Contemporary Classics July 24, 2018 Celebrating the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival Episode 2

Again our theme music is from Kirsten Volness’s Nocturne

Tonight’s Contemporary Classics will be the second of 2 and potentially 3 shows focused on the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, which runs from July 26-30 at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox Massachusetts.  There will be 5 concerts over these 5 days.  I will be missing the concert on Saturday July 28^th as that is the day of the Bang on a Can Marathon featuring composer Steve Reich.

Lets approach the music chronologically by featuring some of the works that will be in each of the 5 concerts over the 5 days of the festival. 

 

Jonathan Harvey String Quartet No. 3

Lets start this evening with a work from the second program of the series on July 27.    The late British composer Jonathan Harvey is difficult to pigeonhole. He has received inspiration and personal encouragement from Britten, Stockhausen, and Boulez, and it's possible to hear influences of all of them in various works from throughout his career. His instrumental music tends to lie mostly in the modernist arena, and the string quartets are unequivocally the work of a composer more concerned with the properties of sounds than with notes. Harvey, who was a Buddhist, has repeatedly stated that his path is a quest for unity, but not a simple or easy unity, and the body of his work bears out that conviction. His music is neither simple nor easy, but it has an organic coherence and an often-lovely surface that could beguile new-music skeptics. All of his string works are strongly textural, with sounds ranging from the diaphanous to the granitic, and the music is driven by distinctive gestures. The Third Quartet’s instrumental writing is inspired by electronic music and shows Harvey’s evolution in timbre. It presents a dialectic between a fleeting sound texture and a very regular underlying structure. A dozen "themes" juxtapose themselves constantly in different ways; they are only developed at rare moments. But each of these "themes" in itself is insufficient. It is as if a static ray of light was diffracted by a prism and dispersed. Often, the sound material, which migrates to the borders of silence, is barely perceived. Thus, for example, there are the themes of the glissandi with bounced bow, harmonic trills, "col legno battuto" and (closer to a stable height) that of the ground to the octave, constantly divided into microtonality. The form of the work can be described as  an exhibition of most themes, with silences;   repetition of this exposure to the cello on a triton pedal (development exhibition);  Climax  with two new themes combined with the old ones (two-string glissandi theme and pizzicato theme); and Conclusion (comparable to a dance), with the dominance of the "legno battuto" theme.

 

Harrison Birtwistle: Cortege for 14 Musicians            2007

In this work from 2007 dedicated to the memory of Michael Vyner, who was a British Arts Administrator has Ten of the 14 players taking turns to play a solo at the front of the semicircle of the whole ensemble.  Each new solo bears witness to the other solos and all are part of the  developing the music's warp and weft of interlocking lines. There's an appropriate sense of on-stage ritual for a piece that is subtitled "a ceremony for 14 musicians". There are quiet moments but there's Birtwistle's violence and energy here too.    This work is part of the fourth program on Sunday July 29

Niccolò Castiglioni            Cantus planus

Castiglioni was a profilic composer, pianist, and highly influential writer and teacher.

Cantus Planus (Plain song), its two parts composed in 1990 and 1991 for the Ensemble Contrechamps in Geneva and are settings of the mystical couplets of Angelus Silesius (pseudonym of the 17th-century Silesian poet-priest Johann Scheffler), whom Castiglioni compared with Webern in the union of simplicity and profundity.

Each part of Cantus Planus consists of 12 tiny songs. and Castiglioni employs many devices and techniques of medieval and renaissance music, including species counterpoint, organum, hocket, canon, and isorhythm. Textures vary dramatically, sometimes within a song as Castiglioni responds to the text.

Castiglioni's main pitch material is 12-tone, but not used dogmatically. Pedal tones and ostinatos abound, as well as all sorts of tonal references, such as the distant little folktune the second soprano sings in No. 3 of Part One.    This work is also part of the fourth concert of the series on July 29th

Per Nørgård:  String Quartet no.10 "Harvest Timeless" (2005)

Norgard experimented directly with the Kroger Quartet while composing his tenth string quartet, 'Harvest Timeless', for the ensemble in 2005, thus creating an unusual dialogue between composer and performers.

Quartet 10, Harvest Timeless, is the only Norgard quartet in a single movement and the long lyrical line that laces the whole movement together feels deeply personal. This quartet combines both the joy and serenity from Nørgård’s Symphony #3 with the darker tone of Symphony #7, both of which are heard throughout this quartet.  It has chameleon-like powers of color shifting and timbral transformation.    This work is also part of the fourth concert of the series on July 29th

 

György Kurtág:   Officium breve in memoriam Andreæ Szervánszky

György Kurtág completed Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervánszky opus 28 in 1989. It is a string quartet in 15 concise movements, and every tiny movement should be heard with great care. It is music that eschews development in favor of brief communications of atmosphere, which are more potent than many listeners may have realized possible. Kurtág is in many ways developing the ideas of Webern in his own music. Kurtág takes the music further.  He uses a hyper-intensification of the moment, so that he requires just enough time to demonstrate an idea that is so powerful that there is nothing left to be done with it once it has been heard. The operative word for this music is intense, which makes it among the most inspiring quartets of its age.    This work is also part of the fourth concert of the series on July 29th

 

 Thomas Adès            In Seven Days

This piano concerto premiered in 2008 has seven movements which musically recount each of the seven days of the Biblical creation myth as detailed in the Book of Genesis.   The work is scored for solo piano and a large orchestra. Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times called the piece "terrific" and observed, "As the creation saga unfolds, the music is at once reverent and playful. Galumphing basses and low brass evoke the creatures of the land, while twittering flutes and crazed piccolo announce the creatures of the sky. Long episodes evolve in arcs of brilliant piano writing where restless, filigreed, spiraling figures cascade down the keyboard." 

 In Seven Days:   1.    Chaos – Light – Dark     2.    Separation of the waters into sea and sky    3.    Land – Grass – Trees     4.    Stars – Sun – Moon     5.    Creatures of the Sea and Sky     6.    Creatures of the Land    7.    Contemplation 

This work is on the last program of the series on Monday July 30