PROGRAM NOTES
Lei Liang (b. 1972)
VERGE FOR 18 SOLO STRINGS
Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2011 Rome Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. He has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, and many others. In addition, Liang has contributed scholarly research through editing and co-editing books and publishing over thirty articles.
Liang’s program note for Verge for 18 Solo Strings follows:
Originally scored for 18 solo strings, Verge was composed on the verge of an exciting moment in my life: the birth of our son Albert Shin Liang. Albert’s musical name – A, B (Bb), E, D (re) – asserts itself in different configurations and disguises as basic harmonic and melodic material. His heartbeat also makes an appearance in the form of changing tempi and pulsations. In a sense, I composed the piece in order to make a musical amulet for Albert.
On a technical level, I was fascinated by the dialectical relationship between the convergence and divergence of musical voices found in the traditional heterophonic music of Mongolia. There, the functionality of a principal line and its accompaniment can interchange, and often not synchronously.
The 18 strings are divided into antiphonal groups: left versus right, front versus rear. They diverge into various sub-ensembles, quartets, and also appear as 18 virtuosic soloists. Near the end, they converge into a singular voice.
Verge was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and its Music Director, Alan Gilbert. It was premiered on December 17th, 2009 in Symphony Space at the inaugural concert of the Philharmonic’s new music series CONTACT!, conducted by Magnus Lindberg.
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
STRING QUARTET NO. 1 IN D MAJOR, OP. 25, TRANSCRIBED BY ZENAS HSU
Benjamin Britten is often described as the greatest composer to set the English language to music since Henry Purcell in the 17th century. He was also a remarkable composer of instrumental works, on par with orchestral colorists like Maurice Ravel, able to coax forth a multitude of sounds, and therefore emotions. His mind was teeming with music from a very young age—making his mother, who dreamed of fame for her son, very happy. By the age of fourteen he had already written upwards of 100 pieces and found a much-needed teacher and friend in Frank Bridge, who encouraged Britten’s originality by instructing him: “you should find yourself and be true to what you found,” and pay “scrupulous attention to good technique.”
Good technique was almost second nature to Britten. Being true to himself, however, was proving to be complex. Britten was becoming increasingly aware of his homosexuality in an era when he could be arrested for it. Additionally, like Bridge, he had become a pacifist—a tricky position to take in Europe with another world war looming. In the mid-1930s, Britten had met W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood whilst working as a composer for the General Post Office Film Unit immediately after studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music. By January 1939, Auden and Isherwood, then lovers, decided to leave the old world behind and start anew in America. Britten decided to follow their lead and arrived in April with Peter Pears, a talented tenor with whom he had begun a relationship. In America, it would blossom into a full partnership, both personally and professionally, that lasted until Britten’s death.
After arriving to join Auden in New York, Britten and Pears soon found the city to be unsatisfactory and clashed with Auden’s lack of tidiness (and showering, allegedly). Isherwood had already gone on to California, and so they headed West, too, since they could stay with friends in Escondido. It was summer, 1941, when they arrived. Under the California sun, Britten ruminated on an idea he had for an opera that would become Peter Grimes and wrote the String Quartet No. 1 to fulfill a commission he received from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, an esteemed patron of modern chamber music. Poignantly, the connection to Coolidge had come through Britten’s teacher, Bridge, who died a few months prior.
From the hushed quavering of its opening chord, the music announces to the listener that something special is unfolding. Next comes the impish brevity of the second movement, and the unearthly elegance of the third movement. Its use of alternating irregular time signatures (5/4 and 7/4) gives it a tinge of uneasiness, and effects like harmonics and sul ponticello create an ethereal aura. Some also point to its prenotion of what would become the “moonlight” interlude of Peter Grimes. Finally, the bustling energy of its fourth movement emerges, which is built around a repeated pattern of triples and sixteenth note runs. The quartet is a tour de force of intense feeling communicated through music that is astonishingly original and yet uses the familiar language of tonality as its means of expression.
Other works completed in America included the violin concerto, the operetta Paul Bunyan, Young Apollo for piano and strings, Sinfonia da Requiem for orchestra, andthe song-cycles Les Illuminations and Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, to name a few. Britten and Pears returned to England, a country at war, in the spring of 1942.
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928)
SUITE FOR STRING ORCHESTRA, JW 6/2
Many years before joining Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák as one of the three most famous Czech composers in history, Leoš Janáček was an eleven-year-old being taken by his parents nearly 100 miles from his hometown of Hukvaldy to live at the Augustinian Abbey in Brno. He had been accepted there as a choral scholar (nicknamed “Bluebirds” for their light-blue uniforms) and would receive both a solid academic education and musical training, as well as relieve the financial strain on his large family. Coming from a family of teachers, Janáček eventually followed the same path and completed teacher training at age eighteen. Soon after, he launched into a life and career that was continuously split between teaching and music making. Incredibly industrious, he found pockets of time between obligations to study at the Prague Organ School, the Leipzig Conservatory, and the Vienna Conservatory. Ultimately, he would return to spend the majority of his life in Brno, where he made an indelible contribution to the cultural life of the town.
The year 1877 proved to be a momentous one. Janáček and Dvořák had become friends and decided to spend the summer on a walking tour of Bohemia. Janáček was twenty-three years old and just starting out, while Dvořák was thirty-six and on the very cusp of launching into a new phase in his career that would result in world-wide fame. Both were organists, and both would play critical roles in championing Czech independence by finding inspiration in the folk music traditions maintained in rural communities. It was also the year Janáček wrote his Suite for String Orchestra, one of his first attempts at writing a larger scale instrumental piece. Up to that point, his works had been exclusively for chorus or organ, penned during his days at the Abbey for his fellow choristers. The decision to write for a string ensemble was likely determined by looking to Dvořák’s recent Serenade for Strings (1875) for inspiration and instruction.
Originally, Janáček designed the Suite for String Orchestra to be modeled after the baroque suite. However, after digging into the process, his vision for the suite shifted and he discarded the scheme as well as the original movement titles (“prelude,” “allemande,” “sarabande,” etc.). Of note are Janáček’s unique arrangements that frame and highlight the various qualities within the group, such as the enchanting second movement scored for violins and violas that is counterbalanced later in the fifth movement that showcases the lower registers. These choices are striking in their inventive scope and beauty, hinting at immense talent just beginning to be tapped.
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.
