Orawa 

Born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), Wojciech Kilar studied at the State Academy of Music in Katowice before continuing with graduate work in composition at the analogous conservatory in Kraków. A work of his was included in the first Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1956, the event that gave Poles their first exposure to where modern music had traveled in recent decades. He expanded his horizons through study at the Darmstadt Summer Courses (an avant-garde hotbed) and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He also became active as a film composer, writing more than a hundred soundtracks and achieving international acclaim through his music for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, among  other productions. His absorption of Minimalism is evident in Orawa (1986), its title referring to a region of the Carpathian Mountains in southern Poland that provided folk inspiration. Originally scored for string orchestra, it has been arranged for numerous other ensembles. Kilar avoided commenting about his works—“This may be because I am afraid to anticipate the listener’s own reaction,” he explained—but he did allow this much in a 1997 interview: “Orawa is the only piece in which I wouldn’t change a single note, though I have looked at it many times.”

Inaktelki nóták (Notes from Inaktelke)
     Sej, hideg sincsen (Hey, it’s not even cold)
     Úri bicsok, nincsen nyele (Sir, you have no
        handle)
     Én az uccán már végig se mehetek (I can’t
        even walk down the street any more)
     Reprise: Úri bicsok

Mátraszentimrei dalok (Songs from Mátraszentimre)
     Három hordó (Three barrels)
     Igaz szerelem (True love)
     Gomb, gomb (Button, button)
     Erdőbe, erdőbe (To the forest, to the forest)

Growing up in a Jewish family in Hungary in turn dominated by Hitler and Stalin, György Ligeti  nonetheless managed to acquire a firm musical education, spending the years immediately following World War II at the Budapest Academy of Music. While producing the stream of folk-based choral music that was de rigueur in Hungary at the time, he also worked on experimental pieces, which he prudently kept to himself. He became part of the Hungarian exodus of 1956 and settled in Germany, where he soaked up the thriving culture of contemporary music. He emerged as one of the leading lights of contemporary music, producing a large catalog of surpassing imagination. But that lay in the future when he wrote the pieces arranged here from his original choral settings of folk songs. He harbored personal affection for the folk music of his region. “I grew up in a Hungarian-speaking environment in Transylvania,” he wrote. “I was three when I first encountered Romanian folk music, an alpenhorn player in the Carpathian Mountains.” After graduating from conservatory, he spent some months collecting Transylvanian folk music and wrote a scholarly paper analyzing its elements. In this concert we hear two sets of his arrangements of short folk songs from specific villages—three (plus a repeat of one of them) from Inaktelke (a.k.a. Inucu) in northwest Romania, four from Mátraszentimre in north-central Hungary.

Changing the Guard

Growing up in Moscow, Nikita Koshkin listened to what most of his friends did: rock music. But when he was 14, he received from his grandfather the gift of a guitar and a recording of Andrés Segovia. This re-oriented his musical taste and led to guitar instruction at the Moscow College of Music (he graduated in 1977) and the famous Gnesin Institute, where he also took composition lessons. He developed a touring career as a soloist, which continues to this day, but he also focused on writing music for his own instrument, often crafting programmatic pieces exploring various narratives. By the 1980s, his guitar compositions were being taken up by other notable performers, including guitarist John Williams, the Assad Duo, and the Amsterdam Guitar Trio. He has produced a substantial body of works for solo guitar, for variously constituted guitar ensembles, and for guitar in combination with other instruments or voice. His Usher-Waltz (1984), inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s tale The Fall of the House of Usher, has entered the roster of essential guitar repertoire. As its title suggests, his Changing the Guard evokes the sounds of a parade ground, with the four players achieving unusual instrumental effects, from brash angularity and violent chords to quiet pointillism.

The Rite of Spring
     Part One: The Adoration of the Earth
        Introduction
        Augurs of Spring (Dance of the
            Adolescent Girls)
        Mock Abduction
        Spring Rounds
        Ritual of Rival Tribes
        Procession of the Sage
        The Adoration of the Earth (the Sage)
        Dance of the Earth

     Part Two: The Sacrifice
        Introduction
        Mystical Cycle of the Young Girls
        Glorification of the Chosen One
        Evocation of the Ancestors
        Ritual Action of the Ancestors
        Sacrificial Dance (the Chosen One)

Igor Stravinsky was famous before May 29, 1913, but the premiere that day of the ballet The Rite of Spring catapulted him, and 20th-century music, onto a path of modernism from which there was no turning back. It was an all-star event produced by Serge Diaghilev’s trend-setting Ballets Russes, whose press release, printed in several Paris newspapers, tantalized through references to “frenetic human clusters wrenched incessantly by the most astonishing polyrhythm ever to come from the mind of a musician,” promising “a new thrill which will surely raise passionate discussions, but which will leave all true artists with an unforgettable impression.” The danced portrayal was in itself shocking, but the music was unlike anything heard before, embracing fierce dissonance, barbaric rhythms, and pagan eroticism. A large orchestra brought all of these into play, plus imaginative orchestration, constantly changing meters, and a nearly unbearable sense of tension—in the ballet’s second part, depicting a pagan sacrifice in ancient Russia. Audible protests accompanied the performance from the opening bars, but things stayed somewhat under control until halfway into the Introduction—which is to say, for about the first minute of the score. Then, to quote Stravinsky, they escalated into “demonstrations, at first isolated, [which] soon became general, provoking counter-demonstrations and very quickly developing into a terrific uproar.” Thus was history made.