CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Thomas Adès

Zankel Hall
Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Thomas Adès, Piano
New York Recital Debut

JANÁČEK "Reminiscence"
JANÁČEK "Malostransky Palace"
JANÁČEK "Christ the Lord is Born"
JANÁČEK "I Am Waiting for You"
JANÁČEK In the Mists
THOMAS ADÈS Traced Overhead
THOMAS ADÈS Darknesse Visible
CASTIGLIONI How I Passed the Summer
STRAVINSKY Souvenir d’une marche boche
STRAVINSKY Valse pour les enfants
STRAVINSKY Piano-Rag-Music
NANCARROW Three Canons for Ursula

Encores:
COUPERIN "Les baricades mistérieuses" from Sixième ordre, Second Livre de pièces de clavecin
JANÁČEK "In Memoriam"
JANÁČEK "The Golden Ring"

Program Notes:

The Concert At a Glance

Children’s pieces by a quirky Italian master and fantastically virtuoso canons from a North American; a Stravinskian rag and some Janáèek sketches. Miscellaneous as these things might appear, they are drawn into a pattern by our composer-pianist, whose own music shows how much they share. This is all music stamped with strong ideas, music at once compact and strange, music that seems to come from a delight in play—including the play of fingers at a machine that resonates with images of worlds: a Baroque palace and ice in the Dolomites, and inner realms of sudden emotion and dream.


Notes on the Program
By Paul Griffiths

LEOŠ JANÁÈEK Reminiscence; “The House of the Professed”; Christ the Lord is Born; “I Am Waiting for You!”
Born July 3, 1854, in Hukvaldy, Moravia; died August 12, 1928, in Moravská Ostrava.

The four pieces opening tonight’s program were composed in 1928, 1927, 1909, and 1928, respectively. All 4 works receive their Carnegie Hall premieres tonight.

Janáèek’s three big keyboard works—In the Mists, On an Overgrown Path, and the Sonata 1.x.1905—all date from the decade before the First World War, a time when his operatic activity was stalled. Later, when he was engaged almost continuously with one opera after another, his piano pieces came out short, even very short. Reminiscence he wrote in his last year, a one-minute drama involving a lyrical motif. The House of the Professed, with repeated notes throughout, refers to the Baroque town palace built by the Jesuits in Prague. Christ the Lord is Born sets a Czech Christmas carol in sounds of pearl; it was published by the composer in the Christmas Eve edition of a newspaper to which he regularly contributed, along with a piece about the children of a neighbouring family and their illuminated tree seen through a window early on Christmas morning. I Am Waiting for You! also has a folk theme, whose treatment is abruptly torn off.


LEOŠ JANÁÈEK In the Mists
Composed in 1912, In the Mists was first performed on December 7, 1913, by Marie Dvofiáková; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on March 15, 1978, with Fritz Jahoda.

If this work was prompted by the composer’s recent exposure to Debussy’s music, as John Tyrrell indicates in his recent biography, the connection was limited to matters of texture and perhaps some harmonic detail. Janáèek’s ideas are as pungently expressive and individual as ever, his forms as dramatic, based on the adventures those ideas undergo. The “mists” are surely not so much meteorlogical as mental: mists of memory that cover potent experiences, though not so completely that the original pain or joy cannot break out. Each movement is based on a short, songlike theme, heard first with a glow of nostalgia, then pressed harder, or pressing harder, before subsiding back.


THOMAS ADÈS Traced Overhead, Op. 15
Born March 1, 1971, in London.

Composed in 1995–96 for Imogen Cooper, Traced Overhead was given its world premiere performance by Ms. Cooper on July 20, 1996, in the Pittville Pump Room in Cheltenham, England; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Zankel Hall on May 8, 2006, also with Ms. Cooper.

What is traced overhead here is a world of resonances, brought into earshot by a highly sophisticated handling of texture, figuration and pedaling. In form the piece might be considered a prelude and fugue, with a pre-prelude that is an invitation both to the twinkling heights where the piece will spend most of its time (the Latin word sursum means “upward”) and to the kind of slow-motion waterfall equally characteristic of it. “Aetheria” is, according to the composer, “a record of ‘things of the middle air’”: rapid wobbly scales and jumpy chords. This music then comes to a long plateau, which is “Chori,” with those waterfalls in several layers of broken chords, tremolos and melody.


THOMAS ADÈS Darknesse Visible

Composed in 1992, Darknesse Visible received its world premiere performance at Lizst’s house in Budapest in October 1992, with the composer as pianist; it was first performed at Carnegie Hall on March 24, 2007, with Louis Lortie.

Near the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton imagines Lucifer in Hell, whose flames emit no light but only “darknesse visible,” by which the fallen angel can see the wretchedness of his condition. Adès creates his own black light with threads extracted from another expression of the somber, Dowland’s song “In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell.” The new piece is, the composer says, “an explosion” of the song: “Patterns latent in the original have been isolated and regrouped.” These are recognizable—the half-step rise and fall with which Dowland’s melody begins, its scale-wise descents, a cadential figure—and the piece is in a sense tonal, with a key signature of A-flat minor. But the explosion has shattered gravity. The fragments remain up in the air—often literally so, as the piece favors the high treble—or turned to ash, whether by hushed dynamics or an almost perpetual tremolo that helps give this piece its shadowy harmonic character. At the end, Dowland creeps back in.


NICCOLÒ CASTIGLIONI How I Spent the Summer
Born July 17, 1932, in Milan; died there September 7, 1996.

Composed in 1983, How I Spent the Summer received its world premiere performance on March 10, 1984, in La Spezia, with Antonio Ballista, piano; it receives its Carnegie Hall premiere tonight.

Like many European composers of his generation, Castiglioni attended the Darmstadt summer courses in his 20s and kept something of the Darmstadt spirit of strictness and adventure (Webern remained an idol) as he moved into his own world—a looking-glass world full of reflections from the past and high, bright textures. A period teaching in the US from 1966 to 1970 was decisive. After that he lived mostly in his native Milan, where Esa-Pekka Salonen was among his pupils.

His delightful travel diary dates from the same year as his piano concerto Fiori di ghiaccio (Ice Flowers). The ten snapshot movements record impressions from the alpine region of Alto Adige, where Castiglioni regularly spent the summer. Arrival at the resort town of Tires prompts some ragtime, which is not quite forgotten during the following movements. Other sights seen, or heard, include a deep gorge (“The Valley of Ciamin”), a spring, the Rosengarten mountain, with its resonant ice, and a castle, whose ghost murmurs in the muffled bass. The person enjoying supervised repose in the eighth movement is the pianist who gave the first performance; he sleeps somewhat to the tune of the third of Schoenberg’s Op.16 orchestral pieces. The composer’s birthday was July 17.


IGOR STRAVINSKY Souvenir d’une marche boche; Valse pour les enfants;
Piano-Rag-Music
Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov, northwest of St. Petersburg), Russia; died April 6, 1971, in New York.

Composed in 1915, Souvenir d’une marche boche receives its Carnegie Hall premiere tonight. Composed in 1916 or 1917, Valse pour les enfants received its world premiere performance at Carnegie Hall on January 13, 1950, with Robert Cornman, piano. Composed in 1918–19, Piano-Rag-Music received its world premiere at the Lausanne Conservatoire on November 8, 1919, with José Iturbi, piano, and its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on December 10, 1965, with Leo Smit, piano.

Stravinsky spent the years of World War I in the area of Switzerland around Lake Geneva, where he had set up home some years before; that was where The Rite of Spring had been largely written. Absorbed still in Russian folk culture, he worked on Les noces and various satellite works, but he also wrote songs and piano pieces for his four young children. Souvenir d’une marche boche could be a father’s exasperated response to hearing young fingers bashing at the keyboard, though in fact Stravinsky dashed it off for a volume Edith Wharton was putting together to sell for the benefit of refugee children from Belgium. The Valse pour les enfants, with the left hand limited to a two-bar ostinato and the right hand adding a deliberately misfitting melody, was printed in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in 1921.

March and waltz were old models; a newer one surfaced in 1918-19, when Stravinsky indulged a brief but highly creative passion for ragtime. He began Piano-Rag-Music in March 1918, at first intending it for Artur Rubinstein, who had helped him financially. The composition of a wartime theater piece, The Soldier’s Tale, supervened, and the piano composition, a cubist collage of ragtime gestures, was not finished until the summer of 1919, while the debt to Rubinstein was repaid two years later with Three Movements from Petrushka.


CONLON NANCARROW Three Canons for Ursula
Born October 27, 1912, in Texarkana, Arkansas; dies August 10, 1997, in Mexico City.

Composed in 1988, Three Canons for Ursula was first performed at New York’s Town Hall on November 20, 1989, with Ursula Oppens; it receives its Carnegie Hall premiere tonight.

In his mid-30s, after some disappointing experiences, Nancarrow gave up writing music for performers and devoted himself to studies for player piano—pieces in which he could explore complex rhythms without hazard. But then performers caught up with him. In 1982, at the Cabrillo Festival, he heard some of his old instrumental pieces accurately played for the first time, and the experience encouraged him to compose more. These Canons for Ursula—Ursula Oppens, of course—were among the results. In the first, the left hand starts alone; the right joins it at a faster speed (in the ratio 7:5); the midpoint is marked by sustained fortissimo chords; and the process unwinds rather as it wound up. Originally abandoned by the composer as too difficult, the second has four parts, whose speed ratios are 6:9:10:15, and which enter so that they can end in quick succession; the theme starts out a bit like a drunken rendering of the British national anthem. The third canon again begins with a left-hand solo, and this time the right hand enters at 3:2 speed just in time to end at the same moment.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Thomas Adès, Piano
New York Recital Debut
Born in London in 1971, Thomas Adès studied piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and read music at King’s College, Cambridge. Between 1993 and 1995 he was composer in association with the Hallé Orchestra, which resulted in The Origin of the Harp (1994) and These Premises Are Alarmed for the opening of the Bridgewater Hall in 1996. Asyla (1997) was a Feeney Trust commission for Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, who toured it together, and repeated it at Symphony Hall in August 1998 in Mr. Rattle’s last concert as Music Director. Mr. Rattle subsequently programmed Asyla in his opening concert with the Berliner Philharmoniker as Music Director in September 2002.

Mr. Adès’s first opera, Powder Her Face (commissioned by Almeida Opera for the Cheltenham Festival in 1995), has been performed all round the world, was televised by Channel Four, and is available on a DVD as well as an EMI CD. Most of the composer’s music has been recorded by EMI, with which Adès has a contract as composer, pianist, and conductor. Adès’s second opera, The Tempest, was commissioned by London’s Royal Opera House and was premiered under the baton of the composer to great critical acclaim in February 2004. It was revived in 2007—again to a sold-out house—and has since been seen in Copenhagen, Strasbourg, and Santa Fe. In September 2005 his Violin Concerto for Anthony Marwood was premiered at the Berliner Festspiele and the BBC Proms, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under his baton. His second orchestral work for Simon Rattle, Tevot (2007), was commissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Adès’s reputation worldwide is now such that a number of international festivals have programmed focuses on his music. Among these were Helsinki’s Musica Nova (1999), the Salzburg Easter Festival (2004), Radio France’s Présences (2007), and the Barbican’s “Traced Overhead” (2007); in addition, Carnegie Hall has appointed him to the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair and will feature him as composer, conductor, and pianist throughout the 2007–08 season.

Unusually for such a full-time composer, Mr. Adès is also a renowned interpreter of a range of other music and his performances and recordings of composers such as Kurtág, Nancarrow, Schumann, Schubert, Ruders, Tchaikovsky, Barry, and Beethoven have been critically acclaimed. The many orchestras he has conducted include the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Philharmonia, Orchestre National de Radio France, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Hallé Orchestra, the BBC, Finnish, and Danish radio symphony orchestras, as well as ensembles such as the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (he was its artistic director for some years), the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, and the Athelas Ensemble.

Mr. Adès’s music has won numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (2000), of which he is the youngest-ever recipient. He has been Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival since 1999.