Matthias Pintscher—famed Music Director of Ensemble intercontemporain—returns to perform the music of today, including the U.S. premiere of his own piano concerto NUR with Inon Barnatan.Translating to fire in Hebrew and Arabic, NUR was hailed as spellbinding and seductive in its 2019 premiere. The program also features innovative works by Brazil’s Marcos Balter, Germany’s Enno Poppe and the U.S.'s own George Lewis.

 

NWS thanks its 2020-21 donors.

Program

Marcos Balter

Bladed Stance (2013)
Approximate duration: 6 minutes

After studying piano and composition in his native Rio de Janeiro, Marcos Balter moved to the United States for postgraduate studies at Texas Christian University and Northwestern University. His “whimsical” and “surreal” scores (to quote The New York Times) have made Balter a fixture of the new music community in his adopted home of New York City, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Tanglewood Music Center, among others, have elevated him to the top tier of contemporary composers.

Balter composed Bladed Stance in 2013 for yMusic, a New York-based chamber ensemble consisting of trumpet, flute, clarinet, violin, viola and cello. The score calls for the music to be played in a manner that is “mournful, lontano [distant], like an echo,” and all instruments are amplified in a way that increases their reverberation and blend. This sonic treatment unifies the many layers of interlocking material into a smooth composite, and the additional component of whistling—performed by the string players while they also execute complex rhythmic swells and fades—adds a subtle shimmer to the upper register of the ensemble. The overall effect creates music that is pulsing with energy but also somewhat oblique, not unlike the “bladed stance” used in fencing and martial arts, with one foot in front of the other and the body turned partly to the side.

Enno Poppe

Brot (2007/2013)
Approximate duration: 10 minutes

“I like to be surprised by music,” says Enno Poppe; “I like the incomprehensible.” In his extensive career working as a composer, conductor and teacher in the upper echelon of Germany’s contemporary music scene, Poppe has found a balance between mathematical precision and organic freedom that endows even his most complex scores with vitality and caprice. He often takes lessons from patterns that appear in nature, and such basic materials as wood, bone and oil have provided fodder for his ornate compositions.

In Brot, composed for trumpet, horn, trombone, piano and percussion, the subject is bread—not a literal depiction of bread as foodstuff, but rather an artist’s reaction to the process that occurs on the inside as the raw material activates, expands, and ultimately settles into a sturdy and durable new form.

George Lewis

Mnemosis (2012)
Approximate duration: 14 minutes

George Lewis has always seen contemporary music through an unusually broad lens, starting with his formative training in Chicago at the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a hotbed for boundary-breaking performances rooted in “Great Black Music,” as members of that collective scene described it. As a composer, trombonist, computer music innovator and professor, Lewis has brought together every corner of his field, often developing his own procedures along the way, alone or in his many collaborative relationships. Fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations are among the many honors that have affirmed Lewis’ invaluable contributions to American music.

Lewis was a philosophy major at Yale University, and his philosophical lens still informs his music, as seen in Mnemosis, composed in 2012 for the Talea Ensemble. As Lewis explained in an interview, “Mnemosis draws inspiration from two conceptions of time, history and memory in Western philosophy: Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence, and Wittgenstein’s conception of Unzeitlichkeit, which is to my mind inadequately translated as ‘timelessness.’” These functions of memory play out in short, repeated chunks of music in which the instruments remain staggered and misaligned, a process he likened to paintings by the multimedia artist Jack Ox that visualize the unfolding of music through an array of vertical bars. To create the specific musical materials, Lewis performed spectral analysis of recordings of saxophone and bassoon multiphonics (essentially two or more tones sounding simultaneously, created with irregular fingerings on wind instruments). This swirl of multimedia reference points might overwhelm a less adroit creator, but for a polymath like Lewis, they only serve to crystallize his distinctive musical vision. 

Matthias Pintscher

NUR for Solo Piano and Ensemble (2018; U.S. premiere)
Approximate duration: 28 minutes

The German composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher has established himself as a formidable musical presence on both sides of the Atlantic. Following in the footsteps of another noted composer-conductor, Pierre Boulez, Pintscher spends part of his time in Paris, where he is Music Director of the Ensemble intercontemporain. He also keeps a residence in New York, where he teaches at The Juilliard School, and he maintains a busy schedule of guest conducting appearances at such orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic. Pintscher’s recent works for The Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra place him in the highest echelon of contemporary orchestral composers.

Pintscher composed NUR in 2018 for pianist Daniel Barenboim to perform with the Boulez Ensemble, and the composer was on the podium to lead the premiere the next year. Instead of a traditional concerto that pits the solo piano against an orchestra en masse, Pintscher crafted NUR more like a Socratic dialogue, with the piano taking a leading role within a collective investigation. All 21 members of the accompanying ensemble play highly differentiated parts, and extended passages bring individual instruments into the foreground. In writing for Barenboim—a great musical statesman who has poured much of his energy in recent years into an orchestra and music academy that promotes peace and understanding between Israel and Palestine—it is fitting that Pintscher chose a title that means “fire” in both Hebrew and Arabic.

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.