Born on August 1, 1962, in Willingboro Township, New Jersey; resides in New York City.
Last Year
Autumn: Dismissing Eunice
Winter: Le triangle noir
Spring: Zephania 1:14-15
Summer: For Julia, born 2045
Composed: 2019
Estimated length: 25 minutes
First performance: November 4, 2021, in Berkeley, California, with Jeffrey Ziegler as cello soloist and leader of the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work.
When Mark Adamo’s debut opera Little Women was premiered in 1998, it heralded a composer with a uniquely compelling lyrical and theatrical gift that has made him one of the most successful American opera composers of his generation. While his compositions for the concert hall comprise a relatively small portion of his oeuvre, Adamo’s first major orchestral piece, the harp concerto Four Angels, was met with acclaim from the start, when Leonard Slatkin led harpist Dotian Levalier and the National Symphony Orchestra in the premiere in 2007.
A little more than a decade later, Adamo became intrigued by a fresh encounter with Vivaldi’s set of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons. “I marveled: not only at the score’s vigor and clarity, but at its innocence, too—as it portrayed each season offering its own delights and terrors while still yielding, safely, to the next,” Adamo recalls. Realizing that “Vivaldi couldn’t write those scores today,” he began to wonder what the Venetian composer would write if he happened to be alive today and knew what we have come to experience of the seasons against the backdrop of climate change anxiety.
Last Year embodies Adamo’s answer to that hypothetical question—especially fitting as the music world this year celebrates the 300th anniversary of the publication of The Four Seasons (as part of a larger collection). Each of Last Year’s four movements corresponds to a season and weaves in material from Vivaldi. Adamo, however, chose “the richer-voiced cello” in lieu of the violin as his protagonist and designed a single concerto instead of Vivaldi’s series of four distinct three-movement concertos (one for each season). Moreover, Adamo expands his predecessor’s string orchestra ensemble by adding “ringing percussion,” piano, harp, and timpani to the soundscape.
Last Year’s punning title is characteristic of the literary sensibility of this composer, who has published thought-provoking music criticism in addition to his librettos. Adamo notes that the impetus “to give voice to the fears and hopes we experience during this moment of crisis pushed me both emotionally and technically in ways I’ve never experienced before.” The score is dedicated to contemporary-music patron Susan W. Rose.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Adamo begins with a fanfare that announces the first movement, Autumn: Dismissing Eunice, a tribute to Eunice Foote, the 19th-century scientist who first theorized about the greenhouse effect. This “polymetric scherzo of nervous and glittering character,” as the composer describes it, is twice interrupted by “a tolling procession of chords” from the percussion.
The ensuing three movements are played without pause. Winter: Le Triangle Noir recalls a devastating 1998 ice storm in North America that left behind beautiful photographic records and “introduces an original theme of hushed, awed character.” The percussion once again interrupts the proceedings, until eventually these interpolations can be identified “as one of our oldest musical tropes of warning.” Adamo refers here to the Dies irae, the “Day of Wrath” referenced in the Book of Zephaniah, which gives the third movement its title: Spring: Zephaniah 1:14-15. Two solo cadenzas frame this tumultuous movement, which incorporates the famous theme from Vivaldi’s Spring in accelerated and decelerated distortions.
Following a thunderous climax, the cello soloist segues into Summer: for Julia, born 2045. Here, writes Adamo, “in a harmonic landscape emptied of everything but sustained bass tones and the cries of seagulls,” the cellist “attempts to speak a promise into the future. “Memories of chaos, and that opening premonition, return to haunt the final moments: but the cello maintains the last word.”
In addition to solo cello, scored for timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings.
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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