Symphony No.15 "Homage to Mozart" - Gloria Coates

Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Boder. I - Iridescences: 0:00 II - Puzzle Canon: 7:59 III - What Are Stars?: 16:32 Coates's Symphony No.15 was composed between 2004-5, being commissioned by the European Festival Passau for Mozart's 250th anniversary year in 2006. It was premiered in Vienna on June of 2006, performed by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Michael Boder. The elements of Coates's music are generally few in number, easily described, often odd, and oddly combined, giving her music an instantly recognizable profile. One recurring element is slow string glissandos. Another is wavery textures of faster glissandos, at varying rates. Another is conventionally tonal chorale writing, often quoting previous music. Another is simple, even march-like rhythmic patterns, sometimes offset within her favourite 5/4 meter. The essence of Coates's music is not any one of these elements, but their juxtaposition and combination — sometimes even their indistinguishable fusion into some of the strangest textures in recent music. She brings together the straight and the curved, the familiar and the weird, the hard-edged and the vague, the tonal and the beyond-atonal, and sets us down in musical landscapes which disallow our usual figure-ground experiences of focusing within a musical texture. The symphony bears the subtitle "Homage to Mozart", which might lead one to expect a neoclassic work. Nothing could be further from the case. The first movement is one of Coates's darkest and most abstract essays, though its evolution is quite transparent. Here are swooping, upward glissandos in the strings, wavery string tones using wide vibrato, timpani tremolos rising in pitch with the foot pedal, and a continuum of intermittent dissonant pitches across the orchestra's entire register. The piece breathes with a slow, irregular pulse, the energy reeling from one part of the orchestra to another and back, and the harmonies, though dissonant, are quite stable and change only slowly. After this dark beginning, the second movement enters in completely unexpected tonal chords. The strangeness returns, though, when the strings enter in dissonant slow glissandos, fanning out in opposite directions as the wind band plays on — a characteristic, 'smeared-tonality' texture that Coates has used elsewhere, beginning in her Fourth Symphony. The 'puzzle' of the title is the identity of the quasi-quotation in the winds: it is taken from Mozart's last motet, the Ave Verum Corpus in D major, K. 618- and played backwards. The contrapuntal lines are silken smooth, but the harmony isn't marked by the forward-leading progression one expects from tonal music. The glissandos grow in range and volume until they engulf the motet, though the latter eventually returns — this time played forwards — and finally merges into the strings as a canon. The final movement takes its title "What Are Stars?" from an Emily Dickinson poem: "Go thy Great Way! / The Stars thou meetst / Are even (seen) as Thyself / For what are Stars but Asterisks / To point a human Life?" Here is a dialogue between two elements: an original chromatically wandering chorale in the brass and later winds, and a texture of multilayered glissandos in the strings. Punctuated by the ever-present timpani, these textures alternate and overlap with the usual clarity of gesture that makes Coates's music so easy to absorb despite the complexity and weirdness of its sound world. Picture: "The Archaeologists" (1927) by the Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Source: https://tinyurl.com/29xmyh64 Unfortunately, the score isn't freely available.