Mannes Orchestra, Mavericks:

Zorn, Viet Cuong, Berio:

Featuring Sandbox Percussion & Stefan Jackiw

Conducted by David Hayes

Viet Cuong: Re(new)al, featuring Sandbox Percussion

John Zorn: Contes de Fées, with soloist Stefan Jackiw

Luciano Berio: Sinfonia, with eight amplified singers

Mannes Orchestra returns to Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in a program that breaks orchestral and stylistic boundaries and up-ends the idea of the expected and unexpected. Featuring works by mavericks John Zorn, Viet Cuong, and Luciano Berio with Sandbox Percussion and Stefan Jackiw – it’s a radical musical journey not to be missed.

Conducted by David Hayes, the one-night-only April 11 performance at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall is presented by The New School’s College of Performing Arts.

The range of innovation inherent in these compositions by John Zorn, Viet Cuong, and Luciano Berio reflects Mannes Orchestra’s ongoing dedication to finding and presenting singular works that reflect a bold and unique point of view, works by under-recognized composers, and overlooked masterpieces. “Mavericks” builds on this season’s theme of exploring the radical orchestra, with unusual orchestrations and non-standard symphonic structures.

About the program:

Viet Cuong’s Re(new)al – a piece in tandem with Earth Day and April’s world-wide focus on environmental conservation and innovation – reflects the composer’s deep interest in renewable energy initiatives, and is dedicated to the four-member Sandbox Percussion. Coincidentally, the theme for Earth Day 2025 is OUR POWER, OUR PLANET, inviting everyone around the globe to unite behind renewable energy, and to triple the global generation of clean electricity by 2030.

Cuong explains, “I have tremendous respect for renewable energy initiatives and the commitment to creating a new, better reality for us all. Re(new)al is a percussion quartet concerto devoted to finding unexpected ways to breathe new life into traditional ideas. The solo quartet performs on several ‘found’ instruments, including crystal glasses and compressed air cans. While the piece also features more traditional instruments, such as snare drum and vibraphone, I looked for ways to alter their sounds or find new ways to play them.”

Re(new)al comprises three continuous movements, each inspired by the power of hydro, wind, and solar energies.

John Zorn’s Contes de Fées (composed in 1999) is one of the musical polymath’s classical masterworks. The work – a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Music in 2000 – is a powerful violin concerto with a virtuosic and lyrical solo, performed for this program by violinist Stefan Jackiw, hailed as “brilliantly skillful and selflessly musical” (Financial Times).

“The concerto is one of the most exciting and enduring of all classical forms—a virtuoso soloist pitted against the color and dynamism of a larger ensemble. Berg, Schoenberg, Mozart, Stravinsky, all wrote some of their best works for this medium and the challenge of writing one is quite daunting for a composer. Very soon after the death of my father I composed the piano concerto/requia Aporias. Contes de Fées came just at the passing of my mother. A dramatic and structurally complex work, it is one of my most rigorous compositions. The notes of the solo violin are repeated through twice in the exact same order in the orchestral accompaniment—an enormous sequence of pitches I call a “pitch incantation.” This method of pitch organization was first used in Le Mômo (dedicated to Antonin Artaud) from earlier in 1999, and again in the solo violin piece Goetia from 2002.

There were many exciting moments in the composition of Contes de Fées and I can still remember many epiphanies and revelations of problem-solving. One interesting detail is that the coda was actually written first, discarded and then brought back with its mirror image inserted as an interlude—the coda violin pitches are used in the orchestra accompaniment of the interlude, and the orchestra pitches of the coda are reiterated as the violin chords of the interlude.

Contes de Fées has had many excellent performances worldwide and I am extremely indebted to those who have championed this work through the years—conductors Jonathan Sheffer, David Fulmer, Micha Hamel, Jeff Meyers, and Ryan McAdams, violinists Kirk Nikkanen, Chris Otto, Jennifer Koh, Pauline Kim Harris, and Stephanie Nussbaum, George Steel, Melissa Smey, Richard Kessler, and Augusta Reed Thomas who are among my most fervent and active supporters, and of course Stefan Jackiw, David Hayes, and all the performers present on April 11.” – John Zorn

Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia was composed in 1968-69 and features eight amplified singers embedded in the orchestra. The vocalists represent a distorted history of culture in which they speak and shout excerpts from texts including Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked. The work’s third movement includes a cut-up of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. Sinfonia was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 25th anniversary and, according to Leonard Bernstein in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1973), was representative of the new direction classical music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties.

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