Opera Without Words
FOR ORCHESTRA
”a brilliantly colourful concerto… no moment goes by without some arresting phrase of sigh, gorgeous flourish, or melodramatic outburst.”
— Laurence Vittes, Gramophone
Details
Commissioned: Co-Commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, DC, Christoph Eschenbach, Music Director, through a grant from the John and June Hechinger Commissioning Fund for New Orchestral Works, and by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Giancarlo Guerrero, Music Director
Premiere: March 10, 2016; Washington, DC; The Kennedy Center, Concert Hall (USA); Christoph Eschenbach, conductor; National Symphony Orchestra
Movements: I The Beloved - II The Minstrel - III The Idol - IV The Gladiator - V The Farewell
Instrumentation: 3(3pic).3(3.ca).3(3.bcl).3(3.cbsn)-4.3.2.1-timp.2perc-hp.pno-str
Duration: 25’
Composer’s Note
Opera Without Words is a music drama about some of the fascinating people I have known. In beginning to compose this work, I found myself reviewing the differences and similarities between a concerto for an orchestra and an opera. As a result, I approached this new orchestral work as I would an opera; I hired a librettist, Irene Dische, and set her words not to voices but to musical instruments, unfettered by considerations of vocal range and technique. When I finished the opera with words, I removed the text, leaving but a few traces and artifacts of the deleted libretto in the score.
— Tobias Picker
Press
American Record Guide (January/February 2021) - Allan Altman
“This recording presents two works with unusual literary connections by the American composer Tobias Picker. The Encantadas, one of his earlier compositions (1983), is a melodrama based on Herman Melville’s poems about his encounters with the Galapagos Islands during a voyage on a whaling ship. Picker was attracted to the way these texts hover in a “border zone between poetry and prose”, and the composer (who acts as narrator) illustrates them with easily engaging tone poems that have the quality of first-rate film music. (That’s a compliment, not a jab.) The last of the six movements, `Dawn’, is particularly memorable.
For the 2016 Opera Without Words, Picker developed, as Thomas May describes it, “a radically new form: a purely instrumental work that conveys a secret opera”. In collaboration with librettist Irene Dische, he composed a one-act opera, setting the characters’ words not to voices but to musical instruments. In finishing the score, he removed all the “vocal lines”, but kept a separate copy so that Opera could theoretically be performed conventionally with the texts and staging restored. He left some indications in the score that “only an opera singer is accustomed to seeing”, such as “defensively”, “terrified”, and even “aside to the audience”. As with all well-crafted operas, the accompaniment does indeed suggest a drama all its own. And so Opera Without Words is notable for a variety of mood and character not typical of orchestral pieces, as well as the tantalizing temptation to guess the contours of the “secret opera” it conceals. The Nashville Symphony, led by Giancarlo Guerrero, accentuates Picker’s clean lines and sonic richness, and the audio quality is exemplary.”
Opera News - Critic’s Choice (January 2021) - Joshua Rosenblum
“Picker’s wordless Opera is coupled with The Encantadas (“The Enchanted Isles”) from 1983, a melodrama for narrator and orchestra. The text consists of selections from Herman Melville’s novella of the same name, which draws on the author’s encounter with the Galápagos Islands in 1841 (six years after Darwin’s historic visit there). The composer narrates this recording, his pleasantly gravelly voice intoning Melville’s elaborate descriptions with affection. Both music and text are thoroughly absorbing—when we’re required to take inboth at the same time, it feels like we might be missing a lot. The piece works best when we hear the spoken text first and then enjoy the music uninterrupted, as in the cacophonous, Ivesian “Din,” which describes a full aviary of noisy, wild birds on Rock Rodondo, a majestic, two hundred-fifty-foot-high observation point. If the gleefully unfettered music is any indication, that must’ve been quite an audiovisual phenomenon. The Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero sounds splendid in both of these unusual works.”
Gramophone (October 2021) - Laurence Vittes
Tobias Picker’s Opera Without Words is a brilliantly colourful concerto for orchestra in which the purely instrumental voices are taken from a secret libretto he co-wrote with Irene Dische. The words in operas, the composer writes, ‘are just an ornament to hear the beauty of the human voice. The music should be telling the story.’
Whatever the story, it is rich in wide-ranging, easily flowing, always absorbingly kinetic scenarios composed on a late Romantic core with nods to an assortment including Babbitt and Mendelssohn. No moment goes by without some arresting phrase of sigh, gorgeous flourish, or melodramatic outburst. He makes solo strings do unimaginably delirious things, has invented new ways of making winds sound like strings, and promiscuously hands out audiophile riffs for unorthodox combos such as solo piano with two bassoons or tubas singing like Gerard Hoffnung once dreamt. Hedging bets, Picker has documented the creation so it can be performed as an opera with voices, words and staging.
Three decades earlier Picker had found in Melville’s immersion in the Galapagos Islands a narrative arc that lay ‘in the border zone between poetry and prose’. It remains a series of haunting sketches that depends on the narrator and in this, Picker’s plain American accents do not erase the memory of Sir John Gielgud’s deeply touching reading (Virgin, 7/91 – nla).
Thomas May’s detailed account of Picker’s working process makes the virtuoso performances by Giancarlo Guerrero and the commissioning Nashville Symphony, captured splendidly in the spatial beauties of Laura Turner Concert Hall, even more enjoyable.
Critica Classica - (September 2020)
Born in New York City in 1954, Tobias Picker began composing when he was just eight. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Charles Wuorinen and John Corigliano and graduated at the Juilliard School with Elliot Carter and at Princeton University with Milton Babbitt. Since he was a teenager he has received numerous commissions from important institutions and many of his compositions have received prestigious awards, most recently the Grammy 2020 for the best recording of an opera, awarded to "Fantastic Mr. Fox", a work inspired by the novel by Roald. Dahl, written in 1998 but recorded for the first time only last year as part of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Naxos, in the series dedicated to American composers (American Classics), also wanted to turn its attention to Tobias Picker, recording “The Encantadas” and, as a “world premiere”, Opera Without Words.Regarding the first piece, dating back to 1983, it is a melologue , a genre that combines an appropriate musical background with the recited text of a story, in order to highlight the passages of greatest literary suggestion. The result of a request by the Albany Symphony on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the Albany Academy, "The Encantadas" takes its cue from some passages of the homonymous story by Herman Melville (who for some time was a student of the aforementioned college).
The starting idea was, of course, to use the famous "Moby Dick", but the choice was then moved to this story, straddling the description of the wonders of the Galapagos Islands (nicknamed in ancient times "Encantadas"), and philosophical reflections, arising from the uniqueness of the place, for which the literary path winds between poetry and prose.
A balance that is very pleasing to Picker, who has given life to a quite particular melologue , as the music does not focus on the salient episodes of a story, but on the succession of emotions caused by a nature that never ceases to amaze. Finally, it should be remembered that, in homage to Melville's frequent use of alliterations, the titles of the six parts that make up the piece all begin with the letter “D”.
Also of great originality “Opera Without Words”, conceived in 2015 following a commission by the National Symphony Orchestra and the Nashville Symphony. Conceived as a bridge between symphonic music and opera, two worlds that are often very distant from each other, and later dedicated to the mother who passed away in 2016, the work draws its initial inspiration from Mendelssohn's "Romance without words", and from some attempts carried out in the past such as "the 'Ring' without words" dedicated by the great Lorin Maazel to the Wagnerian masterpiece, as well as by Phonemena for soprano by Milton Babbit, one of Picker's masters, where the soloist does not have a reference text but her task is to emit a series of phonemes. Finally, another prestigious Picker's teacher, Elliot Carter, considered all instrumentalists to be real actors participating in a theatrical performance. Strengthened by these reminiscences, and with the help of the librettist Irene Dische, specially hired, Picker has created a work based on a text, entrusted exclusively to the instruments of the orchestra, which completely replace the human voices and represent themselves the different protagonists of a story even if, one day, there is still a libretto, the opera could also be represented with the singers. Regarding the performers, the Nashville Symphony and its director Giancarlo Guerrero (specialist in the proposition of contemporary US authors), represent a highly prestigious couple, which in recent years has won several Grammy awards. Also on this occasion the team confirms itself as a splendid reality on the American scene, thanks to an extreme compactness and to the presence of wind and percussion sections of the highest level. It should also be noted the contribution of Tobias Picker, in therather unusual role of narrator, covered with excellent results.
In conclusion, a very interesting CD, which provides two valid examples of contemporary music, highlighting one of the most accredited composers of the current American scene.
The Washington Post, Anne Midgette
"For some people, art is a kind of riddle, to which they don't always know the answers. This view of art was certainly supported by Tobias Picker's seductive yet enigmatic orchestral suite Opera Without Words... You can hear that a lot of story is going on, with solos and duets and conversations, but you are kept at bay, behind a fence, feeling you don't actually know what's happening. It's an interesting conceit, since imagined words in such a context take on an aura of profundity the real words lack."
Washington City Paper, Mike Paarlberg
"Tobias Picker is a poster child for accessible new music, program music in particular... What’s remarkable is that he pulls it off even when the story is a secret to everyone but him, which is the case of his newest work, Opera Without Words...the result is pleasantly lyrical, dramatic, and follows a story arc of some sort that we can only imagine..."