World Premiere of Dirk Brosse's PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

A founding resident company of The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia (COP) is excited to announce its season finale concert featuring Brossé's Pictures at an Exhibition. Inspired by seven iconic works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Music Director and award winning composer Dirk Brossé brings the dynamic beauty of visual art to musical life like never before.

When we think about music inspired by paintings, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition or Respighi's Three Botticelli Pictures usually come to mind. Those composers created brilliant, colorful scores which largely depict the paintings themselves. For his own Pictures at an Exhibition, composer Dirk Brossé has taken a different approach. Over many visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brossé selected seven paintings which sparked his imagination and inspired him to look beyond and explore the emotional and psychological depths within each work of art. The music represents his own reactions to or reflections - what Brossé describes as his musical "translations" - of the artworks. The paintings he selected are all by American artists, but span a wide range of periods and styles. Their diversity allows him to create a distinct musical landscape for each painting.

The works featured in Brossé selections are The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks (1826), Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross "The Gross Clinic" by Thomas Eakins (1875), The Life Line by Winslow Homer (1884), The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River by Thomas Moran (1892), Fair Weather by Man Ray (1939), Untitled by Mark Rothko (1955), and Road and Trees by Edward Hopper (1962).

Browse the gallery of selected works at: https://chamberorchestra.org/20162017season/dirk-brosses-pictures-at-an-exhibition/

The paintings represent not only the rich history and variety of works by American artists, but also two locally beloved paintings: The Peaceable Kingdom and the Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross that reflect Philadelphia's own illustrious history of both art and philosophy. The Peaceable Kingdom by Quaker preacher and commercial painter Edward Hicks depicts both the allegorical figures of a child and docile beasts, and William Penn negotiating a treaty with the native Lenni Lenape. In Maestro Brossé's realization of this work there is a divide both culturally and linguistically, which ultimately comes to an accord. He represents the Lenape with a Native American inspired melody played on reproductions of traditional instruments. "There is the meeting of two completely different worlds," explains Brossé, "Native American and European, which I represent in music. I will start by playing a Native American melody on a Native American flute, accompanied by traditional instruments like log drums."

The Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross represents Philadelphia's history of medical advancement and the intrigue of the practice. With its matter-of-fact realism in the depiction of surgical incision, blood, and nudity, The Gross Clinic caused something of a scandal when it was submitted to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, and was exiled to an Army hospital. "I tried to imagine myself being in the room," says Brossé. "Despite the outward calm, there are undercurrents of tension, anxiety, and emotion which become the sound of a heartbeat which threads its way through the music." This is an insight, Brossé adds, that was provided by his daughter, who is a surgeon.

As a lead up to this world premiere, Music Director Dirk Brossé and Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, Philadelphia Museum of Art, were featured together in a special film project organized in collaboration with Drexel University's Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. The project will be played, in part, during the Classical Conversations post-concert discussion and features exclusive in depth discussions about all seven works in the Museum collection that inspired the performance.

COP will also premiere a new the work written for the Chamber Orchestra by Curtis Institute of Music student, Dai Wei. Dai, originally from China, pursues a parallel career as a Mandopop singer/songwriter where her works have been released by Universal and Sony Music Record Labels. Her aesthetic is guided by a desire to create commercially approachable serious music. Dai is currently pursuing a post-graduate degree at the Curtis Institute of Music where she studies with celebrated composer and teacher Richard Danielpour. She also holds the Susan and Edward Montgomery Annual Fellowship. Dai Wei elaborates that Two of Us is a chamber work inspired by "one of my close friends who came to the United States at the age of 10 under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program." Wei continues, "She and her sister were separated, and reuniting has been extremely difficult for her. In Two of Us, there are two musical characters communicating and supporting each other as these two sisters. Similar as Beethoven's Symphony No.1, the appearance of the tonic chord is delayed. in Two of Us, the main tonality is often up in the air, symbolizing the two sisters' unrest and turbulent fate."

The harmonious relationship between Mozart and Haydn was well documented with Mozart informally calling his teacher "Papa Haydn." The same is not true for the relationship among the then 22-year old Beethoven and 60-year old Haydn. Highly revered as both the father of the string quartet and famously composing one of the most prolific portfolios of symphonies (numbering in the 100's), Haydn and Beethoven's student-teacher relationship was rather strained. This struggle, and fear of comparison, led Beethoven to delay composing his Symphony No. 1 until the age of 30. Musicologists compare the opening misdirection of Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 (1800) to that of Haydn's Symphony No. 99 which was composed in 1793 while Beethoven was still a student of Haydn.

The concert opens with writer and philosopher-turned-composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Overture to Le devin du village (1752). Inspired by the melodic compositions of Italian opera, Rousseau threw himself into the fray and argued that melody should be of more importance than the harmonic construction favored by French composers like Rameau. This work helped inspire 12 year-old Mozart both in his views about music for the stage and plotline for his own one-act opera Bastien und Bastienne.

Mozart will be the focus of the lobby and Patrons' Table area, as we invite COP patrons to 'play' Mozart's very own aleatoric work, Dice Game (Würfelspiel). For our 2017/2018 Improvisionaries season, COP will feature the art of improvisation ranging from the Baroque era to the Jazz age. For our December Series, Mozart, Piazzolla, and John Cage, COP patrons will choose what the orchestra performs through a fun and ingenious game of chance devised by Mozart himself. At our Brossé's Pictures at an Exhibition concert, audience-members will have the chance to play Mozart's Dice Game in the lobby of the Kimmel Center and receive their very own Mozart/COP dice.

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