NEC Symphony + Hugh Wolff: Esmail, Thompson, Shostakovich

Reena Esmail | RE|Member (2021)

Program note

(excerpted from Seattle Symphony 2021 premiere notes by Raff Wilson)
For Reena Esmail RE|Member is a chance to explore what the world has gone through: “When I first spoke to Maestro Dausgaard about this piece, we thought it would be opening the 2020 season. We spoke about that feeling of returning to the concert hall after the summer – a change of season, a yearly ritual. But as the pandemic unraveled life as we knew it, the ‘return’ suddenly took on much more weight.”
     Now the piece charts the return to a world forever changed… writing the musicians back onto a stage that they left in completely uncertain circumstances, and that they are re-entering from such a wide variety of personal experiences of this time.”
     I wanted this piece to feel like an overture, and my guides were two favorites: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Bernstein’s Candide. Each is breathless and energetic, with pockets of intimacy and tenderness. Each contains many parallel universes that unfold quickly. Each has beautiful, memorable melodies that speak and beckon to one another. I strove for all of this in RE|Member.”
     It is a multifaceted title, and by happy coincidence also allowed Esmail to ‘sign’ the work with her initials, RE: “I only noticed that after the fact! This piece connects two meanings of the word ‘remember’. Firstly, the sense that something is being brought back together. The orchestra is re-membering, coalescing again after being apart. The pandemic will have been transformative: the orchestra is made up of individuals who had a wide variety of experiences in this time. And they are bringing those individual experiences back into the collective group. There might be people who committed more deeply to their musical practice, people who were drawn into new artistic facets, people who had to leave their creative practice entirely, people who came to new realizations about their art, career, life. All these new perspectives, all these strands of thought and exploration are being brought back together.”
     “And the second meaning of the word: that we don’t want to forget the perspectives which each of these individuals gained during this time, simply because we are back in a familiar situation. I wanted this piece to honor the experience of coming back together, infused with the wisdom of the time apart.”

Joel Thompson | An Act of Resistance (2022)

Program note

“If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.” Many consider this oft-used saying to be true as it relates to physical fitness, artistic skills, and even mental fortitude. Given the ubiquitous divisiveness and turmoil in the world over the last few years, it seems that this adage may also have other applications. Maybe I'm naive, but I think our current condition can be diagnosed as a severe deficiency in empathy— our world is lacking the strength to love. We haven’t been using it, so we’ve lost it.
     This dearth in empathy is so pervasive that is now the new norm. People pride themselves in their rigid opposition of even listening to someone of differing viewpoints in a spirit of openness. So I decided to write a piece that would help me, and hopefully others, rebuild the strength necessary to love deeply, genuinely, and passionately.
     This piece is essentially a battle between selfishness and empathy—pride v. love—and because one is easier than the other, the victor is clear towards the end of the piece. It is important that the decision to perform the music that follows “the end” remains a choice for each individual member of the ensemble.
     Asking orchestral musicians to put down their instruments and stand up and sing is risky. The act requires a certain vulnerability. It can be perceived as cheesy; It can elicit negative reactions. Only a few people may choose to do it, and therefore be lonely. It can be uncomfortable. But such is the love that is required to truly change our current circumstance.
-- Joel Thompson

INTERMISSION

Dmitri Shostakovich | Symphony No. 5 in D Minor

Moderato
Allegretto
Largo
Allegro non troppo

Program note

At the beginning of 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich was regarded as one the biggest musical talents in the Soviet Union. He had achieved success remarkably young: his First Symphony, premiered when he was 19, had been performed internationally, and a year later he won honorable mention as a pianist in the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. His Second and Third Symphonies were avant-garde experiments that shrewdly praised the October Revolution and pleased the critics. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) was hailed as a masterpiece. By 1936 it had received 180 performances in Russia and had been produced New York and London. But everything changed on January 28, 1936 when an unsigned article entitled “Chaos, not Music” appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda. Stalin (certainly no music connoisseur) had seen the opera and was not pleased. He made sure this scathing review declaring the music “screaming and neurotic…coarse, vulgar and primitive” was published. This was a powerful warning to all creative artists that Modernism and avant-garde ideas were forbidden by the regime. For Shostakovich personally it was cataclysmic. Fellow composers rushed to denounce him; his music was suddenly unplayable. At this time, Stalin ruled by pure fear: people were routinely arrested and even executed on trumped-up charges. No one was immune from criticism; offending the wrong people could bring ruin. As the writer Isaak Babel noted, “a man could talk freely only with his wife and even then only at night, with the blankets pulled over their heads.” Fearful, Shostakovich withdrew his Fourth Symphony (already in rehearsals) and retreated into silence. It is no exaggeration to say that from this moment on, Shostakovich lived in fear of arrest and kept a packed suitcase ready in case of a midnight knock on the door. This is the context in which his Fifth Symphony was created. Subtitled “The Creative Reply of a Soviet Artist to Justified Criticism,” it premiered a year and a half after the Pravda review. An immediate and enormous success, it helped rehabilitate the composer in the eyes of the regime.
        But with this symphony Shostakovich began a lifelong cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. The aim was to invent a musical language that could speak truth to power without offending the party-appointed hacks who passed judgment on creative work. The music had to avoid excessive modernism and dissonance; melodic and harmonic language had to be based in traditional tonality. On one hand, it needed some degree of optimism to reflect the official view of Soviet society, but on the other, it had to reflect the darkness of that troubled time to anyone inclined to hear such a message. In this respect, the symphony is brilliant. The tone is at turns angry, tragic, and melancholy. Brief glimpses of light shine through, but the pervasive mood is somber. The finale ends with a powerful coda in D major, but its intent is ambiguous. Originally thought to be fast and jubilant, it is now often performed more slowly, with an unrelenting, even punishing sense of grim power. Shostakovich himself quietly changed the metronome mark from quarter = 184 to eighth = 184 for later published editions. Years after Stalin’s death, Shostakovich was quoted saying, “I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in my Fifth Symphony. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.’”
        Further evidence of the work’s hidden meaning can be found in a song Shostakovich wrote in 1936, between the publication of the Pravda review and the premiere of the Fifth Symphony. Shostakovich chose a politically safe poet in Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), but the text is:

Rebirth

A barbarian artist with his lazy brush
Blackens the painting of a genius
And senselessly covers it with
His own illegitimate drawing.

But with the passing years, the alien colors
Flake off like threadbare scales;
The creation of the genius emerges
before us in its former beauty.

Thus vanish the delusions
From my tormented soul
And in it appear visions
Of former innocent times.

The melody of the first line of Shostakovich’s song is identical to the opening of the Fifth Symphony’s finale – Stalin as “the barbarian artist” defacing artwork. And the music for “Thus vanish the delusions” is identical to the harp’s gentle B-flat major figuration, a rare moment of quiet beauty just before the finale’s grim coda begins. The message is clear to those who notice: art will survive the worst tyranny, and the tormented artist will find peace.                                                                         
– Hugh Wolff

NEC Symphony

First Violin
Maxwell Fairman
Isabella Sun
Ravani Loushy Kay
Abby Reed
Ashley Tsai
Tzu-Ya Huang
Sofia Skoldberg
Jeremiah Jung
Yirou Zhang
HyoJeong Hwang
Eleanor Markey
Aidan Daniels
Ian Johnson
Ryan Tully

Second Violin
Emma Servadio
Tara Hagle
Ava Kenney
Yeji Hwang
Minkyung Kang
Audrey Weizer
Kevin Kang
Joseph Zamoyta
Joanna Peters
Kearston Gonzales
Lauren Ahn
William Kinney

Viola
Jessi Kaufman
Dylan Cohen
John Turner
QingHong He
Jiashu Yin
Harry Graham
Pharida Tangtongchit
Rita Hughes Söderbaum
Haobo Bi
Nina Dawallu
Charlie Picone
Yu-Heng Wang

Cello
Ethan Murphy
Zanipolo Lewis
Jonathan Fuller
Ching-yu Tseng
Nahar Eliaz
Amelia Allen
Eric Schindler
Angela Sun
Yuxin Du
Austin Topper
Phoebe Chen

Bass
Dennis McIntyre
Lawrence Hall
Brian Choy
Isabel Atkinson

Flute
Sadie Goodman ‡
Amelia Kazazian *
Anna Ridenour §
Nina Tsai *

Piccolo
Amelia Kazazian
JouYing Ting ‡

Oboe
Yuhsi Chang §   
Rebecca Mack *
Victoria Solis Alvarado ‡
    (* offstage)  

Clarinet
Evan Chu *   
Yi-Ting Ma ‡
Cole Turkel §

E-flat Clarinet
Evan Chu

Bass Clarinet
Cole Turkel

Bassoon
Daniel Arakaki
Yerin Choi
Seth Goldman §
Zilong Huang ‡
Wilson Lu *

Contrabassoon
Wilson Lu

French horn
Elijah Barclift
Mattias Bengtsson §
Mauricio Martinez ‡
Xiaoran Xu *  

Trumpet
Maxwell DeForest * 
Sebastián Haros §
Alexandra Richmond ‡

Trombone
Becca Bertekap ‡ 
Devin Drinan   
Allie Klaire Ledbetter §
Alex Russell *

Bass Trombone
Jason Sato §
Shin Tanaka *‡

Tuba
Hayden Silvester

Timpani
Mark Larrivee §
Rohan Zakharia ‡ 
Mingcheng Zhou *

Percussion
Isabella Butler *
Mark Larrivee ‡
Eli Reisz
Rohan Zakharia §   
Mingcheng Zhou

Harp
Jingtong Zhang

Piano, Celeste
Yali Levy Schwartz

Principal players
* Esmail
‡ Thompson
§ Shostakovich