multiplicity. Yet in that moment, the observer perceives that only ‘addio’ (farewell) is possible, not ‘arrivederci’ (see you again).” The bass clarinet and and English horn proceed at speeds in the ratio 16:25, while the voice and violin coincide more frequently, even as each retains a distinctive character.

II. Ed e subito sera (And Suddenly It’s Evening; Quasimodo), for soprano, clarinet, English horn, violin, and cello; “for Victoria Schneider.” A canon for the two strings is joined by a more rapidly moving one for the two winds, over which the voice discourses more freely.

III. Òboe sommerso (Sunken Oboe; Quasimodo), for soprano and oboe; “for [composer and oboist] Heinz Holliger.” Two lines only, with the oboe outdoing the voice in virtuosity.

IV. Una colomba (A Dove; Ungaretti), for soprano and clarinet, “for [clarinetist] Charles Neidich.” The clarinet murmurs and coos around the singer’s single line of text.

V. Godimento (Pleasure; Ungaretti), for soprano, oboe, clarinet, violin, cello; “for Livia and [Italian composer] Roman Vlad.” The “pleasure” arises from the voice’s free floating over the rampant polyrhythms espoused by the instruments.

VI. L’Arno a Rovezzano (The Arno at Rovezzano; Montale), for soprano, oboe, clarinet, violin, cello; “for Enzo Restagno” [music critic and author of a book of conversations with Carter]. In the composer’s words, “A great river is likened to time itself, ‘cruel and impersonal.’ Only when its flow is disrupted or reflected does it betray any awareness of itself, as we do ‘before turning to rage or destruction.’ The poet recalls incidents in a house on the Arno belonging to a former intimate, and speculates that it is now abandoned—‘full of insects . . . uninhabitable.’ Life, like the river, moves on inexorably to ‘other comfort, other discomfort.’” The burden of these thoughts stimulates music of a weighty violence not previously encountered.

VII. Uno (One; Ungaretti), for soprano and cello, “for [cellist] Fred Sherry.” A wry setting, in which the cello’s expressive cantillation belies the singer’s unwillingness to accept it as “singing.”

VIII. Segreto del poeta (The Poet’s Secret; Ungaretti), for soprano, oboe, bass clarinet, violin, cello; “for Maria-Teresa e Riccardo Cerocchi [president of the Campus Internazionale di Musica di Latina].” The tranquility of the opening is twice interrupted before an elegiac close is attained.


JOHN HARBISON North and South (Six Poems of Elizabeth Bishop)
Born December 20, 1938, in Orange, New Jersey.

North and South was composed between 1995 and 1999, initially for voice and piano. That version was first performed on September 3, 2000, at the Token Creek Festival in Token Creek, Wisconsin, by mezzo-soprano Janice Felty and Craig Smith, piano. The present chamber version was commissioned by The Chicago Chamber Musicians, who gave the first performance on May 13, 2001, with the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as soloist; the first Carnegie Hall performance took place in Weill Recital Hall on October 19, 2003, with members of the MET Chamber Ensemble.

The chamber version calls for voice, English horn, clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and double bass.

John Harbison is a musician of multiple talents: a prize-winning composer with an impressive stylistic range, distinguished conductor of his own and others’ music, extraordinary teacher—and also poet and librettist, lucid and searching writer about music, and director (with his wife, the violinist Rose Mary Harbison) of the Token Creek Music Festival, which takes place on the family farm in Wisconsin. His work has been recognized by a Pulitzer Prize (1987, for the cantata The Flight into Egypt), a MacArthur Fellowship (1989), and the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities (1998). He has been composer-in-residence for the Pittsburgh Symphony; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Tanglewood, Marlboro, and Santa Fe Chamber festivals; and the American Academy in Rome. His compositional appetites have ranged over most forms and genres, including symphonies, concertos, string quartets and other chamber music, sonatas, and music for dance.

For Harbison, music with words has been an abiding concern: in the operas Winter’s Tale (after Shakespeare, 1974, revised 1991), Full Moon in March (after Yeats, 1977), and most recently The Great Gatsby (after Fitzgerald, a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, which introduced it in December 1999 and revived it in 2002); a substantial list of choral music, including a Requiem (2003) commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and an impressive series of works for solo voice with a variety of accompaniments, written for such gifted performers as Dawn Upshaw, Susan Larson, Janice Felty, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Sanford Sylvan. Harbison’s choice of texts, from authors ancient and modern, and the intensity of his settings, often speak eloquently to social, ecological, and interpersonal concerns.

The composer has written the following program note about North and South:

“North and South is a cycle of six settings of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, composed between 1995 and 1999. It is divided into two books, each of similar proportion. Book One, dedicated to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, begins with the first of Bishop’s Four Songs for a Colored Singer. In an interview with Ashley Brown, Bishop said, “I was hoping someone would compose the tunes for them. I think I had Billie Holiday in mind. I put in a couple of big words just because she sang big words well . . . As for music in general; I’d love to be a composer.” After this rhetorical opening comes a setting of a typically elusive love-and-loneliness Bishop incantation, Late Air. The [text of the] third song, Breakfast Song, was not published. It was transcribed, in progress, by Lloyd Schwartz during a visit to Bishop while she was in the hospital.

Book Two, dedicated to Janice Felty, begins with another, even more emphatic, declamation from Songs for a Colored Singer. It is followed by Song, a poem from the time of North & South, Bishop’s first book, but published later. Finally, another very private lyric, Dear, My Compass . . ., which was discovered by Lloyd Schwartz at an inn in Ouro Preto, Brazil, an 18th-century mountain town where Bishop bought a house in 1965. Schwartz writes, “Here is the unmistakable voice of Elizabeth Bishop, here the fairy-tale vividness and coloring-book clarity of images. . .; the geographical references—and restlessness—of the world traveler, the delicate yet sharply etched jokes . . . the apparent conversational casualness disguising the formality of the versification; the understated yet urgent sexuality; even the identification with animals.”


MILTON BABBITT The Head of the Bed
Born May 10, 1916, in Philadelphia.

Babbitt composed The Head of the Bed in response to a commission from The Chamber Music Society of Baltimore and its President Randolph S. Rothschild, who are the dedicatees. The score’s final page records the moment of its completion: “12/31/81 22:30.” The first performance took place on January 27, 1982, at a concert of the Chamber Music Society; the soprano soloist was Phyllis Bryn-Julson; the Carnegie Hall premiere took place in Weill Recital Hall on May 2, 2006, with Judith Bettina, soprano; Tara Helen O’connor, flute; Anthony McGill, clarinet; Rolf Schulte, violin; Fred Sherry, cello; and Jeffrey Milarsky, conductor.

Scoring: soprano, flute, B-flat clarinet, violin, and cello.

Raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Milton Babbitt first studied violin (playing the Bach Double Concerto in public at age five!), but at school became interested in jazz, taking up clarinet, playing gigs, composing songs, and laying the foundations of an encyclopedic knowledge of classic American popular song. Eventually, fascination with new music from Europe encouraged him to change his college major from philosophy (at the University of Pennsylvania) to music (at New York University, working with Marion Bauer). Later came private studies with Roger Sessions and graduate work in music at Princeton, where he would teach for many years, succeeding Sessions as Conant Professor of Music in 1960 and himself retiring in 1984, though he continues to teach composition at The Juilliard School. During these years, Babbitt played a central role in founding the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio, where his electronic works were always prepared. His honors include a 1982 special citation from the Pulitzer Prizes for “his life’s work as a distinguished and seminal American composer,” four years later a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 1991 the William Schuman Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.

Babbitt’s extensive oeuvre includes orchestral works (including two piano concertos—the second commissioned for and premiered by the MET Orchestra); six string quartets, and chamber works for many other combinations; solo works for—among others—piano, flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and guitar; and solo and ensemble music for voice. A particular specialty has been works for voice or instrument with synthesized tape accompaniment, the best-known of which is the 1964 dramatic scena for soprano, Philomel, to an original text by the distinguished American poet (and longtime professor of English at Yale), John Hollander.

The text for The Head of the Bed is a 1974 Hollander poem of 15 stanzas, each in turn containing fifteen lines. In a letter to the composer, Hollander suggested that “it’s best to think of the poem as a journey through a period of day and night, a quest story perhaps, with the goal a matter of waking up into a welcoming and warming reality.” He continued:

“The head of the bed” is the place distinguished by the conventional phrase, but it's also used in the sense of a Bettesgeist, a bed-consciousness, a head that is all for, about bed . . . The various stages or progressions of the “story” move through the Sleepers hearing language outside and beyond him (stanza 1); seeing through half-opened eyes—magnified eyelashes, etc.—and then returning to sleep; like other awakenings in the poem, these are like distractions in a fable, diverting the protagonist-reader from the journey, but generating significance more in the way of parallels than of digressions (stanza 2); (stanza 3)—the room, the scene outside the window begin to be inhabited by dreamed or remembered presences—etc. . . . The poem keeps revisiting the recumbent body, and yet with the growing sense that the body in the bed is more and more another region through which the sleeper “moves,” “goes” or is borne.

To this, the poet adds the following suggestions of “narrative or mythological groupings” among the stanzas:

1–3 An introductory group
4–7 A series of fable-encounters
8 A resting-place between the romance-places and the regions free of Lilith
9–12 All these visions of futurity and possibility
13–15 Night sky, day sky, end-of-sky

Though continuous in movement, Babbitt’s setting of The Head of the Bed respects and reflects the poem’s stanzaic structure. The four instrumental parts (flute, clarinet, violin, and cello) are deployed to give each of the 15 stanzas a distinctive scoring, in the process exhausting the fifteen combinations possible with four instruments: four solos, six duos, four trios, and one quartet. (This structural device was fundamental to one of Babbitt’s most influential early works, the Composition for Four Instruments of 1948, with the same four instruments.) The sequence of instrumental combinations involves a range of conjunctive and disjunctive possibilities, plus further differentiation achieved by concentration in particular registers of the instruments. After the quiet opening stanza, accompanied by muted cello, the vocal writing grows more wide-ranging, and all the parts demand not only technical virtuosity but great rhythmic and dynamic precision in order to release the music’s remarkable synthesis of kaleidoscopic energy and elegant lyricism.


IGOR STRAVINSKY The Soldier’s Tale (L’Histoire du Soldat)
Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, Russia (now Lomonosov, northwest of St. Petersburg); died April 6, 1971, in New York.

The Soldier’s Tale, with a text by the Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz, is, according to the score, “to be read, played, and danced,” and, according to the score, was composed in Morges, Switzerland, in 1918, and first performed at the Théâtre Municipal in Lausanne on September 28 of that year, under the direction of Ernest Ansermet. The present performance uses a topical “adaptation” of the original spoken text, prepared by John Harbison for a concert performance at the Berkshire Music Festival in the summer of 2006 with Messrs. Babbitt, Carter, and Harbison in the speaking roles; this performance is its Carnegie Hall premiere.

Scoring: violin, contrabass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet à pistons, trombone, percussion (side drum with snares, 2 side drums without snares, small drum with snares, bass drum, cymbals, tambourine), triangle, violin, double bass.

The “Great War” ignited in 1914 by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Rudolf at Sarajevo brought about major changes in the life of Igor Stravinsky, as of many others. It shriveled his opportunities for performances, dried up the sources of new commissions, and cut him off from his native land (and from the income his family estate in Russia had provided).

He passed the war years in Switzerland, working on Russian-inspired material: a host of songs for various compact vocal-instrumental combinations; a major cantata-ballet, The Wedding (which would only achieve its definitive orchestration in the 1920s), and the barnyard comedy Renard. In 1915, the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet, on the musical staff of Diaghilev’s company, introduced Stravinsky to the Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz, a native of the canton of Vaud, who would collaborate on French translations of the texts to these Russian works. By 1918, both men were in financial difficulties, and conceived the project of a simple theatrical work that could be presented inexpensively and toured in many settings, indoors or out, by a small troupe of actors and/or dancers and a handful of instrumentalists.

The subject was selected by Stravinsky: “The Runaway Soldier and the Devil,” from A. N. Afanasyev’s collection of Russian Folk Tales. Ramuz laid it out for three speakers—a Narrator, the Soldier, and the Devil, with a female dancer to mime the ailing Princess whom the Soldier cures by playing his magical violin and then marries. The Soldier’s Tale was first performed at Lausanne’s Théâtre Municipal on September 28, 1918, with Ansermet on the podium; it was dedicated to the Swiss arts patron Werner Reinhart, who underwrote the production. But the planned tour of Swiss cities and towns fell victim to the influenza epidemic of that autumn. The complete work has never enjoyed a continuous place in the repertory—no doubt in part because its hybrid nature and small scale make it an awkward fit for most standing musical-theatrical establishments.

Stravinsky’s music—“incidental” rather than continuous—soon acquired a vigorous life of its own as a concert suite, for which Stravinsky eliminated some musical repetitions and a spoken patter song for the Devil.

The violin with its magical powers plays a central role in the story, passing back and forth between Soldier and Devil, and is the featured instrument in the music as well. The instrumentation as a whole is unusual, and has often been ascribed, even by the composer himself, to the influence of American jazz. But Richard Taruskin, the foremost contemporary commentator on Stravinsky’s Russian works, has shown that this is both chronologically impossible and instrumentally implausible. Rather, he asserts, except for the bassoon this is a klezmer instrumentation, quite possibly familiar to Stravinsky from his childhood summers in Ustilug, where there was a significant Jewish population. Summing up the other apparent influences, Taruskin concludes that “the ensemble of Histoire du Soldat is no jazz band, but a stylized village band compounded of overlapping cadres of Ustilug klezmorim, Vaudois fanfaristes, and pasodoble players from Seville, all led by a gypsy fiddler.”

Within that framework, the music’s character is straightforward and self-evident. Much of it is based on regularly repeated rhythmic patterns (ostinati), in the double bass and/or percussion, against which melodies with less regular stresses are juxtaposed in ever-changing relationships that contribute to the ensemble’s inherent al fresco spirit. The opening movements show this well: the marching tunes in the first movement continually shift their metrical positions over the oom-pah of the double bass, as does the violin’s spiccato figure at the beginning and end of the second piece. The Royal March plays similar games over a 2/4 bass. The Little Concert, celebrating the Soldier’s recovery of the violin from the Devil so that he may use it to cure the Princess, brings back melodies from earlier movements. The transitions among the Three Dances that revive the Princess are elegantly made. In the Devil’s Dance, the Soldier fiddles his adversary into a frenzy leading to a collapse.

The Great Chorale is Stravinsky’s “deconstruction” of Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” serving as background for spoken moral admonitions, principally to the effect that the Soldier, now wed to the Princess, should not seek too much happiness. But he pays no heed: desirous of seeing his mother again and of introducing her to his bride, he leaves the kingdom to return to the home of his youth and again becomes subject to the Devil’s power. In The Devil’s Triumphal March, the violin plays a percussively transmuted version of one of the Soldier’s favorite tunes, luring him across the border to perdition.


Copyright © 2007 by David Hamilton