German conductor Matthias Pintscher returns to Miami Beach to present works by his native land’s composers. Operatic master Bernd Alois Zimmermann lets the cello sing in his Song of Hope, performed by NWS’s own Cello Fellow Ben Fryxell, a winner of NWS’s Concerto Competition. In Schreiben, Helmut Lachenmann operates the orchestra as a writer that sometimes whispers and at other times screams. This concert includes the world premiere of a new work—Orun—by Brazilian innovator Marcos Balter, whose works are rooted in hyper-dramatization of live performance.

Program

Marcos Balter

Orun (2022; world premiere of NWS commission)
Approximate duration: 8 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.

Mr. Balter provided the following program note:

Central to the understanding of lifecycles in Ìṣẹ̀ṣe, the Yoruba religion, are the concepts of family and ancestralism. Orun is the invisible dimension where disembodied spirits join their ancestors after their journey in the Ayé (the physical existence). It is at Orun that ancestral wisdom is expanded and empowered, absorbing knowledge gained by the previous physical existences of each family member. This collective ancestral force resides in Ikole Orun, which is commonly associated with the idea of heaven in Christian religions, though not exactly the same. A portion of that ancestral essence might be assigned as the consciousness of a living being (Ori), usually within that same ancestral bloodline (Atunwa), guiding that person towards fulfilling their destiny in the llé Ayé, the place where life occurs.  Orun points towards connectivity and family wisdom. It is both an origin and a destination, the source of our ancestral strength and where the best of our essence will someday empower those who come after us.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Canto di Speranza (Song of Hope): Cantata for Cello and Orchestra (1952; revised 1957)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes

In 1948, after completing his studies in Cologne, Bernd Alois Zimmermann attended the third annual summer courses in Darmstadt, Germany, a growing hotbed of avant-garde style. Zimmerman was a bit older than the biggest stars who emerged from that scene, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and unlike those fierce idealogues, Zimmerman took a more nuanced view of serial composition and the dissolution of Classical-Romantic style.

The single-movement cello concerto that Zimmerman composed between 1953 and 1957 shows off this approach that applied new combinations of pitches to the established concerto discourse of a soloist playing off an orchestra. This “Song of Hope” is not exactly filled with sunshine, but its emotional honesty and vulnerability are their own forms of hope, as told by a fatalistic witness to one of history’s darkest chapters—a man who would end up taking his own life.

Helmut Lachenmann

Schreiben   (2003)
Approximate duration: 27 minutes

For Helmut Lachenmann, like so many others in the European avant-garde, summers spent at the Darmstadt courses for new music opened his ears to new approaches. Following further studies in Italy with composer Luigi Nono, he returned to Germany where began teaching and continued composing. In the 1940s and -50s Lachenmann developed a personal approach to sound that he called musique concrète instrumentale, in which ordinary sounds captured on tape recordings were contextualized and presented as musical material. Lachenmann became interested in using musical instruments and the art of performance to create a style that was free from the primacy of pitch collections. The result is a style, as he explains it, “in which the sound events are chosen and organized so that the manner in which they are generated is at least as important as the resultant acoustic qualities themselves. Consequently, those qualities, such as timbre, volume, etc., do not produce sounds for their own sake, but describe or denote the concrete situation: listening, you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered.”

In Schreiben (German for “writing”), composed in 2003 and revised the next year, Lachenmann took the physical act of writing as a point of departure for a long and astounding arc of orchestral sound. He explained, “Those who write the German word “Schreiben” [writing] also unavoidably write the word “Schrei” [scream], as well as the word “reiben” [to rub, as when causing friction]. The second word seems every bit as neutral/practical as the first would seem emotional. And both of these aspects, along with the contrast between them, characterize my piece.”

– © 2022 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.

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