Brian Nabors (b. 1991)
Pulse (2019)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, two oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons including contrabassoon, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, and strings
Performance time: 12 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Brian Raphael Nabors likes to tell stories in his compositions with a colorful harmonic language and eclectic musical palate inspired by jazz, funk, R&B, gospel, and more. Growing up in the South, Nabors was exposed to music that was often deeply rooted in spirituality. As such, much of his music reflects on life, nature, and the human condition. Pulse is no exception. Nabors calls it “a long contemplation of daily life as we know it, combined with thoughts of life in nature.” To him, the universe has a natural, unified rhythm to it. “It is as if every living and moving thing we are aware and unaware of is being held together by a mysterious, resolute force,” he says.

Nabors calls Pulse “an episodic rhapsody” that explores different colors and rhythms but is united by a steady pulse. “Each episode is meant to symbolize a different scenario of life for the listener,” Nabors writes in his program note, “be it a buzzing modern metropolis, a deep wilderness abundant with animalia, or the scenic endless abyss of the ocean.” These scenes and their associated philosophical meanings are united by a contemplative string theme that “symbolizes our deep connection as living beings to everything within, over, under, and around us,” Nabors says. Pulse was first performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and conducted by our very own music director, Maestro Giancarlo Guerrero, as part of the NSO’s Composer Lab Showcase in 2019.

Peter Lieberson (1946–2011)
Neruda Songs (2005)
Scored for: two flutes including piccolo, two oboes including English Horn, two clarinets including bass clarinet, two bassoons, two French horns, two trumpets, percussion, harp, piano, strings, and solo mezzo soprano
Performance time: 30 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

While browsing the bookshop in the Albuquerque airport, Peter Lieberson was struck by a bright pink volume. The book was 100 Love Sonnets by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. “As I glanced through the poems, I immediately thought that I must set some of these for Lorraine,” Lieberson wrote. The Lorraine in question was none other than his wife, the renowned mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. The two met in 1997 while working on Lieberson’s opera Ashoka’s Dream and married two years later. The composer finally had the opportunity to set Neruda’s poetry a few years after discovering the book through a joint commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Boston Symphony. Sadly, Neruda Songs would be Lieberson’s final collaboration with his beloved wife, making the work even more poignant. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson premiered and recorded the orchestral song cycle in 2005, one year before her death at the age of 52, following a long battle with breast cancer.

The five poems Lieberson chose to set in Neruda Songs trace the arc of love from initial butterflies to heartbreaking loss and every feeling in between. The first song, “Si no fuera porque tus ojos tienen color de luna” (“If your eyes were not the color of the moon”), sees the poet enraptured in the feelings of new love, alternating between excitement and awe. The second song, “Amor, amor, las nubes a la torre del cielo” (“Love, love, the clouds went up the tower of the sky”), is equal parts joyful and mysterious as the lovers see the world afresh, their eyes opened by love.

Taking a darker turn, “No estés lejos de mí un solo día” (“Don’t go far off, not even for a day”) reflects on the pain of separation from one’s love for even one day, the singer’s long vocal lines growing increasingly urgent in their pleading. “Ya eres mía. Reposa con tu sueño en mi sueño” (“And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream”) begins with a forceful statement of passion before softening as the poet lulls their beloved to sleep with a gentle bossa nova rhythm in the maracas. The final song, “Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres” (“My love, if I die and you don’t”), continues this lullaby. Lieberson writes of this sad but ultimately peaceful song, “There is the recognition that no matter how blessed one is with love, there will be a time when we must part from those whom we cherish so much. Still, Neruda reminds one that love has not ended. In truth there is no real death to love nor even a birth: ‘It is like a long river, only changing lands, and changing lips.’”

Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980)
The Worlds In Us (2006)
Scored for: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, percussion, harp, and strings
Performance time: 9 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

Dubbed “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” by Time Out NY, Missy Mazzoli is one of the most exciting and inventive composers working today. The Grammy-nominated composer served as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2018 to 2021, and her latest opera, The Listeners, was co-commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago and performed there this spring. Mazzoli wrote These Worlds In Us in 2006. A personal piece, it is dedicated to Mazzoli’s father, a Vietnam War veteran. The title comes from a line in James Tate’s poem The Lost Pilot, also written in honor of Tate’s father, who died in World War II.

“In talking to [my father] it occurred to me that, as we grow older, we accumulate worlds of intense memory within us, and that grief is often not far from joy,” Mazzoli writes in her program note. “I like the idea that music can reflect painful and blissful sentiments in a single note or gesture, and sought to create a sound palette that I hope is at once completely new and strangely familiar to the listener.” Mazzoli’s work is full of unusual instrumental colors, such as melodicas (a kind of mouth organ with a keyboard) and mournful string glissandi that create the impression of drowning. The piece also bears numerous nonclassical influences. “The rhythmic structures and cyclical nature of the piece are inspired by the unique tension and logic of Balinese music,” Mazzoli explains, “and the march-like figures in the percussion bring to mind the militaristic inspiration for the work as well as the relentless energy of electronica drum beats.”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949)
Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), TrV 158, op. 24 (1888)
Scored for: three flutes, three oboes including English Horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, three bassoons including contrabassoon, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings
Performance time: 23 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: August 25, 1936; Richard Czerwonky, conductor

Throughout the late 1880s, Richard Strauss devoted much of his compositional energies to writing tone poems. Also known as symphonic poems, these are usually one-movement orchestral works that depict something nonmusical, such as a painting, poem, landscape, or story. Strauss was inspired to pursue the genre after meeting violinist and composer Alexander Ritter. “He urged me on to the development of the poem, the expressive in music, as exemplified in the works of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz,” Strauss wrote. Ritter also introduced him to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, who also greatly influenced Wagner. Strauss’s 1889 tone poem Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) would be informed by Schopenhauer’s philosophy that one’s will—an unconscious, relentless striving—is the root of suffering and that the only redemption from this suffering is through ascetic renunciation of the will.

With a string of successful tone poems under his belt, starting with Aus Italien in 1886, Strauss began work on Tod und Verklärung in the summer of 1888, completing it the following year. He conducted the premiere in 1890 at the Eisenach Festival to great acclaim. Strauss believed the audience would struggle to follow the work without an explicit program detailing the scenario. Ritter provided Strauss with a sixteen-line poem for the program and a longer version to be printed in the score. Ritter’s poem tells the story of a man on his deathbed,despairing over his impending death. Yet, a smile crosses his face as he dreams of his happy childhood. Suddenly, death cruelly shakes him awake, and he sees his life flash before his eyes, from the innocence of youth to his adult struggle to achieve an unattainable, unknowable goal—perhaps some artistic ideal. Finally, death’s iron hammer comes down. In death it is revealed what the man sought on earth: redemption and transfiguration. As Strauss put it in a letter in 1894, “the soul leaves the body in order to find gloriously achieved in everlasting space those things which could not be fulfilled here below.”

Musically, the tone poem is in two sections, representing the man’s death and subsequent transfiguration. But first, a slow introduction sets the scene in the man’s small, dimly lit room and introduces two main themes. The first theme in the flute represents what Ritter calls “the impudent play of youth,” while the second theme in the oboe reflects the innocence of “childhood’s golden time.” Frightening blows from the kettledrum herald the man’s struggle with death, and the ensuing syncopated rhythm depicts the man’s labored breathing. Just before the end of the first struggle, a new idea emerges in the brass. This central theme, an outgrowth of the previous “childhood” and “youth” themes, represents “the ideal” the dying man had pursued in vain throughout his life. Strauss explains, “It is this theme…upon which the successive climaxes of the piece are built and which, together with the theme of ‘childhood,’ will achieve its apotheosis in the score’s final pages.”

Although Strauss eventually shifted his philosophical allegiance from Schopenhauer to Friedrich Nietzsche, the theme of “the ideal” still rang in his ears. Sixty years later, he would quote this theme in the final song of his Four Last Songs, “Im Abendrot,” after the last line, “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“Is this perhaps death?”). Strauss got his answer. On his own deathbed, Strauss reportedly said, “Death is just as I composed it in Death and Transfiguration.”

—Katherine Buzard