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October 9, 2003 Thursday 8 pm
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directions to
St.
Paul Church
[15 St Paul Street,
Brookline, 02466]
For more info please contact us at
800-896 7340 or email info@kalistos.org
Ticket Prices
Adults $20
Students with valid ID $10
Program
details
Samuel Barber [1910-1981] Adagio
for Strings, op. 11
Evan
Chambers [b.1963] Crazed
for the Flame
[East Coast
Premiere] featuring Vento Chiaro
[click for their
website]
intermission
Dmitri Shostakovich [1906-1975] Chamber
Symphony Op. 110a [arr. Barshai]
Guest
Artists' bio
As an award-winning ensemble, Vento Chiaro is captivating audiences
across the country with their visionary artistry. After winning the
Saunderson Award at the Coleman Chamber Music Competition in April of
2000, the LA Times declared, "the day of the woodwind quintet may be
dawning." Vento Chiaro went on to receive the Silver Medal at the
Fischoff Chamber Music Competition in 2000 and was a semi-finalist at
the Concert Artists Guild Competition in 2001. Founded in 1997 at the
Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, MD, Vento Chiaro relocated to Boston
in 1999 and is now the Ensemble-in-Residence at the Longy School in
Cambridge, MA. In addition to their Longy appearances, the ensemble has
performed several times on WGBH's radio program hosted by Richard
Knisley and at Symphony Hall (including the 2000-01 Centennial
Celebration) and across the Eastern Seaboard at such venues as The
Settlement School in Philadelphia, PA and ArtScape in Baltimore, MD.
Their varied repertoire ranges from the standards to arrangements of
orchestral favorites and newly written works. A part of the ensemble's
mission involves working with musicians and students of all levels.
Every spring, Vento Chiaro works with Longy's Preparatory Composition
students, reading their works, offering suggestions, and ultimately
performing their music. The ensemble was the Quintet-in-Residence at
the 2001 International Clarinet Connection, and has served on the
faculty of Boston University Tanglewood Institute's Young Artists Wind
Ensemble program since 2002.
 Audiences respond to the music of Evan
Chambers:
"That piece ROCKS!"
"Thank you so much for for your gorgeous music; it's just stunning."
"I was so moved; this music made me cry."
"Truly imbued with honesty and soul-water..."
"It was pure power!"
"That was the most amazing piece of music I've ever heard in my life."
Evan Chambers (b 1963, Alexandria, Louisiana) writes music of rare
intensity and emotional depth–his haunting lyricism and explosive
energy have moved audiences around the world. A traditional Irish
fiddler as well as a composer, his music has deep roots in folk music
and in the physicality of performance–he appears frequently as an
interpreter of his own works, and serves as resident composer with the
new-music ensemble Quorum. He is currently Associate Professor of
Composition and Director of Electronic Music Studios at the University
of Michigan.
Chambers' compositions have been performed by the Cincinnati, Kansas
City, Memphis, and Albany Symphonies; he won first prize in the
Cincinnati Symphony Competition, and in 1998 was awarded the Walter
Beeler Prize by Ithaca College. His work has been recognized by the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Luigi Russolo Competition,
Vienna Modern Masters, NACUSA, the American Composers Forum, and the
Tampa Bay Composers Forum. He has been a resident of the MacDowell
Colony, and been awarded individual artist grants from Meet the
Composer, the Arts Foundation of Michigan and ArtServe Michigan. His
composition teachers include William Albright, Leslie Bassett, Nicholas
Thorne, and Marilyn Shrude, with studies in electronic music with
George Wilson and Burton Beerman. Recordings have been released by the
Foundation Russolo-Pratella, Cambria, Albany Records, and Centaur. His
solo CD Cold Water, Dry Stone was released in winter 2001 by Albany
records.
Crazed for the Flame: Program Notes
Will transformation
Oh be crazed for the flame
in which a thing that bursts with becoming
consumes itself;
that spirit of re-creation, master of earthly form,
loves most in our turning the single pivoting point of change.
Rainer Maria Rilke
from Sonnets to Orpheus
Series 2, # 12
translation by Evan Chambers
The title Crazed for the Flame comes from
Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.
The piece was inspired by that image of intense spiritual longing, of
wild yearning for union with the absolute. It is a state exemplified in
the music and literature of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, as
well, and the piece was also inspired my experiences listening to one
kind of Sufi music: the Qawwai music of the great Pakistani singer
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his ensemble. I’ve been listening to this
group for years, and had one of the most profound musical experiences
of my life hearing them in concert--to put it plainly, I’ve been so
affected by the power, sincerity, and radiant depth of feeling in
Qawwali music for so long that it had to come out in my own writing
sooner or later. I wanted to write a a grateful hommage that drew on
the form of Qawwali without directly imitating the style.
In this piece, as in Qawwali, the music consists of tight melodic cells
that are repeated to create a dynamic of intensification; highly
charged and often ecstatic group singing alternates with long wailing
solo lines. The piece is also influenced by the melodic shapes of
southern Albanian Kaba, a semi-improvised instrumental music sometimes
referred to as “music with tears.” . - notes by composer
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Samuel Barber (b. West Chester,
Pennsylvania, 9 March 1910; d. New York, 23 January 1981): Adagio for
Strings
 Perhaps
no other work in
Samuel Barber’s prolific output has been more closely associated with
his name than the Adagio for Strings. So much has the Adagio come to
stand on its own that we may forget that it was actually arranged from
a part of a pre-existing work—specifically, the second movement of
Barber’s String Quartet in B minor op. 11. The 28-year-old composer
presented the Adagio, along with his first Essay for orchestra, to the
great Arturo Toscanini, who had been searching for new music by a
American composer to perform with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Both
works were subsequently premiered in one of Toscanini’s famous radio
broadcast performances on 5 November 1938, and the critical and popular
success of Barber’s music secured his international reputation as one
of America’s foremost composers. The Adagio, in particular, assumed a
special place in the hearts of audiences the world over, but especially
so in the United States as an expression of national mourning in the
face of tragedy. In this function it has been performed at the funerals
of several prominent Americans, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Albert Einstein and John F. Kennedy. More recently, its reputation as
an expression of American grief was made strikingly poignant in a
performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the last night of the 2001
“Proms” concerts in London, less than a week after the September 11th
attacks. Leonard Slatkin, the first American conductor to lead the
orchestra in this most British of events, chose the work as part of a
changed program in light of the recent national tragedy. In an
interview with National Public Radio later that month, he said in
regard to the performance of the Adagio: “The Barber was easily for me
the single most difficult nine minutes or so of conducting I ever had
to do, because I was in tears the whole time. All the images that I
only knew from television and talking to people on the phone had just
come into full focus.” [1] Why the Adagio calls forth such an
extraordinary emotional reaction from its listeners is still something
of a mystery: Barbara Heyman, in her 1992 biography of Barber, recalled
a 1982 BBC broadcast on Barber’s music, in which several prominent
musicians were “asked to analyze why the Adagio was such a ‘perfect
piece of music.’ They were hard-pressed to come up with technical
justifications and focused instead on the emotional response it elicits
from listeners.” [2] Aaron Copland, one of the participants in the
discussion, commented:
It’s really well-felt, it’s believable you see, it’s not phoney … [it]
comes straight from the heart, to use old-fashioned terms. The sense of
continuity, the steadiness of the flow, the satisfaction of the arch
that it creates from beginning to end. They’re all very gratifying,
satisfying, and it makes you believe in the sincerity which he
obviously put into it. [3]
One of the “gratifying” elements to which Copland refers might be found
in the scalar melodic line, which rises inexorably from the
middle-range of the violins, passing through the other string sections
(save the double-basses), to the climactic F-flat major chord. The
denouement following recalls the beginning of the piece, where the
opening gesture, a sort of chordal exhaling of breath (first presented
as an E-flat minor chord with an added seventh passing to an F major
chord) is played no less than four times, making it the perfect
counterbalance to the emotional high point of the piece. It is perhaps
this gesture, heard throughout the work, that lends the Adagio its
sense of unity—a sort of aural as well as emotional anchor for the
listener in the midst of one of the most cathartic musical experiences
ever created. As the composer Ned Rorem once said of the Adagio, “If
Barber later aimed higher, he never reached deeper into the heart.”
Heyman notes that Barber himself must have recognized something of what
he had achieved, exclaiming upon completing the second movement of the
quartet, “It’s a knockout!” [4] Even if musical analysis fails to
explain the formal perfection, melodic rightness, and how each harmonic
structure seems to give way inevitably to its successor, we can expect
the Adagio to continue to speak—as it has for the past 65 years—so
powerfully to audiences the world over as the expression par excellence
of both mourning and emotional renewal.
[1] National Public Radio All Things Considered broadcast, 22 September
2001.
[2] Barbara Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 174.
[3] BBC broadcast, 23 January 1982, quoted in Heyman, 174.
[4] Samuel Barber, letter to Orlando Cole, probably 19 September 1936,
quoted in Heyman, p. 175.
Dmitry Shostakovich (b. St. Petersburg, 25
September 1906; d. Moscow, 9 August 1975): Chamber Symphony, op. 110a,
“In Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War” (arr. Rudolf Barshai)
 Titles,
even subtitles, for pieces of music can frequently give misleading
impressions about a composer’s artistic intentions and his relation to
his art—Dmitry Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony op. 110a is a prime case
in point. The work actually goes back to his String Quartet in C minor
op. 110, which Shostakovich’s friend and conductor of the Moscow
Chamber Orchestra, Rudolf Barshai, arranged for string orchestra (as
sanctioned by the composer), keeping intact the original subtitle, “In
Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War.” The legend behind the
subtitle derives from a visit Shostakovich made to Dresden, East
Germany in July 1960, where he was to work on the music for a
documentary film about the firebombing of the city in World War II. So
devastating was the effect of seeing the ruins of Dresden, the story
goes, that the composer was compelled to put his C minor quartet down
on paper in a mere three days, completing it on July 14th, and
assigning it its now famous dedication. The actual circumstances behind
the composition of the quartet were a good deal more complicated:
Earlier that same year, in June, Shostakovich had been tapped by the
Soviet government to become head of the Union of Composers of the
Russian Federation, and along with this appointment, he was expected to
become a full member of the Communist Party. The effect of this news
caused the composer tremendous distress, being forced as he was to
become an official part of the government which had for Shostakovich
associations with a regime that had persecuted both him and his music,
particularly in the years 1936 and 1948. In light of this event, the
subtitle of the work takes on a pronouncedly more ironic tone of voice:
ostensibly, it protests the horrors of war and affirms the Communist
Party’s condemnation of (Nazi) fascism; but it was Shostakovich’s
friend, the Russian musicologist Lev Nikolayevich Lebedinsky who later
said that the composer “dedicated the quartet to the victims of fascism
to disguise his intentions, although, as he considered himself a victim
of a fascist regime, the dedication was apt. In fact, he intended it as
a summation of everything he had written before. It was his farewell to
life. He associated joining the Party with a moral, as well as physical
death.” [1] Shostakovich’s letter to his friend Isaak Glikman in July
1960 reflects this inner torment, revealing his intense, personal
feelings about the quartet, very much removed from the intentions of
Communist propaganda:
However much I tried to draft my obligations for the film [about the
Dresden bombing], I just couldn’t do it. Instead I wrote an
ideologically deficient quartet nobody needs. I reflected that if I die
someday then it’s hardly likely anyone will write a work dedicated to
my memory. So I decided to write one myself. You could even write on
the cover, “Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet.”
[2]
To underscore the autobiographical nature
of the work, Shostakovich filled the score with quotations from
previous compositions, including his First and Eighth Symphonies, the
Piano Trio, the first Cello Concerto and the opera Lady Macbeth of the
Mtsensk District—this in addition to use of the musical anagram D-S-C-H
(for Dmitry Schostakovich—the notes D, E-flat (the German “Es”), C and
B-natural (the German “H”)). This motive is heard in various guises
throughout the entire work: first as the basis for the imitative
counterpoint at the outset of the somber first movement; then in the
high strings to accentuate the malicious wrath of the scherzo-like
second movement; in the center movement it becomes the basis for a
sardonic waltz (first heard in the violins’ upper range); and in the
last four measures of the austere fourth movement a solo violin
announces the motive, leading directly into the final movement, a
recapitulation of sorts of the first. Perhaps nowhere else in the work
is the motive used to such ironic effect as in the last movement, where
it is played simultaneously with the popular Russian dirge, “Tormented
by a Grievous Bondage,” which, as a number of critics at the work’s
premiere in October 1960 noted, was “Lenin’s favorite song”—if Lenin
was indeed responsible for laying the foundation for the totalitarian
state under Stalin, Lebedinsky’s assertion that Shostakovich
“considered himself a victim of a fascist regime” would seem to hold
particularly true here. The brooding intensity of the piece is further
emphasized in its being performed without a break between
movements—what light does break through can be found in the otherwise
unrelenting severity of the fourth movement, where in an unambiguous
F-sharp major passage, a solo cello quotes from Act Four of Lady
Macbeth. Katerina, on her way to a labor camp in Siberia, is reunited
with her lover, Sergei (the cello’s first three notes intone the name
“Seryozha”), though by now he has condemned her as the cause for his
own deportation to the camp. This, like the other autobiographical
elements in the music, come together to form one of Shostakovich’s most
profound and personal artistic statements; a statement which could also
be said to speak for all his fellow-countrymen who had suffered, and
all too frequently perished, during Stalin’s Reign of Terror.
[1] Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 340.
[2] Isaak Glikman, ed., Letters to a Friend: Dmitriy Shostakovich to
Isaak Glikman (Moscow: 1993), 159; quoted in Laurel E. Fay,
Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 217.
- Program notes (c) 2003 by David Carpenter
David Carpenter is a composer living in Somerville, Massachusetts. He
recently completed a setting of a poem by Elinor Wylie for soprano and
piano, and at his last dental checkup he had no cavities.
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Our past concerts
2003-2004 season
October
9, 2003
November 20, 2003
February 17, 2004
May 21, 2004
2002-2003 season
May
19, 2002
September
27, 2002
November
1,
2002
March 14,
2003
May 9, 2003
Phillips
Exeter
Residency
February 17-18, 2003
Dean
College
Concert
February 22, 2003
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