Episode Information

New York Philharmonic

MARC NEIKRUG, born in 1946 in New York, New York Quintessence (Symphony No. 2)
Marc Neikrug’s history of works performed by the New York Philharmonic started when he was 33 years old and wrote Eternity’s Sunrise, a 15 minute concert-opener. Then came his Violin Concerto—a major concerto with a major soloist (Pinchas Zukerman). Now he’s composed a symphony for the Orchestra. “It’s big, it’s emotionally powerful, it’s deeply-felt,” he says. The idea of writing music is a mysterious process to those who aren’t composers. He offers an explanation: “My inspiration comes from inside me; I have a vast well of ideas that I want to express as music, and composing means finding the sounds to do that.” Though constructed in one 30-minute movement, the Symphony No. 2 encompasses many distinct parts, with certain melodic intervals returning again and again, and building emotional intensity with each repetition. Marc Neikrug provides a comparison: “Imagine a vast landscape continually changing with the time of day or the season…it’s the same landscape, but it never looks exactly the same.” Quintessence began life as a piano quintet composed just a couple of years ago. “But while writing it, I kept feeling that I had to pare down what I wanted to say, to leave things out—not musically but in terms of the complexity of layers and textures. After the premiere, a colleague commented on the Quintet’s impact, and I began to wonder: ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t left those things out?’ So I returned to the Quintet and reworked the composition. The title, Quintessence, is my way of saying that this is the ‘quintet’s essence’.” Marc Neikrug’s many works have been performed by Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Houston Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, among others. One of his most acclaimed compositions is Through Roses, for actor and chamber ensemble, a compelling piece about the Holocaust that has been performed hundreds of times, translated into 11 languages, and filmed as a documentary. Coming from four generations of musicians Marc Neikrug is a multi-faceted artist who divides his busy life among composing, serving as artistic director of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, performing as a pianist at the Festival, as well as touring worldwide (his regular playing partner for over thirty years has been Pinchas Zukerman). “I’m the ultimate multi-tasker; I’m good at organizing my time, because I know how to focus on what’s at hand.” Marc Neikrug and his wife Dolly Naranjo, a Native American potter, make their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They have two children, a son and a daughter who are also talented potters. When not busy with his professional work, Marc Neikrug dotes on his four granddaughters.

RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949)
Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) (1898)
When the critics took Richard Strauss to task for his—as they saw it—unmitigated hubris for making himself the “hero” of the title, he took more than a little joy from the fact that they saw themselves in the work, too: the movement entitled “The Hero’s Adversaries” does not paint an attractive picture of the composer’s detractors. Strauss was not given to modesty, feeling quite comfortable comparing his planned musical autobiography to Beethoven’s “Eroica” in a letter of 1898: “It is entitled ‘A Hero’s Life,’ and while it has no funeral march, is still in E-flat major, and has lots of horns—horns being the way to express heroism.” Strauss indicated six continuous sections in the composition: “The Hero,” “The Hero’s Adversaries,” “The Hero’s Companion,” “The Hero’s Battlefield,” “The Hero’s Works of Peace,” and “The Hero’s Retreat from the World and Fulfillment of his Life.” Strauss said that “heroism which describes the inward battle of life and which aspires through effort and renunciation towards the elevation of the soul” is what he had in mind in Ein Heldenleben; but its thinly-disguised resemblance to his own life is certainly more than coincidental. He even described to French critic Romain Rolland “The Hero’s Companion” (read: Mrs. Pauline Strauss, an opera singer) in great detail, as “very complex, very much a woman, a little perverse, a bit of a flirt, never twice alike…” Here he depicts her with a violin solo, and the section ends with a passionate love theme. Listen also in the “Works of Peace” section for Strauss quoting his own tone poems, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel, and others. Ein Heldenleben is conceived on a giant scale with enormous orchestral forces to match, but the beauty of the music stands on its own and shows Strauss as a supreme master of orchestration.