PROGRAM NOTES

“For” Seasons was curated by Crier Michael Unterman

ANNA THORVALDSDOTTIR (b. 1977) Illumine

In an interview, Anna Thorvaldsdottir reflected on the deep impression her music bears from the experience of her childhood, growing up in a small town in Iceland surrounded by mountains and the ocean: “You hear all these textures and sounds that kind just of become the soundtrack of your life, and I was paying attention to those sounds. When I am inspired by nature, it’s because of the musical qualities I find in it, not to try to take an element from nature…Sometimes it’s about the balances and kind of structural forces and opposites in nature. It’s not really about the romanticism or about the emotion.” Her conceptualization of sound also took inspiration from the natural world, as she describes orchestrating as, “an ecosystem of sounds that come together and breathe together.”

With Illumine, whose subject matter is light, it is easy to imagine we are looking far beyond the earthly landscape, to the raw intensity of solar fire whose heat and radiance cuts through the vast cold darkness of space. In the composer’s own words, “The inspiration for Illumine is based on the notion of dawn and the relationship between light and darkness—in particular the ignition of the first beams of light and the subtle rhythms that appear through the pulsating dance of light emerging.”

ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741) The Four Seasons

In 1711, Vivaldi’s first collection of concertos was published. It dramatically widened the reputation and influence of the asthmatic, red-haired, Venetian priest, who had once played alongside his father in the orchestra at St Mark’s Basilica and taught violin to the talented girls at the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for orphaned and abandoned girls. Colorfully titled L’estro Armonico, or harmonic inspiration, the reverberations of its impact were felt widely. Johann Joachim Quantz, flute instructor and court composer for Frederick II “The Great” of Prussia, remarked, “as musical pieces of a kind that was then entirely new, they made no small impression on me. I was eager to accumulate a good number of them, and Vivaldi’s splendid ritornelli served as good models for me in later days.” Johann Sebastian Bach spent hours copying out Vivaldi’s scores to study them closely and made transcriptions of multiple L’estro Armonico concertos for the keyboard.

Of the over 500 concertos Vivaldi would write throughout his lifetime, four of them would become part of the global musical vernacular for musicians, music lovers and the public, alike. Now known by the nickname “The Four Seasons,” the concertos that descriptively portrayed the changing natural world and the scenes taking place against its backdrop were originally published as part of a set of twelve published in 1725 called Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione op.8 (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention).

In his seasons, Vivaldi sculpted a precise vision through vivid instrumentation and descriptive text he provided throughout the score. If you flipped through its pages, you would see frequently above or around the parts phrases like, “song of the birds,” “the barking dog,” or “the fear of lightening and fierce thunder, and of flies and swarms.” These functioned more as shorthand reminders for the sonnets that were published anonymously in the score, though many believe they were also by Vivaldi. Part of the miracle of their enduring appeal is the tangible accessibility we have with the vividly portrayed subject matter. Vivaldi’s world is also our world. We don’t need to imagine what it must have been like, because we share the experiences he portrays across 300 years of time.

Spring

Allegro
Spring has come with joy
Welcomed by birds with joyous songs,
And the streams, amid gentle breezes,
Whisper softly as they sink.
The sky is covered in black and
Thunder and lightning announce the storm
When they are silent, the birds
Resume their delicious songs.
Largo e pianissimo sempre
And in the pleasant flowery meadow,
To the soft murmur of leaves and plants,
The goatherd sleeps, his faithful dog by his side.
Allegro
To the happy sound of a rustic bagpipe,
Nymphs and shepherds dance in their favorite place
When spring appears in all its glory.

Summer

Allegro non molto
Under the unforgiving sun of the season
The man and the herd are languishing, the pine is burning.
The cuckoo begins to sing and immediately
The dove and the goldfinch join him.
A light breeze is blowing, but Boreas
Woke up to suddenly fight with his neighbor,
And the shepherd cries because above his head
The formidable storm and its destiny.
Adagio e piano - Presto e forte
His weary limbs are deprived of rest
Fear of lightning and scary thunder
And flies and hornets swarming.
Presto
Alas, his fears come true:
Thunder and lightning are raging in the skies.
And the hail cuts down the great wheat.

Autumn

Allegro
The peasant celebrates by dancing and singing
The pleasure of the rich harvest,
And full of Bacchus liquor
They end their rejoicings with a sleep.
Adagio molto
All are led to abandon the dances and the songs
By the air which, now sweet, gives pleasure
And by the season, which invites many
To find their pleasure in a sweet sleep.
Allegro
All are led to abandon the dances and the songs
By the air which, now sweet, gives pleasure
And by the season, which invites many
To find their pleasure in a sweet sleep.

Winter

Allegro non molto
Frozen and shivering in the icy snow,
Under the battering of a terrible wind
Run stamping your feet every moment,
Teeth chattering in the cold.
Largo
Spend calm and happy moments by the fire
While outside the rain sprinkles everyone.
Allegro
Walking on the ice with hesitant steps,
By being careful, lest you fall.
Jump in haste, slip, and fall to the ground,
Get back on the ice and run,
In case the ice cracks and opens.
To hear, leaving their screened house, Sirocco,
Boreas, and all the winds in battle
It’s winter, but it brings joy.

*unknown translator, sonnets

QUINN MASON (b. 1996) Reflections on a Memorial for String Orchestra

Quinn Mason’s childhood was filled with the sounds of
classical music on the radio, but it was a class field trip to the
Dallas Symphony Orchestra that would shape the direction of
his life. There, he heard Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the
Wolf, a programmatic and colorful work, which captured his 10-year-old imagination and got him fascinated in orchestral music. That early interest in emotional storytelling is evident in all of Mason’s music, which demonstrates profound sensitivity to our experience as humans in the world. Originally commissioned for a concert remembering victims of racial violence, Mason found Reflection on a Memorial could easily apply itself to a wide variety of situations and applications, much like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a piece that has become a centerpiece for moments in life that give pause. Mason elaborates on the meaning of the work in his program note, featured here.

"Reflection on a Memorial contemplates the passing of a person or a tragic event and meditates on this idea. In the composition, the listener experiences grief and mourning at first as we ponder and think deeply about events past, and at a brief moment in the climax, an enlightening moment that can be seen as light through darkness and a spark of hope.

The composition is scored for string orchestra and begins with a soli for the viola section. I chose the viola section to begin this piece because of the mournful and singing character of the instrument’s sound. Also prominently featured throughout the composition are the voices of the solo violin and cello, which almost take on narrative roles; at the end, a solo cello reprises the viola line heard at the beginning as a final mournful statement.

There are 4 distinct sections in the piece: a somber, melancholy beginning, then a faster, tragic outburst of grief, followed by a calmer reflective passage, which feature hopeful yet intense chords that build up to a light infused climax. This is all brought together with a coda that is a faint memory of an earlier section of the piece, which becomes distant and fades into the abyss."

SUFJAN STEVENS "Year of the Boar" from Suite from Run Rabbit Run, arr. Atkinson

Occasionally, a composition, once released into the world, undergoes a series of transformations unforeseen by the creator. Around the year 2000, singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens enrolled in a writing program to exercise writing in longform. While this necessitated a shift of focus away from narrative song writing, Stevens still felt the desire to express himself musically. This led him to experiment with writing instrumental works on computer software. What started as a “hobby project” became his 2001 electronic music album, Enjoy Your Rabbit, which used the Chinese zodiac as a template to explore the characteristics of each animal. A metamorphosis of that concept came several years later when a group of composers turned the electronic works from Enjoy Your Rabbit into arrangements for acoustic instruments, releasing them as the 2009 album, Run Rabbit Run. One of the composers who worked on that project, Michael Atkinson, collected four of his arrangements into a Suite, and was eventually tapped to collaborate with choreographer Justin Peck for the creation of a 2016 ballet titled Year of the Rabbit, using songs from Run Rabbit Run.

The brief movement, Year of the Boar, is characterized by a churning, propelling rhythmic motif and squealing glissandos. Mythology notes that the placement of the boar, or pig, in the 12th and final spot is due to the animal always showing up late and last, whether the Buddha or the Emperor was summoning.

CAROLINE SHAW Entr’acte

Joseph Haydn’s Op. 77 quartets would be his last in a genre that had played such a pivotal role in shaping throughout his life. Originally intending to write a set of six for Prince Franz Joseph Lobkowitz, Haydn became overwhelmed and was able to complete only two. Playing with expectation was Haydn’s wheelhouse, and in the Op. 77 no. 2 quartet he reversed the usual order of movements by placing the minuet second. He then wrote its triple meter in a way that makes it sound as if you are counting in two instead of three, an amusing syncopation trick that plays with the ear’s ability to keep track of the beat. This is contrasted by a lithe melody in the trio that breaks the pace and leads the listener into another entirely different world. That transformational quality inspired Caroline Shaw to write Entr’acte. The title, denoting music that plays the role of an interlude, alludes to the specific nature of minuet and trio, with the trio acting as a kind of interval between re-statements of the minuet’s main themes, and the general magic of transitions in music.

Shaw writes about Entr’acte:

“Entr’acte was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2 — with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.”

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.