Program & Residency Schedule
Thursday, September 22, 2011
7:30 PM
Papillons Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
One John Cage (1912 –1992)
Dream John Cage
INTERMISSIONPiano Sonata No. 2 “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860” Charles Ives (1874-1954)
I. Emerson
II. Hawthorne
III. The Alcotts
IV. Thoreau
STEPHEN DRURY, piano
Pianist and conductor STEPHEN DRURY has performed throughout the world with a repertoire that stretches from Bach to Liszt to the music of today.
He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and from Arkansas to Seoul. A champion of contemporary music, he has taken the sound of dissonance into remote corners of Pakistan, Greenland, and Montana.
In 1985 Stephen Drury was chosen by Affiliate Artists for its Xerox Pianists Program and performed in residencies with symphony orchestras in San Diego, Cedar Rapids, San Angelo, Spokane, and Stamford. He has since performed or recorded with the American Composers Orchestra, the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Radio Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Boston Philharmonic, the Boston Pops, the Springfield (Massachusetts) and Portland (Maine) Symphony Orchestras, and the Romanian National Symphony. Drury was a prize-winner in the Carnegie Hall/Rockefeller Foundation Competitions in American Music, and was selected by the United States Information Agency for its Artistic Ambassador Program and a 1986 European recital tour. A second tour in the fall of 1988 took him to Pakistan, Hong Kong, and Japan. He gave the first piano recitals ever in Julianehaab, Greenland, and Quetta, Pakistan. In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Drury a Solo Recitalist Fellowship which funded residencies and recitals of American music for two years. The same year he was named “Musician of the Year” by the Boston Globe.
Stephen Drury’s performances of music written in the last hundred years, ranging from the piano sonatas of Charles Ives to works by György Ligeti, Frederic Rzewski and John Cage have received the highest critical acclaim. Drury has worked closely with many of the leading composers of our time, including Cage, Ligeti, Rzewski, Steve Reich, Olivier Messiaen, John Zorn, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, Christian Wolff, Jonathan Harvey, Michael Finnissy, Lee Hyla and John Luther Adams. Drury has appeared at the MusikTriennale Köln in Germany, the Subtropics Festival in Miami, and the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo as well as at Roulette, the Knitting Factory, Tonic and The Stone in New York. At Spoleto USA, the Angelica Festival in Bologna, and Oberlin Conservatory, he performed as both conductor and pianist. He has conducted the Britten Sinfonia in England, the Santa Cruz New Music Works Ensemble, and the Harvard Group for New Music. In 1988-89 he organized a year-long festival of the music of John Cage which led to a request from the composer to perform the solo piano part in Cage’s 1O1, premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in April 1989. In 2009, Drury performed the solo piano part in the Fourth Symphony of Charles Ives, again with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under Alan Gilbert. In 1999, Drury was invited by choreographer Merce Cunningham to perform onstage with Cunningham and Mikhail Barishnikov as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Drury has also appeared in New York at Alice Tully Hall as part of the Great Day in New York Festival and on the Bargemusic series, in Boston with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and as soloist with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and with the Seattle Chamber Players in Seattle and Moscow at the International Music Festival “Images of Contemporary American Music.” In 2003, he performed and taught at the Mannes College of Music’s Beethoven Institute; in 2005, he returned to Mannes to play and teach at the Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance. That summer, he was also the piano faculty at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute. In 2006, Drury’s performance of Frederic Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” at the Gilmore Keyboard Festival was a sensation; he was invited back in 2008 to premiere Rzewski’s Natural Things with the Opus 21 Ensemble at the Gilmore Festival in Michigan and Carnegie’s Zankel Hall in New York as part of the composer’s 70th birthday. That same summer Drury appeared at Bard College’s SUMMERSCAPE Festival, and at the Cité de la Musique in Paris for a week-long celebration of the music of John Zorn. In 2007, he was invited to León, Mexico to perform music by Rzewski, Zorn, and Cage at the International Festival of Contemporary Art.
Drury has commissioned new works for solo piano from John Cage, John Zorn, John Luther Adams, Terry Riley, and Chinary Ung with funding provided by Meet The Composer. He has performed with Zorn in Paris, Vienna, London, Brussels, and New York, and conducted Zorn’s music in Bologna, Boston, Chicago, and in the UK and Costa Rica. In March of 1995, he gave the first performance of Zorn’s concerto for piano and orchestra Aporias with Dennis Russell Davies and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra. Later that same season he gave the premiere of Basic Training for solo piano, written for him by Lee Hyla. Drury has recorded the music of John Cage, Elliott Carter, Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Colin McPhee, John Zorn, John Luther Adams and Frederic Rzewski, as well as works of Liszt and Beethoven, for Mode, New Albion, Catalyst, Tzadik, Avant, MusicMasters, Cold Blue, New World and Neuma.
Stephen Drury has given master classes at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Mannes Beethoven Institute, and Oberlin Conservatory, and in Japan, Romania, Argentina, Costa Rica, Denmark, and throughout the United States, and served on juries for the Concert Artist Guild, Gaudeamus and Orléans Concours International de Piano XXème Siècle Competitions. Drury is artistic director and conductor of the Callithumpian Consort, and he created and directs the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at New England Conservatory. Drury earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, and has also earned the New England Conservatory’s select Artist Diploma. His teachers have included Claudio Arrau, Patricia Zander, William Masselos, Margaret Ott, and Theodore Lettvin. He teaches at New England Conservatory, where he has directed festivals of the music of John Cage, Steve Reich, and Christian Wolff.
Stephen Drury is represented in North America by ARIEL ARTISTS. Please visit www.arielartists.com for more information.
ARIEL ARTISTS is an artist management company designed and staffed by classical musicians. Founded in Boston in 2009, our mission is to connect three groups of people: a roster of the highest-caliber concert artists chosen for their original performance visions, concert presenters who value truly fascinating, world-class performers and who showcase incredible performance projects, and audiences who long and deserve to hear and experience the kind of mastery, achievement, and vision that these artists live and breathe. Like Shakespeare’s Ariel, from The Tempest, the artists on the Ariel Artists roster have the “spirits to enforce” and the “art to enchant.”
Program Notes
As disparate as the musical styles of the three composers on tonight’s program are, Robert Schumann, Charles Ives, and John Cage had much in common. Each defined new capabilities for the piano. Each was an articulate and important writer about music. And nquiryone was an “ivory tower” musician; rather, each was a generous advocate for his own musical community.
Pianist, composer, and critic Robert Schumann had a major impact on European musical culture in the 1830s and into the 1850s, mediating between the progressive and conservative musical factions of his generation. His works for piano are particularly influential in expanding the instrument’s range and techniques—his response to the rapid technological advances of the instrument (especially the cast iron frame) at this time. His 1831 Papillons (“butterflies”) is the first of several piano cycles he composed. These cycles, including the later Carnaval and Davidsbundlertänze, are among his most influential compositions.
In Papillons, a six-measure introduction is followed by twelve movements (“thought splinters” according to critic Gottfried Weber). Each is unrelated to the preceding one, except for the finale, in which the theme of the first movement returns. The movements’ fragmentary quality, with their blurred beginnings and endings, may be linked to Schumann’s interest into the nature of metamorphosis during this period.
John Cage wrote for the piano throughout his life and was often the first performer of his piano works. Early in his career he developed the concept of “prepared piano” which extended the timbre of the piano by applying objects such as paper or rubber washers to, or among, the strings. But most of his piano works, such as those on tonight’s program, use the conventional piano. Choreographer Merce Cunningham commissioned “Dream” in 1948, and this brief work reflects the structure of the Cunningham’s dance.
Cage wrote “One” in 1987. It is the first in a series of “number pieces” (indicating the number of performers) that absorbed Cage’s attention until his death in 1992.
Commentator Rob Haskins writes that “one quality that unites all of these pieces is their amazing emphasis on ‘ordinary life’--all that performers need to have is devotion both to the act of producing a sound and to hearing the sounds around them. Overly dramatic display has no place in these late works, but curiosity and awareness do. This exuberance for everyday life and for discovery is at the very heart of Cage's artistic legacy.”
Charles Ives composed his “Concord” Sonata largely between 1911 and 1915, but the work uses material that dates back to 1902, and Ives continued revisions into the 1940s. He writes in depth about this work and about his philosophy of music in “Essays Before a Sonata” which he published in 1920. The Sonata was published in the same year, but not premiered until 1938. This began a “discovery” of the music of a composer whose work, up until this time, was largely unknown to the musical public.
Ives writes in his Essays that the “Concord” Sonata is a group of four pieces (a sonata in name only) that convey his "impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Massachusetts of over a half century ago. This is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne." The Emerson movement may be said to present the conscious mind, the Alcott movement, innocence, and the Thoreau movement reflects and synthesizes the other movements.
For Ives, music is a re-creation in sound of life itself. And while the “subject” of this sonata is the Transcendentalists of the period 1840 to 1860, Ives’ highly individualistic musical resources draw on the sounds of his own youth in New England at the end of the 19th century. The listener will recognize certain styles from this era such as brass band music, ragtime, and Protestant hymns, as well as European classical music (most notably, an elongated version of the “oracular” opening to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony). These references, usually transformed throughout the musical texture, are emblematic of experiences Ives thought to be universal. Overall, Ives’ music is intensely expressive, and its “substance” continually overrides the constraints of “style”.
Notes by Mary DuPree