Along the Premiere Path With NJE
by JOEL SACHS

The New Juilliard Ensemble’s November 20 concert at Alice Tully Hall finds the group giving yet another world premiere, and bringing two other compositions to New York for the first time. The brand new piece, Island of Lamentation (2001), was composed as a gift to the NJE by Armenian composer Suren Zakarian, whose Dedicatio was heard last season. Played for the first time in this city are Eclips—Hommage to Alexander Scriabin by Dutch composer Klaas de Vries, and Three Inventions for Chamber Orchestra by British composer George Benjamin. The program will conclude with the weirdly amusing Dracula by American composer David Del Tredici, a former member of Juilliard’s composition faculty.

George Benjamin

It is, of course, always exciting to confront for the first time a piece written for the ensemble. I wish I could share my reactions to Mr. Zakarian’s score, but at the time I am writing this article, it is still in transit from Yerevan. However, I have complete confidence that it will have the same intense, moving message as Mr. Zakarian’s earlier works. Mr. De Vries’ Eclips takes as a point of departure Scriabin’s piano piece Vers la flamme, which is performed as a preface to the new piece.

George Benjamin’s composition is awaited with the same great anticipation as was the Piano Concerto of Hans Abrahamsen that the NJE played on September 22. Like Mr. Abrahamsen, Mr. Benjamin has recently emerged from a decade-long silence, and both composers seem to have experienced an incredible musical growth in the intervening years. This is particularly impressive because they each entered their “hiatus” at a point at which their high level of accomplishment had led them to be regarded as among the finest European composers of their generation.

David Del Tredici

Of Mr. Del Tredici’s Dracula I can only say that once more he has turned to a subject that allows his wry wit and his distinctive style to flourish.

Programs such as this stimulate listeners and professional musicians to ask me about the exerience of rehearsing a program that is utterly unfamiliar to the players and the audience. Actually, I like to hope that we always play older repertory as if it were brand new and we are confronting it for exactly what it is, unburdened by performance traditions that sometimes can be less than desirable. But that is a dream. In this case, newness is a reality. As a conductor, my first job is to arrive at the ýirst rehearsal with an overall conception of the piece. This is not always so easy, however: what looks obvious is sometimes utterly wrong, because scores can be deceptive. And there is frequently no easy route offered by a recording. Apart from the faüt that I prefer not to listen to other conceptions before I have at least some version of my own, many of the pieces performed by NJE have never been recorded—or, for that matter, even performed. As a result, the conception of a previously-unheard pieÏe may need much greater revision in the course of rehearsals than is usual when a piece or style is reasonably familiar. (Fortunately, it can be very helpful to listen to other pieces by the same composer.)

My second job is to convince the performers that the piece is worth doing. Wherever possible, this must be done with the music itself, not with words. If the players conclude that the piece really is worth great effort, most later problems have simple solutions. If they are simply being dragged to the stage, the piece bears little chance of a happy life.

Then comes the task of putting it together. Do we get all the notes right first? Or the rhythm? We all have our own priorities. My own view is the product of a memorable recital by Artur Rubinstein that I heard as a student in London. His performance of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales lingers in my ear after some 35 years as one of the most beautiful Ravel performances I have ever heard—despite his having improvised about 85 percent of the notes! Rubinstein taught me the important lesson that the listener without a score hears the drama of music, communicated by dynamics, color, rhythm, etc. So I work from the broad outlines in, having faith that the players will work out the note problems by themselves once they see how everything fits together. As the rehearsals proceed, the details become more finely tuned. I hope that the results in the past have justified this approach.

Guo Wenjing

The ensemble also gave an extra concert on October 19 in Paul Hall, which was a preview of its program the next day at the University of Maryland. The Maryland concert was part of a festival celebrating the dedication of the school’s new performing arts center. At their request, the program comprised music by composers from along the ancient “Silk Road.” Guo Wenjing’s 1997 Concertino for Cello and Ensemble received its U.S. premiere at the Paul Hall concert, with Clarice Jensen as soloist. It was a special pleasure to include it, because it was written during Professor Guo’s stay in New York in 1996-97, when I had the great pleasure of meeting him. Guo Wenjing now is dean and a composition professor at the Beijing Central Conservatory. The New Juilliard Ensemble has performed his Inscriptions on Bone for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra twice.

Two of the other compositions on the October 19 program had also been performed previously by NJE: Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s Presentiment and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s Crossing II. Mr. Yanov Yanovsky, b. 1963, lives and teaches in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and has traveled very widely in Europe and the United States. Ms. Ali-Zadeh, from Azerbaijan, is reasonably well known in this country, where performers of her musicmhave included the New Juilliard Ensemble, Continuum, the Kronos Quartet, and cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper.

Also on the program was the stunning setting of Psalm 23 by Giya Kancheli. Although it can be performed separately, Psalm 23 is now the first movement of a song cycle Exile. It has the unusual instrumentation of alto flute, viola, cello, bass, and synthsizer. The soloist was Lauren Skuce. Mr. Kancheli is the oldest of the four composers on this “Silk Road” program, a member of the generation of extraordinary Soviet composeýs that includes Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, and Sofia Gubaidulina. Mr. Kancheli spent most of his career in Tbilisi, the capital of his native Georgia, but moved to Berlin during the terrible civil was of the early 1990s. He now lives in Antwerp, Belgium.

Free tickets for the New Juilliard Ensemble’s November 20 in Alice Tully Hall may be obtained from the Juilliard box office.

Joel Sachs is director of the New Juilliard Ensemble and of the School’s annual Focus! Festival.