Rhapsodic Overture

Conductor John Kennedy Piano Julia Hamos

Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra

Program

Rhapsodic Overture Edmund Thornton Jenkins (1894 – 1926)

CHARLESTON GAILLARD CENTER Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall

June 3, 7:30pm

1 hour, 40 minutes Performed with an intermission

Restored, edited, and arranged by Tuffus Zimbabwe

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra György Ligeti (1923 – 2006)

I. Vivace molto ritmico e preciso II. Lento e deserto III. Vivace cantabile IV. Allegro risoluto V. Presto luminoso

Julia Hamos, piano

Intermission

AIŌN Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b. 1977)

I. Morphosis II. Transcension III. Entropia

This performance is made possible in part through funds from the Spoleto Festival USA Endowment, generously supported by BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.

Spoleto Festival USA is proud to present this performance with the support of the Charleston Gaillard Center.

One of the wonderful aspects of Spoleto Festival USA is that in annual return, the arts can serve to help the city of Charleston reflect on and learn from its extraordinary past, and to consider its present and future. Sometimes, we experience the counterintuitive realization that moving forward in time brings us closer to a deeper awareness of times further in the past. And today, we hear a lot about the importance of paying witness to our past.

Rhapsodic Overture

Hearing Edmund Thornton Jenkins’s Rhapsodic Overture for the first time, nearly 100 years after it was composed, is to feel a connection to the soul of Charleston. Jenkins, the preternaturally gifted son of the founder of the Jenkins Orphanage Band, left Charleston when he was 20 to study music at the Royal Academy in London and became well-known there and in Paris, where he found easier success as a Black man. His music merged musical traditions of the Black south and early jazz with the classical traditions of Europe—but from his early death at 32, we can only wonder how much more music he had in him.

In recent years, Jenkins’s work has begun to reemerge (such as in the Festival’s 2016 presentation of his unfinished operetta Afram ou La Belle Swita). Thanks to his grand-nephew, Tuffus Zimbabwe, we now have a restoration of one of his largest and most important works, the Rhapsodic Overture. Rebuilt from a set of parts in the absence of an existing score, it is not known if the work was ever performed in Jenkins’s lifetime. From correspondence with family in the months before his death, he describes working on a large orchestral work which we believe is this composition. Its rebirth is a cause for celebration.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

György Ligeti’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra is one of those landmark compositions that one rarely has the opportunity to hear live, if only because it is so fiendishly difficult that performances are rare. Yet his voice (one of the most innovative and imaginative of the 20th century) is familiar to the public from the use of his groundbreaking soundworlds in films such as Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey.

The concerto is connected to those compositions used in 2001 (such as Atmospheres) in how Ligeti diffuses musical materials into global structures or clouds that have multiple overlapping layers of movement (speed) and harmony (sound). The concerto uses “bimetry,” or simultaneous time signatures, so that asymmetrical rhythmic groupings move inside two speed layers, creating what he calls a “kaleidoscope of renewing combinations.” He describes the effect: “the music…after a certain time ‘rises,’ as it were, as a plane after taking off: the rhythmic action, too complex to be able to follow in detail, begins ‘flying’.”

Ligeti was influenced by music from around the world, including polyrhythmic music from west Africa, and tonal systems from South Asia, in developing the concerto. The harmonic basis of the work also explores layers of tonality (such as C major with B major), and the division of the octave into 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12, to create layered tonal and harmonic patterns. As their combination becomes too complex to discern, moving at different speeds simultaneously, Ligeti revels in what he describes as “illusory rhythmic-melodic figures,” where we find ourselves inside a “rhythmic-melodical whirl.” (In Omar, at one point, Omar Ibn Said reflects on his disorientation in time and place, singing that “the whirlwind has me.”)

For Ligeti, the piano concerto was a signal expression of his ethos of integrating musical influences in celebrating “the spell of time”:

I present my artistic credo in the Piano Concerto: I demonstrate my independence from criteria of the traditional avantgarde, as well as the fashionable postmodernism. Musical illusions which I consider to be also so important are not a goal in itself for me, but a foundation for my aesthetical attitude. I prefer musical forms which have a more object-like than processual character. Music as “frozen” time, as an object in imaginary space evoked by music in our imagination, as a creation which really develops in time, but in imagination it exists simultaneously in all its moments. The spell of time—the experience of enduring its passing by and closing it in a moment of the present—is my main intention as a composer.

AIŌN

The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has emerged in the past decade as a major voice in contemporary music. Her works have had several appearances at the Festival, including the Festival Orchestra’s well-received 2017 US premiere of her work Dreaming. With AIŌN, Thorvaldsdottir has made her first symphony-scale composition, a work in three movements for large orchestra. Her words about how AIŌN explores time and serves our connection to our past and future, inspired me to find it a perfect work for our reckoning with the experience of the pandemic and for our 2022 Festival. Thorvaldsdottir describes her motivations for the composition:

AIŌN is inspired by the abstract metaphor of being able to move freely in time, of being able to explore time as a place/space that you inhabit rather than experiencing it as a one-directional journey through a single dimension. Disorienting at first, you realize that time extends in all directions simultaneously and that whenever you feel like it, you can access any moment, even simultaneously. As you learn to control the journey, you find that the experience becomes different by taking different perspectives—you can see every moment at once, focus on just some of them, or go there to experience them. You are constantly zooming in and out, both in dimension and perspective. Some moments you want to visit more than others, noticing as you revisit the same moment, how your perception of it changes.

Thorvaldsdottir takes this notion further, describing the symphony in terms that we often ascribe to what we hope Spoleto Festival USA is for our audiences:

This metaphor is connected to a number of broader background ideas in relation to the work. AIŌN is a reflection on how we relate to our lives, to the ecosystem,

and to our place in the broader scheme of things. At any given moment, we are connected both to the past and to the future, and not just of our own lives but across— and beyond—generations. In the work, this reflection is envisioned by being able to move freely in time where we are invited to get perspective, to learn, and to grow. AIŌN is characterized by an embracing and resilient energy, combining strength, tenderness and hope. It evokes both the ancient and things to come, seeking refuge in the possibilities of resurrection, of rebuilding ourselves.

As these three works reveal, music has a special capacity to serve as an experience of time and to delve into narratives of time in different yet powerful ways.

— John Kennedy

Artists

JOHN KENNEDY (Spoleto Festival USA Resident Conductor and Director of Orchestral Activities) has been a change-maker in music for over 30 years, leading acclaimed performances and premieres worldwide of opera, orchestral, ballet, and new music. In recent seasons at the Festival, Kennedy has conducted operas by leading composers of our time including Francesconi, Glass, Lachenmann, Lim, Huang Ruo, Saariaho, and others. Kennedy is a prolific composer whose works have been performed worldwide; his family opera The Language of Birds will have a new production by Canadian Children’s Opera Company in Toronto in June. This summer, he will lead West Edge Opera in the US Premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Coraline.

JULIA HAMOS (piano) combines her American and Hungarian roots with an adventurous spirit to explore the essence of repertoire ranging from Bach to composers living today. Instinctive artistic expression, a forward-thinking attitude, a joyful physical flexibility at the instrument, and an unyielding fascination with the music she plays makes her an artist to watch. In 2021 she worked with Daniel Barenboim in a series of filmed masterclasses on Beethoven solo piano and string sonatas. At the invitation of Sir András Schiff, she will appear in the Building Bridges series throughout Europe in the 2022—23 season. She currently serves as the assistant to the musicology program at the Barenboim-Said Akademie. She is also currently in the process of recording her first solo CD.

TUFFUS ZIMBABWE is a pianist, composer, and educator from the Boston area. He studied music at Berklee College of Music and New York University. Zimbabwe is a keyboardist for the Saturday Night Live Band on NBC. He is also a pianist for the Trilogy Opera Company. Zimbabwe has roots in Charleston through his grandmother Mildred Jenkins, who was a professional vocalist in the operatic and spiritual styles, and studied at the New England Conservatory and the Sorbonne in Paris. Mildred Jenkins and her older brother Edmund Thornton Jenkins were children of Rev. Daniel Joseph Jenkins and Lena James who founded the Jenkins Orphanage and internationally renowned Jenkins Orphanage Band. He is honored to continue this musical legacy and to return to Charleston where it all started.

THE SPOLETO FESTIVAL USA ORCHESTRA serves as a backbone to the Festival’s programming, appearing in many different configurations as part of opera, symphonic, choral, chamber, and contemporary performances. Comprised of early career musicians, the Orchestra is formed anew each year through nationwide auditions. Alumni of the Orchestra can be found in orchestras throughout the world, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Concertgebouw Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, and many others.