How the West Was Won: Andriessen, Lim, and Adams
(December 2007)November was a busy month for new music lovers in California, with three world premieres by our composers.
On November 18, Grant Gershon led the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the world premiere of Louis Andriessen’s The City of Dis, part one of the Dutch composer’s forthcoming five-part “film opera,” La Commedia. Part two of the opera, Racconto dall’Inferno, was partially performed in Los Angeles in 2005, during the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” festival.
Scored for voices and large ensemble, Andriessen’s The City of Dis refers to the burning city in Hell, visited by Dante in the Inferno section of his epic poem. The composer has also added a reference to The Ship of Fools, bearing humanity through life as man wastes himself on hedonistic pleasures. Sung in Latin, Italian, German, and English, the “brilliantly disquieting” work exemplifies Andriessen’s “fully developed sense of irony and wondrous appreciation of, and perhaps fondness for, folly.” (The Los Angeles Times)
The Netherlands Opera will present the world premiere of La Commedia in full on June 12, 2008, as part of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, in a production by filmmaker Hal Hartley. A U.K. premiere will follow on October 1, 2008.
Liza Lim’s Shimmer Songs, for harp, three percussion, and string quartet, was commissioned and premiered by the San Francisco New Music Players on November 19. The piece reflects Lim’s Australian heritage, referencing the idea of “shimmer” as indicator of another spiritual reality which, she says, “is a key aspect of so much Aboriginal visual arts culture.”
The Mercury News (San Jose) called Lim “a hot commodity in the new music world” and characterized the piece as “mesmerizing,” saying, “A harp is modified to sound like a gong. It reverberates through gentle waves of percussion, released by rhythm instruments that are bonged, rattled and scraped (think samba) while a string quartet sighs and rustles, whistles and buzzes by implementing Lim’s meticulously-notated choreography of unorthodox bow-strokes and fingerings.”
The following week in Palo Alto, Stanford Lively Arts presented the world premiere of John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony, performed by Alarm Will Sound. The work was co-commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts, The Carnegie Hall Corporation, and San Francisco Ballet.
A raucous and virtuosic ride for fifteen players, Son of Chamber Symphony “bursts with the technical prowess and cogent wit of the composer’s finest efforts.”(San Francisco Chronicle) The Mercury News (San Jose) described it as “a porcupine of a piece, tougher [than Adams’s Chamber Symphony] and driven by spiky rhythms, chasing its own tail down trails that diverge, crisscross, vanish and re-emerge with a yelp. … It feeds off the frenetic quality of the earlier piece and uses a near-identical instrumentation, with five strings, small wind and brass choirs, multiple percussionists (on conga, castanets, cowbell, bongos, pedal bass drum and more), piano and occasional keyboard samplings.”
The Los Angeles Times predicted “an assured future” for Son of Chamber Symphony, which will receive its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 28, and its choreographic premiere with San Francisco Ballet in April.
For information on programming any of these works, please contact composers.us@boosey.com
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