STEVEN STUCKY (1949-2016): Silent Spring, LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827): Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68 “Pastoral”.

Description: A superb composer with an original, always directly emotionally communicative, tonal style, Stucky left us prematurely in contemporary music's annus horribilis, 2016. He first encountered Pittsburgh native Rachel Carson's ground-breaking “Silent Spring” as a teenager, and like many of us was immediately captivated by the book's effortless integration of rigorous science and the poetic eloquence with which the author pled her case for what would later become fashionable as environmental activism. When in 2011 the PSO commissioned a work to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the book's publication they turned to Stucky, an ideal choice with his gift for compelling musical-emotional narrative and for almost cinematically descriptive orchestral color. The work is a tone poem in a single span divided into four distinct sections. The first portrays the vastness of the ocean, which gave us life and will outlast us, with its currents and turbulent depths, as a grand, melancholy chorale. Next is The Lost Woods, a desolate passacaglia which becomes more and more sombre and bleak as it gains in intensity, leading to the scherzo, a vitriolically sardonic Totentanz "Rivers of Death". This nightmare music gives way to the tumultuous cacophony of life that opens the final section, "Silent Spring". Gradually, the rich diversity of the orchestral texture is stilled, voice after voice, until all that remains is a deep, tolling bell in the encroaching darkness. Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Manfred Honeck.