2016 Program Book

2016 INAUGUR AL MUSIC SE ASON

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would like this to be a place of collaboration, of creation, of permanent change, the opposite of a museum, which is a place for preserving works of art in one definite place.

The museum part, which represents permanence, is but a small part of the overall project.

All the activities taking place around these works of art are much more important than the museum part, and they give life to the art. Because of these activities, the works of art continue to live because they communicate their message and dialogue with the public.”

—Aimé Maeght

2016 Inaugural Season

June 17—August 21 Fishtail, Montana

MIDSUMMER NIGHTS TIPPET RISE ART CENTER AND AFTERNOONS AT

2016 Inaugural Season

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2016 Table of Contents

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Welcome to Tippet Rise 8

Pianos at Tippet Rise 20

Music Outdoors 68

For Musicians 10

The Istomin-Horowitz Piano 38

An Evening Walk Through a Bach Prelude 76

The 2016 Concert Schedule 12

Week Two June 24-25 42

The Sound of The Land 78

Week One June 17-18 18

Week Three July 1-2 60

Week Four July 8-9 82

Midsummer Nights at Tippet Rise

Click on any photo to visit the page

Tippet Rise Art Center Alexander Scriabin's Poem 101

Special Weekend August 20-21 148

Tippet Rise’s Partnerships 212

Week Five July 15-16 102

Artist Profiles 169

Thank You to Our Team 218

Evolution of a Performance 110

Education at Tippet Rise 202

Staff and Credits 220

Tippet Rise and the Community 208

Please visit tippetrise.org

Week Six July 22-23 124

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Welcome to Tippet Rise

We are honored to welcome you — our friends, our

neighbors, and our new friends from around Montana and beyond — to our inaugural musical season.

We are often asked the question, why here? Tippet Rise was born out of our passion for the arts, music, and nature, and our quest for a space big and beautiful enough to ensure a private and personal experience for visitors and artists.

When we found the land at Tippet Rise, we saw in it the vast landscape and rich culture of the American West that has inspired so many artists, writers, and composers. Here, the imagination is unleashed by perspectives sculpted by nature, by unlimited horizons that move us to reach out to them. Far away from crowded cities and busy streets, the forgiving spaces of nature and their timelessness heighten our own existence and amplify the freedom which creativity craves. For us, there could not have been a more perfect place to create this Art Center. Here we are separating music from crowded concert halls and centering it in unusual outdoor settings.

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Midsummer Nights at Tippet Rise

Here music will be played outdoors at the sculptures and in natural amphitheaters, as feasts for the eyes and ears, with pieces most often written with vast and resonant hills in mind.

There will be music in the acoustical shell, a structure without walls which uses its corners to envelop performers and audiences with sound. There will be music at the Domo, a monumental indoor-outdoor earthen structure set on a hill, surrounded by five mountain ranges.

And, most important, there is the acoustically immerse hall of the Olivier Barn, which was designed with the dimensions of many rooms favored by Haydn, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, rooms still preferred in Europe but not available until now in the United States.

The ranch brings its own soundtrack, too, with its exceptional silence, similar to what you might hear in the Sahara, and the sounds of birds emerging from the pristine stillness like primal sounds at the beginning of the world.

Here, within this extraordinary setting, we are delighted to welcome exceptional musicians who have accepted the adventure of coming to perform at Tippet Rise.

Like many things at Tippet Rise, the music program has grown out of passionate debates around a dinner table, when we all first discussed music at Tippet Rise, Alban, Chris, Peter and Cathy. Here are some notes from one of our evenings: “Distinctive performers with a particular craft for certain repertoires; great masters; young prodigies, …music coming from the center of the earth, … music expressing a heightened consciousness of preceding historical events, …compositions altering the human spirit at its core, like Alexander Scriabin’s revelations, or Olivier Messiaen’s birdsong; …newly commissioned works from contemporary composers….”

You will find those themes in our inaugural season through recitals by adepts from around the world, concerts honoring our sculptors with music suggested by them as a window into their intentions, and our premiere this summer of songs written for us by the world-renowned Catalan composer Antón García-Abril, played under the Stone Age dolmen designed by his son and daughter-in-law.

Tippet Rise is about its people, as Aimé Maeght said of the museum he created in the south of France. It is not just the bricks and mortar, as innovative as they are, but it is the use that we, its team, and you, its raison d’être, will make of it.

Land and sky are formidable obstacles, and always exhilarating opportunities. In our lives, the chance discovery of timeless music in historic amphitheaters, the once-ina-lifetime encounter with a construction that spoke to us under the stars, inspired us enough to want to make such moments available much more frequently.

Welcome to our dream of midsummer nights (and afternoons) at Tippet Rise.

—The Tippet Rise Team

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EIN UNHEILIGER DANKGESANG

An Unholy Song of Thanksgiving . . . for the Musicians Among Us Musicians don’t decide to become musicians. Musicians

are chosen. By their gifts. By their instruments. A piano chooses you. You aren’t aware you’re doing it, but when you imitate a song you’ve heard on the piano or play anything on a violin—simple things, maybe—you indicate to your parents and teachers that you might go further.

And then you go further, without thinking about it. The upright piano, the kid-size violin, becomes an obsession, something you play all day—and all night—unless forcibly restrained. It’s apparent, even when you’re seven, that you are completely committed to some sort of noise-making machine, to the delight (and horror) of everyone around you. Every musician has stories about this.

When you get older, it becomes apparent, to everyone, that you won’t be doing what everyone else does—playing baseball in summer, going to the beach, hanging out, shooting baskets. You’ll be inside, practicing. There are a hundred pieces you’re dying to learn, and you want to play every note in every piece as perfectly as possible—or even better. You, they, these people becoming musicians, you want to play like Horowitz or Yuja Wang or Heifetz or Lindsey Stirling or Gidon Kremer.

And, yes, you know who these people are. You know these names. They are your heroes.

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Midsummer Nights at Tippet Rise

Such kids aren’t free in the afternoons for play dates—not any afternoon. When other kids go on hockey trips, you go into the city for yet more lessons. Eventually you move to a big city, with or without parents. You live with strangers. Or one parent leaves the other, often for many years, to take care of their prodigy.

Parents move to other countries, sell everything they have, borrow money from relatives, so their child—you— can follow their gifts. No one thinks that anything will happen except fame, fortune, an amazing life in the arts.

But that rarely happens. Mostly there’s no fame, there’s poverty-level income, and the same life as always—more practicing, and more rehearsals.

And you, the musician in you, loves it.

Because music is its own reward.

Even if you become successful, it means flying out right after the concert, grabbing a snack in a motel, getting up early for rehearsal, and flying out again for another concert. It means life in hotel rooms. Mostly bad food. No possessions, because you travel all year. You have a home somewhere, but nothing in it. The only friends you have are people just like you. You travel with a practice keyboard, which Homeland Security keeps on breaking. As soon as a concert is over, it’s back to work learning a new piece, or practicing for the next concert. It never ends.

And you don’t want it to end. Because you love what you do. At any time, if you were offered a chance to be a fireman, or a businessman, or a doctor, you’d never do it.

Because music is your one great love. 1,000%. You don’t think about it. You may look up now and then and say, gosh, was that a stupid decision—but you’d never take it back. You laugh at yourself, because you didn’t know how much work was involved, or that it meant not just a fun week or a year—but your entire life.

And so we want to say thank you to everyone here this summer, for giving us their lives. We know that it takes decades before you feel you can play a single note properly.

We laugh when we see some actress saying she learned how to play the Tchaikovsky piano concerto for a role—in a week. We know you could spend 10, 20 years trying to play it, but only superhuman talent can even get as far as playing it not half badly.

We know you have to memorize tens of millions of notes, each one completely different, each with its own touch, dynamics, with instructions for being very loud or very soft or feathered or attacked, each linked in completely different ways with the notes on either side of it. You have to be able to play those notes just as well as the greatest musicians in history—and differently, so people will want to hear you play them.

And because of you, all of you playing for us this summer, here at Tippet Rise and everywhere, the rest of us can love music. We can play it in our cars, at the beach on boom boxes, buy CDs of it, or download it, or go to concerts, talk about it with our friends, play a few notes on a guitar, start our own bands, play in an orchestra, help book musicians for a theater, be administrators in a museum.

And we can go home at night and practice our own music, learn our own pieces, and listen to a thousand other people who’ve given their lives so they can play the same piece for us on YouTube or at Carnegie Hall.

Because of you, we can dream. We can have a minute alone with our favorite group, or maybe with Mozart. We can listen to the radio. We can have an inner life. We can have a soul. Because of you, there can be us.

So thank you. Thank you. And each one of us can thank the rest of us, because we’re all in this together. And we wouldn’t choose to be any other place.

— Peter and Cathy, and the Team at Tippet Rise 2016Inaugural InauguralSeason Season 2016

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The 2016 Inaugural Music Season 12

Midsummer Nights at Tippet Rise

2016 Inaugural Season

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2016 CONCERT

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Friday, June 17, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Nikolai Demidenko, piano

Saturday, June 18, 2:00 PM Olivier Music Barn Ariel String Quartet

Saturday, June 18, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Nikolai Demidenko, piano Ariel String Quartet

Friday, June 24, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Jenny Chen, piano

Saturday, June 25, 2:00 PM The Domo Christopher O’Riley, piano Emily Helenbrook, soprano

Saturday, June 25, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Alessandro Deljavan, piano

Friday, July 1, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Yevgeny Sudbin, piano

Saturday, July 2, 2:00 PM The Domo Matt Haimovitz, cello

Saturday, July 2, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Matt Haimovitz, cello

Friday, July 8, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn George Li, piano

Saturday, July 9, 2:00 PM Olivier Music Barn Christopher O’Riley, piano Eunice Kim, violi John Henry Crawford, cello

Saturday, July 9, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Christopher O’Riley, piano Svetlana Smolina, piano Yevgeny Sudbin, piano Elmer Churampi, trumpet

The Music at Tippet Rise

SCHEDULE Friday, July 15, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Christopher O’Riley, piano Matt Haimovitz, cello

Saturday, July 16, 2:00 PM The Domo Matt Haimovitz, cello Dover String Quartet

Saturday, July 16, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Christopher O’Riley, piano Svetlana Smolina, piano Caroline Goulding, violin Matt Haimovitz, cello John Bruce Yeh, clarinet

Friday, July 22, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Konstantin Lifschitz, piano

Saturday, July 23, 2:00 PM Satellite #5: Pioneer Excelsis Percussion Quartet Montana Musicians Friends of Tippet Rise

Saturday, July 23, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Stephen Hough, piano

Saturday, August 20, 6:30 PM Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott, piano Christopher O’Riley, piano

Sunday, August 21, 2:00 PM Olivier Music Barn Lucas Debargue, piano

*Artists and/or programs subject to change without notice.

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The Music at Tippet Rise

Our 2016 Music Season 2016 Inaugural Season

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WEEK ONE

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The Music at Tippet Rise

FRIDAY, JUNE 17, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Nikolai Demidenko, piano

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN:

Waltz, Op. 42 in A-flat Major

Mazurka, Op. 33 No. 1 in G-sharp Minor

Waltz, Op. 34 No. 1 in A-flat Major

Mazurka, Op. 30 No. 3 in D-flat Major

Waltz, Op. 18 No. 1 in E-flat Major

Mazurka, Op. 6 No. 4 in E-flat Minor

Waltz, Op. 64 No. 3 in A-flat Major

Mazurka, Op. 17 No. 4 in A Minor

Waltz, Op. 64 No. 2 in C-sharp Minor

Mazurka, Op.30 No. 4 in C-sharp Minor

Waltz, Op. 64 No. 1 in D-flat Major

Mazurka, Op. 67 No. 4 in A Minor (posthumous)

Waltz, Op. 34 No. 2 in A Minor

Mazurka, Op. posthumous, in A Minor

Waltz, Op. posthumous in E Minor INTERMISSION FRANZ LISZT:

Ballade No. 1 in D-flat Major, S. 170

Sonata in B Minor, S.178

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“Recordings are an essential part of my life, which I use partly as a reference. The way we play is a reflection of our life, and we can’t play like pianists in the 1930s because it’s a different life… You take encouragement from previous ages, but then you have to make your own decisions.”

—Nikolai Demidenko

ABOUT THE PROGRAM Nikolai Demidenko has arranged a fascinating program, in which he compares waltzes and mazurkas by Chopin that share similar melodies or harmonic structures, but different forms.

In the second half he compares two works by Liszt, the first Ballade and the vast Sonata. The two pieces share much in concept and intent.

Both Chopin and Liszt frequently wrote first drafts or sketches, passages that inspired later passages or other pieces. Some were warm-ups, or training pieces, for later masterworks. In this intriguing recital you can hear the minds of two geniuses caught in passing, in the act of composition, of rewriting, of moving from one phrase to a later version. Yet each version is a work of art.

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Waltz, Op. 42 in A-flat Major, 1840

Chopin published eight waltzes in his lifetime. He started writing them when he was 14 and continued until the year of his death, 1849. Beneath the melody are incidental notes meant to fill in the time. These notes include a note that sounds wrong, or not in harmony with all the other notes. This kind of grace note, or leading note, was a feature in the slurred notes of a Turkish janissary (such as in 20

The Music at Tippet Rise

Mozart’s Turkish March). Waltzes are in 3/4 time, meaning there are three beats, and a quarter (1/4) note gets one beat. Chopin writes the notes in this waltz as eighth notes, meaning there are six notes to a measure. But there are only two melody notes per measure, meaning that one of the notes on which the beat falls is an accompaniment note. You can count as you hear the music. This means that one note is elevated from the lowly status of accompaniment to melody. This might be interpreted as seditious, a dig at courtly hierarchies, except that Chopin was a great fan of the social order, and depended on it for his students. Nevertheless, the thought must have crossed his mind….

Mazurka, Op. 33 No. 1 in G-sharp Minor, 1838

Although this key uses the same notes as the A-flat major waltz which precedes it, the mood of the somber sharps as opposed to the genial flats is radically opposite. Chopin achieves the quirky stop-and-start rhythms of many of his mazurkas by using a very short note, followed by a rest.

Waltz, Op. 34 No. 1 in A-flat Major, 1838

Chopin’s longest waltz, and the perfect introduction to his world of gilded salons. Chopin lived in elegant rooms at 38, Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin, near the Garnier Opera, and across from what is now the Galéries Lafayette department store. After he had established his genius with a few public concerts, he rarely played anywhere other than at home for his students and their aristocratic parents.

Mazurka, Op. 30 No. 3 in D-flat Major, 1837

More like a waltz than any of the other Mazurkas, this one starts with the same rhythm in single notes as the famous E-Flat Grande Valse brilliante No. 1, Opus 18, then sets its almost Spanish, sad, courtly melody, something from the garden of the Alhambra. It even has a few ominous notes in a different key reminsiscent of the first Ballade. It ends with a whimsical, cheerful variation of its melody.

Waltz, Op. 18 No. 1 in E-flat Major, 1833

The Grande valse brillante was Chopin’s first published waltz, and the perfect beginning to any cotillion or ball.

He had already written and lost 16 waltzes by this time.

He was 23.

Mazurka, Op. 6 No. 4 in E-flat Minor, 1830

into one of the great wines of the world, finally acknowledged by France in 1973 when it was made a first growth, or premier cru, wine. The middle section of this waltz is a spectacular whirl around the dance floor. Chopin’s waltzes elevated the dance form to the status of performance only, but people love to dance to them anyway, as they all maintain the 3/4 waltz rhythm.

Maestro Demidenko has followed the cheerful E-flat Major Waltz with a Mazurka in the same key, but “minore,” in the minor mode.

Mazurka, Op.30 No. 4 in C-sharp Minor, 1837

Waltz, Op. 64 No. 3 in A-flat Major, 1847

Waltz, Op. 64 No. 1 in D-flat Major, 1847

The next year would bring both the February Revolution and the June Days Uprising. In December Napoleon’s nephew was elected president, and later emperor, by the people. After that, France became a republic. So these were revolutionary days. Poland had been rebelling against Prussia for more than a decade, and the insurrection came to a head in 1848. It was unsuccessful, but Chopin lent his name to the cause and composed music for Poland, notably the Polonaises. Chopin was determined to ignore the discontent swirling around him. In fact, his living was based on the continuance of the social order. He would be dead in two years; he never knew the modern Republic of France.

Mazurka, Op. 17 No. 4 in A Minor, 1833

Horowitz used to play this, the most famous of the Mazurkas, as an encore. It’s very similar to the Opus 34, No. 2 waltz, also in A minor, which Maestro Demidenko will play in a few minutes.

Waltz, Op. 64 No. 2 in C-sharp Minor, 1847

This is dedicated to Madame Nathaniel de Rothschild.

Charlotte and Nathaniel were patrons of Balzac, Rossini, Heine, and Delacroix, among others, all friends of Chopin and Liszt. The Rothschilds introduced Chopin to other aristocrats who would become his patrons and the people he emulated. Charlotte was Chopin’s pupil. Five years after this waltz was composed, she and her husband bought Mouton Rothschild, which Philippe Rothschild had turned

Nikolai Demidenko juxtaposes this mazurka with the waltz in the same key.

The so-called waltz of the little dog, shortened to the little (or “minute”) waltz, misinterpreted as taking a minute.

Barbra Streisand has a funny song about this, to the tune of the waltz. Much abused on account of its name, it deserves re-interpretation.

Mazurka, Op. 67 No. 4 in A Minor (posthumous), 1847

This is again very similar to the midsection of the Chopin Waltz, Opus 34, number 2, which follows this in the program. The Mazurka is stranger, more modal, more pagan in a way, but both have chromatic wanderings back to melodies, and cheerful major midsections in very strong waltz tempos.

Waltz, Op. 34 No. 2 in A Minor, 1838 Everyone’s favorite sad, slow waltz.

Mazurka, Op. posthumous, in A Minor, 1827 Very similar to the other two A Minor Mazurkas and to the Waltz in A Minor. The Mazurkas were in a way experiments, Chopin testing the waters of rhythm, ornaments, Lydian and Dorian modes, and a more Orientalist approach to music which ended up being integrated into his more recognizable harmonies. It is out of these earlier adventures that the vast landscape of Chopin’s invented Poland springs.

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Waltz, Op. posthumous in E Minor, 1830

Usually placed last among his waltzes, this was discovered posthumously, and was in fact one of Chopin’s earliest waltzes. He wrote it, along with his First Piano Concerto, just before he left Poland, to show off his technique in a new country. The bravura opening of many of the waltzes is a distinguishing point, as are the codas that close them. Chopin’s codas become faster and more frenetic, and end in a whirlwind of notes, in this case an arpeggio in E minor that cascades the length of the keyboard to finish in the depths, similar to the ending of his last Prélude in D Minor. But the waltz adds four finishing sol-do chords which may be juvenile in retrospect, but which have become one of the most remembered endings in music.

CHOPIN’S MAZURKAS PETER HALSTEAD Chopin wrote 59 mazurkas throughout his short life.

(He died at 39 of tuberculosis.) Nikolai Demidenko has chosen a tour de force assortment of them for his concert tonight.

Chopin had heard Polish national music during his childhood (he left Warsaw when he was 20). Chopin realized that he would never be understood anywhere other than in the world capital of music, Paris. During his lifetime Poland was trying unsuccessfully to secede from a variety of oppressors, mainly Prussia, and Paris was filled with handsome Polish rebels who dressed in military cloaks and preached independence in private salons. Vienna and Trieste, as crossroads to the Balkan countries, had that same atmosphere of adventure, intrigue, espionage, and murder which Paris knew in a tamer way. It wasn’t quite Casablanca, but it had those elements at certain times of the night.

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The Music at Tippet Rise

In this atmosphere Chopin invented his own version of Polish national music, not based on actual songs, but on his own lyric invention. Unlike Liszt, who loved to include Hungarian melodies in his music, and Mozart, who used German folk songs for many of his greatest arias, Chopin was proud to be free of all influence, and his Polish-themed pieces such as the Mazurkas and Polonaises are entirely of his own devising.

Although Arthur Rubinstein used to play them in concert, Chopin’s Mazurkas are mostly simple and short, lending themselves to encores, but rarely to concerts. This evening’s concert is a rare opportunity to be able to compare them with the larger waltz form. Although the generally have a more ethnic structure (similar to the zarzuelas of Bizet) than the better-known waltz form, Chopin modified both forms to invent something we take for granted today, but which didn’t exist before or after Chopin, except for Liszt’s homages. The waltzes might have been danced in a drawing room, and the mazurkas danced in a village square, but they have enormous similarities, such as their optimistic middle sections.

Even Chopin’s waltzes, compared with Strauss’s later and more obvious forms, are as quirky as the mazurkas, with sprung rhythms and arrested forays into dance patterns.

The wit isn’t as obvious to modern listeners, who don’t have the expectations of Chopin’s audience, but if you listen you can hear it. Haydn played with expected clichés in the same way, as did Prokofiev later on. I suppose I’d call wit humor that is mischievous, but not exactly funny. And that’s funny.

FRANZ LISZT: Ballade No. 1 in D-flat Major, S. 170, 1845–49

Liszt was the inventor of the modern piano myth. He was the first to give a solo recital (before that, pianists shared the stage with trained monkeys, violinists, and so forth).

He was also the first to play from memory. He invented the

masterclass, where a musician gathers his students around him to discuss and perform specific pieces.

In 1847 Liszt met Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who felt he should give up concertizing and concentrate on composing. So, at age 35, Liszt retired from performing. Liszt had already given away many of his concert fees to charity, and after 1857 he donated all of them to schools, hospitals, and churches. He was one of the first to give aid concerts to benefit, for instance, the victims of the Great Fire of Hamburg, to build the Beethoven Memorial in Bonn, and to help the bankrupt actress Harriet Smithson (Berlioz’s wife, but that is another story).

In 1847 Liszt wrote his famous Liebestraum No. 3. In 1849 he wrote the first draft of his Sonata. In 1848 he moved to Weimar, where he changed the course of European music and made Weimar the center of the German Enlightenment and of the Wagnerian mythos. Liszt organized the first performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin there in 1850.

It was the home of Goethe and Schiller, and later of Kandinsky and Klee. Kandinsky combined music with paint in a way that no other painter has. The Bauhaus was founded there by Gropius.

The original edition of the First Ballade called it the “Song of the Crusader.” A ballade was originally a dance (as in “Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino,” Figaro’s challenge to his master, the Count), then a song, then a folk ballad, then an art song. Its roots meant it embodied a narrative.

Liszt’s pre-eminent biographer, Alan Walker, claims that Liszt’s Ballades were written in homage to Chopin. Chopin was looking to expand his repertoire with unusual forms, to remove himself from competition with other composers, to become hors de combat. After Chopin died in 1849, Liszt subsumed these forms—polonaises, ballades, berceuses— into his wide-ranging imagination, which eventually led him to atonality and minimalism.

There is a backwards evolution to the concept of variations. Bach would change his melody intrinsically, like a great character actor who can never be recognized.

Mozart would vary a theme only by adapting it to a scale or a march. Liszt keeps the theme entirely the same while the accompaniment changes: arpeggios, march rhythms, broken octaves, broken chords, large chords, complicated descants raging above the always lilting, serene gondola song.

These were the years when Liszt pushed the range of the piano beyond what anyone had ever thought possible. This was when he was rewriting his Transcendental Études to make them almost unplayable, revising his Paganini Etudes with much of the same technique used here, such as fast scales divided between the hands. Many of the tricks used in Gnomenreigen, “La Campanella,” “Harmonies du Soir,” and “Les Jeux d’eaux” rage around the Ballade, while beneath them “La Serenissima” gently ripples. Liszt pulls out all the stops, using every trick at his command to pay homage to a melody he clearly wants to apotheosize. The final rain of arpeggios using every finger on the hand is so magnificent that the ending is a bit of a dénouement. Liszt hasn’t yet figured out how to pull a rabbit out of a hat, how to top himself consistently. The melody itself he perfected very soon afterwards in his Sonata.

Sonata in B Minor, S.178, 1853

It is brilliant that Maestro Demidenko has chosen the first Ballade as the introduction to the sonata, because they are exactly the same piece. The first Ballade is an example of how a brilliant prodigy thinks of having Venetian fireworks without in any way affecting the underlying waters of the Grand Canal.

The Sonata is another thing entirely. One of the monumental achievements in the history of music, it has no break between its four movements, and in that alone it creates an entirely new music, later seen in, for instance, 2016 Inaugural Season

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Dvořák’s scintillating Rusalka, an opera with arias. Music becomes an ongoing flood of gamma rays that stumbles on by opening a door, a celestial phenomenon that continues long after one decided to leave.

marriage. Marie later married a Hohenlohe, a prince, one of the ruling families of the Holy Roman Empire (which, as Andrew Morton pointed out, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire).

Although anyone who needs a murder to justify a novel has tried to develop some sort of plot for the Sonata, it stands alone as a thing which grows out of itself, with no need to describe the world around it. This was a new path for Liszt. From this point on, his music was about itself.

And so Liszt became an abbé, and Carolyne, one of the wealthiest people in the Ukraine (her father had 30,000 serfs), was stripped of her 14 vast estates. She lived chastely but with the great love of Liszt, and died shortly after he did. Her daughter Marie founded the Franz Liszt Foundation, with money from the Kiev estate, which Carolyne had sold and whose proceeds she had personally carried out of Russia during the revolutionary chaos of 1848. Carolyne wrote of the Kiev estate, “Today I have just sold one of my lands, one of the first that my grandfather bought, one of the cornerstones of that fortune amassed so laboriously and honestly by the hard work and sincere efforts of two generations of men…. I burst into tears when it passed into other hands.”

Here technique is deeply embedded in the evolution of the melody, as if the melody’s whims create the exact technique needed for the journey. It dares to end quietly, unheard of for Liszt or any of his piano-thrashing peers.

Everything Liszt did in the first Ballade is here reversed.

The Ballade’s ineffectual ending becomes its opposite: a brilliantly subsiding slip into ultimate silence that would do credit to Rusalka (a mermaid condemned by her father to live in eternal darkness). Crescendos start slowly and take minutes to build. Tone is valued over noise. As the chords mass, they are all the same chord, so it is not for cleverness, but for profundity, that such moments exist.

It is as if Liszt changed his entire personality in a few years, which in fact he had, or at least he had focused on the deeper side of his gifts. We have to thank Carolyne Wittgenstein for that.

Rare is the genius who lives up to his potential. Liszt, who looked as if he might self-destruct like many Hollywood idols, was better than that. Carolyne, who was very devout, gave him strength to develop his best self. Berlioz dedicated his opera Les Troyens to her.

Her Russian husband was immensely powerful and wealthy, a friend to the Czar and a member of one of the vast interconnected ruling families of Europe. He felt that the scandal of his wife’s potential marriage to a musician and, worse, to a Hungarian musician (read: gypsy), would ruin the ability of their daughter Marie to make a noble 24

The Music at Tippet Rise

Reading Alan Walker’s seminal three-volume biography of Liszt as well as Eleanor Perényi’s Liszt will give you a full portrait of one of the loveliest people who ever lived, a man totally generous with his genius, his time, his wealth, completely unusual in his respect for and appreciation of women; he was the real prince, not the Almanach de Gotha nobility who swirled around him like so many scowling butterflies (not that there could be scowling butterflies).

When the Sonata was published, everyone hated it: Clara Schumann, Brahms, Anton Rubinstein, Eduard Hanslick (the major German critic). All these people who fell all over themselves trying to say nasty things about it were, not amazingly, wrong. History has spoken, and with it the people, historians, musicians.

At the time, it was looked down on as “new music.” Today it remains undated, compelling, endlessly varied, and yet entirely of a piece. To hear such a piece played up close by two very different masters will be a rare treat.

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WEEK ONE

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SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 2016, 2:00 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Ariel String Quartet Alexandra Kazovsky, violin Jan Grüning, viola Gershon Gerchikov, violin Amit Even-Tov, cello

Celebrating Artist Stephen Talasnik ’s Satellite #5: Pioneer JOHN ADAMS: Shaker Loops

1. Shaking and Trembling

2. Hymning Slews

3. Loops and Verses

4. A Final Shaking INTERMISSION AARON JAY KERNIS: Musica Celestis

1. Flowing

2. “musica celestis” - Adagio

3. Scherzo - Trio Semplice

4. Quasi una Danza

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM This concert is performed as a celebration of sculptor Stephen Talasnik, who has worked with Christopher O’Riley in choosing the music. The pieces, by two of America’s greatest living composers, reveal a timeless aura. Together, they evoke the scientific continuum of quantum mechanics and the vastness of the universe, as befits Satellite No. 5: Pioneer, one of Talasnik’s many Satellite “variations.” They join us to listen to this unique celebration.

JOHN ADAMS: Shaker Loops, 1978 This piece was originally called Wavemaker. Many of John Adams’s pieces feature repetitive Balinese gamelan ostinatos (wavelike undulations) that mesmerize the audience like a snake charmer, and minuscule changes in the pattern become major events, so we end up hearing micronotes, similar to Asian music.

“The ‘waves’ of Wavemaker were to be long sequences of oscillating melodic cells that created a rippling, shimmering complex of patterns like the surface of a slightly agitated pond or lake,” Adams explained. “The ‘loops’ idea was a technique from the era of tape music where small lengths of prerecorded tape attached end to end could repeat melodic or rhythmic figures ad infinitum. The Shakers got into the act partly as a pun on the musical term to shake, meaning either to make a tremolo with the bow across the string or else to trill rapidly from one note to another.”

I. Shaking and Trembling II. Hymning Slews III. Loops and Verses IV. A Final Shaking

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AARON JAY KERNIS: Musica Celestis, 1990

This piece is the descendant of Samuel Barber’s Adagio.

Written in mourning for the Gulf War, it vibrates with compressed life, with the midsummer stillness, which art requires and which war denies. Kernis’s work is a kaleidoscope of entertaining references, exciting to listen to, always deepened by the jungle of age-old harmony which swirls around the charming parts, as if the characters in a Monet painting decided to sing Piaf.

Musica Celestis is the second movement of Kernis’s First String Quartet. Kernis studied with Adams, Charles Wuorinen, and Morton Subotnick. He has won Grammys, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Rome Prize.

ABOUT THE COMPOSER PETER HALSTEAD John Coolidge Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003 for On the Transmigration of Souls, of which he said:

I’d probably call the piece a “memory space.” It’s a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions. The link to a particular historical event – in this case to 9/11 – is there if you want to contemplate it. But I hope that the piece will summon human experience that goes beyond this particular event…. Transmigration means “the movement from one place to another” or “the transition from one state of being to an other.” But in this case I meant it to imply the movement of the soul from one state to another. And I don’t just mean the transition from living to dead, but also the change that takes place within the souls of those that stay behind, of those who suffer pain and loss and then themselves come away from that experience.

People often think Adams will be minimalist and boring, but in fact his pieces are enormous fun and infectious.

Although Adams is known for his repetitive rhythms, you could say the same thing about Ravel’s Bolero. Adams is one of our major living composers, along with Philip Glass, John Luther Adams, Terry Riley, and Aaron Jay Kernis, whose pieces have become part of our national identity.

John Adams is properly disrespectful of the restrictive labels with which we pigeonhole artists and has called Minimalism “those Great Prairies of non-event,” much as Tom Stoppard called the avant-garde “that child’s garden of easy victories.”

The Chairman Dances, for instance, from his opera, Nixon in China, is a witty piece where the dead Chairman Mao climbs out of his portrait on the wall and dances a foxtrot

with his living wife, Jiang Qing. A few other dances cut in, and both these monolithic icons are humanized. The piece is in rondo form, where one group starts a melody and another group joins in a second later, then another a second after that, and so on. It is a tour de force for a virtuoso orchestra, but beloved and played by youth orchestras everywhere. The timing is so exact that if a single beat is missed the piece becomes chaos. Soon there are 88 players, all in slightly different universes, bouncing along like A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, another one of Adams’s exhilarating pieces.

John Adams studied composition with the faculty of New England Conservatory of Music and MIT: Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, and David Del Tredici. He also studied with Roger Sessions, another of the great American composers.

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Christopher O’Riley is performing several of John Adams’s extraordinary and fun pieces this summer at Tippet Rise, including Hallelujah Junction. This is a piece written in 1996 for two pianos. It is also the name of Adams’s autobiography. The name comes from a small truck stop near the California–Nevada border where two highways meet.

Adams described it as “a case of a great title looking for a piece. So now the piece finally exists: the ‘ junction’ being the interlocking style of two-piano writing which features short, highly rhythmicized motives bouncing back and forth between the two pianos in tightly phased sequences.”

As with The Chairman Dances, one piano starts and the other piano plays the same thing a second later, like a round or, in Bach’s day, a canon. The rhythms are taken from the way we pronounce the word ‘Hallelujah.’

One wonderful thing about a living composer is that you can ask him about his pieces. Adams said of Shaker Loops that “rather than set up small engines of motivic materials and let them run free in a kind of random play of counterpoint, I used the fabric of continually repeating cells to forge large architectonic shapes, creating a web of activity that, even within the course of a single movement, was more detailed, more varied, and knew both light and dark, serenity and turbulence.”

Phrygian Gates shifts between the Lydian mode and the Phrygian mode, ancient Greek scales which make music sound either ecclesiastical (as in Arvo Pärt’s works) or like a science-fiction movie soundtrack. Gates in the world of computers are chips or circuits or camera sensors that slow current down to produce higher voltage, the way you can put your finger over a hose to increase the force of the water. Relay switches in amplifiers use transistors, such as tubes, to amplify sound; modern gates on motherboards are a million times faster because they use the blocking quality of different metals, the way a bullet has a harder time getting through steel than paper. A microprocessor usually has more than 100 million gates, canal locks that regulate the behavior of electricity.

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Gates have memories; they can remember the sequence of the current flowing through them, which is how we get memory on hard drives. Modern gates are being made from organic material, rather than metals, so they replicate the human brain, which uses DNA to create its own logic.

Logic is an orderly thinking process, but it is also what we call the orderly current flow of artificial intelligence. Gates can be added endlessly, like two frogs leaping over each other, creating larger, “cascading” circuits.

In this way, music tumbles over itself; it cascades as it flows, like a waterfall, from structure to chaos to structure, from one mode to another. The modes in Phrygian Gates are like transistors, slowing down the music to another era, before the second mode allows it to speed up a bit. So Adams uses scales like amplifiers, to speed up, slow down, raise or lower the volume of the circuit board, which in this case is the keyboard.

Thus music parallels the electronic current that flows through our brains, the way information flows through he memory of a computer, producing a poem at the end, or an essay, or a spreadsheet. This is similar to the music of the spheres, where the celestial frequencies flow through us to produce special effects: we are the transistors of the heavens.

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WEEK ONE

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SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Ariel String Quartet Alexandra Kazovsky, violin Jan Grüning, viola Gershon Gerchikov, violin Amit Even-Tov, cello Nikolai Demidenko, piano

Collaborative Concert JOSEPH HAYDN: String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4

Allegro con spirito Adagio

Menuetto: Allegro

Finale: Allegro, ma non troppo BÉLA BARTÓK: String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor Lento

Poco a poco accelerando all’allegretto - Introduzione

Allegro vivace INTERMISSION

JOHANNES BRAHMS: Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 60

Allegro non troppo

Scherzo: Allegro Andante

Finale: Allegro comodo

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This is a wonderful chance to hear a great pianist collaborate with four excellent musicians in the great Brahms Piano Quartet, as well as to hear the Ariel Quartet play the string quartets of two contrasting periods: Haydn’s classical era and Bartók’s 20th-century evocation of folk rhythms and ideas. Bartók’s folk music is from the same Hungarian national ethos that surrounded Haydn at the Esterházy palace in Fertőd, Hungary.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

JOSEPH HAYDN: String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 4, 1797

It is nicknamed the “Sunrise” Quartet because in the beginning you can hear the sun rise, musically in the violin theme, which repeats throughout the first movement.

At this time Haydn was composing The Creation, so he was exploring musical paths to depicting resurrection, such as rising suns—the ways in which divinity is made visible.

The cosmos creates agents, or avatars, which spread its phenomena around the universe, so that the metaphors of belief flourish in nature, bringing with them a larger aura of infinity, or, as Shakespeare put it in As You Like It:

“….tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

BÉLA BARTÓK: String Quartet No. 1 in A Minor, 1908

Bartók’s masterworks are the six string quartets, the Concerto for Orchestra, the Cantata Profana, and the Piano Concerto No. 3, one of the most astonishing and invigorating pieces ever written, completely harmonic within its own unique tonalities, filled with the joyous sense of a 34

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village party. Bartók felt that music could be infused with the spirit of folk song, even if it didn’t quote melodies directly. The year before he wrote his first quartet, he had traveled with his friend the composer Kodály into the countryside to collect thousands of old Magyar folk songs on tape. Bartók became the most successful modern composer at integrating the sense of folk music into his pieces, although Donizetti in L’Elisir d’Amore and Mozart in many of his operas conveyed both the spirit of ethnic communities and their actual songs.

In the Carpathian Basin he wrote down Hungarian, Slovakian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Moldavian, Wallachian, and Transylvanian music. Asian pentatonic scales had been preserved in the region, so that Hungarian music at its base was in fact Mongol and, before that, Arabic, as was Russian music and architecture. (The onion domes of the Kremlin are derived from mosques in the golden age of Suleiman the Magnificent.)

His ethnomusicology supported him in later life, where he was a research fellow in anthropology at Columbia University in New York. Columbia paid him so little money that during the weekends the only thing he could afford to do with his family was ride the subways. When the funds ran out for his position, he was supported by contributions from his friends. At the time, no one in the United States valued him as a composer.

In 1907, however, back in Budapest, Bartók was in love with the violinist Stefi Geyer, and privately dedicated to her his First Violin Concerto, one of whose themes also begins the quartet. It is Bartók’s “Clara” theme, or “Stefi” theme in this case. He never allowed the concerto to be published during his lifetime.

Also in 1907 Bartók came to realize how important Debussy was to the evolution of modern music. He later wrote:

Debussy’s great service to music was to reawaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its possibilities. In that, he was just as important as Beethoven, who revealed to us the possibilities of progressive form, or as Bach, who showed us the transcendent significance of counterpoint. Now, what I am always asking myself is this: is it possible to make a synthesis of these three great masters, a living synthesis that will be valid for our time?

The three major influences on Bartók’s First Quartet were thus: Debussy, folk music, and love.

JOHANNES BRAHMS: Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 60, 1875

The first movement begins with the “Clara” theme or code, four descending notes which appear in varying disguises throughout all four movements. Schumann invented this motif to tell Clara he loved her. Brahms had promised Clara he would take care of her after Schumann died of madness, but Brahms instead ran away. For the rest of his life, Brahms devoted pieces to her, marked with the Clara

theme, one of the world’s most affecting apologies. This theme can be heard in many of Brahms’s Intermezzi (1892 and on), but it was introduced earlier, in this quartet.

The second movement is a series of variations on a theme, which both Beethoven and Shakespeare used as a way of revealing, or “deconstructing” the many patterns concealed in a seemingly simple phrase. Often the first scene of a Shakespeare play is used like a tone row to provide a structure for the rest of the play. The beginning of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata provides a theme which the entire sonata uses to expand and darken into its final eruptions.

The descending thirds of the third movement are, in fact, a version of the descending Clara theme, with the “linking” middle notes removed. The musicologist Heinrich Schenker wrote analyses of German music between 1913 and 1921 showing how the “middleman” could be eliminated from music; that is, the transitional notes between structural cairns, the way a non-bearing wall can be removed from a house without the house falling down.

What was left was the quintessence of a piece.

The ascending theme of the fourth movement is simply the descending theme of the first movement inverted; that is, played backwards.

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THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE PETER HALSTEAD A

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nine-foot concert Steinway has over 12,000 parts.

Its strings are under twenty tons of pressure. So it has an effect immeasurably beyond its size, as big as it is. It is a church organ in disguise. Although each piano is made in exactly the same way by the same people, each one is completely different. Each piano has its own DNA.

I’ve played Rubinstein’s and Horowitz’s pianos, I’ve played the pianos in the basement of Steinway Hall which were used by visiting virtuosos, such as Rachmaninoff, for concerts and recordings. I’ve lost pianos to great orchestras and legendary musicians. I sold my 1928 Steinway out of pure stupidity. But after everything, Cathy and I have still been lucky enough to be able to find pianos which we believe are even better than the ones that got away.

At Tippet Rise, besides the extraordinary CD-18, the Istomin-Horowitz concerto piano discussed on the following pages, we have a Hamburg D which was last played by Elisabeth Leonskaja, whose ethereal Schubert sonatas, seeming to float above the audience, were the reason we contacted Arup Engineers to design a hall similar to Snape Maltings, where we had heard the numinous Leonskaja play.

New York Steinway, always the finest and most harmonically complex of all piano brands, has been perfecting its progeny steadily in recent years. The density of the felt used on the hammers has gradually been increased to nearly what it was on Rubinstein’s piano during the great era of humanism in music. And the American company has finally adopted the more flexible parts used by their German branch, to universal acclaim. So the great pianos are not only the ones from the 1930s or the 1890s, but from 2015, and we have two of those. We are also lucky to have on them certain innovations devised by the great The Music at Tippet Rise

magician of the instrument, Tali Mahanor, guardian of pianos for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

And two of our pianos date from 1897, shortly after the invention of the modern Steinway. Their sound is like Proust’s madeleine cake, evoking a relatively more meditative world, where instruments were almost human, walls burled with Circassian walnut wainscoting, and drawing rooms produced sounds like the inside of a violin, multiple layers of aged wood resonating around the divine ratios of an architecture which still remembered the Parthenon, where music meant a soirée in a rococo jewel box specially designed for it. The filigree, the moldings, the niches were not just decorative but today would be called absorbers, diffusors and reflectors, clever shapes to deflect and augment the many frequencies which have to arrive simultaneously or variously at the ear in order to move us.

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THE PIANOS AT TIPPET RISE PETER HALSTEAD The Istomin-Horowitz Piano, CD-18

CD-18 arriving at Kennedy Center (Courtesy of Marta Casals Istomin)

“Columbia wanted its own Rachmaninoff Second, with

the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. And the soloist should be Eugene Istomin.... For this recording, Istomin wanted an exceptional piano, and Steinway had one. It was CD (for “Concert Department”) 18, and it was Vladimir Horowitz’s personal piano. On this instrument the key dip was shallow, which allows very rapid fingerwork and quick, light accenting, and the sonority and dynamic range were exceptional.... When Horowitz was not using it, CD-18 was locked up in the basement of Steinway

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Hall, and only Horowitz could touch it. Now, Istomin called Horowitz to tell him that he was going to record the Rachmaninoff Second.... “I need a piano and I’d love to use yours. Could you possibly consider letting Steinway send it to me?” Horowitz thought for a moment—and rendered Istomin another accolade. “Yes. I will tell them.” [....] Before the recording session, held on Monday, April 8 (1956), Istomin played the Rachmaninoff live at the Academy of Music (in Philadelphia). The violinist Jaime Laredo, then a student at Curtis, sat stupefied in the

audience. The performance, he says, was unbelievable.

“That’s when I realized—I thought and I realized—that this is the greatest pianist of all.”

—Pianist: A Biography of Eugene Istomin, James Gollin, 2010

T

he Istomin performance had brilliance, soul, depth, and that yearning for the Russian steppes, those endless fields where Rachmaninoff had his summer house and into which he put all his earnings before the revolution took away his house (and his muse, the countryside). This record, Columbia Masterworks ML 5103, was the greatest experience of my youth. Singlehandedly, it shaped what I thought about pianos, sound, and Rachmaninoff, who dedicated the concerto to the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and to its conductor, Eugene Ormandy. He said, “Today, when I think of composing, my thoughts turn to you, the greatest orchestra in the world.”

For years, CD-18 was the centerpiece of a musical world that included Istomin, Horowitz, Bernstein, Serkin, Oistrakh, Ormandy, and the great Istomin-Stern-Rose Trio.

Istomin had married Marta, the widow of the legendary cellist Pablo Casals; together they ran the famous Festival Casals de Puerto Rico. Marta later became Artistic Director of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and was recently honored as a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

After Istomin died, Marta put CD-18, the source of so much joy and wisdom, into seclusion, hoping for the right suitor. Years later, Marta and Eugene Istomin’s lifelong friend and tuner, Tali Mahanor, the resident piano expert of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, helped Marta decide that CD-18 needed to be resurrected in a

Istomin and his wife Marta place that would give it the love and the attention it had attracted in the formative decades of the 1950s and ‘60s, when Europe’s great musicians sought refuge in a newly optimistic postwar America and incidentally shaped its musical identity.

And so CD-18, newly restored by Tali, has emerged at Tippet Rise, where we know later generations will prize its lushness and its brilliance, as did the legends of American music.

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WEEK TWO

Jenny Chen has planned an exciting Romantic program for all of us. The Debussy Arabesques weave into his Feux d’artifice (Fireworks), which is echoed by Liszt’s phenomenally difficult but ecstatic “Feux follets” (Wills o’ the Wisp). The evening is rounded off at the very end with Stravinsky’s own special Fourth of July–style display, Three Movements from Pétrouchka, a piano version created from his ballet, which he wrote as a showpiece for Arthur Rubinstein. Works by Schumann, Bach, and Mendelssohn add depth, grace, and historical charm. This is what it was like to be alive in 1913, the air filled with sparklers and Roman candles, with World War I just over the horizon from a disbelieving and innocent time.

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FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Jenny Chen, piano

CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Feux d’artifice CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Deux Arabesques

Andantino con moto

Allegretto scherzando ROBERT SCHUMANN: Allegro, Op. 8 FRANZ LISZT: “Feux follets” from the Transcendental Études FRANZ LISZT: Rhapsodie espagnole (Spanish Rhapsody) INTERMISSION

J.S. BACH: Partita No.1 in B-flat Major, BWV 825 Praeludium Allemande Corrente Sarabande

Menuet I

Menuet II Gigue FELIX MENDELSSOHN: Rondo capriccioso, Op.14 IGOR STRAVINSKY: Trois mouvements de Pétrouchka Dance russe Chez Pétrouchka

La semaine grasse

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Feux d’artifice (1913)

The last of Debussy’s 24 préludes, Feux d’artifice (Fireworks) was written the same year as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and Rachmaninoff ’s Second Sonata. This was the year of rising tension and coming chaos as Europe slouched towards World War. Cubism and fragmentation were on the breeze, and this is a wonderful opportunity to see how they translated into French. By using the celebratory concept of Roman candles and pinwheels to describe the quality of the air, Debussy not only imitated the fizzling of pointillism, but the melding together of colors into the myopic blur of Impressionism.

Debussy’s earlier preludes described the exquisite dancing of the fairies, mists, dead leaves, the ocean prison of Ondine, and the sunken cathedral of Ys, but this, the last and ultimately most challenging of the inimitable études which Debussy called preludes, is the epitome of his technique melded with his philosophy. It is a moto perpetuo, an engine of constant motion, the fission of creation meeting the resistance of the keyboard.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Deux Arabesques (1888–91)

An arabesque is a design combining transparency with the safety of a gate or grill, safety made into freedom, prisons made into gardens, seraglios turned into oases, filigrees found in Damascus mosques, Indian temples, Moorish palaces, Russian churches, Venetian villas, stemming from the Persian golden age where astronomy and art were encouraged.

In the 600s, Islamic armies conquered Syria, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Later Mongol conquests in China and Russia brought the filigree of flowers, the correspondences of planetary orbits and star charts to vines and tendrils, and 44

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finally to architecture, to window muntins, doors closed but still open to the breezes, bell towers. Palmettes were plaster palm trees, guarding the house like the gods of the household, but also celebrating the Moroccan environment.Resembling spiral DNA helixes, palm trees (living arabesques) structure themselves the way people do; they reinvent themselves, their whorls and bracts turning over on each other like stairways in Escher paintings, or like the Escher hand which draws itself: another sort of palm.

Palms are DNA visualized, as people are: burrowing deeper into the patterns we set as children, we add rings, minarets, ramps, balconies to our adolescent hopes, until we have something hopefully as supple, soft, and permanent as a palm.

Palms are an example of what we would like to weave with our own lives. We would like to preserve their hardy delicacy for the people who have never seen a palm. We would like to pronounce palms possible, for people who feel trees should be more rigid affairs. We would like to discover in palms the spiral secrets of life that lurk in similar artifacts: in meadows, seas, and genes. Rather than turn away from the voluptuous date palm because of its simple, intimidating elegance, we would like to provide those dates to a confused society and hope for the best. As Wallace Stevens saw it, Penelope weaves a world for Ulysses on her loom, and she weaves an image of Ulysses for herself which transcends the past, as spouses (and societies) hope to invent glittering futures out of deficient fabric. As poems are the world palms spin for us. As palms are the words worlds weave.

This modified Italian sonnet is also a tapestry where skeins ornate as Moorish architecture find themselves traced in a minimalist age, in society’s spiroform toy.

If you spend a morning writing in the Moorish courtyard of the Honolulu Public Library, up on the balcony where you live in canopies of palm, you can watch the crosshatched shadow play turn palms into a constant chiaroscuro, a crossword puzzle of light.

Daedalus left thread behind so he could find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Poems leave labyrinths in place of the initial thread of emotion, a logic which directs lost poets.

Meanings are added to meanings as younger fronds build on earlier, lower branches, the way height builds on hidden depths, the way what we see copies something we don’t see.

This is a poem as much about Debussy’s arabesques as about ancient Moorish society building on the diversity of its roots; it refers to words and fronds in the same way, because they are both building blocks of structures that nurture us, whether poems, libraries, piano pieces, or civilizations.

ARABESQUE

Maybe just because their spindles burst

Exuberantly from a spiral spine, overdone

Moroccan lace dressing every line, immersed

And honeycombed with Persian sun,

Do these leaflets seem almost too Well-versed, minarets foreshadowed By each other’s thirst, streaked bamboo Where, beneath each node,

The DNA of light weaves in And out like Escher stairs, Leaving labyrinths where thread had been, Layered by a hand that copies theirs.

ROBERT SCHUMANN: Allegro, Op. 8 (1831)

Schumann had already written Papillons and his Paganini Études. He had devised the idea of the Sphinxes which appeared later in Carnaval: silent pauses in the music where the pianist imagined notes (here they are written in an earlier form as echoing octaves).

Schumann was beset with the arabesques of chaos (he would eventually go mad). “Everywhere only confused combinations of figures, dissonances, passages—in short, for us torture.”

Here he paints them in ways he would later use in more familiar works like the Fantasiestücke and Kreisleriana.

He devised themes that represented people, and different personalities that were represented by differing moods in the music. All of that is present even here, in one of his earliest pieces (he was born the same year as Chopin; when he wrote this he was 21).

He changed music with his ideas and his prose journalism, but he also went mad. He paid the price for our easier revelations.

FRANZ LISZT: “Feux Follets” from the Transcendental Études (1826; rewritten 1837, simplified 1852)

The Transcendental Études of Liszt are widely considered to be the hardest pieces ever written for piano. A few are simple, but most are impossible to play, so much so that before we made a recording of my teacher, Russell Sherman, playing them around 1981, there was only the Cziffra recording available, and that only in Europe.

Feux follets are crazy follies, wills o’ the wisp, heat lightning, ignis fatuus, St. Elmo’s fire. It’s what flickers around the masts of haunted ships in the deep sea, static electricity which moves with its own intelligence. It can make your hair stand on end, or kill you.

Like all of the above, Liszt’s piece flickers around the mast of its invisible structure, jags of energy, bursts of a strobe, neon signs exploding with too much current. As soon as one figure has been played, a new challenge emerges. Then octaves are added on, trills at high speeds while other notes are skittering 2016 Inaugural Season

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below them, trills in the left hand on top of base notes, then wild jumps in the left hand while the right hand gets even more difficult. Just when your endurance is at an end, the piece gets twice as difficult, with octaves jumping to chords in the left hand, and the right hand all over the keyboard.

To be able to play this up to tempo is one of the great achievements of virtuosity. It is the most difficult of all the Transcendental Études, as all the other challenges fit in the hand, but the fifth is as unnatural to the fingers and palm as the erratic spurts of demonic electricity it describes.

FRANZ LISZT: Rhapsodie espagnole (Spanish Rhapsody) (1863)

Liszt adapted the ancient Portuguese folk song La Folia (also called Folies d’Espagne) and a dance from Aragon into this Hungarian Rhapsody in maja’s clothing. Liszt had traveled to Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and Hungary in 1845, out of which much later came his Années de Pèlerinage and this rhapsody. Liszt had adapted the form to mean almost anything he cared to cobble together, usually nationalistic Hungarian songs, into a loose form of slow and fast, lassan and friska, of which Liszt wrote 19, plus a Hungarian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, his gorgeous Hungarian Melody, and this piece.

Liszt had just moved into a small cell on Monte del Rosario, an hour south of Rome, a dilapidated monastery with three other monks, where in three weeks he was visited by Pope Pius IX, who asked for a piece on the piano. Liszt played for him his Legend, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, and then his version of “Casta Diva” from the opera Norma. The Pope, a baritone, was moved to sing the soprano aria from memory, with Liszt as orchestra.

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His friend Glinka, one of the fathers of Russian music, had just died, and left him his symphonic poem, Jota aragonesa, also known as First Spanish Overture, which inspired Liszt to revisit his own thoughts on Spain. His former son-inlaw Hans von Bülow, the eminent pianist and conductor, performed it, slowly and with dignity, rather than with the panâche which characterized both his and Liszt’s earlier playing. It is nevertheless a tour de force as well as a tour d’Espagne.

J.S. BACH: Partita No.1 in B-flat Major, BWV 825 (1726)

Bach had been appointed cantor at the St. Thomas Church and the director of music at the Thomasschule in Leipzig in the spring of 1723, even though the church would have preferred Telemann—considered a more up-to-date composer—but couldn’t afford him.

Bach was working for Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen.

He had written the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier in 1722 (20 years later, he would finish the second book).

This was the first seminal, epic achievement in the history of keyboard music: 24 preludes and fugues which to this day represent the pinnacle of achievement in music. Bach had also written the six Brandenburg Concertos, which will be performed at Tippet Rise on June 11.

Köthen Castle is now a museum, and a biannual Bach Festival is held in the Hall of Mirrors, where much of his music was first performed. It can be seen on DVD in the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra’s recording of the Brandenburg Concertos.

Leopold had hired Bach in 1717, but when he downsized his orchestra because of military cost overruns, Bach felt he would have greater composing chances in Leipzig.

The former Kapellmeister had been Johann Kuhnau, a novelist, translator, lawyer, music theorist, and conductor who had been at his post for 21 years; Bach got the position only because Kuhnau died. Bach felt the need to thank him by modeling his partitas after Kuhnau’s.

At the Thomaskirche he wrote the partitas, which he called his Opus 1. He also wrote his Magnificat and the St. John and St. Matthew Passions. And he took over the Collegium Musicum, which performed his new cantatas at the local coffeehouse, Café Zimmermann in the market square.

Bach’s goal was to become not just Kapellmeister but the Royal Court Composer, the head of all music for Elector Frederick Augustus (who was also King of Poland) in Dresden, which he became a decade later. He held all these positions until he died, and remained on excellent terms with both the Prince and the King.

Bach called the first partita his Opus 1.

He referred to the dance movements as galanteries: diversions for gallants, the courtiers who had endured the purely cerebral episodes and needed to clear their heads.

It has seven parts: Praeludium, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Menuet I, Menuet II, Gigue.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN: Rondo capriccioso, Op.14 (1830) Mendelssohn died when he was 36, usually the sign of a prodigy, which he was, beginning piano when he was six, and writing 12 string symphonies before he was 14. At 16 he wrote his String Octet, one of the most beloved pieces in the chamber music repertoire to this day. He wrote the

incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on which his fame deservedly rests, when he was 17. When he was 15, he studied under the great virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, who admitted that he had nothing to teach him.

He met Goethe at 15 in the company of his tutor, the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter. Goethe said,

“Musical prodigies... are probably no longer so

rare; but what this little man can do in extempo

rizing and playing at sight borders the miracu

lous, and I could not have believed it possible at

so early an age.”

“And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at

Frankfurt?” asked Zelter.

“Yes,” answered Goethe, “...but what your pupil

already accomplishes bears the same relation to

the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk

of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.”

Charles Rosen has called him “the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known.”

He was born into an immensely wealthy banking family in Hamburg. His family moved to Berlin to escape their banking roots. Mendelssohn’s father adopted his wife’s name so he could pretend to be Christian, not Jewish. His children, all prodigies, hated the name Bartholdy and what it signified.

Mendelssohn went on to become conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, to found the Leipzig Coservatory of Music, and to revive interest in Bach and Schubert, along with writing five symphonies, two amazing piano concertos, the great E Minor Violin Concerto, and the gorgeous Songs Without Words for the piano and voice.

He was quite conservative, and disliked Liszt and Berlioz, 2016 Inaugural Season

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more for their reputations than the reality. He was an extraordinary pianist and organist, a fine painter, and a brilliant improviser. When the soprano Maria Felicia Malibran asked him to improvise after one of her recitals, he devised a piece out of all the songs she had sung. His papers are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Mendelssohn composed the witty and elegant Rondo when he was 21.

IGOR STRAVINSKY: Trois mouvements de Petrouchka (ballet written in 1910; piano version for Rubinstein in 1921) Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring in 1913. Like this piece, it was meant for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, as was the Firebird ballet, also written in 1910.

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Later the pianist Arthur Rubinstein talked Stravinsky into writing a highly difficult piano version for him. Stravinsky adapted a street hawkers’ song, many Russian folk tunes, and a risqué French music hall song to his pagan rhythms.

In 1907 Picasso encountered tribal art from Papua New Guinea and elsewhere at the Trocadéro Museum in Paris, which led to his painting of Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, where he depicted Provençal courtesans in African masks that had become their faces, savage indictments of society.

As the playwright Oscar Wilde said, a mask tells us more than a face. This show led to Picasso’s seeing the sharp angles in human physiology, in objects, and thence to the idea that all things could be defined with planes of light, or Cubism.

This tribal savagery was not lost on Stravinsky, who must have seen the same show. A new barbarism was apparent all over Europe, as otherwise civilized young people strained at the bit to go to war for no reason other than the stories it would provide. Europe was simmering with various racial and class resentments, specific to each country, but put together they led to a méprise, a discontent, a contempt for organization and for civility. You can see this reflected in the Cubist music of Stravinsky, especially during this, his most disruptive period.

It may seem fantastical that composers, painters, and writers can predict the future: but you only have to look around at our world and see how obvious it is that calm has been compromised by violence, bad governance, misplaced education, and commercial emphasis. The future is very clear to anyone who looks in that direction. It certainly was in 1910.

It is ironic that the Punch and Judy sideshow of Petrouchka, the juvenile fairy tale of the Russian fairytale, which Jenny Chen will tell you about, serves as an innocent tabula rasa on which is written the future story of two world wars and numerous Balkan conflicts: la condition humaine.

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WEEK TWO

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SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2016, 2:00 PM

The Domo Emily Helenbrook Christopher O’Riley

Celebrating Composer Antón García-Abril “Une Estrella se Perdio”

INTERMISSION

“Baladilla de las Tres Torres” “Baladilla de las Estrella Perdida” “Rumor de Mar y Viento”

“Ella Lloraba por Mi”

Preludios de Mirambel, No. 1 “Lontananza: Nocturnal” “Pareja en Sombras Sobre Fondo de Oro” Preludios de Mirambel, No. 5 “Tres Piezas Alejandrinas” “Un Ramo de Rosas” “Sonatina del Guadalquivir” “Cinco Piezas Breves IV” “Microprimaveras IV” “Baladilla del Rio Blanco”

“La Plaza Tiene una Torre”

“Microprimaveras II” “Tres Piezas amantinas II” “Diologos con la Luna II” “Pero Me Quede sin Ti”

Tippet Rise Songs

I. The Changing of the Leaves II. Piano Maker III. Chalk IV. Second Childhood V. Setting Up the Umbrella VI. Buoy VII. The Secret of the Air

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The lush Spanish songs of Spain’s greatest living composer, Antón García-Abril, will resonate against the Beartooth skyline under the Domo. This artwork is a megalith from prehistory, designed by García-Abril’s son, an architecture professor at MIT and one of the chosen representatives from the United States to the Venice Biennale this year. At the Domo, which is a table, a house, in the mystical shape of a dolmen, where druids would celebrate the mysteries of the seasons, soprano Emily Helenbrook and pianist Christopher O’Riley pay homage to those monastic modes with vibrant seguidillas of Catalonia.

The ultimate familial fruition, though, emerged from friendly conversation about perhaps incorporating sometime in the fond, future songs taking their textual wing from the poetry of Tippet Rise co-founder Peter Halstead.

Dream became reality with father inviting son to come to Madrid to clarify English inflection of the lyrics (Antón, fils, confided to me that his father always wanted him to follow in his musical footprints; this was perhaps a way of pulling him back in to the musical fold?), and so we have today the gleefully anticipated premiere of the Tippet Rise Songs.

—Christopher O’Riley

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

The communal and familial aspect of our sculpture-commemorative concert events comes truly full circle with music performed under the megalith Domo conceived by Antón Garcia-Abríl, composed by his eponymous father.

I am enchanted and astonished by the immense body of beautiful work by the eminent Spanish composer, Antón Garcia-Abríl, most particularly the wealth of incredible work for voice and piano. There was never a doubt that there was ample material to present a concert of his music; it was more a matter of the enviable task of whittling down a roster of favorites to fit into one evening’s worth.

I had already begun learning and performing short piano solos at my live tapings around the country of NPR’s From the Top. Reactions of those hearing Antón’s music for the first time were similar to my own inaugural introductions: melody and harmony of such intrinsic and elemental perfection as to make one wonder where this music has been all one’s life; works that seem to have been discovered among the geologic layers, not hewn from human imagination, but discovered, unearthed, inevitable.

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Antón Garcia-Abríl, father

Señor Abril’s music incorporates the street dances of the majos, the “macho” posturings of Bizet in Carmen, of Granados in his Goyescas (Goya is well known for painting The Naked Maja), of Albéniz and Gershwin, encompassed by his innate lyricism and innovative trailblazing.

He was head of composition at the Madrid Conservatory for three decades and has been an essential part of the cultural identity of Catalonia for most of his life. Spain has lavished every honor available on him, including the Gold Medal of the Spanish Film Academy for his work in film.

He has composed more than 100 works, including a piano concerto, symphonies, ballets, operas, chamber music, songs, unique Catalan forms, and the Hemeroscopium Concerto for Orchestra. The Hemeroscopium is the place where the sun sets, the offing, the unseeable goal of mariners and dreamers, the offstage realm where the play is written, from which the ghost enters, the mind’s eye. It is also the name of the house that Señor Abríl’s son built for his father in order to feature the piano.

Hilary Hahn has recorded one of his violin pieces for her album In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores.

Christopher Neame chose him to compose the music to his film Monsieur Quixote, and has said that “Garcia-Abríl expressed the timelessness, the colours, the awe and romance of Spain.”

Señor Abríl has composed seven songs for Tippet Rise, using poems of Peter Halstead, Tippet Rise’s co-founder, and the Montana landscape as his inspiration.

Abríl’s son, also named Antón Garcia-Abríl, designed the Domo and the two Portals at Tippet Rise. It is a continuing revelation for us to see the work of the son in the father, and the other way around. To have produced an extraordinary amalgam of architect and artist, simultaneously with such an immense achievement in music, is the highest tribute which can be paid to Antón and Aurea Garcia-Abril.

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WEEK TWO

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SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Alessandro Deljavan

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Trois Nouvelles Études

Nos. 1–3 Études, Op. 10

Nos. 1–12 INTERMISSION Études, Op. 25

Nos. 1–12

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Few pianists in history have dared play all the Chopin Études in concert, due to the demands they make on both technique and stamina. They are, in fact and faith, the entire Romantic era compressed into notes. Allesandro Deljavan began piano at age two in Italy. Among his teachers is Menahem Pressler, noted for his singing fin-de-siècle tone during his many years as pianist with the Beaux Arts Trio. This will be a rare opportunity to hear Mr. Deljavan in the States.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: The Complete 24 Etudes, Opp. 10 and 25 (1829–36)

This is something that is hardly ever done. The Chopin Études, along with the Ligeti Études and the Liszt Transcendental Études, are impossible to play. They test every bone in your body. They require not just fingers, but elbows, waist, shoulders, brains to play them. You have to hold a million notes in your head that have become instinctive, so that there is no gap between the thought and the execution.

You have to forget you know them, but then concentrate on every detail. It doesn’t do to get lazy, or all your sins will be revealed. It is one thing to use them to improve your technique, but to play any of them in public (let alone all of them) is the ultimate test of endurance, precision, and musicianship.

Liszt was writing his own Études at this time, although he later decided to make them more complicated. Chopin dedicated his to Liszt. Liszt had power and speed, and it seems he could sight-read anything perfectly. Although the most charitable of aristocrats, Liszt did say once that “Liszt can play Chopin; but can Chopin play Liszt?” It was also true that Liszt played Chopin all the time in public, but Chopin never once played anything by Liszt.

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Each Étude focuses on a different weakness of the hand.

Each one (with a few exceptions) is essentially a perpetual motion device, giving the pianist no time for rest.

Études, Op. 10

The first one is about stretching the right hand way beyond its reach, as fast as possible. The second is about playing chromatic scales while also putting in a chord with the same hand every second, again at top speed. Both these studies must be played at lightning speed, while relaxing completely. They console and disrupt at the same time.

Because, behind the notes are gorgeous pieces that captivate you all your life. You never get tired of them.

The third was called the “Tristesse” in the 1945 film, A Song to Remember, although Chopin was always horrified by all such nicknames, never of his doing, often of posterity. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, YouTube has a charming excerpt from the film. This has Liszt playing in the dark, but when George Sand approaches with the candelabra, it is revealed to the awestruck aristocrats that it is Chopin playing his own Scherzo.

Chopin’s only influence was Bach, but even there he was always entirely Chopin. He had no precedents and no antecedents. He was a unique phenomenon. (Leopold Godowsky rewrote his Études to make them even more difficult, but that is more parody than invention.) What is astonishing about the Études is their ability to make technical feats completely lyrical, with melodies and accompaniments you never forget.

When Chopin arrived in Paris, he was told to go to Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who listened to him play and said, “In three years with me you may be able to give a concert.”

Chopin gave a concert the next week and became instantly better known than Kalkbrenner. This story is too convenient to be true. However, Chopin never studied with anyone after he left the Warsaw Conservatory at 19.

The most entertaining and insightful book into all the Romantics is Eleanor Perenyi’s Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero. The most wry and charming film is Impromptu, with Hugh Grant as Hugh Grant (and incidentally, Chopin) and Julian Sands as an elegant, tolerant Liszt.

To describe the études briefly is not to impugn their perfection, complexity, and position as the extreme challenge in the piano repertoire.

4. Possibly the most impressive of all, it involves octaves going one way and arpeggios the other and is a tour de force.

5. Almost entirely on the black keys.

6. Musically gorgeous, but the least technically impressive, the challenge is simply to maintain an even and quiet accompaniment, allowing the treble hand to sing.

7. This mixes sixths and thirds together into a fast cantilevered dance, where the thirds anchor the hand around which the sixths revolve.

8. Happy arpeggios.

9. An ostinato bass which stretches the left hand while the right hand plays a sad, beautiful single-note melody.

10. The hand stretches over an octave, the thumb playing the lower octave and the rest of the hand playing sixths that copy the thumb melody.

11. Large rolled chords.

12. The “revolutionary” étude, due to its combination of frenzied left-hand scales with dashing right-hand intrusions.

I was sitting behind two cultured European ladies when Rubinstein played this étude at Carnegie Hall in the early ‘60s. “Ach, vat a Chrevolution!” they sighed at each other. But Rubinstein had forgotten the order, and had played another étude instead. Accents don’t necessarily mean you know.

Études, Op. 25

The “harp” étude. Although this is an obvious treble melody over rolling arpeggios, my teacher Russell Sherman felt that its center existed in the tension between the two hands, and not exactly in either hand.

Triplets played rapidly over a simple left hand.

Three-part figures involve a leap on the third note to a low note in the left hand and a high one in the right hand, at considerable speed.

Very Lisztian, a kind of galop, the “Paganini” features leaps on the violin between a note in the bass and a chord in the treble. When the melody returns in the second half, Chopin requires that the single notes be sustained legato, or linked, while the staccato chords are played, which is quite a stretch for the hand.

The right hand plays a slightly discordant sharp as a grace note at the beginning of each chord, which gives the effect of a Turkish janissary. The middle part is one of Chopin’s most gorgeous melodies.

Thirds at great speed, very jazzy.

A very sad, nostalgic, salonish étude, where the challenge is to make the melody sing out from the repeated chords of the accompaniment.

Sixths at high speed, with sixths in the left hand as well, 12 to a measure. The right hand gets all the attention, but the left hand is equally difficult.

A joyous romp with the thumb playing the first note, a third the second note, and octaves the next two notes in each figure. The challenge is to move rapidly between the third and the next two octaves.

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The octave étude, a whirlwind study in endurance.

The winter wind, with single notes providing the melody while, above them, virtuoso cascades of notes explode around the piano.

The ocean étude, where the thumb hits the bass melody which motivates sweeping arpeggios in the key of the bass note that bring the entire piano to bear on the simple one-note theme for a storm-tossed finale.

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WEEK THREE

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FRIDAY, JULY 1, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Yevgeny Sudbin

DOMENICO SCARLATTI:

Sonata in D Minor K213 / L108 (The Lover)

Sonata in C Major K159 / L104 (La Caccia)

Sonata in D Minor K9 / L413 (Pastorale)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111

Maestoso – Allegro con brio ed appassionato

Arietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile INTERMISSION WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Lacrimosa dies illa, from Requiem in D Minor, K. 626

(arranged by Yevgeny Sudbin)

MAURICE RAVEL: Gaspard de la nuit Ondine

Le gibet Scarbo

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Yevgeny Sudbin has been hailed by London’s The Telegraph as “potentially one of the greatest pianists of the 21st century.” His Scriabin recording was awarded album of the Year by The Telegraph and received the Midem Classical Award for Best Solo Instrument Recording at Cannes. It was described by Gramophone as “a disc in a million,” while the International Record Review stated that his Rachmaninoff recording “confirms him as one of the most important pianistic talents of our time.”

We are delighted to celebrate the breadth of his repertoire this season at Tippet Rise, including his grand facility with Ravel’s literally fiendishly difficult Gaspard de la nuit.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

DOMENICO SCARLATTI: Three Sonatas

Domenico Scarlatti wrote 555 sonatas for harpsichord and the clavier. He was born in 1685, the same year as Bach and Handel. Although he was Italian born and worked for four years for the Vatican, he lived his life in Spain.

He was music master to the woman who later became Queen of Spain. He lived and composed many of his most famous sonatas in Madrid, where a few were published in 1738, embodying tunes sung by carriers, mule traders, and craftsmen. This is where, some three centuries later, Antón García-Abril was head of composition at the Conservatory.

It will be very interesting to compare the courtly Spain very neatly classicized by Scarlatti with the more emotional and contemporary homeland presented by Maestro García-Abril in what he has written for Tippet Rise.

Scarlatti often used the Phrygian mode, the same Spanish-sounding scale used by John Adams in 1978 for his composition Phrygian Gates. But Scarlatti was mostly content to write elegant dance forms in straightforward keys like C or D, where the notes never strayed far from the main key.

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His sonatas are only one movement long each, but that movement embodies many moods. His use of dance music is less involved than Bach’s, although he was fully as prolific in the lesser sonata form he favored, still without the heights and depths and intricacies of Bach. He is loath to break the perfect surface of his still and well-planned lily ponds with anything too unsettling.

His world is one of order, manners, and impeccable form.

His glass filigree is a diamond necklace on which every bead sparkles.

In his choral writing, such as Salve Regina and Stabat Mater, Scarlatti reaches deeply moving if traditional churchly heights. If you try to hear voices in his piano notes, you can begin to understand the deep spiritual resonance underneath his human harmonies. Although his more well-known innovations came later, with the harpsichord sonatas, it is useful to flesh out these witty diversions with the great passion of his spiritual masterpieces to understand what is behind the music. That is, you have to go backwards and know Scarlatti’s history before you can appreciate the greatness of his life’s work.

My teacher, Russell Sherman, used to say that you need to go forward and play Schoenberg to appreciate Mozart, to know what winds of change raged at the edges of his harmonies.

In Scarlatti’s case, you have to go backwards.

As Ralph Kirkpatrick, the great Scarlatti interpreter and harpsichordist, wrote enthusiastically:

[His] music ranges from the courtly to the savage,

from an almost saccharine urbanity to an acrid

violence. Its gaiety is all the more intense for an

undertone of tragedy. Its moments of meditative

melancholy are at times overwhelmed by a surge

of extrovert operatic passion. Most particularly he

has expressed that part of his life which was lived in Spain. There is hardly an aspect of Spanish life, of Spanish popular music and dance, that has not found itself a place in the microcosm that Scarlatti created with his sonatas. No Spanish composer, not even Manuel de Falla in the 20th century, has expressed the essence of his native land as com- pletely as did the foreigner Scarlatti. He has captured the click of castanets, the strumming of guitars, the thud of muffled drums, the harsh, bitter wail of gypsy lament, the overwhelming gaiety of the village band, and above all the wiry tension of the Spanish dance.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor Op. 111 (1820)

This is Beethoven’s last sonata, written the same year as his immense Missa Solemnis, with the same fervor to unearth the ends of music one last time. It would be one of Beethoven’s final pieces for the piano.

As with so much of Beethoven, he had the ideas 20 years earlier and put them into his notebooks. Only later did he get around to them. Many of the structures and melodies of his great masterpieces had been incubating for decades, as is true of this sonata. Much of what Beethoven would achieve he had already achieved in his mind when he was 30. It took him the rest of his life to write it down.

It has only two movements (rather than the standard three): a fast and a slow. Many people have questioned why there were only two movements. This is how Thomas Mann described it in Doctor Faustus, his extraordinary political allegory about the composer Adrian Leverkühn, based on

the creative lives of Nietzsche, Mahler, and Schoenberg, during the devolution of Germany into fascism:

He sat on his revolving stool, ...and in a few words brought to an end his lecture on why Beethoven had not written a third movement to Op. 111. We had only needed, he said, to hear the piece to answer the question ourselves. A third movement?

A new approach? A return after this parting—im- possible! It had happened that the sonata had come, in the second, enormous movement, to an end, an end without any return. And when he said “the sonata,” he meant not only this one in C minor, but the sonata in general, as a species, as traditional art-form; it itself was here at an end, brought to its end, it had fulfilled its desiny, resolved itself, it took leave—the gesture of fare well of the D–G–G motif, consoled by the C sharp, was a leave-taking in this sense too, great as the whole piece itself, the farewell of the sonata form.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Lacrimosa dies illa, from Requiem in D Minor, K. 626 (1791) (arranged by Yevgeny Sudbin)

The story of Mozart’s Requiem is told in Amadeus. No one believes it, as we know that it was commissioned by Count Walsegg, who intended to pass it off as his own. But to the two biographers of his day, Johann Friedrich Rochlitz and Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Mozart and his wife, Constanze, told the same story: A man neither Mozart nor Constanze had ever seen one day appeared and asked for a Mass for the dead, a Requiem Mass. He never said whom he represented. He didn’t 2016 Inaugural Season

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mention any date by which his client needed it. Mozart told Constanze he had “very strange thoughts” regarding the unpredicted appearance and commission of this unknown man. Constanze took away the score, because she thought it was killing Mozart. He told her, “I am only too conscious that my end will not be long in coming: for sure, someone has poisoned me! I cannot rid my mind of this thought.” He believed that it was Death itself who asked him to write it, and he and Constanze used to joke about it.

But Mozart was determined to finish it, and so Constanze brought him the score. He died that day shortly after midnight, after writing eight measures of the Lacrimosa. No one ever showed up to claim the score. Constanze hired one composer, Joseph Leopold Eybler, to finish it, but he wouldn’t tackle the Lacrimosa. He suffered a stroke while conducting it. (Another composer, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, had finished the other half of the Requiem.)

The Lacrimosa is part of the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath in the traditional sung Catholic Requiem Mass. Some 20 rock bands have based songs on it. Here is the text: Lacrimosa dies illa Qua resurget ex favilla Judicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce, Deus: Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem. Amen.

Lachrymose day, that, When shall arise from the ashes, To be judged, the man who lies.

But may he be bless’d: Gentle Jesus, Lord, Give him rest.

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Mozart wrote his first concerto at age four. As Salieri, played by F. Murray Abraham, says in the film Amadeus, while looking at Mozart’s scores: “Here again was the very voice of God. I was staring through the cage of those The Music at Tippet Rise

ridiculous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.”

What will Sudbin make from these risen ashes?

MAURICE RAVEL: Gaspard de la nuit (1908)

The turn of the century had one foot in the past and one foot in the future. Oscar Wilde died in 1900. Tosca premiered. Rachmaninoff wrote his Second Piano Concerto in 1901. Puccini was writing Turandot until he died in 1924. In 1899 Ravel composed his first popular piece, Pavane for a Deceased Infanta. In 1900 he was thrown out of the Paris Conservatory. He was a highly disciplined, self-assured dandy, whose private life remains to this day a mystery.

On the other hand, in 1900 quantum physics was born. In 1912 Schoenberg wrote Pierrot Lunaire. Stravinsky wrote The Firebird in 1910, and The Rite of Spring in 1913. (He said that Ravel was the only person who understood the music.) Satie was earning his living as a pianist in a café.

While one world was continuing the Viennese Sachertorte atmosphere of the 1890s, another was arming. In 1908 the Reichstag expanded the German Navy. It was the countdown to war, and the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim were filled with spies. Everyone seemed to have a hidden agenda.

Stravinsky was using primitivism to suggest the breakdown of society. It was Picasso’s African period. He had seen a show of Papua New Guinean art, from whose masks he derived Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Cubism was beginning to suggest that society was broken into pieces.

It was not that social despair arose out of war: war rose out of the prevailing mood. Austrians were bored with the waltz. The British felt that a good war would invigorate cocktail party repartee.

So it was no accident that Ravel was thinking of the devil (Gaspard), a mermaid who is banished into the void because of love (Ondine), the tolling bells of death (le Gibet), or the will o’ the wisp, the feux follets, the St. Elmo’s fire of the goblin Scarbo, who flits over the land like sheet lightning.

Ravel claimed that the devil was the author of the music.

He based it on poems by Aloysius Bertrand, who also claimed that his rhymes were Satanic in origin.

Dracula was published in 1897, and The Turn of the Screw in 1898. Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre of 1874 was a blasphemous inversion of the Dies Irae, the day-of-wrath melody used earlier by Liszt in Totentanz (Dance of Death) as a kind of early Gothic music.

As a response similar to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Gaspard uses many modern innovations of discordance and chaotic structure to create a tour de force that is entirely entertaining, understandable, lyric, harmonic, and fun in old-fashioned ways, while being at the same time anarchistic, pessimistic, barbaric, and chaotic. It is chaos spilling over structure, as modern science imagines the universe to be composed. Ravel has managed to materialize the devil in a highly acceptable, traditional fashion, composing modern and brilliantly innovative chords in the service of a theme which is eminently understandable and which has proved one of the great foundations of the modern piano literature, even if only virtuosos can attempt it.

Although Bertrand’s poem portrays Ondine as a simple water sprite, in Dvořák’s Rusalka, written in 1900, the nymph is condemned to an eternity of darkness in the deepest part of the ocean as a demon of death because she fails to keep the love of a fickle prince, who, later abandoned by another love, returns to Rusalka, knowing that her kiss will kill him. So water sprites were not as simple eight years later as they had been before Rusalka. The beauty of the rippling water around her is offset by a sadness and foreboding in her ethereal song, intercut with moments of rapture. Hidden in the sparkles is an unsettling aria for soprano, like Rusalka’s Song to the Moon, infinitely forgiving, unlike Ravel’s

more tentative melody. Dvořák has an entire opera to paint his nymph, while Ravel takes six minutes, and bases his “program,” that is, the text that inspires his music, on a short poem by Bertrand, which nevertheless echoes Rusalka: Archibald MacLeish has described this situation exactly in his poem “Calypso’s Island,” written at the Mill Reef Club in Antigua, where MacLeish had a house and where he wrote his most lyrical poems: I know very well, goddess, she is not beautiful As you are: could not be. She is a woman, Mortal, subject to the chances: duty of Childbed, sorrow that changes cheeks, the tomb— For unlike you she will grow gray, grow older, Gray and older, sleep in that small room.

She is not beautiful as you, O golden!

You are immortal and will never change And can make me immortal also, fold Your garment round me, make me whole and strange As those who live forever, not the while That we live, keep me from those dogging dangers— Ships and the wars—in this green, far-off island, Silent of all but sea’s eternal sound Or sea-pine’s when the lull of surf is silent.

Goddess, I know how excellent this ground, What charmed contentment of the removed heart The bees make in the lavender where pounding Surf sounds far off and the bird that darts Darts through its own eternity of light, Motionless in motion, and the startle Hare is startled into stone, the fly Forever golden in the flickering glance Of leafy sunlight that still holds it. I 2016 Inaugural Season

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Know you, goddess, and your caves that answer Ocean’s confused voices with a voice: Your poplars where the storms are turned to dances; Arms where the heart is turned. You give the choice To hold forever what forever passes, To hide from what will pass, forever. Moist, Moist are your well-stones, goddess, cool your grasses!

And she—she is a woman with that fault Of change that will be death in her at last!

Nevertheless I long for the cold, salt, Restless, contending sea and for the island Where the grass dies and the seasons alter: Where that one wears the sunlight for a while.

Ondine is immensely difficult because its unusual arpeggios have never-before invented modes, in sonorities from other worlds beneath the sea, which are extremely hard to play adroitly at the virtuosic speed which Ravel demands.

Its repeated notes are the only survivors for the second piece, The Gibbet, its tolling bells an echo of Debussy’s drowned steeple, a lament for society, and yet a hint of the riches buried in it. Ravel was eternally confident of his powers, even when surrounded with a submerging culture.

Those same repeated notes begin Scarbo, one of the most literally fiendish challenges to the best of pianists. Scarbo is a shadow who enters through the window during a full moon and flickers around the walls like a feu follet, heat lightning, “when the moon at midnight Brillos on the crag like silver specie on an azure flag sown with golden bees.”

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Music Outdoors

By Peter Halstead

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"And in general I dislike seeing the orchestra in a frontal

position, which obliges the listener to remain outside the music. The concert hall of the Berlin Philharmonic was an attempt to place the orchestra in the middle of the audience, but this interesting idea was not completely realized because in several parts of the hall the orchestra is not audible in its totality. We need therefore to invent the architectural form that will liberate collective listening from all these disadvantages...."

—Iannis Xenaki

In our lives, we’ve noticed that when the wall of the stage comes down, when the artificial barrier between performer and listener is removed, the audience becomes part of the music, as the musician should be a collaborator with the composer.

We have all had “aha” moments. In music, this is often the sudden expansion of the sound into a universe that surrounds us, shelters us, explains us, as happens when we hear music outside. The ancient amphitheaters of Europe legislate this kind of experience: the Baths of Caracalla,

the Coliseum, Pompeii, Ephesus, Taormina above the sea, Delphi in the mountains. But there are more recent versions of music outdoors: the bleachers at Sceaux outside Paris, the Archevêché at Aix-en-Provence, the Ford Amphitheater in Vail, Red Rocks, the natural amphitheaters on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, the Venetian Courtyard at Caramoor, the Hollywood Bowl, the Hatch Shell in Boston. Rock and roll realized that you don’t need natural acoustics if you have amplifiers, thus allowing Coachella, Woodstock, Lollapalooza, Bumbershoot, Glastonbury, Roskilde….

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WEEK THREE

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SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2016, 2:00 PM P

The Domo Matt Haimovitz

DU YUN: The Veronica J.S. BACH: Suite No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1008 VIJAY IYER: "Run" J.S. BACH: Suite No. 3 in C Major, BWV 1009 INTERMISSION ROBERTO SIERRA: "La Memoria" J.S. BACH: Suite No. 4 in E-flat Major, BWV 1010

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WEEK THREE

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SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2016, 6:30 PM P

The Olivier Music Barn Matt Haimovitz

PHILIP GLASS: Overture to Bach’s Suite in G J.S. Bach: Suite No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 DAVID SANFORD: "Es War" J.S. Bach: Suite No. 5 in C Minor, BWV 1011 INTERMISSION LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Lili ‘uokalani J.S. BACH: Suite No. 6 in D Major, BWV 1012

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM Matt Haimovitz is renowned for performing in challenging, innovative, and almost disruptive outdoor settings, including the High Line in New York and the gym at Columbia University. For two special performances this summer, he will perform the summit of musical achievement, the Bach Cello Suites, on one of the high ridges of Tippet Rise’s own summits. Half of the suites will be played in the afternoon, and the final half in the Olivier Music Barn in the evening.

Each of the six suites is paired with modern responses commissioned by Haimovitz from great living composers.

The original manuscript of J.S. Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello has been lost to history. The only remnant is a copy made by Anna Magdalena, Bach’s second wife, her handwriting uncanny in its likeness to the composer’s own. Since 1890, when Casals found a published copy in a second-hand music shop and first performed the suites in public 20 years later, the suites have been both Bible and Holy Grail of the solo cello repertoire—each cellist searching for his own way into the heart of this music.

Cellist Matt Haimovitz has been closely associated with the Bach Suites since the year 2000, when the former child prodigy jump-started the alt-classical revolution by performing the complete cycle in folk clubs and rock venues, including New York’s now-defunct punk palace CBGB. That same year, he released a three-CD set of the Suites that launched the newborn Oxingale Records.

Now, 15 years later, Haimovitz returns to the Cello Suites with a stunning new interpretation, intimately informed

by Anna Magdalena’s manuscript and the tools of the time.

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The Bach Cello Suites

These and the solo Violin Suites of Bach are the most

difficult pieces possible, because you are completely alone on the stage, with no accompaniment to give you moral support, or to disguise your finger slips. Even a finger not perfectly placed on a string or a string not perfectly vibrating with the bow will create a bad intonation. Critics are so harsh in judging performances of these sublime pieces that many cellists won’t play them in public. While not flashy, they are the supreme test of virtuosity, as each phrase must speak perfectly, with just the proper modulations, the way a Shakespearean actor must pronounce each word of “To be or not to be” with just the right inflection, mindful of what each actor before him did with each word.

The great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich put off recording these pieces until he was 70, because he never felt ready.

Pablo Casals rescued them (and all of Bach) from an image of being dowdy exercises and turned them into gorgeous evocations of stillness, even as they danced around in his vibrant versions. He would begin each day with a Suite. It made him attuned to the grandeur of the world. Bach sets you straight. He aligns your pulse to the throb of the world.

He makes you realize that no detail is small.

Haimovitz is widely acclaimed for his own version, which is personal, neurotic, and tormented, exposing the emotional conflicts inherent in modern life. Very much like Casals, he has expanded Bach’s capacity to encompass the human condition. No matter what trends prevail, they always seem to be anticipated by Shakespeare’s language; the same is true of Bach. Like seeds, they sow in all winds.

Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello mostly have seven sections:

A prelude to introduce the piece.

An allemande, a majestic German dance where you walked three steps and then balanced on one foot for the fourth beat. The allemande delights in order and calm.

A courante was a dance where you used three springing steps and then a short hop. As Snoopy said, if you can’t dance, at least you should be able to do a happy hop.

A meditative midsummer sarabande. Originally banned (Cervantes said that hell was its birthplace), it gradually became a slow Italian court dance. Ingmar Bergman used Bach sarabandes as soundtracks for Cries and Whispers and his last film, Saraband.

Two bourées. A bourée begins with a half or quarter hop, from which the ballet step gets its name. It is also called a French clog dance, and is danced to this day in the Massif Central. Paul McCartney’s song “Blackbird” is based on a bourée.

Sometimes in the Fifth and Sixth Suites Bach puts a gavotte rather than a bourée in this space. A gavotte is generally slightly quicker. It is a very complicated line dance whose jumps and foot crossings Bach imitates with accents and discordances, jarring chords which disturb the peace in the Fifth, but with a very simple and famous melody in the Sixth.

Rules exist to be broken.

Sometimes Bach writes a minuet in this space. A minuet has short (minute) fast steps. Being more even and simpler, and more generally danced, a minuet has more transparent rhythms.

A gigue is the fast British jig, which traditionally ends a suite.

Eric Siblin has written an entire book about these pieces: The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece (2008).

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An Evening Walk Through a Bach Prelude

By Peter Halstead

This is a description of the first six measures from the Third Solo Cello Suite by J. S. Bach.

One evening a young man thought he’d take a walk. Let’s call him John. Well, this was an important event, I’ll tell you, worthy of a 21-gun salute. But with only a slight grunt for a fanfare, John began the walk.

One foot in front of the other. The voyage of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But his Maoist trajectory was straight downhill into an alley, turned by gravity into a somewhat depressing slide, rather than a boulevardier’s saunter.

But from the dumpster at the bottom of the alley—it wasn’t really a very serious encounter; things began to look up for John. Off he went, repeating his steps on the way up the hill, even to the point of grunting at the top, the same way he had grunted when he began.

So it’s a palindrome: his day is a kind of Groundhog Day, a mirror image of itself, an exact reversal of what he started to do. We all have days like that. As the Red Queen says to Alice about her race, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” So far he hasn’t gotten very far. In fact, he stumbles, goes backwards a bit, and then climbs uphill quickly, stumbles again, and runs uphill to get to where he started, like Alice. Really quite comic.

And this is the way he will walk, he determines. He will fool fate and pretend to go downhill, but then scoot a bit upwards, each time gaining a foot or two. And so he 76

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continues for a few minutes, running crazily but in a distinguished fashion from goal to goal, although only he knows what those goals are. He is on a mission of his own making, fighting already against the forces which would thwart him, disguised as they might be by gravity. He has something in common with Debussy’s eccentric General Lavine, an old man out for a walk, avoiding buses and delicately belching now and then.

And so you would say that John was a man of his own mind. But he was in fact a creature of another John, a Johann Bach of Cöthen. So far he had gone only six measures in that particular interlude, a prelude to what was to come, and the light was remaining steady, although evening was sure to fall. There were another 71 measures left, so if he had walked for an hour, it would take him an entire day to get where he was going, even if it was only back home.

And that was, of course, only the prelude.

There would be many encounters along the way, with derelict sharps and somewhat suggestive flats and even an extremely annoying discordance, possibly a fall or a flat tire, a bit of time killing, and then the waddle back down into the grave—or maybe just the dumpster.

Was he taking out the garbage and decided to go for a bit of an adventure? Or was there someone else there, a second walker, a very insistent, if boring, talker, as Edward Albee said, La la la, forever on one note? If he was indeed duped or even drugged for part of the route, like any good homing pigeon or spinning top, he rights himself and scurries off, with a few pauses to catch his breath, back to the safety of the alley.

But there were no clues left by Mr. Bach as to his intent or his achievements, as everything was written quite simply in very basic code, mostly notes involving one single scale, a coming and going. Nothing could be more modest than that, nothing could be more noncommittal. And yet much had happened during that day abroad. There was real beauty now and then, and it almost seemed as if a decision might have been reached, before the stranger interfered with his unusual accent and distracted John from his purpose.

But although much might have been gathered from certain wry grimaces along the way, nothing could be proved. There were no plots, no programs, no language. Just those eight notes in the C scale. And yet even in pure mathematics, there is occasional drama. At least for John, the holiday cellist.

You can follow along with John through the prelude from the Sixth Cello Suite.

And now it was time for a dance.

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THE SOUND OF THE LAND ALBAN BASSUET

Approach to the Olivier Barn, Oehme van Sweden (OvS)

In Montana we are always reminded that it is the wild life,

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Working with the Land

the landscape, and the weather that tell us what to do. A humbling experience, a shifting of hierarchy that situates us within Nature, and ever present in people’s minds; one which forges mentalities in the region.

Defining the architecture and infrastructure for Tippet Rise started with a study led by the international design and engineering firm Arup, a team that I led at the time with my colleague Raj Patel.

Here nature’s scale overwhelms the senses. Cows look like ants, trees like bushes, hills like moving sand dunes, the sky feels like a reverse ocean, and the horizon line is never straight. There is no relatable sense of scale in Montana.

Driving helps. On Route 78 between Red Lodge and Fishtail, the parallax of the rolling hills moving in the foreground and fixed mountain ranges in the distance gives better indications of relative distances. Driving in Montana is a cinematic experience that influences musical tastes.

Mine changed from Blonde Redhead to Mogwai and Sigur Rós, from Schubert to Scriabin and Messiaen.

Long sunny days in the summer and strong windy days in the winter define the environmental conditions, accompanied by extreme temperature differential, poor water resources, and no power or roads. Everything would have to be built from scratch.

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After two years of feasibility and concept studies, an architectural competition was launched. Four renowned firms were asked to propose architectural concepts for the center.

The site and its wonders inspired extraordinarily original designs, but something unforeseeable happened. The

designs appeared as if architecture were trying to reestablish a hierarchy between land and human habitat, as if the natural wild lost its life force once architecture became too present in it. At this point, we decided to rethink the meaning of architecture at Tippet Rise.

taken back its own rights, or towards architecture made out of the land from mud or rocks, or towards agricultural structures with their indisputable right to exist on the land—each one expressing a visceral connection with Nature.

The land was telling us what to do, and instead of populating the land with architecture, buildings were moved to the periphery of the property. The majority of the land was left unencumbered, available for the exploration and the exhibition of large-scale artwork offering an unlimited number of personal interpretations. The siting of each artwork was calculated so that artists could develop their own engagement with Nature.

The Stones were born: three enormous concrete pieces, cast from molds dug into the ground, curated by Ensamble Studio Architects in order to provide shelter and to suggest a narrative to the visitor’s exploration of the land. They stand timelessly, removed from known archetypes, resonating with the full geological span of the area, mythical figures calling each other across canyons.

Fitting to the Land

The land itself influenced our taste. We started to be drawn towards raw architecture: the architecture of ruins and remains, left from ancient civilizations, where Nature has

Olivier Music Barn, the first performance space and visitor center, was envisioned as a true rustic barn and as a familiar structure reminiscent of agricultural structures from the region. Heritage construction firm Gunnstock Timber Frames effected both the architecture and construction of the building and its adjacent artists’ residences.

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The outdoor acoustical shell, Tiara, is made from wood stanchions, recalling the timber frame of the Music Barn, and with plywood boards to reflect sound. The absence of walls liberates the views of the landscape, while its floating structure and corners collect the music and immerse the audience in the performance.

Halstead describes the interior of the spaces as creating an almost “druidic” atmosphere. Revered internationally for its pristine acoustics, Snape Maltings is Cathy and Peter Halstead’s favorite concert hall and the reason that they selected Arup, the venue’s original engineers and acousticians, to be the acousticians at Tippet Rise.

The energy building, the nexus of all the utilities, is hidden in the ground; it is simply meant to disappear into the land, like a natural hill formation.

The acoustical design of the Oliver Music Barn at Tippet Rise follows inspirations from Snape Maltings—a few simple materials, a pitched ceiling that forges a particular sound signature, and timber framing that aids the diffusion of sound. Researching some of the most intimate and enveloping acoustical spaces, we also took inspiration from rooms used by classic composers, including the Music Room in the Esterházy Palace of Hungary, used extensively by Joseph Haydn for chamber music performances. A design emerged blending the qualities of both spaces.

Acoustics of the Olivier Music Barn

The architectural and acoustic planning for Tippet Rise was greatly influenced by Snape Maltings Concert Hall, an acclaimed building located in the bucolic British counttryside. Its buildings are distributed on the land like an agricultural compound or a small medieval village. Peter

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Snape Maltings Concert Hall, UK

The acoustical design was fine-tuned through computer simulation and listening studies in the groundbreaking Arup SoundLab. This allowed us to hear exactly how music would sound in different virtual-room prototypes

Music Room, Esterházy Palace, HG

before the space was constructed. The study set the final dimensions of the performance space and the shape of the ceiling, combining both flat and pitched ceilings, and helped enhance the acoustical envelopment and intimacy.

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WEEK FOUR

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FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn George Li

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN: Sonata in C Major, Hob. XVI: 50 Allegro Adagio

Allegro molto FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Sonata in B-flat Minor, Op. 35

Grave — Doppio movimento Scherzo

Marche funebre: Lento

Finale: Presto INTERMISSION SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 FRANZ LISZT: Consolation FRANZ LISZT: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2

(cadenza by Rachmaninoff)

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM George Li is the second prize winner in the XV International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow this year. He studies with Wha-Kyung Byun and her husband, Russell Sherman, acknowledged masters of advanced piano theory at the New England Conservatory of Music, with whom Christopher O’Riley and Peter Halstead also studied.

Sherman and his wife are known for bringing philosophy and deep introspection to the most difficult repertoire. Li will juxtapose the effervescent buoyancy of Haydn’s wellknown Sonata in C Major with the vast depths of Liszt’s great Sonata in B Minor and Rachmaninoff ’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli.

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN: Sonata in C Major, Hob. XVI: 50 (c. 1794)

The Hoboken-Verzeichnis is the catalogue of more than 750 works by Haydn compiled by Anthony van Hoboken.

Nothing to do with New Jersey.

Unusually, this catalogue has categories, so that symphonies are designated I, piano sonatas are XVI, which is what those numbers above mean: this is the 50th piano sonata.

L. is the catalogue number given to the sonata by Howard Chandler Robbins Landon, who published his definitive five-volume study, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, between 1976 and 1980. In 1949 he co-founded the Haydn Society, dedicated to publicizing and recording Haydn’s works.

This sonata was popularized by Horowitz. Its staccato beginning, with lots of space between the notes, is just the C chord played backwards, which theme continues throughout the first movement, intercut with mocking trills. The piece plays in typically witty Haydnesque ways with the simplicity of this almost childlike key. The key 84

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of C has no sharps or flats (although Haydn mischievously puts in a few), which makes it seem simplistic in the minds even of composers. Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3 is in C major, and it sounds very similar to Copland, simple Ives (for instance, the first part of his song “Memories”), or Mozart’s well-known four sonatas in C. Debussy’s portrait of a beginning pianist (his daughter Chouchou), Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, is in C.

The second and third movements could be Mozart, such as his sonata in C, K. 330. It is similar to the Schubertian motto of ending with a happy dance (after all, Mozart was Viennese).

Haydn, who lived to the age of 77, was Kapellmeister for decades on a remote estate of the wealthy Esterházy family which, he said, “forced me to be original.” The Esterházys were the Texans of Hungary. One of them came to Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 in a diamond-studded tuxedo. Nevertheless, in 1772 they were talented musicians and great patrons of Haydn.

Esterháza was an immense palace in Fertőd, Hungary, where Haydn was in virtual exile for 24 years, during which he wrote many of his symphonies and performed them in what is now called the Haydn room (on which the hall at Tippet Rise is based). All of Vienna made the long journey to Esterháza to hear the music each summer. It was called the Hungarian Versailles, and is the largest rococo building in Hungary. It has 126 rooms. The library has 22,000 volumes. This was the scene of the famous “Farewell” Symphony (no. 45). The orchestra members had been too long at Esterháza and were dying to get back to the other palace at Eisenstadt. They asked Haydn to beseech Prince Nikolaus the Magnificent.

Haydn put the request into music. At the end of the symphony, each player stopped playing one by one as the others continued. The departing player blew out the candle on his music stand, and left the salon. At the end there were only

two violinists left, Haydn and Tomasini, the two concertmasters. The prince got the message, and everyone left the next day.

FÉRDÉRIC CHOPIN: Sonata in B-flat Minor, Op. 35 (1839)

The beginning of the Chopin pays homage to Beethoven’s last sonata, No. 32, Opus 111 (1822). If not passing the torch, it is grabbing the torch. The Kanye West move. The actual theme of this movement is then modified from the octaves in the beginning to a closer theme with the same pattern but with the notes closer—that is, three notes apart rather than seven in the beginning.

This is different from Beethoven, who uses his abrupt octave introduction four times, then introduces an entirely different theme. In a way, building an entire sonata on the initial four or five notes is exactly what Beethoven usually does. Chopin has employed the same method in the first few measures. Possibly in his mind Chopin was correcting the deaf Beethoven’s wandering mind. He certainly means to draw the comparison. And Chopin’s melody is more compelling and lyrical than Beethoven’s late explosions of modern angst. Beethoven was moving towards the music of the future, but Chopin was rooting music firmly in more traditional structures, even if no one had ever done it anything like Chopin.

The third movement, known as the Funeral March, is the same theme and the exact same notes as the first movement inverted and slowed down. The first movement is febrile, and the second moribund, and the fourth nicknamed (to Chopin’s indignation) “the wind over the grave,” all three possible expressions of his growing tuberculosis. From 1842 onwards he spent all day in bed. In December 1838, he complained about the incompetence of the doctors in

Mallorca: “Three doctors have visited me.... The first said I was dead; the second said I was dying; and the third said I was about to die.”

The Russian tradition has been to hold the pedal down on the third and fourth movements (Charles Rosen mentions that both Rachmaninoff and Anton Rubinstein did this), but Chopin has indicated the exact opposite in his manuscript. The Funeral March has to start distant, detached, and only when it comes back at the end with force should there be any sense of the sweep of perspective that a pedal adds. The last movement is meant to be played without pedal, incredibly quietly, and incredibly fast. It’s very short, so it goes by in a flash, which Charles Rosen feels is unfair to the listener, because the pianist may know it well enough, but the listener has no time to appreciate it.

The miracle of recordings, of course, is that you can listen to the movement until you’ve actually heard it. But many people hear things for the first time in concert, so Rosen feels that Chopin makes unduly harsh demands on both pianist and listener, because the way he wants the last movement to be performed is easily lost in a large hall and leaves the audience feeling that the pianist wasn’t very forceful—but he’s only following the composer’s wishes.

Einstein called the exchange of energy possible between particles billions of years apart “spooky action at a distance.” This is a good phrase for the fourth movement.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 (1931)

Rachmaninoff wrote the Corelli Variations during the summer of 1931 at Le Pavillon, a villa he rented at Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines, about 30 miles southwest of Paris. The villa abutted the French president’s residence at Rambouillet. These variations are his last work for piano 2016 Inaugural Season

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alone. There is despair in them, which gives them truth, but also hope, out of which the theme rises. Rachmaninoff probably knew that it was false hope, which is also strangely present in the piece.

Rachmaninoff couldn’t compose after he left Russia in 1917 with his family, on an open sled. As an aristocrat, he lost his estate, his career, and his wealth, much of which he had put into his house, Ivanovka, or given to his serfs.

He was later horrified by the vengeance with which they looted the estate. His last pieces in Russia were the Opus 39 Études-Tableaux.

He spent fruitless years performing in Europe and the United States, during which he put half his annual income into very personal charitable gifts, helping Russians emigrate or survive. His goal with the rest of his savings was to build a sanctuary where he could compose again.

Clairefontaine was a test. His sisters wanted him to live near them in France. But the unattractive Bauhaus home he built in Switzerland, Villa Senar, near Lake Lucerne in Hertsenstein (where, ironically, Lenin used to vacation), was the place where he felt closest to his Russian estate, Ivanovka. Consequently, he wrote two fine pieces while vacationing there, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Third Symphony.

Interestingly, the area around Ivanovka, around 300 miles south of Moscow, is depleted, stark, impoverished. It is as if the land itself had died. Rachmaninoff sought to return to Russia but was refused, although the Soviets tricked Prokofiev into coming back. Had Rachmaninoff succeeded, he would have realized that old Russia was in his head. Nabokov memorialized a lush Russian childhood in his wonderful autobiography, Speak, Memory. But White Russia exists in ballets, in novels, not in reality. Rachmaninoff never would have gotten his inspiration back in Soviet Russia. It’s probably good he never realized it.

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Corelli. It was an early European folk song called “La Folia,” dating from Portugal in 1577. Liszt used it as the basis for his Spanish Rhapsody. Bach used it in his Peasant Cantata. Beethoven quoted it in the Fifth Symphony.

Lully, Corelli, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Geminiani, Handel all used it. Half of the folk songs in Sweden are based on it.

It is actually a figured bass, such as the one in the famous Pachelbel’s Canon, which has many versions, where the chord progressions are similar but musicians are free to improvise the treble (top) part, the melody. So in a way the melody is really the bass harmonies, rather than the notes on top, which are given their meaning by the harmonies.

(This is also true of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.) Rock has similar chord conventions. The musical Grease celebrated them in the song, Those Magic Changes, which starts with the usual rock bass of the C chord, the A minor chord, the F chord, and the G chord. With those four chords, you can accompany the early rock and bebop songs. It doesn’t matter so much what the melody is: it’s the familiar bass which lets you know that it’s going to be your kind of song.

The advantage of such a figured bass is that it’s a perfect foundation for anything you want to write on top of it.

Rachmaninoff wrote 20 variations, an intermezzo in the middle, a coda at the end, and the theme, so there are 23 parts to the Variations. The theme itself is timeless, and is similar to the Dies Irae motif. It also imitates his earlier Variations on a Theme of Chopin, from 1903. The few successful works Rachmaninoff wrote during his permanent exile he had in fact written a long time before, in Russia.

Maxim Bernard makes many interesting points in his study of the piece, in which he compares the variations to miniature études-tableaux and to the separated voices of Schumann’s Carnaval and of his Études Symphoniques: A Pianist’s Study of Rachmaninoff ’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42, which may be found online. The pianist Dmitry Rachmanov wrote an excellent analysis of the piece and its various recordings in Pianist Magazine in 2007, also

available for reading online.

Rachmaninoff ’s goal in his music was to convey his love for the Russian landscape in very simple folk melodies. He took great pains to disguise his underlying, almost naive sentiments with enough decoration to justify them in his eyes. He told the musicologist Alfred Swan, “All this mad rushing about [in the intermezzo] is necessary in order to efface the theme.”

This is also true of the poetry of Dylan Thomas: his first drafts were sentimental and straightforward. Only later did he bring in the vast wordplay that sets his poetry apart, but also distances it from the sincere, gushing wonder of the small-town boy he was, rather than the city boy he wanted to seem.

The intermezzo is the calm center of the piece, changing from D minor into D flat, transforming the mood immediately from despair to revelation.

FRANZ LISZT: Consolation (1849)

In 1830 Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve published a book of poems, Consolations. He never felt secure as a poet and eventually became a literary critic, moving in a circle that included de Vigny, Hugo, and the Abbé de Lamennais, all friends of Liszt. Sainte-Beuve’s melancholic poetry, his musical language, and his pre-Symbolist use of concrete objects to suggest the human soul appealed to Liszt, who was going spiritedly through a period which would have devastated an ordinary mortal.

Chopin had just died, and Liszt, who had never touched the forms which Chopin made immortal, now began to write his own versions in homage, perhaps to keep Chopin alive. His love, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn Wittgenstein, was chronically ill, suffering from boils and cankers which covered her skin. In leaving her husband, she had forfeited

her own enormous fortune, which was being pillaged by her vindictive ex-husband and the Russian crown, as a result of which no one in Weimar would speak to her.

Liszt had to spirit Wagner into 11 years of exile to save his life, as Wagner had unwisely taken part in the unsuccessful Dresden Uprising. There was no money for the enormous concert schedule which Liszt nonetheless conducted in Weimar as its Kapellmeister.

He must have known somewhere in his unconscious how many enemies he had—many of them, like the Schumanns, exploiting his friendship. The book he was writing about Chopin was taken over by the princess and turned into a mediocrity, causing many recriminations between them. Orchestras everywhere were schmaltzing up his compositions, assuring him of ignominy.

In the midst of all of this, Liszt was a pillar of strength, proselytizing on behalf of the Schumanns as they vilified him behind his back, conducting Wagner when all of Germany was terrified of being associated with the political exile, sticking with the bankrupt Weimar Court out of loyalty to his friend the duke (until the duke turned against him), and more or less forsaking the piano when other virtuosos were free agents. As the duke said of Liszt, “The world usually judges wrongly what it cannot comprehend.”

So what Alan Walker calls the “secret sorrow” of this piece is no longer so secret from us, and its constant reference to Chopin’s D flat Nocturne must have been a source of revitalization for Liszt, who once softly played one of Chopin’s Nocturnes publicly and at the end turned to Chopin and said, “Now we see that Liszt can play like Chopin. But can Chopin play like Liszt?”

Behind this ribbing was the great affection and loyalty of Liszt, and it breaks your heart to know how nobly, how blithely, how unbitterly Liszt coasted through tragedies that would have crushed anyone else. Nor was he simply clueless.

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His ability to see the truth led him to become an abbé later in life, and to simplify his compositions to the point that he is rightly called the father not only of modern music but also of minimalism, he who was its direct antithesis for half his life.

So it is a great consolation to me that if such a piece could console a genius with a searing vision of the world around him, who must have seen hypocrisy and tragedy so blindingly, then how much more consoling must it be to those of us who face (hopefully) smaller problems. For all its seeming Romanticism, the piece is structurally quite modern, requiring two different time zones, one for the Venetian boat song of the bass accompaniment, which is itself a melody, and the other for the slower, out-of-sync top melody. Only occasionally do the two zones coincide, causing notes to sound in unison.

Mostly, the two hands cannot agree, and battle each other delicately until the very end, when descending thirds end in unison, and you realize that what has sounded like one melody is in fact both together, and there has after all been resolution, subtle and consequently even more affecting, because it only dawns on you after the piece has faded away.

The inconsolable segregation of the voices is, I feel, similar in spirit to Charles Ives’s modern composition The Unanswered Question, where themes war similarly, leading to an uneasy and possibly only temporary peace.

FRANZ LISZT: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (1847) (cadenza by Rachmaninoff) 1847 was Liszt’s golden year musically, even if he was tormented in other aspects of his life (mentioned elsewhere).

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He was working on the Transcendental Études, the first Ballade, and the Liebesträum No. 3. He had met the most important person in his life, the Princess Wittgenstein.

He would suffer much critical spite for the wonderful rhapsodies, those split personality dioramas of gypsy life, with their Gothic lassans and their wild friskas. However, there is nothing more shining, more perfect, than this rhapsody, among the other 14 rhapsodies.

Horowitz simplified the last few minutes of the piece and called it a cadenza. I think he was just too lazy to learn what Liszt wrote (because his cadenza was so much simpler).

Arthur Rubinstein admitted in his wonderful two-volume autobiography (My Young Years and My Many Years) that he faked most of the pieces he played, and when records became popular, he realized he’d better take a summer and actually learn the notes.

Marc-André Hamelin has written a cadenza; Liszt wrote several. I played my own mish-mash (or Tritsch-Tratsch) for the director of the Berlin Conservatory years ago when we were shipping one of the pianos in Berlin Philharmonic Hall to Prague. I think that’s why he sent the piano to Prague.

George Li’s teacher was there as well.

Li plays the Rachmaninoff cadenza, which is a wonderful opportunity to hear how a legendary virtuoso and composer interacted with his equivalent in the past century, played by a great young virtuoso with an enormous career in front of him.

To me, this piece is filled with carriage rides, howling wolves, vampires, full moons, as in the novel Dracula (1897) or in the film Van Helsing (2004), anachronisms that they are: program music knows no dimension. When I was young, I used to mix my favorites together, which is probably how you get program music in the first place.

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WEEK FOUR

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2016, 2:00 PM

The Domo Eunice Kim John-Henry Crawford Christopher O’Riley

Celebrating Artist Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams GABRIEL FAURÉ Violin Sonata in A Major, Op. 13

Allegro molto Andante

Scherzo: Allegro vivo

Finale: Allegro quasi presto FRANCIS POULENC: Cello Sonata

Allegro — Tempo di marcia Cavatine Ballabile Finale INTERMISSION MAURICE RAVEL: Piano Trio in A Minor Modéré

Pantoum: Assez vif

Passacaille: Très large

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM This afternoon’s musicians present a program of Impressionistic ripples and dappled sunlight, of the kind which find their way through Patrick Dougherty’s sculpture Daydreams. These are the daydreams musicians have in school, when they should be paying attention to the teacher.

To create this sculpture, woven willows gathered from local riverbanks by Pete Hinmon of Tippet Rise were assembled by Dougherty and his team into a skein of phantasmagoric dream trellises, through which light and music find their way to form patterns on the floor, and in the eyes and ears of viewers.

Dougherty has made some 300 sculptures around the world in exotic locations over the last 30 years, and we are thrilled that one of those sculptures was created here at Tippet Rise.

Where on Earth but Tippet Rise does the confluence of art, architecture, liquid architecture (music) and the land result in integral yet phantasmal programming and music-making? This intermingling of media and organic immediacy is, of course, helped along by artists like Mark di Suvero, whose life’s trajectory as a young lad was forever altered, listening in a summer-camp treetop to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and whose first installation at Tippet Rise is entitled Beethoven’s Quartet. How better then to commemorate in familial celebration the assembly of Beethoven’s Quartet than to have the Ariel Quartet perform the “Heiliger Dankgesang” movement from Op. 132 under the pendulous swaying and musical sweep of di Suvero’s stainless-steel ram’s horn vision, exploding girders and steel-gray elephantine obelisks resurrected by centuries-old Cremona maple under shifting gale-force skies?

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Before there were walls to play in at Tippet Rise, the familial spirit arising from di Suvero’s installation crew and our own diligent Montana team gave rise to commemorative events under the whirling compass and range of both his monuments. I will never forget performing Schubert’s last piano sonata (di Suvero’s impassioned musical devotions reaching from Bach, to Beethoven, and beyond to his beloved Mozart and Schubert) under the golden tower, part rocket ship, part metronome, of his Proverb, again amongst our team, our family, watching a hawk careen and conduct on the horizon behind.

It’s a small leap, therefore, assembling these private concerts into a thread weaving through the inaugural season, programs inspired by the works erected under the Beartooth gaze, concerts curated by the implied or explicit musical tastes of their creators.

In conversation with Patrick Dougherty and my collaborators in this concert, Eunice Kim and John-Henry Crawford, having become familiar prior to commemoration with Dougherty’s work, the perfect musical representation of Daydreams’ nostalgic, hallucinatory infusion of willowbranch waves wafting through memory’s shell of a folk-iconic schoolhouse was deemed ideally French, romantic, impressionistic, and phantasmal in the chosen works of Fauré, Poulenc, and Ravel. The worlds of antiquity, poetry, and dance are also conjoined in this Daydreams concert, Pantoum from the Trio being a traditional poetic format, the last two lines of one stanza becoming the opening pair of the next, Ballabile a boisterous dance; the wave and weave of all the works on the program are exemplifications and inspirations born of the wonder at the heart of Dougherty’s work.

—Christopher O’Riley

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WEEK FOUR

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SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Svetlana Smolina, Yevgeny Sudbin, Christopher O’Riley Elmer Churampi

Celebrating Composer Alexander Scriabin SCRIABIN: Fantasy in B Minor, Op. 28 SCRIABIN: Piano Sonata No. 4 in F-sharp Major, Op. 30

Svetlana Smolina SCRIABIN: Poème de l’extase, Op. 54

Christopher O’Riley and Svetlana Smolina, piano,

Elmer Churampi, trumpet INTERMISSION SCRIABIN: Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 53

Yevgeny Sudbin SCRIABIN: Vers la flamme, Op. 72

Christopher O’Riley SCRIABIN: Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, Op. 60

Svetlana Smolina and Christopher O’Riley, pianos;

Elmer Churampi, trumpet

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM Composer Alexander Scriabin’s great dream was the Mysterium, a week of outdoor music and festivities that would result in apocalypse. We hope that the music of his performed this weekend achieves something of his mystical goals while falling tastefully short of manifold destruction.

As Russia lost its way politically and spiritually a century ago, personal religious systems became the psychological anchors of society. Scriabin was a prime example of how theosophy, Freud, Jung, and spiritualism became an escape for the decaying physical infrastructure of Russian materialism. This led to an immense blossoming of the arts, in the twilight before the end of the old world.

We hope that having Scriabin’s music played at the symbolically prehistoric dolmen of the Domo here at Tippet Rise will further define his philosophy in our presence.

ABOUT THE COMPOSER ALBAN BASSUET

What better choice than Alexander Scriabin (Dec. 25, 1871 – April 14, 1915) to address a big idea such as the relationship between mankind and the cosmos! He dreamt of music being performed at the foothill of the Himalayas, after which the world would dissolve in bliss. Bells suspended from clouds would summon spectators. Sunrises would be preludes, and sunsets codas. Flames would erupt in shafts of lights and sheets of fire, perfumes would change to the music and pervade the air… Tippet Rise is proud to present a commemorative event in honor of the illustrious Scriabin, surrounded by the majesty and forces of the nature of Montana.

Truly distinctive and original during his time, Scriabin’s music is often regarded as bridging late Romanticism with

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serialism and impressionism of the 19th century through his use of original chord arrangements and thinking of music in terms of visual attributes and moods, rather than traditional forms. There is, of course, a lot more to his compositional work, and his music does not leave one indifferent—Scriabin stirs up passion. Some have found a bewitching quality to his music, as addictive as a drug; others have dismissed him as a mystic or as insane. But to truly understand Scriabin’s music, one must study his philosophy, which dominated all of his composition—one which finds roots in his historical context in a search for a new mankind.

Scriabin’s Philosophy

During Scriabin’s life, Russia was led by Tsar Alexander II and later by Nicholas II. Growing industrialization was stretching the Russian political system, with lower classes attempting to gain more freedom. The inadequacy of the autocratic Tsarist rulers was becoming increasingly apparent, leading to the October Revolution toward the end of Scriabin’s life. This is also the time of Russia’s great expansion toward new territories, including Afghanistan, China, and Crimea. Embracing her Mongol Asian roots, Russia then glorified herself as the leader of mankind, as she stood between the East and the West. Russia’s patriotism and expansionism influenced many thinkers and artists at the time, including Kandinsky, Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Tolstoy, and Scriabin, who all considered themselves “Universalists,” as part of the new awareness of the world and mankind (although with a number of territories under Russian’s domination). For example, Dostoevsky often felt that brotherly love could cure the world’s ills. The Universalist ideology was further reinforced by the looming turn of the century and its apocalyptic predictions—a time not too dissimilar from ours.

But Universalist ideology was only the beginning of Scriabin’s philosophy, which he took to an extreme when he met with theosophists in England, France, and Belgium, a school of esoteric philosophy seeking to establish a description of the universe through direct knowledge and presumed mysteries of divinity, humanity, and the universe.

Scriabin thought of himself as a messiah, one who would bring enlightenment through his art and music: “The purpose of music is revelation,” he said.

To this Scriabin added the pivotal idea which infuses all of his music and which he described profusely in his writings and poetry: the concept of ecstasy. For Scriabin, ecstasy could be sensual, religious, the ecstasy of artistic creation, or the sight of beauty. He saw in it a heightened state of consciousness, a universal unification of mankind with the

divine, unification between male and female genders. It was for Scriabin a process of rebirth, as if he wanted to reawaken human beings to their essential selves, stating, “Consciousness without sensation is empty.”

Scriabin’s concept of ecstasy also coincides with the glorious Art Nouveau movement happening in Europe at the same time—a period during which feminine attributes and beauty were celebrated everywhere from architecture to design and the visual arts. Scriabin’s beliefs that mankind could be saved through art here meets with Plato and Socrates’ famous discourses on the feeling of love in Phaedo and The Symposium, describing the ascension and fever of the soul at the sight and contact of beauty—completely in the spirit of the times at the turn of the century.

Left, Victor Horta staircase; Right, Medicine (Detail: Hygieia), 1900/07.

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His Music

Scriabin almost exclusively composed for piano, with more than 100 pieces, including études, impromptus, mazurkas, preludes, fantasies, poems, and nine sonatas. His repertoire also consists of three symphonies, two symphonic poems, Prometheus, the Poem of Ecstasy, and a piano concerto.

No other composers have explored with so much passion the instigation of feelings, such as love, desire, passion, or ecstasy. Titles of his pieces include Danced Caress, Poem of Ecstasy, Desire, and Towards the Flame. Scriabin achieves these sensations by stimulating thrills and shaking human beings to their core, like shock therapy. There are no long fluid melodies, nor long developments, as one would find in Schumann or Medtner. Rather than changing tonalities, Scriabin’s musical material is developed through intensification of rhythm and by adding harmonic ornamentations as augmentation to the chromatic character and mood of the piece, as if his music were digging deeper and deeper into the human soul. Fantasy in B, Opus 28, is a perfect example of the musical theme repeated throughout the piece, with a gradual intensification of rhythm almost as a centrifugal motion, conveying a sense of trance, fever, and ecstasy.

Through his use of tonality as almost Freudian introspection, Scriabin was able to express deep personal feelings in very few measures. In the very first chord of Sonata No. 4, he is able to express a sense of surprise and admiration at the sight of beauty, which is continued through the first movement. The faster second movement appears like a dance of love, culminating in epiphanies—some of the most sensual pages of music for piano ever written.

Not surprisingly, Scriabin also had the ability to see colors as representations of musical notes (artifacts of synesthesia). He used chords to set moods and atmospheres like a painter, preceding Debussy and Ravel in that process.

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chromatic language, emulating a sense of mystery with his famous “mystic” chord, made of an augmented and diminished fourth. For most of his pieces, notes of melodies are extracted from a pre-defined “mystic” chord, which creates an immediate sense of tension (a similar process used later by the 12-note serial music composers such as Schoenberg and Webern). Deeply immersive, Scriabin’s melodies are more constructed to fit inside a chromatic space, rather than inhabiting dialogues or conversations like classic or romantic composers used to do. “There is no difference between melody and harmony,” Scriabin said. “They are one and the same.”

Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, considered Scriabin’s greatest symphony, is presented here in a transcribed version for two pianos and trumpet. It was originally part of the larger and unfinished piece called Mysterium, which Scriabin envisioned as an apocalyptic and multisensory composition to be performed at the base of the mountains, with bells in the sky and shooting flames, which would end with the destruction of the universe. Prometheus is composed as a dramatic vehicle, resulting in a transformative experience. Scriabin was attracted to the figure of Prometheus, whom he saw as fallen from a false paradise of gods to help the earth, both making man wiser than the gods themselves and uniting divine with human nature. “I want truth, not salvation”, said Scriabin, imagining flames of fire and light as symbols of man’s highest thoughts.

The piece starts with Scriabin’s mystic chord, expressing chaos, and the orchestra representing the cosmos with projections of blue and green as symbols of the earth’s essential elements. Melodies express the first state of consciousness, and Man appears as a self-affirming musical theme, with the color of steel. “Joy of Life” is expressed by the sun-color yellow, then to blood-red for procreation, love, passion and sensuality. Man is then reborn, singing the beautiful cry of self-realization, “I am,” as a glorification of creative principles, the theme heard at the very beginning. Yellow, symbolizing illumination given by Prometheus, persists

through the end in the form of flames and light, and a choir in the orchestral version, dressed in white, symbolizes the multiplicity of life. The piece ends in a final cosmic dance of matter, and the world is now formed. Man has been fired with wisdom, and the color of Prometheus ends and turns to blue again as a cycle of life.

approach could, for example, be contrasted with composers of the 12th century Gregorian period (e.g., Palestrina, Victoria) for whom enlightenment is conveyed through elevated voices of gods, saints, or angels, while Scriabin’s vision of enlightenment is a search from within, as a path through recognition of human feelings, contemplation of art, creativity and reason, to achieve a higher state of consciousness.

The doctrine of The Poem of Ecstasy coincides here with Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, imagined as a superhuman who has liberated himself from predetermined dogmas. During the same period, Schopenhauer and Wagner invested this ultimate being with new values, inspired by the aesthetic (art), selfless compassion, and the denial of the will, which meets with eastern Buddhist philosophies, and as a whole symbolizes the Universalist values prevailing at the time: Universal love and absolute spirit.

Scriabin’s entire body of work represents an important marker of a renewed consciousness and world awareness in human evolution, as Stanley Kubrick depicts a century later in 2001: A Space Odyssey, using as a soundtrack Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Illustration for the premiere of Scriabin’s Prometheus realized by Jean Delville, Belgian painter and Theosophist.

The Poem of Ecstasy and Sonata No. 5 were both composed from the same 300-line literary program written

by Scriabin. If Prometheus appears more like a play, The Poem of Ecstasy is centered more on the single philosophical idea of the elevation and liberation of human spirit, a theme which is illustrated through almost a single melodic motif, repeated throughout the piece, with a number of crescendos symbolizing its gradual enlightenment. This

We are proud at Tippet Rise to celebrate such milestones of history. We hope our collection of art installations and musical programs will illustrate the genius of the human spirit in the way anticipated by Scriabin and lead to the enlightenment he predicted and a better world for all of us, although that’s a lot to ask of any afternoon, even in the mountains.

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Alexander Scriabin’s Poem At its premiere, Scriabin inserted this note into the program book:

The Poem of Ecstasy is the Joy of Liberated Action. The Cosmos, i.e., Spirit, is Eternal Creation without External Motivation, a Divine Play of Worlds. The Creative Spirit, i.e., the Universe at Play, is not conscious of the Absoluteness of its creativeness, having subordinated itself to a Finality and made creativity a means toward an end.

The stronger the pulse beat of life and the more rapid the precipitation of rhythms, the more clearly the awareness comes to the Spirit that it is consubstantial with creativity itself. When the Spirit has attained the supreme culmination of its activity and has been torn away from the embraces of teleology and relativity, when it has exhausted completely its substance and its liberated active energy, the Time of Ecstasy shall arrive.

Scriabin based his fifth piano sonata on the same themes, and he published this poem with it: Je vous appelle à la vie, ô forces mysterieuses!

Noyées dans les obscures profondeurs De l’esprit créateur, craintives Ebauches de vie, à vous j’apporte l’audace!

I summon you, mysterious force.

Drowned in the dim depth Of my own making, remorseful Corpse, to you I bring my breath.

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WEEK FIVE

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FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Matt Haimovitz Christopher O’Riley

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH: Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 40

Allegro non troppo Allegro Largo Allegro SERGEI PROKOFIEV: Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in C Major, Op. 119

Andante grave Moderato

Allegro ma non troppo INTERMISSION SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Sonata in G Minor, Op. 19

Lento — Allegro moderato

Allegro scherzando Andante

Allegro mosso

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM These three works for cello and piano provide the kind of musical core of what we hope Tippet Rise will suggest to its visitors —the ineffable yearning for the land, the love of the steppes, and the fight for the nation, which these composers and these extraordinary works symbolize.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH: Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in D Minor, Op. 40 (1934)

While Dmitri Shostakovich composed on a piano in squalid flats, both of which were luxuries unknown to almost all Russians during the Great Terror, around him his best friends perished, sometimes out of Stalin’s frustration that Shostakovich himself was untouchable.

Eight years earlier, just before the censors decided to ban his work, Shostakovich had fallen in love with Elena Konstantinovskaya, his 20-year-old translator, and determined to divorce his wife. In those two weeks, he wrote the cello sonata. By the time it was finished, Nina had won him back.

He had rejected his early radicalism during this brief flirtation, and turned to Tchaikovsky, and Mussorgsky, to the comfort food of folk music. The cello sonata is his struggle to put his childhood behind him. As Gould said of Mozart’s sonatas, you have to record them to get them out of the way. This cello-piano sonata is the eye of the storm, a lyrical farewell to harmony before the devastation began, inside him and around him.

Later Shostakovich would delight the apparatchiks with whimsy and echoes of childhood, while at the same time evoking for his general audience the horror, poverty, and hopelessness which turned life in Russia into the Great Terror. Shostakovich composed parodies of folk tunes (which suddenly became moments of immense lyrical beauty) as a counterpoint to the brutality of the regime,

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at the same time fooling the censors into thinking he was fulfilling Stalin’s recipe for nationalistic tunes. People heard in the music what they wanted to hear.

Edward Said said* that it is the ability of music to provoke confusion and uncertainty, and the inherent expressive freedom in its different voices that accounts for the creativity of each individual listener. Modern life is based on conflicting soundtracks, the fragmentation of the formerly single-minded classical symphony.

Stalin, a paranoid psychopath whose name is Russian for “man of steel” (his real name was Josef Djugashvili), tried to lure well-known artists like Nabokov back to Russia by hiring charming diplomats as ambassadors of goodwill who would wine and dine their prey in Europe. But the Russians who were trapped inside Russia knew a different story.

While American intellectuals like Edmund Wilson praised Stalin, who had become an ally of the U.S. by the end of the Second World War, ultimately six million people would die because of Stalinism, which brought famine, war, and the Gulag purgings.

William T. Vollmann (Chris O’Riley has read everything he has written) dedicates a chapter of his epic novel Europe Central to the influence of Shostakovich’s affair with his translator on the music of the Cello Sonata. Vollmann stresses the composer’s battle between lyricism, young love, and the chaos caused by the loss of his self in another (not to mention life under Stalin). To Vollmann, Opus 40 is a sanctuary which the composer built to live in with his lover, before the charismatic and mature Nina brought him back to the marriage which, like Nabokov’s, allowed him the safety he needed for his anarchy. Elena herself was reported to the police and spent a year in prison.

There are two versions of any cello-and-piano sonata: the cello version, and the piano version. It depends on the balances the musicians decide upon, and what credence both give to each other’s instrument. If you listen to a variety of

pianists and cellists play Shostakovich’s music, each version is entirely different; musicians themselves determine how to color and balance it, as if it were aleatoric music by Xenakis, where the performer decides many aspects of the interpretation.

You can hear on YouTube a balanced version, almost a guided tour, with Shostakovich himself on the piano, and Daniil Shafran on cello, recorded in 1946. Later, wilder renditions

by Rostropovich or Sol Gabetta build on the foundations of this performance.

The Cello Sonata begins with the piano playing a version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, over which the cello plays a gorgeous and whimsical reminiscence-of childhood, of the countryside? Some pianists bring out the Beethoven, others let the cello carry the opening. The piano is then left free to vary the Beethoven accompaniment into other octaves.

Imagine if the Moonlight Sonata did that. This is mostly lost behind the gorgeous cello theme. The sonata seems to improvise, then gets around to a bit of Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue had been around for 25 years already) and moves into a bluesy interchange, gradually moving back for a long interlude into the rhapsodic stillness of the initial sighing theme, a dream of any summer, American or Russian. The yearning theme returns and fades away. Sounding like another movement, a slow funeral fugue begins in the cello, which the piano tiptoes around, as if Shostakovich is saying that he isn’t a dead master yet (he was 28). Here the steppes loom larger, and the movement ends in a fatalistic D minor, asserting its home key. Rachmaninoff wrote his Third Piano Concerto in D minor: its open, brooding expanses summon up the immense swamps and stark plains of the steppes, a dead canvas which bored children were forced to imitate with vast silent symphonies and novels which became all that was left of their prolonged childhood.

The racing second movement is a moto perpetuo folk melody, almost Bartók, constantly surging, with cello scales spreading to the piano and morphing into glissades, where

scales are slid, or glissandoed, which every cellist does to different effect, some making it otherworldly, some worldly; some a caricature, some offhandedly harmonic.

Wild arpeggios then surround the scales, until the sky and ground merge and the middle compromise is revealed not as a pulse but as an actual melody, which becomes ethereal and turns into an Austrian Ländler and a Scottish reel. The piano’s early chords are transferred to the cello, and the Khachaturian theme is passed between both instruments until the movement turns into a prisyadka, a jumping Cossack climax.

The slow movement begins with the gorgeous theme from Beethoven’s Third Cello Sonata, but immediately wanders off into constant revelations; every 10 seconds brings an epiphany. Another funeral march has that Russian sense of strangification, or displacement, found in the writings of Andrei Biely, where the harmonic security of a key structure disappears, to leave the cello and piano in an unrecognizable desert. What they play is harmonic, even old-fashioned: but its context is missing. This became a trademark of Shostakovich’s compositions over time, a sense of tabula rasa, an erased palette, whited-out in a blizzard, with no sense of which way is up. In a way, the cello and piano have lost their common language and exist in separate worlds, the opposite of the usual collaboration in chamber music.

The piano improvises badly in the depths of the keyboard until a gorgeous melody suddenly arises, unanchored by any key, and the piano searches through single notes for a home, an identity. The cello chimes in at the end, very Gershwin, plaintive, at the same time a cry from the Russian steppes. After a few false endings, the piano agrees with the cello at last, a home is found (although it is a sad one), and the cello finishes the cadence. This long finale is a search for the meaning of the movement, of the cello itself, of Russia. But every step into the wilderness is a destination. The question itself is the goal. The beauty lies in the journey. The yearning ringing throughout the last few mea2016 Inaugural Season

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sures is the love of mist, the sorrow for the loss of the light, which echoes throughout Chekhov and Rachmaninoff.

Although most descriptions of Shostakovich’s works are filled with generalities, it is actually in the unique and specific wanderings of each note that the contribution of the music is to be found.

The final movement begins with a parody of Mozart’s “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” moving on to Mozart’s two similar sonatas in C, all of them childish melodies, before growing into a more adult, massive variation, then an escalating fugue on the theme. The piano breaks into a variation of virtuosic scales before returning to the Mozart (with the cello bursting into scales) and breaking into a contented second theme, a world removed from the Mozart. It could be Dvořák. A childlike folk melody slows the momentum, and suddenly with a sol-do it’s unexpectedly over, as if Mitya has said, Enough: let’s go to sleep.

Shostakovich premiered it on Christmas day of 1934, along with Rachmaninoff ’s Cello Sonata, also played here tonight, so in a way this is a re-enactment of that epic debut. * Cited in John McGreevy’s Glenn Gould Variations: By Himself and His Friends, p. 47)

SERGEY PROKOFIEV: Sonata for Violoncello and Piano in C Major, Op. 119 (1949)

Stalin had sent a charming and cultured ambassador to talk expatriates into returning to Russia. Having spent 15 years in Paris, Prokofiev, “patriotic and homesick,” was longing to “see the real winter again and hear the Russian language in my ears.” He was easily duped into moving back to the Soviet Union in 1936.

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The next year the Great Purge began. Its goal was to eliminate Stalin’s real and imaginary enemies and to terrorize the country into abject slavery. There was no logic to it, only the ravings of a paranoid psychopath of the kind who seem to be able to hijack the minds of the very people they intend to slaughter. Very much like McCarthyism, poets and politicians alike were forced to name the names of imaginary “traitors,” who then provided yet more names for mock trials and summary executions. Once the NKVD broke in the door, even if you were innocent, it was too late. Half a million people were put to death over three years, and some six million people were sent to labor camps in Siberia.

Prokofiev had been allowed to keep his passport initially, but it was confiscated permanently during a routine checkup. He spent the rest of his life in Moscow. The exuberance and charm of Peter and the Wolf, written the year he immigrated, spiraled down into a black hole, an era where he wrote nothing at all.

In 1948 the Politburo issued the Zhdanov Decree denouncing Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian as formalists, people who renounced classical music for “muddled, nerve-racking” sounds that “turned music into cacophony.”

Eight of Prokofiev’s works were banned from performance.

This doctrine stunted artistic growth in the Soviet Union for the rest of Prokofiev’s life. He didn’t dare play even uncensored works; by August 1948 he was in severe financial straits, his personal debt amounting to 180,000 rubles, more than five million dollars at today’s rates.

In 1948 Prokofiev’s wife Lina was arrested for “espionage,” as she had tried to send money to her mother in Spain.

After nine months of interrogation, she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor.

Having heard Rostropovich play the first Prokofiev cello concerto at the Moscow Conservatory in 1947, Prokofiev was inspired to write the Sonata for Cello and Piano. By that time Prokofiev’s doctors were allowing him to compose for only an hour a day.

Rostropovich, who was then 22, had to play the sonata for the Committee of Artistic Affairs so they could judge if it were “hostile.” Apparently it was friendly, and Rostropovich was allowed to debut it with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter in 1950. Amazingly, this performance was recorded, and you can listen to it on YouTube. Thirteen years of despair and oppression, and the result is on YouTube.

Three years later Prokofiev would be dead. He died the same day as Stalin, making it impossible for three days to carry the composer’s body out to be buried. Lina was released from prison later that year.

It remains an enigma that Prokofiev wrote music which seems untouched by any of the requirements of committees or the tragedy of his own entrapment in Russia or the executions of most of his peers, which must have ruined his yearning for Mother Russia. Nostalgia only exists at a safe distance. But the nightmares never make their way into the music. Maybe there are a few chords here and there. Maybe you can listen for them….

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Sonata in G Minor, Op. 19 (1901)

Someone wrote of Maggie Smith that her voice matured from a violin to a cello. Although the violin has attracted composers over the years, it is the throatier viola and the immense richness of the cello which evoke in a single note all the mornings of the world, as the cello film Tous les matins du monde so beautifully demonstrates. Although composers have devised many ways of varying the sound of a cello’s animal resonance through plucking, striking, hammering, spiccato (or controlled bouncing), it is the single note, played anywhere on the long neck of the strings, which summons up the sound we would think that planets make in their travels, lush with gourds, pears, quarries, rust, and the metallic gears of constellations.

Rachmaninoff himself said that he wrote music to play melodies of simple, single notes, but that the crowd wanted octaves, so he disguised those single notes with the scaffolding of entire concertos. It is, however, the single notes of the Bach solo cello works which contain the soul of the world, and it is into the single notes of the cello that Rachmaninoff distills the essence of his meandering genius at the piano, as if to center the chaos of the ocean by focusing on the way light shines through a single wave.

Rachmaninoff, the giant of the piano, was born into the Russian aristocracy, descended through his father from the Hospodars Dragosh, rulers of the realm of Molday. Although his mother had five estates, his father reduced them by his gambling to a small apartment in St. Petersburg. Rachmaninoff used all his earnings to buy his childhood with the purchase of Ivanovka, from which he fled by sleigh during the Russian Revolution in 1917. He was 44. Having lost Russia, he never wrote anything real again. He redid pieces he had written in Russia, but what he wrote in America had no ground below it.

He was lost in Hollywood, dabbling in jazz, making his living as a pianist. But he had nowhere to go home to.

His most famous piece, the Prelude in C-sharp Minor, written when he was 18, he had sold to his publisher Gutheil for 40 rubles, the equivalent of $20. Thereafter, whenever he was called on to play it—which happened at every concert—he had to pay someone else royalties; so he hated it.

Rachmaninoff wrote the Cello Sonata around the same time as his Second Piano Concerto, and you can tell. After a slow introduction from the cello with hints of the Second Piano Concerto from the piano, the same gorgeous romantic atmosphere begins to mass. Rachmaninoff is at the peak of his powers. Virtuosic outbreaks from the piano don’t faze the quiet cello, which takes over the role which the orchestra plays in the Second Concerto. A quieter piano continues to play transcendent versions of that Concerto: Rachmaninoff has been able to rewrite his masterpiece and even improve it.

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Outbursts from the polymorphous piano are always calmed, focused, by the moral cello. The piano grows in its virtuosity and its lyricism, and yet contradicted, solved by the single line of the cello until the piano surrenders to the cello’s single heart.

The piano builds disguises, which it will get cagier at doing over the next 16 years, while the cello asserts the underlying simplicity of the landscape, the simple wind that shapes the steppes, before the bells dispel the strangeness, before the solitary walker asserts his right to describe the air. Brilliant but contained, unimpressed with the ego of the piano, the cello follows the upward surge of the pulse towards the horizon, until the sky merges with the land in Rachmaninoff ’s signature three-note fillip, the music of the spheres distilled, filtered into just three even-tempered notes at the end of the first movement.

He had been told by Tolstoy that his music was meaningless: “Is such music needed by anyone? I must tell you how I dislike it all. Beethoven is nonsense, Pushkin and Lermontov also.” But as Rachmaninoff was leaving, Tolstoy backtracked: “Forgive me if I’ve hurt you by my comments.” Rachmaninoff replied, “How could I be hurt on my own account, if I was not hurt on Beethoven’s?”

(If you repeat this several times, you will see that he was outraged for both himself and Beethoven. One suspects Tolstoy saw through this clever grammatical deflection.)

But in fact Rachmaninoff was devastated; he didn’t compose for a year. Beethoven had already dared the ostracism of the world, and all we need to do is be easy riders on his courage. But Rachmaninoff was a doe in the headlights of history, unformed, hoping for love.

Rachmaninoff ’s First Symphony had just been trashed by critics. Tolstoy’s comments pushed him over the edge, onto the mirror where he could see himself from outside. Freud had said around that time that we fashion our identities 108

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out of how other people see us. T. S. Eliot had vowed to carry on despite the human condition:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Rachmaninoff entered into hypnosis and was told to repeat to himself, “You will work with the greatest of ease. The concerto will be of excellent quality.” And so, eventually, he climbed out of the whirlpool of how we see ourselves into the clearer tidepools of how we channel the waves, blind to the walls of currents, the wails of sirens that always say no to the surfer.

And so it is this piece, Opus 19, which Rachmaninoff threw against a world which had never heard of what he wrote, until he wrote it. This was how he disturbed the universe. His cry of defiance encompassed this sonata and the Second Piano Concerto, which is more outward, ebullient, gregarious, while the Cello Sonata is like having the composer’s commentary on what he really means, the eye of the hurricane.

This would be his last chamber work. It was when he showed his hand. He would never again be so vulnerable; he retreated quickly inside the shell of virtuosity, of his massive piano technique, and never emerged. This is a chance to hear him singing in the shower. This is the piece closest to the soft hum of his identity, before he added the mask against the howl of other people.

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The Evolution of a Performance

By Peter Halstead

Matt Haimovitz plays a cello made by the Venetian

luthier Matteo Goffriller in 1710, 10 years before Bach composed the six solo Cello Suites. Matt has played Casals’s own Goffriller. It was Casals who discovered the manuscript of the Cello Suites in a used bookstore in Barcelona and went on to change the world’s opinion of all of Bach’s music, which at the time was played in a lugubrious, rigid manner imposed on it by hundreds of years of pedantry. Casals made it joyous, light, dancing, and at the same time a source of enlightenment in ways that were extramusical. Casals played one suite every morning before he did anything else, and it changed the way he faced his day. He taught his students, his friends, strangers about the truths in the scales.

My own teacher, the pianist Russell Sherman, taught that scales existed to serve the structure of a piece, and might contain in them hidden motifs, tying them into the piece as scaffolds, rather than just decorations. Horowitz’s concert Steinway was voiced by Franz Mohr so that random notes leapt out of a scale, so that inner voices abounded, whether or not they were intended.

The butterfly effect comes from Edward Lorenz, an early contributor to chaos theory, who developed a system based on earlier observations of heated water whose simple convection eventually takes on complex chaotic patterns which, when plotted, resemble the patterns on the upside wing of a butterfly, the camera lucida. Ray Bradbury worked this into a science fiction story, “A Sound of Thunder,” where killing a dinosaur in Jurassic times changes the political climate when the time travelers return to the present.

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In music, changing the timing of a pattern in the beginning of a piece necessitates altering each repetition of that pattern throughout the piece. If a small initial pattern grows and becomes a major episode, as it usually does in structured composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, any change made to the small pattern has to be continued as the motif expands, leading to a major change later in the piece. So a very short pause in a scale could ultimately become a rest, or a period of prolonged silence, later on.

If you stress one note in a fugue, integrity and the long tradition of loyalty to a piece’s inner structure demand that you have to carry on the “conceit,” the daring of your change, into subsequent repetitions of the pattern.

There are many film comedies based on this premise, such as Blame It on the Bellboy, If Looks Could Kill, The Valet, and A Perfect Plan, where an initial lie or mistaken identity leads to amusing complications.

So a musical butterfly effect is partly like a jazz improvisation, where if you change a melody you have to keep changing it the same way or in different ways as the piece continues. Playing Bach is this kind of improvisation, because Bach left no record of how to play his music, so it is up to each musician.

As my wife, Cathy, points out, only musicians have the training, the discipline, the obsession, the drive, the language to fly back in history, in their own kind of time machine, and mesh their own opinion of Bach with his music. She doesn’t feel it’s an interpretation—instead, it’s a meshing, a coming together of education, time, and spirit into a third thing.

As a musician experiments with the hundreds of different ways to play Bach (who wrote almost no indications of tempo or emotion), small changes result in eventual revelations, or great emotional insights into oneself. If you recorded the Cello Suites once a year, you would end up after a lifetime with certain moments that seem inevitable, just right, or totally wrong. You would have favorite performances and embarrassments. As you play the Suites over and over, you learn about phrasing, breathing, slurring certain notes, stressing other notes, to make a coherent narrative or even to tell a false story which can be contradicted dramatically later on. The permutations are endless.

Casals played the Cello Suites for 13 years before daring to play them in public. When asked at 93 why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day, Casals replied, ”I’m beginning to notice some improvement.” Rostropovich waited until he was 70 before he felt he was ready to commit to one version in a recording. Moments that feel brilliant in a concert don’t stand up to repeated hearings, so you have

to think out what you’re going to say quite a bit, lest you make a face in the mirror and it freezes for life.

Glenn Gould’s first and last recordings were Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In between, Gould had learned to slow down so that he could luxuriate in the beauty of the music, to be meditative. Rather than playing quickly to influence the audience, Gould had learned to play deeply to influence himself.

Matt Haimovitz has recorded the Cello Suites twice so far, once in 2000 (in a recording that was chosen as a “Top Pick” by U.S. News & World Report and featured in Billboard, Gramophone, and The New Criterion), and recently in a high-resolution version on the Pentatone label, which uses Sony’s SACD format to present a warm, dynamic, and detailed window onto the cellist’s current interpretation. As Haimovitz has said, “I owned dozens of published editions. Which one should I rely on to base my bowings and fingerings? Where does one begin to look for the hints as to tempi, dynamics, ornamentation? Must one play with discipline or spontaneity, strictly in time or with a fluid sense of rubato? More and more I turned to Anna Magdalena’s manuscript as particularly valuable, becoming increasingly convinced that hers is closest in spirit to the original.”

Anna, Bach’s second wife, copied out the Suites, the earliest surviving source for them. Just as Casals changed every aspect of how Bach was played, Haimovitz has introduced introspection, a fevered transparency suited to postmodern emotional complexities, tortured narratives, ironic levels, and sounds unknown to earlier generations. As Russell Sherman said, why does all music have to be pretty? Bach contains, like raw film files, all the voices, all the emotions; he can reveal as much of your soul, your antipathies, your epiphanies, as you care to share.

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SATURDAY, JULY 16, 2016, 2:00 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Dover String Quartet Matt Haimovitz

Celebrating Artist Mark di Suvero’s Beethoven’s Quartet LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132 Allegro

Allegro ma non tanto

Molto adagio; Andante

Alla marcia, assai vivace

Allegro appassionato; Presto INTERMISSION FRANZ SCHUBERT: String Quintet in C Major, D. 956

Allegro ma non troppo Adagio Scherzo Allegretto

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T.S. Eliot listened to the A Minor Quartet as he wrote his extraordinary poem, The Four Quartets:

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Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past….

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

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Eliot said of the Beethoven A Minor Quartet:

I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconcilia- tion and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.

The first of the four poems, "Burnt Norton", was written in anticipation of World War II and to celebrate (or mourn) how much there was to lose in that conflict. It could not

have been written without the tragedy of the First World War, and is an example of how art often prefigures history. Although the poem doesn’t mention war directly, it is suffused with the sadness and dread of the loss of meaning in civilization. It intuits a new mood.

As Paul Fussell said of the pre-Quartets limbo in England in The Great War and Modern Memory:

There was no Waste Land, with its rats’ alleys, dull canals, and dead men who have lost their bones: it would take four years of trench warfare

to bring these to consciousness. There was no Ulysses, no Mauberly, no Cantos, no Kafka, no Proust, no Waugh, no Auden, no Huxley, no Cummings, no Women in Love or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There was no “Valley of Ashes” in The Great Gatsby. One read Hardy and Kipling and Conrad and frequented worlds of traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language.

The A Minor Quartet later figured heavily in the coda to Aldous Huxley’s novel, Point Counter Point.

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132 (1825) Beethoven’s late string quartets, Numbers 12 through 16, are considered the epitome of his art. By this time he had long finished the nine symphonies, the piano concertos, most of the works we value. He was dying.

But then he miraculously recovered. From this, we, along with the powers of heaven, get his eternal thanks, in this case literally, as they have been as eternal as music gets: the middle movement of the 15th Quartet has the “holy thank you,” the “Heiliger Dankgesang,” one of the most transcendent pieces ever written.

This piece inspired Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica Celestis (played at Tippet Rise on June 18), two other examples of music that somehow describes what cannot be described, the ethereal atomic and artistic ties that bring us through an artistic wormhole into other dimensions of clarity.

The 15th Quartet has five movements:

1 Assai sostenuto – Allegro

2 Allegro ma non tanto

3 Molto Adagio – Andante – Heiliger

Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die

Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart. Molto

adagio – Neue Kraft fühlend. Andante –

Molto adagio – Andante–Molto adagio.

Mit innigster Empfindung

4 Alla Marcia, assai vivace (attacca)

5 Allegro appassionato – Presto

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FRANZ SCHUBERT: String Quintet in C Major, D. 956 (1828)

Chamber music is the guilty pleasure of the music world.

It doesn’t help your career; it isn’t fire-breathing, knockdown-the-piano, set-fire-to-the-cello music. Instead, it’s charming, fairly easy to play, and for once you, the musician, can concentrate on having a good time with friends.

This is what musicians do to relax. And this is one of the chosen pieces for such soirées.

The "Cello Quintet" was finished two months before Schubert died. He was 31. It is essentially a symphony for five instruments. But it wasn’t performed until 1850, 22 years later. He sent it to his publisher, who basically replied, “But do you have any songs?”

Schubert heard very little of his music performed, as he only gained some small popularity towards the end of his life. He was thought of as the writer of dances, waltzes, and songs, not of great music like symphonies and this, one of the greatest of all chamber works. Many of the 600 songs he wrote remained unpublished during his lifetime.

Schubert studied with Salieri, as did Mozart and Beethoven. There should be an Amadeus where Salieri secretly poisons all three and puts their names on his work, thus guaranteeing the immortality of his music (if not his name). Schubert also benefited from the patronage of the Esterházys, as did Haydn and Beethoven.

In that last summer and fall, Schubert composed this quintet, his last three great (and ultimately posthumous) sonatas, and yes, some of the Schwanengesang songs. In all, he had written 10 symphonies, six Masses, the great song cycles Winterreise, Schwanengesang, Die Schöne Müllerin, Wilhelm Meister, the eight Impromptus, the Trout Quintet, the Moments Musicaux, 23 sonatas, and the Wanderer Fantasy.

There are four movements to the “Cello Quintet.” The pianist Arthur Rubinstein wanted the second movement played at his funeral.

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SATURDAY, JULY 16, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Svetlana Smolina Christopher O’Riley Caroline Goulding Matt Haimovitz John Bruce Yeh

Celebrating Composer Olivier Messiaen Visions de l’Amen

Amen de la Création

Amen des étoiles, de la planète à l’anneau

Amen de l’agonie de Jésus

Amen du Désir

Amen des Anges, des Saints, du chant des oiseaux

Amen du Jugement

Amen de la Consommation Svetlana Smolina and Christopher O’Riley, pianos INTERMISSION Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time)

Liturgie de cristal

Vocalise, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps

Abîme des oiseaux Intermède

Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus

Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes

Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps

Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus Caroline Goulding, violin; John Bruce Yeh, clarinet; Matt Haimovitz, cello; and Christopher O’Riley, piano 2016 Inaugural Season

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Messiaen traveled widely and was moved by what he could hear and by what he believed. He was influenced by Bryce Canyon in his compositional structures, by birdsong, by the life of St. Francis, the great lover of birds—many of the natural elements present in our part of Montana. Very much like John Adams and Philip Glass, Messiaen was influenced by Indonesian gamelan music. He composed his Quartet for the End of Time in prison at the end of World War II, which must have felt very much like the end of days. He wrote it for the four instruments which the prison had.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM I knew from my first moment in Boston that there was no better place for a training musician, nowhere else in the country where one could sample from the cornucopia of musical groups of world stature, concert halls, museums and festivals, and, best of all, the long-forgotten days of 24-hour classical music broadcasts on WGBH. As a freshman in the dorms at New England Conservatory, I would regularly leave my radio on all night long, my dream state informed and narrated by the more adventurous late-night fare.

I remember waking up to a haunting clarinet solo, an expanse of dynamic and dramatic propulsion, a lone but warrior-like voice; then a gauntlet-unison of violin, clarinet, and cello, then an endless and beatific arietta for cello and stellar inevitability in the stately piano tolling.

All these singular musical landscapes were unique in their way, and yet somehow related, of a piece. Finally, after the transcendent violin and piano finale, its reverent meditation on the immortality and eternity of Jesus, the title and composer were announced, revealed to me for the first time as Olivier Messiaen and his Quartet for the End of Time.

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I fell in love with this music, devouring all I could find; so much beautiful, birdsong-inspired piano music, rhythmic intricacy true to post–World War II rigor yet at base invocations of gamelan, harmonies drawn from Messiaen’s synesthetic kaleidoscopic enchantment most likely born of his ever-present stained glass Notre Dame windows, the monolithic, anthropomorphic scale and scope of music composed by a man always within the gaze of the French Alps. What better way to celebrate music among Montana mountains than with the music of Messiaen?

This afternoon’s program is a specific invocation of that first blush of Messiaen-mania. In the year of my coming upon his music for the first time, Olivier Messiaen himself came to Boston. His proto-Wagnerian and massive Turangalîla-Symphonie was performed by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, and in that same flush of activity (Messiaen even visited the humble dormitory of New England Conservatory; the top-floor dorm monitor had a parakeet the bird-loving composer just had to visit) the Boston Symphony Chamber Players along with the composer and his brilliant pianist-wife, Yvonne Loriod, played the very concert recreated today at Antón Garcia-Abríl’s Domo amidst the Beartooth Range. Messiaen and Loriod opened the concert with the meditative and massive two-piano work Visions de l’Amen, and then Loriod joined an incomparable company in violinist Joseph Silverstein, clarinetist Harold Wright, and cellist Jules Eskin in a performance of the Quartet for the End of Time, which I’m sure permanently altered the consciousness of all in attendance at Jordan Hall that Sunday afternoon.

This is music dreamed on mountaintops, now brought again to life.

—Christopher O’Riley

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ABOUT THE COMPOSER The composer Olivier Messiaen was captured by the Germans at Verdun. At Stalag VIII-A, his fellow prisoners included a violinist, a cellist, and a clarinetist. He wrote a trio for them, which became the Quartet for the End of Time. It was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and guards, with the composer playing a beat-up upright piano in the cold. To Messiaen, to anyone, the Apocalypse, the end of time, was upon them. There was a different end to time which Messiaen came to believe: instruments didn’t have to play “in time”—they existed in what would now be called parallel universes. It is often easier to follow different harmonies if they are slightly displaced and do not happen simultaneously. Great musicianship is partly dependent on the ability of a performer to convey those different voices in different time frames; that is, the hands or different instruments sometimes benefit from playing slightly apart. This is extremely difficult, and can produce a train wreck as easily as magic.

Messiaen is the ideal composer for Tippet Rise, as his works evoke the landscape; his mathematical fugues are based on birdsong, the way the world slowly wakes at dawn to a chorus of sound, which can be heard at Tippet Rise.

We live in a noisy world, where mechanical noises drown out the sounds of nature; most of the composers played at Tippet Rise lived in a world before engines, where the loudest sound was a carriage on the cobblestones. People heard quiet things, and were moved by them.

Messiaen also believed in endlessly slow music. Slow music moves us, because we have time to absorb it, to hear it as slowly as it was composed. Playing quickly often loses the heart of the sound.

Messiaen was influenced by Debussy, Villa-Lobos, and Albéniz, relating his music in a way to that of Garcia-Abríl (played on June 25), influenced by the same masters.

In his use of ancient Greek and Hindu rhythms, Balinese gamelan, and Japanese music, he influenced John Adams (played on June 18) and Philip Glass.

Messiaen’s students became the leaders of post-war European composition: Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis. In his Treatise on Rhythm, Color and Birdsong he discussed his sense of audition colorée, or synesthesia, which he shared with the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

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FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016, 6:30 PM The Olivier Music Barn Konstantin Lifschitz

J.S. BACH: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

Aria

Variations 1-30 Aria

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The Goldberg Variations have become a barometer, a moral compass for how certain people approach their lives. In these 30 variations is a complex labyrinth of exuberance, grief, meditation, stillness, revelation, and resolution.

Here can be found answers to questions posed by an often chaotic society, questions too often unanswered in our busy lives. Konstantin Lifschitz is a legendary interpreter of this, one of the most seminal constructions in music.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

J.S. BACH: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1741)

Many notes had been written before Bach’s great masterpieces, but no composer before had managed to unearth such a universe of meaning and beauty from intense explorations of structure. Notes are the Platonic shadows in our cave, the avatars, the surrogates, which are the keys which unlock a galaxy of coincidence, correspondence, harmony, and revelation, which provide a wormhole into parallel dimensions of the soul.

Music, the daughter of number and sound, on an equal basis with the fundamental laws of the human mind and of nature, is naturally the preferred way to express the universe in its fundamental abstraction. Modern science brings us to a more primeval knowledge of music, and by expanding the imagination of the musician it moves him towards unknown horizons.

—Iannis Xenakis There are only 19 copies of the original text of the Goldbergs, of which one is a printer’s proof, with corrections made by Bach. Very little printed matter stands between civilization and the loss of our greatest achievements.

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When Shakespeare died in 1616, only half of his plays had ever been printed, as scripts for actors. Another 18 plays are known today only because they were printed in the first collected edition of his plays, the 1623 First Folio.

When Vivaldi died, the 450 manuscripts found in his house went through eight owners; a complete edition was only published in 1947. One of his works was only discovered in 2005.

Bach himself was lost to society until his reputation was revived by Mendelssohn in 1829 and then again by Pablo Casals, who was the first to record all six of Bach’s Cello Suites in 1939 (they had formerly been thought only for study, not for performance). Casals changed the way Bach was heard with his lilting versions of the Brandenburg Concertos at the Prades Festival in 1950 and again at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1965, with Rudolf Serkin playing the stunning piano cadenza in the Fifth Concerto.

The score of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos was sold for $24 at his death in 1734, and lost until 1849.

The Goldbergs were intended for a two-manual harpsichord, like the “William Hyman 1980” owned by Tippet Rise.

The way you play the Goldbergs makes an almost Buddhist statement about your stage in life. When Glenn Gould made his first recording, it was of the Goldbergs, fast and brash. When he made his last recording, it was also the Goldbergs, slow and meditative, listening to every note. It is a great mistake to assume that, because you know every note of a piece, that your audience will have spent the years with the piece that you have. You have to allow people time to absorb the beauty of the notes, the cleverness of the ornamentation.

Ornaments in music are called trills, turns, ascending and descending appoggiatura, fioratura, mordents, inverted mordents, grace notes, cadences, and so on. They are

particular to a piece, to an era, and to a performer. Rosalyn Tureck, Ruth Laredo, Glenn Gould, Dinu Lipatti, Angela Hewitt, Konstantin Lifschitz, Sviatoslav Richter on piano, or Trevor Pinnock, Gustav Leonhardt, Ton Koopman, William Christie, or Wanda Landowska on harpsichord, each one favors different timings, different notes where an ornament should begin or end. Each of us has a favorite.

As Russell Sherman used to say, you need the right edition to play a piece as the composer intended. Errors creep into texts over the years, and only the urtext editions, the purest and most scholarly versions, are acceptable at the highest levels of performance in the great conservatories.

Try to hear how Bach takes a simple melody, the song or aria which begins the Goldberg Variations, and then explores it in 30 different ways. By the end, he has “deconstructed” the original melody into varieties of spiritual and emotional experiences.

Here is a very brief guide for each variation, not including the original aria: Variation 1: Rapid scales; an elegant dance or polonaise.

Variation 2: A timeless, syncopated treble melody over a syncopated “walking” bass line. The left hand plays the bass, the right hand the treble.

Variation 3 Canone all’Unisono: The scales are in the left hand; the right hand plays triplets, groups of three notes which make a wonderful joyous dance. This is the pianistic equivalent of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time.

Variation 4: A passepied, where you pass your foot over your other foot, or your hand over your other hand. The brilliance here is that the left hand imitates or turns upside down the melody started by the right hand. Like a canon, the left hand starts a bit after the right hand, but the

mirror images meet in unexpected places to make, not a pedantic repetitive form, but a fractal pattern of brilliant unexpected harmonies made up of predictable patterns.

The universe is structured like this: the chaos of inspiration leaping out of the anchor of structure, both opposites tumbling over each other like bears playing.

Variation 5: The right hand plays rapid scales, and the left hand crosses over to make comments with single notes and ornaments. The two hands mix perfectly, so it sounds more complex than Bach’s brilliant solution, which is to cheat and transfer the singing treble to the double-crossing left hand, which sneaks out of its basement to play on the swings.

Variation 6: Canone alla Seconda: Note the groups of five notes, one for each finger. This is a canon, where the second group of five starts a bit late and overlaps and then the next group overlaps the second, et cetera. Despite the brilliant mathematics of the complex form, the effect is of a lush and comforting song.

Variation 7: Al tempo di Giga: This is a jig from the Canary Islands, syncopated and slightly wistful. The ornaments are rapid scales leading to the end note, which is the “point” of the ornament, to decorate one note with many others. Rachmaninoff used this technique in a virtuosic kaleidoscope of intersecting melodies and digressions, derived from simpler melodies, as this Bach jig swirls around an easygoing core.

Variation 8: Rather than using groups of five notes, this piece uses groups of 10 or 11 notes. It has hand crossings as well, but this time the hands cheat even more cleverly, duetting with the other hand’s scales. This is easy to do if you have two keyboards, as on a dual-manual harpsichord, but your fingers can get tripped up when you play it on a piano, because the fingers have to be so close to one another.

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Variation 9 Canone alla Terza: This is almost an interlude, when everyone is free to dream. One hand copies the other, but in a courtly, polite slow dance.

Variation 10 Fughetta: This is a four-voice fugue. You can hear the original theme; then it’s repeated in the left hand.

Glenn Gould felt that four voices were the most that the mind (or the hands) could keep track of all at once.

The initial trill from the original theme is a good way to keep track of when the second voice comes in, because its long trill alerts you. Despite how busy it is, notice what beauty is created. This is always the challenge: to make the technical difficulties disappear in favor of simply having a good time with the harmonies. You have to reveal the structure, which is the point of all German music: “form’s what affirms,” as James Merrill has said. But at the same time you have to forget the structure, and enjoy the hedonism of the song. It is reason versus passion. The two must combine. T.S. Eliot felt that we lost our anchor to the earth when we separated the two hemispheres of the brain into warring entities, rather than cooperative teams.

Variation 11: Here Bach expands the first note of the theme into seven notes, but keeps the trill at the end, the goal of the earlier notes. Bach uses reverse motion scales, pauses, and syncopations to keep it interesting.

Variation 12 Canone alla Quarta: All the scales here shelter hidden patterns where each group’s first or last note becomes a melody of its own, so that the original theme’s harmonic structure, its chords, are used as a melody. Rock and roll and bebop use chord progressions as melodies as well.

Variation 13: Here the ornaments themselves are the point, and the harmonies are used as modulations which lead to the next ornament, or appoggiatura. The complex ornamented figures gradually morph into the scales themselves, so you can tell, and even feel, how both the decoration 128

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and the underlying harmonies and the linking scales are all the same thing, each disguised as the other. This is an extraordinary revelation, where Bach shows how even a few seconds of a passage is composed of the same three basic elements, the way the earth is composed of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, rearranged in a hundred ways; the way the materials of stars have also shaped the earth. If you listen to this piece enough, suddenly it dawns on you: one part of it is derived from the part before, and so on.

Variation 14: And this virtuoso amalgam of trills, syncopations, and silences is your reward. It may be the same formula as all the other variations so far, but it’s infectious.

It shows how all of the elements that are so serious can also be fun. This is the most virtuosic and explosive variation.

Variation 15 Canone alla Quinta: Andante: The pianist Glenn Gould called this “the perfect Good Friday spell.”

It puts the previous variation, which was so effervescent, in its place. We realize here that serious ecclesiastic codes can be woven from the same DNA as pleasure. It is the ultimate merging of the two spheres of the brain: the music of the spheres. The physical and the metamorphic: things that exist and things that vaporize, both merging into the metaphysical, metaphors that start in the flesh and rapidly transmute into more ethereal airs, lead turning into gold.

Prayer turning into heaven itself. It’s the opposite of what Claudius, the evil king, says in the play Hamlet: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

But if physical words can somehow combine with incorporeal thoughts, the result is catharsis, magic, redemption, ascension. This is the stuff of miracles. Notes become the wardrobe door in C.S. Lewis, the mirror in Lewis Carroll: notes become wormholes where ordinary dimensions are transmigrated into extraordinary dimensions. This is the halfway point in this long and demanding exegesis of spirit and charm. I feel there should be an intermission here. Too much genius is an exhausting thing.

Note that there’s been the wild celebration of the 13th variation, followed by the compensatory transmigration of souls. The metamorphosis is complete: we have spoken to the angels, we have touched the heavens, we are restored.

How can there be more to come?

Variation 16 Ouverture: Like an entirely different piece, this overture opens with a cinematic chord and introductory scale, and a few separated trills before moving into a dance which expands the trills into scales. The challenge in the second half is to figure out how the variations are connected to the main theme. Bach makes many of the themes very simple, but keeps them farther away logically from the familiar chords of the melody, so it’s more of a job sleuthing out the connections.

Today the urban myth is discredited, where Bach wrote the pieces for his friend Goldberg, who had to play them to help his boss, Count Kaiserling, conquer his insomnia.

The concentration necessary in the second half of this enormous work does seem at times, however, like a descent into the depths of a drugged incantation, an exploration at the bottom of the cave of consciousness.

Variation 17: This toccata is somewhat like Bach’s C-minor Prelude from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which has both hands doing the same thing but with one hand the inverted mirror image of the other, so they both start at the outside and meet in the middle.

Here he’s opened that idea up into a broader universe, so the intense Rorschach pattern goes higher into the spring sky and down into the waking swamps. Two similar stories are inverted to make opposites which mostly live at their extremes until their breezy, seemingly independent flightiness meets in the middle.

Variation 18 Canone alla Sesta: A very calm afternoon walk through a beautiful meadow. Repeated patterns based on a “turn” (where notes revolve around a central anchoring note) gradually turn into a more melodic tune while the left hand plays the same harmony in scales. This repeats rather than develops, and gradually subsides.

Variation 19: A variation on the previous variation. A calm melody floats over scales in the middle and low registers.

Variation 20: The hands mirror each other, right descending as left ascends, syncopated so that they are cushioned on air as they seem to float together and drift apart.

Sustained turns climb rapidly in the bass as the right hand comments in the margins, and uses arpeggios in the right hand to make the same points as the turns in the left hand, broadening the scope of this dialogue of opposites until the rapid end. This is one of Bach’s charming virtuosic dances, where technical prowess is necessary for the moto perpetuo, which, however, is really a simple dance in disguise.

Variation 21 Canone alla Settima: The melody here climbs in single notes under the moving treble scales. The single notes are chromatic—that is, they move upwards by half notes; they seem to be sneaking up on some target which is never identified. Then the left hand takes the scales and the right hand the crablike crawling melody.

Variation 22 Alla breva: The left hand modulates up and down simply, the way a rock song would, almost like a two-legged animal climbing slowly up and then back down. The treble melody is the exact same pattern, but upside down. So the effect is of two people crawling towards each other.

Variation 23: This virtuosic scale variation is broken into 11-note scales with a rest. The hands at the end unite to play thirds together (that is, the right hand plays three notes higher than the left hand). By doubling the tempo, Bach retains interest.

Variation 24 Canone all’Ottava: A lovely lyrical theme is repeated in the bass and then an octave above the original theme. This is the pattern the piece follows back and forth, ending as it began.

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Variation 25 Adagio: Rachmaninoff stated that a piece, no matter how long, should only have one ultimate point. If so, this is the point of the Goldbergs. A droning and inching depressed chromatic bass is offset by a treble melody that climbs and jumps slowly to ecstatic high notes. It is like a conversation between two people who speak different languages. The bass and the treble don’t agree. You have the feeling that the treble might be joyous if the bass didn’t drag it down with its underwater, ungrateful tonalities.

This is the duality between reason and passion expressed as an impossible barrier, the dissociation about which T. S. Eliot warned, the fragmentation of a modern world where there is no inner correspondence between the spirit and the flesh. It is what the modern world has become, without the unifying force of 17th-century belief.

The trills are a diversion, because what Bach wants to do is very simple, but he needs to make it entertaining. Even Bach has a sense that he has asked a lot of Count Kaiserling in the 25th Variation, and there must be a contrasting playfulness in the variations that follow. He uses such fast-slow, profound-diverting contrasts throughout, acknowledging the dual purpose of music. As Rachmaninoff said, he really wanted to communicate single-note messages, but was forced to play scales and octaves to keep people entertained while he went about his simple revelations.

Variation 26: Bach realizes that we need some excitement after the profundity of the last variation. You can hear the familiar chord structure of the original melody, now covered over with the filigree of endless turns. It’s like a trellis covered with vines blowing in the wind.

Gould pointed out that this and the following variation have the same motivic structure. Everywhere else, Bach varies his attention to add to the complex skein of the harmonics. So here you can hear directly two ways of improvising on the same notes.

Variation 27 Canone alla Nona: Using the by now familiar scales to begin each phrase, Bach breaks open the ends of phrases into ornaments that jump very far apart, rather than staying close to a central anchoring note. He wants to see what this will sound like in a few different positions.

There is a kind of joy in the way the end of each phrase dances: a happy hop.

Variation 29: The descending bass notes of the original theme introduce every measure (as they did in the last variation), motivating giant trills in the treble. The trills are actually huge chords moving back and forth, which is a brilliant way of varying a two-note figuration. The effect is very celebratory. The massive chords give way to rapid passagework, where the bass melody of the original aria becomes a virtuoso aria, coming into its own at last, as important as the treble melody, which Bach focused on first.

In the second section you can hear even more clearly the descending theme. Schumann and Brahms both used descending themes of four notes to signify their love for Clara Wieck, but here Bach links four descending groups of four descending notes, a vaster classical endoskeleton than even the Romantic giants inspired by his complex example devised.

Variation 28: Both hands play trills and one note of melody at a time. This technique, where one hand plays the inversion, the mirror-image, of the other, is also employed in the C-minor Prelude in the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. It can be played either as a dance or meaningfully slowly. The melody is the bass of the initial aria, played upside down, so it’s inverted both as a theme and inverted also by being in the right hand rather than the left.

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To mirror the treble melody, Bach often repeats it in the bass by crossing the right hand over the left while the left hand continues the trills. This virtuosic trick is attributed to the French, especially to Couperin.

Then he reverses the descent, and the same notes ascend.

Bach puts in clever chromatic aberrations on the path upwards, in the way that, much later, Haydn would put in wrong notes and add clever comments on the melody into the melody itself, a kind of kibbitzing (scribbling in the margins of one’s own manuscript), as Balzac would do (Balzac made so many additions to his first drafts that all his profits were eaten up by proofreading).

expected part of the piece, but there is room still for individual contribution. This is a very regulated form of aleatory music, where the composer and the performer collaborate on the choices made at the last second. It was adopted by avant-garde composers such as Varèse, Berio, and Xenakis in Paris and Rome, in an attempt to seek “harmony within mankind” in the 1970s, but this is where it started.

And of course Bach ends these wildly fragmented descending episodes with a witty ascending group of four notes, and rounds out the symmetry of the piece by finishing with a final chordal trill in the original key in which the variation (and the entire piece) begins.

The ear remembers the shape of the last variations, all of which have focused on the descending bass of the Aria itself, so the root of the entire piece is embedded in our unconscious memory. It is as if Bach is saying, look around, see how many wonders of the world are hidden in the small details of daily life.

Variation 30 Quodlibet: “As soon as they were assembled, a chorale was first struck up,” Bach’s first biographer, Johann Forkel, wrote. “From this devout beginning they proceeded to jokes which were frequently in strong contrast. That is, they then sang popular songs partly of comic and also partly of indecent content, all mixed together on the spur of the moment. . . . This kind of improvised harmonizing they called a Quodlibet, and not only could laugh over it quite whole-heartedly themselves, but also aroused just as hearty and irresistible laughter in all who heard them.”

And how many wonders of the instrument and of the performer, how many voices and gifts must be combined to produce this, one of the great achievements of musical history?

Forkel (whose library forms the core of the Berlin State Library) thus believes this last variation is meant as a joke.

It contains humorous folk songs about food, such as Kraut und Rüben (cabbage and turnips), which was used earlier in a 32-part Partita by the composer Dieterich Buxtehude. If you count the themes at both ends of Bach’s variations, there are also 32 parts.

The return of the initial theme, the Aria, suddenly reveals how many works there are in any one melody. You can hear how half the melody is composed of grace notes, of ornaments meant to be added or varied at the discretion of the performer. After centuries of tradition, most of these parenthetical comments on the melody have become an 2016 Inaugural Season

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SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2016, 2:00 PM

Satellite #5: Pioneer Excelsis Percussion Quartet Billings Symphony Orchestra Montana Musician Friends of Tippet Rise

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Inuksuit

Ensemble features the Excelsis Percussion Quartet and percussionists from the Billings Symphony Orchestra (Douglas Perkins, coordinator)

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The Excelsis Percussion Quartet assembles together with a grouping of Montana friends to perform in the meadows in front of Stephen Talasnik’s sculpture Pioneer, named for the satellite launched in 1973. The audience has been invited by the composer, John Luther Adams, to wander among the assembled 33 musicians while they are performing his Inuksuit, a work for “up to 99 percussionists.”

ABOUT THE PROGRAM “One of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.”

— Alex Ross, The New Yorker

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS: Inuksuit (2009)

John Luther Adams is a composer whose life and work are deeply rooted in the natural world. Adams was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his symphonic work Become Ocean, and a 2015 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Inuksuit, his outdoor work for up to 99 percussionists, is regularly performed all over the world.

Columbia University has honored Adams with the William Schuman Award “to recognize the lifetime achievement of an American composer whose works have been widely performed and generally acknowledged to be of lasting significance.”

A recipient of the Heinz Award for his contributions to raising environmental awareness, JLA has also been honored with the Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University “for melding the physical and musical worlds into a unique artistic vision that transcends stylistic boundaries.”

Born in 1953, JLA grew up in the South and in the suburbs of New York City. He studied composition with James Ten134

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ney at the California Institute of the Arts, where he was in the first graduating class (in 1973). In the mid-1970s he became active in the campaign for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and subsequently served as executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center.

Adams has taught at Harvard University, the Oberlin Conservatory, Bennington College, and the University of Alaska. He has also served as composer in residence with the Anchorage Symphony, Anchorage Opera, Fairbanks Symphony, Arctic Chamber Orchestra, and the Alaska Public Radio Network.

The music of John Luther Adams is recorded on Cantaloupe, Cold Blue, New World, Mode, and New Albion, and his books are published by Wesleyan University Press.

As he said in his article in The New Yorker, “Leaving Alaska”:

Throughout the nineteen-eighties, I lived alone in a cabin down in the black spruce forest....

There I would roll out of bed in the morning, crawl down the ladder from the sleeping loft, and find myself standing in the middle of my work.

I loved it. And I couldn’t imagine living any other way.

From “PrestoClassical.co.uk”:

Some musical events encourage a community to

take stock of its surroundings, but very few actu-

ally fold so seamlessly into the environment itself

that they become part of a community’s memory

and imagination. John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit

is one of those works. Scored for 9 to 99 percus-

sion players who are meant to be widely dispersed

in an outdoor area (although the piece has also

been performed indoors), Inuksuit has been de-

scribed by The New York Times as “the ultimate en- vironmental piece,” while The New Yorker’s Alex Ross hailed it as “one of the most rapturous experi- ences of my listening life.”

“Each performance of Inuksuit is different,” Adams explains, “determined by the size of the ensemble and the specific instruments used, by the topology and vegetation of the site—even by the songs of the local birds. The musicians are dispersed through out a large area, and the listeners are free to dis cover their own individual listening points, which actively shapes their experience.”

The title refers to the Stonehenge-like markers used by the Inuit and other native peoples to orient themselves in Arctic spaces. Adams structured the rhythmic layers in the score to mimic these stone shapes, but there’s an open-endedness to how the music is performed that reflects the sense of free dom behind it.

Among other places this summer, his Inuksuit will be performed at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and here at Tippet Rise. All three performances are staged and produced by the composer and percussionist Doug Perkins, who will be playing at Tippet Rise. Inuksuit means “cairns” in every language of the Arctic region. It is not only a marker, but “someone who looks like a person but isn’t.” The groups of percussionists are markers of our own experience in the land, inspired by the constant drumbeat of the human pulse. This piece is the bass track to the music of the spheres, the subterranean graph of the heartbeat of the planet.

Adams is currently working on a commission for the Metropolitan Museum in New York City called Soundwalk 9:09, the time it takes to walk from the Met to its new wing in the old Whitney Museum. By using the sounds of the streets, he continues in the tradition begun by Glenn Gould

in The Idea of North, where voices were arranged like musical notes to produce a fugue of voices.

Adams writes, “These pieces are not complete until you are present—listening, walking your own route, and creating your own unique mix with the sounds you encounter.”

It is the Observation Principal, where the presence of an observer changes the status of the matter observed, the ultimate expression of which is Schrödinger’s cat, where the polarity of the cat (on or off, alive or dead) is determined by the observer opening the cat’s box. This is used by certain philosophers to solipsize the universe; that is, to say that reality is ultimately determined by our ability to judge it, and that man is consequently the point of existence.

This has also been called the pathetic fallacy, where we assume that nature derives its emotions from ours.

(Certainly the opposite is true.) The song “Rhythm of the Rain” is an example of the correspondence we sense between our own emotions and nature, somewhat validated by recent discoveries in quantum mechanics.

To find out more about Adams, please visit his excellent website at johnlutheradams.net.

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SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Stephen Hough

FRANZ SCHUBERT: Sonata in A Minor, D. 784

Allegro giusto Andante

Allegro vivace

CÉSAR FRANCK: Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue INTERMISSION STEPHEN HOUGH: Sonata III (Trinitas) FRANZ LISZT: Valses oubliées, Nos. 1 and 2 FRANZ LISZT: Transcendental Étude No. 11 (“Harmonies du soir”) FRANZ LISZT: Transcendental Étude No. 10 (“Appassionata”)

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Stephen Hough won the sixth International Poetry Competition in 2008. He is on the faculty of the Juilliard School, and has appeared as a recitalist on the major stages of the world and performed with every major orchestra around the world. He is a celebrated composer and will perform his latest sonata tonight. He is a painter who exhibits frequently. He has written a book, The Bible As Prayer. He has more than 50 albums in print. He is, needless to say, a polymath.

Writing a piece today using a 12-note row seems almost like stepping back into a period drama—a bygone age with very different fashions. But serialism is a technique, with rules to be learned, used, or, if desired, rejected. In this piece it is also a symbol of dogma, rules which can liberate or enslave.

The Sonata (my third, in three sections, with a row using connecting major and minor thirds) is all about threes; and as it was commissioned by The Tablet, a Catholic magazine, I decided to include a religious subtitle: Trinitas, Latin for “Trinity,” another dogma, a theological ordering with numbers.

Twelve-note pieces are made to be analyzed; strictly speaking every bar can be picked apart, but suffice to say that the row used here has many tonal implications, made more explicit halfway through when it becomes the foundation of a blazing chaconne in C major. Just after this, at the high dramatic point of the Sonata, the music stops as if suddenly frozen and a hymn tune is introduced. “Nicea” is a famous setting of the Trinitarian text “Holy, Holy, Holy,” but its simplicity is compromised here, firstly as the tune is underpinned by the row and accompanied with three-note chords out of sync, and then by these same chords being transformed into mighty chromatic clusters.

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And the origin of this particular 12-note row? It appears once, near the beginning, pizzicato, in my Cello Sonata (Les Adieux). I was going to develop it in that piece, but in the end it became a bit part with a walk-on role. Now in my Third Piano Sonata it takes center stage. It is the dominant character in every bar.

— Stephen Hough

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

FRANZ SCHUBERT: Sonata in A Minor, D. 784

Schubert wrote his greatest sonatas after he died. That is, they weren’t published until 1839, 10 years after he died.

This was around the time Liszt published the complicated versions of his Transcendental Études. While those were monsters of complexity and obvious brilliance, Schubert’s sonatas were simple. Not much attention was paid to them for a hundred years. Although death is a commendable career move, in the short term it gets in the way of being able to promote your own works. Even when I was young, agents warned pianists against playing either Schubert or Schumann in concert as the kiss of death.

One of the great arguments for democracy is that eventually truth will out. Schubert’s sonatas are fun for pianists to play, and easy for listeners to understand. As well, they’re gorgeous, and have that end-of-the world feeling. There is no one left on the planet, and now for some reason all truths may be revealed. Schubert has nothing to lose. As only two of them were published during his lifetime, there was no risk of critical censure.

Like his great “Unfinished” Symphony, time stops for these sonatas. Melodies are sighs; even the few demonstrative passages aren’t bravura, simply profound.

Schubert spent his life writing and playing waltzes and Ländlers (an early, rustic, lilting, heartbreaking waltz which became elegant over time) for suburban Viennese parties in coffee houses and living rooms. These began to be called Schubertiades and are still given in his honor around the world. He rarely went to Vienna, he never met Brahms (although he helped carry Beethoven’s coffin); he was a very parochial, small-town music teacher, eking out a living the only way he could.

As he became slightly known, he also began to die of syphilis. In the last three weeks of his life he composed his three greatest sonatas. He was like Proust on his deathbed, revising his passages about dying out of first-hand experience. He wrote everything he could think of in this time, distracting himself from panic.

When he was 18, he was hired by the Esterházys, the great patrons of Haydn, who built several intensely beautiful chamber music halls in their palaces, including the one after which the Olivier Music Barn is designed.

By 1826 he knew he was dying (Glenn Gould predicted the exact day of his death many years before it happened).

Everything Schubert wrote from that time forward was a race against the clock. It focused his lyric gift into something profound.

In 1827 he wrote Die Winterreise, gorgeous songs about a man setting out for an impossible journey to a winter wasteland (as had Frankenstein’s monster in 1818). The German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich had painted The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog in 1818. Melmoth the Wanderer (which was what Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert called his car) was written in 1820 by Charles Maturin, Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle. The plot is similar to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, with the difference that Melmoth, true to form, wanders the world trying to find someone to take on his pact with the Devil: Melmoth had pledged his soul in order to live longer.

Goethe had begun the Romantic era with The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. For a century afterwards, literature and song was filled with lovelorn young men who went to America (the last resort before an inevitable suicide).

Chateaubriand himself wandered to America and wrote René in 1802, about a lovelorn wanderer like himself, which continued the fashionable trend of wanderlust; it and Werther later inspired Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; Byron’s Manfred in 1816; and, much later, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël and Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles.

In 1828 the first concert devoted entirely to Schubert’s works was given in Vienna on March 26. By November 19 he was dead. He was 31.

After he died, the publisher Diabelli (Beethoven turned a theme of his into the great Diabelli Variations) bought 1,000 of his last works from Schubert’s brother, Ferdinand.

Diabelli put out Schubert’s works for the next 30 years; it took him 10 years to get around to publishing the sonatas. Biedermeier Vienna was more intent on waltzing. The sonatas were scented with mortality. But also with transcendence.

So not only was Schubert dying, but there was a tradition of dying with nobility to uphold. Much of this found its way into his last compositions. When he discovered he had syphilis, for which there was at that time no cure, he wrote the poem, “Mein Gebet” (My Prayer), in which he longed for death. While he was in the hospital that same year, he wrote Die schöne Müllerin, wherein a lovelorn tenor finally drowns himself, after celebrating the beauty of his unrequited love, in the best Werther tradition. Later that year Schubert wrote the A Minor Sonata.

At the end of the first movement the minor theme transforms into one of those miracles of morphology, into a harmonic butterfly. The minor suddenly becomes major, and the ominous theme becomes one of the most transcendent melodies in music.

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The last movement is a tarantella, the kind of dance you did in Spain and France when bitten by a largely imaginary tarantula. A Ländler enters and subdues the whirlwind and the poison into a melody reminiscent of the one ending the first movement, but the minor octaves return at a tempo which makes them very hard to play accurately, and the piece ends violently, inconsolate. Even music is only a temporary cure for Schubert.

As a suburban Viennese, everything of Schubert’s, no matter how moribund, always ended with a good dance. This is true of Mozart operas, and the tradition continues in London to this day, where the great plays on stage (Sheridan, Shakespeare, Stoppard) all end with a merry dance. The A Minor Sonata ends with a dance of death, but at least it’s a dance. And despite the terror it caused Schubert, for us it radiates pure pleasure.

He was a popular teacher caught in the morass of jealousies which swirled around Conservatory politics, a rival of the great Saint-Saëns, composer of the much-loved D Minor Symphony and a Violin Concerto. He wrote the Prélude for the piano. Like Rachmaninoff, he had a huge hand which could cover 12 notes, to which virtuosity came easily, which gave rise to inner voices which flourished in the great spaces between his fingers, and which require chords to be rolled, much as they are in Liszt’s étude, Harmonies du Soir, played

by Hough later in the program. The inner voices in both pieces are as if a singer is encompassed on both sides by an ocean of instruments, or a pedal point in the bass on top of which a two-handed orchestra billows and crashes.

CÉSAR FRANCK: Prelude, Chorale and Fugue (1884)

All three segments of this vast sonata have a similar theme based on repeated notes descending chromatically.

The fugue is surprisingly modern. His massed chords are churchly, as befits an organist, rather than secular, making his music more like Alkan’s or late Liszt, both of whom were also at their core musical mystics, as were Scriabin and Messiaen.

The arpeggiated coda at the end of the fugue is reminiscent of Liszt’s Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este. Its sparkling fountains circle back to the initial Prélude figures and rise transcendently (or transcendentally) to the heavens.

This brooding and gorgeous three-part sonata is a vision fugitive, like the theme of the little phrase by the imaginary composer Vinteuil (who may have been Franck) in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or in Massenet’s aria of the same era from Hérodiade:

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Franck was a well-known organist, championed by Liszt, who improvised at the Church of Sainte-Clotilde in the Rue Las Cases in Paris, home of one of the greatest organs in the world, which Franck made even more famous by being at the forefront of the new, improved organ technique made possible by this organ.

Vision fugitive et toujours poursuivie Ange mystérieux qui prend toute ma vie...

Ah! c’est toi! que je veux voir Ô mon amour! ô mon espoir!

Vision fugitive! c’est toi!

Vision fleeing but always sought, Dark angel whom my touch has caught, It’s you in whom I see My life, my light and destiny, Lost in your short-lived mystery.

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FRANZ LISZT: Transcendental Étude No. 11 (Harmonies du soir) (1826; complicated 1838; simplified 1851)

When he wrote the Transcendental Études, Liszt was just 15. It was 1827. His father had just died, having squandered all the money Liszt had spent five years building up, since he was 10. Liszt was so poor he had to sell his piano. He lived alone on the rue de Montholon in Paris, surrounded by books. He had become so inner he could not speak in company, as happens when you spend your whole time reading. He had lost his girlfriend, the daughter of the French Minister of Commerce, who had forbidden his daughter to date an impoverished musician. Liszt was so depressed his obituary was published. So the roots of the Études are steeped in poverty, melancholy, and presumed death, written in homage to a piano he did not even have.

Glenn Gould always felt that art needs solitude to flourish, as was the case with Thomas Mann.

As James Huneker said in his book Franz Liszt, when Liszt rewrote the Études in 1839, he wrote the history of the piano during the last half of the 19th century. Everything the piano meant to its composers and its audience, everything the piano could do, was thrown into the études. With them, Liszt wrote his own identity. The sunsets of painters, the fight for Polish independence, the stillness of pre-industrial meadows, is all there. History is not just the machinations of ministers, but the emotions that spring in any given year from a summer sky.

Amy Fay, Liszt’s American student, a schoolgirl in Germany in the 1870s, has left us one of the most realistic portraits of Liszt’s playing:

It was a hot afternoon and the clouds had been gathering for a storm...a low growl of thunder was heard muttering in the distance. “Ah,” said Liszt, who was standing at the window, “a fitting accompaniment.” If only Liszt had played

Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata himself the

whole thing would have been like a poem. But

he walked up and down and forced himself to

listen, though he could scarcely bear it. A few

times he pushed the student aside and played a

few bars himself, and we saw the passion leap into

his face like a glare of sheet lightning. Anything

so magnificent as it was, the little that he did play,

and the startling individuality of his conception, I

never heard or imagined.

But here is the great pianist Alexander Siloti, equally impressed with Liszt’s tone:

[T]he piano was worn out, unequal and discor- dant. Liszt had only played the opening triplets of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata however when I felt as if the room no longer held me and when, after the first four bars, the G sharp came in the right hand, I was completely carried away. Not that he accented this G sharp; it was simply that he gave it an entirely new sound, which even now, after 27 years, I can hear distinctly.

It was Liszt’s sound, not his speed, which fascinated everyone. As the musicologist E. J. Dent wrote: “ ...[M]inor pianists turn [the greater works of Liszt] into mere displays of virtuosity because their technique is inadequate for anything beyond that....

Heinrich Heine confirmed that when Liszt played, “the piano vanishes, and music appears.”

Liszt’s technique eventually advanced to the point where he no longer cared about it. “My dear, I don’t care how fast you can play the octaves,” he told a pupil. In 1851 he revised his octaves away from sheer technique into the version that is performed today. Nevertheless, Liszt was said to be able to hit two notes many octaves apart with 2016 Inaugural Season

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one hand, so fast that it sounded as if both notes were hit at exactly the same time, so simplicity, in his case, is a relative term. This ability to leap great distances without sacrificing delicacy or accuracy of intonation is one of the many challenges of the piece.

into the numina, the spirits of the sky, the icons which lead us to their palisades and palimpsests, to their cloudy tents and pentimentos, to unearth in the sky states hiding in statues, traps in tropes, hopes in notes, the point of it being to unearth the earth, or at least free us from it.

In fact, nothing beautiful is really difficult, because there is so much motivation to learn it. The Godowsky vivisections of Chopin’s Études are difficult, because they complicate for the sake of complication. Any virtuosic showpiece is as suspect: febrile, spiderlike skitterings about the web are rarely as beautiful as the dew suspended delicately on it.

You can hear the dripping verdure rustling broodingly in the building evening wind, distant sunlit fields shining through the dark Corot landscape, the chords rising towards the sky like giant trees in the half light.

Liszt’s complexities are simply multiple simplicities.

The great rolling chords, the harmonies of the title, are in fact three melodies played by one hand, so that the middle melody, for example, must somehow be made to tie into the middle note of the next rolled chord, as if three singers were fighting for prominence simultaneously: hopefully, no one wins.

The colors of evening darken in their husky D-flat registers, and the fuliginous sky gathers its penumbra of heliotropes, to put it the way writers of the day would have— that is, the sunset thickens and grows, as the muumuus and murmurs of willows and poplars grow into a great coloristic grove of sound. This is sound imitating sight.

Whether or not Liszt is thinking of clouds bloodying or leaves rouging, sky-long rays of gold linking all the clouds, or yellows deepening to rococo velours in the distorted lead of a monastery window, the pianist must have something in mind other than the notes and half-notes, the haves and have-nots, the nots and half-nots.

Only then is technique transcended by thought, and technique is what the Transcendental Études transcend.

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The broken chords (which are so large they must be broken up into their individual notes) actually have inner rhymes like poems, where the end rhyme is only one feature of the chiming line, and so every note of each ripped chord is in fact a melody, and you can hopefully follow these lower melodies as they wind their inexorable way higher into the evening sky. These fevered climbs are interspersed with panting lulls which only set the stage for the next spasm of tendrils and vines.

Then the clamor-filled sky falls down into the dark understory and the bass takes over, using similar syncopated broken notes to create a stable foliage over which more simple chords rise and fall and rise, growing more ecstatic until they fall into the exhausted eye of the storm.

The midsection is what Schumann called the most fervent in all of Liszt, where a sustained melody is contrasted with more disturbed, belching uneasiness which gradually resolves through Liszt’s starkly modernist single notes (recalling Mazeppa’s rise to life after his fall from his horse in an earlier étude), leading to absolute grandeur. The initial trees now come back as 30-mile-high thunderheads lit by Delacroix’s blood-red sky. After the chords rise and pause, octaves imitate their rise. The depths are now as perturbed as the heights, the whole world whirling in color, like Van Gogh’s starry night.

A flurry of octaves descends to a melody which is actually the simple, plaintive melody of the midsection transfigured into a cymbal crash of revelation: the rejected lover has found a way out of despair. Liszt’s natural ebullience and nature’s Lisztian ebullience triumph over melancholia. The falling note at the end of the theme is now a rising note.

This is music clear as words. Composing had staved off hunger and depression for another day. Such remedies have succeeded for composers and writers throughout history.

Mozart springs to mind. This frenzied natural spectacle takes over the whole range of the piano and, by inference, the world, eliminating all doubts with climax upon climax, leading to the same three-note theme as the midsection, now resolved and resigned.

Something has been proved. The sunset has taught us something, working through sadness into transfiguration, really its theme, as much as Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night and Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Like many of Mahler’s symphonies, a problematic world has been set up by the composer and solved. Liszt answers his own questions. A 15-year-old boy has created the world in notes, answered his own doubts about who he is and what the world is, and subsided into sleep. The world gradually loses its color, but not its structure, as clouds do, as the last rays slowly wind their way up into the clouds.

The final bells of night ring the truth and security we gain from knowing that the day’s cycle is complete, and that the cycle will repeat dependably, although this was certainly the sunset to end all future sunsets. But if the secrets of the sunset can be described and decided, then each day has been dealt with in the future, because each day will be the same. Taps at evening is in fact based on a similar rising and falling melody, the same salute to the day’s battles, and a positive reassurance that the world is under control, at least momentarily, by a lone trumpet, substituting for the armies of the night. Here, the piano substitutes for the armies of the soul, fighting the battles of adolescent identity.

In those last, fading chords is the same hard-won calm that Strauss finds momentarily in a Vienna blithely waltzing its way to destruction. The light is rung down and suddenly it is dark. Although the world has disappeared into night, a residue remains, the memory of sun. The transience of man is highlighted against the continuity of nature, as in Salvatore Quasimodo’s poem:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra trafitto da un raggio di Sole: ed è subito sera

A man stands alone On the curve of the world Transfixed by a ray of sun And it is suddenly evening.

It is, however, in identifying with the fragility of time and the resonance of the world that we take on its enduring qualities. By documenting the evening, Liszt has managed to fuse it, and himself, together in time.

This discussion of Liszt’s Transcendental Étude No. 11 is from Pianist Lost: Excesses and Excuses (The Himalaya Sessions, Vol. 1, 2011) by Peter Halstead.

FRANZ LISZT: Transcendental Étude No. 10 ("Appassionata") (1826; complicated 1838; simplified 1851)

One of the most tormented and tormenting of the impossibly difficult études written by one of the greatest virtuosos in history, played by another.

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Liszt treats chords like single-finger trills, thickening the texture of a potentially butterfly-like flight up and down the keys into a wild night of sheet lightning. Despite this, a simple melody rises from the bass, like a corpse rising from the grave during a lightning storm. The melody climbs into the skies, and the storm returns. The chords themselves become the melody, rage against the keyboard, and the piece subsides into a calm center surrounded by soft and then increasingly frenetic chorded arpeggios.

That is, certain notes of the arpeggios grow into chords.

The coda is built of staggered octaves played at blinding speeds.

This piece has a lot in common with Liszt’s “St. Francis Walking on the Waves.” There is an almost religious apotheosis, like Christ ascending into heaven from a stormy sea. There is an extramusical quality to the notes where they take on an identity of their own beyond mere scales and harmonies. They are a metaphor, Plato’s shadows which symbolize truths beyond our ability to see, noumena, knowledge independent of human sensation.

In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we make sense of what we see by using the objects of the natural world to transcend their shapes and assemble a philosophy which is beyond shapes, beyond the visible, namely, thought or philosophy. Understanding beyond the limits of understanding: what T. S. Eliot in his poem “The Wasteland” calls Shantih, the peace which passeth understanding.

In climbing towards the heights, Liszt even at his most sensory is yearning towards the ineffable, the unknowable, things that can’t be expressed even in music, and which would lead him eventually towards the ultimate transcendence of things of this world. This is the aim of the Transcendental Études.

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SPECIAL WEEKEND

On this night the music director for Tippet Rise performs with

Anne-Marie McDermott, the artistic director of the Vail Valley Music Festival and of the Avila Chamber Music Celebration in Curaçao. Their rapport at the piano combines with the energy they bring to this challenging and eye-opening repertoire. There is an extramusical quality about these pieces, which they themselves epitomize in their enormous humanist reach as performers.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 2016, 6:30 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Anne-Marie McDermott Christopher O’Riley

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Sonata for Two Pianos, K. 448

Allegro con spirito Andante

Molto allegro PHILIP GLASS: Four Movements for Two Pianos INTERMISSION JOHN ADAMS: Hallelujah Junction SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Suite No. 1, Op. 5

Barcarolle: Allegretto

La nuit...L’amour...: Allegro sostenuto

Les larmes: Largo di molto

Russian Easter: Allegro maestoso

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ABOUT THE PROGRAM I’ve known and admired Anne-Marie McDermott for my whole professional life, coming up together as we did as New York pianists. We’d run into each other on the road, in elevators, and actually had a couple of occasions to collaborate: a Poulenc two-piano concerto movement and one of the Mozart movements in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Last year, Annie invited me to her wonderful Bravo! Vail summer series, where we stretched our wings, stylistically, in the Four Movements for Two Pianos by Philip Glass.

I’d done a fair amount of minimalism; Annie needed some convincing. I sent her a video of Philip himself performing Mad Rush at St. John the Divine: very subtle and supple, rhythmically, not at all stiff and predictable. So, maybe this was the way in for us? To bring our mutual array of shaping sound and figuration in the best Brahmsian chamber music fashion and shape the texture as whimsically as the sparsely notated dynamics allowed. It was a hit at Vail, and we repeated a movement on a subsequent From the Top broadcast there.

I anticipate a similarly accordant approach to the other great two-piano piece of the era, John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction. I like to think of this clarion of Americana as a further celebration of Stephen Talasnik’s Pioneer. The opportunity of playing with such a Mozartean as Anne-Marie made the Two-Piano Sonata an absolute must. The Suite No. 1 of Rachmaninoff is movements of his utmost suppleness and subtlety. Its closing clangor, Russian Easter, is the perfect antipode for the antiphonal celebration of Adams’s opening salvos.

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—Christopher O’Riley

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Sonata for Two Pianos, K. 448 (1781)

Mozart was 25 when he wrote this sonata for a private concert with his pupil Josephine von Auernhammer at her family’s home in Vienna. His other partner, Constanze von Weber, became his wife. He was never attracted to Josephine, although he said she played well.

He would be dead in a decade at 35, but in this year he wrote many piano sonatas, his thirteenth opera (Idomeneo), three violin and piano sonatas, and began his “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” variations. It was a slow year for Mozart, who during his life wrote more than 600 pieces, including some 58 symphonies, 18 piano sonatas, 36 violin sonatas (he also played the violin), and 22 operas. Even though he was young by most standards, you can hear the operatic writing beginning to creep into his music in this sonata. One piano is the soprano, and the other the orchestra.

Mozart also wrote concertos for both two and three pianos, as well as his sonatas for one piano and four hands.

PHILIP GLASS: Four Movements for Two Pianos (2008)

It is interesting that the two most recognized recent American composers, Philip Glass and John Adams, decline to describe themselves as modern composers. They have both, as they have matured, returned to the sources of their inspiration. In Glass’s case this is Bach, and his favorite, Schubert, whose birthday he shares. Glass feels he is a classicist. You’ll have to agree with him after you hear this alien, rapturous, astral transfiguration.

And if you are lucky enough to hear this piece, you will realize that it is in fact a symphony by Schubert or a concerto by Beethoven, only with melodies, rhythms, and harmonies from another planet.

Forget every preconception you might have about modern music. This is music for the end of the world, from across time, mixing Beethoven with de Falla and Rocky Horror, Bach with Danny Elfman, and even at the end throwing in some early Philip Glass with a demonic descant. It is a tour de force of eternity. It should be played in the sky. It is the sound of the world whirling through space, of our fate and our triumph, the modern music of the spheres.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Suite No. 1, Op. 5 (1893) I. Barcarolle. Allegretto, in G minor.

II. La nuit... L’amour... Adagio sostenuto, in D major.

(The night...the love...)

III. Les larmes. Largo di molto, in G minor (The Tears) IV. Pâques. Allegro maestoso, in G minor (Easter)

For the sake of water, of barcarolles, of the ostinato of the Russian night, I write this in a sea room, the cold winds blowing off the endless ocean outside and rustling the room like a constant fan which, however, when I look at its wooden blades, is stationary, pushed into action only by the natural condition of air it emulates at the insistence of thermally inspired electrons.

Hélène Grimaud writes of always needing to be “within earshot of living water, legato, rubato...,” the way waters laps a capriccio, molecules linked in an endless river, but then slowing down and speeding up, stealing time from here and making up for it there, but freely, without calculation,

without the fussy capitalism of arithmetic, but with the forgiveness of wind, proceeding at its own blustery pace, now soothing, now gusting, always compensating to allow the steady exchange of the same amount of air around the globe, the life-giving flow of the same amount of water, mutating into different shapes, whether cloud, or stream, trickle or cataract, moisture suspended in air, steam evaporating water into stasis, so that both water and air flow with the music of the spheres: elastic, inevitable, but also stable, maintaining the status quo of the universe by catching up or slowing down, like tempos breathing with the music.

Some inflexible German machine, some celestial metronome, may dictate how the story unfolds in the long run, as chaotic patterns in a running faucet follow fractal rules not immediately apparent to our washing hands, but, like fingers parsimoniously handing out morbidly accurate scales in subservience to a brutal god with a train schedule for a heart, these waterfalls and fingerfalls substitute the smooth curve of the universe seen at great distance for the sheer confusion of any of its details, replacing the boiling maelstrom inside the pot with its calm iron exterior, like some robotic astronomer aligning the disturbed drafting curves of van Gogh’s starry night to a mediocre grid, or stuffing his madness into an urban plan of geometric street lights.

We often cease our explorations into the uncertainties of existence after discouraging encounters with the unimaginative math of grade-school pedants, but we are wrong to stop at easy answers to impossible questions. Certain people would rather the loose ends be tied up right now, all problems solved, all plots finalized, all segues diagrammed, rather than having metaphors suggested by poetry lead us down the rabbit hole into vaster dimensions and new questions. Take your choice: robomusic, or the skitter and scramble of bongos; tearoom music of the prim 2016 Inaugural Season

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afternoon or the gypsy scrabble of the possibly empty night. Even the social leveler, the suburban yardstick of the waltz, allows its corseted strictures to be pushed and pulled, because musicians instinctively know that charm comes from the quirks, the accidents, the empty boxes where we expect to find pencil marks, the flaws, the uneven flows of the human heart.

As Paderewski said of time:

There is no absolute rhythm. In the course of

the dramatic developments of a musical compo-

sition, the initial themes change their charac-

ter; consequently rhythm changes also, and, in

conformity with that character, it has to be ener-

getic or languishing, crisp or elastic, steady or capricious....

Paderewski makes another wonderful comment:

Some people, evidently led by laudable principles

of equity, while insisting on the fact of stolen

time, pretend that what is stolen ought to be

restored.... The value of notes diminished in one

period through accelerando cannot always be

restored in another by ritardando. What is lost is lost.

Music isn’t a simple equation, where stolen kisses must be replaced like flowers in a vase, like pennies stolen by children from the cash drawer, so that the world is perfect again. Criminals always intend in their minds to replace the funds they embezzle. They become fascinating to us when they fail; when they succeed, they do not exist.

Proust feels that lost time can be recaptured, not through math but through art. We can reverse the flow of time with the nostalgia of music, or the perfect equation of words. A verse in poetry comes from the Italian and the Latin words for “flowing.” The universe is flowing in one direction. Of course, once Einstein comes along, we realize that time 152

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is curved in on itself, particles repeat in other dimensions, there are mirror symmetries, and time can be recaptured.

We are blinded to the larger patterns by what Nabokov calls the “frenzied corpuscles of Krause.”

We stop too soon at adolescent answers to discover the tolerance, the flexibility built into more complex M-theory or quantum mechanics.

The metronome is the great enemy of complex music; its unforgiving schoolmarm ruler-on-the- knuckles school of singsong scales and slavish rote has gone a long way to remove classical music from the souls of our children, who have by default sought out tangos, rhumbas, ragas, riffs, the more human pulse of less stringent forms. Those who would breast the copycat routine of their high school music masters should sit down by a stream and watch it eddy, trickle, splash, purl, and ripple, among other tricks.

Water fascinates us because it doesn’t repeat itself. Water is a portmanteau word which conjures up to the dull a static basin of standing soapy brine, and to the romantic a storm sea awash in spouts and spray. Water as a word may connote one simple essence, such as might be contained in a glass; but the reality of water in nature is a more rambunctious amusement park of chutes, rapids, and waves.

Composers have been trying since the beginning of music to capture its unbridled and indescribable fury, its delicate murmur and drip (Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau), its demonic rage (Debussy’s Jardins sous la pluie), the Walpurgisnacht of storm (Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain), gondolas lolling in the canals (Mendelssohn’s various gondola songs; Liszt’s and Schubert’s Hungarian Melody, Alkan’s Barcarolle), saints walking on water (Liszt’s St. Francis de Paul Walking on the Water), fountains drizzling and trilling (Liszt’s Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este), tides swelling and breaking (Chopin’s “ocean wave” étude), or the infinity and silence of steps or steppes in the snow (Debussy’s Des Pas sur la Neige; Rachmaninoff ’s G-Sharp Minor Prélude), the first movement of Rachmaninoff ’s Suite No. 1 (Barcarolle).

Some water pieces use the pretext and rhythm of a gondola song to arrive at more complex ends (Chopin’s only and Fauré’s many barcarolles), the way Tom Stoppard uses the cliché of an Agatha Christie murder mystery to present deeper issues in The Real Inspector Hound.

As Feynman did, the only way to discover the more intricate nature of particles (or pieces) we thought we knew is to start from the beginning, to change the rules, to relive our childhood in the language of adults.

This discussion of Rachmaninoff ’s Suite No. 1 is from Pianist Lost: Eliminated Harmonies (The Himalaya Sessions, Volume 3) by Peter Halstead.

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SPECIAL WEEKEND

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SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016, 2:00 PM

The Olivier Music Barn Lucas Debargue United States debut

DOMENICO SCARLATTI: Four Sonatas:

G major: Adagio

C major: Presto

C major: Andante

D minor: Toccata LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op.10, No. 3 Presto

Largo e mesto

Menuetto: Allegro

Rondo: Allegro INTERMISSION FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op.52 MAURICE RAVEL: Gaspard de la nuit Ondine

Le gibet Scarbo FRANZ LISZT: Mephisto Waltz No. 1

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Lucas “started playing a friend’s piano by ear, aged 11, and tinkered around until giving up at 17 and working in a Paris supermarket…. Invited by his old home town to play in their local festival, he picked up the piano again and played so brilliantly that he was put in touch with a hothouse Russian piano coach in Paris. After four years, he was in the final of the Tchaikovsky competition, playing with an orchestra for the first time in his life.”

—Ismene Brown, in the Spectator

At the recent International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Lucas Debargue won fourth prize. The Moscow Music Critics Association awarded him their prize for “the pianist whose incredible gift, artistic vision, and creative freedom have impressed the critics as well as the audience.”

We welcome him to the States this week, and especially to the vast Montana frontier.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

DOMENICO SCARLATTI: Four Sonatas

Domenico Scarlatti wrote 555 sonatas for harpsichord and the clavier. He was born the same year as Bach and Handel (1685). Although he was Italian born, and worked for four years for the Vatican, he lived his life in Spain.

He was music master to the woman who later became Queen of Spain. He lived and composed many of his most famous sonatas in Madrid, where a few were published in 1738, embodying tunes sung by carriers, mule traders, and craftsmen. This is where, some three centuries later, 156

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Antón Garcia-Abríl was head of composition at the Conservatory. It will be very interesting to compare the courtly Spain very neatly classicized by Scarlatti with the more emotional and contemporary homeland presented by Maestro Abril in what he has written for Tippet Rise.

Scarlatti often used the Phrygian mode, the same Spanish-sounding scale used by John Adams in 1978 for his composition Phrygian Gates. But Scarlatti was mostly content to write elegant dance forms in straightforward keys like C or D, where the notes never strayed far from the main key.

His sonatas are only one movement long each, but that movement embodies many moods. His use of dance music is less involved than Bach’s, although he was fully as prolific in the lesser sonata form he favored, still without the heights and depths and intricacies of Bach. He is loath to break the perfect surface of his still and well-planned lily ponds with anything too unsettling.

His world is one of order, manners, and impeccable form.

His glass filigree is a diamond necklace on which every bead sparkles.

In his choral writing, such as Salve Regina and Stabat Mater, Scarlatti reaches deeply moving if traditional churchly heights. If you try to hear voices in his piano notes, you can begin to understand the deep spiritual resonance underneath his human harmonies. Although his more well-known innovations came later, with the harpsichord sonatas, it is useful to flesh out these witty diversions with the great passion of his spiritual masterpieces to understand what is behind the music. That is, you have to go backwards and know Scarlatti’s history before you can appreciate the greatness of his life’s work.

My teacher, Russell Sherman, used to say that you need to play Schoenberg in order to appreciate Mozart, to know what winds of change raged at the edges of his harmonies. To really know the past, you have to know what’s coming.

In Scarlatti’s case, you have to go backwards.

As Ralph Kirkpatrick, the great Scarlatti interpreter and harpsichordist, wrote enthusiastically:

[His] music ranges from the courtly to the sav- age, from an almost saccharine urbanity to an acrid violence. Its gaiety is all the more intense for an undertone of tragedy. Its moments of meditative melancholy are at times overwhelmed by a surge of extrovert operatic passion. Most particularly he has expressed that part of his life which was lived in Spain. There is hardly an aspect of Spanish life, of Spanish popular music and dance, that has not found itself a place in the microcosm that Scarlatti created with his sonatas. No Spanish composer, not even Manuel de Falla in the 20th century, has expressed the essence of his native land as completely as did the foreigner Scarlatti. He has captured the click of castanets, the strumming of guitars, the thud of muffled drums, the harsh bitter wail of gypsy lament, the overwhelming gaiety of the village band, and above all the wiry tension of the Spanish dance.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10, No. 3 (1798)

Beethoven’s Seventh Sonata opens with the Mannheim Rocket, ascending staggered octaves into the night sky, even more forcibly than the same device used for the first sonata. Johann Stamitz was the founder of the Mannheim School around 1750. He pioneered certain devices such as the Mannheim Crescendo, the Mannheim Roller, the Mannheim Sigh, the Mannheim Birds, and the Grand Pause.

This sonata comes from the same year when Beethoven wrote his Second Piano Concerto. He was studying music under Haydn, Salieri, and others. Mozart had been dead for six years, and Beethoven was aware that he was the new Mozart.

The sonata has four movements. The first movement, although it ascends like a rocket, actually begins with four “throwaway” notes which are lost in the excitement of the immediate ascent into the sky.

These four initial notes, like so much of Beethoven, then give him the material for the rest of the movement, which uses those notes in a dozen different ways. At the end of the movement, over a trill in the left-hand bass, you hear those four notes again, played five times, before they begin to ascend again like the initial Mannheim Rocket, this time in a more virtuosic fashion. But they now ascend in groups of four, the upside-down version of the theme. This was true in the beginning, but now it’s become a pattern.

Shakespeare does the same thing: his plays all have the structure of the first scene. What happens then determines how the play is shaped.

Alan Ayckbourn has written an aleatory play called Intimate Exchanges, where a phrase used by an actor determines what text is next used. This continues throughout the play, so each actor has to memorize 16 hours of dialogue. Based on whether or not the actress decides to have a cigarette in the first five seconds of the play, several people might get divorced or married, have children or die. Two actors play 10 characters, with varying accents and disguises; it takes a long time to realize, if you ever do, that there are only two actors.

So what Beethoven is doing is similar. He has four actors, those four notes, and they will play many parts, get married, have fights, have fun, be happy, be sad. But it is always those four characters, no matter how many words are spoken.

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The slow, gorgeous second movement was written as Beethoven was going deaf, so there has always been a lot of discussion about whether he could hear this in some way. Imagine you are the one person in the world who can capture and convey the greatest sounds in history, and yet you cannot hear. Possibly the only solution is to continue doing what you do. His deafness was gradual. In 1801 he still had around 40% of his hearing.

The third movement is a charming minuet with an exciting trio, after which the minuet returns.

The last movement is a dance rondo, continuing the idea of the Viennese farewell (Beethoven lived in Vienna from 1792 until he died in 1827), although Beethoven turns it into considerably more. In the end it just fades away to nothing, a very radical idea at the time.

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52

Chopin and even George Sand were at great pains to deny the influence of Adam Mickiewicz on Chopin’s music.

As Sand, Chopin’s lover, said in her Histoire de ma vie: “No one shuddered more [than Chopin] at linking ethereal sound with concrete matter.”

Even Lubov Keefer, in her essay “The Influence of Adam Mickiewicz on the Ballades of Chopin,” agrees that Chopin was an intellectual isolationist, who was determined that no contemporary influences would disfigure his music. Sand, Liszt, and even Schumann attempted to engage Chopin with Mickiewicz’s lavish poetic imagery, which seemed tailor-made for Chopin’s nationalist tendencies.

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Jean Stan, in Les Ballades de Chopin, claimed that Mickiewicz’s imagery was so attuned to Chopin that “it will be easy to adjust the music to the verses or vice versa.”

Stan further claims that the rain in Majorca nurtured a longing in Chopin for its polar opposite, Lithuania.

Later, the eminently respectable pianists (and yet proponents of notoriously schmaltzy literary descriptions of Chopin’s préludes) Anton Rubinstein, Alfred Cortot, and Robert Casadesus found obvious correlations between moths and raindrops.

But all this is circumstantial evidence. The “thunder and surge, fabulous genii, tall fountain lilies, and slender-hipped maids” of Mickiewicz’s poem Konrad Wallenrod have been transliterated phrase by phrase to coincide with the chords of Chopin’s First Ballade, but Chopin would have denied any heritage but Bach.

Nevertheless, Adam Mickiewicz was the greatest poet in all Polish literature, long regarded as Poland’s national poet. His contemporary Zygmunt Krasiński wrote: “For men of my generation, he was milk and honey, gall and life’s blood: we all descend from him. He carried us off on the surging billow of his inspiration and cast us into the world.”

George Sand compared him in her roman à clef Elle et Lui to Byron and Goethe. He was dashing, a brilliant improvisatory poet, well known to Chopin’s crowd (Delacroix, de Musset, Liszt, Sand), and his very image in Paris as the living embodiment of Polish resistance against Russian encroachment was enough to cause everyone in Paris (except Chopin) to dream of Chopin’s portraying him musically. Of course, Chopin denied it so often and so vehemently that one suspects it might be true.

In any case, Chopin descends from no one but himself. He has no parents, and no children. When Chopin first came to Paris, he went to Sigismond Thalberg, the popular exponent of octaves and flashy playing. Thalberg told Chopin that if he studied with him for three years, he might be able to take in students. Instead, Chopin rented a hall and gave a concert, and within a day he was more famous than Thalberg was ever to be again. Of Liszt versus Chopin, Balzac famously said, “The Hungarian is a devil; the Pole is an angel.”

Although Chopin is traditionally thought of as a weak, tuberculoid invalid, the first metrosexual, you have to be a trained athlete in top form to play his ballades, études, and polonaises. The common wisdom which comes down to us as children from unnamed adults is almost always a myth.

But there are happy myths. I still like the image of Liszt and Chopin in the Columbia Pictures movie about Chopin, A Song to Remember. They meet in Pleyel’s piano shop in Paris, when Chopin discovers Liszt playing a draft of Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise. Chopin sits at another piano and plays along with him.

Stephen Bekassy (Liszt): I’d like to shake your hand, but I don’t want to stop.

Cornel Wilde (Chopin): If I play the melody and you play the bass, we should each have a free hand.

They shake, and Paul Muni (Chopin’s mentor) magnificently faints.(For this to happen, they had to reverse how the music was written.)

Totally ridiculous, but wonderful. You can see it on YouTube.

José Iturbi was the pianist for the film. When I was 18, I met him in an elevator in a New York hotel with his mistress, one of Cathy’s parents’ best friends. It was a scene right out of the movie. I was delighted; everyone else was simply caught.

MAUTICE RAVEL: Gaspard de la nuit (1908)

The turn of the century had one foot in the past and one foot in the future. Oscar Wilde died in 1900. Tosca premiered. Rachmaninoff wrote his Second Piano Concerto in 1901. Puccini was writing Turandot until he died in 1924. In 1899 Ravel composed his first popular piece, Pavane for a Deceased Infanta. In 1900 he was thrown out of the Paris Conservatory. He was a highly disciplined, self-assured dandy, whose private life remains to this day a mystery.

On the other hand, in 1900 quantum physics was born. In 1912 Arnold Schoenberg wrote Pierrot Lunaire. Stravinsky wrote The Firebird in 1910, and The Rite of Spring in 1913.

(He said that Ravel was the only person who understood the music.) Erik Satie was earning his living as a pianist in a café. While one world was continuing the Viennese Sachertorte atmosphere of the 1890s, another was arming.

In 1908 the Reichstag expanded the German Navy. It was the countdown to war, and the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim were filled with spies. Everyone seemed to have a hidden agenda.

Stravinsky was using primitivism to suggest the breakdown of society. It was Picasso’s African period. He had seen a show of Papua New Guinean art, from whose masks he derived Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon. Cubism was beginning to suggest that society was broken into pieces.

It was not that social despair arose out of war: war rose out of the prevailing mood. Austrians were bored with the waltz. The British felt that a good war would invigorate cocktail party repartee.

So it was no accident that Ravel was thinking of the devil (Gaspard), a mermaid who is banished into the void because of love (Ondine), the tolling bells of death (le gibet), or the will-o’-the-wisp, the feux follets, the St. Elmo’s fire of the goblin Scarbo, who flits over the land like sheet lightning.

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Ravel claimed that the devil was the author of the music.

He based it on poems by Aloysius Bertrand, who also claimed that his rhymes were Satanic in origin.

Dracula was published in 1897, and The Turn of the Screw in 1898. Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre of 1874 was a blasphemous inversion of the Dies Irae, the day of wrath melody used earlier by Liszt in Totentanz (the Dance of Death) as a kind of early Gothic music.

As a response similar to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Gaspard uses many modern innovations of discordance and chaotic structure to create a tour de force that is entirely entertaining, understandable, lyric, harmonic, and fun in old-fashioned ways, while being at the same time anarchistic, pessimistic, barbaric, and chaotic. It is chaos spilling over structure, as modern science imagines the universe to be composed. Ravel has managed to materialize the devil in a highly acceptable, traditional fashion, composing modern and brilliantly innovative chords in the service of a theme which is eminently understandable and which has proved one of the great foundations of the modern piano literature, even if only virtuosos can attempt it.

Although Bertrand’s poem portrays Ondine as a simple water sprite, in Dvořák’s Rusalka, written in 1900, the nymph is condemned to an eternity of darkness in the deepest part of the ocean as a demon of death because she fails to keep the love of a fickle prince, who, later abandoned by another love, returns to Rusalka, knowing that her kiss will kill him. So water sprites were not as simple eight years later as they had been before Rusalka. The beauty of the rippling water around her is offset by a sadness and foreboding in her ethereal song, intercut with moments of rapture. Hidden in the sparkles is an unsettling aria for soprano, like Rusalka’s Song to the Moon, infinitely forgiving, unlike Ravel’s more tentative melody.

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“And when I answered Ondine that I loved a mortal woman, sullen and spiteful, she cried some few tears, burst out laughing, and vanished in sleet which rippled white the length of my leaded blue windowpanes.”

Archibald MacLeish has described this situation exactly in his poem “Calypso’s Island,” written at the Mill Reef Club in Antigua, where MacLeish had a house and where he wrote his most lyrical poems: I know very well, goddess, she is not beautiful As you are: could not be. She is a woman, Mortal, subject to the chances: duty of Childbed, sorrow that changes cheeks, the tomb— For unlike you she will grow gray, grow older, Gray and older, sleep in that small room.

She is not beautiful as you, O golden!

You are immortal and will never change And can make me immortal also, fold Your garment round me, make me whole and strange As those who live forever, not the while That we live, keep me from those dogging dangers— Ships and the wars—in this green, far-off island, Silent of all but sea’s eternal sound Or sea-pine’s when the lull of surf is silent.

Goddess, I know how excellent this ground, What charmed contentment of the removed heart The bees make in the lavender where pounding Surf sounds far off and the bird that darts Darts through its own eternity of light, Motionless in motion, and the startled Hare is startled into stone, the fly Forever golden in the flickering glance Of leafy sunlight that still holds it. I

Know you, goddess, and your caves that answer Ocean’s confused voices with a voice: Your poplars where the storms are turned to dances; Arms where the heart is turned. You give the choice To hold forever what forever passes, To hide from what will pass, forever. Moist, Moist are your well-stones, goddess, cool your grasses!

And she—she is a woman with that fault Of change that will be death in her at last!

Nevertheless I long for the cold, salt, Restless, contending sea and for the island Where the grass dies and the seasons alter: Where that one wears the sunlight for a while.

Ondine is immensely difficult because its unusual arpeggios have never-before invented modes, in sonorities from other worlds beneath the sea, which are extremely hard to play adroitly at the virtuosic speed which Ravel demands.

Its repeated notes are the only survivors for the second piece, The Gibbet, its tolling bells an echo of Debussy’s drowned steeple, a lament for society, and yet a hint of the riches buried in it. Ravel was eternally confident of his powers, even when surrounded with a submerging culture.

Those same repeated notes begin Scarbo, one of the most literally fiendish challenges to the best of pianists. Scarbo is a shadow who enters through the window during a full moon and flickers around the walls like feu follet, heat lightning, “when the moon at midnight Brillos on the crag like silver specie on an azure flag sown with golden bees.”

FRANZ LISZT: Mephisto Waltz No. 1 (1859)

There are two varieties of hell on display tonight, Ravel’s and Liszt’s.

A fitting accomplice to Gaspard de la nuit is Liszt’s paean to the devil; he wrote four different versions over his lifetime, which became more and more adventurous and innovative, although the first one remains the most played.

Although Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust are more familiar, Liszt based his waltz on a Faust by Nikolaus Lenau, Austria’s great lyric poet, written in 1836, around the time that Liszt himself was mired in a similar Weltschmertz, or world-weariness.

Almost a century later, in 1947, Thomas Mann wrote his own Doctor Faustus, about a musician who makes a pact with the devil, calling to mind Paganini, who people felt must have sold his soul to be such a sorcerer at the violin; Schoenberg, whom Mann consulted about the music; Nietzsche, whose arrogance mixed with doubt and madness was similar to Mann’s hero; Mann himself, who claimed to be philosophically ambivalent like his hero, Adrian Leverkuhn; but, most importantly, Gustav Mahler, whose own nervous breakdown paralleled the disintegration of the social order as the world descended into the chaos of World War II. Mann’s Faust was about the world making a pact with the devil; about how one great philosopher, Nietzsche, caused the loss of belief which led to the war; and about how another great thinker, Mahler, captured the angst of the era in his music and in his life.

The Faust theme led to what Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions called the revolution phase, where the breakdown of social conventions leads to absolute chaos and the questioning of established thought, the way the series Foyle’s War in England chronicled the sense of lawlessness which paralyzed the south of England during the German blitz.

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More tragic is the novel Mephisto, written by Mann’s son Klaus, who felt he himself could compromise his beliefs while advancing his career in Nazi Germany. He couldn’t, and it led to his suicide, and that of his brother-in-law, the despised subject of Mann’s novel, who won great fame in Nazi Germany by acting Faust, and later Hamlet, under the patronage of Hermann Göring. From Mann’s longbanned novel, a wonderful film was made by Istvan Szabo in 1981 with Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Combining the idea of an anarchic devil with a civilized waltz is about as far from Walpurgisnacht as possible. Liszt’s initial Mephisto is more of a drawing room devil, however.

Most of the waltz is closer to Richard Strauss than it is to Ravel’s or Saint-Saëns’ more cacophonic versions. Liszt’s Totentanz from 1849 is more frightening than his Mephisto waltzes. However, the waltzes are works of great charm and virtuosity.

Mozart’s conception of the devil was a chromatic scale, which he uses in his opera Don Giovanni to summon up hellfire. To the classical mind, the very close harmonies of “neighbor notes”—that is, notes right next to each other on the piano keyboard—is not only overly intimate, but terrifying. Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre was written in 1874, and Ravel’s Gaspard came from 1908. You can see how the idea of evil has mutated from a chromatic scale to absolutely horrifying harmonies.

Even more realistic is Ravel’s La Valse (1919), which benefits, if that is the word, from the hideous juxtapositions of the First World War, where the waltzes of Vienna and the smug, in-denial hubris of society in a way led to the boredom which cynically sought out war as a change in cocktail party conversation, until the horror of such nonchalance became apparent to everyone. Ravel describes this frightening metamorphosis in his piece.

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film Psycho (1960), came to America to escape Hitler; their music had been opened up by the experience of the war into new realms of harmonic disintegration, and by closer association with European atonalism sprung from the First World War. Later film composers like Danny Elfman (Batman, Avengers: Age of Ultron), Jerry Goldsmith (Alien), Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar), James Horner (Aliens, Avatar) have expanded the harmonic vocabulary of alienation and anxiety, partially through the early advances in computer-generated sound developed by composers like Stockhausen, Takemitsu, Cage, Ussachevsky, Xenakis, Luening, Varèse, Babbitt, Wuorinen, Subotnick, Riley, many of whom were teaching at institutions in Boston, Cambridge, and New York during our own school years.

Gregorian chant, the ultimate expression of cloistered spirituality for centuries and the basis of the Dies Irae of Berlioz, Liszt, and others, has been the foundation of music composed in modern times to express its opposite. The great linguist Mario Pei believed that words come to mean their opposite; and so does music. Ecclesiastic music is now the staple of the horror film.

Liszt was often embarrassed by his younger self. One of his earliest sins was program music (see the article “Program Music“ in this program), where he described paintings, plots of plays, poems by patriots like Mickiewicz.

Here is Liszt’s description of Lenau’s Mephisto, which Liszt is paraphrasing in his music:

There is a wedding feast in progress in the village inn, with music, dancing, carousing. Mephistoph- eles and Faust pass by, and Mephistopheles induc- es Faust to enter and take part in the festivities.

Mephistopheles snatches the fiddle from the hands of a lethargic fiddler and draws from it

indescribably seductive and intoxicating strains.

The amorous Faust whirls about with a full-blood- ed village beauty in a wild dance; they waltz in mad abandon out of the room, into the open, away into the woods. The sounds of the fiddle grow softer and softer, and the nightingale warbles his love-laden song.

Liszt’s six Paganini Caprices did for the piano what Paganini did for the violin. Paganini was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play the violin so brilliantly.

Liszt aspired to be the Paganini of the piano, and here he emulates the devil’s violin with all the charm of so many dark prophets.

Not as scary as later composers, Liszt’s devil was as well-mannered as his own soul. Everything you know about Liszt is backwards. He wasn’t a Lothario; he respected and admired women and treated them wonderfully; they were all in love with them. He wasn’t a vulgarian; he was a mystic. He wasn’t a godless heretic: he became an abbé, and a great voice for the ways of God among men. He wasn’t an egoist: he was the most selfless of men, who played Schumann when Schumann despised Liszt, a genuine hero of infinite kindness and generosity. His motto was not noblesse oblige (nobility obliges us to treat people with great dignity) but la génie oblige (with genius comes responsibility).

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Artists Profiles 2016 Inaugural Season

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2016 Performing Artists Ariel String Quartet Jenny Chen Elmer Churampi John-Henry Crawford Lucas Debargue Alessandro Deljavan Nikolai Demidenko Dover String Quartet Excelsis Percussion Quartet Caroline Goulding Matt Haimovitz Emily Helenbrook Stephen Hough Eunice Kim George Li Konstantin Lifschitz Anne-Marie McDermott Christopher O’Riley Svetlana Smolina Yevgeny Sudbin John Bruce Yeh 2016 Inaugural Season

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The Ariel String Quartet was formed in Israel more than Ariel String Quartet

16 years ago, when its members were young students.

Recently awarded the prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award, the Quartet serves as the faculty quartet in residence at the University of Cincinnati’s CollegeConservatory of Music, where they direct the chamber music program and perform their own annual series of concerts—a remarkable achievement for an ensemble so young.

The Ariel Quartet performs widely in Israel, Europe, and North America, including two record-setting Beethoven cycles last season, performed before all the members of the quartet turned 30. It has been mentored extensively by Itzhak Perlman, Paul Katz, Donald Weilerstein, Miriam Fried, Kim Kashkashian, and Martha Strongin Katz, among others. The Ariel continues to astonish with its performances of complete works by memory and has collaborated with the pianist Orion Weiss, violist Roger Tapping, cellist Paul Katz, and the American and Jerusalem String Quartets. The Ariel was quartet in residence for the Steans Music Institute at the Ravinia Festival, the Yellow Barn Music Festival, and for the Perlman Music Program. Characterized by its youth, brilliant playing, and soulful interpretations, the Ariel Quartet has quickly earned a glowing international reputation.

For more information, please visit www.arielquartet.com.

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Alexandra Kazovsky, violin Gershon Gerchikov, violin Jan Grüning, viola Amit Even-Tov, cello

Jenny Chen represents a new generation of performers.

Jenny Chen

Her passionate artistry expresses her individuality and excitement about music. Since age nine, she has performed with orchestras such as Philadelphia Orchestra, National Repertory Orchestra, Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic, New York Downtown Sinfonietta, Taipei Symphony Orchestra, and the Pacific Symphony. While still quite young, she distinguished herself by winning numerous first prizes in Taiwan and by performing in the National Theater and Concert Hall for her native Taiwan, with a blessing from Taiwan’s President Ying-Jeou Ma. At age 10, Chen entered the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Gary Graffman and Eleanor Sokoloff. She recently graduated with a master’s from Yale, the youngest doctor of music arts candidate, at age 22.

She performs frequently as a soloist and with chamber musicians across the United States and abroad. She has collaborated with great musicians such as Anne-Marie McDermott, Peter Wiley, Rossen Milanov, Carl St. Clair, and Arnold Steinhardt and has been invited as artist in residence to many festivals, including Bravo! Vail Music Festival, Mainly Mozart Festival, Sejong International Music Festival, and Vredenburg Leidsche Rijn in the Netherlands. Despite all her successes, the energy and insight of her music has not lost the joy of youth, a contradictory mix where the rigors of virtuosity abet, rather than hinder, the spontaneity, the freshness of her music.

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lmer Churampi will be the trumpet virtuoso in the Domo Scriabin homage.

“When I was four, I took [my father’s] trumpet when he was taking a break, and I got a good sound,” Churampi told Christopher O’Riley on From the Top’s Show 268.

Elmer Churampi

“On that day, he told me that I was going to be a trumpet player.”

From the moment Churampi picked up the trumpet, he began a journey to becoming one of the most impressive musicians in the history of From the Top. He moved everyone not only as a musician, but as a person.

While growing up in Lima, Peru, music would be his driving force. It would be his vehicle for self-expression, his ticket to success, and his calling in life. It would make him an inspiration to everyone he met. “My parents were poor, but with a big heart,” he said. “They always supported me in music, and in life.”

As a child, Churampi’s musical talent caught the attention of many in his community. Their encouragement would soon be very important.

One of his most notable supporters was soccer player Nolberto Solano. When he noticed Churampi’s gift for music, he helped him acquire his first professional instrument.

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Trumpet

John-Henry Crawford

Cello

John-Henry Crawford, a 22-year-old cellist from

Shreveport, Louisiana, is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Carter Brey, principal cellist of New York Philharmonic and Peter Wiley, formerly of the Guarneri Quartet. Crawford held the Nina and Billy Albert Fellowship at Curtis. He was accepted at age 15 and served as principal cellist of the Curtis Orchestra during his senior year.

Crawford gave his solo debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2011 as first prize winner of the Orchestra’s Greenfield Concerto Competition. He has recently been chosen as one of only three U.S. cellists invited to the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Russia. This past November Crawford was invited to give a solo recital in the International Concert Series of the Louvre in Paris. In 2015 he won first prize in cello and grand prize at the American String Teachers National Solo Competition. Crawford has been featured twice with Christopher O’Riley on National Public Radio’s From the Top, and has given concerts in 20 states, as well as Canada, Switzerland, Germany, France, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico. He was also accepted at the prestigious Verbier Academy in Switzerland, where he was the only American cellist of eight selected worldwide. He has performed on WHYY public television in Philadelphia, and is included in the documentary Maestro Movie. He is interviewed and quoted in the best-selling book The Talent Code by Dan Coyle.

Crawford has studied with Lynn Harrell, Frans Helmerson, Gary Hoffman, Paul Katz, Ralph Kirshbaum, Pinchas Zukerman, Pamela Frank, Ida Kavafian, Shmuel Ashkenasi, Lawrence Dutton, Michael Tree, Zuill Bailey, Shauna Rolston, and Amit Peled. His chamber groups have performed for the Emerson and St. Lawrence Quartet and at Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society Master Classes in New York. He has performed a wide spectrum of music, ranging from early music, as part of the Curtis Collegium, to John Adams and Joan Tower, with members of the contemporary music group Eighth Blackbird.

He is from a musical family and performs on a 200-year-old European cello smuggled out of Austria in 1938 by his grandfather, the cellist Dr. Robert Popper. In addition to playing the cello, Crawford enjoys reading, swimming, and performing magic tricks.

For more information, please visit johnhenrycrawford.com.

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ianist Lucas Debargue quickly became the most talked-about competitor at this year’s International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, garnering praise for the emotional expression in his playing and his musical individuality and integrity. The London Spectator called Debargue “the real winner” of the competition, due to the Moscow Music Critics Association prize bestowed on the fourth-prize recipient.

Lucas Debargue

An introspective and insightful artist who draws inspiration across disciplines—in literature, painting, cinema, and jazz—Debargue seeks to foster a deeper sense of musical appreciation among his audiences and develop personal interpretations of a carefully selected repertoire, including works by some lesser-known composers, such as Nikolai Medtner, Samuel Maykapar, and Nikolai Roslavets.

This season Debargue opens the Pianoscope Festival in Beauvais, France, and performs the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra in Birmingham Symphony Hall, at Warsaw’s Folles Journées’ Festival, the Südtirol Classic Festival in Italy, and the Pyeongchang International Music Festival in Korea. He reprises the Tchaikovsky Concerto with the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia and Vasily Petrenko, and plays the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Mariinsky Orchestra in Beijing and the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Fedoseyev.

More information, please visit www.lucas-debargue.com.

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Born of an Italian mother and a Persian father,

Alessandro Deljavan

Allesandro Deljavan began learning to play piano before the age of two and gave his first performances at age three.

He has since performed around the world, including in Austria, Belgium, China, Columbia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland, and the United States.

Deljavan graduated from the Conservatorio Statale di Musica Giuseppe Verdi (Milano, 2003) and the Istituto Gaetano Braga (Teramo, 2006). From 2005–2013 he was among the select young artists attending the International Piano Academy at Lake Como, Italy, under the tutelage of the Academy’s artistic director, William Grant Naboré. In addition, he has taken part in courses at the Mozarteum Salzburg, the Festival dell Nazioni at Città di Castello, and the Ottorino Respighi Foundation on St. George Island, Venice, Italy.

Piano

He is currently professor of piano at the Niccolò Piccinni Conservatory of Bari, Italy. In addition, in fall 2015 Alessandro begins his appointment as professor of piano at the Accademia Vivaldi in Locarno, Switzerland.

For more information, visit www.alessandrodeljavan.com.

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Nikolai Demidenko’s Chopin emerges from the layers of Nikolai Demidenko despair and fragmentation a modern pianist brings to the wrought-iron filigree of Haussmann’s Paris. He rarely performs in the United States, making this an extraordinary opportunity to hear him. A review of his Prokofiev Second Concerto with the Galicia Symphony Orchestra stated, “It is a huge cadenza not only for its duration: the brilliant arpeggios, the crossing of hands and other elements of brilliance that Prokofiev wrote on his own honor and glory were resolved with impeccable technique and profound musicality by Demidenko.

Then, the playful irony of the Scherzo, the mock solemnity of the intermezzo and its virtuosic elements— those electrifying glissandi of the right hand with his left hand arpeggios—and the dense and growing intensity of the final Allegro tempestoso, rounded a version of reference that will remain in the memory of the audience of A Coruña for a long time….”

With a catalogue of 36 albums, his live Masterworks concerts, his Bach and his Beethoven captivate Europe.

For more information, please visit www.demidenko.net.

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Piano

Dover String Quartet The Dover draws its musical lineage from the Cleveland,

Vermeer, and Guarneri String Quartet, having studied at the Curtis Institute and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, when those quartets were in residence, from 2011–2013. The Quartet has been mentored extensively

by Shmuel Ashkenasi, James Dunham, Norman Fischer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Silverstein, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, and Peter Wiley. They are dedicated to sharing their music with underserved communities and are active members of Music for Food, an initiative to help musicians fight hunger in their home communities.

Joel Link, violin Bryan Lee, violin Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola Camden Shaw, cello

The Dover Quartet catapulted to international stardom following a stunning sweep of the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, becoming one of the most in-demand ensembles in the world. The New Yorker recently dubbed them “the young American string quartet of the moment.” Members of the quartet have appeared as soloists with some of the world’s finest orchestras. Visit www.doverquartet.com to see more of their amazing accomplishments and their schedule of performances.

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T

he multi-instrumentalist, communal/ritual/tribal John Luther Adams’s work, Inuksuit, requires a radiant core of percussionists as an impetus for the larger proceedings.

The Excelsis Percussion Quartet is the catalyst and seed of this performance. Its founder, Marcelina Suchocka, was just 12 years old when she first performed on From the Top; precociously talented and infectiously enthusiastic, she was also the winner of the first collaboration between From the Top and YouTube in their Big Break competition, with her performance video gaining thousands of enthusiastic votes.

As a recipient of a Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship through From the Top, she appeared with Excelsis in performance and collaboration with Christopher O’Riley on a Washington, D.C., broadcast commemorating 15 years of Cooke Foundation sponsorship. The four members of Excelsis met at the Manhattan School of Music, and they are all trail-blazing citizens of the freelance and percussion worlds of New York City.

For more information, visit www.excelsispercussion.com.

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Excelsis Percussion Quartet

Marcelina Suchocka Clara Warnaar Mariana Ramirez Aya Kaminaguchi

Caroline Goulding first appeared on From the Top at the

Caroline Goulding

Piano

age of 13. Her Telarc debut recording, a collaboration with Christopher O’Riley, received a Grammy nomination.

Called “precociously gifted” by Gramophone Magazine, she has appeared as soloist with many of the world’s premier orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, National Symphony, Nashville Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Houston Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, Berlin’s ensemble mini, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. She has appeared in recital at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, the Tonhalle-Zurich, the Louvre Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Her 2015–2016 season includes engagements in Asia, Europe, and North America with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Dortmunder Philharmoniker, Houston Symphony, Fort Worth Symphony, Omaha Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Tacoma Symphony, and New West Symphony. Her upcoming recital CD release with pianist Danae Dörken features works by Schumann, Enescu, and Dvořák.

Goulding is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Currently studying with Christian Tetzlaff at the Kronberg Academy, she splits her time between Kronberg, Germany, and Boston, Massachusetts.

For more information, visit www.carolinegoulding.com.

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Matt Haimovitz

The original manuscript of J.S. Bach’s Six Suites for Cello Solo has been lost to history. The only remnant is a copy made

by Anna Magdalena, Bach’s second wife, her handwriting uncanny in its likeness to the composer’s own. Since 1890, when Casals found a published copy in a second-hand music shop and first performed the Suites in public 20 years later, the Suites have been both Bible and Holy Grail of the solo cello repertoire—each cellist searching for his own way into the heart of this music.

Haimovitz has been closely associated with the Bach Suites since the year 2000, when the former child prodigy jumpstarted the alternative classical revolution by performing the complete cycle in folk clubs and rock venues, including New York’s now-defunct punk palace CBGBs. That same year, he released a three-CD set of the Suites that launched the newborn Oxingale Records.

Now, 15 years later, Haimovitz returns to the Cello Suites with a stunning new interpretation, intimately informed by Anna Magdalena’s manuscript.

M

Cello

att Haimovitz, renowned for his courage in performing in challenging settings such as the High Line in New York City and the gym at Columbia University, will perform the summit of musical achievement, the Bach Cello Suites, on one of the high ridges of Tippet Rise’s monadnocks in the afternoon, and again in the lush Olivier Music Barn in the evening.

A protégé of Rostropovich and Leonard Rose, Haimovitz specializes in playing along with nature, while remaining entirely undistracted, which demands an extreme, but invisible, virtuosity. This summer, he will contrast the planetary gears of the Bach Suites with modern responses, which he has commissioned from great living composers, such as Philip Glass.

As the Bach Suites are a compendium of musical cultures from Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, the modern responses he adds translate these high structures into the vernacular of our own time.

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Before the formation of Oxingale Records, Haimovitz’s 10-year exclusive relationship with the Deutsche Grammophon label (DGG) resulted in six acclaimed recordings. His 1989 debut recording of Saint-Saëns, Bruch, and Lalo, with James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was lauded

by Gramophone as heralding “the arrival of a new star in the cello firmament.”

Born in Israel, Haimovitz has been honored with the Avery Fisher Career Grant (1986), the Grand Prix du Disque (1991), the Diapason d’Or (1991), and Harvard’s Louis Sudler Prize (1996). He is the first cellist to receive the prestigious Premio Internazionale “Accademia Musicale Chigiana” (1999). He has been featured in numerous publications, including Newsweek, The New Yorker, People, Connoisseur, Gramophone, Strings and Strad magazines, and has been the subject of full-length televised features on CBS’ s Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt and Germany’s ZDF, and has appeared on PBS’ s Salute to the Arts and Nova.

For more information, please visit www.matthaimovitz.com.

Emily Helenbrook E

mily Helenbrook’s performance will take place at the Domo, which is a table, a house, in the mystical shape of a dolmen, where druids would celebrate the mysteries of the seasons, and where Helenbrook will pay homage to those monastic modes with the vibrant soprano seguidillas of Catalonia.

Helenbrook credits her late grandfather, Mathew Tworek, a much-admired violinist and former associate concertmaster for the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, as her inspiration.

“Together, we put in countless hours at the piano, and he taught me the importance of understanding the music through music theory, musical interpretation, and the fundamentals of the piano. We performed together frequently, and I learned so much about how to be a true musical interpreter and how important it is to, most of all, love what you do.”

Soprano

Helenbrook is a dual-degree student, pursuing a bachelor of music in vocal performance with Professor of Voice Carol Webber, and a bachelor of arts in business with a concentration on pre-law.

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Stephen Hough

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Stephen Hough is a Renaissance man, not only as a true

polymath, but as a master in the achievements of that period. Hough combines his career as a uniquely insightful concert pianist, writer, and composer with philosophic pursuits, which have earned him a multitude of prestigious awards and a long-standing international following.

In 2001 Hough was the first classical performing artist to win a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He was awarded Northwestern University’s 2008 Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano, won the Royal Philharmonic Society Instrumentalist Award in 2010, and in January of 2014 was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in the New Year’s Honors List.

He has appeared with most of the major European and American orchestras, and plays recitals regularly in major halls and concert series around the world. He is a regular guest at festivals such as Aldeburgh, Aspen, Blossom, Edinburgh, Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart, Salzburg, Tanglewood, Verbier, Chicago’s Grant Park, Blossom, and the BBC Proms, where he has made over 20 concerto appearances, including playing all of the works of Tchaikovsky for piano and orchestra over the summer of 2009, a series he later repeated with the Chicago Symphony.

Hough’s 2015–2016 season begins with complete Beethoven cycles in Australia and Singapore, followed by recitals in Beijing, Taipei and Tokyo. The season continues with return appearances with the Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the San Francisco, Montreal, Houston, Vancouver, and New Jersey symphonies, among others in North America, as well as re-engagements with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Europe.

Hough has a catalogue of more than 50 albums, many of which have garnered international prizes, including the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, the Diapason d’Or, the Monde de la Musique, several Grammy nominations, eight Gramophone Magazine Awards (Record of the Year in 1996 and 2003), and the Gramophone Gold Disc Award in 2008, which named his complete Saint-Saens Piano Concertos as the best recording of the past 30 years. His 2012 recording of the complete Chopin Waltzes received the Diapason d’Or de l’Année, France’s most prestigious recording award.

Published by Josef Weinberger, Hough has composed works for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, and solo piano. His Mass of Innocence and Experience and Missa Mirabilis were respectively commissioned by and performed at London’s Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral. Hough has also been commissioned by the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic, London’s National Gallery, Wigmore Hall, the Louvre Museum, and Musica Viva Australia, among others.

A noted writer, Hough regularly contributes articles for The Guardian, The Times, The Tablet, Gramophone, and BBC Music Magazine, and was invited by The Telegraph in London in 2008 to start a blog that has become one of the most popular and influential forums for cultural discussion. His book The Bible as Prayer was published by Continuum and the Paulist Press in 2007.

Hough resides in London, where he is a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music and holds the International Chair of Piano Studies at his alma mater, the Royal Northern College in Manchester. He is also a member of the faculty at The Juilliard School.

To find out more about Hough, please visit his website www.stephenhough.com or his Facebook fan page.

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A

native of the San Francisco Bay Area, violinist Eunice Kim made her solo debut at the age of seven with the Korean Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra. Called “just superb” (The New York Times) and “a born performer” (Epoch Times), she recently made her solo debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Louisville Symphony, and performed George Tsontakis’ Unforgettable with the Albany Symphony Orchestra. Recently, she performed at the Library of Congress on the “Ward” Antonio Stradivari violin, and she toured Taiwan, Hong Kong, Germany, and South Korea with “Curtis On Tour.” A winner of Astral’s 2012 National Auditions, Kim is the recipient of awards and honors from the California International Violin Competition, the Pacific Music Society Competition, the Korea Times String Competition, and the Youth Excellence Scholarship for the Arts. She also represented the Curtis Institute of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the Millennium Stage Series Conservatory Project at the Kennedy Center.

Eunice Kim

An enthusiastic advocate for community engagement, she has partnered with the Philadelphia Orchestra Department of Education to perform in outreach series, and regularly participates in Astral’s Community Engagement and Education programs. She has taught at numerous international music festivals, most recently at the Teatro Del Lago Festival in Chile and the Valdres Music Academy in Norway. She has participated in the Music from Angel Fire and Marlboro Music festivals.

Kim graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, where she served as concertmaster of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra and as a mentor in the Curtis Community Engagement program, and was awarded the Milka Violin Artist Prize.

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Violin

Silver medalist in the 2015 International Tchaikovsky

George Li

Piano

Competition and winner of the prestigious XIV Concours International Grand Prix Animato 2014 Paris, George Li is regarded as one of the world’s most talented and creative young pianists. His astonishing technique, distinctive tonal quality, and exceptional musicality have earned him consistent critical acclaim and enthusiastic audience response worldwide for his solo recitals, orchestral collaborations, and chamber music performances.

In addition to winning the Grand Prix Animato Piano Competition (with the Schumann Prize, the Brahms Prize and the Audience Prize) in December 2014, Li won third prize in the 2015 U.S. Chopin Competition and second prize in the 2014 Vendome Prize. In 2012 he received the prestigious Gilmore Young Artist Award, becoming its youngest recipient. With his exceptional musical gifts being recognized by Alfred Brendel, Dimitri Bashkirov, and Menahem Pressler, Li was the winner of the Tabor Foundation Piano Award at the 2012 Verbier Academy.

In 2010 he won first prize in the prestigious Young Concert Artists International Audition, and since that time has been under management of the YCA. In 2010 he also won first prize at the Inaugural Cooper International Piano Competition. In 2008 Li won second prize at the Gina Bachauer International Piano Junior Artist Competition.

In 2011 he performed at a White House state dinner for President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In 2005, at age nine, Li made his first orchestral debut as a soloist with the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra.

Thereafter he has appeared as a soloist with many symphony orchestras, including the Cleveland Orchestra,

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Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, Albany Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Pro Musica, Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Spartanburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Miami Symphony Orchestra, Nordic Chamber Orchestra (Sweden), Norrkoping Orchestra (Sweden), Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Lexington Symphony Orchestra, Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra “I Solisti di Perugia” (Italy), Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra, Waltham Symphony Orchestra, Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, Boise Philharmonic Orchestra, Pasadena Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra at Temple Square, Longwood Symphony Orchestra, Stamford Symphony Orchestra, Akron Symphony Orchestra, Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (Canada), and Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

An active recitalist and orchestral soloist, Li has performed in venues throughout the world, including the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Musikverein (Vienna), Rudolfinum’s Dvořák Hall (Czech Republic), Severance Hall, Symphony Hall, Jordan Hall, Mechanics Hall, The Tabernacle, Alice Tully Hall of Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, and the Kennedy Center.

He is also an enthusiastic chamber musician. Since age nine, Li has regularly performed in chamber music concerts, with repertoire ranging from Haydn to Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, and Bolcom. As a member of the Vivace Trio, Li performed for members

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of the U.S. Congress on Capitol Hill. He has also played chamber music concerts with the Boston Trio and in the Winsor Chamber Music Series.

He has frequently been featured as guest artist on National Public Radio (WGBH). He also appeared on CBS TV (the Liz Walker Show and the Martha Stewart Show). At age 11, Li performed at Carnegie Hall as a featured pianist on the From the Top TV series. He has participated in numerous world-renowned summer festivals, including the Verbier Academy (Switzerland), Miami International Piano Festival, Southeastern Piano Festival, and Gilmore Keyboard Festival. He has had masterclasses with renowned pianists Alfred Brendel, Emmanuel Ax, and Richard Goode.

A resident of Lexington, Massachusetts, Li graduated from Walnut Hill School for the Arts and the Preparatory School of New England Conservatory, where he studied piano with Wha Kyung Byun. His previous piano teachers include Dorothy Shi (from the ages of 4 to 12) and Chengzong Yin (ages 7 to 12).

Li is currently enrolled in the dual-degree program at Harvard University and the New England Conservatory, continuing his piano studies with Wha Kyung Byun, as well as Russell Sherman, the master pianist and distinguished artist in residence at the New England Conservatory.

For more information, visit www.georgelipianist.com.

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Konstantin Lifschitz

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The New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein

named Konstantin Lifschitz’s 1996 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations “the most powerful interpretation since that of Glenn Gould.”

Lifschitz was born in Kharkov to a musical family, and at the age of five entered the Moscow Gnessin Special Middle School of Music, in the class of Tatiana Zelikman. He subsequently studied in Russia, the U.K., and Italy under Vladimir Tropp, Theodor Gutman, Hamish Milne, Alfred Brendel, Fou Ts’ong, Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Leon Fleisher, Rosalyn Tureck, and Charles Rosen.

In the early 1990s, Lifschitz received a grant from the Russian Cultural Foundation. He has subsequently performed in Paris, Munich, and Milan. While taking part in the New Names Programme, he drew the attention of Vladimir Spivakov, who invited him to perform on tour in Japan with the Moscow Virtuosi ensemble in a program, featuring Bach’s Concerto in D Minor. Konstantin Lifschitz has since appeared with Vladimir Spivakov at Monte Carlo and in Antibes, performing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1.

At age 13 Lifschitz gave a recital at the October Hall of the House of Unions in Moscow, marking a new stage in his solo career. Around 1994, Denon Nippon Columbia began to release recordings by the pianist. In 1995 Lifschitz received the German Echo prize for his debut recording in the category Most Promising Artist of the Year.

Lifschitz has worked with the conductors Yuri Temirkanov, Bernard Haitink, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Yuri Simonov, Eri Klas, and Mstislav Rostropovich. He frequently gives chamber music concerts, partnered by such

master musicians as Gidon Kremer, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Maxim Vengerov, Patricia Kopachinskaya, Yevgeny Ugorsky, Leila Josefovich, Lara St. John, Mischa Maisky, Sol Gabetta, Mstislav Rostropovich, Lynn Harrell, Jiří Barta, Bella Davidovich, and Valery Afanasiev.

In autumn 2008, Lifschitz performed Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto with the Theater und Philharmonie Essen Orchestra under Konstantinos Karydis. He then completed a tour of Germany with the Musica Viva ensemble as both pianist and conductor. He conducted the ensemble in performances of works by Bach, Stravinsky, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky. Conducting is Lifschitz’s second major creative field; between 2006 and 2008 he studied at the conducting faculty of the University of the Arts in Berlin.

This season the pianist toured Germany with the Bern Symphony Orchestra under Andrei Boreiko, in addition to concerts in Munich and Moscow and his first visit to South Africa at the Capetown Arts Festival.

The pianist has an extensive discography. In 2007 he recorded Bach’s A Musical Offering and Frescobaldi’s toccatas. In 2008, together with Austrian Radio and TV Orchestra, he recorded Gottfried von Einem’s Piano Concerto, and in 2010 Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. VAI has released a DVD of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

Lifschitz has twice won the Rovenna prize for his outstanding contribution to the performing arts. He is an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London and has been a professor of the Musikhochschule in Lucerne since 2008.

For more information, visit www.konstantinlifschitz.de.

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Anne-Marie McDermott

Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott is a consummate artist

who balances a versatile career as a soloist and collaborator.

She performs more than 100 concerts a year, in a combination of solo recitals, concertos, and chamber music. Her repertoire choices are eclectic, spanning Bach and Haydn to Prokofiev and Scriabin to Kernis, Hartke, Tower, and Wuorinen.

With more than 50 concertos in her repertoire, McDermott has performed with many leading

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Piano orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Seattle Symphony, National Symphony, Houston Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, Hong Kong Philharmonic, San Diego Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, and Baltimore Symphony, among others.

McDermott has toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Moscow Virtuosi.

In recent seasons, McDermott performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, North Carolina Symphony, Charlotte Symphony, Huntsville Symphony, Alabama Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Oregon Mozart Players, and New Century Chamber Orchestra.

Recital engagements have included the 92nd Street Y, Alice Tully Hall, Town Hall, The Schubert Club, and Kennedy Center, as well as universities across the country.

McDermott has curated and performed in a number of intense projects, including the Complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas and Chamber Music, a Three Concert Series of Shostakovich Chamber Music, as well as a recital series of Haydn and Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Most recently, she commissioned works of Charles Wuorinen and Clarice Assad, which were premiered in May 2009 at Town Hall, in conjunction with Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

As a soloist, McDermott has recorded the complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas, the Bach English Suites and Partitas (which was named Gramophone Magazine’s Editor’s Choice), and most recently, Gershwin’s Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra with the Dallas Symphony and Justin Brown.

In addition to her many achievements, McDermott is the Artistic Director of the famed Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival in Colorado, which hosts the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony, and the St. Martin in the Fields Orchestra (led

by Joshua Bell), in addition to presenting more than 40 chamber music concerts throughout the summer. She is also artistic director of two new Festivals: Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival and Avila Chamber Music Celebration in Curaçao.

As a chamber music performer, McDermott was named an artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1995 and performs and tours extensively with CMS each season. She continues a longstanding collaboration with the highly acclaimed violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. As a duo, they have released a CD titled Live, on the NSS label, and plan to release the complete Brahms Violin and Piano Sonatas in the future. McDermott is also a member of the renowned piano quartet Opus One, with colleagues Ida Kavafian, Steven Tenenbom, and Peter Wiley.

She continues to perform each season with her sisters, Maureen McDermott and Kerry McDermott, in the McDermott Trio. McDermott has also released an all-Schumann CD with violist Paul Neubauer, as well as the complete chamber music of Debussy with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

McDermott studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Dalmo Carra, Constance Keene, and John Browning. She was a winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions and was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

McDermott regularly performs at festivals across the United States, including Spoleto, Mainly Mozart, Sante Fe, La Jolla Summerfest, Mostly Mozart, Newport, Caramoor, Bravo! Vail, Chamber Music Northwest, Aspen, Music from Angelfire, and the Festival Casals in Puerto Rico, among others.

For more information, please visit www.annemariemcdermott.net.

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Christopher O’Riley

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P

ianist, musical arranger, and advocate for the next generation of classical musicians, Christopher O’Riley oversees programming for Tippet Rise’s concerts and other music projects. In addition to organizing the inaugural season, he spearheads masterclasses with visiting artists and an artist-in residency program, two important components of Tippet Rise’s education program.

Acclaimed for his engaging and deeply committed performances, O’Riley is known to millions as the host of NPR’s From the Top. His performing repertoire spans a kaleidoscopic array of music from the pre-Baroque to present day.

He performs around the world and has garnered widespread praise for his untiring efforts to reach new audiences.

Now in his fifteenth year on air, Christopher introduces the next generation of classical music stars to almost a million listeners each week on From the Top, broadcast by 250 stations across the United States. From the Top at Carnegie Hall won two Emmys for its second season on PBS. Living by the Duke Ellington adage, “There are only two kinds of music, good music and bad,” O’Riley is a proponent of the former in all of its guises. He has received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, prizes at the Montreal, Leeds, Busoni, and Van Cliburn piano competitions, and an equally coveted four-star review from Rolling Stone magazine for his first of many discs devoted to his arrangement work, True Love Waits: Christopher O’Riley Plays Radiohead, available on Sony Classical. O’Riley strives to introduce new audiences to classical music with an almost missionary zeal by performing piano arrangements of music by Radiohead, Elliott Smith, Pink Floyd, and Nirvana, alongside traditional classical repertoire.

Together with the cellist Matt Haimovitz, O’Riley also tours with “Shuffle.Play.Listen,” a program that combines classical and contemporary repertoire. Their most recent Pentatone/Tippet Rise recording was Beethoven, Period, the complete sonatas and variations of Ludwig van Beethoven, performed on period instruments.

Their next album will be recorded at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and will include the cello and piano sonatas of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff.

A prolific recording artist, O’Riley has recorded the music of Beethoven, Stravinsky, Scriabin, Liszt, Ravel, Gershwin, Debussy, and John Adams for Sony Classical, Oxingale Records, RCA Red Seal, Decca, and Harmonia Mundi. His most recent solo recording featured two discs of Liszt’s transcriptions, including songs by Schumann and Schubert, the opera paraphrase on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the Don Juan Fantasy and Liszt’s own transcription of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, liberally re-imagined.

Also a voracious reader, O’Riley has developed a number of projects combining music and literature. He has composed scores for novels of Mark Z. Danielewski and Kris Saknussemm, and his first foray into film composition is this year’s release of Saknussemm’s adaptation of his play The Humble Assessment.

O’Riley makes his home in Los Angeles whenever he can tear himself away from Montana.

Visit him online at christopheroriley.com, or From the Top.

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Svetlana Smolina

Svetlana Smolina will perform at the Domo in both the

iconic Scriabin and Messiaen concerts on July 9 and 16, during which time she will be in residence at Tippet Rise.

Both composers are closest to the revelatory sensibilities which music can invoke, and no one is more suited to such epiphanies.

Born in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, Smolina started to develop her craft at a very young age. “Music is the most amazing gift a human being can have, and I pour all my feelings into each piece I perform.”

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Piano By the time she graduated from her city’s Balakirev Music College, where she studied under the direction of Natalia Fish, she had already won several prestigious piano competitions, performed with the Nizhny Novgorod Symphony, given numerous recitals, and starred in several international music festivals. Smolina’s talent and early accomplishments earned her an invitation to study with the master pianist Alexander Toradze, at his world-famous Indiana University piano studio.

Smolina studied with Eugene and Olga Mogilevsky at the Brussels Royal Conservatory in Belgium. Later, she partnered with their son, Maxim, to win the Murray Dranoff International Two Piano Competition in Miami, a triumph which has been echoed many times in the distinguished prizes and awards she has received throughout her career.

Smolina has made solo appearances with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, Mariinsky Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, l’ Orchestre National de France, Odessa and Nizhny Novgorod Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Toledo Symphony, Florida Philharmonic, Shreveport Symphony, Chamber Orchestra of New York, and many others. She has performed at the Royal Covent Garden Opera in London, Mariinsky Theater Concert Hall in St. Petersburg, Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory Hall, Mozarteum and Großer Saal in Salzburg, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Miller Theater at Columbia University in New York City, and Vienna’s Sacher Hall, to name just a few.

She is also a frequent participant at international music festivals, including the Salzburg Festival, Hollywood Bowl Festival in Los Angeles, Ravinia Rising Stars Festival in Chicago, White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg, Maggio Musicale in Florence, Settimane Musicali di Stresa, Festivale di Bologna, Michelangeli Festival in Brescia, Hennessy Artists Series at Hanoi Opera House in Vietnam, iPalpiti Festival of International Laureates, and numerous others.

In choosing her music, Smolina likes to select lesser-known pieces to surprise and excite the audience. All in all, both the selection process and the performance bring together “a lot of constructive thinking, emotional input, and spirituality,” she says.

Smolina received her bachelor of music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she studied under Monique Duphil; her master of music degree from the College of Musical Arts at Bowling Green State University; and her doctorate from the University of Michigan, where she credits her teacher, Arthur Greene, for helping perfect her skills. She was appointed as the Samuel Barber Artist in Residence at West Chester University of Pennsylvania’s School of Music in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and she is also a member of the piano faculty at Philadelphia International Summer Festival. Her projects have included recording a solo album at Cove City Sound Studios; recording Martin Matalon works for Naxos; the soundtrack for the film You’re Not You, starring Hilary Swank; and a tour of China with the Russian European Orchestra.

In 2014–15, Smolina gave a series of concerts with Vadim Repin for his Trans-Siberian Art Festival at the residences of the Russian Ambassador in both Washington, D.C., and London.

Their recent recital in Koerner Hall in Toronto received great critical acclaim. In 2014 she won the Live on Stage showcases and was chosen as its only Classical Pianist Artist for the 2015–16 season. This upcoming tour will bring her to more than 20 states. She recently was featured and gave an interview for Keyboard Magazine. Other collaborations include a series of concerts with Robert Davi and Dave Konig at Eisenhower Park, Harry Chapin Lakeside Theater presented by Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano.

Smolina was a featured soloist on a tour with Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra in China in December 2015, with the South Florida Symphony and with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional Juvenil in Lima, Peru.

For more information, please visit www.ssmolina.com.

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Yevgeny Sudbin

Piano

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The Musicians at Tippet Rise

Yevgeny Sudbin has been hailed by The Telegraph as

“potentially one of the greatest pianists of the 21st century.” As BIS Records’ only exclusive artist, all of Sudbin’s recordings have met with critical acclaim and are regularly featured as CD of the Month by BBC Music Magazine or Editor’s Choice by Gramophone. His Scriabin recording was named CD of the Year by The Telegraph and received the MIDEM Classical Award for Best Solo Instrument Recording at Cannes. It was described

by Gramophone as “a disc in a million,” while the International Record Review stated that his Rachmaninoff recording “confirms him as one of the most important pianistic talents of our time.”

Sudbin performs regularly in many of the world’s finest venues and concert series, both in recital and with orchestras, including Tonhalle Zurich; Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall (International Piano Series) and Wigmore Hall (London Pianoforte Series) in London; Concertgebouw (Meesterpianisten, Amsterdam); Avery Fisher Hall (New York); and Davies Symphony Hall (San Francisco). Recent engagements and tours have included orchestras such as New Zealand Symphony, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, Lucerne Symphony, Czech Philharmonic, Bergen Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, London Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. His performance of Rachmaninoff ’s Concerto No. 1 at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall was described by The Telegraph as “sublime.”

Sudbin has collaborated with some of the world’s most influential conductors, including Neeme Järvi, Charles Dutoit, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Osmo Vänskä, Hannu Lintu,

Tugan Sokhiev, Mark Wigglesworth, Andrew Litton, Dmitri Slobodeniouk, and Vassily Sinaisky. His love of chamber music has led him to collaborate with many other musicians, including Alexander Chaushian, Ilya Gringolts, Hilary Hahn, Julia Fischer, the Chilingirian Quartet, and many others. Appearances at festivals include Aspen, Mostly Mozart, Tivoli, Nohant, La Roque d’Antheron, Menton, and Verbier.

Recent and future engagements include concerts and recording projects with the Tapiola Sinfonietta and Osmo Vänskä, Netherlands Philharmonic and Ivor Bolton, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Michael Seal, Rotterdam Philharmonic and Stanislav Kochanovsky, and extensive touring in North America. He also returns to many recital stages, including the Wigmore Hall, Moscow International House of Music, and Serate Musicali (Milan).

Sudbin was born in St Petersburg in 1980 and began his musical studies at the Specialist Music School of the St Petersburg Conservatory with Lyubov Pevsner at age 5. In 1990 he emigrated with his family to Germany, where he continued his studies at Hanns Eisler Musikhochschule (Galina Ivanzova). In 1997 he moved to London to study at the Purcell School and subsequently the Royal Academy of Music, where he completed his bachelor and master degrees under Christopher Elton. He was supported by the Hattori and Pulvermacher Foundations as well as The Wall Trust, of which he is now vice president. In 2010 he was awarded a fellowship by the Academy and is now a visiting professor.

Sudbin lives in London with his wife and two young children and, in his spare time, is an avid photographer.

For more information, visit www.yevgenysudbin.com.

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John Bruce Yeh

John Bruce Yeh joined the Chicago Symphony

Orchestra in 1977, the first Asian musician ever appointed to the CSO. He is now the longest-serving clarinetist in CSO history. Having joined the CSO at the invitation of Sir Georg Solti as clarinetist and solo bass clarinetist, Yeh is currently assistant principal and solo E-flat clarinet of the CSO. He served the CSO as acting principal clarinet from 2008–11, and he has also performed as guest principal of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Seoul Philharmonic in Korea.

A prize winner at both the 1982 Munich International Music Competition and the 1985 Naumburg Clarinet Competition in New York, Yeh continues to solo with orchestras around the globe. An enthusiastic champion of new music, he is the dedicatee of new works for clarinet by numerous composers, ranging from Ralph Shapey to John Williams. His more than a dozen solo and chamber music recordings have earned worldwide critical acclaim. Recently released by Naxos is a disc titled Synergy, showcasing single and double concertos with clarinet, featuring Yeh, his wife, Teresa, and his daughter Molly.

Piano

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Yeh is director of Chicago Pro Musica, which received the Grammy Award in 1986 for Best New Classical Artist. With clarinetist Teresa Reilly, erhu virtuoso Wang Guowei, and pipa virtuoso Yang Wei, Yeh recently formed Birds and Phoenix, an innovative quartet dedicated to musical exploration by bridging Eastern and Western musical cultures. He is on the artist faculties of Roosevelt University’s Chicago College for the Performing Arts and Midwest Young Artists in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He is the proud father of Jenna Yeh, 30, a culinary artist and wine specialist in Chicago; Molly Yeh, 26, a percussionist and award-winning blogger in Minnesota; and 10-year old Mia Reilly-Yeh.

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Education Programs at Tippet Rise

by Peter Halstead

A New University of Montana Foundation Course

College of Art Director Brad Allen and Instructor Mary Ann Bonjorni have developed a syllabus for a new course, Neo Geo: Site Specific Art. An important element of the course will be background for site-specific art research, provided through three presentations from established authors and artists in the field. The three lecturers will join the students at Tippet Rise during the last site visit. The lectures will take place on the landscape at Tippet Rise and also inside a lecture space. After the presentations for students and visitors on Day One, a panel discussion will be streamed live and documented.

Lecturers will include Lucy Lippard, Dan Flores, and Patrick Zentz. A UM graduate student in photography or film will be engaged to travel with the students recording class sessions, and will produce a documentary on the pilot course.

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University of Montana will continue to play a role in the Tippet Rise Art Center’s establishment as a valuable resource for art, architecture, and environmental students in Montana. This land art course represents a new form of academic art inquiry, and shares values of exploration and discovery with Tippet Rise.

Lucy Lippard (born 1937) is an internationally known writer, art critic, activist, and curator from the United States. Lippard was among the first writers to recognize the “dematerialization” at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She is the author of 21 books on contemporary art and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations.

Dan Flores is an American writer and historian who specializes in cultural and environmental studies of the American West. He held the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, until he retired in May 2014. Flores is the author of 10 books, with two new books forthcoming in 2016. As a historian of place, Flores is “one of the best this country has produced,” according to acclaimed author Annie Proulx. “His work ranks

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with that of Thoreau, William Bartram, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Peter Matthiessen.” Elliott West has called Flores “one of the most respected environmental historians of his generation.” William Kittredge concurs, stating that Flores belongs in “the ranks of first-string Western American writers.” “Engaging and provocative,” “personal, passionate, and scholarly,” Flores’ writing draws broad praise, including from writer William deBuys, who calls Horizontal Yellow “one of the best books about place you’ll ever read.”

Patrick Zentz is an avant-garde farmer, rancher, coder, and site artist from Laurel, Montana.

He creates sculptural instruments that translate events occurring on the earth. For example, he has created masterfully crafted objects that possess the action of a timpani, stringed instrument, and flute connected to wind receptors installed on the gallery roof that responded to the velocity, fluctuations, and direction of wind activity. The “translation” of the natural events of wind source and velocity were intended to make the viewer more aware of the surrounding environment. While studying biology at Westmont College in California, Zentz realized he was not as interested in studying life forms as he was studying the interactions between life forms. Zentz interprets the relationship between today’s mechanized farming operation and the land as one where “farmers act on nature with their machines.” He inverts this relationship in his art to explore the ways nature impacts machinery. The creations, which Zentz calls “systems,” look like pieces of equipment used for scientific purposes, but are actually controlled by the natural phenomena surrounding them.

A new Montana State University Honors College “Great Expedition” course will bring 20 honors students to the Tippet Rise Art Center. The visit will give students the opportunity to immerse themselves not only in art, music, and nature, but also architecture, environmental sciences, engineering, and land management, all in a way that links the human experience with the sights, sounds, and sensations of rural Montana. The students will be accompanied by Dean Ilse-Mari Lee, professor of music and dean of the Honors College, and a professional cellist. In preparation

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for the weekend, the students will study the artists, musicians, musical scores, composers, natural history, and artwork they will experience at Tippet Rise. The Honors College aims to enrich the state of Montana, offer exceptional opportunities to Montana students, and offset the “brain drain” common in rural states such as Montana. Honors students routinely receive some of the most prestigious awards, including the Truman Scholarship (Brown, Vanderbilt, Yale, and MSU all had two winners this year) and Goldwater Scholarships (MSU ranks eighth in the nation, just ahead of Yale, for the total number of Goldwater Scholars).

Tippet Rise is helping fund Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild International Sculpture Park, which celebrates the rich environmental, industrial, and cultural heritage of the Blackfoot Valley. Sculptors have been invited to create significant site-specific works of art using the materials—natural and industrial—that are associated with the community’s economic and cultural traditions.

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Over the summer, a historic teepee burner was reassembled at Sculpture in the Wild, and a series of photovoltaic panels were installed on the dome of the burner structure. The cells power LED lights, which are illuminated in red at night, and recall the look of the historic burner that incinerated scrap lumber and sawdust as part of the region’s logging industry. The space has been used for community events and concerts throughout the fall.

The 2016 artist in residence at Sculpture in the Wild will be British land artist Chris Drury. Chris has been creating outdoor sculpture using natural materials for the past 40 years, and has a reputation similar to those of Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long, and David Nash. His work is included

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in the 2007 Princeton Architectural Press book Natural Architecture, and he is known for his meaningful engagement with small communities throughout the world. He will be in Lincoln in September to create a permanent artwork and to work with local school groups who visit the park. More than 400 children now visit the park to engage in arts education activities each fall.

Cierra Coppock, when she was 14, sold her iPad to finance her school project: paying her art teacher to teach Van Gogh, whom she loves, to women in the Billings prison. Several years later, the Tippet Rise Fund continues Cierra’s initiative, and the only criticism the program has gotten is that it isn’t long enough.

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Tippet Rise and the Community

By Lindsey Hinmon

Carbon County Arts Guild

The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation is pleased to support the Carbon County Arts Guild. With this collaboration we support the common purpose of keeping art as a vital part of the education of today’s youth.

The Tippet Rise Fund brings art into the classrooms of seven local schools through a traveling art teacher program.

Three art teachers make regular visits to Nye, Fishtail, Luther, Fromberg, Joliet, Roberts, and Belfry schools, schools in which art classes may not have otherwise been an option. Through this partnership, students also come to Tippet Rise Art Center to meet artists during the installation of their sculptures, and to experience, hands on, art in nature. The Fishtail and Nye Schools worked with sculptor

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Stephen Talasnik during the installation of Pioneer. Motivated by the visit, they returned to their classrooms and built their own sculptures using their interpretations of Pioneer and the skills they learned from Talasnik. Tippet Rise is thrilled to report that programs such as these will continue to grow alongside the art center.

Red Lodge Area Community Foundation

In partnership with the Red Lodge Area Community Foundation and the Carbon County Arts Guild, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation brought more than 20 local grade school students to the Tippet Rise Art Center in July 2015 to participate in a unique workshop with artist Patrick Dougherty during the installation of Daydreams. Students worked alongside Patrick, one of today’s most admired sculptors, learning and building their own sculptures using local willows. Students boarded the bus at the end of the day with arms full of willows for their own future creations.

Red Lodge Music Festival

The Red Lodge Music Festival has been celebrating summer music camp for more than 50 years, focusing on inspiring a love of classical and jazz music in youth. The Festival’s nine-day camp hosts professional faculty to teach student musicians and prepare them to perform in recitals. The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation supports scholarships for the festival’s Honor Ensemble and other students.

Nye Community Foundation

Nye Volunteer Fire Department

The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation has been proud to support the Nye Volunteer Fire Department’s fire preventative and protection services. With the Fund’s support, the Department is now better equipped with a custom “wild lands fire truck” and a Smokey the Bear fire danger sign for the town. The Tippet Rise Art Center appreciates the hard work and time that volunteer firefighters dedicate to ensuring the safety and security of the community and land near the Center.

The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation provides scholarship funding for the Nye Community Foundation’s efforts to encourage the higher education dreams of local students. We are pleased to have the Community Foundation board as such a strong, knowledgeable partner that we can entrust the board to make the best scholarship distribution decisions.

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Absarokee Community Foundation

The Absarokee Community Foundation takes pride in organizing and building a stronger community within Absarokee and its surroundings communities for today and for the future. In support of the ACF’s efforts, the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation helps to fund local community initiatives for educational, environmental, and social services. Local nonprofit organizations supported by ACF with the help of funders like Tippet Rise Fund include the Absarokee PTA, Husky Wilderness Adventures, and Operation Second Chance.

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Skip’s Kids

Absarokee resident Skip created Skip’s Kids to dedicate his time and energy to providing local youth with opportunities for positive pursuits and academic support. Supported by the Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, Skip’s Kids provides a safe place for students and young adults to congregate and learn; runs after-school programming including archery, arts, cheerleading, and wrestling; offers summer camps that teach hunting safety and camping skills; and delivers academic tutoring. Many adults volunteer with the program, providing positive adult mentors and role models as well as sharing their skills and talents with the students. Tippet Rise Art Center hopes to share with Skip’s Kids the vision of art, music, and nature at the art center.

Absarokee Volunteer Fire Department

The Tippet Rise Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation has been proud to support the Absarokee Volunteer Fire Department’s mission to protect and preserve the lives and property of Absarokee area residents. Because the Fund cares about the safety and efficacy of the dedicated Absarokee Volunteer Fire Department volunteers, the Fund has provided support for updating uniforms as well as purchasing new helmets and a thermal imaging camera.

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Tippet Rise Partnerships

By Peter Halstead

We are very fortunate to be able to partner with the

Hirshhorn Museum, the contemporary art branch of the august Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian is our nation’s museum, and also the world’s largest museum, founded in 1846, with 19 museums and nine research facilities. We are helping fund their digital lab, which provides training for young people in technologies such as disc jockeying and virtual reality, offering certifications which students can then use for college admissions and later in the job market. Melissa Chiu, the new director of the Hirshhorn, believes in extending the nation’s museum to everyone in the country, not just urban areas. Fishtail is one of the first beneficiaries of that expanded outreach. We thank her, her staff, the Hirshhorn board, and David Skorton, the thirteenth secretary of the Smithsonian, for the loan of two Calder sculptures, the stabile Two Discs, and the mobile Stainless Stealer. Two Discs was gifted to the Hirshhorn by its founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, in 1966. This is its first appearance outside Washington. Joseph Hirshhorn presented Stainless Stealer to the Hirshhorn in 1972.

Christopher O’Riley, our own music director, this summer at Tippet Rise. Hailed as one of the Top 10 “Can’t Miss” classical musical festivals in the United States

by NPR, Bravo! Vail is the only festival in North America to host four world-renowned orchestras in a single season: the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, playing in the gorgeous outdoor Ford Amphitheater.

We are proud as well of our continuing collaboration with the Aspen Music Festival and School. We are funding the performance of John Luther Adams’s monumental outdoor adventure in audience participation, Inuksuit, at Vail, Aspen, and Tippet Rise this summer, among other endeavors.

The Billings Symphony has contributed both the Red Lodge Chamber Players and the Magic City String Quartet to Tippet Rise over the past few years. We have helped fund their Musicians in Our Schools program.

We are also honored to be the friends of the Mariinsky Foundation of America, whose purpose is to strengthen and expand the cultural and educational relationships between Russia and the United States and to be a positive, apolitical force for peace. The International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow falls under its aegis, and we are fortunate to have the appearance this summer of two of its most recent laureates, George Li and Lucas Debargue.

The Royal Shakespeare Company will be screening three live performances of Shakespeare plays in the Olivier Music Barn this summer and fall: Hamlet, Cymbeline, and King Lear, as part of our continued support of Shakespeare Live! Tippet Rise’s partner, The Sidney E. Frank Foundation, has helped fund the filming of many Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre plays over the years.

We celebrate this summer as well our friendship with the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, whose artistic director, Anne-Marie McDermott, is performing with

A new course at the University of Montana, Neo Geo: Site Specific Art will be taught in residence at the University of Montana in Missoula and on location at 2016 Inaugural Season

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Tippet Rise Art Center. Its objectives are to foster individual artistic connections to the landscape while studying the connections others have created; research the nature and history of site-specificity in art; and ask vital questions about Tippet Rise, such as, “What is Tippet Rise’s relationship to the art world and art history?” and “What does it have the potential to be?”

Medici TV, the largest online collection of classical music, operas, and ballets in the world, will broadcast a concert from Tippet Rise in 2018 as it does for the most prestigious venues in the world, such as the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Juilliard, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the Salzburg Festival, and the Verbier Festival.

Finally, we have been inspired by our friendship with the Storm King Art Center. They have generously agreed to part with Mark di Suvero’s iconic Beethoven’s Quartet, which was displayed by them since 2003. Di Suvero’s sculptures have been displayed at Storm King since 1968. Widely celebrated as one of the world’s leading sculpture parks, Storm King has welcomed visitors from across the globe for 50 years. Its pristine 500-acre landscape of fields, hills, and woodlands provides the setting for a collection of more than 100 carefully sited sculptures created by some of the most acclaimed artists of our time. Storm King has recently published the first definitive monograph of the works of Mark di Suvero, with 150 photographs.

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A Thank You to Our Team We are lucky at Tippet Rise to have an organization of uniquely talented and enthusiastic people who function like a family.

Alban Bassuet: architect, engineer, acoustician, aesthetician, community relations, collaborations, contractor, tastemaker. He has suggested to us the Haydn room, the halo, the geothermal system, the Arup ventilation system, the Tiara, the Aperture, and photographers, and he often worked until 4:00 in the morning. We’ve traveled in Europe with him to acoustic venues he’s built and dissected room dimensions in his groundbreaking SoundLab at Arup Engineers in New York. Alban has designed some 200 acoustic environments in his 17-year career, including the Niarchos Cultural Center in Athens; Steinway Hall in New York; Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland; Wellesley College; and acoustics at Avery Fisher Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, and Alice Tully Hall, among many others.

Pete and Lindsey Hinmon can adapt to any new situation and master it, from working with the Smithsonian in Washington to construction companies in Wyoming, always with the highest integrity and greatest spirit.

Lindsey has adopted our educational focus and invented her own dynamic approach to the work we do in our neighboring communities, while maintaining dozens of essential friendships with our partners around the country.

The Hinmons’ sense of kindness, teamwork, and consideration extends to everyone around us, and benefits all of us. They are both ski patrollers from Vail and champion bicyclists. We’ve known Pete since he was nine years old and are so fortunate to have him and his incredible wife, Lindsey, with us now at Tippet Rise.

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Mickey Houlihan, Djuna Zupancic, and Taylor Fraser have been filming, interviewing, and charming our visitors for years now, and they have developed a major audio-video archive over years of work while representing Tippet Rise in a variety of places with grace, humor, and warmth.

Mickey has masterminded and overseen the installation of our state-of-the-art sound and video systems in the Olivier Music Barn, while invigorating all of us with his enormous wisdom and whimsy. Mickey has won both an Oscar and a Grammy.

Ben Wynthein is the sage of the open range, our barometer of decency and common sense, the epitome of accumulated ranching tradition, livestock and wildland expertise, agricultural and mechanical acuity, who runs the ranch with a sense of community and fairness that conveys our commitment to our neighbors and to the land. Ben, his wife Cristi, and his delightful children live on the ranch.

Christopher O’Riley is the even-handed and modest polymath of music and literature, who wears his extraordinary genius, his immense memory and education with great charm and a good deal of sanity. He is always willing to fly anywhere to represent the center, to perform outside in freezing temperatures during storms (and make jokes about it), to learn an impossibly difficult new piece in the midst of flying around the country to concertize. His collaborations during a lifetime in music and his abilities to inspire new friends form the core of so much of Tippet Rise. He has 15 albums available and is famous for his virtuosic transcriptions of Radiohead, Nick Drake, Nirvana, and Joni Mitchell.

Andre Bassuet has been working around the clock to design this summer program book as well as our newsletters, while Melissa Moore has been of great value in organizing our enormous catalogue of audio and video files, contracts, articles, and outside communications. Against deadlines, both have worked with great grace and care.

Our great architect, Laura Vyklund, and her husband, Chris Gunn, our master framer and builder, have been obligingly flexible for the many years of changing designs and materials and have always stepped up with the exact solutions. They have made it possible for the Olivier Music Barn to blend into its landscape and ranching environment while being a state-of-the-art concert facility in disguise. They own Gunnstock Timber Frames in Cody, Wyoming.

Karen and Neil McCaslin have stood by us from the beginning to make sure everyone was treated well, that all the details of hospitality were in place, that the dozens of people who needed to be organized to make our concerts and dinners seem effortless were all happy and taken care of.

Nick Goldman and Wendi Reed of Wild Flower Kitchen are providing our BBQ on weekends and lunches for our artists.

They’ve been feeding us for years now, and their spirit of fun is contagious. Just to see them is to know it’s a party. Nick is a Cordon Bleu chef from Paris and London, and Wendi is a former bar owner. They are enthusiastic residents of Fiddlers Creek and serve dinner in the Muddy Lamb in Fishtail.

Cindy Waters, our friend from Honolulu and Beehive, has spent a year now designing the interiors of our artist residences, the Tia guest house, and the many spaces of the Olivier Music Barn. The comfort you feel is her doing.

Craig White was one of the founding members of Vail Magazine. We are lucky to have him working with us on the second hardcover edition of our first summer program.

He has cheerfully eliminated the errors which crept into the layout of the first edition, so that its strengths can face the future in their original form.

René Spencer Saller has lent her expertise to Tippet Rise since 2018, and we are very honored by her contributions.

The quote on her website says a lot: “The music causes me to dream of fabulous empires, filled with fabulous sins.” https://renespencersaller.com And, indeed, all of this is for you, whether you are an artist, a friend, an audience member, or all three, from far or near. Tippet Rise exists as an experience to be shared by all of us. Thank you for being here, and for reading this to the bitter end.

Peter and Cathy Halstead Founders

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Staff and Credits Founders Cathy and Peter Halstead

Interviews Coordinator Djuna Zupancic

Director Alban Bassuet

Front Desk and Outreach Assistant Tristan Sophia

Music Director Christopher O’Riley

Piano Technicians Mike Toia, Tali Mahanor, Drew Carter

Director of Operations Pete Hinmon

Food Services Nick Goldman and Wendi Reed from Wild Flower Kitchen & Catering, Fishtail

Director of Outreach and Logistics Lindsey Hinmon Communication and Administration Manager Melissa Moore Ranch Manager Ben Wynthein Director of Audio and Video Mickey Houlihan from Digital Poets Queen of the Light Taylor Leigh Fraser

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Publication Graphic Design Andre Bassuet

A Thank Y to Our Tea

Videography Djuna Zupancic, Taylor Leigh Fraser, Kathy Kasic, André Costantini, Ramsey Fendall

Photography André Costantini, Erik Petersen, Alban Bassuet, Peter Halstead

Website Design Crush & Lovely

LEED Consulting High Plains Architects

Lead Architecture, Design, and Planning Alban Bassuet

Design and Engineering Ove Arup & Partners

Architecture (Olivier Barn, Residences, Tiara) Laura Viklund and Chris Gunn, Gunnstock Timber Frames

Audiovisual Consultant K2 Audio, LLC

Architecture (Energy Building, DayDreams School House, Solar Canopy) CTA Architects Engineers

You Acoustician am Alban Bassuet

Landscape Architect Lisa Deplace and Liz Stetson from Oehme Van Sweden Interior Design Cynthia Waters

Local Civil Engineering DOWL Local Engineering MKK Engineering Civil Contractor BAIRCO Construction Management Jeff Engel Construction, Inc., and On Site Management, Inc.

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This publication was prepared for the inaugural season of Tippet Rise, Summer 2016 Text by Peter Halstead unless otherwise noted.

Edited by Melissa Moore, Amy Holmes, Eric Sellen.

Designed by Andre Bassuet.

Second edition design and production by Craig M. White.

Editing and proofreading by René Spencer Saller.

Photography: André Costantini, Peter Halstead, Steph Mackinnon, Erik Petersen, Yevgeny Sudbin, Craig M. White, Djuna Zupancic.

Watercolor Illustration: Jungsub Lee. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner in any media, or transmitted by any means whatsoever, electronic or mechanical (including photo copy, film or video recording, internet posting, or any other information storage and retrieval system), without the prior, written consent of the publisher. © 2019 Tippet Rise, LLC Visit tippetrise.org for more information about the artists, tours, events, videos of performances, and interviews.

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