Ravinia 2023 Issue 4

JASON QUIGLEY (KAHANE) JASON QUIGLEY (KAHANE) I was a child, mom and dad had traded the guitars, flutes, and beaded jackets for careers in clinical psychology and classical music re- spectively. But they remained devoted listen- ers of folk music. Growing up, it was routine for dad to put on a Joni Mitchell record when he took a break from practicing a concerto by Mozart or Brahms. That collision of musical worlds might help to explain the creative path I’ve followed, in which songs and storytelling share the road with the Austro-German mu- sical tradition. “That tradition comes to me through the mu- sic I heard as a child, but also through ances- try. My paternal grandmother, Hannelore, escaped Germany at the tail end of 1938, arriv- ing in Los Angeles in early 1939 after lengthy stops in Havana and New Orleans. For her, there was an unspeakable tension between, on the one hand, her love of German music and literature and, on the other, the horror of the Holocaust. In this piece, I ask, how does that complex set of emotions get transmitted across generations? What do we inherit, more broadly, from our forebears? And as a musi- cian caught between two traditions, how do I bring my craft as a songwriter into the more formal setting of the concert hall? “The first movement, Guitars in the Attic , wrestles specifically with that last question, the challenge of bringing vernacular song into formal concert music. The two main themes begin on opposite shores: the first theme, poppy, effervescent, and direct, undergoes a series of transformations that render it in- creasingly unrecognizable as the movement progresses. Meanwhile, a lugubrious sec- ond tune, first introduced in disguise by the French horn and accompanied by a wayward English horn, reveals itself only in the coda to be a paraphrase of a song of mine called ‘Where Are the Arms.’ That song, in turn, with its hymn-like chord progression, owes a debt to German sacred music. A feedback loop emerges: German art music informs pop song, which then gets fed back into the piano concerto. Gabriel Kahane (2022) “ My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg picks up the thread of intergenerational memory. Grandma didn’t actually know Berg, but she did babysit the children of Arnold Schoen- berg, another German-Jewish émigré, who, in addition to having codified the twelve-tone system of composition, was Berg’s teacher. Why make something up when the truth is equally tantalizing? I suppose it has some- thing to do with wanting to evoke the slip- periness of memory while getting at the ways in which cultural inheritance can occur in- directly. When, shortly after college, I began to study Berg’s Piano Sonata, his music—its marriage of lyricism and austerity; its supple, pungent harmonies; the elegiac quality that suffuses nearly every bar—felt eerily familiar to me, even though I was encountering it for the first time. Had a key to this musical lan- guage been buried deep in the recesses of my mind through some kind of ancestral magic, only to be unearthed when I sat at the piano and played those prophetic chords, which, to my mind, pointed toward the tragedy that would befall Europe half a dozen years after Berg’s death? “In this central movement, the main theme is introduced by a wounded-sounding trumpet, accompanied by a bed of chromatic harmony that wouldn’t be out of place in Berg’s musical universe. By movement’s end, time has run counterclockwise, and the same tune is heard in a nocturnal, Brahmsian mode, discomfited by interjections from the woodwinds, which inhabit a different, and perhaps less guileless, temporal plane. “To close, we have a kind of fiddle-tune ron- do, an unabashed celebration of childhood innocence. In March of 2020, my family and I were marooned in Portland, OR, as the world was brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic. Separated from our belongings— and thus all of our daughter’s toys, which were back in our apartment in Brooklyn—my ever-resourceful partner, Emma, fashioned a ‘vehicle’ out of an empty diaper box, on which she majusculed the words VERA’S CHICK- EN-POWERED TRANSIT MACHINE. (Vera had by that point developed a strong affinity for chicken and preferred to eat it in some form thrice daily.) We would push her around the floor in her transit machine, resulting in peals of laughter and squeals of delight. In this brief finale, laughter and joy are the prevail- ing modes, but not without a bit of mystery. I have some idea of what I have inherited from my ancestors. What I will hand down to my daughter remains, for the time being, a won- drous unknown. “ Heirloom is dedicated with love, admira- tion, gratitude, and awe, to my father, Jeffrey Kahane.” SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953) Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, op. 100 Scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two B-flat, E-flat, and bass clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, wood block, snare drum, tambourine, bass drum, tam-tam, harp, piano, and strings When Germany commenced its brutal bom- bardment of Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in 1941, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 (“Leningrad”) became the musical symbol of Soviet defiance and resolve. Shostakovich completed this orchestral monument as Nazis slowly strangled the city and its citizens. The first performance took place on a radio broadcast transmitted not only within the city, but also far beyond the limits of Lenin- grad. International outcry over the 972-day Nazi siege escalated when newspapers world- wide printed a picture of Shostakovich in his fireman’s gear protecting the Leningrad Con- servatory from fires set by incendiary bombs. Equally powerful musical and visual imagery surrounded the ending of German hostilities in 1945. Another composer, Sergei Prokofiev, stood at the center of attention. Pianist Svi- atoslav Richter remembered what happened when Prokofiev walked onstage at the Mos- cow Conservatory’s Great Hall to conduct the premiere of his new symphony on January 13, 1945: “When Prokofiev had taken his place on the podium and silence reigned in the hall, artillery salvos suddenly thundered forth. His baton was raised. He waited, and began only after the cannons had stopped.” Moments later, the Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, op. 100, commenced. The premiere marked a major landmark in the composer’s career. Approximately 15 years had elapsed since his previous symphony, but Prokofiev emerged from this slumber with a work of epic grandeur: “The Fifth Symphony is the culmination of an entire period in my work. I conceived of it as a symphony on the Serge Prokofiev greatness of the human soul.” In fact, Russian scores occasionally nickname this symphony the “Russian giant.” Audience members burst into applause at the work’s first performance, stirred by its intense (but perhaps unintend- ed) patriotic aura. Prokofiev conceived his symphonic monu- ment to “the greatness of the human soul” with extreme swiftness during the summer of 1944 and completed orchestration by the end of November. “Many of the themes are two or three years old: I put them down in my theme book and put them aside. When the time came, I was ready to work very fast on the symphony—I wrote the whole thing in a month on a three- or four-line score. Then I stopped for a month or two and took it up again, and in another month I finished it.” The Andante begins with a pastoral theme reminiscent of Mahler’s lush symphonic panoramas. Woodwinds pass this lyrical tri- ple-meter melody to the strings. Later, the flute and oboe introduce a gentle contrasting theme in 4/4 meter that the string instru- ments soon take over. The development offers occasional flashes of Prokofiev’s meandering chromaticism and mocking rhythmic ges- tures. Otherwise, richly expressive post-Ro- mantic writing predominates. The coda builds to a grandiose conclusion. Prokofiev’s sardonic musical wit emerges full- blown in the brash Allegro marcato . Shifting tonal planes in the opening clarinet melody contrast starkly with the violins’ mechanical staccato eighth-notes. In the central section, the clarinet introduces another expressive character in its supple melody, although fragments of the opening theme periodical- ly reappear in a slower tempo. A varied re- statement of the initial theme rounds out the movement. In the Adagio , triplets in the strings (com- bined with the tuba) establish a haunting background for the duple rhythms of the clar- inet and bass clarinet melody. This rhythmic conflict reinforces the movement’s restless, tormented character. The Allegro giocoso be- gins deceptively, with a tranquil introduction culminating in a passage for divisi cellos. The violas then begin a repeated-note pattern that develops into an accompaniment figure be- neath a spry clarinet melody. Prokofiev em- ploys this theme as the refrain in a spacious rondo finale. One grand, prolonged crescen- do climaxes in the fortissimo final chord. –Program notes © 2023 Todd E. Sullivan RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 39