Friday, August 8
Aspen Chamber Symphony
Jane Glover, conductor
Jeremy Denk, piano

Anna Clyne

ATLAS

Anna Clyne was born on March 9, 1980, in London. ATLAS was composed in 2023, and was premiered on March 28, 2024, at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas, by pianist Jeremy Denk with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra under conductor Fabio Luisi. ATLAS is scored for pairs of flutes (one doubling piccolo), oboes, clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), horns, and trumpets; as well as trombone, tuba, timpani, extensive percussion, piano, and strings.

Artist Gerhard Richter has made a career out of, among other things, his uncannily photorealistic paintings. It became a way to remove part of himself from the process of creation. “I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day,” he told an interviewer in 1972. “Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That’s why I wanted to have it, to show it—not use it as a means to painting, but use painting as a means to photography.” But first, he needed to find the right photographs.

In 1961, Richter and his wife Ema defected from East Germany and settled in Düsseldorf. Almost immediately, Richter began taking photographs of anything that caught his eye: his family, landscapes, clouds, the play of light and shadows, still lifes, and on and on. Some of these would become fodder for those photorealistic paintings, while others became more abstract inspiration, but most seem to be taken simply for the sake of taking them. The act of looking at and capturing the world on film was clearly generative for him, a means for him to filter aesthetic meanings out of the abundance of the world. “I see countless landscapes,” Richter wrote in his diary in 1986, “photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph—I am therefore looking for something quite specific; from this I can conclude that I know what I want.”

Starting in 1962 he began affixing some of these snapshots, along with newspaper clippings, color palettes, sketches for exhibitions, technical drawings, and other bits of ephemera, to pieces of cardstock. Over time, these pages gradually grew into an ongoing, perpetually unfinished project he titled ATLAS. Since 1972 it has been displayed numerous times, with pages added and subtracted at each subsequent installation. It currently contains at least 800 pages and more than 5,000 individual images. Each sheet generally has a unifying theme—clouds, forest landscapes, or Richter’s children, say—and each sheet typically has between four and twenty images. Themes will often spill out over multiple sheets, but there isn’t always a connection between one thematic grouping and the next. This creates a sense of jagged evolution, with unrelated visual blocks careening into each other. The compiled work has been published in a few different editions, each more massive than the last.

Visual art has long been an inspiration for composer Anna Clyne. “I love abstract painting in general, and I love Gerhard Richter’s work,” she recalls. As she was beginning to sketch a piano concerto (her first), she stumbled on a four-volume edition of ATLAS and knew she wanted to build the piece around it. “It’s so visually evocative, and it felt like every picture had a story. I thought that was a really interesting point of departure, not to have a literal reflection of these, but sort of taking a few of these images and guiding the listener through that imaginary world.” Written for pianist Jeremy Denk, Clyne’s ATLAS borrows much from Richter’s structure: both appear in four volumes, both are built around fragmentary ideas. In her program note, she even calls out a number of specific pages of Richter’s ATLAS such as “Spheres,” “Photographic Details of Colour Samples,” “Still Life (Apples and Bottle),” and “Railway Embankment.” As she writes, “My music responds to the imagery contained in these four volumes to create a musical montage and a lucid narrative.”

Sometimes Clyne makes the connection between her work and Richter’s clear. Richter’s “Sketches (Numbers)” shows a line fragment that curls over four frames to become an intricate rosette. Clyne begins Volume II by gradually unfurling a delicate tune from the center of the piano until it is surrounded by emotive countermelodies and filigrees in the orchestra. Other times, her use of Richter is more obscure, the colliding pages a justification for throwing different material together in unexpected ways to see what comes out. In Volume III, for instance, she cycles gleefully through a spy movie theme, a drunken waltz, a pastoral idyll, a fugue, and other fragmentary characters, letting them recklessly careen together.

Throughout, Clyne seems to invoke Richter’s notion of creative work as a means of transforming something that’s known into something unexpected or unfamiliar. As part of the compositional process, she was able to “reconnect with pieces that I loved, like some Brahms Intermezzi, some Bach, some Beatles, all kinds of different pieces that I’ve really loved over the years. And my musical tastes are very eclectic, which I think is reflected in the influences in the piece.” That eclecticism shows up as a series of musical quotes or near-quotes that dapple the piece (though she insists that all the material is original). Volume I features a recurring chorale that sounds just like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture and a quiet passage that seems like an inversion of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. J. S. Bach appears in different guises in Volume III (a misremembered version of the main theme from the Well-Tempered Clavier’s C-minor fugue) and Volume IV (another fugal theme, this time with a vaguely 1950s Jazz feel). These are a nod, she says, to Jeremy Denk’s particular mastery of Bach. Bits of not-quite-Debussy, Brahms, Ives, Glass, Wagner, and Satie also flit by. Each listener will probably pick out their own set of musical rhymes. Unlike Berio’s post-Modernist collage or Schnittke’s self-conscious polystylism, Clyne doesn’t seem to want to draw unnecessary attention to the references she may or may not be making. They are just musical themes or ideas like any other, their referents fuzzy and obscure like the blurred-out edges of Richter’s photo paintings. — © Dan Ruccia

Franz Schubert

Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944, “The Great”

Franz Peter Schubert was born in Liechtental, a suburb of Vienna, on January 31, 1797, and died in Vienna on November 19, 1828. He began his Ninth Symphony in the summer of 1825 and completed it by October 1826. At some point between the summer of 1827 and Schubert’s death in November 1828, the Symphony received at least one reading at a rehearsal of the orchestra of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde). The first fully authenticated (and first public) performance, heavily cut, took place on March 21, 1839, with Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy conducting the orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets; also three trombones, timpani, and strings.

chubert composed no fewer than six symphonies between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. Then he ran into trouble; though he was to live ten years longer, he only finished one more symphony. Yet it was not for want of trying. Extensive sketches survive for other symphonies, not to mention the two completed movements of the Unfinished Symphony in B minor, one of his most magical works. Only the Great C-major Symphony was fully finished—and even it remained unknown and unperformed for more than a decade after Schubert’s early death. Going by the numbering in the chronological Deutsch catalogue of Schubert’s works, the Great C-major Symphony (so called to distinguish it from the Sixth Symphony in the same key) was one of his final compositions. Indeed, the manuscript bears the date “March 1828,” only eight months before Schubert’s death.

After the composer’s death, the work was “lost”—unknown and unperformed—until 1839, when it was seen by a musician, Robert Schumann, who truly valued its significance and arranged for a performance in Leipzig, the first public hearing of this enormous score. In 1840 the Ninth Symphony had great success there, but other orchestras long regarded it as “too long and difficult.” Gradually audiences and performers came to recognize the truth of Schumann’s ecstatic reaction to this music: “It transports us into a world where we cannot recall ever having been before.”

The first movement begins with a horn theme that might be the typical “slow introduction.” But Schubert welds it to the body of the movement, making it a cornerstone of the entire Symphony. The first three notes (C–D–E)

cover the interval of a major third, which is heard, either rising or falling, throughout the score. The lengthy lyrical opening eventually turns into the Allegro ma non troppo, with a little fanfare theme (C–G–C–D in a dotted rhythm, repeated) in the strings. Schubert originally composed the entire first movement using an even simpler motive (C–G–C–G). Well after completing the full score (possibly in March 1828), he decided to rework the motive, which meant rewriting all the hundreds of times it occurs in the first movement. He scratched out the changed note at each occurrence with a penknife and replaced it.

The second movement, in A minor, is laid out like a sonata form without development, with contrasting themes emerging first in F major, then in A major. Yet the flow of ideas is so lavish and imaginative that one scarcely notices the straightforwardness of the design in the poetry of the elaboration. The Scherzo, too, is elaborated in extenso, this time as a full-scale sonata form, a far cry from the binary dance movement of earlier symphonies. In several places, Schubert introduces themes that truly waltz, lilting in the style that became the hallmark of Vienna.

The last movement is nothing short of colossal in length, energy, and imaginative power. Two separate motives—one dotted, one in triplet rhythm—stand at the outset as a call to attention and a forecast of things to come. Both play a role in the opening theme, which grows with fierce energy to the dominant cadence. After a pause, a brilliantly simple new idea—four repeated notes in the unison horns—generates an independent march-like theme that shows off its possibilities later on as it dominates the extended development. The opening dotted motive prepares the recapitulation with increasing intensity, though when it arrives, Schubert arranges matters so as to bring it back in the completely unexpected key of E-flat. The first section of the recapitulation is abridged, but it works around to C major for the lyric march of the secondary theme. This closes quietly on a tremolo C in the cellos; they sink down two steps to A, starting the massive coda, which reworks the materials nearly as extensively as the development section in the middle of the movement. The mood passes from mystery and darkness to the glorious sunshine of C major as the Symphony ends in a blaze of glory.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Acclaimed British conductor Jane Glover, named dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 New Year’s Honours, is music director of Chicago’s Music of the Baroque and principal guest conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony. Recent and future engagements include the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Florence’s Maggio Musicale, and Camerata Salzburg, as well as the symphonies of Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Recent opera productions include The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Aspen Music Festival; Xerxes with the Detroit Opera; Albert Herring at both Minnesota Opera and Chicago Opera Theater; Don Giovanni with the Houston Grand Opera and Cincinnati Opera; and the North American premiere of Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora with Chicago Opera Theater. Jane Glover’s discography includes a series of Mozart and Haydn symphonies with the London Mozart Players, as well as recordings of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Britten, and Walton with the London Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic, and the BBC Singers. She is the author of the critically acclaimed books Mozart’s Women, Handel in London, and Mozart in Italy. In 2020 she was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gamechanger Award for her work in breaking new ground for female conductors.

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists and a New York Times bestselling author. Jeremy is the recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the 2024–25 season, Jeremy continued his collaboration with his longtime musical partners Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis with performances at the Tsindali Festival and Wigmore Hall. He also returns to the Lammermuir Festival in multiple performances, including the complete Ives violin sonatas with Maria Wloszczowska and a solo recital featuring works by female composers from the past to the present day. Highlights of Jeremy’s 2023–24 season included premiering a new concerto written for him by Anna Clyne, co-commissioned and performed by the Dallas Symphony led by Fabio Luisi, the City of Birmingham Symphony led by Kazuki Yamada, and the New Jersey Symphony led by Markus Stenz. Jeremy has performed frequently at Carnegie Hall, and in recent years has worked with such orchestras as Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony. He has performed multiple times at the BBC Proms and Klavierfestival Ruhr. He has also performed extensively across the U.K. Denk is also known for his original and insightful writing on music. His New York Times bestselling memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine, was published to universal acclaim by Random House in 2022. Denk also wrote the libretto for The Classical Style, a comic opera co-commissioned by the Aspen Festival.