Ensemble 20/21 Presents "Music of the Earth" this Saturday, February 11

Ensemble 20/21 presents “Music of the Earth,” this Saturday, February 11, 2023, at 8:00 p.m., in Gould Rehearsal Hall at the Curtis Institute of Music. The eclectic program features selections that celebrate the sights and sounds of the natural world, with works by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, Kaija Saariaho, Gabriela Lena Frank, Olivier Messiaen, and the world premiere of Tania León’s song cycle, In the Field. Featuring the talents of Curtis’s extraordinarily gifted musicians under the batons of students Micah Gleason and Jacob Niemann, the Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellows, the specially curated program endeavors to inspire and encourage an eco-conscious mindset from its audience through five exquisitely composed pieces. 

Learn more about “Music of the Earth” HERE.

Read composer Tania León and poet Carlos Pintado’s program notes on In the Field HERE and view the libretto HERE. 

Notes on Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, Talowa’ Hiloha (Thunder Song) 

Praised by The Washington Post for his “ability to effectively infuse classical music with American Indian nationalism,” Emmy Award-winning Chickasaw composer and pianist Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate explores the intersection of classical and Indigenous musical culture, history, and ethos through his compositions. Tate’s commissioned works have been performed by numerous major orchestras, including the National Symphony Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony, and his inimitable music was featured on the hit HBO series Westworld.  

Written in 1997 when Tate was a master’s student of piano performance and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Talowa’ Hiloha (Thunder Song) is a reverent homage to a time-honored tradition. The title of this astounding piece for solo timpani comes from the Chickasaw word for thunder and lighting. Throughout history, the Chickasaw people believed thunderstorms were the holy people, or beloved, at war above the clouds. Defying death and displaying courage, these warriors would shoot their guns into the sky during the storms. Over eight exhilarating minutes, Tate’s composition shows the breadth, dynamic range, tonal colors, and majestic resonance of one of the oldest instruments in an orchestra as a storm slowly brews, gradually unleashing a high-voltage spectacle of sound and fury.  

Visit Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s official website HERE.

Notes on Kaija Saariaho, Terrestre

Inspired by Oiseaux, a collection of poems by Saint-John Perse, award-winning Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Terrestre is a reworking of the second movement of her flute concerto, Aile du songe (Wing of Dream). This beguiling chamber piece uses the rich metaphor of birds to describe life’s mysteries. However, unlike Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques, another avian-influenced composition closing the evening’s program, Saariaho appears to be more intrigued by the idea of birds than referencing the sounds they make.   

Commissioned in honor of Kaija Saariaho’s 50th birthday, Terrestre is divided into two parts. The first frenetic movement, “Oiseau dansant” (“Dancing Bird”), refers to the Aboriginal legend of a bird teaching an entire village how to dance. This intriguing work explores some unique soundscapes and calls for the flutist to sporadically sing, chirp, trill, and purr while playing their instrument, creating a unique dialogue between voice and woodwind. Then, through frenetic syncopations and a driving kinetic pace, the flute incites the xylophone, harp, violin, and cello to dance with wild abandon, evoking the otherworldly mystique of the folktale it aspires to bring to life.   

This hyperactive exchange shifts dramatically within the indigo-hued mood of the second section, “L’Oiseau, un satellite infima,” which likens the bird to a satellite in celestial orbit. Intense and brooding, with a rippling ostinato that climbs and descends as it is passed back and forth between the strings, harp, and xylophone, Saariaho’s haunting movement is a synthesis of previous elements of Aile du songe. As the piece unfolds, one can imagine looking up into the darkness and catching a glimpse of a small, bright object as it rapidly spins across the night sky, orbiting the Earth and reflecting the light of the stars as it drifts by. 

Visit Kaija Saariaho’s official website HERE.

Notes on Gabriela Lena Frank, Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout

Inspired by the “idea of mestizaje as envisioned by Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, where cultures can coexist without the subjugation of one by the other,” Latin GRAMMY winner, composer, and pianist, Gabriela Lena Frank’s Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout fuses elements of western classical forms and Andean folk music tradition within six innovative movements. Initially commissioned by the Chiara Quartet in 2001, these miniature tone poems, as with most of her impressive catalogue, explore Frank’s multiculturalism, paying homage to her Peruvian, Chinese, and Lithuanian-Jewish heritage. Supported by a sizeable grant, she traveled to South America and toured remote villages and cities across the Andes mountains. There she recorded hours of live folk music, a la Béla Bartók, but with microphones hidden in her eyeglasses, stealthily capturing the sounds of what would later influence the musical landscape of Leyendas, one of her earliest works. 

The opening movement, “Toyos,” draws the listener in with the imitative sounds of one of the largest types of Andean panpipes, one that requires incredible lung power to play. This is followed by “Tarqueda,” a swiftly paced movement that emulates the tarka, a striking wooden duct flute abrasively blown to split its tones. Like the husky sound of the toto, it is typically played in parallel fourths or fifths, reflected in Frank’s music. The third movement, “Himno de Zampoñas,” displays the rhythmic hocketing technique as the musicians pass the melodic line back and forth by alternating notes. The distinctive sound of the zampoña panpipe is conjured up here with an aggressive double-stop technique that mimics the instrument’s flatly blown fundamental tones overlaid by overtones. 

“Chasqui” depicts the legendary Incan runners who would sprint across the Andes delivering messages. This fourth movement incorporates the sounds of the high-pitched, stringed charango and the airy bamboo quena flute to elicit the feel of sprinting over steep slopes along the precarious Incan Royal Highway (“Qhapac Nan”). The final two movements, “Canto de Velorio” and “Coqueteos,” each capture another unique facet of Peruvian life and culture, with the former referencing the Catholic “Dies Irae” chant, professional crying women (“Llorona”) and a chorus of mourners, the latter patterned after a sensual love song often sung by the flirtatious romanceros, and accompanied by a storm of guitars (“vendaval de guitarras”). Technically challenging yet emotionally rewarding, this crowd-pleasing work is as vivacious, virtuosic, and evocative as it is richly expressive.   

Learn about the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music HERE.

Notes on Olivier Messiaen, Oiseaux Exotiques

A passion for ornithology and music collides in French composer Olivier Messiaen’s dazzling mid-century work for piano and small orchestra, Oiseaux exotiques. Stepping away from total serialism to forge an entirely new musical language and style based upon the transcription of birdsong, Messiaen’s work is based on the recorded songs of 47 birds throughout China, India, Malaysia, and North and South America. Commissioned by his former student Pierre Boulez and given its first performance on March 10, 1956, at the Théâtre du Petit Marigny, with pianist Yvonne Loriod, the composer’s wife, and the ensemble Domaine musical, this chirping, squawking celebration of life is full of colorful noises, both strident and shrieking, cheerful and sonorous.

Described by Messiaen as “almost a piano concerto,” Oiseaux exotiques is roughly divided into nine well-defined sections, with an introduction, a sequence of instrumental interludes and piano cadenzas with two central tuttis, five prominent piano solos framed by six orchestral ritornellos, and a coda for piano solo, woodwind, brass, and percussion. The work opens with a pair of high-pitched, piercing chirps from the Indian myna and unfolds in a feathered frenzy with the sounds of birds thrown together into an imaginary aviary. Beyond simply existing as a sound collage, the composer underpins the work with Hindu and Greek rhythmic patterns, courtesy of the snare drum and woodblock, providing a metronomically firm framework to contrast with the free rhythms of the birdsong. 

Messiaen experienced a form of synesthesia, sensing colors when he heard sounds and harmonies. The vibrant plumage of the birds is illustrated in the choices of instruments he utilizes at specific points throughout and stresses the importance of hearing the different colors of the sounds: “In the second tutti, orange mixed with gold and red are in the horn part; green and gold are found in the first and last piano cadenzas.” In remarking about the score, he even notes that we should see the central tutti as a mixture of “engulfed rainbows in spirals of colour.”   

Delightfully angular and jittery, this cacophonous score concludes with more interesting sounds, including two North American species, the meowing cry of the catbird and the sharp, metallic-throated song of the bobolink, as a two-part invention of sorts. This is followed by the tremendous final tutti, with a main solo from the Indian shama, a piano cadenza on the wood thrush, and the Virginia cardinal, and closes with the clamor of the white-crested laughing thrush. Dazzling, eccentric, uniquely brilliant, Oiseaux exotiques, is a landmark in 20th-century classical music, still defying convention 67 years after its premiere. 

Learn more about the late Olivier Messiaen HERE.

All program notes by Ryan Scott Lathan.

ENSEMBLE 20/21
Flexible in size and scope, Ensemble 20/21 performs a wide range of music from the 20th and 21st centuries, including works by Curtis students and alumni. The ensemble has appeared at major U.S. venues such as the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Miller Theatre, as well as international venues. The ensemble has also presented concert portraits of iconic composers in residence Tania León, Alvin Singleton, Unsuk Chin, John Corigliano, George Crumb, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Chen Yi, among many others.

Ensemble 20/21 closes the 2022–23 season on Saturday, March 25, 2023, at 8 p.m. in Curtis’s Gould Rehearsal Hall, with a “Portrait of Aaron Jay Kernis,” featuring Earth and Goblin Market by the Pulitzer Prize and GRAMMY Award-winning composer.

Visit Curtis.edu/Calendar to view Curtis’s entire season of performances and events.

ENSEMBLE 20/21
Music of the Earth

Saturday, February 11, 2023, at 8 p.m.
Gould Rehearsal Hall, Curtis Institute of Music, 1616 Locust Street, Philadelphia

Micah Gleason, Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow
Jacob Niemann, Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow

PROGRAM

This event is sold out. Join the waitlist to be notified should additional tickets become available.

Single tickets for Ensemble 20/21 performances and the 2022–23 season start at $19: Curtis.edu/Ensemble2021. Season subscriptions are also available.

Generous support for Ensemble 20/21 is provided by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Foundation.

Photo of Tania León by Gail Hadani/EFE. Photos of Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate by Shevaun Williams. Photo of Kaija Saariaho by Maarit Kytöharju. Photo of Gabriela Lena Frank, courtesy of the artist. Photo of Olivier Messiaen by Olivier Mille for the documentary La Liturgie de Cristal.