Whorl, n. – Each of the turns, coils, or convolutions in any spiral structure and

Eddy, n. – A circular motion in water, or air, contrary to the current.

As someone who spent a decade attempting to tame the tricky winds that flow from mouthpiece to bell, I have a deep love of the horn and enormous admiration for those who can master its treacherous physics.  The thoughts swirling in my head as I wrote for Andrew Bain were largely connected to the beauty of his sound and the purity of his tone in all registers.

Le temps et l’écume was premiered on December 11, 1989, at the Maison de Radio France by the Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by the American David Robertson. It was Robertson’s first in-depth engagement with spectral music. “I remember thinking, OK, this is complex stuff, let me go to the piano and play it,” he said. “There were thirteen notes in the first chord that starts the piece off, and I could only play three of them on an equally tempered piano. That left me feeling quite daunted.” Robertson had to accept that he would not be able to hear the music in his head before he gave the first downbeat. But he rehearsed with Grisey, whom he found “very calm, but very exacting,” and the premiere was a success. The concert was long and had too many new works, Robertson recalled, but the audience could tell that Le temps et l’écume “was a serious piece in the repertoire.”

1. “…la musique incertaine de leur voix…”
2. Anfore del cuore
3. Rounding to Joy

Written for and dedicated to Orli Shaham. Commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, Eric Jacobsen, Music Director, 2022.

David Lang
Brian Eno
Richard Serra
Michael Gordon
Michael Tilson Thomas
Russell Hartenberger
Robert Hurwitz
Stephen Sondheim
Jonny Greenwood
David Harrington
Elizabeth Lim-Dutton
David Robertson
Micaela Haslam
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker
Julia Wolfe
Nico Muhly
Beryl Korot
Colin Currie
Brad Lubman

Leoš Janáček had a singular conception of operatic composition.  He arrived at his vision of music drama through a long apprenticeship, and Káťa Kabanová, written at an age where most societies expect a person to retire, is a work of outstanding genius.  It may be helpful to look at three aspects that make him such a unique figure in the history of opera: his use of speech melody, his harmonic and melodic language, and his approach to orchestration.

David Robertson

The great conducting teacher, Hans Swarowsky, told his students at Vienna’s Academy of Music and Performing Arts that a conductor has only three jobs: start the piece, make any changes within it, and finish it. Indeed, certain elements of time keeping would seem to render that task in conducting rather simple.

On March 12, 2020, cultural institutions of every description shut down to help stop the spread of COVID-19.  The Juilliard School quickly transformed its many programs into online studies – and the now ubiquitous Zoom class became the only available forum for the highly physical, emotional, intellectual and sensory process of learning conducting.  What would that mean for my Juilliard conducting students?  These are their lessons from the Spring 2020 semester – try this at home!

Opera is, above all, a collaborative project.

From the stage and lighting, with its builders, technicians and crew, the costumes put together with care by the wardrobe department, the dancers, the orchestra, and the chorus with their musical staff and librarians, not to mention the material support for all this from the administrative staff; it’s a big undertaking.  No wonder it is often called “Grand.”

Even the works themselves are touched by many hands before they go into production.  A man named Dubose Hayward pens a story, which plays a significant role in the Harlem Renaissance, giving his work the name of its principal character, Porgy – incidentally the name of a common, unremarkable fish.  Heyward’s wife, Dorothy, turns it into a play, which then gets put on Broadway to great success by Rouben Mamoulian, who also added important touches. George Gershwin, already enchanted by the book, works together with the Heywards, his brother Ira and Mamoulian to turn the play into an opera , but with a small change to the title:  Porgy and Bess.

On July 16, 2018, David Robertson and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra received the Helpmann Award – Australia’s equivalent of the Tony Awards – for Best Symphony Orchestra Performance for their performances of Bluebeard’s Castle at the Sydney Opera House, November 29 – December 2, 2017.  On November 21, 2017, Limelight – Australia’s Classical Music and Arts Magazine – published the article below, “David Robertson on the Darkness at the Heart of Bluebeard’s Castle.” 

Like Béla Bartók, many turn of the century composers were attracted to the story of Duke Bluebeard, perhaps because for the first time the complexity of women was being taken seriously. Major novelists like the Brontës and George Sand, and characters in literature like Madame Bovary, meant that all of a sudden, Bluebeard was seen as not just a European version of the Thousand and One Nights, but a deeper questioning of the differences between the sexes.

On the one hand, you can look at Perrault’s 1697 folk tale with its inquisitive wife as an extension of the Wagnerian Lohengrin-Elsa dilemma or the Christian idea of Eve’s curiosity being her downfall, but by the time we get to the works of Maeterlinck, which influenced Béla Balázs’ poem from which Bartók’s libretto was taken, there was a sense that psychoanalysis had gazed into the depths of the human soul. It’s as if you are looking into a very deep well and you can’t see the bottom, but occasionally you can put a bucket down and bring something up.

It’s been an amazing partnership right from the start.  It’s one of those things that lives on, and so to some extent, although I won’t have the regular rendezvous on the stage of Powell Hall, I can’t think of the experience with the orchestra in the past tense because it’s a living thing, it’s one of the things that has made me who I am, and so you carry that around with you all the time.  There was this immediate chemistry, and then it developed into something which has meant a thirteen-year music directorship where you can argue who’s been blessed the most by this, whether it’s been the musicians, the community, or myself… it’s just been an amazing, amazing thing.

I have often given a talk before a concert to highlight certain ideas it might be helpful to think about before listening. There is a danger inherent in speaking about something as ungraspable as music. In crucial ways, the music and the program where it finds its local context have to speak for themselves. What is fascinating is just how free the associations can be for each of us. It requires us to be receptive not only to the works at hand, but to ourselves. For this, we often need quiet to really be in the moment. This is the same quiet the composers need to write a piece, the same one the performers need to convey its ineffable meaning.

David Robertson talks about Messiaen’s From the Canyons to the Stars…  photographer Deborah O’Grady’s extraordinary visual accompaniment, and building the 2016 project for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.