Preview Recital:
Selecting the Program

Programming a concert is like curating a gallery in a museum. There is merit to doing a monolithic collection of 300 sketches by Pablo Picasso (as I saw at the Centre Pompidou in Paris last month) or assembling the complete works of Van Gogh from his final 72 days (as I saw at Musée d’Orsay last month). That will be what the Saairaho Festival is: the first-ever “collection” of Saariaho’s chamber music.

However, I think that programming is most interesting when we see what came before, what happened at the same time, and even what came afterwards. Picasso is more interesting next to Braque, I think, and we get a clearer sense of his work when we put it beside Kandinsky and Miro.

Contextualizing the music of Saariaho is that way is surprisingly easy; she studied at ICRAM, which is basically like a post-doc research college for composition in Paris, right across from the Centre Pompidou. Composers there are particularly interested in using technology to explore sound the way that infrared and ultraviolet measurement tools help to explore color. These composers are generally labeled as “spectralists.”

So I’ve been thinking about presenting these 3 solo cello (+ occasional electronics) programs leading up to the festival. The recitals would be “Horizontals” from wine vocabulary, in which each concert focuses on a specific year - in this case, 1976, 1992, and 2017.

1. Works from 1976

Karlheinz Stockhausen | In Freundschaft - 16'
Klaus Huber | Transpositio Ad Infinitum - 6'
Tristan Murail | C’est un Jardin… - 4'

–Intermission–

Brian Ferneyhough | Time & Motion Study II - with electronics - 16
Kaija Saariaho | Petals (from 1988) - with electronics - 9'

Total - 51'

Saariaho studied with Huber and Ferneyhough at ICRAM. Stockhausen and Murail are “spectralist” composers adjacent to Saariaho. Murail would eventually become a composition professor at Columbia.

2. Works from 1992

Jonathan Harvey | Ricercare Una Melodia (from 1984) - with electronics - 6'
Kaija Saariaho | Près - with electronics - 18'

–Intermission –

Tristan Murail | Attracteur étranges - 8'
Jonathan Harvey | Chant - 4'
Kaija Saariaho | Spins and Spells (from 1997) - 8'

Total - 44'

Another appearance of Murail and two works by a British spectralist, Jonathan Harvey, who attended ICRAM in the 80’s.

3. Works from 2017

Kaija Saariaho | Dreaming Chaccone (from 2013) - 5'
Georg Freederich Haas | Blumenwiese 6 - 25'

–Intermission–

Kaija Saariaho | 7 Butterflies (from 2000) - 11'
Alireza Farhang | A Capella V - 12'
Eric Moore | Postlude - 5'

Total - 58'

Two more solo works, plus a fourth spectralist, Georg Frederich Haas (who studied at ICRAM and took over teaching at Columbia when Murail retired in 2013), and a fantastic piece that draws as much from Saariaho as it does from Kodaly’s Solo Sonata by Alireza Farhang (who also studied at ICRAM), plus my Homage to Saariaho (YouTube) at the end (I visited the outside of ICRAM so basically I fit in).

Likely, I don’t have time to prepare all three, so I’ve created a condensed (but dense) program concept and started to work on it. I’ve performed Chant, A Capella V and Postlude before; the other works are new.

A Triple Horizontal with Saariaho’s Près

Huber | Transpositio Ad Infinitum (1976) - 6'
Saariaho | Près for cello and electronics, mvt. 1 (1992) - 7'
Murail | C’est un Jardin… (1976) - 4'

~ Pause ~

Harvey | Chant (1992) - 4'
Saariaho | Près for cello and electronics, mvt. 2 (1992) - 3'
Murail | Attracteurs Etranges (1992) - 8'

~ Pause ~

Farhang | A Capella V (2017) - 12'
Saariaho | Près for cello and electronics, mvt. 3 (1992) - 8'
Moore | Postlude (2017) - 5'

Total - 61'

At any rate, I wanted to share the expanded program with you so that you can explore on your own if you have the opportunity; hopefully it was interesting to see how the final program came about.