Page 142 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY
JOHANN SABASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)
trans. GYÖRGY KURTÁG (b.1926) Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV106
TIMO ANDRES (b. 1985)
O Lamm Gottes, unschildig,
Timo Andres was born in Palo Alto, California, grew up in rural Connecticut, and now lives and works in Brooklyn. He wrote this piece between 2006 and 2007, and premiered it in New York that year. It was originally part of a two-piano album called Shy and Mighty, which was his senior thesis project at Yale and became his first CD release on Nonesuch in 2009. Andres writes about the solo piano version heard today:
How can I live in your world of ideas? takes its unwieldy name from the caption of a cartoon I drew in college, which depicts a young penguin and his parents in a museum, looking at a painting of a naked woman. This piece starts out as a passacaglia or theme and variations, but is then gradually overtaken by extraneous material from somewhere else entirely. . . . I transcribed it for a solo pianist (myself) because I needed something to play at short notice; in its solo version, however, the pianist must work much more strenuously to denote the mercurial transitions (“needle-drops”) which characterize the piece.
Cartoon by Timo Andres
BWV1085
György Kurtág, a contemporary Hungarian composer, transcribed these two chorale preludes by Johann Sebastian Bach for piano four hands. Kurtág published them in a volume called Transcriptions from Machaut to J.S. Bach and recorded them with his wife, Márta, on a 1997 CD called Játékok (Games). In his own work, Kurtág is especially known for icy miniatures, well described by his aphorism, “one note is almost enough.” His transcriptions are likewise lean, bringing a judicious clarity to Bach’s music.
Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (God’s time is the best of all times) comes from the opening Sonatina of Actus Tragicus, BWV 106, one of Bach’s earliest cantatas. It was originally scored for two recorders, two violas da gamba, and basso continuo—an old-fashioned ensemble even in Bach’s day, harkening back to the music of the previous generation. All of Bach’s sacred cantatas were intended for use in Lutheran services, and this one was written for a funeral.
O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig (O Lamb of God, innocent) is a Lutheran hymn that Bach used in several works, including in the opening of St. Matthew Passion. Kurtág made this transcription, however, from a little-known organ prelude that was lost for centuries and rediscovered in a collection at Yale University in 1984. Still uncatalogued at the time Kurtág picked it up, it is now designated BWV 1085.
How can I live in your world of ideas?
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The Music at Tippet Rise