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A N T H O N Y I A N N A C C O N E
O R H C E S T R A L W O R K S
JANACEK PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
BOHUSLAV MARTINU PHILHARMONIC
Composer and conductor, Anthony Iannaccone (born 1943) is one of a handful of contemporary artists whose exploration of musical polarities in the 1960's and 70's consistently separated their output into populist and specialist works. In the world of music, the former tended to be tonal and accessible, while the latter leaned toward atonality and abstraction. In his own case, Iannaccone refers to these categories as “large-audience” and “small-audience” music, respectively.
The first three pieces on this disc demonstrate a remarkable blending and balancing of both “small-” and “large-audience” music. The last two works clearly inhabit the realm of the “large-audience.”
Not unlike the overview afforded on earlier Albany releases of Iannaccone's music for strings (TROY414) and music for winds (TROY280), this CD includes works that span nearly two decades of music for the orchestral medium. As a conductor and former orchestral violinist, Iannaccone is particularly at home in this medium. From his earliest orchestral venture, Suite for Orchestra (1962), to his most recent, From Time to Time (2000), one can trace the development of a truly personal voice from an early mixture of influences, both traditional (Brahms, Debussy, Mahler) and modern (Stravinsky, Berg, Copland, Bartok).
Waiting for Sunrise on the Sound (1998) and West End Express (1997) are part of an orchestral series entitled Recollections. Recollections recalls people, places, and events that the composer considers important personal memories in his life. They draw primarily on his youthful experiences growing up in New York City between 1949 and 1962.
In an interview with Molly Sheridan in New Music Box (Issue 28, Vol. 3, No. 4), the interviewer states, “He [Iannaccone] laughs when questioned about the seeming fixation [with water], but explains that he grew up near the ocean and has always felt very connected to it…`the sea [he says] has an awesome presence in my mind, in my imagination.'” In regard to Waiting for Sunrise on the Sound, the word “awesome” describes the composer's love and fear of the sea.
Based on a recurring childhood dream, Waiting for Sunrise on the Sound conjures memories of serene beauty as well as brutal force. In program notes for the European (Prague Philharmonic) and American (Plymouth Symphony) premieres, which the composer conducted, Iannaccone comments on his “fear of the unknown,” which he labels as “the fuel” for this nightmare:
On several occasions when my cousins had taken a boat out into the Atlantic from the southern shore of Long Island, sudden summer storms turned a pleasant trip into a frightening encounter for a young person. Waves over twenty feet in height and relentless pounding rain and wind made even a large fishing boat seem like an insignificant toy on a vast and omnipotent ocean.
Despite assurances from his relatives, the youth believed they would capsize and drown in the turbulent sea. Dreams of these few bad storms recurred for some years, especially on beautiful summer nights spent sleeping on board the same vessel, anchored in the typically calm waters off the north shore, the Long Island Sound. The nightmare usually focused on the young dreamer piloting a boat on a moonless night in the normally tranquil sound, when the gently undulating water surface began to transform into larger and larger black towers of water that engulfed the vessel. Somehow, the dreamer knew that only the rising sun could quell the violent surges of the sea. The composer states:
At the moment when the fate of boat and pilot seemed doomed to drowning in the murky depths of the sound, the sun would break through thick mist and the sea would subside. As the friendly day star rose above the eastern horizon, the mist disappeared and the water sparkled gently with the radiant energy of the sun.
These powerful images are memorably suggested in this tone poem. Shimmering, transparent textural beauty and soaring lyricism from introspective Largo passages counterbalance the work's hellish, multi-layered eruptions from the central Allegro, where the listener can feel an internalized cry of terror from horns and trumpets struggling to be heard in a chaotic sea of hammered syncopations.
Selected as one of five finalists from more than 1,100 scores from 62 countries, Waiting for Sunrise on the Sound received a cash award in the BBC—London Symphony—Masterprize competition. Under Daniel Harding, the London Symphony Orchestra gave the British premiere in October 2001 at the Barbican Centre.
West End Express (1997) romps through New York City on a musical journey that the composer says “evokes memories on the Sea Beach and West End lines of the 1950's.” Growing up in Brooklyn, the New York City subway was Iannaccone's principal means of daily transportation to school, relatives, friends, concerts, stores, etc. The young Brooklynite traveled between midtown Manhattan and Coney Island on both trains—the local West End crossing the East River over the Manhattan Bridge, the express Sea Beach tunneling under the river to Brooklyn.
On a few summer evenings these trains varied their normal itinerary and, nearly empty of passengers, made practically no stops between downtown Brooklyn and Coney Island. West End Express recalls the unusually fast pace on these empty express rides. (The title also refers to the fact that this fast music was commissioned and premiered under the direction of Yoshimi Takeda, by the Kalamazoo Symphony, an orchestra on the west side of Michigan.) The composer offers a program of four scenes for the robust and mercurial ride:
1) The hectic bustle of fast-moving people in midtown Manhattan train stations, 2) luminous and warm city lights and sweeping arrays of illuminated cables rising majestically to the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge (as seen from the Manhattan Bridge), 3) intimidating dark enveloping a subway car when all lights go out (except for showers of sparks flying up from below the train) in parts of the East River Tunnel and in older sections of the subway, while one is jostled in every direction by abrupt turns at excessive speed, 4) the final mad dash to Coney Island, buoyant and giddy for the sole young passenger whose face is pressed against the cool glass of a front car window, whizzing by a rush of familiar sights when the train comes above ground in Bay Ridge.
In a “Classical Hall of Fame” review in Fanfare magazine, the author Stephen Ellis states: “I can't be more direct: Night Rivers, the Third Symphony of Anthony Iannaccone, is stunning—a rare work that achieves a dramatic balance of the cerebral and the visceral. To my mind, it is one of the supreme American symphonies.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians adds: “His [Iannaccone's] craft reaches its zenith in his synthesis of the two styles [i.e., “large- and small-audience music”] in Two-Piano Inventions and the Third Symphony, in both these works, organic growth inspires music of great strength and formal clarity…” These are but two of many ardent and perceptive responses to Night Rivers, Symphony No. 3 (1990-1992).
Cast in a single movement, Night Rivers is, in the composer's words, “a work about motion, the slow, subtle motion of changing colors in static textures or the conspicuous motion of driving motives in dynamic textures.” Unlike Iannaccone's two earlier multi-movement symphonies, his Third Symphony telescopes a large three-movement design into one tightly integrated unit. Commissioned by the Michigan Council for the Arts for the Detroit Symphony (Günther Herbig, director), this technically demanding work derives all of its thematic, textural, and timbral material from the first seven bars. In a 1991 interview, the composer acknowledged a debt to Sibelius and Barber, whose single-movement symphonies Iannaccone lauded as “masterworks of the genre.”
Like Mahler, Iannaccone's motivic figures permeate both foreground and background and undergo continuous variation, repetition, and development. Also like Mahler, whether the musical drama or narrative is progressing from darkness to light (or the reverse), or from gentle to savage, it is always tautly argued on a purely structural level, and is motivated by a lyric subtext, a spiritual core, rooted in the singing line.
Night Rivers borrows two distinct images from the poetry of an earlier Brooklyn inhabitant, Walt Whitman, whose poetry has been a generating force in this composer's music since the early 1960's. The symphony title appropriates the word “night” as used by Whitman in the poem “The Sleepers,” and the word “river” from Whitman's metaphor in “Whispers of Heavenly Death” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The following note was written by the composer for a performance he conducted with the Plymouth Symphony in November 1992:
Whitman's mystical image of life flow (“river”) is latent in the opening bars, in the form of a dreamlike tremolo figure, which later becomes a continuous rhythmic flow. Whitman's mysterious realm of death and rebirth, “night,” is suggested by the sound that begins the piece, a low sustained D, which swells in volume, suddenly diminishes to a whisper, and slowly becomes part of a four-note descending figure, a seminal figure for the entire symphony.
Night Rivers is then ultimately a work of movement and repose. It is a symphony whose principal musical figures, both dark and light, shadowy and bold, were inspired by Whitman's metaphors for journey and rebirth in a spiritual realm. The composer's rivers of musical energy separate and collide in layered textures at several structural high points only to reunite again in cycles of repose, where the flow of musical energy is transfigured and refined into a rainbow of static melodic planes of complementary colors.
A guide to the macro-form of Night Rivers, which relates its trajectory to traditional symphonic form, divides the work into three large areas: part one (slow—moderately fast—moderate) comprises exposition, transition, development, coda, and transition to part two (fast), a scherzo and transition to part three (slow—fast—slow), a re-exposition, development (with successively higher energy plateaus and culminating climax), and coda.
The final two works present a lighter side of this composer's imagination and craft. From Time to Time, Fantasias on Two Appalachian Folksongs (2000) was commissioned through the American Composers Forum as part of the Continental Harmony Program, for which Iannaccone completed a residency in Virginia, in conjunction with the Richmond Symphony, and co-sponsored by Wintergreen Performing Arts and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. The Richmond Symphony under Gerardo Edelstein gave the 2000 premiere at a concert celebrating Virginia's past and future. The composer provided the following note for the first movement, Once Upon a Time: Crosscurrents Remembered:
In the first fantasia, the extraordinary natural beauty of Virginia and the resilient spirit of its people provide the inspiration for an extended tone poem. The expressive folk song Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair symbolizes both the lofty dreams of Virginia's founders and the physical beauty of the state itself. Musically, these ideals in the form of a tender folk song, are confronted by the harsh realities of war and natural disasters, in the form of restless, discordant, and ultimately explosive music. In the end, the spirit and the beauty of Virginia endure, and the folk song is heard intact, for the first time, in a lyrical and expressive setting. The musical scenario of the first movement was conditioned by these conflicting quotes:
1) “Heaven and earth never agreed to frame a better place for man's habitation.”
John Smith, celebrated colonial leader and explorer
2) “Our men were destroyed [by] cruell diseases…by warres…but [mostly by] meere famine. There were never Englishmen left in a foreigne countrey in such miserie as wee were in this new discovered Virginia.”
3) “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
Thomas Jefferson, founding father
4) “The [civil] war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor.”
Wilmer Mclean, Appomattox resident
The second movement of From Time to Time, entitled Moving Time: A Millennium Ride, is, in the words of the composer “a fast and brief launch into the new millennium.” The folk tune Shenandoah is presented in fragments woven into passages of original festive music. From this fusion of folk and original music, the orchestra extracts the folk melody and recasts it in a kind of Fourth-of-July fireworks display. The short, dazzling movement does indeed suggest a rocket and ends with a colorful “bursting in air.”
Divertimento for Orchestra (1983) was commissioned by the American String Teachers Association. It is Iannaccone's most popular orchestral work and has had over 200 performances to date. Based mainly on Boccherini's famous Minuet from the String Quintet in E Major, Op. 13, No. 5, it is essentially a charming two-movement essay in free variation and thematic metamorphosis. Boccherini's tune supplies the principal subject for the first movement (Night Music) and returns, disguised, in various supporting roles in the second movement (Morning Music). In a program note from a May 1987 Detroit Symphony performance, the composer writes:
Both movements are based on three interwoven ideas: 1) a lullaby, 2) a dance-inspired theme, and 3) Boccherini's popular Minuet. In the first movement, compatible elements from the three diverse ideas are combined in ways that make them appear momentarily as one unified thought. As the piece unfolds, the listener gradually becomes aware of three distinct musical entities. Song-like tonal tranquility dissolves into energetic pantonal development (Allegro), before returning to the opening lullaby (Adagio). The second movement is dominated by dance-like motives that dart and spring and rebound around the orchestra. This music is continuously infiltrated by references to both the lullaby and the Minuet. These references gain in strength and eventually emerge as substantial flashbacks to the first movement, scored for a chamber ensemble of woodwinds, harp, keyboard percussion, and strings. Brass and pizzicato strings answer this espressivo chamber music with a sweeping crescendo and a final thrust to a climactic end.
The first movements of both Divertimento and From Time to Time reverse the order of traditional theme and variations. Both movements begin with variations and fragments which seamlessly evolve and accrue into the theme which motivated them. However, in the long run, it is probably not variation techniques that account for their warm reception. Formal clarity, thematic invention, accessible musical language, and brilliant orchestration make both of these works popular with musicians and audiences alike.
Anthony Iannaccone (born New York City, 1943) studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Eastman School of Music. His principal teachers were Vittorio Giannini, Aaron Copland, and David Diamond. During the 1960's, he supported himself as a part-time teacher (Manhattan School of Music) and orchestral violinist. His catalogue of approximately 50 published works includes three symphonies, as well as smaller works for orchestra, several large works for chorus and orchestra, numerous chamber pieces, a variety of large works for wind ensemble, and several extended a cappella choral compositions. His music is performed by major orchestras and professional chamber ensembles in the US and abroad. He is an active conductor of both new music and standard orchestral repertory. In addition to conducting numerous regional and metropolitan orchestras in the US, he has conducted several European orchestras, including the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic, the Bavarian Festival Orchestra, the Janacek Philharmonic, the Moravian Philharmonic, and the Slovak Radio Orchestra. Since 1971, he has taught at Eastern Michigan University, where he conducts the Collegium Musicum in orchestral and choral music of the late 18th century.
The Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in the 1950's as a radio orchestra in Ostrava, a major urban center in the Eastern Moravian region of the Czech Republic. Frequent tours in several European countries, the United States, and Japan have established the Janacek as one of the major Czech orchestras. The Philharmonic is well represented in recordings of the works of major composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Cover Photograph: “Dawn”(Lake Superior Sunrise) by Eddie Soloway
Producers:Jaroslav Stránavsky, Robert Stein, Iwona Sowinska
Recording and Technical Direction:Jaroslav Stránavsky (Music Master)
Digital Editing:Mark R. Bunce
Photograph of Anthony Iannaccone by Richard Schwarze.
All works on this recording are available from Theodore Presser Co. (ASCAP).
This recording was made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
Producers: Jaroslav Stránavsky, Robert Stein, Iwona Sowinska
Cover Art: Eddie Soloway, Lake Superior Sunrise
Recording and Technical Direction: Jaroslav Stránavsky (Music Master)
Digital Editing: Mark R. Bunce
Publication Information: All works available from Theodore Presser Co. (ASCAP)
This recording was made possible by a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
1 Waiting for Sunrise on the Sound [10:44]
2 West End Express [7:15]
3 Night Rivers, Symphony No. 3 [19:07]
From Time to Time, Fantasias on Two Appalachian Folksongs
4 I: Once Upon a Time, Crosscurrents Remembered [10:23]
5 II: Moving Time, A Millennium Ride [4:04]
Anthony Iannaccone, Conductor
Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic,
Anthony Iannaccone, Conductor
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