Nature's Way at Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center

VIVALDI The Four Seasons
GANDOLFI Selections from The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

To start the program, the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra and concertmaster Jessica Hung will perform one of the best-known compositions of Antonio Vivaldi. Vivaldi, one of the most-published composers of the early 1700s, was a prolific writer with more than 500 concertos and 50 operas to his credit. The Four Seasons is the collective name given to four separate violin concertos based on the seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. When he published The Four Seasons, Vivaldi included four sonnets. These poems, which may have been written by the composer himself, evoke the seasonal images that he then captures with the music. The sonnets and the music refer to many things we all know and enjoy at different times of the year, from the birdsong and storms in spring to the harvest and hunting in autumn. The music of winter echoes the winds and chill of the snowy season and yet, as the poem states at the close, “Such is winter, such the joys it brings.”

In Dumfries, Scotland, an architectural theorist, Charles Jencks, and his late wife, Maggie Keswick, an expert on Chinese gardens, designed what came to be called the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. The garden “uses nature to celebrate nature through nature.” In other words, it features forms of nature interpreting forces of nature. The 30-acre site consists of 40 major areas of landscapes, gardens, bridges, sculptures, and architecture. The Six Gardens of the Senses, the Quark Walk, Black Hole Terrace, The Nonsense, the DNA Garden, Fractal Terrace, and the Universe Cascade are just a few of the concepts and artistic representations.

Michael Gandolfi is currently chair of the Composition Department at the New England Conservatory of Music and a faculty member of the Tanglewood Music Center. As a composer and music educator, his natural curiosity leads to creating many “points of contact” between music and other fields, including science, film, and theater. His interest in and understanding of science in turn led him to discovering the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. This home of science as garden and vice versa inspired Gandolfi’s 2009 work The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. With the garden and its theories as his muse, Gandolfi has created an energetic and innovative piece that never really allows the listener to predict what will be heard next. The music deftly conjures the garden landscapes and the premises of natural and physical science that they represent. When Jencks and Keswick worked on the garden, they saw it as connecting the worlds of art, nature, and science. Gandolfi’s Garden of Cosmic Speculation invites a new link, making connections between the worlds of art, nature, science, and music.

We are lucky in the Miami Valley to experience all four of the seasons as well as nature and its forces . . . come revel in the beauty with the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra!