Contemporary Classics April 2, 2019 - Richard Power's Orfeo Show 2

Richard Power’s novel Orfeo tells the story of a composer who attempts to encode a composition into the DNA of a strain of pathogenic bacteria.  It is a interesting story but also an extraordinary exploration of contemporary classical music.   Tuesday is the second episode of Contemporary Classics exploring some of the music described or at least mentioned in this novel.   Tonight we have music by Steve Reich, Richard Strauss, George Crumb, Peter Lieberson and John Cage.

Steve Reich’s Proverb is written for three sopranos, two tenors, two vibraphones, and two electric organs. It sets a text "How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!" by Ludwig Wittgenstein published in Culture and Value to a polyphonic plainchant with emphasis on rhythmic modes and pedal points.  It was written in 1995 and was originally intended for The Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Utrecht Early Music Festival, but was premiered at Alice Tully Hall in New York City on February 10, 1996 by Theatre of Voices with Paul Hillier, to whom the piece is dedicated.

The Four Last Songs (German: Vier letzte Lieder), for soprano and orchestra are the final completed works of Richard Strauss. They were composed in 1948 when the composer was 84. The name was provided by Strauss's friend Ernst Roth, who published the four songs as a single unit in 1950 after Strauss's death.  Strauss died in September 1949. The premiere was given at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.

John Cage: Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra is a composition in 3 parts.  In parts 1 and 2, the piano and the orchestra never sound together; only in the third part are the two combined. Cage created a 14” x 16” chart, with different sonorities noted in every box, and by moving across the chart, the musical materials for the Concerto can be determined. In part 1, the piano part is improvisatory, following Cage's ideas, while the orchestral parts are determined through rules and diagrams derived from the chart. In part 2, Cage brings the piano under the rules of a second (parallel) chart, creating a sense of confluence between soloist and orchestra. In the final movement, both piano and orchestra are governed by the same chart (the version from part 1).

Peter Lieberson’s The Neruda Songs are a cycle of five songs based upon poems by twentieth-century Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda composed for mezzo-soprano soloist and orchestra by the American composed by Lieberson for his wife, singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. The Neruda Songs were co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony; the world premiere was given on May 20, 2005, by the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Hunt Lieberson as soloist. The Boston Symphony performed the work in November 2005 again with Hunt Lieberson as soloist and James Levine conducting, followed by performances with the Cleveland Orchestra, Robert Spano conducting.

George Crumb’s Black Angels, 13 Images from the Dark Land  was written as a threnody, an ode or lament for the progress of the Vietnam war.    George Crumb writes in the score for this composition that it was written in 'a time of war', in tempore belli.  It is scored for an amplified string quartet with additional instruments such as maracas, crystal glasses, and two suspended tam-tam gongs played by members of the string quartet.  The thirteen movements arranged in three groupings Departure, Absence and Return have an overall palindromic symmetry with the number of instruments playing in each movement as 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4 and the beginning and ending movements marked as threnody.