≈ 2 hours · With intermission
Repertoire
(in creation)
1Q84: Sinfonietta Metamoderna
Behind Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra is the Friedrich Nietzsche novel of the same name, which explores, among other things, the idea of an “eternal recurrence.” A 21st-century understanding of this might look something like the multi-verse, a complex and overlapping vision of reality where multiple worlds become a metaphor for the strangeness of lived experience in our contemporary time.
In the novel 1Q84, novelist Haruki Murakami explores the possibility of multiple realities—worlds that split off one from the next because of minute decisions. As in Strauss’s tone poem, 1Q84: Sinfonietta Metamoderna loosely follows the novel’s structure, with thematic material connected to the characters and events of the story.
When the novel opens, it is April of 1984. On her way to her next hit, professional assassin and fitness instructor Aomame finds herself stuck in traffic on Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway 3. The radio is blasting Janáček’s Sinfonietta. So as not to be late, she exits the taxi and climbs down the emergency stairway. In so doing, she enters the world of 1Q84—an alternate version of the world she knows, where the sky has two moons, and where the leader of a powerful cult is controlled by the Little People. She thinks often about a boy she once knew, Tengo.
Tengo, now 30 years old, is a cram school instructor and the ghostwriter for the highly successful novel Air Chrysalis—a story about a powerful cult under the control of supernatural beings called Little People who move about between worlds through the mouths of their victims. Tengo longs to reconnect with a girl whose hand he held briefly when he was a child.
Aomame is sent to kill the Leader of the cult. The Little People swarm in a fit to stop her. A violent storm thunders above the city. Aomame assassinates Leader and goes into hiding until she can escape 1Q84. But before leaving this world she needs to find the boy she has loved since she was a child when they briefly held each other’s hand after class. While in hiding she discovers that she is pregnant. Despite not having seen Tengo for 20 years, she learns that she is pregnant with his child.
Tengo and Aomame reunite. They climb up the emergency stairway to Metropolitan Expressway 3 to get back into the world they left behind. Standing on the Expressway, they realize they may just have stepped into a new unfamiliar world, but it is a world they will journey through together.
Program note by the composer
La Mer
Born in Saint Germain-en-Laye, August 22, 1862
Died in Paris, March 25, 1918
An irresistible fascination with the sea has impelled almost countless composers and songwriters to evoke it in their music. Debussy’s La Mer is surely the best known work of this title, and few works so richly and evocatively portray the sea as Debussy has done. Oddly enough, however, this composition was not written anywhere near the sea, but rather in various inland locations, including the Burgundian mountains and Paris. In La Mer, Debussy portrays the sea in its varied moods but does not attempt explicit images in sound; rather, through sonorities he seeks to stir the memories, emotions and imagination, permitting each listener a personal perception of the sea. The first performance took place on October 15, 1905 at the Concerts Lamoureux in Paris, with Camille Chevillard conducting.
The first part, “From dawn to noon on the sea,” begins very quietly with slow, mysterious murmuring. Through sonority itself, Debussy evokes the sensation of peering into the very depths of the dark, mysterious sea. As the sea awakens, the orchestral colours brighten and motion quickens. Eventually a noble, chorale-like passage appears and slowly grows to paint a majestic picture of the sea under the blazing noonday sun.
“Play of the waves” is full of sparkle and animation. The range and delicacy of Debussy’s scoring fascinate at every turn – even the “ping” of the triangle has evocative power.
Biographer Oscar Thompson describes this music as “a world of sheer fantasy, of strange visions and eerie voices, a mirage of sight and equally a mirage of sound.”
“Dialogue of the wind and the sea” opens restless, gray and stormy, the music suggesting the mighty surging and swelling of the water. Melodic fragments from the first movement return. The activity subsides, and out of the mists comes a haunting, distant call, like that of the sirens, high in the woodwinds. The music again gathers energy. Finally we hear once more the grandiose chorale motif from the first seascape, and La Mer concludes in a frenzy of whipping wind and dashing waves.
– Program note by Robert Markow
Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Op. 30
In the 1880s and 90s, Richard Strauss (1864–1949) made his name internationally as the bold, modernist composer of tone poems. A single-movement work that illustrates or evokes the content of an extramusical source such as a story, poem, or painting, a tone poem was a novel way to structure an orchestral piece compared to the more abstract forms of a multi-movement symphony. With each one he composed—from Don Juan (1888) and Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration, 1889), to Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1895) and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life; 1898)—Strauss found innovative and ever expansive methods of using orchestral timbre, texture, and sonority to vividly convey the breadth of human experience.
Strauss composed his tone poem Also sprach Zaruthustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) in 1896 and conducted the premiere in November that year to great acclaim. The work, as indicated in its subtitle, is based “freely after” Friedrich Nietzsche’s book of 1883–1885, which the composer had read (among other works by the philosopher) during a period when he was emerging out of a personal crisis. Facing a collapse of faith in the then-dominant metaphysical view of music—i.e., that music could convey redemptive spiritual truths—Strauss found in Nietzschean philosophy a new concept and purpose for his music.
To this end, Zarathustra is Strauss’s first composition to manifest an anti-metaphysical view of music. From Nietzsche’s book, he selected the prologue and eight of its 80 subsections, the titles of which he indicates in the orchestral score and are outlined below. These sections, though in a different order from the book, form an overarching “narrative” that still highlights its central theme: in a world where (in Nietzsche’s formulation) “Gott ist tot” (God is dead), human beings should strive to evolve into a “higher humanity” (the Übermensch— “overhuman” or “superhuman”), which can only be achieved through an individual’s persistent overcoming of metaphysical longing (blind faith, superstition, ignorance) in eternally recurring cycles. To convey this concept, Strauss links key ideas with musical motives, whose presentation, recurrence, and transformation we can follow through the piece.
Prologue. The text of Nietzsche’s Prologue, quoted in full at the beginning of the score, describes Zarathustra awakening and addressing the sun in admiration of its light. After ten years in solitude on top of a mountain, he decides to descend to be among humans again. In what has become one of the most famous excerpts of classical music due to its use in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, trumpets introduce the first of the piece’s fundamental musical motives: a three-note call in the tonality of C, representing “Nature” as the great unsolved “world riddle” that all humanity must face. After two more calls, the orchestra arrives at a resounding C major chord, on which the organ is left hanging.
“Von den Hinterweltlern” (Of the afterworldsmen). Zarathustra reflects on the beliefs of his youth, characterized by the “dream and fiction of a God”. Cellos and double basses start this section with a shuddering phrase. Soon after, they pluck out the “Longing” motive with its characteristic upward reach that evokes mankind’s desire to understand; set in B minor, the tonal area symbolizing humankind, it will come into conflict with Nature’s tonality of C throughout the tone poem, thus signifying the irreconcilability of the two realms. “Longing” is immediately answered apprehensively by muted horns on a phrase representing blind religious faith (Strauss added the words “Credo in unum deum” (I believe in one God) to these notes in the score). Strings and organ begin a hymn, which builds with intensity to a warm peak, then relaxes as a lone violin wanders upward.
“Von der großen Sehnsucht”(Of the great longing). The reverie is interrupted by the return of the “Longing “motive in the lower strings, which is further developed in this section. Zarathustra realizes that “this God which I created was human work and human madness, like all gods!” “Nature’s” call repeatedly punctuates the turbulent texture, like a critique barring further attempts to carry on with a religious life.
“Von der Freuden- und Leidenschaften” (Of joys and passions). Zarathustra’s epiphany leads him to determine a new solution to the “world riddle”: to “listen to the voice of the healthy body,” which is a “purer and more honest one” than that of religion. Violins unleash a swirling theme in C minor that surges forth with youthful vigour. As they reach their climax, trombones blast out the first statement of a new important motive, “Disgust”, which disrupts further progress. Two quicker variants sound in the bassoons, trombones, cellos, and double basses, dissolving into the…
“Das Grablied” (Song of the grave). The “Longing” motive (in B minor) returns, this time given a chromatic extension by solo violin, as oboe and English horn carry over the swirling theme. Zarathustra takes stock, surveying the “graves of my youth” where he has relegated his metaphysical hopes—his “sights and visions”, “all you glances of love, you divine momentary glances”. The restless web of motives builds, until once again, a trumpet sounds the “Nature” motive, after which they wind down into a single falling line on solo cello.
“Von der Wissenschaft” (Of science). Several cellos and double basses initiate a slow fugue, which represents the rationality of science as another solution to the “world riddle”. Making its way up the strings and woodwinds, the subject begins on the original three notes of the “Nature” motive in C, then extends into a melody using all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. The tempo picks up with the relaunch of the B minor “Longing” motive; it soon morphs into a hopeful new melody in B major—the “Ideal” theme, a glimpse of the “overhuman”—on flutes and first violins, then becomes a sparkling dance tune on woodwinds and strings. But soon, the shimmering vision of the latter is confronted by “Nature”, which triggers a gradual build-up of “Disgust”.
“Der Genesende” (The convalescent). The “Disgust” motive swirls fiercely around entries of the fugue subject, suggesting the violent dismantling of faith in scientific rationality. A terrifying climax is reached, on C, as the lower brass announce in colossal fashion the “Nature” motive. Afterwards, a dramatic silence, evoking the parallel moment in Nietzsche’s text in which Zarathustra “fell down like a dead man and remained like a dead man for a long time.” He awakens (the section restarts with the “Longing” and “Disgust” motives in B minor) and the idea of eternal recurrence comes to him: “Everything goes, everything returns; the wheel of existence rolls forever.” In an extended transitional passage, the “Disgust” motive is transformed into a cheeky laugh on high clarinet, while “Longing”, now in B major, assumes a joyous mien as it dialogues with the “Dance” theme.
“Der Tanzlied” (The dance song). Zarathustra discovers a “new music”—“one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star”—having arrived at the revelation that overcoming metaphysical longing is not a state of permanent freedom, but rather “is a cycle of disgust and recovery that must continue eternally,” as noted by musicologist Charles Youmans. The music begins on the “Nature” motive, then spins out to a lilting melody on solo violin (in C major), itself an introduction to the “Dance” theme which is now recast as an exuberant waltz played by the strings. Later, the “Longing” motive (now in B major) is taken up into the dance, moving through various keys, nearly though never actually resolving into C major. It cycles through intensifying waves, eventually culminating in a massive climax.
“Das Nachtwanderlied” (The night-wanderer’s song). Over tolls of the “midnight” bell, the climax subsides. Violins sing the “Ideal” theme in B major, suggesting humanity’s persistent dream of its continued evolution. But it will come with no easy answers—near the end, this rarified B major realm in the upper woodwinds and violins is haunted by that of the C major of “Nature”, its motive quietly plucked by cellos and double basses, before fading out on a final C.
Program note by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD
Artists
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Alexander Shelley succeeded Pinchas Zukerman as Music Director of Canada’s NAC Orchestra in September 2015. The ensemble has since been praised as being “transformed... hungry, bold, and unleashed” (Ottawa Citizen) and Shelley’s programming credited for turning the orchestra into “one of the more audacious in North America” (Maclean’s).
Shelley is a champion of Canadian creation; recent hallmarks include the multimedia projects Life Reflected and UNDISRUPTED, and three major new ballets in partnership with NAC Dance for Encount3rs. He is passionate about arts education and nurturing the next generation of musicians. He is an Ambassador for Ottawa’s OrKidstra, a charitable social development program that teaches children life skills through making music together.
Alexander Shelley is also the Principal Associate Conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and, starting with the 2024–2025 season, Artistic and Music Director of Artis-Naples and the Naples Philharmonic in Florida, USA. In the spring of 2019, he led the NAC Orchestra on its critically acclaimed 50th Anniversary European tour, and in 2017, he led the Orchestra in a tour across Canada, celebrating Canada’s 150th anniversary. Most recently, he led the Orchestra in its first performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 30 years.
He has made eight recordings with the NAC Orchestra, including the Juno-nominated New Worlds, Life Reflected, ENCOUNT3RS, The Bounds of Our Dreams, and the acclaimed Clara, Robert, Johannes four-album series, all with Canadian label Analekta.
The Music Director role is supported by Elinor Gill Ratcliffe, C.M., O.N.L., LL.D. (hc)
Since its debut in 1969, the National Arts Centre (NAC) Orchestra has been praised for the passion and clarity of its performances, its visionary educational programs, and its prominent role in nurturing Canadian creativity. Under the leadership of Music Director Alexander Shelley, the NAC Orchestra reflects the fabric and values of Canada, reaching and representing the diverse communities we live in with daring programming, powerful storytelling, inspiring artistry, and innovative partnerships.
Alexander Shelley began his tenure as Music Director in 2015, following Pinchas Zukerman’s 16 seasons at the helm. Principal Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and former Chief Conductor of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra (2009–2017), he has been in demand around the world, conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic, DSO Berlin, Leipzig Gewandhaus, and Stockholm Philharmonic, among others, and maintains a regular relationship with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and the German National Youth Orchestra.
Each season, the NAC Orchestra features world-class artists such as the newly appointed Artist-in-Residence James Ehnes, Angela Hewitt, Joshua Bell, Xian Zhang, Gabriela Montero, Stewart Goodyear, Jan Lisiecki, and Principal Guest Conductor John Storgårds. As one of the most accessible, inclusive, and collaborative orchestras in the world, the NAC Orchestra uses music as a universal language to communicate the deepest of human emotions and connect people through shared experiences.
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