WolfGANG Sessions #22

A Wild Night of Chamber Music

2024-01-20 21:00 2024-01-20 13:00 60 Canada/Eastern 🎟 NAC: WolfGANG Sessions #22

https://nac-cna.ca/en/event/33742

In-person event

WolfGANG Sessions at Club SAW : a night of music that is sure to entertain.
Grab your adventurous friends and take them out for a wild night of chamber music with your favourite musicians from the NAC Orchestra. 

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Club SAW,67 Nicholas Street,Ottawa,Canada
Sat, January 20, 2024

≈ 90 minutes · No intermission

Last updated: January 10, 2024

Program

MISSY MAZZOLI Death Valley Junction for string quartet (10 min)

Yosuke Kawasaki, violin
Noémi Racine Gaudreault, violin
Tovin Allers, viola
Leah Wyber, cello

GITY RAZAZ Spellbound for solo viola (7 min)

Tovin Allers, viola

CAROLINE SHAW Boris Kerner for cello and flower pots (8 min)

Julia MacLaine, cello
Zac Pulak, flowerpots

AUGUSTA READ THOMAS Silent Moon for violin and cello (8 min)

I. Still: Soulful and Resonant –
II. Energetic: Majestic and Dramatic –
III. Suspended: Lyrical and Chant-like — “When twofold silence was the song of love.” 

Yosuke Kawasaki, violin
Desiree Abbey, cello

JULIA WOLFE Early that summer for string quartet (12 min)

Yosuke Kawasaki, violin
Noémi Racine Gaudreault, violin
Tovin Allers, viola
Leah Wyber, cello

Sean Rice, host

Repertoire

Missy Mazzoli

Death Valley Junction for string quartet

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (The New York Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out New York), Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980) has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Opera, and many others. In 2018 she became one of the first two women, along with Jeanine Tesori, to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a Grammy Award. She is Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012 to 2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia. Upcoming commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia, the National Ballet of Canada, Chicago Lyric Opera, and Norwegian National Opera.

Mazzoli composed Death Valley Junction for string quartet in 2010 for Santa Fe New Music. As she describes, the piece “is a sonic depiction of the town of the same name, a strange and isolated place on the border of California and Nevada. The ‘town’ is home to three people and consists of a café, a hotel, and a fully functional opera house.” Mazzoli considers Death Valley one of her favourite places on Earth and is drawn especially to the “harshness of the landscape, the extreme weather, and the weird characters who live there.”

One of the town’s eccentric characters, Mazzoli notes, is Marta Becket, “the woman who resurrected and repaired the crumbling opera house in the late 1960s and performed one-woman shows there every week until her retirement [in 2009] at age 86.” Death Valley Junction is dedicated to Becket, who once compared herself to the single yellow flower that is able to, against all odds, flourish in the desert. This piece, which “begins with a sparse, edgy texture—the harsh desert landscape—and collapses into a wild and buoyant dance, attempts to depict some of her exuberant energy and unstoppable optimism.”

GITY RAZAZ

Spellbound for solo viola

Hailed by The New York Times as “ravishing and engulfing” and named a 2022 “Rising Star” by BBC Music Magazine, Iranian American composer Gity Razaz (b. 1986) writes music that ranges from concert solo pieces to large symphonic works. Her music has been commissioned and/or performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, Seattle Symphony, San Diego Symphony Orchestra, Washington National Opera, National Sawdust, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, former cellist of the Kronos Quartet Jeffrey Zeigler, cellist Inbal Segev, and the violinist Jennifer Koh, among many others. Her compositions have earned numerous national and international awards, including the Andrew Imbrie Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019.

Spellbound was commissioned by violist Maggie Snyder for the VIOLA2020 project in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment establishing American women’s right to vote. The piece appears on Razaz’s debut album The Strange Highway, released on BIS Records in August 2022, and has since garnered international praise. Born in Tehran before moving to the U.S. in 2002, Razaz often explores aspects of her immigrant identity in her music. In Spellbound, which “has the intimate quality of a reminiscing soliloquy”, she explains, “textures and soundscapes weave in and out of an original melody that conjures the improvisatory lyricism of traditional Persian music. I was particularly inspired by the mourning and sul ponticello [bowing very close the instrument’s bridge] sound quality that is inherent to Persian instruments such as the ney and kamanche.”

Caroline Shaw

Boris Kerner for cello and flower pots

Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy Awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale University, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has worked with a range of artists including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, and Yo-Yo Ma, and she has contributed music to films and TV series including Fleishman is in Trouble, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, and Beyoncé’s Homecoming. Her favourite colour is yellow, and her favourite smell is rosemary.

Shaw composed Boris Kerner in 2012 for New Morse Code, a cello and percussion duo. The piece takes its title from the name of the German engineer, physicist, and author of Introduction to Modern Traffic Flow Theory and Control: The Long Road to Three-Phase Traffic Theory, which Shaw acknowledges she had discovered through “the serendipity of the internet, through some late-night research and musing on the idea of friction and flow in Baroque bass lines.” Thus, Boris Kerner, she says, takes a “fun, instinctive, intuitive little dive into this idea of a musical line as kind of a traffic pattern, something that gets stuck and then releases.” The work is one in “a series of expositions” on the phrase “the detail of the pattern is movement” from T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. As for flower pots as the percussion instrument, she selected the everyday ceramic type for their “beautiful, bell-like sound,” finding that they have a “delightful imperfection about them” against the “very cultivated” sound of the cello.

As Shaw describes, Boris Kerner begins with “a fairly typical 17th-century continuo-style line in the cello that leans and tilts, sensitive to gravity and the magnetism of certain tendency tones, before getting stuck in a repeated pattern. The flower pots enter the scene as an otherworldly counterpoint to this oddly familiar character, introducing a slightly cooler temperature to the Baroque warmth, and sometimes interrupting and sometimes facilitating the cello’s traditional flow of melodic traffic.”

AUGUSTA READ THOMAS

Silent Moon for violin and cello

I. Still: Soulful and Resonant –
II. Energetic: Majestic and Dramatic –
III. Suspended: Lyrical and Chant-like — “When twofold silence was the song of love.”

The music of Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964 in New York) is described as nuanced, majestic, elegant, capricious, lyrical, and colourful. A composer featured on a Grammy Award–winning CD by Chanticleer and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Thomas has composed an impressive body of works that “embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). Her discography includes 90 commercially recorded CDs. Thomas is also a Professor of Composition in Music and the College at The University of Chicago, and in 2016 founded the university’s Center for Contemporary Composition. She was the longest-serving Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for conductors Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez (1997–2006) and was central in establishing the orchestra’s thriving MusicNOW series.

For Thomas, music “is an embrace of the world—a way to open myself up to being alive in the world in my body, in my sounds, and in my mind.” Composed in 2006, Silent Moon was “commissioned by, and is dedicated with admiration and gratitude to, Almita and Roland Vamos”, celebrated pedagogues of the violin and viola who are also wife and husband. Tonight, the work is being performed in its violin and cello version.

As Thomas describes,

“Silent moon” is a reference to the break in the stillness of winter that is indicative of a gathering of energy. Like the silence before the storm, the “silent moon” offers an opportunity to cleanse the past so that we might better shift our attentions to future growth.

This concept is often depicted through certain double-visaged gods and goddesses such as Janus, who looks simultaneously backward at the past and forward to the future. 

A silent moon exists in the deep silence of winter earth after the solstice celebration heralding the birth of energy and the return of ever-lengthening daylight.

This is a time for stillness.

The quality of this moon’s energy is vivid.

Unfolding in three movements of distinct character which are played without pause, the music of Silent Moon “goes full cycle, coming back to its exact starting point, as if we hear one orbit.” In the title of the third movement, Thomas quotes the final line of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem Silent Noon—“When twofold silence was the song of love”, thus adding a tender poetic layer to Silent Moon that alludes to the eventual arrival of summer in the future and the intertwining parts of the violin and cello as if lovers.

Julia Wolfe

Early that summer for string quartet

The music of Julia Wolfe (b. 1958) is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. She draws inspiration from folk, classical, and rock genres, bringing a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them. Her music, which ranges from works for solo/duo to chamber ensemble to orchestra, band, chorus, and opera, has been heard at major venues throughout the world, and has been recorded on Decca Gold, Naxos, Cantaloupe Music, Teldec, Sony Classical, and Universal labels. In addition to receiving the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Wolfe was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. She received the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in Music, and was named Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year. Julia Wolfe is co-founder / co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can, and she is Artistic Director of NYU Steinhardt Music Composition.

Wolfe has written a major body of work specifically for strings, including quartets that have been described in The New Yorker magazine as “combin[ing] the violent forward drive of rock music with an aura of minimalist serenity [using] the four instruments as a big guitar, whipping psychedelic states of mind into frenzied and ecstatic climaxes.” Early that summer, which she wrote for the Lark Quartet in 1993, is one such work.

In her program note to the piece, Wolfe said she began composing the piece while living in Amsterdam in 1992. At the time, she was also “reading a book about U.S. political history and the author kept introducing small incidents with phrases like ‘Early that summer…’ The incidents would eventually snowball into major political crises or events. I realized that the music I was writing was exactly like this—that I was creating a constant state of anticipation and forward build.”

When the Lark Quartet premiered the work, Wolfe said that she asked them “to play it the way they play Beethoven,” as she admired the clarity and strength with which they played his string quartets, “full of fire and aggression.” Later in an October 2001 interview with David Krasnow for Bomb Magazine, she admitted that “I didn’t know how intense that was going to be live. It’s a feat, and I didn’t set out to do that. It’s almost like a stutter, it has this interrupted feeling where all these patterns fight against each other, and then finally they get to a place where they rip. That goes on for a long time and it’s physically strenuous. The first time I saw people play it, I thought, Oh, my God, their arms are going to fall off. I did wonder, How over the top is this? Not every group’s going to want to play it, but there’s an effect from it, a reason to do it.”

Program notes compiled and edited by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD

Artists

  • bio-orchestra
    Featuring Members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra
  • yosuke-kawasaki
    Violin Yosuke Kawasaki
  • Violin Noémi Racine Gaudreault
  • tovinallers
    Viola Tovin Allers
  • cattroll-312-xl
    Cello Leah Wyber
  • julia-maclaine-2
    Cello Julia MacLaine
  • Cello Desiree Abbey
  • zac-pulak
    Flower pots Zac Pulak
  • sean-rice-2
    Host Sean Rice