| Album notes by FZ
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| This is the first recorded performance of these works (“Pedro’s Dowry”, as released on the “Orchestral Favorites” album was another version for 40 pieces, and “Envelopes”, as released on the “Drowning Witch” LP was in a version for small rock band), and, as with every performance of new music, errors will occur. Every effort has been made to remove these, but without a much larger budget for rehearsal and recording time, the possibility of perfection in a premiere situation such as this is somewhat remote. A second volume of material from these sessions is being prepared as well as the recordings of several chamber works which Pierre Boulez will conduct in January ‘84. For those of you who enjoy this kind of musical entertainment, more is on the way.
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| Thanks to the membership of the L.S.O. for their valiant efforts, especially Ash, the concert-master, for his enticingly Australian violin solo improvisation during the disco section of “Pedro”.
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| Album notes
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| KENT NAGANO was born in 1951 and grew up on a family farm in Morro Bay, California. His early musical training was equally strong in both Japanese and Western traditions. At the age of four, he began studying the piano with his mother, and by high school was also playing koto, viola and clarinet. After graduating from high school, he briefly attended Oxford University, then returned to the United States to complete his undergraduate work at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he was awarded highest honors. While earning a master’s degree in San Francisco, he served as assistant to conductor Laslo Varga, and at the same time worked for the San Francisco Opera.
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| In 1977, John Reeves White, director of the New York Pro Musica, arranged for MR. NAGANO to represent the United States as guest conductor at the International Music Festival of Brazil. Between 1977 and 1979, he studied with the noted musicologist and conductor Osbourne McConathy, and worked with Sarah Caldwell and the Opera Company of Boston as associate artistic director. Upon his return to the San Francisco Bay area, MR. NAGANO became director of the San Francisco Chamber Opera Co. Today he is well known to audiences as the music director of the Berkeley Symphony and the Oakland Ballet Orchestra, and is presently serving his third season as assistant conductor of the Oakland Symphony.
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| MR. NAGANO will be actively involved in Europe beginning in the spring of 1983 with invitations to conduct in Holland, Belgium, France and Italy. These performances are mostly centered around contemporary literature for which MR. NAGANO has a notable reputation.
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| [Notes by FZ on Barbican Theatre concert program - January 11, 1983] The first version of “Envelopes” was written for two amplified keyboard instruments with rhythm section accompaniment, and an attempt was made to record it at Trident Studios in London in 1968. The performance was not good enough and was never released. Eventually musicians entered my touring group who possessed the manual dexterity required to perform it, and so it become a part of the repertoire. A good recording of the keyboard version can be heard on the album “Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch”.
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| In response to a request from the Netherlands Wind Ensemble for several compositions designed for their instrumentation, a special reggae version was prepared, eventually leading to this version for large orchestra. (There is also an obscure version with lyrics which was filmed in 1978 along with the concert material for “Baby Snakes”, but it has not been released either).
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| “Envelopes” utilizes a new harmonic technique based on seven and eight note chords which generate their own counterpoint as an automatic result of the voice leading. This technique is used extensively in other musics performed tonight.
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| [Notes by FZ on Barbican Theatre concert program - January 11, 1983] DAVID OCKER, the clarinet soloist who will perform the premiere, commissioned “MO ‘N HERB” as a piece for clarinet with no accompaniment. Well, folks, I’m not all that enthusiastic about the Bb clarinet as a source of audio entertainment to begin with, since they always sound so inoffensive (except when they play Dixieland music, at which time they strike me as EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE, but in an aesthetically unusable way) … so, David asked for some clarinet music, and I wrote it, and he learned it, and later I added the orchestra parts.
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| “Mo ‘n Herb’s vacation”, in this large version, can be thought of as an extension of that amusing romantic tradition known as the “tone poem”… meadows, frolics, birds of various persuasions, thunder, wind, etc.
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| In this permutation, however (actually performable as a ballet / pantomime), the listener is invited to relax and travel with my former manager and the president of Warner Brothers Records as they take their wives on a trip to Pamplona to watch the bulls run and the peasants get gored, while several people in the adjacent elsewhere attempt to discern who paid for the tickets.
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 Design by John Vince.jpg "(Front) Design by John Vince")
 Photo by Steve Schapiro.jpg "(LP back) Photo by Steve Schapiro")
Title origin |
Songs list
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