It’s one of our most exciting performances of the season! This one-night-only event marks Stéphane Denève’s debut as New World Symphony’s Artistic Director. Offering a glimpse at the future of New World Symphony, the evening will feature three works that have yet to be performed at New World Center: Henri Dutilleux’s Métaboles—an orchestral showpiece by a French composer for an American orchestra, SERMON—a song cycle assembling works from John Adams and Anthony Davis, envisioned and performed by Davóne Tines, and Richard Strauss’ monumental Ein Heldenleben—A Hero’s Life. This is a concert for the history books.

Pre-Concert Chat: Ticketholders for the Saturday, April 8 performance are invited to a pre-concert chat with NWS Fellows in the Truist Pavilion. These half-hour chats begin one hour prior to the performance. Seating is limited. 

 

 

 

 

Tickets no longer available online.

Program

Henri Dutilleux

Métaboles (1959-64)
Approximate duration: 18 minutes

During a career that spanned the entire second half of the 20th century, Henri Dutilleux managed to avoid the dogmas and orthodoxies that weighed down so many of his contemporaries. After training at the Paris Conservatory, Dutilleux earned the establishment’s seal of approval when he won the prestigious Rome Prize in 1938, although the outbreak of World War II cut short his Italian residency. By the time he first encountered Schoenberg’s 12-tone principles after the war, he was already far enough down his own independent path that he didn’t get too swept up like his younger colleagues. Instead, Dutilleux crystallized his intuitive sound in a breakthrough Piano Sonata from 1948, and he honed his orchestral palette in the Symphony No. 1 from 1951. Working to exacting standards and at a glacial pace, Dutilleux ended up completing only a dozen works for orchestra during a career that stretched into his nineties.

Métaboles originated in 1959 as a commission to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Cleveland Orchestra, but it took Dutilleux five years to deliver the 17-minute score. It was a period when the composer was questioning the formal models of his forebears, and seeking new principles that could organize the structure of a piece; in this case, he developed a novel solution by linking five interconnected sections that morph through a series of “metabolisms.”

Each section highlights a different subset of the orchestra, starting with the woodwinds in an elemental mood Dutilleux described as Incantatory. Near the end, a thick block of strings materializes and then dissipates, previewing their featured role in the second section, Linear. Dry plucking from a single bass begins a process that blooms into punctuated brass in the third section, Obsessive. Out of that climax, a shadowy continuation from clarinets and percussion introduces the dominant voices of the fourth section, Torpid. The Flamboyant finale is the shortest section, and it brings all the orchestral forces together for an enigmatic ending that metabolizes and recontextualizes earlier material.

Davóne Tines, et al.

Concerto No. 1: SERMON (2021)
Approximate duration: 18 minutes

Davóne Tines is best known as an operatic bass-baritone who has electrified the stage in roles written by such prominent composers as John Adams, Kaija Saariaho and Terence Blanchard. He is also a creator in his own right, developing genre-defying works like The Black Clown, a theater piece based on a Langston Hughes poem that led The New York Times to declare that Tines “embodies the evolving, divided soul of Black America.”

After 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was killed in her bed by the Louisville police, Tines collaborated with the songwriter Igee Dieudonne to compose a short art song, “VIGIL,” subtitled An Exercise in Empathy. Another collaborator, Matthew Aucoin (a high-profile young composer who has written for Tines before), arranged an orchestral version that was premiered by the Louisville Symphony in 2020.

“VIGIL” became the core of SERMON, a larger work that Tines dubbed his Concerto No. 1. The first movement extracts the aria “Shake the Heavens” from the Nativity-themed oratorio El Niño by John Adams, built on a section of Old Testament prophecy. The bone-rattling proclamation gains extra power from being preceded with a text by James Baldwin, drawing on related imagery.

The pattern continues with a recitation of Langston Hughes’ poem “Hope” as a prelude to “VIGIL.” The final movement brings in music composed in 1985 by Anthony Davis: “Malcolm’s Prison Aria” from the opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. First, though, comes a vulnerable and unsparing text by jessica Care moore, a poet Tines first collaborated with through his role as an artist-in-residence with the Detroit Opera. Her poem’s title is “EXEGESIS,” aligning with Tines’ concept of this entire hybrid work being patterned after the church tradition of the exegesic sermon, which “takes a scripture and expounds upon it in order to tell a story,” as he explained in an interview with the BBC. In this structure, words selected from Black writers hold the space of scripture, and the musical selections function as the commentary.

Richard Strauss

Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40 (1898)

Richard Strauss began his musical life with conservative tastes, taking after his father (the great horn player Franz Strauss) in a preference for the Classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. It was only once Strauss left home that his ears opened up to the “music of the future,” to quote a phrase associated with his new musical idol, Richard Wagner. In time, Strauss would inherit Wagner’s mantle as the king of progressive opera, thanks to works like Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). But first he followed Franz Liszt into the orchestral genre of storytelling known as the symphonic poem, as heard in such standout works as Don Juan (1889), Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1895) and Also sprach Zarathustra (1896). These “tone poems,” to use Strauss’ preferred term, redefined orchestral craft and placed the young composer at the forefront of the musical avant-garde.

For Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), the 34-year-old Strauss made the audacious plan to base the tone poem loosely on his own life. We also know from letters that he was partly responding to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, nicknamed the “Heroic” symphony (“Eroica” in Italian). Like that grand symphony, Ein Heldenleben strikes up the key of E-flat, and it assigns important themes to the horns, “always a symbol of heroism,” according to Strauss.

The triumphant first section, The Hero, declaims a symphonic argument that is a logical successor to Beethoven’s landmark symphony. With a grand pause—the only pronounced point of silence in an otherwise continuous score—the focus shifts to The Hero’s Adversaries, represented by the clucking flute, snarling oboe, and a self-important tuba figure. The third section, The Hero’s Companion, introduces another character, a solo violin, which stands in for Strauss’ wife Pauline, a soprano.

An offstage trumpet fanfare interrupts this romantic idyll, heralding a chaotic scene of The Hero at Battle. The next section begins with a menacing return of the adversarial tuba figure, but it settles into a sublime tour through The Hero’s Works of Peace, including quotations from Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, and Also sprach Zarathustra. At the end of The Hero’s Retirement from this World and Completion, a final swell uses the climbing figure familiar from the start of Also sprach Zarathustra (and even more familiar from 2001: A Space Odyssey) to retire Ein Heldenleben on a suitably heroic note.

– © 2023 Aaron Grad

 Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel's masterpiece as a collective call for justice.

Text for Concerto No. 1: SERMON (2021; devised by Davóne Tines)

A Note from New World Symphony

Concerto No. 1: SERMON contains an excerpt from Anthony Davis' opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, the text of which contains a racial slur. Though we will present the music with its original lyrics, as is the composer's intent, we have chosen not to print or project the word itself. 

 

Movement I

James Baldwin: Excerpt from “A Letter to My Nephew” (1962)

Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.

 

John Adams: “Shake the Heavens” from El Niño (1999)

For thus saith the Lord: Yet once, it is a little while, And I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land: It is a little while and I will shake the heavens And the desire of all the nations shall come.

 

Movement II

Langston Hughes: “Hope” (1951)

Sometimes when I’m lonely,
Don’t know why,
Keep thinkin’ I won’t be lonely
By and by.

 

Igee Dieudonne / Davóne Tines: “VIGIL” (2020; arranged by Matthew Aucoin)

Where there is darkness, We’ll bring light. Hallelujah.

 

Movement III

jessica Care moore: “EXEGESIS” (2021)

Why do I still feel the need to prove or explain my humanity to you?

The stories of bones traveling
Beneath my skin
Exhausted from explaining
All the men I’ve been.

Our bodies Atlantic
Our bodies, boundless economy
A magnificent exhibition

I live in a place that detached our legs
From trees that bore strange fruit and
Gave birth to blues.

Humanity’s deepest contradiction
Looks      just      like      me.

I've cried over the deaths of sons that were not my own, so it becomes, you become this ocean. And then you become this body that has to hold an entire racist pain.

Bodies never broken
Refusing and resisting
How does one play the part of
Someone
Simply existing?

This is not a show. This is our lives. This is my life. Performance art around our trauma doesn't move me in the same way. It's not even for me, for that matter. It's really about explaining why to white people, why they should care about us as equal human beings. And I find it to be quite absurd.

Why don't you understand that we're exhausted? That I'm exhausted, that we're all exhausted from this very trite conversation ––that this is really beneath us at this point. Why don't you understand we have so much work to still do? Why?

I need you to understand that you will never fully understand what it's like to be a black woman or a man or a child.

And that's not the expectation.

But, I do expect you to have empathy, and I do expect you to do the work, the deep work, the deep searching of figuring out what your role is and knowing that you have one to play.

I need you to stop assuming you get it.

I need you to stop assuming you get it.

 

Anthony Davis: “Malcolm’s Prison Aria” from X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1985; libretto by Thulani Davis)

I wouldn’t tell you what I know; you would not hear my truth.
You want the story, but you don’t want to know.
My truth is you’ve been on me a very long time. Longer than I can say.
As long as I’ve been living you’ve had your foot on me, always pressing.
My truth is white men killed my old man, drove my mother mad.
My truth is rough, my truth could kill, my truth is fury.
They always told me, “You don’t have a chance, you’re a n―r after all. You can
jitterbug and prance, but you’ll never run the ball.”
My truth told me, quit before you start.
My truth told me, stayin’ alive is all you’ve got.
I’ve shined your shoes, I’ve sold your dope, hauled your boot-leg, played with hustler’s
hope, but the crime is mine. I will do your time so you can sleep.
I won’t be out to get you on the street at night, but I won’t forget any evil that’s white.
My truth is a hammer coming from the back.
It will beat you down when you least expect.
I would not tell you what I know.
You want the truth, You want the truth,
You want the truth, but you don’t want to know.

Programa

Henri Dutilleux

Métaboles (1959-64)
Duración aproximada: 18 minutos

En el transcurso de una carrera que abarcó toda la segunda mitad del siglo XX, Henri Dutilleux logró evitar los dogmas y las doctrinas estrictas que agobiaron a tantos de sus contemporáneos. Después de estudiar en el Conservatorio de París, Dutilleux se ganó la aprobación del mundo musical cuando le fue otorgado el prestigioso Premio de Roma en 1938, aunque el comienzo de la Segunda Guerra Mundial interrumpió su residencia en Italia. Cuando descubrió la serie de 12 tonos de Schoenberg después de la guerra, ya estaba lo suficientemente adelantado en su propio camino y no se dejó impresionar como sus colegas más jóvenes. En cambio, Dutilleux cristalizó su intuitiva sonoridad en una innovadora Sonata para Piano que escribió en 1948, y perfeccionó su técnica orquestal en la Sinfonía No. 1 de 1951. Trabajando con estándares rigurosos y con gran lentitud, Dutilleux terminó completando solo una docena de obras para orquesta durante una carrera que alcanzó sus noventa años.

Métaboles nació en 1959 como un encargo para celebrar el 40 aniversario de la Cleveland Orchestra, pero le tomó a Dutilleux cinco años para completar la partitura de 17 minutos. Fue un período en que el compositor se cuestionaba los modelos formales de sus antecesores y buscaba nuevos principios que pudieran organizar la estructura de la pieza; en este caso, desarrolló una novedosa solución vinculando cinco secciones interconectadas que se transforman a través de una serie de “metabolismos”.

Cada sección resalta un subconjunto diferente de la orquesta, comenzando con los vientos madera en un estado de ánimo elemental que Dutilleux describió como Incantatory (Encantador). Casi al final, un grueso bloque de cuerdas se materializa y luego se disipa, como un preámbulo a su importante papel en la segunda sección, Linear (Lineal). Un contrabajo solo pulsando en seco comienza un proceso que deriva en vientos metales punteados en la tercera sección, Obssesive (Obsesivo). Fuera de este clímax, una sombría continuación de los clarinetes y la percusión nos presenta las voces dominantes de la cuarta sección, Torpid (Letárgico). El Flamboyant (Ostentoso) finale es la sección más corta, uniendo todas las fuerzas orquestales para un enigmático final que metaboliza y recontextualiza material musical anterior.

Davóne Tines, et al.

Concerto No. 1: SERMON (2021)
Duración aproximada: 18 minutos

Davone Tines es mayormente conocido como un bajo-barítono operático que ha electrizado los escenarios con papeles escritos por compositores tan prominentes como John Adams, Kaija Saariaho y Terence Blanchard. Es también un creador por derecho propio, desarrollando obras que desafían el género como The Black Clown (El payaso negro), una pieza teatral basada en un poema de Langston Hughes de la cual el periódico The New York Times declaró que Tines “personifica el alma dividida y en evolución de la América negra”.

Después que Breonna Taylor, de 26 años, fuera asesinada en su cama por la policía de Louisville, Tines colaboró con la cantautora Igee Dieudonne en la composición de una canción clásica corta, “VIGIL” (Vigilia), subtitulada An Exercise in Empathy (Un ejercicio de simpatía). Otro colaborador, Matthew Aucoin (un compositor de alto perfil que ha escrito para Tines anteriormente), hizo un arreglo para orquesta que fue estrenado por la Louisville Symphony en 2020.

“VIGIL” se convirtió en el núcleo de SERMÓN, una obra más grande que Tines nombró su Concerto No. 1. El primer movimiento extrae el aria “Shake the Heavens” (Tiemblan los Cielos) del Oratorio sobre la Natividad El Niño de John Adams, basada en una sección de profecías del Viejo Testamento. La estremecedora proclamación gana en poderío al ser precedida por un texto de James Baldwin, basado en imágenes relacionadas.

El patrón continúa con la lectura del poema “Hope” (Esperanza) de Langston Hughes, como preámbulo a “VIGIL”. El movimiento final nos trae música compuesta por Anthony Davis en 1985: “Malcolm’s Prison Aria” (El aria de la prisión de Malcolm) de la ópera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (La vida y la época de Malcolm X). Primero, sim embargo, viene un vulnerable e implacable texto de Jessica Care Moore, una poeta con la que Tines colaboró por primera vez durante su trabajo como artista en residencia con la Detroit Opera. El título de su poema es “EXEGESIS”, alineándose con el concepto de Tines de que esta obra híbrida fuera un patrón basado en la tradición eclesiástica del sermón exegético, el cual “toma una Escritura y la expande para contar una historia”, como explicó en una entrevista con la BBC. En esta estructura, palabras seleccionadas de compositores afroamericanos llenan el espacio de la Escritura, y las selecciones musicales funcionan como comentario.

Richard Strauss

Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40 (1898)

Richard Strauss comenzó su vida musical con gustos conservadores, siguiendo a su padre (el gran trompista Franz Strauss) en su preferencia por el estilo clásico de Mozart, Haydn y Beethoven. Fue solo cuando Strauss  dejó su hogar que sus oídos se “abrieron” a la “música del futuro”, para citar una frase asociada con su nuevo ídolo musical, Richard Wagner. Con el tiempo, Strauss heredaría el manto de Wagner como el rey de la ópera progresista, debido a obras como Salome (1905) y Elektra (1909). Pero primero seguiría a Franz Lizst en el género orquestal narrativo conocido como poema sinfónico, como podemos apreciar en grandes obras como Don Juan (1889), Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1895) y Also sprach Zarathustra (1896). Estos “poemas sonoros”, para usar el término preferido por Strauss, redefinieron el arte orquestal y colocaron al joven compositor al frente del avant-garde musical.

Para Ein Heldenleben (La vida de un héroe), Strauss, de 34 años, planeó de manera audaz basar libremente el poema sonoro en su propia vida. También conocemos por cartas que en parte estaba respondiendo a la Sinfonía No. 3 de Beethoven, nombrada la sinfonía “Heróica” (“Eroica” en italiano). Al igual que esa gran sinfonía, Ein Heldenleben utiliza la tonalidad de Mi bemol mayor, y le asigna temas importantes a los instrumentos de viento metal, “siempre un símbolo de heroísmo”, según Strauss.

Su triunfal primera sección, El héroe, declama un argumento sinfónico que es un lógico sucesor de la trascendental sinfonía de Beethoven. Con una gran pausa – el único punto pronunciado de silencio en una partitura que no se detiene- el enfoque cambia hacia Los adversarios del héroe, representados por el cacareo de la flauta, el gruñido del oboe y una tuba vanidosa y engreída. La tercera sección, La compañera del héroe, introduce otro personaje, un violín solo, el cual reemplaza temporalmente a la esposa de Strauss, Pauline, una soprano.

Una fanfarria de trompetas tras bastidores interrumpe el romántico idilio, proclamando la caótica escena de El héroe en la batalla. La próxima sección comienza con un retorno amenazador de la tuba antagonista, pero alcanza una resolución en un viaje sublime a través de Las obras de paz del héroe, que incluye citas de Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, y Also sprach Zarathustra. Al final de El retiro del héroe de este mundo y su culminación, un último crescendo utiliza la figuración ascendente que conocemos del comienzo de Also sprach Zarathustra (y aún más familiar gracias a 2001: A Space Odyssey) para concluir Ein Heldenleben  en un merecido tono heróico.

                      – © 2023 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad es un compositor y escritor radicado en Seattle. Además de escribir notas al programa para la New World Symphony, la Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, la Baltimore Symphony entre otras, también se desempeña como director artístico de Many Messiahs (Muchos Mesías), un proyecto que recrea la obra maestra de George Frideric Handel como un llamado  colectivo a la justicia.