August 3

Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra
Robert Spano, conductor
Gil Shaham, violin

Missy Mazzoli

These Worlds in Us

Missy Mazzoli was born in 1980 in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. She is on the faculty of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and with Ellen Reid Mazzoli co-founded Luna Composition Lab for young female, non-binary, and gender non-conforming composers. These Worlds in Us was written in 2006, and was premiered on December 1 of that year by the Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vanska. The work is scored for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, as well as four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, percussion, synthesizer or melodica, and strings.

These Worlds in Us is dedicated to Missy Mazzoli’s father, a Vietnam War veteran. The work draws from James Tate’s poem The Lost Pilot, which meditates on Tate’s father’s death in World War II:

My head cocked towards the sky,

I cannot get off the ground,

and you, passing over again,

fast, perfect and unwilling

to tell me that you are doing

well, or that it was a mistake

that placed you in that world,

and me in this; or that misfortune

placed these worlds in us.

The text resonated with Mazzoli’s father’s war experiences. The composer writes:

In talking to him it occurred to me that, as we grow older, we accumulate worlds of intense memory within us, and that grief is often not far from joy. I like the idea that music can reflect painful and blissful sentiments in a single note or gesture, and sought to create a sound palette that I hope is at once completely new and strangely familiar to the listener.

These Worlds in Us begins with a sudden swell of strings which gives way to a solemn melody for the string section. Mazzoli gives us an entry point into the music:

The mournful line first played by the violins collapses into glissandos almost immediately after it appears, giving the impression that the piece has been submerged underwater or played on a turntable that is grinding to a halt.

She also highlights the special sounds that bookend the work. Melodicas in the piece’s opening and closing “mimic the wheeze of a broken accordion,” creating a “particular vulnerability.” Throughout the work, percussion and brass punctuate the texture with sudden bursts and extended rhythmic passages. Mazzoli writes:

The rhythmic structures and cyclical nature of the piece are inspired by the unique tension and logic of Balinese music, and the march-like figures in the percussion bring to mind the militaristic inspiration for the work as well as the relentless energy of electronica drumbeats.

The result is a piece that grapples with war and memory, love and pain. It contemplates how children grapple with the experiences of their forebears. — © Kamilla Arku

Max Bruch

Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, op. 26

Max Karl August Bruch was born in Cologne, Germany, on January 6, 1838, and died in Friedenau, Berlin, on October 20, 1920. He composed the Violin Concerto in G minor between 1864 and 1867, revising it several times before October 1867. The definitive version was first performed by Joseph Joachim in Bremen on January 7, 1868, with Karl Reinthaler conducting. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Max Bruch was a German Romantic polymath—not only a composer, but also a violinist, teacher, and conductor. His success in his own time and continued popularity today can be attributed to the complex yet sturdy construction of his works; he was capable of reliably turning out pieces with professional finish that were often immediately accessible and of great beauty. This may explain why, tonight’s piece excepted, we hear so little of his sometimes quaint music today. He was certainly never embroiled in the kind of controversy that followed Brahms or Wagner or most of the other great innovators.

Despite this lack of scandal (or perhaps because of it), Bruch’s works were extraordinarily popular during his lifetime. His vocal works Frithjof, Odysseus, and a setting of Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke were long popular in the heyday of the cantata and oratorio market that was fueled by annual choral festivals across Europe and America. He also wrote three operas, three symphonies, songs, choral pieces, and chamber music. Yet today he is remembered primarily for a few concertos. There can be little doubt that the violin was his preferred solo instrument.

Indeed, today we hear the pinnacle of achievement that came from Bruch’s preference. One of the few works of Bruch that has not fallen into obscurity is his earliest published large-scale piece, the present Violin Concerto. And it is, of course, the violinists who have kept it before the world, since it is melodious throughout and skillfully written. The G-minor Concerto is so popular, in fact, that it is often simply referred to as “the Bruch Concerto,” though he wrote two others for violin, both in D minor.

Bruch had a great deal of difficulty bringing the present work to a successful conclusion; he reworked it over a period of four years with the input of many colleagues. The greatest contribution belonged to Joseph Joachim, who was to serve much the same function for the Violin Concerto of Johannes Brahms. Joachim’s contribution to the score fully justifies its dedication to him: he worked out the bowings as well as many of the virtuoso passages; he made suggestions concerning the formal structure of the work; and he insisted that Bruch call it a “concerto” rather than a “fantasy,” as the composer had originally intended.

Bruch’s original title, Fantasy, helps to explain the first movement, which is something of an oddity. Rather than being the largest and most formally elaborate movement, Bruch designs it as a Prelude and labels it as such. The opening timpani roll and woodwind phrase bring in the soloist for a dialogue that grows progressively more dramatic. The modulations hint vaguely at formal structures and new themes, but the atmosphere remains preparatory.

Following a big orchestral climax and a brief restatement of the opening idea, Bruch modulates to E-flat for the slow movement, which is directly linked to the Prelude. This is a stunningly lyrical passage; the soloist sings the main theme and an important transitional idea before a modulation to the dominant introduces the secondary theme (in the bass, under violin triplets). The movement itself is a sumptuous reverie, filled to the brim with lush orchestration and gentle pathos.

Though the slow movement ends with a full stop, it is directly linked to the Finale by key. The last movement begins with a hushed whisper in E-flat, but an exciting crescendo engineers a modulation to G major for the first statement of the main rondo theme. This is a lively and rhythmic idea that contrasts wonderfully with the soaring, singing second theme, which remains in the ear as the most striking idea of the work, a passage of great nobility in the midst of the Finale’s energy.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Hector Berlioz

Symphonie fantastique

Louis-Hector Berlioz was born at La Côte-St. André, Isère, France, on December 11, 1803, and died in Paris on March 8, 1869. He composed the Symphonie fantastique in the spring of 1830 and conducted the premiere on December 5 that year in Paris. The score calls for two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, four bassoons, four horns, two cornets, two trumpets, three trombones, two ophicleides (played here by tubas), percussion, two harps, and strings.

The composition of symphonies was not a highly-regarded activity in the France of the early nineteenth century. Thus, when Hector Berlioz produced a symphony, of all things, as his first masterpiece, he was founding a new tradition of French symphonic writing at the same time that he was getting his own career underway.

Already something of a rebel, Berlioz promptly found himself on the outside of the musical establishment, where he remained all his life. What separated him from the entrenched powers in France’s musical hierarchy was his passionate conviction that music was important, that it was more than a charming plaything to while away leisure hours. Berlioz was not interested in writing the kind of music that the average French concert goer preferred: “not too dramatic, but lucid, rather colorless, safely predictable . . . modest in its demands on the intelligence and concentration of performer and listener alike.”

Probably no musical event of his life fired his energies more than his first exposure to music that was the very opposite of that description—the symphonies of Beethoven. Berlioz heard the Third and Fifth Symphonies in Paris in March 1828. This experience overwhelmed him by demonstrating that instrumental music by itself could have an expressive force far more profound than the vocal compositions he had heard or composed up to that point.

Immediately after Harriet Smithson’s performance as Ophelia in Hamlet on September 11, 1827, Berlioz conceived a hopeless infatuation for the actress. In an attempt to woo her, he conceived a program symphony, which after several false starts took on the outline of the present work. He wrote to his friend Humbert Ferrand on April 16, 1830, describing his musical revenge on the heartless woman: in the last scene, the Witch’s Sabbath, she was to appear as “a prostitute fit to take part in such an orgy.” In successive versions of the program, the explicit attack on a woman whose heartlessness drove the protagonist to poison himself with opium was gradually softened into a not-very-specific “fit of despair about love.” Even after the piece had premiered later that year (after numerous delays), it was still far from the Symphonie fantastique we know today. A revised version was performed with its sequel, Lélio, or The Return to Life, on December 9, 1832; the Symphony, at least, was a great success: Harriet Smithson attended, and was apparently charmed to discover the lengths that he had gone to express his feelings for her. She married him the following October. (Alas for happy endings—they were miserable together, and they separated in 1844. Immediately after Harriet’s death in 1854, Berlioz married Marie Recio, his mistress of many years.)

He considered the Symphonie “an instrumental drama” for which the program was akin to “the spoken text of an opera, serving to introduce the musical movements, whose character and expression it motivates.” The introduction to the first movement is derived from a romance, a slight expressive song that Berlioz had composed under the influence of a youthful infatuation and then burned before moving to Paris. But the music recalled itself to his mind as he began working on the Symphony, and he gave the melody to the violins at the very beginning of the work, finding it “exactly right for expressing the overpowering sadness of a young heart caught in the toils of a hopeless love.” At the same time, Berlioz makes it an effective introduction, in C minor, for a movement that will ultimately be in the major. Probably the most famous element of the score is the use of a melody, an idée fixe (the designation was the composer’s own), in each movement—it appears as the principal theme of the Allegro in the first movement.

The Ball is quite simply the traditional ternary dance movement—here a waltz—with the idée fixe appearing as the Trio. Two harps lend a wonderful splash of color seconded by the bright woodwinds.

The Scene in the Country is largely in a slow sonata form with the idée fixe appearing with the secondary theme. The movement is framed by a miniature tone poem, a dialogue between an English horn (on stage) and an echoing oboe (off stage). When the movement draws to its close, the English horn attempts to resume the dialogue, but the only response is a tense silence and menacing, soft timpani chords in F minor while the English horn attempts to sing the end of its song in F major.

From the beginning Berlioz linked the last two movements as part of the “opium dream.” They are musically linked as well in their scoring for large orchestra with a full brass ensemble. Berlioz claimed to have composed the March to the Scaffold in a single night. It is not so bold a claim as it appears: he had already composed the March for an opera, Les Francs-juges, which was never performed and which he finally cannibalized for other works. In this case all Berlioz added was the idée fixe, which appears only once—in the unaccompanied clarinet just before the fall of the guillotine.

The Dream of a Witch’s Sabbath that concludes the Symphony is fine Classical form, returning to the C minor/C major of the opening movement. But in his evocative use of tolling funeral bells and the Dies irae melody of the Requiem Mass (first in earnest and later parodied), Berlioz brings layers of extramusical reference to bear that had rarely been employed in a symphony before. The extended introduction, filled with mysterious tritones to suggest diabolism, culminates in a grotesque parody of the idée fixe; this is interrupted by the clanging of the funeral bells, which in turn motivates the low bassoons and tubas to chant the Dies irae, echoed in harmony by the horns and trombones, then parodied by the woodwinds. All of this seems to serve as introduction to the “sabbath round-dance,” which appears in a full-fledged fugal exposition. Both Dies irae and fugue subject return together for the recapitulation, following which Berlioz unleashes the full energy of his large orchestra in the hair-raising coda.

With this work Berlioz established himself at a single stroke as the most significant (though not the most popular!) French composer. He had brought the Beethovenian symphonic tradition to France while reinterpreting it with extraordinary originality. The Symphonie fantastique is so completely sui generis that it could never form the foundation of a school of symphonic composition. Even Berlioz himself, though he adopted some of its ideas in Harold in Italy, never returned to till this ground again. But he had produced a colorful, openhearted, richly expressive score that demonstrates an inimitable, cunning musical craft in every movement.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Gil Shaham is one of the foremost violinists of our time; his flawless technique combined with his inimitable warmth and generosity of spirit has solidified his renown as an American master. Highlights of recent years include a recording and performances of J.S. Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin and recitals with his long-time duo partner, pianist Akira Eguchi. He regularly appears with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco symphonies, the philharmonic orchestras of Israel, Los Angeles, and New York, and the Orchestre de Paris, as well as in multi-year residencies with the Orchestras of Montreal, Stuttgart, and Singapore. Mr. Shaham has more than two dozen recordings to his name, earning multiple Grammys, a Grand Prix du Disque, a Diapason d’Or, and Gramophone Editor’s Choice distinctions. Many of these recordings appear on his own label, Canary Classics. Gil Shaham was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990, and in 2008 he received the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. In 2012 he was named Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America. He plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius and performs on an Antonio Stradivari violin, Cremona c. 1719, with the assistance of Rare Violins in Consortium, Artists and Benefactors Collaborative. He lives in New York City with his wife, violinist Adele Anthony, and their children.