The unique creative exchange between John Adams and the San Francisco Symphony spans four decades and represents one of the most significant success stories in the collaboration among contemporary American composers, orchestras, and audiences.
Co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the San Francisco Symphony, Adams’s brief but scintillating new piece, I Still Dance, honors the 25th and final season of Michael Tilson Thomas’s tenure as the San Francisco Symphony’s music director. Inscribed “for my longtime friends, Joshua and Michael,” the score is dedicated to Tilson Thomas and his husband, Joshua Robison. I Still Dance celebrates “the continued youthful vitality” of Tilson Thomas, as well as of his spouse, a former champion gymnast. “They both still have a youthful energy,” Adams remarks.
Crafted with immense intricacy and pointillist detail, I Still Dance takes its place alongside a small but highly characterful group of short orchestral pieces in Adams’s catalog. Without any existing models in mind, Adams says that his starting point for I Still Dance was “a powerful musical energy” that took him to unexpected places: Once the wrestling with a piece has begun, “I never know what is going to come down the pike.”
I Still Dance sustains an explosive, relentless intensity from the first downbeat through most of its span. At the same time, Adams condenses multiple events and an enormous amount of contrast within this framework, creating in effect a pocket symphony. The driving energy comes from perpetual motion figurations undergirded by fiercely accentuated chords and deep, rumbling pulsation.
Adams weaves his material into an electrifying tapestry of contrapuntal rhythms, wheeling arpeggios, and prismatic harmonies. I Still Dance presses forward unpredictably: a constant volley of pithy motifs in multiple directions across the soundscape generated by its vast orchestra. Bright flecks of melody from winds and tuned percussion drift by without warning. In recent scores, Adams has shown a fascination with the sound of the bass guitar—here fortified by the Japanese taiko as well as djembe, a goblet-shaped drum originating from West Africa.
Just as the churning maelstrom of energy seems poised to rouse for a climax, Adams dims the lights for what he describes as a “soft landing.” Suspenseful, with a dash of the elegiac, this concluding wind-down seems to cleave the dancer from the dance.
—Thomas May
It is astonishing to think that Saint-Saëns was born when Beethoven was still being mourned and died when Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps was already being assimilated into the repertory. Fortunately for Saint-Saëns, he remained generally respected by musicians to the end. Some viewed him as a curious relic of antiquity, to be sure, but those with open ears could hardly overlook that his style continued to develop practically until the day he died.
By the time he composed his Cello Concerto No. 1 in November 1872 at the age of 37, Saint-Saëns was highly regarded in French musical circles but had not yet written the works for which he is most famous today. He was a bit further along in the genre of the concerto, having completed the first three of his five piano concertos and two of his three violin concertos, as well as the popular Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for Violin and Orchestra.
The First Cello Concerto’s overall conservative, classical stance doubtless accounts for the widespread popularity it enjoyed from the outset, celebrity that to this day far surpasses that of Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 2, which would follow in 1902. The orchestra plays a role beyond that of mere accompaniment, and it is a testament to the composer’s skill that this work never succumbs to the imbalance frequently encountered in cello concertos whereby for long stretches the soloist is seen bowing furiously but is scarcely heard. Saint-Saëns here employs three connected movements of modest proportions, following the model of famous concertos by Beethoven and Mendelssohn, among others.
Rather than wait out an orchestral introduction, the soloist leaps into the fray from the beginning, spinning out rapid triplets. The work is rich in melodies that show off both the dramatic and the lyrical aspects of the cello. The second movement is a latter-day minuet. Saint-Saëns biographer Stephen Studd suggests that the composer’s sudden interest in the cello—this concerto was immediately preceded by a sonata for the instrument—resulted from his mourning a recently departed great-aunt. “His feeling for the cello,” writes Studd, “with its deep, dark tone and capacity for both dignified and impassioned utterance, was now rekindled by the melancholy that set in after his bereavement.” If that is the case, this minuet section might underscore his great-aunt’s connection to the music of an earlier time. A cadenza is interpolated near the end of the second movement, and then the finale proceeds with reminiscences of material from the beginning, along with entirely new material that keeps this concerto surprising through to its final measures.
—James M. Keller
Stravinsky not only studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, he learned from him. Rimsky-Korsakov’s flair for the exotic, his orchestral mastery, and the folk tunes he collected inform and saturate The Firebird, the score whose gorgeous lava-flow of sound established Stravinsky’s international reputation. Considering the effect this music had on Stravinsky’s career, it comes as a surprise to learn that he almost missed the chance to write it.
Sergei Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes turned around the visual taste of cultivated Europeans in the first decade of the 20th century, was a great producer partly because he was a talent scout of uncommon fantasy and daring, yet in the case of The Firebird his instinct took time to find its target. Richard Taruskin, in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, has unraveled the tangled dealings that resulted in one of Western music’s most brilliant scores. From Taruskin we learn that Diaghilev’s original choice of composer for The Firebird had been Nikolai Tcherepnin, who withdrew from the project for reasons not entirely clear (though not before completing enough music to form the lovely sketch The Enchanted Kingdom). Anatoly Lyadov, a man with a charming gift and a rather casual attitude about deadlines, was next in line. Lyadov, for whatever reason, declined the Firebird project, as did the composer Diaghilev turned to next, Alexander Glazunov. Diaghilev may even have courted another composer, Nikolai Sokoloff, before contacting Stravinsky. “After four refusals,” Taruskin writes, “Diaghilev would indeed have been frantic. He would have been ready for any plausible candidate who would accept the commission.” Stravinsky was eager to try his hand at a ballet score for Diaghilev—indeed, as Taruskin says, he began writing the Firebird music more than a month before Diaghilev turned to him.
The story Diaghilev had selected came from a Russian fairy tale in which Ivan, the young Tsarevich, while in pursuit of the beautiful Firebird, wanders into the garden of the ogre Kashchei. He captures the Firebird but yields to her entreaties to let her go, retaining a single feather as forfeit. In the garden, he falls in love with one of a group of 13 princesses, all prisoners under the spell of Kashchei. When he attempts to follow his new love into Kashchei’s palace, he is captured. At dawn he will be turned to stone, but he uses the feather to summon the Firebird. Her magic counteracts that of Kashchei. She causes the ogre’s monstrous company to dance about madly until they are exhausted, and her lullaby puts the maleficent sorcerer and his courtiers into a deep sleep. The Firebird reveals to Ivan how to defeat the ogre by smashing the great egg in which his soul resides. Kashchei’s captives are set free, and the tale ends with the nuptials of Ivan Tsarevich and his princess.
—Michael Steinberg
Program notes © 2020 San Francisco Symphony