BSO The Maestra Begins
BSO at Strathmore
Thursday, September 27, 2007 at 8:00 PM
Music Center at Strathmore

Fearful Symmetries
John Adams
Born February 15, 1947, in Worcester, MA
Now living in Berkeley, CA

Tonight’s concert contrasts serious and
sometimes deeply troubled music—
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony—with music
that is pure, playful entertainment—
John Adams’ Fearful Symmetries. And
Adams, who is being featured in a twoweek
residency with the BSO to open
the 2007-08 season, says that just such a
dichotomy between high seriousness and
sheer fun can be found throughout his
own oeuvre.

He explains that his pieces seem “to
alternate between two opposing polarities:
along with every dark, introspective,
‘serious’ piece, there must come the
Trickster, the garish, ironic wild card. ...
I don’t consciously choose to manipulate
these polarities. It’s more like being
engaged in a kind of psychic balancing
act, dark alternating with light, serene
alternating with jittery, earnest alternating
with ambiguous. ... What may strike
others as strange is that I value my trickster
pieces just as highly as my more serious
ones. I certainly put just as much effort
into them, and in many ways the free air
that they breathe has allowed me to try
new and even radical ideas that I might
otherwise have routinely suppressed.”

BSO audiences can witness this
dichotomy for themselves, for in 1988,
the same year he completed Fearful
Symmetries, Adams also wrote The
Wound-Dresser, an orchestral song cycle
also being performed this season by the
orchestra at the Meyerhoff Symphony
Hall in Baltimore. There is absolutely
no levity in that moving work, which
sets poetry by Walt Whitman about his
grueling experiences nursing wounded
soldiers during the Civil War.

Fearful Symmetries is actually more
closely allied with the composer’s groundbreaking
opera Nixon in China, the
so-called “CNN opera” that turned
Richard Nixon’s 1972 diplomatic journey
to China into a compelling lyric drama
with a radically new sound. Fresh from
its successful yet controversial first
performances in the U.S. and Europe, Adams then turned to a new work for
orchestra. “Working in the almost too
beautiful confines of the American
Academy in Rome, I found that ideas
were slow to arrive. When they did make
an appearance, I was surprised to see
that they were in much the same vein as
the Nixon music. Apparently I had more
to say in that particular style, although
this time it would be purely instrumental
music, and the sound would be largely
dictated by the Nixon orchestra, a kind
of mutated big band, heavy on brass,
winds, synthesizer, and saxophones.
To this ensemble I added for Fearful
Symmetries a keyboard sampler playing
sampled percussion sounds.” The new
work bore a considerable sonic resemblance
to a popular concert piece Adams
had already derived from Nixon in
China, The Chairman Dances, but it is
considerably longer—lasting almost half
an hour—and more complex. It is also
completely abstract music, having nothing
to do with the Nixon plot.

The work’s striking title is drawn from
William Blake’s poem “Tyger” in his
Songs of Innocence and of Experience. But
Adams admits that the title really came
after the work was well underway and
that he wasn’t thinking of Blake or tigers
at all. “The music is, as its title suggests,
almost maddeningly symmetrical. Fourand
eight-bar phrases line up end to end,
each articulated by blazingly obvious
harmonic changes and an insistent chugging
pulse. ... It’s clearly an example of
what I call my ‘traveling music,’ music
that gives the impression of continuous
movement over a shifting landscape. In
this piece, however, a cityscape is doubtless
the more appropriate analogy, as the
sound has a distinctly urban feel.”

In the superb new book The John
Adams Reader from Amadeus Press,
Adams explains his concept of “traveling
music,” comparing the relationship
between musical space and geographical
space. “Let’s say: you could be going over
... the central part of the continent in an
airplane at 30,000 feet and looking down
and seeing hundreds of miles of the
Earth’s surface, but what you see moves
very, very slowly. Or you could be in a
speeding car going 80 miles per hour
while the road in front of you changes almost every second, with new objects—
houses, trees, signs, people, along the
side—whizzing past your field of vision
at breakneck speed. The formal idea
with my music is that something appears
on the event horizon, and then it increases
in importance as it begins to dominate
the screen, and then it passes you and it’s
gone. Meanwhile, several other events
have arisen and are at various stages of
moving towards you. I think that is the
essence of how I compose, and it’s the
way I experience my own music.”

Indeed Fearful Symmetries takes the
listener on a hypnotic, viscerally thrilling
trip. Its pulsing repetitions of little
rhythmic, harmonic, or melodic ideas in
constant flux suggest the minimalism of
Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but this
is minimalism with a much faster rate
of change and much more musical complexity.
Here Adams plays lavishly with
counterpoint, reveling, he says, in the
“joy of making many events coexist
effortlessly.” The busy independence of
the various instrumental lines contributes
mightily to the rhythmic power of this
high-energy music.

But above all, it is the sheer sound of
this music that is most intoxicating: the
suave nightclub crooning of saxophones,
the acid snarl of the brass, the gamelan
woodwinds and percussion, the funky
ambidexterity of the synthesizer.
According to Adams, “It mixes the
weight and bravura of a big band with
the glittering, synthetic sheen of techno
pop (samples and synthesizer) and the
facility and fitness of a symphony orchestra.”
This is music that tells us to simply
kick back and enjoy.

Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor
Gustav Mahler
Born July 7, 1860, in Kalischt, Bohemia
Died May 18, 1911, in Vienna

On February 24, 1901, Gustav Mahler
had his first close brush with death. It
had been a typically frenetic day: he had
conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in
the afternoon, then moved on to the
opera house in the evening to lead a
production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
Later that night, he suffered a violent
hemorrhage, and his sister Justine found
him lying in a pool of blood. He recalled: “While I was hovering on the border
between life and death, I wondered
whether it would not be better to have
done with it at once, since everyone
must come to that in the end.” But
Mahler’s constitution was still robust
and, after surgery, he recovered rapidly.
His body had chosen life over death, and
in the following summer his creative
spirit made the same choice for his Fifth
Symphony.

After this crisis, the summer of 1901
turned out to be the most productive
and serene of Mahler’s career. Because
of his nonstop conducting career from
September through May, only the summer
months were available to him for
composing. In 1901, a new summer
home awaited him: a splendid villa he
had had built in the village of Maiernigg
on the shores of the peaceful Wörtersee
in southern Austria. Up a steep path in
the woods was his little composing cottage
or Häuschen, meagerly furnished
with a piano, a worktable, and a chair
or two. Here that summer he created the
central Scherzo and the first two movements
of his new symphony, as well as
eight orchestral songs, including three
of his great Kindertotenlieder (“Songs of
the Death of Children”) and three other
songs to poems by Friedrich Rückert.
Not surprisingly, the songs fertilized the
symphony, and some of their themes
and moods infiltrated its movements.

Before he was able to return the next
summer to complete his Fifth Symphony,
another major event occurred. That
winter, he met and married the alluring
Alma Schindler, 19 years his junior.
As he returned to Maiernigg in June
1902, he brought his new bride, already
expecting their first child. Yet, as Alma
Mahler ruefully recalled, the routine at
the Mahler Villa changed hardly at all
to accommodate their new status: everything
still revolved around providing
Mahler with peace and solitude for his
composing. Nevertheless, new feelings
of joy surely influenced the symphony’s
conclusion as he created the gorgeous
string-and-harp Adagietto (which his
friend the Dutch conductor Willem
Mengelberg believed was a love song to
Alma) and the exuberant Rondo-Finale.

With the Fifth, Mahler realized he had created something “completely unlike
anything I have written before.” In the
broadest terms, it marked a break from
the three preceding symphonies, which
incorporated sung texts into the symphonic
fabric. Though they still contain
melodic quotes from his songs, Mahler’s
three middle symphonies, the Fifth
through Seventh, are exclusively instrumental
compositions. The composer’s
development and transformation of
themes become more imaginative, his
contrapuntal interweaving of lines more
complex, his harmonies more daring, and
his orchestration leaner and often harsher.

Yet, although the Fifth Symphony
contains no external program, it still
intimately reflects the patterns of its
creator’s inner and outer life. Only Mahler
could juxtapose such wildly conflicting
moods as this work contains. In the words
of Deryck Cooke, “The symphony might
almost be described as schizophrenic, in
that the most tragic and the most joyful
worlds of feeling are separated off from
one another, and only bound together
by Mahler’s unmistakable command
of large-scale symphonic construction
and unification.”

The symphony’s five movements are
grouped into a larger structure of three
sections. The death-obsessed movements
one and two, which share much of the
same thematic material, form Part I.
Part II is the Scherzo, the work’s longest
movement. Part III comprises the
Adagietto as a slow introduction and the
Rondo-Finale.

Movement one is a funeral march—a
favorite Mahlerian trope—in the dark
key of C-sharp minor; its various sections
are linked by the searing solo-trumpet
fanfare that opens it. After the fanfare,
the strings in low register introduce the
principal theme, a dry-eyed lament over
the muffled tread of the cortege. When
the fanfare returns the third time, it is
immediately engulfed by a wild outburst
of grief from the violins in the first Trio
section. Later a second Trio takes a different
emotional approach with consoling,
very Viennese music in the strings. But
this too builds to a climax of pain Mahler
labels “Klagend” (“Lamenting”). The
music sinks downward in exhaustion
while a frail flute whispers the fanfare.

Marked “Stürmisch bewegt”—“with
stormy motion”—movement two is the
angry working out of the themes and the
emotions largely kept under control in
the march. The strings open with a wild
paroxysm of grief, burdened by harmonic
and rhythmic struggle, that seems an
intensification of the march’s first Trio
music. Then cellos introduce a contrasting
mood, a marvelous, long-spun theme that
expands the consoling music of the march’s
second Trio. Above them, high woodwinds
tremble and cry out an important
motive: a wailing melodic leap of a ninth
falling back to the octave. These themes
and moods battle for control until an
exalted brass chorale in the key of D
major seems to proclaim triumph. But it
is too soon, and the music soon flickers
out in woodwind cries.

The symphony now undergoes a
schizophrenic mood swing from tragedy
to comedy. This buoyant dancing
Scherzo in D major—the symphony’s
harmonic goal—was the first music
Mahler created for the work, and it portrays
the untroubled pastoral pleasures
of his retreat at Maiernigg. The scherzo
music itself is in the style of the Austrian
country dance known as the Ländler, but
its naiveté is contradicted by the composer’s
sophisticated rhythmic cross-play.
It is succeeded by a first Trio, a lilting
Viennese waltz for the strings, and a
second Trio, in which the principal
horn—which has an important solo role
throughout this movement—creates
gentle, dreamlike music with strings and
woodwinds. Listen for a haunting passage
of horn calls and distant answers as
if from across a mountain valley. Cooke
calls this Scherzo “a dance of life, evoking
all the bustle of a vital existence as
opposed to the concentration on the
inevitability of death in the funeral
marches.” For the rest of the symphony,
Mahler chooses life over death.

In Part III, the beautiful Adagietto for
strings and harp serves as slow introduction
to the Finale. Often excerpted, its
sensuous beauty speaks for itself. Written
in the first summer of his marriage, it is,
if not a love song to Alma, surely an
expression of the peace of his composing
retreat.

The ebullient Rondo-Finale in the new home key of D major follows
immediately. Solo woodwinds introduce
a collection of folksong-like themes
that will propel the movement, then
the French horns spin out the mellow
rondo refrain. At this time, Mahler was
entranced with J. S. Bach’s contrapuntal
wizardry, and this finale overflows with
exuberant fugato passages. When the
horns and low-register violins introduce
the subject of the second fugato section,
we may not immediately recognize the tune, but the strings soon confirm it as
the Adagietto’s yearning theme, now sped
up and dancing with all the rest. Themes
are combined in contrapuntal merriment
until the brass proclaims a chorale similar
to the premature one in movement two.
Now the time is right to celebrate the
triumph of life over death, as the music
romps to a joyous conclusion.