04/16/2002
SFS performs Giya Kancheli World Premiere and Commission
San Francisco Symphony press-release
Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas will lead the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the world premiere of Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s Don’t Grieve, featuring acclaimed Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, in concerts at 8:00 p.m. May 15-17 in Davies Symphony Hall. Completing the program is the complete concert version of Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, with the SFS Chorus; the work was last performed by the SFS in January 1994 under the direction of Andre Previn.
Giya Kancheli was born in Tbilisi, Georgia on August 10, 1935, and now lives in Antwerp, Belgium. Commissioned by the SFS, Don’t Grieve was composed in 2001; Kancheli began it in the spring and completed it on September 5. Kancheli is among the Eastern European composers who have explored the “new mysticism.” He expresses a deep sense of spirituality through a personalized vocabulary that draws on an eclectic array of musical traditions. Although Kancheli wrote an opera in the early ’80s and has occasionally produced vocal scores since then, his principal reputation is as a composer of instrumental music. When he has created vocal works, he has sometimes taken an unorthodox stance regarding his texts, dovetailing verses or lines by several authors (or several works of a single author), essentially creating a sort of collage libretto whose meaning he controls himself. Don’t Grieve is set to excerpts of poetry by Boris Pasternak, Lord Byron, Osip Mandelstam, Dylan Thomas, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Shakespeare, Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev, W.H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky (in paraphrase), Galaktion Tabidze, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in addition to an anonymous poem and an original text by the composer.
Kancheli comments on the work: “I began writing a piece for baritone and symphony orchestra in the early spring of 2001. It was completed six days prior to the tragedy that took place in the USA on September 11. Although my music is usually sad, or even tragic, I did not dare to dedicate this piece to the memory of the innocent victims. I must confess that I was tempted! However, I was aware that music written after the tragedy would have been different. Therefore, I decided to use the last two words of the text for the title: Don’t Grieve! They are addressed to everyone who endured this tragedy with tears, and still believed in the future.
“I have always considered and still deem that great poetry carries great music within itself. By limiting myself to the use of single lines, phrases, or titles from various poems, I am free to create music according to my own interpretation of a given image. Just an image, rather than the ideas behind Shakespeare’s sonnet, for example. This is not the path of least resistance. This is rather a realistic perception of one’s possibilities. It is beyond my ability to create music which will sound better than the music I sense in the poetry of J. Brodsky or O. Mandelstam. But I am capable, to a certain extent, of creating musical images that reveal the sense of separate words, phrases, lines. Therefore, taking this opportunity, I would like to beg the eminent authors and you, my dear listeners, to forgive me for such a liberal treatment of great poetry.”
Internationally acclaimed Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky was born in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia and studied in Krasnoyarsk. His career has rapidly expanded to include regular engagements at all of the major opera houses, including the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, Kirov Opera, and Metropolitan Opera, in addition to appearances at the Salzburg Festival. His most notable roles include Onegin in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Figaro in Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia, the title role in Mozart's Don Giovanni, and Posa in Verdi's Don Carlos. He has also given many recitals to great acclaim in all of the major international recital venues, and appears regularly in concert with orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony, appearing most recently with Tilson Thomas and the SFS in April 1997 performances of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. Mr. Hvorostovsky retains strong musical and personal contacts with Russia. The distinguished Russian composer Georgi Sviridov wrote a song cycle, St. Petersburg, especially for him. He also takes an interest in Russian church music and has given numerous concerts and made a recording of this music with the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir. His other recordings include several recital and aria discs; complete operas including Verdi's La Traviata with Zubin Mehta and Don Carlos with Bernard Haitink, and Tchaikovsy's Pique Dame and Iolanta with Valery Gergiev; he has also recorded Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death with Valery Gergiev and the Orchestra of the Kirov Opera.
(c) SFS, 2002