August 1

Aspen Chamber Symphony
Ryan Bancroft, conductor
Lise de la Salle, piano

Gabriella Smith

Tumblebird Contrails

Gabriella Smith was born on December 26, 1991, in Berkeley, California. Her Tumblebird Contrails was written in 2014, commissioned by the Pacific Harmony Foundation (John Adams and Deborah O’Grady) for the 2014 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, where it was premiered on August 9, 2014, by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Tumblebird Contrails is scored for three each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, as well as four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, and strings.

Point Reyes National Seashore juts out into the Pacific Ocean about thirty miles northwest of San Francisco, a picturesque mix of mountains, rocky bluffs, and endless beaches. Its name in Spanish means “Cape of the Kings,” for good reason. Growing up, composer Gabriella Smith understandably spent as much time there as she could.

In the early 2010s Smith took a three-day solo hike through Point Reyes. One moment in particular stuck with her. She described it at the 2023 Nobel Prize concert: “I . . . was feeling completely exhausted in the best possible way, and not quite ready to go back to my life in civilization. I remember setting down my pack and taking off my boots and sitting in the sand at the edge of the ocean on this huge expanse of beach, not another human in sight, listening to sound of the ocean, the pounding surf, the gulls, that sizzle of seafoam, feeling the sand between my toes, the smell of salt air.” In her program notes, she describes “watching a pair of ravens playing in the wind, rolling, swooping, diving, soaring—imagining the ecstasy of wind in the wings—jet trails painting never-ending streaks across the sky.”

To capture that ecstatic, hallucinatory moment, Smith wrote Tumblebird Contrails, a piece that is almost entirely devoid of melody, pitch, or even a sense of teleological motion. Its twelve minutes are, instead, a mass of shifting textures that pass by, following nature’s unfathomable logic. Using an expanded palette of extended techniques, Smith captures the uncanny presence of the natural world in almost granular detail, with surges of sound rising and falling as each player in the orchestra makes their own decisions, like individual ripples of water coalescing into a wave. The title, she says, is a bit of “Kerouac-inspired” nonsense meant “to evoke the sound and feeling of the piece.”

Over time the piece has become more than just a document of that moment on the beach for Smith. “As climate disasters have become an increasing part of our daily lives,” she said in that 2023 introduction, “the music also came to be about the grief, loss, fear, and rage I have experienced as a result of the climate crisis. And also the joy in . . . being part of climate solutions because, in a time when it sometimes feels so easy to slip into despair at the magnitude of everything we’re facing, I want people to understand that there are people all around them that refuse to give up and who are devoting their lives, our lives, to climate solutions in incredibly joyful ways.” — © Dan Ruccia

Maurice Ravel

Piano Concerto in G major

Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées, on March 7, 1 875, and died in Paris on December 28, 1937. He composed the Concerto in G between 1929 and 1931. The composer conducted the first performance, with pianist Marguerite Long, at a Ravel Festival concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on January 14, 1932, with the Lamoureux Orchestra. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinets in E-flat and B-flat, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

FAt about the same time that Paul Wittgenstein, a concert pianist who had lost an arm during World War I, asked Ravel to write a concerto for him, Ravel’s long-time collaborator Marguerite Long asked for a concerto for herself. Thus, although he had written no piano music for a dozen years, he found himself in 1930 writing two concertos at more or less the same time. His Concerto for the Left Hand turned out to be one of his most serious compositions, but the Concerto in G major, dedicated to and first performed by Long, falls into the delightful category of high-quality diversion. Ravel’s favorite term of praise was divertissement de luxe (high-class entertainment), and he succeeded in producing just such a piece with this Concerto.

Ravel had a long-standing friendship with Serge Koussevitzky. It seems likely that Koussevitzky prompted Ravel to consider composing a piano concerto for an American orchestra, although in the end the piece would not come about through this relationship. Whatever happened—quite probably Ravel’s difficulty in writing music in his later years caused him to withdraw out of fear that he would not be able to finish in time—the idea of writing music for an American orchestra helps explain why he employed jazzy Americanisms in this delightful score.

The motoric hijinks of the first movement are set off by the cracking of a whip. Dominated by solo wind turns that flare in a moment and vanish just as quickly, the tutti orchestral section then yields to a legato lyrical section led by the piano solo. The sprightly and intensely cheerful episodes occasionally yield to lyric contemplation, but soon the featured piano gets in on the fun as well. Fluttering trumpet and soothing horn occasionally interrupt the melodic development, but for the most part the movement chugs along with wonderful verve in perpetual motion.

The second movement is a total contrast, hushed and calm, with a tune widely regarded as one of the best melodies Ravel ever wrote. The effort of composing was taxing on him—he found it necessary to write this movement one or two measures at a time—and it may have been here that he first realized his powers were failing. They broke down completely in 1932, when the shock of an automobile collision brought on a nervous breakdown and he found himself thereafter incapable of sustained work. The soaring flute melody of this movement is poignant, and the masterful turns of orchestration—at times Ravel supports the solo piano with a wind accompaniment rather than the more obvious choice of strings—drive home to the listener his truly unmatched genius for instrumentation.

The final Presto brings back the rushing motor rhythms of the opening, as well as the almost literally slapstick percussion. Both the first and third movements occasionally bear witness that Ravel had traveled in America and become acquainted with Jazz and recent popular music. He also met George Gershwin and told him that he thought highly of Rhapsody in Blue; perhaps it is a reminiscence of that score that can be heard in the intermittent “blue” passages in evidence.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Carl Nielsen

Symphony No. 4, op. 29, “The Inextinguishable”

Carl August Nielsen was born in Norre-Lyndelse, Fyn, Denmark, on June 9, 1865, and died in Copenhagen on October 3, 1931. He began to sketch the Fourth Symphony in 1914 and completed the work on January 14, 1916. He conducted the first performance with the orchestra of the Copenhagen Music Society in Odd Fellows Hall, Copenhagen, on February 1, 1916. The score calls for three flutes (one doubling piccolo), three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

Carl Nielsen grew up in a rural environment and from early childhood developed a love of the natural world and a remarkably insightful disposition. Though he was artistic in both visual and literary ways, his musical gift was even stronger. It was discovered early because his father played violin and cornet as a sought-after village musician. His mother sang him simple songs, and by the age of six he had learned to imitate them on a small violin. By nine he had become part of an amateur orchestra, extending his horizons to orchestral dance movements and a few symphonic excerpts from Haydn and Mozart. Yet he remained a product of the countryside, earning some income by looking after geese during school holidays.

Though he earned his living as an orchestral violinist, Nielsen’s interest quickly turned to composing. His First Symphony (1894) was strongly influenced by Brahms, but his Second, The Four Temperaments, was already wonderfully characteristic. To many of his symphonies he gave a title intended to suggest a general character rather than a detailed program. Like the others, the Third Symphony, Expansive, shows Nielsen’s tendency to shape his symphonies through progressive tonality, written not so much in a key as towards it.

Today’s Fourth Symphony was composed during two of the most harrowing years of the twentieth century, from 1914–16, when the vast European war broke out in August 1914 and quickly became a grinding, repetitive, murderous slog that wore away four full years of human history. Nielsen was by no means blind to the situation along the hundreds of miles of trench warfare, where one side might gain a few yards today only to lose them next month—given the horrors that were unfolding only a few hundred miles from where he lived in Denmark, it is astonishing that Nielsen retained his essentially positive view of life.

Perhaps the strongest sign of Nielsen’s trust in the “life force” is the title he gave his Fourth Symphony. This is not the “Inextinguishable Symphony”—as if the title were an adjective intended to describe the music. The Danish title, Det Uudslukkelige, is in the neuter; it refers to that which is inextinguishable in human life and in the world of nature.

In a short epigraph to the score, Nielsen noted that the title was intended “to indicate in one word what the music alone is capable of expressing to the full: The elemental Will of Life.” He emphasizes that the title is not a program, but it does represent the feeling that he had learned as a child in the woods, that after the longest and coldest winter, a new burgeoning of life would appear in the spring: even after the longest and most senseless of wars, there could yet be a hope for the rebirth of the natural world and for the future of human aspiration.

The work unfolds with four sections that function and sound like the four movements of a traditional symphony, but that are linked directly from one to another. Nielsen had been immensely impressed by Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, which was shaped in much the same way. And he had gotten well started on the new Symphony by mid-July 1914, which he described in a letter to a friend as “a sort of symphony in one movement, which is meant to represent all that we feel and think about life in the most fundamental sense of the word, that is, all that has the will to live and to move.”

Only a few days after the writing of this letter the world exploded with the assassination in Sarajevo that catalyzed the War.

It is hard to know exactly how much the blueprint of the Symphony might have changed because of the war, but there was no change to Nielsen’s plan to end The Inextinguishable with the sounds of success, which wins out at the end of the work even though the war still had nearly three years to run as he penned the closing pages.

The piece begins with music that seems to be in D minor (or perhaps major—it changes often), but that key is undermined by a simultaneous suggestion of C: even without a guidebook, it is clear from the opening measures that a struggle is in the offing. Ultimately the Symphony will end in a glowing E major, and that resolution can be glimpsed briefly at various points in the Symphony until it finally becomes the only possible ending for the music.

The first movement opens in an outburst of great energy with the woodwinds and the strings emphasizing different keys (D and E respectively) but unfolding essentially the same musical ideas, rhythmically vigorous (with long and short notes appearing in surprising places to complicate our sense of the meter) and at a great speed. The argument gradually calms down. A pair of clarinets sings a sweet duet in thirds (later echoed by other woodwinds), but the rest of the orchestra objects to more of this and breaks out in a restatement of the very opening, followed by a new idea in E—the first strong statement of the key that will be the final goal of the Symphony.

First violins over a solo timpani rhythm link the first movement with the Poco allegretto. This tempo, and indeed this whole movement, seem to reflect the kind of substitution for a scherzo that Brahms liked to employ—not too fast, not too slow, often quite charming and slightly old-fashioned. Winds are featured throughout, offering a splendid example of Nielsen’s ear for woodwind color.

As the last hint of the movement dies away in a faltering clarinet flutter, the violins enter with a passionately intense statement to introduce the slow movement (in E, though chromatic and not immediately stable). It becomes less stable when the woodwinds begin to return (solo flute first), agitating and building to a massive orchestral climax. A short statement lickety-split in the strings sounds as if it is going to turn into a fugue—but it suddenly stops in a grand pause and the finale begins.

The last movement begins with a vigorous waltz theme that is not allowed to dance because it is part of the final struggle of life force to exert itself. The key signature suggests A major (which is closely related to E), but the timpanists—two separate players—begin attacking any sense of key by playing the “forbidden” interval of the tritone (F and B, and D-flat and G, once called “the devil in music”), to confound any sense of “home.” Eventually a clear A major rings out as the orchestra—including timpani—descends by a perfect fifth (E down to A), which banishes the “devil.” (Nielsen marks this passage “glorioso.”) But the final destination, E major, is still to come. Further struggle culminates in the arrival of brass instruments pouring forth the melody that the clarinets had introduced in thirds back in the first movement—now climactically in E, a key that the rest of the orchestra confirms to bring the Symphony to its glorious climax, celebrating that which is inextinguishable. — © Steven Ledbetter

Raised in Los Angeles, conductor Ryan Bancroft regularly appears with the world’s leading orchestras. Since September 2021 Bancroft has been principal conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Following his first visit to work with the Tapiola Sinfonietta in Finland, Bancroft was invited to become their artist in association from the 2021–22 season onwards. In 2021 Bancroft was announced as chief conductor designate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; he took up the chief conductor position in September 2023. Bancroft’s second season as chief conductor in Stockholm has included performances of Mahler and Bruckner symphonies, world premieres by Chrichan Larson and Zacharias Wolfe, and appearances by renowned soloists including Leif Ove Andsnes, Maxim Vengerov, and Víkingur Ólafsson. In North America, Bancroft has performed with the orchestras of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Minnesota, Baltimore, Houston, and Dallas, as well as with the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Festival and the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood. In Europe, Bancroft appears frequently with the Philharmonia, and has debuted with the DSO Berlin and the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne. Since his success at the prestigious Malko Competition for Young Conductors in 2018, Bancroft has conducted a number of other leading European orchestras. Bancroft has a passion for contemporary music and has assisted Pierre Boulez in a performance of his sur Incises in Los Angeles, premiered works by Sofia Gubaidulina, John Cage, James Tenney, and Anne LeBaron, and worked closely with improvisers such as Wadada Leo Smith and Charlie Haden.

With a career already spanning over twenty years, award-winning Naïve recordings, and international concert appearances, Lise de la Salle has established herself as one of today’s exciting young artists and as a musician of real sensibility and maturity. The 2024–25 season saw a debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and returns to Philharmonia Orchestra and NHK Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Fabio Luisi. Other recent highlights include major performances at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées with Orchestre de Chambre de Paris and returns to RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, and Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. She also takes pleasure in educational outreach and conducts master classes in many of the cities in which she performs. Among her critically acclaimed Naïve CDs are an all-Chopin disc featuring a live recording of the Second Piano Concerto with Fabio Luisi conducting Staatskapelle Dresden. Her 2011 Liszt album received Diapason magazine’s Diapason d’Or and Gramophone’s editor’s choice. Her latest album When Do We Dance? (2021) presents an odyssey of dances through a whole century. In 2004 Lise de la Salle won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. She started the piano at age four and gave her first concert five years later in a live broadcast on Radio France. She studied at the Paris Conservatoire. She has worked closely with Pascal Nemirovski and was long-term advisee of Geneviève Joy-Dutilleux.