Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's New Century Chamber Orchestra has consistently adventurous programming, but the upcoming series may be the first (at least until I am corrected) of an all-symphonic lineup. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Haydn’s Farewell Symphony will bracket the commissioned world premiere of Lera Auerbach's String Symphony No. 1, Memoria de la Luz (Memory of the Light). For much more about Auerbach, see the previous column item.
Movements of String Symphony are:
I. Primera luz (First Light)
II. Monólogo (Monologue)
III. Cuatro preguntas (Four Questions)
IV. Díalogo extatico (Ecstatic Dialogue)
V. Trágico (Tragic)
VI. Epilogo (Epilogue)
The composer says of String Symphony:
In this work, the boundaries between the secular and sacred are blurred. The work is structured in six movements that become six prayers. The act of praying, not in a traditional religious manner, but rather a most intense act of soul searching, a hard and honest look into oneself, questioning and searching for answers.To pray is to relinquish defenses, pretenses, to quiet everyday noise, to accept the strength and fragility of one’s own naked soul. Musical gestures become symbols. A prayer is a way to connect to one’s own origins, to the distant memories of the primordial light. All the threads lead back to childhood, we are our memories.
The first movement is an attempt to find this forgotten melody that is still alive somewhere within — a simple yet longing sound from the past. The second movement begins with unsettled monologues followed by passionate replies. The four questions of the third movement return to the lonely, fearful, lost sense of the doubtful mind.
The fourth movement is agitated, and burning with hopeful fervor. It climaxes in the tragic intensity of the fifth movement. The unbearable tension protrudes between the sustained pedal points of the lower strings and the main thematic material is presented in parallel fifths in the violins. At the end of the movement, the ever-questioning viola brings the memory of the beginning.
The sixth movement is a postlude, which grows from the darkness of a lament to a quiet chorale that brings if not yet peace — a chiaroscuro sense of hope to find the lost harmony of the primordial light.
And, speaking about the String Symphony, Auerbach also quoted from her autobiographical novel, The Mirror:
In the beginning was the word. Music is speech. Speech that hasn’t yet named itself, unrealized and therefore not yet lost. In the beginning was music. The world was created with it. On the sacrament of loss, a sacrament, for while we lose we do not deplete, but make whole and acquire.The world was born on the sacrament of the primordial melody of losses. And there was a loss before birth. For birth is a loss. And the infinite tenderness of this loss, this loss that gives, this abundant loss; it is tenderness, the tenderness of a return which creates the harmony holding the world together.