Cris Derksen is an internationally acclaimed, Juno Award–nominated, Indigenous cellist and composer. In a world where almost everything—people, music, culture—is labeled and slotted into simple categories, Derksen represents a challenge. Originally from Northern Alberta, she comes from a line of chiefs from the North Tallcree Reserve on her father’s side, and strong Mennonite homesteaders on her mother’s. Derksen braids the traditional and contemporary, weaving her classical background and Indigenous ancestry together with new-school electronics to create genre-defying music.
As a composer, Derksen has a foot in many worlds. Her compositions include Napi and the Rocks, a symphonic story commissioned by the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra; Same Wave, an eight-part choral piece commissioned by the choir Camerata Nova; and The Triumph of the Euro-Christ, an eight-part choral piece commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Other works include Maada’ookii Songlines, a choral piece for 250 singers commissioned for Toronto’s Luminato Festival; Rebellion, a short symphonic work commissioned by the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra; Iron Peggy, a theater piece commissioned for the Vancouver International Children’s Festival; and Ikumagiialit, a performance-art piece commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada. Additional projects on which Derksen has worked include Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes), a short animated film directed by Amanda Strong; Ka:hawai Dance Theatre’s production of BloodTides; Kamloopa for Western Canada Theatre; White Man’s Cattle as part of her 2018 residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; and 5 Bucks per Head, a woodwind quintet commissioned for Wind Quintet International. In 2018, Derksen won a Dora Award for Best Sound Design for the theater work Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools.
As a performer, Derksen appears as a soloist nationally and internationally with some of Canada’s finest artists, including Tanya Tagaq, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Naomi Klein, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, among others. Recent concert destinations have included Hong Kong, Australia, Mongolia, and Sweden, as well as many parts of Canada, the place she refers to as home.
While raging forest fires in Canada made headlines all summer and will likely increase in the coming years due to climate change, Derksen’s new work is about controlled burns, a traditional Indigenous practice that is used to manage natural environments and promote resilience to wildfires. This practice involves burning certain parts of the forest in the spring, before temperatures rise and while the ground is still wet, to keep flames from burning out of control. Indigenous peoples determine where to intervene based on centuries of observation. By clearing out the twigs, dead trees, and pine needles that cover the forest floor, they protect their land and help preserve the ecosystem. As a result, flames are transformed from threat to tool—two aspects of fire that Derksen explores in this timely work.
—Andréanne Moreau
The seemingly effortless outpouring of lyricism in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 belies its excruciating composition process. Throughout the late 1890s, Rachmaninoff was plunged into a terrible state of depression (“a paralyzing apathy,” as he called it) that left him barely able to function. This state was occasioned in part by the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony, during which he had fled from the hall in horror, later destroying the score. Nor could Rachmaninoff have been cheered by the reviews, the most notorious of which was composer César Cui’s: “If there were a conservatory in Hell, Rachmaninoff would get the first prize for his symphony.”
Rachmaninoff’s friends were so concerned about his debilitated state that they talked him into seeing Dr. Nikolai Dahl, a pioneer in psychotherapy and hypnosis as well as a gifted violinist and cellist. “You will begin your concerto,” Dr. Dahl assured Rachmaninoff in a mantra during months of confidence-building. “You will work with great ease … the concerto will be excellent.” So dramatically successful was Dr. Dahl’s therapy that by the summer of 1900, Rachmaninoff found “new ideas stirring within me … more than enough for my new concerto.” These became the genesis of the Second Piano Concerto, but Rachmaninoff was so steeped in self-doubt that that he insisted on trying out the second and third movements on the public before writing the first. He presented the work in its entirety in Moscow in 1901, with a moving dedication to Dr. Dahl. Along with Mahler’s final symphonies—composed after Mahler had seen no less august an analyst than Sigmund Freud—the concerto must surely stand as one of the most impressive early advertisements for psychotherapy.
The work does have a kind of therapeutic thrust—a feeling of melodic inspiration bursting out of moroseness. Examples include the dark, bell-like chords for piano alone that open the work and suddenly explode into a passionate stream of interconnected melodies; the soaring return of the elegant tune in the slow movement after pensive woodwind solos and turbulent cadenzas; and the entirety of the finale, which opens with a mysterious march and builds cumulatively toward a spectacular climax that feels like a catharsis for the entire piece.
The concerto has long been a favorite of pianists for its spectacular writing for the instrument—Rachmaninoff wrote it for himself, after all—but the orchestration is equally felicitous. Among the many magical details are the distant horn melody over shimmering strings in the recapitulation of the first movement (one of the most sublime moments in Rachmaninoff), the flute and clarinet solos in the slow movement, and the breathless pedal point following the endlessly quoted second subject in the finale. Most satisfying of all is the seamless blend of soloist and ensemble: This is a concerto in which piano and orchestra are true equals.
Despite its treacherous technical difficulties, many pianists have championed the concerto, most notably Rachmaninoff himself, who performed it in his Carnegie Hall debut on November 13, 1909, with Max Fiedler and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It became his most frequently performed work at the Hall, where he made nearly 100 appearances as composer, pianist, and conductor over a stretch of 33 years. Other notable artists to perform the work include Philippe Entremont, Gary Graffman, John Ogdon, Krystian Zimerman, Leif Ove Andsnes, and numerous Russians: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sviatoslav Richter, Evgeny Kissin, Yefim Bronfman, and Denis Matsuev. Ashkenazy remarked that he wished he had bigger hands—Rachmaninoff’s could allegedly span 12 keys—to negotiate the notoriously wide-spread piano chords.
The concerto has always been a favorite in popular culture; not surprisingly, as its wealth of quotable tunes makes it endlessly plunderable. It has been used by pop artists such as Frank Sinatra (“Full Moon and Empty Arms,” “I Think of You”), Eric Carmen (“All By Myself”), and Muse (“Space Dementia”); and in movies old and recent, including Grand Hotel, The Seven Year Itch, I’ve Always Loved You, Nodame Cantabile, and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. Most notable is David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which has a poignant sense of yearning that matches the piece.
—Jack Sullivan
Sibelius’s contribution to Western musical culture has always been shifting and ambiguous. A unique mix of the old and the new, his music has inspired strikingly contradictory assessments. Calling Sibelius “the opposite of an innovator,” Virgil Thomas declared: “Whether good or bad, his music does not belong to our century’s concerns and worries … it represents the continuation of the 19th century in the midst of the 20th.” Yet in his 1934 essay “Sibelius and the Music of the Future,” composer Constant Lambert wrote that of “all contemporary music, that of Sibelius seems to point most surely to the future.”
As it turns out, Lambert may well have been right: As Alex Ross recently pointed out, numerous later–20th-century composers—from Kaija Saariaho to John Adams—have been “paying heed to Sibelius’s thematic deliquescence, his ever-evolving forms, his unearthly timbres.” Sibelius’s loyalty to the tonal system and his lonely grandeur were never hip enough for the modern-music crowd of his era (though he was always popular with orchestras and the general public), but now he is often seen as an overlooked prophet. His symphonies have oscillated between heights of popularity and depths of neglect, but they have recently made a strong comeback after a long dry spell. Olin Downes admirably summed up the paradox, stating: “In one sense, Sibelius is a singular anachronism; in another, he is as modern as tomorrow.”
The first sense—Sibelius the “singular anachronism”—would appear to be neatly represented by the Second Symphony, the most popular of the seven and one of the most unabashedly Romantic. Written in 1901–1902 and premiered by Sibelius himself, it has an unmistakable “twilight-of-Romanticism” quality. Yet even the Second Symphony is the subject of debate. Much ink has been spilled over whether the first movement is a traditional sonata structure, an “inverted sonata form,” or in Cecil Gray’s words, a “veritable revolution” in form altogether. Whatever the form, the music conveys an original sense of economy and rightness. It has a way of sounding lyrical even though most of the thematic material is hesitant and fragmented. Only in the beginning of the recapitulation (if indeed it is one) does the music swell to the grandeur of Sibelius’s popular early style; the rest, in its misty impressionism, looks ahead to the Sibelius to come.
The austere plucking that opens the second movement introduces a series of melancholy ruminations over modal harmonies. In contrast to the conciseness of the opening movement, this one stretches out with mournful elasticity. A distinctive Sibelian touch, the recurring hymn-like melody, originally stated by hushed strings, keeps shifting between major and minor keys, acting as a barometer of the changing nuances of sadness in this episodic movement.
The last two movements are deftly welded together in one of Sibelius’s finest specimens of musical architecture. The ambiguous tonalities of the scherzo, which sweeps by like a sudden wind, are set off against the firm, almost primitive tonic-key tonality of the main tune in the Finale. The trio of the third movement is a variation on the opening of the first; what is most striking is the way this simple little tune manages to usher in the epic transition passage to the Finale.
After the elusive interweaving and irregularities of the first three movements, the inexorable lines and nobility of feeling in the Finale are cathartic. The coda—one of the most stirring things Sibelius ever wrote—is not so much a hymn with the aspirations of Finlandia, as some commentators have insisted (and Sibelius denied), as a fond farewell to a fading musical language and a warm-blooded Romanticism the composer was to leave behind as he plunged into the chillier waters of the later symphonies.
—Jack Sullivan
© 2024 Carnegie Hall