Robin de Raaff (b.1968)
Entangled Tales  (2007)

This is the world premiere performance of Entangled Tales, which was commissioned for the Boston Symphony Orchestra with financial support from the Fund for the Creation of New Music, The Netherlands.

Robin de Raaff’s new Entangled Tales for orchestra, completed earlier this summer, was commissioned as part of the initiative NL: A Season of Dutch Arts in the Berkshires, a season-long celebration of the cultural riches of the Netherlands. Arts organizations throughout the county, including the dance venue Jacob’s Pillow, visual art at the Clark Institute, visual art, theater, and music at MASS MoCA, and six programs at Tanglewood: the two Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts led by Edo de Waart this weekend, last week’s two performances by the Netherlands Bach Society, and two Ozawa Hall concerts—an all-Schubert program and an all-Beethoven program—by the Netherlands-based period-instrument ensemble Orchestra of the Age of Englightenment, on August 21 and 22 at 8:30 p.m.
	As might be understood from the title of the piece, Robin de Raaff wrote his piece specifically for Tanglewood. The composer credits his experience here as the Senior Composition Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center in 2000 as an important stage in his career, and he also remembers fondly the time he spent working and attending concerts here. His sparkling and uniquely constructed Enneas Domein was performed at that summer’s Festival of Contemporary Music. In 2001 he returned to Tanglewood as the recipient of the TMC’s Paul Jacobs commission to attend the premiere of the result of that commission, his Piano Concerto, performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra led by Ludovic Morlot (then a TMC Fellow, now in the last month of his two-year tenure as assistant conductor of the BSO), and TMC Fellow Ralph van Raat as piano soloist.
	Already before his Tanglewood sojourns, de Raaff was an acclaimed composer in his native country, having had performances by some of the best-known Dutch ensembles and instrumentalists, including the ASKO Ensemble, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, and the Nieuw Ensemble, which premiered his Flute Concerto under Ed Spanjaard and flute virtuoso Harrie Starreveld in 1997. De Raaff had attended Amsterdam’s Sweelinck Conservatory, working with composers Greet va Keulen and Theo Loevendie. After meeting and working with George Benjamin at Tanglewood in 2000 (Benjamin was a composer in residence and Festival of Contemporary Music director that summer), he went on to study further with Benjamin in at the Royal College of Music. Since then, his career has blossomed further, perhaps most notably with the production of his chamber opera RAAFF, which was commissioned by the Netherlands Opera and co-produced with the Holland Festival and premiered in June 2004. (The title RAAFF refers to the opera’s main character Anton Raaff, the tenor for whom Mozart wrote the title role of Idomeneo and to whom Robin de Raaff is distantly related.) The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has performed his Concerto for Orchestra (originally written for The Hague’s Residentie Orchestra) and commissioned and premiered his Unisono. Recent major premieres include his Clarinet Concerto, first performed by Le Nouvel Ensemble Modern in March 2006, and his ensemble piece Time After Time, introduced by the Schönberg Ensemble at the Donaueschingen Festival in October 2006. His Piano Concerto, the Tanglewood commission, has had many performances since its premiere here in 2001.
	De Raaff was approached about writing a new work for premiere at the Tanglewood festival about two years ago. This will be the first time he has collaborated with his countryman, conductor Edo de Waart, who is guest conductor of the BSO in two programs this weekend. About his current piece, de Raaff writes, “A newly commissioned work always starts from an utter and complete void. But as I sketch, more and more the important material separates itself from the lesser material, and in the end I always seem to end up with the ‘proper’ material that enables me to write an entire work, for whatever length; but that is a long journey.” When asked about whether the experience of working on his large-scale opera had changed his music, he replied,
[block quote; first line indent]The oeuvre of a composer always splits itself into before and after the first opera…. My Piano Concerto, for instance, is a very constructivist piece—the length of the movements all correspond to a certain ratio, as do the rhythmic motifs, without losing the sense of real musical timing…and therefore everything is conceived from a sort of “perfect” plan…. While writing my opera I felt that the timing, from moment to moment, needed to be free, while the overall timing of the entire opera was carefully planned. After my opera I really let go of the constructivist approach to structure and the music that flows through it, and found that I had actually made a big step forwards. This piece [Entangled Tales] and many other newer pieces are much more free again. I use the same musical grammar [as in the Piano Concerto and other earlier, pre-RAAFF works], but now more freely.[end block quote]
	One of the key words in the composer’s comments is “flows”—the impelling motion of most of de Raaff’s work is one of its most audible characteristics, along with deft and scintillating orchestration reminiscent of Strauss or Debussy or, more currently, Boulez and George Benjamin. In Entangled Tales the composer employs a large orchestra with a full complement of percussion plus harp. Alto flute adds a touch of exoticism to the woodwind section. Instruments are grouped together for complex collections of musical gestures, which are themselves combined to form what might be thought of as multilayered “supermotifs,” as opposed to a simpler melodic or harmonic theme-group. Several of these dynamic gestures are used to form a fluid mosaic of rhythms, brief melodies, and timbres in an ever-changing texture, enhanced further by intricate attention to dynamics and articulation (accents, muting, tremolando, strings “col legno” or played with the wood of the bow, and so forth throughout the orchestra). In the largest sense, the experience is ebb and flow of musical density and intensity, from active hyperactive tutti orchestra to transparent, chamber-music like passages and back again, with all entangled details sparkling.