Grace Williams:
Sea Sketches for string orchestra

I’ve lived most of my life within sight of the sea, and I shall never tire of looking at it and listening to its wonderful sounds. It must have influenced my music – its rhythms and long flowing lines and its colours must have had an effect, not only on my sea music, but on other works not directly associated with the sea.

– Grace Williams

The first female Welsh composer to achieve prominence, Grace Williams (1906-1977) was born in the coastal town of Barry. She received musical training with Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music, joining several other young female composers at the RCM, including Imogen Holst, Dorothy Gow, and Elizabeth Maconchy.

Williams’ compositional output includes symphonies, concertos, various orchestral works, and an opera. She received numerous commissions from BBC radio, writing incidental music for radio plays and scripts for school broadcasts, and was the first British woman to score a feature film, with Blue Scar (1949). During the Second World War, Williams was evacuated to Grantham in Lincolnshire, and it was here that she wrote some of her most popular works, including her Sinfonia Concertante, Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, Symphonic Impressions, and Sea Sketches.

Composed in 1944, Sea Sketches was dedicated to her parents, “who had the good sense to set up home on the coast of Glamorgan.” In five movements, it is an evocative work of the varying moods of the sea, and may even express the homesickness she felt during the years she spent away from Wales. After the War, Williams would eventually leave London due to poor physical health and return to Barry—residing near to the ocean for the rest of her life.

— Notes by Samuel Park

Michael Daugherty: Fallingwater for solo violin and strings

Michael Daugherty was inspired to write his Fallingwater Violin Concerto during a visit to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate in Wisconsin named Taliesin. Inside the main living hall, he noticed a beautiful, circular wooden musical stand that Wright built himself. This musical stand could seat four musicians at a time and was originally intended to facilitate readings of Beethoven string quartets. With this connection between music and Frank Lloyd Wright’s concept of “organic architecture” in mind, Daugherty began to compose his concerto for violin and string ensemble, with each of the four movements influenced by one of Wright’s architectural achievements, and each rooted in varying musical traditions.

Wright’s Taliesin (“shining brow” in Welsh) takes the spotlight in the first movement, “Night Rain,” and Daugherty alludes to Wright’s Welsh ancestry through his melodic and textural writing. The solo violin begins with a brief, pensive statement, and the rest of the violins answer with soft pizzicati that create a sensation of calming rain drops. A lush solo violin melody soon evolves from this backdrop, and eventually, the whole ensemble transforms into a chorale-like texture that is rich and fully cathartic by the climax.

The second movement, “On the Level,” is a scherzo on “Fallingwater,” one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most well-regarded masterpieces. The sense of magnificence and drama with this architecture, perched on top of a waterfall, is palpable from the start of this movement, when the string ensemble and solo violin play in a slow, maestoso unison, with sudden, dramatic shifts in dynamics in every measure. After this powerful, declamatory statement, the cello runs off with the scherzo theme, followed by the solo violin. The rising and falling thematic material is then presented in various canons and tempis, in order to imitate, as the Daugherty mentioned in his composer’s note, “the daring cantilevers of Wright’s architectural structure.” 

“Prairie Psalms,” the third movement, refers to Wright’s founding of the Prairie School of Architectural Design and specifically features the Unity Temple in Chicago. This building exemplifies the concept of unity in different ways, but it is most physically apparent by Wright’s primary use of reinforced concrete for the entire construction. Frank Lloyd Wright also created the illusion of nature by incorporating green, yellow, and brown tinted stained glasses throughout the temple. The feeling of nature, meditation, balance, and peace is pervasive throughout this movement, even despite the solo violin and the string orchestra playing with increasingly lush, passionate harmonies and melodies. The occasional glissandos in the solo violin throughout this movement finally takes center stage towards the end, as the violin glides upwards and floats peacefully above the rumbling orchestra.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York is the final architecture to be featured in this violin concerto. The last movement, “Ahead of the Curve,” begins with an ascending motivic material in the solo violin, imitating the walk up the spiraling design of the Guggenheim. Then the orchestra enters with the same motivic set, as if it is one step behind the solo violin. The solo violin and the ensemble are in constant struggle throughout the movement. The violin steadily climbs up in register with each motivic iteration, culminating in a serene but suspenseful passage on a high F in the final cadenza, and then tumbling down with the orchestra into the coda. The violin makes one last virtuostic dash to the highest G on the instrument before finally joining the rest of the ensemble with one final outburst.

— Notes by Samuel Park

Jean Cras:
String Trio

A lifelong career naval officer, Jean Cras reached the rank of rear-admiral and was decorated several times in World War I. While receiving much less recognition for his compositional achievements, and having no formal training in music composition, Cras nevertheless was a prolific composer, most significantly, for his contribution to the French chamber music repertory. Besides his celebrated String Trio, Cras also wrote a piano trio (1907), string quartet (1910), and piano quintet (1922).

Tonight’s performance features just the first movement of Cras’ four-movement String Trio for violin, viola, and cello—one of the most difficult chamber music genres for which to compose. In the absence of an additional violin, which would complete the more standard formation of a string quartet, the string trio texture is significantly leaner, requiring each musician to play at their maximum textural capacity —including frequent double stops and chords. In writing the first movement, Cras described it has a “hellish bother,” tempting him to abandon the work altogether. However, the movement was completed on May 30, 1926, full of liveliness and a sense of optimism. He wrote: ‘I am happy to announce that I have completed the first movement of my Trio. The exposition of the ideas had given me a lot of trouble, their development came easily, and in the end, I am pretty pleased.”

— Notes by Samuel Park

Daniel Temkin:
Ocean’s Call (string orchestra version)

At age sixteen, I traveled to California with my family, driving up the famous “Route 1” (also known as the “Pacific Coast Highway”) from Los Angles towards northern California. This was my first up-close encounter with the Pacific Ocean, and I found it mesmerizing. I had grown up near the Gulf of Mexico, and later spent time on the Atlantic Coast frequenting beaches in New Jersey, yet California’s central coast, with its steep, jagged, cliffs and panoramic landscapes was like nothing I had seen. The Pacific Ocean seemed to have its own aura, a rugged energy calling out to me.

A decade later, having recently moved to California, Ocean's Call was commissioned in its original string quartet version, and it became an homage to my new home. The first movement, “Hanging Cliffs, Rising Mist” contrasts violin and viola harmonics in an airy upper register, with a singing solo cello, ringing out in its lowest range. This acoustic division is a musical metaphor for the physical space between the Pacific’s rocky cliffsides and the ocean far down below. The second movement, “The Bitter Salt of the Sea” is about different ocean currents. After opening with quiet ocean sounds, tapped lightly on the instrument bodies, the music builds like a rising tide towards a final vigorous climax when crashing waves passing through the ensemble. The final movement “Lullaby Waves” considers the ocean at its most tranquil time, and the music alternates between episodes of group chorales and soloist duets. With an understated simplicity, the movement ponders the notion of love, suggesting that at its depths, true love has a certain purity and eternal quality, not unlike that of gentle ocean waves that ebb on throughout time.

— Original Notes by Composer