seeking all that's still unsung
We are dedicating this concert program to nature and our place in it, providing both a humanistic and musical lens on a time of environmental and sociological crisis.
Joseph Haydn String Quartet in B flat, Op. 76, No. 4, “Sunrise,” 1st movement
Kurt Rohde seeking all that’s still unsung (world premiere, forthcoming commission)
John Luther Adams The Wind in High Places (2011)
Pēteris Vasks String Quartet no. 2, “Songs of Summer” (1984)
Program 2 - noteS
Joseph Haydn’s Op. 76 No. 4 quartet suggests an Arcadian ideal of natural beauty. The opening evokes a sunrise, giving the work it’s nickname, musically paving the way for an optimistic and promising future. Where Haydn’s quartet paints an idealized portrait, Kurt Rohde’s new work “seeking all that's still unsung” asks us to examine the quality of our relationships with the world around us, and face uncomfortable truths and the increasing fragility of life on earth.
“seeking all that's still unsung” listens to the rapidly changing outside sonic natural world and brings that ‘inside.’ An interior mirroring of the sounds that surround us, and that we take for granted, it documents in music the gradual disappearance and extinction of songs that will never be sung again.” — Kurt Rohde, 2019.
In John Luther Adams’s ethereal string quartet, The Wind in High Places, each of its three movements is named after a location in the Alaskan wilderness. More than just sound pictures depicting a place, each movement also attempts to capture the essence of memories from those locations. The work is performed entirely on open strings and natural overtone harmonics.
“I’ve long been enamored with the ethereal tones of Aeolian harps — instruments that draw their music directly from the wind. The Wind in High Places treats the string quartet as a large, 16-stringed harp. All the sounds in the piece are produced as natural harmonics or on open strings. Over the course of almost 20 minutes, the fingers of the musicians never touch the fingerboards of the instruments. If I could’ve found a way to make this music without them touching the instruments at all, I would have.” — John Luther Adams
As a child, Pēteris Vasks began to study the violin. He recalls as his happiest, the times he was able to play in a string quartet. Later Vasks performed as a double-bass player with various Latvian and Lithuanian symphony and chamber orchestras. He says it was clear soon enough that the sound of string instruments was for him the most perfect: “Apart from everything else, I was fascinated by cantilena – the feeling of an immense and never-ending chant. It is in the sound of string instruments that my message sounds best – I am able there to sing out in the best way.”
Vasks’s pantheistic love of nature is mirrored in his String Quartet No. 2, “Songs of Summer”: “I experience God and pray to him in the forest, on the seashore, everywhere, because the world as God created it is so beautiful.” The first movement, “Coming into Bloom” is introduced in a subdued and flowing manner until the music settles. The second movement, “Birds” – with its free imitations of birdsongs – ranks among the most elaborate of Vasks’s compositions. The third movement, “Elegy”, ushers in autumnal resignation.
