NOVA Chamber Music Series
Fry Street Quartet, music directors
Libby Gardner Concert Hall
concert program
with notes by Jeff Counts
Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror)
Arvo Pärt
(b. 1953)
Hasse Borup violin | Cahill Smith piano
Like authors and painters, composers lucky enough to have long careers occasionally undergo periods of reinvention. These re-orderings of the creative self can be subtle, or they can be total. For Estonian musician Arvo Pärt, it was the latter. Pärt spent the first ten years of his composing life immersed in the dogma of 20th-century modernism. But by 1968, he had begun to question his place in that school of thought. The questioning went deeper for him than simple idealistic estrangement. “I didn’t know at the time that I was going to be able to compose at all in the future,” he later recalled. Through intense study of Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, and religious orthodoxy, Pärt eventually developed a personal sound he called “tintinnabuli” (from the Latin for “little bell”) that manifests as a stripped-down, highly concentrated language with a great deal of spiritual purity at its core. Spiegel im Spiegel dates from 1978 and is one of the first (and best) examples of the composer’s new path. It is a stunning rumination on the concept of an “infinity mirror” (two mirrors facing one another to create an endless repetition of reflections), and a gentle musical juxtaposition of the molecular and the celestial.
You Are Free
Sarah Kirkland Snider
(b. 1973)
Caitlyn Valovick Moore flute | Lee Livengood clarinet
Hasse Borup violin | Louis-Philippe Robillard cello
Cahill Smith piano | Jason Nicholson marimba
American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider wrote You Are Free in 2015 on a commission from Grand Valley State’s New Music Ensemble. As part of an initiative called “Music in Their Words”, she was one of several musicians hired to compose a piece inspired by the actual recorded voice of another composer they admire. “I chose Arvo Pärt,” writes Snider in her program note for the work. “When I first encountered contemporary music, he was one of the living composers whose music genuinely moved me.” To meet the demands of the assignment for You Are Free, Snider chose an interview Pärt gave (rare for him) to the Icelandic pop icon Björk in the late 1990s. Their chat is an incredible cultural artifact. In it, the two artists discuss the distance between life and death in sound and how, as a composer, you can choose your place along that continuum. Björk also likens Pärt’s musical style to a dialogue between Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket. For Snider and her project, there was an “F major triad” embedded in the conversation, “undulating in marimba, piano and clarinet.” With that germ of an idea, she “tried to let the piece unfold relatively free of agenda or judgment, something I don’t often do.”
The following fragment of Björk’s interview with Arvo Pärt was incorporated into You Are Free:
ARVO PÄRT
Maybe it is because I need space for myself, even if I am working.
I think sound is a very interesting phenomenon. You can... Why the people like and are so influenced of music? They don’t know how strong the music influences us, good and bad.
You can kill people with sound.
And if you can kill, then you can... Maybe there is also this sound which is something opposite of killing.
BJÖRK
Yeah.
ARVO PÄRT
And the distance between these two points, it’s very big.
BJÖRK
Yeah.
ARVO PÄRT
And you are free.
You can choose.
Seen
Nathalie Joachim
(b. 1983)
Caitlyn Valovick Moore flute | Zachary Hammond oboe
Lee Livengood clarinet | Jennifer Rhodes bassoon
Jessica Danz horn
I. Mysterious Flowers
II. This Old House
III. Sleeping Baby
IV. Tiny Golden Bells
V. Empty Space
Nathalie Joachim’s biography credits her with an ability to “comfortably navigate everything from classical to indie-rock, all while advocating for social change and cultural awareness.” As a flutist, vocalist, composer, and educator, she has used her unique talents to make meaningful statements across a wide variety of styles and disciplines. According to Joachim herself, the wind quintet Seen (2021) is “inspired by the Kin series of visual artist Whitfield Lovell, which depicts individual portraits of unknown African Americans with ordinary everyday objects.” Lovell has said that “the importance of home, family, ancestry feeds my work entirely” and invites viewers of his work to “contemplate the markings the past has made – and continues to make – on who we are.” Joachim clearly finds affinity with this approach to creative responsibility. “Written for Imani Winds,” she continues, “this piece draws inspiration from ordinary objects in their own lives… Much like Lovell’s drawings, the work — a series of five short musical portraits — strives to present each player and object on the basis of their immediacy.” In the end, both Lovell and Joachim hope to give every viewer and listener “an opportunity to make sense of a small piece of a stranger’s past.”
- Pause -
Piano Quintet
Nikolai Medtner
(1880-1951)
Fry Street Quartet
Robert Waters, Rebecca McFaul violin
Bradley Ottesen viola | Anne Francis Bayless cello
Cahill Smith piano
I. Molto placido
II. Andantino con moto
III. Finale. Allegro vivace
Even the most well-travelled chamber music aficionado comes across composers they wish they knew more (or anything) about. There are names throughout the history of the art form that, for different but equally baffling reasons, resist the recognition and wealth they deserve. Nikolai Medtner was one such unseen flame, a man whose hard work and promise were never fully answered by the world. Rachmaninoff once dubbed his dear friend the “greatest composer of our time”, but even his endorsement was not enough. Medtner spent the last three decades of his life in obscurity and poverty. In addition to Rachmaninoff, contemporary pianists like Cahill Smith should be thanked for what little we do know about Nikolai today. The welcome evangelical efforts of people like Smith bring his forgotten catalogue to life in the 21st century, and they are gaining strength. The Piano Quintet (1949) was a 45-year project for Medtner and his last completed work. It was the noble summation of a promising career, made a bit tragic perhaps by the silence it received (and still receives) in return, but one that also gives weight to the generous pronouncement of his much more famous friend.
Please join us in the lobby following the concert for light refreshments with NOVA’s current and past artistic directors.
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