Violin Concerto #3: "Juggler in Paradise" (2008)
For violin and orchestra
First performance by Frank Peter Zimmermann (violin solo) and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Andrey Boreyko conductor, at Salle Pleyel, in Paris, on 16 January 2009
Second performance by Frank Peter Zimmermann (violin solo) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiri Belohlavek, conductor, at Royal Albert Hall, in London, on 9 September 2009
Duration: 20 minutes
PROGRAM NOTE
By Robert Maycock
© Robert Maycock, commissioned by BBC Proms
Augusta Read Thomas (b 1964)
Violin Concerto No 3, 'Juggler in Paradise' (2008)
Co-commissioned by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the BBC Proms, Mr and Mrs Bill Brown, and the National Symphony Orchestra
As one of the most prolific of current orchestral composers, Augusta Read Thomas has refined her writing for the medium in the choicest circumstances. From 1997 to 2006 she was resident composer at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra where Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez among others conducted her premieres. She taught orchestration for a decade. This concerto - a highly organised shared commission, as is her sensible practice, first performed in Paris by Frank Peter Zimmermann on 16 January 2009 and now recorded by him — is her eleventh listed work for solo or soloists and orchestra, and every note counts in a precisely imagined and placed way. "Please don't move one 1/16th note one notch to the left or right," this exuberantly expressive musician wrote earlier in the year, "EVERYTHING is exactly in its place."
Listeners who remember one of her boldly scored gatherings of orchestral momentum towards high points, brass to the fore — such as Helios Choros II, played in London last autumn — may nevertheless be in for a surprise. The delicacy of touch that they display at times, along with her chamber and vocal music, is sustained for the full 20 minutes of the concerto's single movement. Thomas's fondness for bright, high textures remains, and so does the gradual increase of animation: in this case it goes from slow to moderate to fast and back again. Sometimes many instruments are in action, but they are not playing simultaneously and there is never a full-orchestral statement. The sequence of music often moves rapidly across the instruments. Many pages of the score look as if the music is scattered purposefully, translating heard patterns into seen ones, and Thomas has compared the effect to a dot-painting by Georges Seurat. "A pointillistic lace of bells plays throughout the composition. The harp, celesta, piano and percussion together form a 'helix' of bell sounds. . . . There are 'dots' of 'bells' everywhere, no two ever the same — a carillon of colors surrounds the violin soloist."
In the making of this aural character there's a full awareness of the benchmark modern orchestrators, particularly French ones from Ravel to Boulez, and more currently Oliver Knussen and George Benjamin. Beyond that is a more rooted American soundscape: the jazz of the mid-20th century. However, Thomas's lifelong love of jazz has been subtly digested, and in no way is this an attempt at the sort of pseudo-jazz that usually makes real followers of the genre squirm, whether by pastiche or by crossover. It's part of a fully integrated set of references and flavours. The long fast section that makes up the centre of the concerto echoes bebop, but also Stravinsky; it has lyrical interludes that evoke the orchestral colours of Ravel and the chromaticism of Berg. Add it together and the voice is Thomas's own.
A Thomas score is usually alive with fresh terminology. Sections are headed 'Animated and with whimsy' and 'Playful, spry, jazzy', and the practical musician in her goes out of her way, often disarmingly, to help performers faced with the unfamiliar. Having given the flautist an extremely long sustained note, most of it crescendo, she adds 'Fade out earlier if you are out of breath'. Or — to the solo violinist — 'Almost as if your spell-casting started over. A new beginning to the spell in a slightly different color.' Near the end, when the emotional tone deepens, she labels a figure for wind and strings 'homage to Mahler . . .'. T he colour is exactly that, also the way the orchestra can play it, but it's not a quote of some detail buried in a symphony — she abhors the practice as much as pretend-jazz. It's like hearing a straightforward cadence in a dream, slightly skewed and out of focus, and the dreamlike quality rather than anything literal is, she says, where to locate the homage.
And the work's subtitle? It's a metaphor for the way solo and orchestra relate, a continuous rhapsodic cadenza set against 'paradisiacal constellations'. It's physical, too: in Thomas's music dance is always close by. When the violin starts to speed up, the score suggests playing 'as if "juggling" the notes, rhythms, articulations'; and further on, 'like several objects in motion, in the air'.
by Robert Maycock
© Robert Maycock, commissioned by BBC Proms
Selected reviews
Barry Millington, London Evening Standard
Violin Concerto #3 at the BBC Proms
"The subtitle of American composer Augusta Read Thomas's Third Violin Concerto, Juggler in Paradise (a BBC co-commission, receiving its UK premiere), hints both at the athletic part given the solo violin and the almost celestial regions inhabited by the orchestra.
"At the start of the work it is the violin that establishes that sphere, though it is soon surrounded by an aura of bell-like sounds produced by harp, celesta, vibraphone, glockenspiel and indeed tubular chimes.
"There are few if any grand statements by the whole orchestra: more in the way of mini-discussions among groups of instruments, with a gathering of forces for a brief exclamation before a return to the rarefied spheres high above the stave.
"Soloist Jennifer Koh, comfortable at the top of her fingerboard, brought a sweet tone and secure technique to the latest offering from this prolific American composer."
Neil Fisher, The Times (London)
Prom 72: BBCSO / Belohlavek at the Albert Hall, London
"The American composer Augusta Read Thomas calls her newest violin concerto (her third) Juggler in Paradise, and its circus tricks are certainly spangled across a colourful sky. Bright, dappled effects — Read Thomas likens them to the pointillist style of Georges Seurat — are speckled across a small orchestra whose full power is never heard, but whose glistening, open textures are primarily drawn from the bell-like sonorities of celeste, piano and percussion.
"As fantasy or caprice the piece certainly teases. The solo part, delivered with grave simplicity by Jennifer Koh, swoops and chatters around serene half-melodies without finding a certain anchor."
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