Thirty Ways of Looking at an Aria

Sarah Darling, one of the Goldberg arrangers and the instigator of this week's program, wrote this post about the process of working with the piece. Enjoy! 

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Two score and seventy-five years ago, a guy whose name translates to John Brook sat down and wrote a tune. 

Was it the best tune? Possibly it was, indeed, the best tune.

What we know for sure is that the guy loved the tune. And love makes everything it touches more beautiful. 

After he wrote the tune, the guy thought about it for a while. The more he thought about it, the more awesome it became. Some days it was really silly and cute. Other days it was radiant and still. Other days, it got really dramatic and sometimes, it must be said, the tune really made quite a fuss. Occasionally it got sad, and then everything became very quiet. But it would always perk up again, sometimes with a jolt, sometimes with a slow secret smile. No matter where the tune went, no matter what shape it took, even on that one crazy day when it decided to flirt with several other tunes simultaneously (!) at the end of the day, the guy always knew that it was still his beloved tune. He could still hear every note, every suspension, the supple curve of every ornament, the dappled light-and-shadow of major and minor, in the silence when the other music died away.

This is a story that begins with a happy ending. 

LIkely the next person to fall in love with the Aria from the Goldberg Variations was Bach's wife, Anna Magdalena. And the beautiful writing-out of the tune at the top of this email is actually hers - inserted into two blank pages of a book of keyboard works that was a present from JS. ("Hey, he forgot my favorite one! Let me just add it in...") 

There is something so magical about this piece. I feel as though nearly everyone I know has some kind of intimate relationship with it. When you listen to the Variations, and you watch the Aria undergo those amazing transformations from one movement to the next, each shift feels real, active, engaged. You believe in it all. Your mind turns into a cathedral full of notes and geometric shapes. And sometimes, as many folks have done over the years, you even think "Oh! I see it! That's what Bach was implying in that one! Wait... wait... I really want to write that down!"

It's amazing how the desire to arrange the Goldbergs almost feels like a tradition at this point. And it's a funny thing. Each arrangement is unique, and yet I swear, the process is not creative. I really mean that. It's one thousand percent interpretive. It's staring at something and asking the question "What are you?" It's not really all that different, perhaps, from playing them. The boldest creative act is the moment when you begin, when you say "I want to do this." So I did that last year, in a programming pitch for A Far Cry, and the group, amazingly, said "OK, let's go for it!"

Every variation takes you to a different place. Not just in the character of its music: also with what's implied. Some variations (why hello, French Overture) call out for massive, pompous forces. Others work so beautifully as a dance between two solo voices. Every single one was written for keyboard, though - and the thing that I don't understand about so many Goldberg arrangements is that they are always "for" something else. All you see are the implications, but you don't actually get to hear the beauty of the original source. So the idea behind this Goldberg arrangement pitch was to go all-out with a group that could do everything with its forces, both large and small - AND to invite a pianist to the party, because OF COURSE. (Our hearts collectively stopped when Simone Dinnerstein, one of the great Goldberg interpreters of any time, agreed to play with us) 

Arranging it has been an intense process. I split the task with Alex Fortes, and we worked with a small "brain trust" of Criers - thinking through options, imagining the interplay of different lines. Is it more like a concerto grosso or a trio sonata? What about pizzicato for this one? How many voices? What are the basses doing? Can the soloists for that one canon be in the back? There's a small army of various movement charts in our Googledocs...

What has been truly fascinating has been the evolution of each idea. Very, very, little has stayed the same. Things that I thought were hugely significant turned out to be sort of minor; throwaway ideas were sometimes magical. I really can't say more without issuing a spoiler alert. Adding Simone to the creative process (she graciously committed a lot of time to being a really active part of this arrangement) gave it yet another layer of coherence and focus. And rehearsals this week have been an utter joy - well, mostly. 9 times out of 10 it's the euphoric feeling of watching a statue come to life, or a two-dimensional creation acquire a third dimension. Occasionally, though, you put your head in your hands and think "That just sounds boring. What was I thinking?" 

And then you keep tweaking, experimenting, changing it up. Now it's the entire group that is taking control of the last stage of this creative/interpretive process. In a twist of fate, I'm not able to play the show this week, so I've been able to watch it grow from the outside and then gradually let go, knowing that it's in the best hands possible. 

I feel as though a part of me is still there in the performance, but I will openly admit that I'm going to regret not being a part of the thing that will happen for the first time when we play it for you. The thing where you watch that little tune as it grows and redefines itself again, again, and again, changing shape, changing size, changing affect, but always keeping a kernel of itself, until finally, after thirty metamorphoses (and one hard-core flirtation with various theme buddies in the final Quodlibet) you see it again, whole and complete. 

T.S. Eliot is so good at describing this moment. Here's something from the final pages of the Four Quartets that says it in the right way: 

We shall not cease from exploration. 
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. 

Goldberg program notes

Enjoy the program notes for this weekend's concert, written by our fabulous musicologist-in-residence, Kathryn Bacasmot! 

It’s easy to forget there was a time when the Goldberg Variations were not a part of the cornerstone collection of music to which we loved to listen. Their real debut into society occurred in 1955, when a young, eccentric, Canadian pianist named Glenn Gould stepped into a recording studio and made what has become an iconic recording of the work (Pablo Casals did a similar thing for the Six Suites for Solo Cello in 1936). Since then, they have captured our collective imagination with their seemingly endless nooks and crannies for exploration. Like the dialogue and scenes of an intricately shot and witty movie, the lines, jokes, and relationships between the notes of the variations reveal themselves to the listener on deeper levels with every listen.

 Aria mit verschiedenen Veränderungen, “Aria with Diverse Variations,” was the original title for BWV 988. The nickname “Goldberg” comes from a story that has been acknowledge as likely apocryphal due to lack of concrete evidence (Goldberg would only have been fourteen years old, and no dedication page to the Count exists) —yet it has had such an impact on the music it bears a brief re-telling. The story originates in 1802 with Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach’s first biographer, who related an anecdote about Johann Gottleib Goldberg—reportedly one of Bach’s students: “The Count [Hermann Carl von Kaiserling of Dresden] was often sickly, and then had sleepless nights. At these times Goldberg, who lived in the house with him, had to pass the night in an adjoining room to play something when the Count could not sleep. The Count once said to Bach that he should like to have some clavier pieces for his Goldberg, which should be of such a soft and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights.” Thus, so the story goes, did Bach write the Goldberg variations.

More likely is that Bach wrote the variations as the culmination to his Clavier-Übung (“Keyboard Exercise”), a collection of harpsichord and organ works published in four parts from 1731-1741. Part I included the six Partitas, Part II consisted of the Italian Concerto and the Overture after the French Manner, Part III is a master compendium of organ works, and Part IV is the Goldberg variations. As a whole, the Clavier-Übung traverses every style and skill set a keyboardist would need to know.

The opening theme in the Aria owes its harmonic structure to one of Bach’s contemporaries, whom he admired greatly: George Frideric Handel. A side-by-side comparison of Handel’s Chaconne avec 62 variations (HWV 442) reveals an identical base in the first eight bars between the two works. One of the marvels of the Goldberg variations is the beautiful symmetry of the entire work. The thirty variations are divided into two “sections” of fifteen: Nos. 1-15, and Nos. 16-30. Including the Aria that appears both at the outset and at the conclusion, Goldberg consists of thirty-two parts total. This macro piece structure is reflected in the micro structure each variation, most of which are either 16 or 32 measures in length. There are only three minor key variations, and the first is No. 15—the last variation of the first part. Variation No. 16 is marked “Overture” to herald the beginning of the second half. Every third variation is a canon at an increasing interval (i.e. No. 3 is a canon at the unison, No. 6 a canon at the second, No. 9 a canon at the third, etc.) up to the ninth, and culminates at No. 30 with a quodlibet—a combination of counterpoint and popular song. Here is where Bach’s sense of humor shows most prominently, since the quodlibet includes popular melodies in his day, the words of which translate to “I have been away so long from you” and “Cabbage and turnips have driven me away (had my mother cooked meat, I’d have opted to stay).” After such a long journey through all the possibilities of the theme almost entirely in the major mode of its key of G (perhaps comically referred to as the “cabbage and turnips” redundancy of musical diet), the variations have come to an end, and returned home to the Aria, once again.

A major award for Robyn's project!

A Far Cry is thrilled to share the news that one of our violinists, Robyn Bollinger, has been awarded a two-year Arts Fellowship from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund. Robyn joins eight other young artists in receiving the award this year. (A New York Times article details the award here.) The Fellowship program reflects the late Leonore Annenberg’s lifelong commitment to the arts, her desire to provide opportunities for artistic growth, and her intention to strengthen American cultural life. Its goal is to help these individuals become successful so they may someday serve as leaders in their field and help others in the future.

Please join us in congratulating Robyn on this magnificent achievement, and keep reading for a blog post by Robyn about the project that her Fellowship will support. 

Robyn, we are so proud of you!

Today, I’m the luckiest girl in the world, and not just because I play with a A Far Cry- although we can all agree, that’s a pretty good reason in and of itself, isn’t it?

No, today I’m the luckiest girl in the world because I’ve just received an Arts Fellowship from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund.

An Arts Fellowship from the Annenberg Fund comprises $50,000 a year, for up to two years, to be invested in young artists’ careers.  Previous winners include dancer Misty Copeland of American Ballet Theatre, actor Jeremy Strong of “The Big Short,” singer Isabel Leonard, and violinist Tessa Lark, a former classmate at NEC and Guest Crier.  I’m one of nine Fellows this year, and the line-up is impressive: a bass-baritone with the Metropolitan Young Artists Program, a dancer with ABT, an actor/rapper, a visual artist, and other astounding actors and musicians.  It is somewhat jarring to see my name in that list, but there it is- what an honor!

My two-year grant has been awarded to develop professional-quality videos of my multi-media performance project titled CIACCONA: The Bass of Time and to present the full program in a live debut event in New York City next year.  I am of course slightly daunted by this prospect, but mostly I am enormously excited.  This is truly the opportunity of a lifetime, and I fully intend to make the most of it.

So, what is a multi-media performance project, and why “CIACCONA?”  Let me back up a bit.

I grew up backstage at the Philadelphia Orchestra, where my father plays bass trombone.  I have been going to concerts for as long as I can remember, and even from a young age, the concert experience felt ritualized and stale to me; the relationship between the audience and the performers felt separated and cold, if present at all.  As technology was becoming ever more pervasive throughout my adolescence, I began to wonder if there was a way to engage audiences using a more stimulating set of tools better suited for our hyper-connected present.  

During these years I studied with virtuoso violinist Soovin Kim, who remains an important mentor to me to this day.  Perhaps my most important lesson under his tutelage was to appreciate the power and importance of virtuosity.  Just prior to beginning our studies together, Soovin released his critically acclaimed recording of the twenty-four Paganini Caprices.  Paganini is often thought of as a throw-away composer, all flash and no substance.  However, in the way Soovin performed the caprices, and in the way he taught them to me, the monstrous technical virtuosity demanded of the violin was in pure service of the music rather than a mere showcase of the performer.  It quickly became my goal to one day perform all twenty-four Caprices myself.

New England Conservatory, which I attended from 2009 to 2015, became the ideal laboratory for uniting these two legacies of my childhood: a mission to revitalize the concert experience for the digital age, and my conviction in the inherent but under-appreciated virtue and beauty in Paganini’s music.  In my third year at New England Conservatory, under the guidance of my teacher, Miriam Fried, former NEC President Tony Woodcock, and musicologist Rebecca Cypess, I created a multi-media performance project called Project Paganini, made possible through a grant from NEC’s Entrepreneurial Musicianship department.  During the performance, I wove together my own live performances of the twenty-four Caprices with historical images of the composer and other pertinent figures, voiceover segments chronicling Paganini’s biography, and live monologues about what these pieces and Paganini’s story meant to me personally.  The event was a huge success.  The hall was standing-room only, and the program attracted attention not only throughout the Boston arts community, but on a national stage from Minnesota Public Radio’s classical music show, Performance Today.

With the success of Project Paganini, I knew I’d found a concert format worth developing.  In the autumn of 2014, shortly after joining A Far Cry, I embarked on a second multi-media performance project, this one entitled CIACCONA: The Bass of Time.  The goal of this project was to demystify Bach’s influential Ciaccona for solo violin and to trace the story and impact of the ciaccona form through history, from the Baroque Era to the present.  Bach’s Ciaccona is one of my favorite pieces and for a variety of personal reasons is close to my heart.  My project sought to make this music accessible to a wider audience by connecting listeners to the story of Bach, his predecessors, and his musical legacy.  The program featured a similar format to Project Paganini: live performances of pillars of the solo violin repertoire with the Ciaccona serving as the focal point and centerpiece, projected images, voiceovers providing historical context for each composer and piece, along with spoken personal monologues.  The response from my mentors, teachers, and peers was overwhelmingly positive. Six months later, on a 2015 summer cruise down the River Danube as a guest artist with Performance Today, I presented a portion of CIACCONA as a featured evening program.  The impact was palpable.  Over and over for the remainder of the cruise, members of the audience approached me, often in tears, to thank me and tell me that my music and my presentation was the highlight of their trip.

This Fellowship is an incredible opportunity to bring my vision for a revitalized concert experience to the national stage.  I believe that if classical music as an industry is to compete with the movies, pop-music, television, the internet, and an ever-expanding universe of digital media and mobile apps, we must incorporate multimedia stimulusation into our performances.  It should be made clear that I never intend to distract from the music; over the course of the presentation, no images or voiceovers will ever appear while I am playing, nor will I distribute a set of program notes. My performance format seeks to provide listeners with ample information and historical context using contemporary media while simultaneously encouraging them to approach the music on a personal level, giving them more to see and more to hear.

(Incidentally, though we haven’t gone the multimedia route yet, my pursuit of these goals directly overlap with the reasons that I love playing in A Far Cry; we are constantly going the extra mile to reach audiences, challenge listeners, welcome conversations, and establish relationships both within the music and between individuals to foster human connection.)

If you’re interested in following me on this journey, I hope you will visit my website at RobynBollingerViolin.com.  If you’d like to see a clip of CIACCONA, you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwd7GO4j_qM

But don’t worry- I’m not going anywhere!  I’m still very much a part of everything A Far Cry.  Most of all right now, I’m excited for our upcoming set with Simone Dinnerstein.  She will be joining A Far Cry for a special arrangement of Bach’s famous Goldberg Variations, a work she famously championed in her own New York debut recital and recording project.  I know that our work with her and our conversations on Bach and music will prove fruitful and rewarding.

Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to my AFC family for all of their support, both musical and personal.  I can’t imagine who I’d be without A Far Cry.

Mix Tape introduction

Friday's concert will have 21 (!) separate "tracks" on it! So in lieu of program notes, Miki wrote up a beautiful introduction explaining why we love the Mix Tape concept - and urging everyone to set their programs aside and just enjoy. (No worries, we've printed everything at the back of the program book in case you want to refer to it later.) 

See you on Friday for this wild ride! 

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"A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do."  The words are from Rob Fleming -- the sullenly romantic record store-owner of Nick Hornby's 1996 novel High Fidelity -- but we couldn't have said it better.

It's been over four years since we started discussing the idea of a Mix Tape concert, and there's a reason for that.  Over the past twelve months, we've wracked our brains, lobbied passionately for our faves, had a few major and minor skirmishes, and narrowed it down to 21 "tracks" from our past nine seasons of performing together (plus a few new surprises to keep things fresh).  It hasn't been easy.  AFC has never had a dearth of passion or opinions.  Ultimately though, the concept was too intriguing to pass up.  

You see, most of us came of age around the heyday of the mix tape, and know that a good mix tape is more than just a collection of catchy songs.  A good mix tape tells a story.  A good mix tape juxtaposes and elides and frames music in a way that makes us wonder, laugh, question and sometimes forget to breathe. That's a tall order, but our love for this music inspires us to take risks.  We couldn't pass up this chance for Prokofiev to cool down a hot Biber, for Andrew Norman to volley with fiddling Swedes, or Mozart to wink at Daft Punk.    

Lastly and most importantly, any mix tape worth its salt is a very personal communication to a very specific audience.  And as we begin to see the edge of our tenth season on the horizon, we felt compelled to make this mix for you. For those of you who have been with us for the long haul, who came to our concerts even when you didn't recognize a single composer's name on the program - this mix is for you.  For those of you who are here for the first time, maybe something you hear tonight will plant a seed that we can grow together over the next decade.  And so, this mix is also for you.  

The full program is printed on the back page of your program book, but do us a favor, and put it away when the music begins.  You can go to town figuring out what you just heard at intermission.  For now though, these are our choicest, juiciest bits of hand-picked ear candy, laid out for you.  Sit back, get comfy, and prepare to take a bite.

- Miki-Sophia Cloud, on behalf of the Criers

Lady Russia: Program Notes

Enjoy these notes on Sofia Gubaidulina's "Fachwerk" (written by the fabulous Kathryn Bacasmot) and Olga Bell's "Krai" (written by Olga!) 

See you at the Gardner for this stirring show. 

FACHWERK

Having experienced suppression and censorship in the Soviet Union (having being temporarily blacklisted), Gubaidulina made her way to German and settled in Hamburg in the early 1990s. Her oeuvre is largely influenced by her Orthodox faith, as well as her interest in Eastern tonality stemming from her Tatar heritage. Reflecting on her style, Gubaidulina has also commented, “Dmitri Shostakovich and Anton Webern have had the greatest influence on my work. Although my music bears no apparent traces of it, these two composers taught me the most important lesson of all: to be myself.”

Fachwerk teeters on a razor’s edge between beauty and terror, and employs the sound world of the bayan in blisteringly inventive ways. The accordion (a cousin of the Russian bayan) virtuoso Geir Draugsvoll had once approached Gubaidulina about writing a concerto for his instrument, and eventually, she penned Fachwerk. While not a concerto in a formal sense, the bayan has a starring role against the orchestral backdrop.

The title comes from the world of architecture. Fachwerk, the composer reveals, “can be traced back to my enthusiasm for the architectural style of timber framing. This is a highly specialized, unique style in which the constructive elements of a building are not hidden behind the building façade, but, on the contrary, are shown openly. The constructive elements which are indispensable for such a building, such as wall struts, window and door latches and beam ceilings, form different kinds of geometrical patterns which become an aesthetic phenomenon. And at times, a still more profound phenomenon shines through from behind this beauty, an essential, intrinsic phenomenon. Thus one distinguishes, for example, between the strut types ‘Swabian man,’ ‘Swabian woman,’ ‘wild man,’ and ‘standing St Andrew’s cross.’”

She continues, “I imagined that one could also show something in music reminiscent of [the Fachwerk architectural] style, i.e. compose in such a way that the construction of a certain instrument would become visible and transformed into something of an aesthetic nature...A musical instrument does in fact exist which makes it possible to realize this idea. It is the bayan, on which one can switch the keyboard from the melodic mode to the chordal mode. In one and the same row of buttons one has the dynamics of a melodic line above or below and, at the same time, the stasis of chord sounds in the middle of the sound area at one’s disposal. In this structure, in principle, there is a dominant (the melodic line above), a subdominant (the melodic line below) and a tonic (chords in the center of the system)—three aspects that determine the essence of order in the universe.” 

KRAI

In the opening moments of Krai, an avalanche of low notes from the piano drops the listener into the middle of a vast, icy C Major chord. I like to think that this sound has been going forever, like Russia’s vast Western steppe, or its endless taiga forests in the Far East. The same harmony returns in the final seconds of the last movement, underscoring a quote of Nikolai Nekrasov’s poignant epigram: “You are bountiful! You are mighty! You are powerless — Mother Russia!” 

For some, this kind of irreconcilable paradox has come to characterize Russia more than anything else. Like many émigrés (we left when I was seven), I’m conflicted about the place I left behind. I romanticize it wildly; I’m unfamiliar and uncomfortable with what it is today. If this sentiment is experienced in some capacity by people everywhere, perhaps it becomes uniquely Russian in a climate of extreme distance, cold and emptiness. The great Eurasian landmass––much of it inhospitable, some portion always in dispute––underscores everything, and the pageantry of human existence here becomes a feat more miraculous and more delusional than anywhere else in the world. 

Krai (край) is the Russian word for edge, limit, frontier or hinterland. Present-day Russia is divided into a myriad of 'federal subjects', including nine krais. In this capacity the term is a political designation, like 'territory', but for the earliest Russians these places represented both the promise and terror of the vast unknown. While much has been written about Russia's major cities, Krai is concerned with the rest of the map: the wilderness, the towns, the inhabitants and their stories. From the Cossack melodies of Krasnodar Krai in the West to the Chukchi drumming of Kamchatka Krai in the Russian Far East, Krai is a journey across the Eurasian landmass in forty minutes. The texts of Krai are a mix of traditional, liturgical and original poetry assembled with tremendous of guidance and direction from my mother, a former Radio Moscow broadcaster. 

This is the world premiere of a new arrangement of Krai for solo voice, string orchestra, piano and percussion.

Intimate Voices: Program Notes

Enjoy these program notes for "Intimate Voices" on Saturday, written, as ever, by our fantastic program note writer Kathryn Bacasmot!

Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933) ::  Sinfonietta for Strings
Out of the wars and friction ignited by zealous political ideologies came the avant-garde. Penderecki, a native of Poland, was a member of this collection of composers spanning the globe who, by various ways and means, explored deconstructionism through sound. New theories and philosophies of sound were found everywhere (What role does chance play? Is tonality simply a tyranny imposed over pitches?), and yet the old traditions and old “Masters” remained under the layers of questions. Some would use snippets of recognizable pieces as fragments of sonic collage, or test out the old forms and structures in brashly new contexts, as if to pose the question “What did it all mean?” Others, like Messiaen, would riff off ancient music theory, reinventing the idea of “modes” (predecessors to our modern major/minor scales) by developing newly organized tonalities that he dubbed “modes of limited transposition.”

Penderecki would also employ deconstructed musical traditions, and experimented widely with extended techniques, finding ways to elicit alien sounds from traditional instruments rather than plunging into the world of electronics, such as his contemporaries Stockhausen and Berio did. The music of his youth was predominantly discordant and strident. As he matured, the edges softened a bit, but Penderecki’s music has always remained earnest, passionate, and uncompromising.

The Sinfonietta for Strings of 1992 is a faithful orchestration of his String Trio from the previous year, 1991. In this fuller iteration, the first movement in particular seems to riff off the structural outline of the Baroque era concerto grosso, in which the voice of a soloist occasionally surfaces from and submerges back into the sound of the group. Melding old technique with new sound, the second and final movement traces a fugue theme through a menacing landscape where the stabbing chords of the first movement reappear.

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) :: Trisagion

The Estonian composer Pärt had his compositional beginnings in serialism, which earned him a rebuke from the Soviet government. Later, his immersion in studying the works of J.S. Bach as well as Gregorian chant slowly evolved into a compositional style that became the beating heart of Pärt’s oeuvre: tintinnabuli. The term refers to the ringing/sound of bells, and alludes to the mathematical division of the overtone series, the basis of Western music theory and its harmonic progressions. A single pitch is actually an entire sequence working together – the “fundamental” and its “partials” (much like the “notes” of flavor that combine to produce a particular taste of wine). Thus, when you hear the fundamental A-natural you also hear the partials—the overtones—from the A scale sounding sympathetically in a pattern: A, E, A, C-sharp, E, etc.

Another significant evolution Pärt underwent was deeply personal: his journey to the Russian Orthodox faith (the reason he is sometimes referred to colloquially as a “Holy” minimalist). Much of his music revolves around the liturgy of his faith. The Trisagion is a prayer, with the words, “Holy God, Holy Strong, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.” Written between 1992 and 1994, this instrumental iteration of the prayer was written for the 500th anniversary of the Parish Of Prophet Elias in Ilomantsi.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) :: String Quartet in D minor, op. 56, Voces intimae

In moments of personal crisis we go deep into ourselves. We sort through loneliness, pain, fear, and a multitude of other emotions. When Sibelius—the great symphonic composer—wrote the only string quartet of his mature output, it poured out from his experience of being mired in a major health scare. There was a lump, and he believed it was cancer. In the end, after surgery, it was determined to be benign; the only consequences were the doctor’s orders to cease smoking cigars and cut out drinking wine.

The title for this quartet refers to a message that Sibelius wrote in a friend’s copy of the music above three hushed E-minor chords, “voces intimae,” which translates as “intimate” or “inner” voices. Not often does a piece of chamber music unattached to any specifically programmatic elements carry such a deeply personal note—quite literally. It calls to mind Beethoven’s existential questioning in writing “Muß es sein?” (“Must it be?”) as his note to the op. 135 quartet.

Written in 1909, chronologically falling between the composition of his third and fourth symphonies (1907 and 1911, respectively), Sibelius’ Voces intimae was perhaps psychologically a return to the chamber compositions of his youth, memories whispering from deep inner worlds. In the midst of all the complexity in music and in life, he writes these three simple chords, otherworldly, calming, centering.

A Devotional Chat

The Boston Musical Intelligencer published an interview/chat between Jason and Scott Metcalfe, director of Blue Heron, about Friday's concert. Feel free to read the original here or peruse the text below!

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A Far Cry will be teaming up with Blue Heron for a performance of Faure’s Requiem this Friday. The first half of the program centers on the “Song of Songs,” and features a “conversation” between the two groups as they perform, separately but interspersed, a combination of Nicolas Gombert’s motets on the “Song of Songs,” Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur’s Le Cantique des Cantiques and Jean Francaix’s Symphonie d’Archets. Jason Fisher, the Crier program curator, and Scott Metcalfe, Blue Heron’s director share their discussion to BMInt readers.

BMInt: How did this collaboration initially come about?

Jason: Well, the program and collaboration are really two different tracks that came together early on. The program began in the way that many A Far Cry programs do, with one person coming up with the initial conception. I came to the group wanting to do a Faure Requiem program, using the original 1893 version, and once that hit the ground with the group, it turned into an all-French program idea. Very early on, before the program was even approved, we brought up the question of who we wanted to do it with. Of course we would do it with Blue Heron if they said yes. But would they say yes? After all, they’re an early music group!

Scott: And we didn’t even consider saying no! Blue Heron is first and foremost a vocal ensemble. Sure, we’re a vocal ensemble that mostly does music written between 1400 and 1600, but all of us do music from way before and way after, and many of us specialize in new music as well. And a lot of the skills that we’ve acquired in this context apply to other music, exactly as they do for you.

What does that skill-transfer look like in the context of the Faure Requiem?

Scott: Everyone loves the Requiem, for good reason—it’s one of the greatest pieces ever – and it’s a great opportunity for us to bring the sort of “inquisitive” approach that we use for earlier music to Faure. (And Faure is early music, in a sense, right?) There’s a lot of information there about what we want to try. The French Latin is a great example. We’re not doing that because Faure did it – though we know he did, for sure. The pronunciation of French Latin as though it were more like French fits the melodic lines of the piece better than Italianate declamation, and so it’s clearly what he had in mind. This is usually what you’ll find when you start doing French pronunciation is that actually it shows you how to do melodies in French music. It’s very much the case in this piece, since Faure’s really a French Classicist. He’s a Romantic with a very, very, upright sense of a Classical background.

Jason: And I think one thing that drew us to Blue Heron in particular, amongst the things that you said, was that we knew you would have that curiosity, to want to do the exploration and really want to approach it in a very defined and thoughtful way And of course you are known in town for much the same reason that we are: for making music in a chamber music atmosphere. A lot of people come to hear A Far Cry not necessarily because of what we program but because of the way we perform, and I think a lot of people come to Blue Heron concerts for that reason too. And that’s an exciting thing about this collaboration – because our audiences are going to meet each other, and they’re both here for that similar kind of collaboration, rather than just hearing the Faure Requiem. And hopefully those who do come just to hear the Requiem will be delightfully surprised.

How do you imagine people will experience the “engineered” first half of the program that joins several works?

Scott: That was really Jason’s idea, to make this Francaix/Daniel-Lesur conversation, flirtation, which reinterprets both pieces in light of each other. It could have been just an arbitrary thought, but in fact it’s a beautiful marriage of the two pieces, because they do seem to converse with each other. Besides, they’re written in largely the same style – they’re only four years apart.

Jason: When we talked about adding the Daniel-Lesur to the Francaix, I started to listen to the two pieces together on my playlist. I was jumping back and forth between the two works, and there were a few times when I thought “Whoa – that was crazy! Let me do that again!” and the concept of the interlacing took shape.

Scott: They were talking to each other!

What does it feel like to perform in Old South Church?

Scott: It’s beautiful! The sound is lovely, the setup is sensible, and Old South Church’s organ is as perfect as you’d find in this town.

Jason: It’s a large space to fill but feels intimate, not cavernous. Even when you’re on stage, it doesn’t feel like you’re playing into a bathtub, it feels like you’re playing to something very familiar.

Scott: A number of the singers have also sung in the choir here, so they’re very familiar with the space.

How does the “Song of Songs” inform the program—and why pair such a sexy text with the more chaste Faure Requiem?

Jason: First of all, about the Faure, anyone who doesn’t think that two violas in split harmony and two cellos in split harmony, and harp isn’t sexy... well, let’s just say I don’t think we’d make it past the first date.

Scott: The Daniel-Lesur is extremely sensuous, and it’s very frankly about sexuality. We’re in America, so sex is either conceived of as pornographic or somehow naughty. But this is not the right way to think about either of the “Song of Songs” settings. It’s like the question: Is this sacred, or is it secular? The answer is “Yes.” And these all show it in different ways. I would never argue that the Requiem is a sensuous text in the way that the “Song of Songs” is. But it’s profound—I mean, all music is about sensuality; it’s about sound and emotion and things that can’t be conveyed in words.

Jason: On a basic level, the first half is profound, but the second half is sacred.

Scott: And the Gombert is right in the middle. Now those motets are EXTREMELY sexy. There are incredibly dissonant overlaps, all these false relations—and this is a liturgical piece. He’s really pushing it one way. And the Daniel-Lesur is a secular, a non-liturgical piece, which is very religious as well.

Jason: It’s an interesting combination of contexts.

Jean Françaix seems to be best known for frothy wind concoctions. Is his Symphonie d’archets serious?

Jason: Curiously, Francaix has become somewhat of a staple in our recent repertoire. This fall, we performed his narrative work Gargantua with Robert Pinsky, and before that, we tackled his six Preludes for strings. All of the music that we’ve explored has had a playful side, but also something extremely tender, a little whimsical but also wistful. There’s always a bit of irony hiding away. But I don’t believe that makes the work any less serious. In a way, Francaix’s music is extremely honest, and refreshing. Actually, we recently received an email from his son in Paris, who was happy to hear that we had performed Gargantua. Hopefully he’ll be tuning in to our live stream on Friday night!

Scott: Just a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an Ode to Gastronomy for 12 voices, written by Francaix. He was doing everything!

Any danger of A Far Cry running out of string symphonies?

Jason: We get that question a lot, but we’ve actually found it to be true that our repertoire options keep expanding the longer we stay together. It’s true that there are only a few of the truly “classic” string serenades like the Tchaikovsky, but there is actually a huge amount of other repertoire available to us. And unlike a symphony orchestra, which has about 200 years of music to choose from, we can select repertoire from pretty much any point in music history: Baroque, Renaissance, even early vocal music. When you add in the fact that nearly every culture has some kind of string instrument, and the possibilities for crossover projects, you have a huge, nearly unprecedented, body of repertoire—which is crowned by a number of string quartets that we’ve been able to re-imagine for a larger group. Of course, this week has made us excited about something else entirely: the potential for more collaborations with voices. Stay tuned on that front! We have a whole violin section that didn’t get to play the Faure, and they are hungry for another project!

Devotion Program Notes

Enjoy these program notes for "Devotion", written by Scott Metcalfe and Kathryn Bacasmot. 

Song of Songs: Gombert and Daniel-Lesur

by Scott Metcalfe

Pose moi comme un sceau sur ton coeur, comme un sceau sur ton bras, car l’amour est fort comme la mort, la jalousie est dure comme l’enfer, une flamme de Yahvé! Les grandes eaux n’ont pu éteindre l’amour, les fleuves ne le submergeront pas!

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a sign upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is bitter as the grave, a flame from Yahweh! Great seas have not been able to extinguish love, rivers will not drown it!

The first half of our program presents several conversations: between interpretations of a text, between composers and compositions, between two ensembles. We open with two motets by Nicolas Gombert (c. 1495-1560) which set texts from the Song of Songs recast as antiphons to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Although Gombert’s motets are devotional works for liturgical or paraliturgical use, his intensely sensuous music, perfused with expressive dissonance, seems to emphasize the earthy origins of the Song as a Hebrew love lyric rather than its later, scriptural life as religious allegory. In Ortus conclusus, for five voices, the mood is dark, mysterious, and urgent; Descendi in ortum meum, for six, is open and radiant: in both, the endlessly unfolding, overlapping counterpoint is saturated with suspensions and pungent clashes between flats and naturals, naturals and sharps, which both structure the music into waves of tension and release and create an atmosphere of amorous intoxication.

 If Gombert’s motets reveal the sensuous within a sacralized text, Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur’s twelve-voice setting of the words of the Song translated into French, Le Cantique des Cantiques, places a religious frame around the love poetry. The piece offers a beautifully condensed version of the entire Song, touching on all of its major themes, images, and characters: the main protagonists, a girl and a boy who speak to and of each other in direct, highly physical terms; the Daughters of Jerusalem; the watchmen; King Solomon and his retinue; the dancing Shulamite; gardens, orchards, vineyards, pastures, and hills; the city of Jerusalem, the desert, Gilead, Amana, Mount Carmel. But the first word is “Alleluia,” from Hebrew via Greek, and words in the sacred languages of Latin and Hebrew pervade the texture. Only in The enclosed garden and The Shulamite are the words exclusively the French text of the Song. The former offers a striking counterpart to Gombert’s “enclosed garden,” every bit as mysterious and dreamy, while the second is a head-spinning dance in 5/8 time which dissolves at the last moment. The movement toward a sacred interpretation culminates in an ecstatic Epithalamium or wedding song built on the words and melody of the plainchantVeni sponsa Christi, leading up to a final Alleluia.

We present the seven movements of Le Cantique des Cantiques (1952), performed by Blue Heron, interspersed with the four movements of Jean Francaix’s Symphonie d’archets (1948), performed by A Far Cry. At some moments the dialogue between these two contemporary works is uncanny: be sure to listen closely as one movement ends and the next begins!

Jean Françaix:: Symphonie d’archets (Symphony for Strings)

by Kathryn J Allwine Bacasmot

We sometimes speak of modern composers who go through a “neo-classical” phase. Stravinsky, for example, or Prokofiev. For Jean Françaix it was never a phase, it was his idiom. His music displays a consistently crystalline quality, a sonic equivalent to gazing at a beautifully cut gemstone. The structure and designs are evident, and brilliantly dazzling in their complexity and craftsmanship, despite however simply they may appear to be set. He wanted his music to “give pleasure,” and he succeeded. A pervasive sunny quality is often present, but the music manages to sidestep sounding glib or naïve, rather it sounds genuinely delighted to exist. Its moments of solemnity are thoughtful but not obsessive. It reflects without melancholy. It seems to have no regrets. In some ways his work inherits the witty, bright, effervescent writing (in part their reaction to the romantic and post-romantic era’s heavy-handed excesses and drama) typified by the loosely associated collective of French composers colloquially referred to as “Les Six”: Honegger, Milhaud, Tailleferre, Auric, Durey, and Poulenc.

The sonorities of the Symphonie d’archets are unmistakably of recent times, with its winking employment of dissonance, and lilting jazz-like rhythms. To quote one of his biographers, who put it very succinctly “His style…expresses his harmonic language very freely” while remaining “resolutely tonal.” All around him, Françaix’s colleagues were heading into deeper experimental territory, preoccupied with deconstructing tonality, itself, and delving into philosophical questions about the very nature of sound. But here, and in his oeuvre, Françaix is content to link himself to the great traditions of the past, never abandoning the terminology and structural traditions of the craft of music, though he infused them with a modern flavor. The Symphonie was premiered in 1948, with the venerable Nadia Boulanger, his former teacher, conducting.

Kathryn J Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.

Fauré Requiem

by Scott Metcalfe

Mon Requiem…on a dit qu’il n’exprimait pas l’effroi de la mort, quelqu’un l’a appelé une berceuse de la mort. Mais c’est ainsi que je sens la mort: comme une délivrance heureuse, une aspiration au bonheur d’au-delà, plutôt que comme un passage douloureux.… Peut-être ai-je aussi, d’instinct, cherché à sortir du convenu, voilà si longtemps que j’accompagne à l’orgue des services d’enterrement! J’en ai par-dessus la tête. J’ai voulu faire autre chose.

My Requiem…people said it did not express the terror of death; someone called it a lullaby of death. But that is how I feel death: as a happy deliverance, a yearning for the happiness of the beyond, rather than as a painful crossing.… Perhaps also my instincts have led me to side-step convention, as I have been accompanying burial services on the organ for so long! I am fed up with that. I wanted to do something else

—Gabriel Fauré to Louis Aguettant, 1902

Although beloved virtually since its creation and an enduring staple of the repertoire, for most of the twentieth century Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem was known only in a conventional orchestration which was prepared years after Fauré considered the work finished, probably by one of the composer’s students, in response to the demands of the publisher Julien Hamelle. In its original scoring, the Requiem deployed divided violas and cellos, contrabass, organ, harp, and timpani; a solo violin appears only in the Sanctus, soaring above voices and orchestra alike. Fauré later added horns, trumpets, and eventually trombones, but never sections of violins or woodwinds. The rich sonority of the lower strings, underpinned by organ and brass and decorated by filigree in the harp, is a fundamental part of the music’s conception which was obscured until the late twentieth century. Today we are using an edition by Jean-Michel Nectoux and Roger Delage, published in 1994 by none other than J. Hamelle et Compagnie, that restores Fauré’s original orchestration of 1893. We employ forces appropriate not to a concert hall, but to a church, honoring the Requiem’s many performances in churches under the composer’s direction, including its first performance for a funeral at La Madeleine in Paris, where Fauré was choirmaster and organist. (“As far as the number of voices in the chorus is concerned, it naturally depends on the proportions of the hall in which you give your concerts,” Fauré wrote to Eugène Ysaÿe.) On the other hand, free from the church’s stricture against mixed choirs, we happily use women’s voices for the upper parts, including a female soloist for the Pie Jesu—exactly as Fauré did in every concert performance he ever conducted.

Another aspect of how Fauré heard his Requiem is even less commonly understood, and that is the pronunciation of Latin. Until well into the twentieth century Latin was pronounced across Europe more or less according to the rules of the vernacular, so that each country’s Latin spoke with a distinctive accent. The tradition was particularly strong in France, which clung proudly to its sense of Gallic independence from Rome. Differences between national pronunciations were so marked at the time of the First Vatican Council of 1869-70 that the Vatican had to train reporters specially so that they would be able to record what the delegates from various countries were saying—all in Latin, the common working language of the Catholic Church! In 1903 Pope Pius X called for a single pronunciation of Latin for the whole Church; naturally he inclined to his own Italianate variety. But the reform took decades and met with considerable resistance. “Aimez le latin même sous le vêtement qui lui ont donné les siècles parmis nous, l’accomodant aux évolutions de notre langue, car il n’a jamais cessé d’être nôtre. Ne l’obligeons pas à prendre un déguisement étranger ou d’arlequin…” pleaded a French curate and phoneticist in 1928. (“Love Latin in the guise which its centuries among us have given it, fitting it to the growth of our language; for it has never ceased to be ours. Don’t force it to take up a foreign or harlequin disguise…”) Only with the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 did universal Italianate pronunciation finally prevail.

Today we employ the traditional French Latin that Fauré knew; indeed, he could have imagined no other. Not only does French Latin make better sense of certain aspects of his declamation (consider, for example, “LibeRA me,” with its rising end stress), its reedy vowels and softened consonants lend a characteristically French elegance and refinement to this perfectly poised, most serene Requiem.

Scott Metcalfe is the artistic and music director of Blue Heron.

A New Year's Cry!

2016 is here... and wow!

First things first, we hope that this finds each of you doing well as we cross over the line into another year. We're all in this together, and we wouldn't have it any other way. 

The turning of the year is always a great chance to take a second and just look around. So we glanced back at 2015. Three words: That was fun!

From our Grammy nomination to the rocket-to-the-moon success of "Crossing" to our "Best of Boston" moment, it's been an extraordinary run. There are still some moments when we look back and say "Hey, did that really happen? 

But really - and this is always, always, true - it's not about the high points. It's about the work that we do every day, with each other. We are a group that is continually thinking about process, dreaming about shared virtuosity, and helping each other to be as creative and communicative as we can be. That's our real purpose. Accolades are always great, and affirming - but it's because they're a reflection of the work we love. 

So here we are, looking forward after looking backward. And there's no doubt that 2016 is a year that fills us with excitement. It's the year of our Tenth Anniversary Season, which is coming right up! (It's so tempting to drop even one hint of some of what's in store next year, but it's still under wraps!) We're also very close to hiring a wonderful Executive Director, which will move the organization forward in ways that, frankly, we still can't imagine. 

And right around the corner, we're looking forward to a fantastic spring filled with concerts and collaborations. Before January even ends, we will have performed the Faure Requiem with a choir we've been admiring for years - Blue Heron. It all comes back to the work, and ringing in 2016 with these inspired singers is a bit of a collective dream come true. 

We can't say often enough that this is all possible because of you. Your presence, your partnership, your listening ears and inspired minds, your love, and the million ways that you help and support us. 


2016 begins in gratitude. 


With love and music, 

The Criers