Red Poppy Music Home

Michael Gordon

premiere performance: City Symphonies trilogy

On May 26, Spoleto Festival USA presented three powerful City Symphonies by Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison, performed for the first time as a trilogy by the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra.

Gotham (2004) for New York, Dystopia (2008) for Los Angeles, and El Sol Caliente (2015) for Miami Beach celebrate the character of place and how it evolves, pairing image and music to share the energy, chaos and beauty of urban life.

Gordon describes the trilogy:

The City Symphonies are part of an ongoing series of orchestra/film collaborations I have created with filmmaker Bill Morrison. How to capture the aura of a city? The sound and images converge as a biography of both time and place. In Morrison’s signature style, film is both newly shot and drawn from archival black-and-white footage. Decaying celluloid allows for an ongoing commentary of hidden and revealed imagery. The orchestra sings the city’s song in fractured tunes, rhythmic pulses, and harmonic echoes.

At the start of our creative process Bill shows me one of his rare finds — a snippet of decayed footage — and we go from there. In Gotham, the subject is New York City, where we both live. In Morrison's film, images of old New York begin with a surprising scene of a man tending sheep. As the camera pulls back, the surrounding urban landscape is revealed, and we see that he is tending sheep in what is now the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The opening music is spare, a solo violin and piano. As the visuals expand the sound extends to the all strings, winds, and brass.

Gotham begins with the Sheep Meadow, but moves on to capture the intense city that we love. Hyper pulses and blaring glissandos in the trumpets contribute to the industrial howl. Gotham is not a tourist’s view of New York – gritty sidewalks, manhole covers, and construction activity fill the screen. It’s noisy. It’s dirty. It’s exciting. Why do we live here? We took a fresh look.

Dystopia is Los Angeles. We start on the highway at high speed and don’t slow down. I explore the lines between clear harmony and dissonance, pleasure and trouble. There is a sense of a phonograph record speeding up and slowing down — you hear the beauty, but in an altered state. Disparate sounds and musics poured into a great blender. Bill's visual material combines new footage shot in modern Los Angeles and well as historic footage of the city. Included is the first film ever shot in LA ,’'South Spring Street, Los Angeles,'' by Thomas Edison. We are in 1898. There are horse drawn carriages. As we enter current LA, Morrison offers a rare glimpse into the under-belly of the city as he traces the vast machinery of waste processing, a by-product of our hyper-consumerism.

The third City Symphony, El Sol Caliente, celebrates the 100th anniversary of Miami Beach. The players are arranged on the stage in an architectural pattern to allow for sound to move spatially through the orchestra. These sound waves ebb and flow, connecting to the natural forces that envelope this tiny vibrant strip of land. Newsreels, tourism clips, home movies, as well as Bill’s newly shot footage, fill the screen. Bathing beauties, hurricanes, families vacationing, and art deco hotels are there to capture our imagination of this iconic destination. We see men wrestling alligators and manatees, symbolically wresting South Florida from the swamp and into the world's imagination as a tourist destination. Yet this fragile barrier island lying off a continental peninsula at sea level will probably not survive this century without a drastic intervention on its behalf. How will we wrest Miami Beach from nature in the 21st century?

David Lang

world premiere: 'prisoner of the state'

June 6-8, 2019, music director Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic gave the world premiere of David Lang's new, fully-staged opera, prisoner of the state, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer.

>>>Click here to watch arias from prisoner of the state<<<

prisoner of the state was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam's De Doelen, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Germany's Bochum Symphony Orchestra, Belgium's Concertgebouw Bruges and Sweden's Malmö Opera. This premiere concludes the Philharmonic's three-week-long Music of Conscience initiative, and their 2018/2019 season.

prisoner of the state tells the story of a woman who disguises herself as a prison guard to rescue her husband from unjust political imprisonment, with a libretto by the composer that refers self-consciously to Beethoven’s Fidelio. Lang was inspired to write the piece by what he felt to be the unrealized potential in Fidelio’s narrative. Lang explains:

The most problematic observation about Fidelio is that at the end, after the prisoner is freed, I always want the townspeople to sing about freedom, or about tyranny, or about justice, and instead they sing about how great it is for a wife to save her husband. ‘All who have such a wife, join our song!’ And of course, only one of the prisoners has been freed. What happens to the rest of them? For the past forty years I have wanted to make my own version of Fidelio, so I could think more closely about it, and maybe answer some of these questions for myself.

Lang started by constructing a libretto through an analytical process that involved assessing, appraising, and rearranging the content of the original work:

I began with the various versions of Beethoven's libretti, filtering out the things I felt were dramatically confusing or off the topic, searching for moments that I thought were odd or interesting, or which gave me opportunities to go a little deeper into environment or character or narrative...My process was to simplify the parts of the libretto that I kept, and to comment on them, by adding language from other, outside texts that might deepen our understanding of the original. For example, after The Governor orders The Jailor to help him kill The Prisoner I have added an aria that is a paraphrase of Machiavelli’s famous dictum ‘It is better to be feared than to be loved.’ To describe the prison’s structure I have added a paraphrase of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s theory behind the invention of the ‘modern’ prison, modern being 1791. To The Prisoner’s aria I have added references to Rousseau, to the Guards’ definition of punishment I have added references to Hannah Arendt.

While constructing his libretto, Lang also drew upon historical definitions of criminality that may have informed Fidelio:

I was curious just who Beethoven thought prisoners were in 1805, when Fidelio premiered. I found a list from 1805 of those crimes for which English prisoners could be transported to Australia and I used part of it as a way for the prisoners to introduce themselves to us.

The production fully incorporates the orchestra into the staging, another move inspired by Lang's experiences with Fidelio.

In the late 1970s I saw two performances of Fidelio within a few months of each other. One was a fully staged production, in an opera house, with costumes and sets and drama, and the other was in a concert hall, with an orchestra on stage, singers in concert clothes, and performed oratorio style. I enjoyed them both, but what I most noticed was how the format and location of each performance influenced how I thought about the piece. In the opera house I paid more attention to the opera’s narrative, while in the concert hall I paid more attention to the opera’s ideas.

With prisoner of the state, Lang seeks to bridge that gap, uniting the narrative and the ideas into the inseparable whole of its performance.

This season has already seen three other operatic premieres from Lang. His 2016 work the loser had its West Coast premiere in February, presented by LA Opera, starring Rod Gilfry. This past October, Lang and librettist Sibyl Kempson premiered true pearl, a site-specific work commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. true pearl is an opera made specifically to be seen and heard in the museum’s Tapestry Room. true pearl ran as a self-guided audio tour from October 4 until January 13, 2019 and will return to the Gardner in future seasons. Also in October 2018, the mile-long opera, co-created by Lang and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, premiered October 3 on the High Line in New York City.

The word “opera” connotes a world of traditions, telling a certain kind of story, with a certain kind of singer, in a certain kind of venue. Lang seeks to overcome these connotations. He believes that opera's core power is to deepen the humanity of a character through music, and that that power can be applied anywhere, with any kind of story, or singer, or venue. With radically unconventional approaches to set, audience, and narrative, Lang’s operas are intended to push the genre into places it has not yet gone. Other recent works include the whisper opera (2013) where the performers are so quiet that no two audience members hear the same narrative, and anatomy theater (2016), which Lang based upon a historically accurate 18th-century criminal dissection.

Lang is known for his vocal music, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning the little match girl passion, and for writing narrative music for dance, films, and theatrical productions, as well as his own operas. He earned Golden Globe, Critics' Choice, and Academy Award nominations for his music for Paolo Sorrentino's film "Youth". Their collaboration began when Sorrentino used Lang's music in his Academy Award-winning "La Grande Bellezza". Most recently, Lang scored Paul Dano's directorial debut, "Wildlife", as well as Patty Jenkins’s limited TNT series "I Am the Night".

Julia Wolfe

world premiere: Fire in my mouth

January 24–26, the New York Philharmonic premiered Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my mouth, commissioned by the orchestra, Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley; the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Wolfe's music focuses on the garment industry in New York City at the turn of the century — specifically the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 garment workers, most of them young, female immigrants. The immersive, multimedia performance features the Philharmonic debut of the 36 women of the chamber choir The Crossing, directed by Donald Nally, as well as the Philharmonic debut of Jeff Sugg as scenic, lighting, video, and projection designer.

Wolfe has previously explored American labor history with Steel Hammer, her reimagining of the John Henry legend, and Anthracite Fields, an oratorio about Pennsylvania coal miners. Anthracite Fields was presented by the Philharmonic and won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music, while the recording with the Bang on a Can All Stars and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street was nominated for a 2016 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Wolfe was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 2016.

The title of Wolfe's new work comes from labor activist Clara Lemlich Shavelson, who, when looking back on her radical youth said, “Ah, then I had fire in my mouth,” though the titular fire also refers to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Wolfe is using her signature intensive research methods, drawing on oral histories, speeches, interviews, and historical writings. The music will capture the roar of hundreds of sewing machines and the language of protest to recreate the world of women working in New York garment factories in the early 20th century. Throughout the current season, Wolfe has workshopped Fire in my mouth with the Philharmonic's three commissioning partners. Campus-wide discussions about history, music, and creative writing have been an important part of Wolfe's writing process.

Wolfe's previous works on labor history have had extended lives beyond the premieres, with a Steel Hammer stage show and a performance of Anthracite Fields in coal country. The Steel Hammer stage show, which toured the country in the fall of 2015 before ending at BAM's Next Wave Festival, incorporated the work of four American playwrights into the original art ballad. At the same time, Wolfe took the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street to Pennsylvania coal country to share Anthracite Fields with the community who inspired her, in a benefit concert for the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton. To date Anthracite Fields has also been performed in Philadelphia, PA; New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Berkeley, CA; Champaign-Urbana, IL; Trenton, NJ; Copenhagen, Denmark; Athens, Greece; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Prague, the Czech Republic. It will be performed at The Kennedy Center on March 13, 2018, and at Carnegie Hall on December 1, 2018.