JULY 12, 2016 @ 7:30 PM
The Knights
Colin Jacobsen and Eric Jacobsen, Artistic Directors
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
Gabriel Kahane, vocalist, The Knights
Franz Joseph Haydn, (1732-1809), Symphony No. 64 in A Major, “Tempora Mutantor”, Hob/ I/64 (1773-75)
I. Allegro con spirito
II. Largo
III. Menuetto and Trio: Allegretto
IV. Finale: Presto
Gabriel Kahane, (1981-), Crane Palimpsest (2012), (New York Premiere)
1. How many dawns…
a. Vinegar Hill
II. I think of cinemas…
b. BMT
III. Out of some subway scuttle…
c. The Navy Yard
IV. O harp and altar…
d. Hicks Street
V. Again the traffic lights…
Gabriel Kahane, vocalist
INTERMISSION
Franz Schubert, (1797-1828), Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, D.485 (1816)
I. Allegro
II. Andante con moto
III. Menuetto. Allegro molto
IV. Allegro vivace
Bob Haggart (1914-98)/Ray Bauduc (1906-88) (arr. The Knights), “The Big Noise from Winnetka” (1938)
Bob Dylan (1941) (arr. The Knights), “The Times They Are A-Changin” (1938)
Christina Courtin and Gabriel Kahane, vocalists
**This performance by The Knights has been made possible by a generous grant from Andrea and Guillaume Cuvelier.**
WQXR HOST: Elliott Forrest
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
THE KNIGHTS
The Knights are an orchestral collective, flexible in size and repertory, dedicated to transforming the concert experience. Engaging listeners and defying boundaries with programs that showcase the players’ roots in the classical tradition and passion for artistic discovery, The Knights have “become one of Brooklyn’s sterling cultural products.” (New Yorker).
The Knights’ 2015-16 season kicked off at Caramoor, with a performance featuring cello superstar Yo-Yo Ma. The group is in residence at Brooklyn’s BRIC House, as part of a series of New York City residencies undertaken with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This winter, The Knights teamed up with violinist Gil Shaham on a North American tour and appeared on Shaham’s 1930’s Violin Concertos, Vol. 2, released in February, joining the master violinist on Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto. Recent highlights include The Knights’ debut at Carnegie Hall in the New York premiere of the Steven Stucky/Jeremy Denk opera The Classical Style; a U.S. tour with banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck; a European tour with soprano Dawn Upshaw, including the group’s debut at Vienna’s Musikverein; frequent festival appearances at Ravinia and Tanglewood; and seven years of free summer performances at Central Park’s Naumburg Orchestral Concerts.
The Knights evolved from late-night chamber music reading parties with friends at the home of violinist Colin Jacobsen and cellist Eric Jacobsen. The Jacobsens, who serve as artistic directors of The Knights, were selected from among the nation’s top visual, performing, media, and literary artists to receive a prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in 2012. The Knights’ roster boasts remarkably diverse talents, including composers, arrangers, singer-songwriters, and improvisers, who bring a range of cultural influences to the group, from jazz and klezmer to pop and indie rock music. The unique camaraderie within the group retains the intimacy and spontaneity of chamber music in performance.
Eric Jacobsen, Artistic Director
Hailed by the New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” conductor and cellist Eric Jacobsen has built a reputation for engaging audiences with innovative and collaborative projects. Jacobsen is the founder and Artistic Director of The Knights and a founding member of the genre-defying string quartet Brooklyn Rider. As conductor of The Knights, Jacobsen has led the “consistently inventive, infectiously engaged indie ensemble” (New York Times) at New York venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Central Park, and at renowned international halls such as the Vienna Musikverein and Cologne Philharmonie. In the 2015-16 season, Jacobsen celebrates his inaugural season as Music Director of the Orlando Philharmonic and his second season as both Music Director of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony and Artistic Partner with the Northwest Sinfonietta. Also in demand as a guest conductor, Jacobsen has recently led the Camerata Bern, the Detroit Symphony, the Alabama Symphony, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Deutsche Philharmonie Merck, and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble.
Colin Jacobsen, Artistic Director
As the Washington Post observes, violinist and composer Colin Jacobsen is “one of the most interesting figures on the classical music scene.” A founding member of two game-changing, audience-expanding ensembles – the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and orchestra The Knights – he is also a touring member of Yo-Yo Ma’s venerated Silk Road Project and an Avery Fisher Career Grant-winning violinist. Jacobsen’s work as a composer developed as a natural outgrowth of his chamber and orchestral collaborations. Jointly inspired by encounters with leading exponents of non-western traditions and by his own classical heritage, his most recent compositions for Brooklyn Rider include “Three Miniatures” – “vivacious, deftly drawn sketches” (New York Times) – which were written for the reopening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Islamic art galleries. Jacobsen collaborated with Iran’s Siamak Aghaei to write a Persian folk-inflected composition, “Ascending Bird,” which he performed as soloist with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House, in a concert that was streamed live by millions of viewers worldwide. His work for dance and theater includes Chalk and Soot, a collaboration with Dance Heginbotham, and music for Compagnia de’ Colombari’s theatrical production of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.
Learn more at theknightsnyc.com.
Support for The Knights’ performance has been provided by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
See Also: We Are The Knights – a Channel 13 Special on them.
NOTES ON THIS PROGRAM’S MUSIC:
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Quo modo? Fit semper tempore peior homo.
These words are from an epigram by Elizabethan-era poet John Owens, and Haydn used them as a subtitle to his wondrously inventive Symphony No. 64. They translate roughly to:
The times change, and in them changed are we. How so? As times get worse, so does man.
While this statement may seem a bit pessimistic for the music Haydn wrote in his 64th symphony, the musicologist Elaine Sisman has further pointed to the line, “Time is out of joint” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the origin point specifically for the strange, disjunct, rhetorical Largo movement. (Haydn had been working extensively with a theater troupe led by famed actor Carl Wahr at the time of this symphony’s composition).
Perhaps one of music’s greatest powers is the way it allows us to experience time: lulling us with repetitive phrases; setting up expectations and then either fulfilling them or taking us in unexpected directions; expanding time with cosmic stillness; making our heart race as we sense things coming to a climax, or trailing off in unfulfilled longing. Music can encapsulate the time and place it was written either in a very premeditated way or seemingly by accident. Today’s program has examples of both, as we shuttle back and forth between symphonies of the classical era to folk, popular and art songs from the more recent past.
In Gabriel Kahane’s Crane Palimpsest we experience another form of time displacement, as he sets up a shifting musical ground that goes between a rigorous/formal setting of the words of Hart Crane in the Depression-era poem To Brooklyn Bridge and his own original songs and lyrics of a more vernacular and pop-leaning nature.
On the second half, following Schubert, (the great songwriter of his time,) we will hear another relic of Depression-era America by Bob Haggart and Ray Haugart (members of Bob Crosby’s orchestra the Bob-Cats) as reimagined by Knights bassist Shawn Conley (who lives his own slightly disjunct musical life, spending half of his time in jazz and the other half in the classical world).
The program concludes with another take on times changing- in the form of Bob Dylan’s iconic anthem to a time and place, America in the 1960’s, in an arrangement I recently made of The Times, They Are A-Changin’.
You could argue over whether the times (and human beings) have gotten worse or better since Haydn worked in the employ of the Esterhazy court, or Hart Crane saluted the Brooklyn Bridge as the Great Depression had just cast its long shadow, or Dylan penned his challenge to a divided nation. We do know that in music, we enter a shared space where the disjunct and continuous can merge, step out of their own times and into a temporary ideal world held by all those present, including musicians and audience.