Two works commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, reprised by the Orchestra for the first time since their World Premieres. Two others the Orchestra has never before performed, one by a maverick American, the other by an eminent Finn. How did they come together on the same concert? We asked composer-conductor Thomas Adès why he selected the repertoire for the concerts he’s conducting January 22–24.
In a phone call, Adès explained that his starting point was a composition he particularly wanted to bring back to the New York Philharmonic. The English-born composer’s America (A Prophecy) was premiered in 1999 as one of the Philharmonic’s Messages for the Millennium, which then Music Director Kurt Masur commissioned from six composers as “a universal message of hope to the people of the world.” Adès recalled: “The approaching millennium came with not just a lot of hope and excitement, but also a certain amount of apprehension,” including the so-called Y2K problem: whether the world would survive when the computers that ran it rolled over to a year ending in zeros. America (A Prophecy) reflected Adès’s view that the atmosphere was “full of portents, both good and evil ones.”
For his piece, Adès set Mayan poetry documenting the destruction of its civilization by Spanish invaders, and borrowed the music of those invaders—specifically a vivid, four-part vocal description of battle by Renaissance composer Mateo Flecha called La Guerra (War). The agelessness of the Mayan texts appealed to the composer, who noted: “They come from across centuries. They morphed, changed, and adapted to the stories that were coming. You have mentions of Christian imagery rather startlingly inside the Mayan text.” The Mayan warning “Invaders will come from the east. Your cities will fall!” took on new resonance not long after Adès’s work premiered. “Whenever my piece was performed in the years immediately following 2001, there was absolutely no missing that."
A different work with a catastrophic connection opens the program. On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, killing more than 1,000 people, including 128 Americans. The American composer Charles Ives was on a New York City train platform when he and all the people around him heard the shocking news. A street musician happened to start playing the hymn “In the Sweet By and By,” and everyone within earshot began to sing along. Ives commemorated that moment in From Hanover Square North, which became the final movement of his Orchestral Set No. 2, which the Philharmonic is performing for the first time. With two American-themed pieces bookending the 20th century, the program fit with US at 250, several Philharmonic concerts marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Both the Adès and Ives compositions include chorus, which plays an even larger role in America (A Prophecy) since Adès revised his piece last year, adding a third movement to the original two. In the first movement, the chorus heralds victory in battle; in the third movement, again using Mayan poetry, Adès explains, “It comes full circle, and they in their own turn are overwhelmed by the wheel of time.”
A third piece on the program uses chorus, and was also commissioned through the Philharmonic’s millennial initiative: Oltra mar, by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Adès always felt that his work and Saariaho’s complemented each other: “My piece is on the harsher end as a statement about everything; hers is a vision of death, but it’s very, very beautiful. She uses fabulously moving native text from Africa, in French,” paralleling his use of Mesoamerican native text. He always wanted to bring the two works back to New York together, so when the Philharmonic invited him to conduct this season, he had his chance to include both. And when the soloist, Yuja Wang, suggested a piano concerto by Einojuhani Rautavaara, another Finn, Adès thought it was a perfect fit.
A New York City thread also runs through the program. Ives ran a highly successful insurance agency in lower Manhattan. Rautavaara spent time at The Juilliard School, and in 1998 told NPR that living in Manhattan “taught much more about life to me than all those teachers about music.” Saariaho was composer-in-residence at both Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival and Carnegie Hall; in 2016 her L’Amour de loin was the second opera by a woman ever staged at the Metropolitan Opera, and her Innocence will be performed there in April. Adès, who first conducted the Philharmonic 10 years ago, has also had a pair of operas produced at the Met: The Tempest, in 2012, and The Exterminating Angel, in 2017. So while the variety of compositional voices and eras may at first glance seem disparate, with all the New York and American connections, this program forms a window into the U.S. at 250, as well as into the mind of a notable composer-conductor.
