The After Party:
four post-soviet portraits
The Old Church
Monday, November 13 • 7:30 pm
1422 SW 11th Ave, Portland, OR 97201
••
The Metropolitan Youth Symphony MYSfits join cellist Nancy Ives and Fear No Music for our next main-stage program, featuring the music of four post-soviet composers: Galina Grigorjeva, Galina Ustvolskaya, Franghiz Ali Zadeh, and Sofia Gubaidulina.
Composers (left to right): Galina Grigorjeva, Franghiz Ali Zadeh, Sofia Gubaidulina, Galina Ustvolskaya
PROGRAM
Galina Grigorjeva - Molitva
Nancy Ives, cello; Raúl Gomez Rojas,
Kenji Bunch and members of the MYSfits ensemble
Sofia Gubaidulina - String Quartet
Inés Voglar Belgique & Keiko Araki, violins;
Amanda Grimm, viola; Nancy Ives, cello
- INTERMISSION -
Galina Ustvolskaya - Piano Sonata No. 5
Jeff Payne, piano
Franghiz Ali Zadeh - Mugam Sayagi for String Quartet
Inés Voglar Belgique & Keiko Araki, violins;
Amanda Grimm, viola; Nancy Ives, cello
Clockwise left to right: Nancy Ives, cello; Jeff Payne, piano; Keiko Araki, violin; Kenji Bunch, viola; Inés Voglar Belgique, violin; Monica Ohuchi, piano
Program Notes & Artist Biographies
Molitva
Galina Grigorjeva
PROGRAM NOTES FROM KENJI BUNCH, artistic director of FNM
About Molitva, the composer writes: “Prayer (Molitva) was written for the David Oistrakh festival held in Pärnu in 2005 and the original version was written for alto saxophone and organ. Thereafter, new arrangements were written for different instrumental combinations. Victor Hugo wrote the following in his novel Toilers of the Sea: “Prayer, that mighty force of the soul, an incomprehensible force. Prayer addresses itself to the magnanimity of the Shades; prayer regards mystery with eyes themselves overshadowed by it, and beneath the power of its fixed and appealing gaze, we feel the possibility of the great Unknown unbending to reply.” Orthodoxy holds the position that prayer can be both verbal as well as ‘soulful.’ We generally give our preferences externally. In Orthodoxy, laudatory prayer is paramount, and a eulogy to God sounds like this at the end when the following words are said: “And let Your name be blessed.”
BIOGRAPHY
Galina Grigorjeva (b. 1962) is a Ukrainian-born composer living in Estonia. After early somposition studies at the Odessa Conservatory, she graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and moved soon after to Estonia, where she has lived and worked since the mid 1990s. Her work has moved progressively toward a focus on the Slavic spirituality of the Eastern Orthodox Church and in finding innovative ways to capture the haunting textures of early eastern European choral polyphony. Like fellow Estonian Arvo Pärt, the appearance of tonal simplicity in her work disguises a depth of detail and nuance in its notation and performance.
String Quartet No. 4
Sofia Gubaidulina
PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER
What interested me especially in this piece was how the "real" arises from the "unreal": (1) The normal play of arco or pizzicato from the transparent sounds achieved by the playing of a plastic ball on the strings, (2) the "real" playing of the quartet physically present on stage from the "unreal" play of the same performers on pre-recorded tape, and (3) the real essence of the light part from the unreal (creatively speaking) white and black light. (Black and white, after all, represent the absence of light. Color loses its reality within them.)
Three trinities resulted: (1) the sound of the quartet and its two recorded hypostases, (2) the real form and its two recorded satellites, and (3) the creative reality of the play of light and its two ordinary (i.e., unreal) protagonists: complete light and complete darkness.
Is this a quartet? Or is some other title more appropriate here? However that may be, all of the details of the piece - both of its material essence and its compositional design - are derived from the basic idea: the birth of the "real genuine" from "unreal artificial" (and on no account the reverse). This was expressed best of all in the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot. If my composition were to be heard and perceived as a musical reaction to the creative world of this great poet, I would be content.
— Sofia Gubaidulina
BIOGRAPHY
Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina was born in the USSR on 24 October 1931 in Chistopol, a small town in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, not far to the west of the Ural Mountains which form the natural border between Europe and Asia. While the composer was still a child, she moved to the Tatar capital city of Kazan, and it was there she attended musical school, and then the Kazan Conservatory, studying piano and composition. Graduating in 1954, she transferred to the Moscow Conservatory, where she was taught by Nikolai Peiko and, later, Vissarion Shebalin, finally completing her studies in 1961.
After admission to the Composers’ Union, an essential step for anyone wishing to earn a living writing music in Soviet times, she became a freelance composer, surviving by writing children’s music and, more importantly, film scores. Music for cinema became her main source of income for the next 30 years.
The titles and character of her pieces made strikingly clear Gubaidulina’s fascination with religion, something which caused her trouble with the Soviet authorities, especially when her music was performed abroad. In 1980, she composed her first violin concerto, Offertorium (subsequently twice revised), for Gidon Kremer, who performed the piece widely across the world, thus garnering her international attention and commissions from many performers and orchestras in Western Europe, the USA and in Japan. In 1992, with the collapse of the USSR, she moved to a small village outside Hamburg, Germany, where she has lived ever since.
Over the years, Gubaidulina has been given many prizes, honours and awards, and in 2021, the year of her 90th birthday, there were celebrations of her life and work, in many countries of the world. Her greatest wish, however, remains that she should continue to write music, quietly and at home.
Sofia Gubaidulina is published by Boosey & Hawkes/Sikorski.
Reprinted by kind permission of Gerard McBurney/Boosey & Hawkes
Piano Sonata No. 5
Galina Ustvolskaya
PROGRAM NOTES FROM KENJI BUNCH, artistic director of FNM
To call Ustvolskaya’s Piano Sonata no. 5 (1986) an eccentric work is at once both an understatement and a distinction that diminishes the unusual nature of her other five piano sonatas. Simply put, there is no compromise with Ustvolskaya’s music, and in listening to it, one has the distinct sensation that her unique musical vocabulary will not invite us in so much as demand we sit at attention. In Sonata no. 5, she explores the full range of the keyboard from low clusters of sound to piercing piccolo-like stabs in the extreme high register, all the while obsessively returning to one nots in the middle of the keyboard (Db). The work is organized in 10 short movements, none longer than three minutes in duration, and played mostly without pause. As is evident immediately, Sonata no. 5 also explores a wide spectrum of dynamics, from ppppp to fffff.
BIOGRAPHY
Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) grew up in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and studied at the conservatory there, where notably she was the only female student of Dmitri Shostakovich, who was a strong champion of her work. Despite his support, her music from an early age featured an almost overwhelming amount of dissonance that ran afoul of the Soviet government and was not allowed to be published and publicly performed until her mid-40s. Gradually, her music became more and more influenced by a deep spirituality, though the jarring, angular dissonance and heavy blocks of sound never wavered in intensity. Once described as “the lady with the hammer” by a Dutch critic, her music slowly became more known to Western audiences after the fall of the Soviet Union, and today she is recognized as one of the most important composers of the late and post-Soviet era.
Mugam Sayagi for String Quartet
Franghiz Ali Zadeh
PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER
Kronos encouraged me to use the Azeri musical tradition of Mugami – a secret language used in the 16th century to disguise emotions discouraged in Islam. Through Mugami, the ecstatic longing of a man for a woman could be expressed as the love of God.
It begins as a meditation, in darkness – only the cello is lit, trying to wake the wold with the call to prayer. The cello is the composer’s voice – a woman. Nothing changes, and you don’t believe it can. It goes on and on, then suddenly, it explodes, in a flash! Concealed passion breaks out in wild dancing, or in virtuosic cadenzas. The violin plays an unbounded song of love where the soul flies high into the sky. It’s a competition among them all – who can be more perfect? Then comes the finale, and an end. The cello is alone again, intoning the sunset prayer. The sound of the triangle echoes a myriad of stars.
– Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, 1993
BIOGRAPHY
Franghiz Ali-Zadeh comes from Baku in Azerbaijan. In 1999/2000, she spent a year working in Berlin as a DAAD scholarship holder, and since then has divided her time between Germany and Azerbaijan. In November 2000, she was awarded the honorary title "People's Artist of the Republic of Azerbaijan" and in 2008 she was named 'UNESCO Artist for Peace'.
Performers such as Mstislav Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, Evelyn Glennie, Ivan Monighetti, David Geringas, Julius Berger, Wu Man, Alexander Ivashkin, Alim Qasimov, Vladimir Tonkha, Elsbeth Moser and many others have championed her music. Ensembles and orchestras from all over the world enthusiastically perform her works.
In a unique way, Ali-Zadeh succeeds in fusing the musical traditions of her home country with modern Western compositional techniques. Her music, so rich in contrasts, reflects lightness and vehemence, playful light-heartedness and brooding thoughts, delicate transparency and strong colours, quiet simplicity and turbulent virtuosity as well as meditation and ecstasy. So, on the one hand, the composer reflects the religious and cultural rift between East and West and national traditions, while on the other hand she translates her own personal tensions into music, tensions that have arisen through the course of her life.
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes/Sikorski.
A special THANK YOU to Ronni Lacroute for sponsoring this concert season.
Fear No Music is also supported by grants from: New Music USA, Oregon Arts Commission, Multnomah County Cultural Coalition, and Regional Arts and Culture Council.