Bernstein: Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah
Carter: Of Rewaking
Copland: Appalachian Spring
Rouse: Rapture


Thursday, Oct. 30, 2008, 7:30 PM
Friday, Oct. 31, 2008, 8:00 PM
Saturday, Nov. 1, 2008, 8:00 PM


Soloist: Michelle DeYoung, Steven Stucky
Conductor: David Robertso



CHRISTOPHER ROUSE (born in 1949 in Baltimore, Maryland)
Rapture (2000)
Jokingly called “Mr. Sunshine” or, as Christopher Rouse admitted to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette in 2000, “typecast in people’s minds as a kind of prince of darkness, I am known for writing very dark, disturbing music. It just happened that every time I had a piece to write, somebody died whose death had a big effect on me. But I was aware after I wrote the last of that batch of pieces, which was in memory of my mother, that I didn’t have any further need to do those. Nobody had died on me; my life had gone death-free,” he says. So he consciously decided to compose something that would be on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from dark. “I am interested in extremes. I am not interested in writing pieces of music about a plate of ham and eggs.” The result was the one-movement joyful and light-filled Rapture, commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and premiered there in May 2000. “[I intended] to depict a progression to an ever more blinding ecstasy, but the entire work inhabits a world devoid of darkness.” Christopher Rouse unfurls a tapestry of continually changing sonorities and orchestral colors—progressing from the woodwinds to the brass to the strings, while at the same time “gradually increasing tempi; it begins quite slowly but…proceeds to speed up incrementally until the breakneck tempo of the final moments is reached.”