I Musici de Montréal Program Notes
by Robert Markow
OSVALDO GOLIJOV (b. 1960)
The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind
Ten years ago, the name Osvaldo Golijov was barely known in musical circles. Today he ranks as one of the leading figures in classical music. The Chicago Symphony recently named him one of its two Composers-in-Residence for the seasons 2006-2007 and 2007-2008. Deutsche Grammophon is committed to releasing a whole line of CDs. Musical America chose him as 2006 Composer of the Year.
Golijov can rightly claim to be a musical citizen of the world. He was born in Argentina of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, studied on three continents, and now lives just outside Boston. Having absorbed influences from such disparate sources as Latin American dance forms (especially the tango, via his country's greatest exponent of the form, Astor Piazzolla), the Eastern European tradition of Jewish music both sacred (liturgical) and secular (klezmer), and the European classical tradition, Golijov has forged his own unique style and approach.
The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind was originally composed for string quartet and clarinet in 1994. The version with string orchestra was first performed last April by the Santa Rosa Symphony with tonight's soloist, Todd Palmer, who has played it in both forms more often than any other clarinettist. The work was inspired by a medieval mystic, the rabbi known as Isaac the Blind, who believed that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are responsible for the way all things turn out in the universe. Gramophone magazine observed that Golijov "uses the building blocks of music to tease the same cosmic mysteries in a work that echoes the joy and sorrow, the passion and reason of the entire Jewish experience." At times deeply meditative and mystical, at others driven by energetic dance impulses, Prayers and Dreams is a true showcase for the clarinet which sings, pleads, wails and screams through thirty minutes of klezmer-style dreams and prayers.
GEORGE ROCHBERG (1918-2005)
Transcendental Variations
George Rochberg played a leading role in American music for much of the twentieth century. In addition to his large output that included six symphonies and seven string quartets, he was at various times director of publications for one of the largest music publishers, Theodore Presser, taught at the Curtis Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, and won more than two dozen awards and prizes in the course of a career spanning more than six decades.
Concertgoers who are apt to dismiss all contemporary music as inaccessible or even downright unpleasant might want to revise their viewpoint after hearing Rochberg's Transcendental Variations. Much like the slow movement of Beethoven's Quartet Op. 132 or, more recently, Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, which has taken on almost cult status, Rochberg's work speaks immediately and powerfully to virtually all listeners through its aura of restrained ecstasy and beatific stasis.
The Transcendental Variations (1975) are Rochberg's own arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement of his String Quartet No. 3. This work caused something of a furor when it was first performed and recorded in 1972, not for its avant-garde language or novel procedures, but for exactly the opposite reason. This was the first major work from a composer who, like most of his colleagues at the time, had embraced dodecaphony and serialism, but who was now turning his back on this kind of writing, declaring that "the over-intense manner of serialism and its tendency to inhibit physical pulse and rhythm led me to question a style which made it virtually impossible to express serenity, tranquility, grace, wit, energy." Rochberg was branded a renegade, but his Third Quartet heralded a new page in twentieth-century music history as the beginning of what came to be called the "new Romanticism." The theme and six variations are, in the composer's words, "unambiguously tonal" (in A major), and "embrace the harmonic / polyphonic palette of the Classical and Romantic traditions."
MORTON GOULD (1913-1996)
Spirituals for Strings
- Gospel Train - Old Time Religion
- Were You There? - Steal Away
- All God's Children Got Wings
- Little David Play on Your Harp
- Calvary - He Never Said a Mumblin' Word
- Ezekiel Saw de Wheel
Morton Gould's legacy of work as composer, arranger, conductor, radio personality, arts administrator and all-around musical spokesman has seldom been equaled in the annals of American music. Like Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and others, Morton Gould breathed into much of his music a distinctly American flavor, but he was also fluent in a wide range of musical styles, often incorporating elements of jazz, folksong, gospel, Broadway and Latin American music into his works. Gould held a particular affection for Negro spirituals, a word that appears in three different titles: an orchestral work called Spirituals from 1941, a Symphony of Spirituals (1976), and the work on tonight's program. Each of its six movements is based on a spiritual melody. All except the last employ a double string orchestra, and a harp is used in three of the movements. On the occasion of its premiere in 1961, Gould wrote of spirituals that "while national in origin, they echo man's soul everywhere. Their appeal is universal. They were the start of our jazz, and have spiced and seasoned our creative musical scene, both popular and symphonic."