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Oliver Herbert—renowned cellist and son of two former NWS Fellows—is hailed for his “wonderful youthful exuberance… coupled with a highly sophisticated musical expression and outstanding technique.” (Santa Cruz Sentinel) The recent Avery Fisher Career Grant winner will join the NWS Cello Fellows for Julius Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, which comes to life with the help of dancers from Kyle Marshall Choreography. When faced with the pandemic, Christopher Cerrone penned what he calls an “accidental diary” that reflects life before and during this unusual time, from relentless energy and incessant street noises to empty spaces and static soundscapes. HK Gruber makes his anticipated return to New World Symphony as both conductor and composer. After a near-100-year mystery—in a story of lost scores, WWII and forgotten safes—Kurt Weill’s Little Magic Night Music at long last receives its U.S. premiere.

This is a pre-recorded concert with original footage captured at the New World Center on October 24, October 29 and November 13, 2021. 

Program

Julius Eastman

The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc for 10 Cellos (1981)
Approximate duration: 20 minutes

Julius Eastman, a gay Black provocateur with exceptional gifts as a composer and singer, died in obscurity in 1990. With his radical perspective on identity politics and a sound-world that intensifies the cyclical processes of minimalism, Eastman is resonating with 21st-century listeners and filling concert halls that were never accessible to him while alive.

In the late 1970s, Eastman was living in the Bowery, a notoriously gritty neighborhood in lower Manhattan that was filled with clubs, including the iconic CBGB. He quoted a riff from a song he heard and apparently loved by Patti Smith—the queen of New York’s punk scene—in the hard-driving opening to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, as noted by Josh Langhoff in The Cresset. 

Its sanctified title notwithstanding, The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc used the medieval martyrdom of a gender-fluid warrior as an entry point to explore themes of resistance and freedom. He addressed the saint directly in his program note, writing, “Dear Joan, when meditating on your name I am given strength and dedication… I shall emancipate myself from the materialistic dreams of my parents; I shall emancipate myself from the bind of the past and the present; I shall emancipate myself from myself.”

After Eastman introduced The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc at The Kitchen in 1981, the score went missing. Fortunately a recording of that concert survived, and the composer and cellist Clarice Jensen undertook a meticulous reconstruction. The American Contemporary Music Ensemble (of which Jensen is artistic director) launched a new life for this rapturous score with a performance in 2016.

Christopher Cerrone

Don’t Look Down: Concerto for Prepared Piano and Percussion Quartet (2020)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes

Since completing his studies at the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University, Christopher Cerrone has become one of his generation’s most accomplished composers. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and the winner of the Rome Prize in 2015, he has written for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Calder Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Eighth Blackbird and the Albany Symphony, where he was a composer-in-residence.

Mr. Cerrone wrote the following program note:

Don’t Look Down is an accidental diary of having lived through the worst pandemic of the last hundred years. When I started writing this piece in February 2020, it would be inconceivable to imagine the world we live in now. The one thing that kept me sane during this period was clocking into work—that is, working on this piece. So looking back, it’s not at all surprising the piece would wind up reflecting both the strangeness and the instability of the world we live in.

The title of the work takes its name from an article by the economist Paul Krugman, himself referring to the moment when the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote would look down and suddenly realize he’d fallen off a cliff, at which point he would actually drop. The first movement, “Hammerspace,” is the world before: all grooving and relentless energy. The pianist hammers away at the high notes of the piano which have all been muted with putty. I imagined his part as like a drum solo performed in an echo chamber—the rhythmic muted notes create unique and fantastic sympathetic resonances with the lower strings of the instrument when the pedal is held down. A variety of percussion instruments support him, from the more traditional to drum set to other oddities like a bicycle pump and sandpaper block. 

The piece “looks down” at the start of the second movement, “The Great Empty,” when suddenly all of the energy stops and we are left with an uncertain and static soundscape: instead of playing the piano, the pianist “bows” the instrument by drawing fishing tackle over the strings. The percussionists play cheap harmonicas and blow over the tops of wine bottles alongside other instruments to create a dissonant and deliberately out-of-tune sound world. The piano part that interjects halfway through is similarly out-of-tune: the pianist has placed small pieces of putty, causing the piano to sound as out of tune as the percussion instruments. The title of the movement is drawn from a photographic series that was shown in The New York Times of city centers devoid of people.

The final movement, “Caton Flats,” refers to a construction site active on my block in Brooklyn. When I was working on this movement in my studio, my partner, Carrie, walked into the room and remarked that the music “sounds like the construction going on outside”! I loved the idea so much that I had to include it in the piece. I also loved the idea that the things that most drive us crazy—like noisy construction on our street—could become a thing of nostalgia when it’s gone.

               – Christopher Cerrone

Kurt Weill

Kleine Zaubernachtmusik (Little Magic Night Music) (1922; U.S. premiere)
Approximate duration: 22 minutes

Kurt Weill was a 22-year-old music student and cabaret pianist in Berlin when he created his first work for the stage, a dance-pantomime for children titled Zaubernacht (Magic Night). Taking into account the tender age of his intended audience and reacting to the fanciful plot about toys coming to life, Weill composed in a more tuneful and simple style than the “serious” music of his student years, and he was delighted with the response from children and adults alike, setting him on a course to continue writing some of the most popular theater works of the century. When Weill learned that a famous playwright had been impressed with Zaubernacht, he made contact and started a process that resulted in his first opera a few years later; from there it was just another small leap to the music theater collaborations with Bertolt Brecht that made Weill an icon of Weimar-era Germany. Even Weill’s marriage to Lotte Lenya, the saucy chanteuse who starred in those shows, has its roots in Zaubernacht, since they met when she auditioned for a role.

After its initial run in Berlin, Zaubernacht played for five performances in 1925 at a children’s theater in New York, where its librettist had resettled. That was the last staging produced in Weill’s lifetime, and the full score was among the documents lost in Germany when he fled in 1933, having become an early target of the Nazis for his Jewish faith and his provocative theater pieces.

It was exciting enough in 2000 when a scholar took a stab at recreating the orchestration based on markings in Weill’s surviving piano score, but Zaubernacht had an even greater surprise in store. In 2005, when Yale University cracked open a forgotten safe that had been stashed behind cabinets in a basement storage room, they discovered the orchestral parts that had been copied out for the New York staging. Besides making the entire work available for theatrical productions, Weill’s publisher developed this concert suite of Kleine Zaubernachtmusik (Little Magic Night Music), featuring eight highlights from the show. The tolling bells in the first and last selections frame the show’s action between midnight and dawn, and the dance episodes in between sample the show’s many delights, including a mock-tragic funeral march and a tipsy waltz.

This performance is funded in part by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Inc., New York, NY. The Kurt Weill Foundation, Inc. promotes and perpetuates the legacies of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya by encouraging an appreciation of Weill’s music through support of performances, recordings, and scholarship, and by fostering an understanding of Weill’s and Lenya’s lives and work within diverse cultural contexts. It administers the Weill-Lenya Research Center, a Grant and Collaborative Performance Initiative Program, the Lotte Lenya Competition, the Kurt Weill/Julius Rudel Conducting Fellowship, the Kurt Weill Prize  for scholarship in music theater, and publishes the Kurt Weill Edition and the Kurt Weill Newsletter. Building upon the legacies of both Weill and Lenya, the Foundation nurtures talent, particularly in the creation, performance, and study of musical theater in its various manifestations and media. Since 2012, the Kurt Weill Foundation has administered the musical and literary estate of composer Marc Blitzstein.  www.kwf.org.

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel's masterpiece as a collective call for justice.