Program

Sonatas and Interludes

This concert celebrates a seminal work by one of the great radical voices in 20th century music, the composer who once said that his creative responsibility was ‘not the making of choices, but the asking of questions’. 
 
At one level, John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes resemble the two-part sonatas of the Baroque master Domenico Scarlatti. But it’s the differences that mark Cage’s work out as epoch-making: the mathematical relationships that govern the duration of each component part; the philosophical idea that each work began life, in Cage’s words, as ‘an empty container,’ and the way in which, for the first time, the piano itself became a container – for bolts, wedges, screws, plastic strips and other objects inserted between the strings, so that the instrument can be lyrical and percussive – and, thus ‘prepared,’ can sound both more and less like a piano.  
 
In this exceptionally stimulating evening, ANAM pianists will explore Cage’s complete Sonatas and Interludes, interspersed with readings from Cage’s prose, which is just as influential as his music. 

John CAGE Sonatas and Interludes

Timothy Young (ANAM Head of Piano) director/piano
ANAM Pianists

17 May
7pm
Rosina Auditorium 

Arithmetic of Sound

This exquisitely curated program is like a conversation with modernism. What does ‘modern’ music sound like? What makes it sound ‘modern’? How widely did its influence reach across the planet? At the head of the table is Debussy, and 13 of his keyboard preludes. You can hear the world of music breaking free of Romantic tradition in these pieces, as Debussy evokes sensations (The Sounds and Fragrances Swirl Through the Evening Air) and objects (Dead Leaves) with a glowing sonority that acted like a beacon to composers who followed: this is music both hazy and precise, mysterious and explicit.

Succeeding generations would take Debussy’s ability to evoke a vivid moment (or a remembrance of one) even further. In his very first piece, composed while Debussy was at work on his second book of Preludes, the 15-year-old Henry Cowell uses polytonality and clusters of chords to evoke the legendary Irish god of the sea in The Tides of Manaunaun. In Amores, by Cowell’s pupil John Cage, two percussion trios interact with prepared piano in a work exploring Cage’s conviction ‘that love is something that we can consider beautiful’. And with Debussy and Cage as two of his touchstones, the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu created many sublime pieces inspired by water, in which he explores the border between sound and silence in exquisitely fine timbres and textures.

Claude DEBUSSY Préludes
Henry COWELL The Banshee
Henry COWELL Aoelian Harp
Henry COWELL The Tides of Manaunaun
John CAGE Amores
John CAGE 4’33”
Torū TAKEMITSU Rain Tree
John CAGE Living Room Music

Paavali Jumppanen (ANAM Artistic Director) director/piano
Timothy Young (ANAM Head of Piano) director/piano
ANAM Pianists and Percussionists

18 May
3pm (The performance will last 2 hours and 10 minutes)
Rosina Auditorium 

Warm Winds by ANAM 

‘Every instrument is like a person sleeping, whom I must wake to life,’ Nielsen once said, and there is something enchanted about the opening of his Wind Quintet, in which the bassoon seems to bring the other instruments joyfully to life. Nielsen’s radiant work is joined by another classic of the wind ensemble repertoire in this program. ‘Mozart is sunshine,’ Dvořák used to tell his composition students, and his only wind serenade, inspired by Mozart’s examples, is suffused with warmth and light.

The work of the Finnish composer Sebastian Fagerlund is wonderfully eclectic – informed by the major figures of the 20th century, from Bartok to the minimalists – yet it has a voice and identity all its own. He describes the opening movement of his Octet as ‘rhythmically charged and energetic…creating new multilayered situations that emerge and unfold in the music.’

Christoffer Sundqvist took part in the world premiere of Fagerlund’s Octet in 2017 and is as renowned for his pedagogy as for his playing. Who better to bring this glowing program to life?

Carl NIELSEN Wind Quintet op. 43
Sebastian FAGERLUND Octet Autumn Equinox
Antonín DVOŘÁK Serenade for Winds op. 44

Christoffer Sundqvist director/clarinet
ANAM Musicians 
 

24 May
7pm (This performance will run for approximately 2 hours, including a 20-minute interval)
Rosina Auditorium 

That Moment In Time

The past is present and the future foretold in these emblematic works of the 20th century.

The small orchestra and sense of play in Stravinsky’s 1924 concerto might suggest a look back at the world of the Baroque Concerto Grosso or Mozartian serenade through cubist-shaped spectacles, but the dark colouring (thanks to the four horns), the restless interplay between piano and winds, the wisps of jazz phrasing and the austere melancholy of the central Largo tell you that, in the aftermath of WWI, the world would never be the same – and that the future of music looked quite different to the composer of this work than it did to the Stravinsky who’d composed The Firebird some 14 years earlier.

‘Seminal’ is an over-used word, but how else to describe Schoenberg’s first Chamber Symphony? In its blurring of melody and harmony it foretold of the atonal space Schoenberg would create in his very next work, the Second String Quartet. And in its ‘reduction sauce’ approach to symphonic form – in which he compresses the movements of a traditional symphony into a continuous 20-minute whole – he prefigures the formal experiments which would become so dominant a feature of 20th century composition. In the transcription of the Chamber Symphony by Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern for violin, flute, clarinet and piano, the work’s frequently intricate issues of internal balance are solved with clarity and elegance.

Claude DEBUSSY Études (selections)
Arnold SCHOENBERG Chamber Symphony no. 1, arr. Webern
Igor STRAVINSKY Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments

Paavali Jumppanen (ANAM Artistic Director) director/piano
ANAM Musicians

2 August
7pm
Rosina Auditorium