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Illuminations
Festival Concert 1
August 9, 2022
Tuesday
7:30 pm – Festival Concert
Lincoln Theater
Masks are required to be worn at all times during the concert. While we strongly recommend everyone be vaccinated, proof of vaccination is no longer required to attend.
Tickets available in advance or at the door.
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
PROGRAM
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov “Flight of the Bumblebee” from The Tale of Tsar Saltan
Makoto Nakura, marimba; Rieko Aizawa, piano
Osvaldo Golijov Mariel
Ole Akahoshi, cello; Makoto Nakura, marimba
Arr. Makoto Nakura The Story of Aoyagi (Featuring Memory of the Woods by Akemi Naito)
Makoto Nakura, marimba
Visuals by Emi Hatsugai, Takashi Ui, and Masaru Mitsuhashi
Kenji Bunch Paraphraseology
Jesse Mills, violin; Makoto Nakura, marimba
Felix Mendelssohn Piano Trio No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 66
Horszowski Trio (Jesse Mills, violin; Ole Akahoshi, cello; Rieko Aizawa, piano)
Artists
Makoto Nakura, marimba
Horszowski Trio (Jesse Mills, violin; Ole Akahoshi, cello; Rieko Aizawa, piano)
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
Program Notes
by Mark Mandarano
The memorialization of seasonal death and renewal has been a recurring theme for artists throughout the history of humankind. Art, with its ability to last beyond the mortal lifespan of the artist, serves as a form of persistence and document of temporal changes of state. In the case of Mendelssohn, we have testimony of the importance to him of these moments of change. In April of 1845—the year he composed the Trio in C minor—in a letter written to his brother Paul, Mendelssohn, living in Frankfurt, complained about a stretch of time when he was ill. Then, he wrote: “...since the onset of such uniquely splendid weather I have been taking long, long walks and that is a good remedy, when one can take in the blue sky and the restless buds and the pointy branches and limbs. O, long live spring!” After receiving some good news about the engagement of a friend, “I was jumping for joy around my room for five minutes after this unexpected letter dropped out of the sky several days ago…Quite wonderful!” Such moments of renewed hope after periods of darkness form the bedrock sentiments of a work such as the Trio. In this and the other works on the program, we explore the notion of how music can perpetuate the memory of a person, a story, an image, or a moment of feeling.
In his work for violin and marimba, Paraphraseology, composer Kenji Bunch explores how in both music and language, ancient fragments of the past persist in an unconscious manner through much of our regular speech and expression. He says:
“Latin, like Western classical music, enjoys a posthumous influence on many languages succeeding it—a foundation for most modern European languages. In today’s English we still throw around Latin cliches, quotes, and intimidating legal terms on a regular basis. Yet no one really questions why we still employ these anachronistic terms instead of their modern translations.”
The movement titles (Prima facie, In Absentia, Persona non Grata, etc.) demonstrate how incongruous these phrases from a “dead” language can seem when stripped of their usual context. The actual musical substance moves back and forth between modes of expression. Bunch writes that “places in Paraphraseology are almost completely removed from tonality. I like to have the freedom to go off the rails and then come back…to explore the entire spectrum of consonance and dissonance. For me, dissonance has more meaning when it is in the context of a tonal framework.” The instruments themselves become a part of the creative process: “I’ve always been curious about musical instruments. It has been a hobby of mine to collect them. That’s an interest that I got from my father who has dozens of instruments in his home. With the music I’ve written, I’ve been really lucky to work closely with virtuoso performers on each of the instruments that are in my chamber works.”
Through its extension in time, music can serve to immortalize not just a person, but an instant of feeling for which the subjective experience is larger than the time in which it occurs. Argentine composer Osvaldo Goljov has written of his piece Mariel, for cello and marimba: “I wrote this piece in memory of my friend Mariel Stubrin. I attempted to capture that short instant before grief, in which one learns of the sudden death of a friend who was full of life: a single moment frozen forever in one’s memory, and which reverberates through the piece, among the waves and echoes of the Brazilian music that Mariel loved.”
In addition to using Akemi Naito’s 21st-century composition Memory of the Woods, The Story of Aoyagi project takes its written text from one of the earliest Japanologists, Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), based on Japanese folklore. The tale involves a high-born samurai (Tomotada) who, while traveling through a wintry, wind-swept mountain pass, pauses to stay the night in the humble cottage of an elderly couple and their young daughter. Entranced by the astonishing beauty and innocence of the daughter, Aoyagi (“Green Willow”), the samurai convinces the couple to allow him to take her with him as his wife. Upon reaching the city of Kyoto, his plans are at first disrupted and then fulfilled. However, after five years, Aoyagi suddenly and mysteriously dies from a cruel pain she knows is a karmic power; she confesses that she is not truly human, but the soul of a willow—a willow that is just at this moment being cut down. In his grief, the widowed samurai returns to the site of the humble cottage, only to find that no structure ever existed there. He sees rather the stumps of three willow trees, two very ancient, and one quite young. This magical story of love and innocence is told, in part, through examples of Japanese Waka poetry and Chinese poetry. The projected photos of the wood and the forests were taken in Hakuba in Nagano prefecture, Japan by Japanese photographer Emi Hatsugai.
In Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in C minor, the connection between the renewed beauty of the growing world and the delights and promise of love and matrimony are bound together. Broadly speaking, the unsettled, forward advance of the C minor first movement creates a sense of a “present” that is dark, overcast, and yearning for a fulfillment that remains, as yet, absent. In the coda, a new mood of potential hope begins tranquillo, but the striving and longing remain desolate and the movement returns repeatedly and decisively to C minor, clearly indicating that, for the moment, hope has been dashed. The slow movement is a song in E-flat major and the Scherzo is one of those marvelous examples of Mendelssohn’s distinctive virtuosity as a composer. It reminds us that this is the composer who, at 18 years of age, turned the image of nimble, flapping wings of fairies into a magical onrush of pianissimo staccato harmonies for high register violins in his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here, minor-key quivering figuration once again tumbles upon us in a thrilling, if somewhat humorous and ironic cascade. The last movement rescues the work from feelings of loss through an ever-intensifying spiritual ascent, famously breaking out into a paraphrase of a Protestant chorale melody, “Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ.” Toward the latter part of the movement, the ultimate triumph of hope over gloom is beyond doubt when the tune thunders forth in a glorious C major, transformed into what sounds like an allusion to a psalm known in English as the “Old Hundredth.” These appearances occur not so much as a consequence of a seriously religious intention, but because in the common language of the day the ultimate feeling of uplift could only be adequately expressed through a gesture of thanks to providence.
By Mark Mandarano