New music really matters to Scott Yoo

Regular guest and New York Times Critic’s Choice winner Scott Yoo comes to Winnipeg for a very good reason: he likes working with our orchestra! He’s passionate about new music, and our audience enjoys the challenges presented by fresh work.

Musically, one of our more interesting concerts last season was the one in which Yoo featured works by American composers Jeffery Cotton and John Adams. Yoo’s brief for this January concert is to introduce you to Serge Arcuri, the MCO’s new composer-in-residence.

Against the Québec composer’s Episodes, Yoo will juxtapose two 20th-century titles, including his celebrated Boston orchestra’s namesake.

Quebec’s Serge Arcuri:
MCO Composer-in-Residence

Anne Manson went to the Canadian Music Centre in Montreal to read scores and listen to music, and she found a composer-in-residence!

"I loved his music, which is very sophisticated, with slightly more European and French influences than Anglo composers, who write with a more American sound. Many composers I looked at were like this, but I was drawn to Serge’s incredible skill and sophistication. His work is not as well known as it should be; he is one of Canada’s best and most skilled composers."

Pre-concert event

Guitar Nouveau ensemble from Tec Voc High School;
Jerry Semchyshyn, director; 6:45 pm

Programme

Serge Arcuri
Episodes

Frank Martin
Petite Symphonie Concertante

Richard Strauss
Metamorphosen, for 23 solo strings

Concert sponsor: CN Rail

Scott Yoo

After beginning his musical studies at age three, Scott Yoo performed Mendelssohn's violin concerto with the Boston Symphony at age twelve. He received first prize in the 1988 Josef Gingold International Violin Competition, the 1989 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, and the 1994 Avery Fisher Career Grant. After graduating with honours from Harvard University, Mr. Yoo founded the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, conducting the ensemble in its series at Jordan Hall in Boston, and more than ninety performances on tour.

Scott Yoo has collaborated with eminent artists Sarah Chang, Edgar Meyer, Benita Valente, and Dawn Upshaw. He is currently Music Director and Principal Conductor of the 39-year old Festival Mozaic, which presents over thirty orchestral, choral and chamber music concerts and events each year on California's Central Coast.

This year Yoo will make his Carnegie Hall debut with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and will be touring Europe with the Britten Symphonia and jazz pianist Brad Mehldau. He will continue his collaboration with Brad Mehldau at Disney Hall in January 2011, an event produced by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Society.

As a guest conductor, Mr. Yoo has led the Colorado, Dallas, Indianapolis, San Francisco and Utah Symphonies. He regularly conducts the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and led their Elliott Carter Festival as well as numerous subscription series concerts. He has conducted the New World Symphony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and the orchestras of Columbus, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Kansas City, Louisville, Mexico City, Nashville, and Phoenix. In Europe, he conducted the City of London Sinfonia, Orchestre de Bretagne, Odense Symphony and the Estonian National Symphony. He made his debut with the Seoul Philharmonic in 2007 and his debut with Yomiuri Nippon Orchestra in Tokyo in 2009. Scott also continues his longstanding relationship with the MCO.

A proponent of the music of our time, Mr. Yoo has premiered 59 works by 30 composers. With Metamorphosen, he has recorded Mark O'Connor's American Seasons for Sony Classical, John Harbison's chamber orchestra works with soprano Dawn Upshaw for Archetype (nominated for a 1999 National Public Radio Performance Today Award) and song cycles of Earl Kim with sopranos Benita Valente and Karol Bennett for New World (named a 2001 ‘Critics Choice' by the New York Times). His recent recording projects include the complete orchestral works of Earl Kim with the RTE National Orchestra of Ireland for Naxos, and works of Mozart and Elliott Carter for Bridge Records.

Mr. Yoo studied violin with Roman Totenberg, Albert Markov, Paul Kantor and Dorothy DeLay, and conducting with Michael Gilbert and Michael Tilson-Thomas.

Serge Arcuri

Anne Manson went to the Canadian music Centre in Montréal to read scores and listen to music, and she found a Composer-in-Residence! "I loved his music, which is very sophisticated, with slightly more European and French influences than Anglo composers, who write with a more American sound. Many composers I looked at were like this, but I was drawn to Serge's incredible skill … his work is not as well-known as it should be; he is one of Canada's best and most skilled composers."

Serge Arcuri was born near Montréal in 1954. After studies in composition and analysis with Gilles Tremblay, Arcuri studied electroacoustic techniques at the University of Montréal with Yves Daoust and Marcelle Deschenes. In 1981 he was awarded the Sir Ernest MacMillan Award by the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada for his orchestral work Agregats (1970) and was also a winner in two categories in the 1984 CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers.

Arcuri received commissions from the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec in 1985, for Prologue for small ensemble and tape, and from the Association des orchestres de jeunes du Québec in 1986, for Brumes for concert band and Amers for orchestra. Other works with electronics include Bandoneon for accordion and tape, premiered in 1990 by Joseph Petric, and Migrations, premiered by Josée Poirier in 2003, which uses flocks of geese as its sound source. Arcuri has continued to write acoustic music including Fragments (1997) for solo piano, in which he uses source material from the bells of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Church in Montréal. He has also written soundtracks for such films as the 1995 thriller Liste Noire.

Arcuri's music strives for visceral impact, as well as a connection to the real world and to myth — one of the reasons he turned to electroacoustic composition. His first CD, Les Méandres du rêve, is a starting point for this exploration: he kept a log of his dreams for use in the composition process, though he later relied only on their themes. His interest in myth appears in both Murmure and La Porte du sable, the former being inspired by various tribal creation myths, the latter by the parables from The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun. Regarding Fragments, the composer demonstrates his intuitive approach by saying "… I do not fully understand (the work) but recognize (it) as a certain kind of resonance."

Arcuri was the president of Association pour la création et la recherche électroacoustiques du Québec 1985-1988, and the production head for its Printemps électroacoustique. He is a member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community and of the Canadian League of Composers, and an associate of the Canadian Music Centre.

Épisodes
Serge Arcuri

The composer has written the following note:

This piece was commissioned by l'Ensemble Baroque de Montréal, a group that specialises in baroque repertoire. It was premiered by them under Joel Thifault in 2001. It evokes a story in three contrasting episodes where the solo violin is the hero. The project was to create a programmatic piece inspired by Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, in a more modest way. The first movement is solemn to agitated. The second is ecstatic, and the third is more frantic, but ends calmly.

Petite symphonie concertante
Frank Martin

The parents of this distinguished Swiss composer wanted him to become a scientist, but his love of music proved too strong to deny. After musical studies with private instructors, he served as a teacher and performer on piano and harpsichord, all the while composing his distinctive music. It brings together elements of French and German styles, and combines traditional practices with contemporary ones. Relocating from Switzerland to the Netherlands in 1946, he used that country as a base for travelling to the many international centres where his music was being performed and appreciated.

His catalogue includes operas, incidental music for plays, choral works, chamber pieces and numerous compositions, large and small, for solo instruments and orchestra. The array of featured instruments in the concertos is quite a broad one, ranging from piano, violin, flute, and cello to saxophone, trombone, viola d'amore and harpsichord. He also composed a concerto featuring no fewer than seven wind instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet and trombone.

The Petite symphonie concertante is another multiple-instrument concerto, though as its name implies it combines the richness and depth of a symphony with the virtuoso display dimension of a concerto. This hybrid form enjoyed its heyday during the era of Haydn and Mozart, who each composed at least one example.

Martin created this work in 1944 and 1945. The premiere took place on 17 May 1946 in Zurich, Switzerland, with Paul Sacher (who had commissioned it) conducting the Basel Chamber Orchestra. Other works that he requested included major scores by Stravinsky, Bartók, Honegger, Hindemith, Lutoslawski and Strauss (Metamorphosen). Martin's new piece won immediate success. He later transcribed it for chamber orchestra alone, but the original concertante version is much more striking.

The solo line-up of harp, piano and harpsichord, which Sacher had suggested, made for many intriguing individual and collective sonorities. Martin most often used the solo instruments as a unit rather than as separate voices. They are joined by an orchestra of strings, divided into two halves. The piano had replaced the harpsichord as the dominant keyboard instrument around the dawn of the nineteenth century. By the time Martin composed this piece (and the Harpsichord Concerto of 1951-52), it had made something of a comeback after 150 years of virtually total neglect.

The opening movement consists of a slow introduction for orchestra alone, mysterious and passionate by turns. Martin included a tone-row constructed through the serial method of Arnold Schoenberg. He chose not to follow the method slavishly, injecting his own expressive personality into it. The introduction segues into a brisk Allegro section in which the soloists are heard for the first time. They figure prominently in an expansive lyrical interlude before the music re-establishes its forward-pressing momentum. The soloists, unaccompanied, launch the delicate, introspective second movement. The strings inject warmth. The music rises in volume and animation as the witty, march-like finale follows on without a break.

Metamorphosen
Richard Strauss

On 2 October 1943, the opera house in Munich, Germany, Strauss's home city, was destroyed by Allied bombs. The composer was moved to write as follows to his biographer, Willi Schuh: "The burning of the Munich Hoftheater, the place consecrated to the first performances of (Wagner's) Tristan and Meistersinger, in which 73 years ago I heard (Weber's) Der Freischütz for the first time, where my good father sat for 49 years as first horn in the orchestra … this was the greatest catastrophe which has ever been brought into my life, for which there can be no consolation and in my old age, no hope."

Immediately afterwards, he sketched a few bars of music that he labelled "Mourning for Munich." He put them aside, after they reminded him of a waltz he had composed in 1939 for a documentary film about Munich, one that was never released. He revised the waltz by adding a sombre, minor-key section inspired by the destruction of the opera house, and christened the resulting concert work Munich: A Memorial Waltz.

In September 1944, conductor Paul Sacher commissioned a new work from him. The following February, the Semper Opera House in Dresden (where eight Strauss operas had premiered, as well as three of Wagner's) suffered a similar fate to Munich's. Then the Vienna State Opera was heavily damaged on 12 March 1945. The very next day, Strauss turned back to the 1943 ‘mourning' sketch and used it as the point of departure for Metamorphosen (subtitled ‘a study for 23 solo strings'), the work that he composed in response to Sacher's commission. He completed it on 12 April, mere weeks before the end of the war.

It is a deeply emotional, passionately eloquent lament, reflecting his distress over not only the destruction of the opera houses, but what they represented to him: the grand German culture that had nurtured him. For a time, he considered releasing this very personal work for performance only after his death. In the end he relented. Sacher conducted the premiere on 25 January 1946, leading the Collegium Musicum of Zurich, Switzerland.

Strauss scored Metamorphosen for 10 violins, five violas, five cellos, and three double basses. It falls into three broad, continuous sections. The centre panel is quick in tempo and impassioned in mood. Strauss book-ended it with slow sections, the last even slower and more desolate than the first.

"Themes proliferate and interweave in seamless counterpoint," author Michael Kennedy has written. "These themes, particularly the first, sound familiar to the listener, not because they are especially reminiscent of earlier Strauss themes, but because they seem to carry echoes of Wagner, Brahms, and others. Only at the very end do we realize what the principal theme really is, when Strauss quotes the opening of the Funeral March from Beethoven's ‘Eroica' symphony, and writes underneath it in the score ‘In Memoriam!' He later said that not until he reached this point did he realize that this was the theme that had been haunting him from the start. In no other work of his is the writing for strings more eloquent, more moving, and technically more accomplished. The thematic allusions are so subtle yet so poignant that we seem to be hearing a funeral hymn for the whole of German music."