ASCENSION – APRIL 22, 2023 at 7:30 PM
Anne S. Richardson Auditorium at Ridgefield High School
RIVER ROUGE TRANSFIGURATION – Missy Mazzoli
Born: 1980. Pennsylvania
Premiere: May 31, 2013 by the Detroit Symphony, conducted by Leonard Slatkin
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani + percussion, piano, harp and strings
Duration: About 4 mins, 30 secs
Programs Notes: “…all around me and above me as far as the sky, the heavy, composite, muffled roar of torrents of machines, hard wheels obstinately turning, grinding, groaning, always on the point of breaking down but never breaking down.” — Louis-Ferdinand Céline, from Journey to the End of the Night
I first fell in love with Detroit while on tour with my band, Victoire, in 2010. When I returned home to New York I dove into early Detroit techno from the late eighties, Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night and early 20th century photographs by Charles Sheeler, who documented Detroit’s River Rouge Plant in 1927 through a beautiful, angular photo series. In my research I was struck by how often the landscape of Detroit inspired a kind of religious awe, with writers from every decade of the last century comparing the city’s factories to cathedrals and altars, and Vanity Fair even dubbing Detroit “America’s Mecca” in 1928. In Mark Binelli’s recent book Detroit City Is the Place to Be, he even describes a particular Sheeler photograph, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, as evoking “neither grit nor noise but instead an almost tabernacular grace. The smokestacks in the background look like the pipes of a massive church organ, the titular conveyor belts forming the shape of what is unmistakably a giant cross.” This image, of the River Rouge Plant as a massive pipe organ, was the initial inspiration for River Rouge Transfiguration. This is music about the transformation of grit and noise (here represented by the percussion, piano, harp and pizzicato strings) into something massive, resonant and unexpected. The “grit” is again and again folded into string and brass chorales that collide with each other, collapse, and rise over and over again.
— Missy Mazzoli
River Rouge Transfiguration was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony in honor of Elaine Lebenbom. Thank you to the Detroit Symphony, Leonard Slatkin, Erik Ronmark, Rebecca Zook, Farnoosh Fathi, Katy Tucker and Mark Binelli.
DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION (Tod und Verklärung), OP. 24 – Richard Strauss
Born: June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany
Died: September 8, 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
Composed/Premiere: 1888-1889 / June 21, 1890
Instrumentation: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarniet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, strings
Duration: About 26 mins
Program Notes: In its exploration of that most universal of questions – what lies waiting for us all at the end of the road – Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration was a decidedly ambitious venture. By the time of its premiere in 1890, Strauss had already proven himself a master of orchestration and sound painting with the first few of his self-titled tone poems – his word was Tondichtung, literally “saying with sound” – portraying the vibrancy of the Italian countryside and culture in Aus Italien, the tragic events of the Scottish play in Macbeth, and the misdeeds, romantic conquests and ignominious fate of the infamous Don Juan. After the success of these early ventures, his next effort was on a topic of profound philosophical intent: a musical reflection on the final moments of life and the beyond. While the literature abounds with Requiem masses, funeral marches, and death scenes in operas or ballets, few composers had tried to create a purely musical narrative describing in detail the sensations and thoughts that might accompany the experience of dying. Rather than starting from a descriptive text or specific program, Strauss called upon friend and poet Alexander Ritter to compose a sort of descriptive accompaniment to the piece after the music had been written. In the lines of Ritter’s poem, we hear very clear echoes of the scene that Strauss had so carefully tried to paint in the music itself: “In the small, poverty-stricken room…lies the sick man on his cot…exhausted, he has sunk into sleep, and the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall is all you can hear…At the confines of his life, is he dreaming of the golden days of his childhood? – But death does not grant its victims sleep and dreams for very long. It shakes him awake cruelly and starts the battle anew.”
The gently pulsing rhythmic motive that begins the piece and runs throughout it in various guises could serve just as well as the ticking of a clock or as the irregular heartbeat or labored breathing of a dying man. Over it, harmonies take shape and shift slowly, conveying the silence and foreboding advance of the inevitable, and a wistful melody brings hints of reminiscence. The tranquility is broken by a harsh interruption, an audible death pang that initiates the struggle between motives of fate and suffering versus those of youthful memories and ardent striving that shapes the dialectic of the piece. In this struggle we can hear the painful convulsions of a dying man, and sense a body and mind wracked with conflict, only to be resolved by the arrival of what the ailing subject “has sought all this time with his heart’s deepest longing” – an idea of transfiguration that starts to peek through at the height of the struggle. The prefiguration of this theme sounds in stark contrast to the agitated texture that surrounds it and momentarily wins out; again Ritter’s words capture exactly what the music’s closing passages suggest: “…The last blow of death’s iron hammer rings out, breaks the earthly body in two and covers his eyes with the night of death. – But he hears mightily resounding from heaven that which he sought here longingly: world-redemption, world-transfiguration!”
– Eric Dudley, DMA Yale University
SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN F MAJOR, OP. 90 – Johannes Brahms
Born: May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany
Died: April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria
Composed/Premiere: 1883
Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, a contrabassoon, two hornsin C, two horns in F, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings
Duration: About 30 mins
Program Notes: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann—compared to Johannes Brahms, they had barely left school when they launched their symphonic careers. Brahms saw those forebears as examples, inspiring and intimidating. For years he remained determined to join their league, to harness the orchestra as they had and add his name to the historic line they represented. By the time he pulled it off with the premiere of his First Symphony, he was already forty-two.
Brahms had been an early bloomer. He was barely out of his teens when Robert Schumann, unable to curb his enthusiasm, introduced him in the pages of Europe’s most influential music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, as “the one . . . chosen to express the most exalted spirit of the times in an ideal manner, one who [sprang] fully armed from the head of Jove… [A] youth at whose cradle the graces and heroes of old stood guard.” Overnight, Brahms encountered the delight of fame and the dread of high expectations. The pressure all but stopped him before he could move on to larger-scale compositions than the piano works that had excited Schumann.
Part of the problem was that Brahms was such a harsh self-critic. He honed his material until he was satisfied and held himself to tough standards. Consider: He composed more than twenty— possibly as many as thirty—string quartets besides the three he published. (He burned the others.) Ultimately, through the fusion of hard work, reflection, and inspiration that makes for genius, Brahms recovered from Schumann’s prophecy and fulfilled his promise in songs and piano music and chamber works and choruses. He approached the orchestra more deliberately, producing two serenades, a piano concerto, and his German Requiem before retreating exclusively into more intimate forms.
Meanwhile, the music world expected him to write a symphony. Come on, he said: “You have no idea what it’s like to hear the footsteps of a giant like that behind you”—the giant being Beethoven, whose echoing steps forced Brahms to question if he could ever do anything on a par with the author of nine symphonies that seemed to define the limits of what music could express.But while Brahms was keeping the press at bay with his talk about the giant, he was busy trying to hear his own symphonic voice. When he was forty, he introduced the Variations on a Theme of Haydn. For all its generosity of spirit, this is an exercise in how to create and arrange sonic shapes. The Haydn Variations marked the first time in a decade Brahms had used the orchestra, and the first time in fifteen years—since his Serenade No. 1—that he had written a purely orchestral work for a sizable ensemble. The forty-five works between the serenade and the variations had established Brahms as one of Europe’s leading composers—and the leading composer among those who embraced the traditional ideals of abstract music as opposed to music drama and tone poems. Brahms’s First Symphony, fourteen years in the writing, was instantly recognized as the greatest symphony of the past half-century, since Beethoven’s Ninth had first been heard in 1824.
Brahms knew now that he could get it right. In less than a year he turned out a second symphony. A third symphony would follow the second in six years. During that interval, Brahms discovered the subtleties of orchestral language and his emotional range. These were the years of the Violin Concerto, the Academic Festival and Tragic overtures, and the Piano Concerto No. 2, a massive work that moved some listeners to call it a symphony with piano accompaniment. If his first two symphonies reveal Brahms exploring what he could do with an orchestra, the orchestral works that followed show him increasingly at ease as he knits his personal world- view into the fabric of sound. In these compositions, he consolidates his art. He becomes Johannes Brahms.
The Third Symphony opens with two broad chords in a gesture repeated throughout the first movement. Here, at its initial appearance, the gesture is a deep inhalation before the music bursts into motion, muscles straining, momentum building. Then comes a passage that exhibits why Brahms’s music is often described as “autumnal”: the gentle second subject introduced by the winds and the little dance-like tune that grows out of it, stopping in its tracks when it encounters the brief song that ends this quiet interlude, two symmetrical phrases, poignant and resigned, before momentum resumes. The densely textured development conveys a sense of great struggle, spelled by the respite of a deep-throated passage dominated by a solo horn, like sunlight filtered through haze, before the forces regroup and revisit the symphony’s opening paragraphs. As this recapitulation ends, new tensions are introduced, rising through a passage that climaxes in the consummation of F major, the key in which this all began. Dynamic levels recede and tensions relax in a magical denouement. The last sounds are a recollection of the movement’s opening, transformed now into a gesture not of defiance, but of serenity.
The opening of the Andante suggests a folk melody. A third of the way through, the tempo slows as winds and strings engage in a call-and-response, a gesture that will reappear with explosive force in the finale. The folk-like character returns, then the call-and-response, this time led by the strings, with the winds answering. This is prelude to a gently rocking passage that flows forward both in the high strings and the low, the low strings weaving their song in counterpoint to that of their higher voiced cousins in a way that sounds slightly out of synch, to produce one of those aching moments gone almost before you know it has started. After a reprise of the opening, the movement ends in a bittersweet coda and a recollection of the call-and-response.
The intermezzo captures a melancholy that seems the essence of this composer. The finale opens in nervous music for strings, their voices held low, first plotting, then nonchalant. Now the call-and-response from the Andante reappears. Catastrophe intervenes in a long passage of succeeding episodes, all rushing toward some end not yet visible. The music subsides—to be interrupted by great jabs from massed strings. These prepare a brass pronouncement that sounds like a summons to raise the dead: the call-and-response from the Andante, transformed into pure aggression. Again we hear the wrenching episodes from just moments before. This time, as the energy spends itself, a subdued glow fills the atmosphere, with strings at their softest pianissimo pulsating in a veil of sound. After a reticent recollection of the call-and-response, a passage heard half an hour earlier emerges from the veil. In its first appearance it was headstrong and defiant. Now it is mellow and restrained. It is the main theme of the opening movement, transformed by time and experience from a shout into a whisper: calm, reassuring, complete.
– Larry Rothe (Rothe, former editor of the SFS program book, is author of Music for a City, Music for the World, a history of the San Francisco Symphony, and co-author of the essay collection For the Love of Music. Both books are available at the Symphony Store.)