UMS Concert Program, October 24, 2018 - Yuja Wang and Martin Grubinger, Jr.

   10th Performance of the 140th Annual Season 140th Annual Choral Union Series
Wednesday Evening, October 24, 2018 at 7:30
MARTIN GRUBINGER, JR.
Yuja Wang / Piano Martin Grubinger, Jr. / Percussion
with
Alexander Georgiev / Percussion Leonhard Schmidinger / Percussion Martin Grubinger, Sr. / Percussion
Hill Auditorium Ann Arbor
YUJA WANG
and
 
 This evening’s performance is supported by Richard and Susan Gutow and by
Peter Toogood and Hanna Song.
Funded in part by The Wallace Foundation.
Media partnership provided by WRCJ 90.9 FM, WGTE 91.3 FM, Ann Arbor’s 107one, Between the Lines, and Metro Times.
The Steinway piano used in this evening’s performance is made possible by William and Mary Palmer.
Special thanks to Matt Albert and Paul Feeny for their participation in events surrounding this evening’s performance.
Special thanks to Tom Thompson of Tom Thompson Flowers, Ann Arbor, for his generous contribution of lobby  oral art for this evening’s performance.
Yuja Wang appears by arrangement with Fidelio Arts.
Martin Grubinger, Jr. appears by arrangement with HarrisonParrott.
In consideration for the artists and the audience, please refrain from the use of electronic devices during the performance.
The photography, sound recording, or videotaping of this performance is prohibited.
 
PROGRAM
Igor Stravinsky, Arr. Martin Grubinger, Sr.
Le sacre du printemps
First Tableau: The Adoration of the Earth
Introduction —
The Auguries of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls) — Ritual of Abduction —
Spring Rounds —
Ritual of the Rival Tribes —
Procession of the Sage —
The Sage —
Dance of the Earth
Second Tableau: The Sacri ce
Introduction —
Mystic Circles of the Young Girls — Glori cation of the Chosen One — Evocation of the Ancestors — Ritual Action of the Ancestors — Sacri cial Dance (The Chosen One)
Intermission
Béla Bartók, Arr. Martin Grubinger, Sr.
Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
Assai lento — Allegro molto Lento, ma non troppo Allegro non troppo
John Psathas, Arr. Martin Grubinger, Sr.
One Study One Summary (excerpt) Etude
Arturo Márquez, Arr. Leticia Gómez-Tagle and Martin Grubinger, Sr.
Danzón No. 2
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LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS (THE RITE OF SPRING) (1911–13)
Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia Died April 6, 1971 in New York City
Arr. for one piano and percussion by Martin Grubinger, Sr.
UMS premiere: Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitsky; October 1933 in Hill Auditorium (orchestral version). This arrangement has never been performed on a UMS concert.
 Snapshots of History...In 1913:
· Hill Auditorium opens in Ann Arbor
· The Mexican Revolution breaks out
· In March, a scandal erupts at a Vienna concert featuring works by
Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and Zemlinsky
Stravinsky’s long and storied
career took him from the drawing rooms of czarist St. Petersburg to the Tinseltown sound studios of
Los Angeles. It was as a Russian nationalist that he rocketed to fame on the eve of World War I with a trio of colorful ballets — The Firebird, Petrushka, and Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) — written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The Parisian Stravinsky of the 1920s and 1930s cut a more cosmopolitan  gure, characterized by such coolly neoclassical masterpieces as the ballet Apollo and the Violin Concerto in D. Upon immigrating to the US
in 1939, he reinvented himself yet again in works like his opera The Rake’s Progress and the spikily serial Movements for Piano and Orchestra. The legendary premiere of Le sacre du printemps took place on May 29, 1913. The incendiary combination
of Stravinsky’s primitivistic music and Vaslav Nijinsky’s de antly
anti-balletic choreography nearly incited a riot at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Subtitled “Pictures of Pagan Russia,” the ballet builds
to a frenzied climax in which a sacri cial virgin dances herself to death in order to restore fertility to the soil. Playwright Jean Cocteau described Le sacre du printemps as “a symphony impregnated with savage pathos, with earth in the throes of birth, noises of farm and camp, little melodies that come from the depths of the centuries, the panting of cattle, deep convulsions, prehistoric georgics.” Stravinsky’s piano reduction of the orchestral score was originally intended for use at dance rehearsals, but it has since taken on a life of its own.
Stravinsky habitually composed at the piano, which helps to explain his music’s crystalline and often percussive brilliance. It is these qualities, rather than the opulent colors of the symphonic score,
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that come across most powerfully
in the new transcription by Martin Grubinger, Sr., as in the composer’s own two-piano arrangement. There is no question of reproducing the sonic splendor of the original 99-piece orchestra, nor can the piano and percussion mimic such unforgettable sounds as the weirdly denatured bassoon solo that opens the ballet. On the other hand, Stravinsky’s pounding ostinatos and complex meters sound more sharply etched than ever on the keyboard. The  nal “Sacri cial Dance” throbs with such nervous, twitching energy that the listener can almost feel the spasms of the dancer’s body.
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SONATA FOR TWO PIANOS AND PERCUSSION (1937)
Béla Bartók
Born March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sinnicolau Mare, Romania) Died September 26, 1945 in New York City
Arr. for one piano and percussion by Martin Grubinger, Sr.
UMS premiere: This piece has never been performed on a UMS concert.
 Snapshots of History...In 1937:
· Michigan celebrates its centennial anniversary of being a US state
· The Golden Gate bridge opens
· Amelia Earhart disappears after attempting to be the  rst woman to  y
around the world
In his music as in his life, Bartók straddled two starkly different worlds: the rich peasant culture of his native Hungary, where he conducted his pioneering ethnomusicological research at the beginning of the
20th century; and the violent, angst-ridden landscape of W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety. The late 1930s was a heady and productive period for the composer. Relieved
of his onerous teaching duties at
the Budapest Academy of Music, he returned to the study of Hungarian folk music. Its endlessly varied store of melodies and rhythms combined with Bartók’s mastery of contrapuntal procedures to produce a string of boldly expressionistic masterpieces, including the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Violin Concerto No. 2, and String Quartet No. 6.
Bartók wrote the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in 1937 at the behest of Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and patron of the arts who also commissioned the composer’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and
Celesta (1936), and Divertimento
for String Orchestra (1939). The  rst performance of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion took place in Basel on January 16, 1938, under the auspices of the International Society for Contemporary Music, with the composer and his wife at the pianos. Five years later, in his  nal public appearance as a pianist, Bartók played his concerto version of the work with the New York Philharmonic.
The Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is laid out in three movements that center on the
keys of C, F, and C, respectively.
The tonal symmetry is re ected in the character of the movements, with a dark, mysterious “Lento” sandwiched between a pair of brilliantly propulsive allegros. The  rst movement opens with a sinuous chromatic melody, punctuated by explosive outbursts and shuddering tremolos, and the small battery of percussion instruments adds color and de nition to the texture. Out of this slow, amorphous introduction
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emerges a brisk, sharply rhythmicized countersubject: listen for its insistent syncopated pattern throughout the movement. Bartók’s themes are wonderfully varied, from the nervous stutters and swooping glissandos
of the  rst movement to the perky, dance-like tune introduced by the xylophone in the  nal movement. The combination of repetitive ostinatos and driving, irregular rhythms is the source of the sonata’s extraordinary vitality.
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ONE STUDY ONE SUMMARY (EXCERPT) (2005)
John Psathas
Born July 3, 1966 in Wellington, New Zealand
Arr. for one piano and percussion by Martin Grubinger, Sr.
UMS premiere: This piece has never been performed on a UMS concert.
 Snapshots of History...In 2005:
· The  rst YouTube video is uploaded
· Hurricane Katrina makes landfall along the US Gulf Coast · The trial of Saddam Hussein begins
John Psathas’s colorfully eclectic, vibrantly rhythmicized music vaulted to international attention at the
2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, for which he wrote a series of opening ceremonial fanfares. A New Zealander of Greek heritage, the 52-year-old composer is a citizen
of the world; his music doesn’t
so much cross traditional musical boundaries as  oat above them.
This polyglot synthesis of styles, idioms, and genres is exempli ed
by Psathas’s longtime collaboration with percussionist Evelyn Glennie, his “score” for the e-book version
of Salman Rushdie’s short story “In the South,” and the jazz works he’s written with and for saxophonists Joshua Redman and the late Michael Brecker. Much of Psathas’s recent work addresses social and historical issues, including his multimedia undertaking The No Man’s Land Project, which was created in 2016 as part of New Zealand’s World War I commemorations.
One Study One Summary was commissioned by Portuguese percussion virtuoso Pedro Carneiro,
who premiered the work in London in 2005. The hybrid live-electronic score calls for digital audio, marimba, and
a battery of “junk percussion.” The latter category is  exible — Psathas authorizes the performer to use other percussion instruments, or even
to omit them altogether (in which case the “junk” sounds are recorded on the audio track) — but Carneiro seemingly threw in everything but the kitchen sink: frying pans, a wok, salad bowls, a laundry-powder lid, crash cymbals, gongs, a plastic woodblock, and a generic “metallic object.” For Psathas, composing is less a matter of invention than of discovery; he describes the creative process as “being aware of a thing in one’s peripheral vision and, while staring straight ahead, trying to decipher, without looking at it, the true nature of what it is. What one is  nding is exactly the right thing for any given moment in a musical work.”
One Study One Summary consists of two movements, “Etude” (the titular Study) and “Summary,” which can be played in their original order, in reverse, or on their own. (We hear
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the  rst movement, “Etude,” on this evening’s program.) Psathas’s casual attitude toward macro structure doesn’t extend to the micro level: With the exception of the audio
part, the score of One Study One Summary is as precisely notated as the score of any more conventional work. In contrast to the soft, dreamy, and rhythmically nebulous second movement, the  rst movement’s etude-like character arises from
its kaleidoscopic, relentlessly driving rhythmic patterns, which blend elements of rock, jazz, and minimalism in the manner of Steve Reich.
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DANZÓN NO. 2 (1994)
Arturo Márquez
Born December 20, 1950 in Álamos, Mexico
Arr. for solo piano by Leticia Gómez-Tagle
Arr. for one piano and percussion by Martin Grubinger, Sr.
UMS premiere: This piece has never been performed on a UMS concert.
 Snapshots of History...In 1994:
· The Rwandan genocide begins, killing hundreds of thousands of Tutsi · Jeff Bezos founds Amazon
· Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as South Africa’s  rst Black president
Arturo Márquez is one of a handful of contemporary Mexican composers whose music has acquired a following in the US. An older generation of his compatriots, including Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas, bene ted not only from the enthusiasm of American musicians like Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, but from a variety of cultural exchange programs designed to foster better relations with Latin America. Although Márquez lived in Los Angeles as a child and attended the California Institute of the Arts on a Fulbright scholarship
in the late 1980s, his music has only recently traveled north of the border, thanks largely to the championship of Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Danzón No. 2 is part of a series of symphonic works inspired by the tango, fandango, zapateado, and other Latin American folk and ballroom dances. It was commissioned by
the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and
has become enormously popular throughout the country and abroad,
both as Márquez’s signature piece and as a marker of Mexico’s vibrant popular culture. Originally scored for a large, percussion-rich orchestra, the work was recently transcribed and recorded by Mexican pianist Leticia Gómez-Tagle.
Danzón No. 2 opens with a quiet, languorously looping melody (originally conceived for a clarinet) in the characteristically slinky rhythm of a tango. After this quietly restrained lead-in, the music quickly grows faster, more furious, and considerably more complicated, but Márquez’s skillful evocation of Mexican popular culture wears its sophistication lightly. Although his score is chock-full of tunes and coloristic effects — which Gómez-Tagle has skillfully captured
in her bravura arrangement — it is the dance’s pulsating energy, alternately sultry and sassy, that gives the work its crowd-pleasing allure.
Program notes by Harry Haskell.
© 2018 The Carnegie Hall Corporation. Reprinted with permission.
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ARTISTS
Critical superlatives and audience ovations have followed Yuja Wang’s dazzling career. The Beijing-born pianist, celebrated for
her charismatic artistry and captivating stage presence, is ready to register fresh achievements during the current season which features recitals, concert series, as well as season residencies and extensive tours with some of the world’s most venerated ensembles and conductors. She began summer 2018 with a performance
of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto at
the Tanglewood Music Festival with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Andris Nelsons, followed by a tour with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
and Kirill Petrenko and a program featuring Proko ev’s Piano Concerto No. 3. Later engagements include an extensive recital tour to South America as well as several concerts with the Munich Philharmonic and Valery Gergiev in Asia in the fall. The current season sees her as the artist in residence at Carnegie’s “Perspectives” series, as
well as the Vienna Konzerthaus and the Luxembourg Philharmonie. Highlight engagements include concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at Versailles as well as the Summer Night Concert Sch nbrunn with Gustavo Dudamel. She also embarks on tours with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Mirga Gra inyt -Tyla. Other notable appearances include concerts in Istanbul, Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Kotor.
In the spring, Yuja Wang will embark on a tour to Los Angeles, Seoul, and Tokyo with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra
to give the  rst-ever performances of
John Adams’s newest piano concerto as well as reuniting with cellist and frequent collaborator Gautier Capucon for a vast US chamber tour.
Yuja Wang was born into a musical family in Beijing. After childhood piano studies
in China, she received advanced training
in Canada and at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music under Gary Graffman. Her international breakthrough came in 2007 when she replaced Martha Argerich as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Two years later she signed
an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon and has since established her place among the world’s leading artists with a succession of critically acclaimed performances and recordings. She was named Musical America’s 2017 “Artist of the Year.”
Martin Grubinger, Jr. possesses an unusually broad repertoire ranging from solo works and chamber music with partners including his own Percussive Planet Ensemble. His technical perfection, enthusiasm, and musical versatility make his performances “must-see” events and has brought percussion from the back of an orchestra to center stage.
Starting off the season at the Vienna Konzerthaus with a multi-percussion program entitled The Bernstein Experience, Mr. Grubinger will then join forces with Yuja Wang and his Percussive Planet Ensemble for appearances at Carnegie Hall and Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor. Later this season, he will tour in Europe with
the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and later with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra before making his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic.
Among the growing number of works written for Mr. Grubinger are Avner Dorman’s Frozen in Time (2007) and Friedrich Cerha’s Concerto (2008), performed and recorded with the Vienna
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Philharmonic conducted by Peter E tv s on Kairos, as well as Tan Dun’s concerto Tears of Nature (2012). Spring 2014 saw the German premiere of E tv s’ Speaking Drums with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra conducted by the composer. The current season brings world premieres of new percussion concertos dedicated to
Mr. Grubinger by Fazil Say and Daníel Bjarnason. His renowned percussion projects such as “The Percussive Planet,” “Century of Percussion,” and “Caribbean Showdown” are further examples of his versatility.
Winner of multiple prizes, Mr. Grubinger is recipient of the Bernstein Award by the Schleswig Holstein Musik Festival and the prestigious Jeunesses Musicales’ Würth Prize. His  rst CD, Drums ‘n’ Chant, was followed by a live DVD recording of The Percussive Planet, both for Deutsche Grammophon. He has since recorded a number of projects for various labels.
Born in Salzburg, Mr. Grubinger
studied at the Bruckner Conservatory
in Linz and at the Salzburg Mozarteum. He quickly garnered attention through appearances at several international competitions, including the second World Marimbaphone Competition in Okaya, Japan, and at the EBU Competition in Norway. Mr. Grubinger holds teaching positions at Zurich University of the Arts and as professor for multipercussion at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts Mozarteum Salzburg.
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Immediately prior to this evening’s concert, U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance students brought to life three chamber settings of excerpts from The Rite of Spring in the Mezzanine Lobby of Hill Auditorium, in a performance curated by Matthew Albert, chair of the department of chamber music.
Woodwind Quintet
Arr. Jonathan Russell (2010)
Jordan Smith / Flute Laurel Wellman / Oboe Mary Fortino / Clarinet Tommy Militello / Horn Trevor King / Bassoon
Trumpet Duo
Arr. Edward Hoffman (2013)
Amanda Ross and Michelle Riechers / Trumpets
Saxophone Ensemble
Arr. Dannel Espinoza (2013)
Chad Lilley, Connor O’Toole, Salvador Flores / Soprano Saxophones
BethAnne Kunert, Andrew Hasher, Alex King, Alex Gurchinoff / Alto Saxophones Jonathan Hostottle, Hannah Hickman, Marina Sakellakis / Tenor Saxophones Matthew Koester, Brian Kachur / Baritone Saxophones
Mitchell Luttermoser / Bass Saxophone
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 UMS ARCHIVES
This evening’s performance marks Yuja Wang’s fourth performance under UMS auspices, following her UMS debut in January 2008
in a solo recital in Hill Auditorium. She most recently appeared
at UMS in November 2014 with violinist Leonidas Kavakos in Hill Auditorium. UMS welcomes Martin Grubinger, Jr., Alexander Georgiev, Leonhard Schmidinger, and Martin Grubinger, Sr. as they make their UMS debuts tonight.
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   TONIGHT’S VICTORS FOR UMS:
Richard and Susan Gutow
—
Peter Toogood and Hanna Song
—
The Wallace Foundation
Supporters of this evening’s performance by Yuja Wang and Martin Grubinger, Jr.
 MAY WE ALSO RECOMMEND...
11/1 Czech Philharmonic Orchestra
2/21 International Contemporary Ensemble: In Plain Air 3/12–13 Philharmonia Orchestra
Tickets available at www.ums.org.
ON THE EDUCATION HORIZON...
10/25 My Latinx is...An Open Mic Event
(Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery, 913 S. University Avenue, 7:00 pm)
10/31 Master Class: Alisa Weilerstein
(Stamps Auditorium, Walgreen Drama Center, 1226 Mur n Avenue, 5:00 pm)
11/7 UMS 101: Jake Shimabukuro and the Ukulele
(Hill Auditorium Mezzanine Lobby, 5:30 pm)
Paid registration is required for this event; please visit bit.ly/UMSClasses (case-sensitive) to register.
In partnership with Ann Arbor Public Schools Rec & Ed.
Educational events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.