The Gardner Museum is thrilled to present the firebrand Junction Trio in a concert of music written for them by John Zorn. All of the works on the concert are Boston premieres; two are world premieres. In the ideal acoustics of Calderwood Hall, Sunday’s concert will linger in the memory as a virtuoso showcase.
Composer portrait concerts are very much a part of the Gardner Museum tradition. Isabella Stewart Gardner herself presented the first here within a month of opening the Palace: a concert of the music of Charles Martin Loeffer. When I was first invited to bring concerts to the Gardner Museum in 2005, I produced composer portraits of Steve Reich, Nicolai Roslavets, and John Zorn, himself. So this apt, all-premiere John Zorn concert continues the Museum’s longstanding tradition.
Watching groups tackle Zorn’s music is breathtaking. He often likes to write at the extremes of instruments’ and performers’ capabilities—very high, very fast, very quiet, very loud—often turning on a dime, changing radically from moment to moment. Yet his voice is equally often romantic, intensely lyrical, spiritual, and still.
The Junction Trio, a supergroup piano trio comprising violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao, have been working with Zorn for years, and are uniquely equal to the emotional, musical, theatrical, and technical challenges Zorn’s protean music demands of performers. After all, Zorn wrote all of this music for these remarkable performers.
John Zorn has had a lifelong love of art and museums. He admits to having been to the Metropolitan Museum (he lives in New York City) at least once a month since 1958. He has many works inspired by art he loves, old and new. In recent years, he has been producing concert events in museums he loves: the Met, MoMA, LACMA, the Frick, the Art Institute of Chicago, and an astonishing residency at the Louvre, for which he wrote a work to be premiered in front of Leonardo’s La Gioconda (aka Mona Lisa). In celebration of his 70th birthday two seasons ago, he came to the Gardner Museum with three concerts showcasing different aspects of his works. Earlier this year, the Drawing Center in New York mounted an exhibition of Zorn’s own extraordinary visual art in many media, spanning decades of work. The exhibition was called, appropriately, “Hermetic Cartography.”
Zorn has a supernatural fecundity of invention that enables him to craft vivid and intense musical moments. He also has an innate understanding of the drama of juxtaposition, an instinct sharpened by a lifetime performing live—often improvising—in front of audiences. He is able in his composed works to juxtapose intense vignettes in ways that are eternally surprising, often abrupt, but always apt and moving. This mise-en-scene reflects his love of filmmakers (one room in his apartment is floor-to-ceiling films). But it also reflects his profound admiration for artists like Joseph Cornell, whose gorgeous assemblages create uncanny drama through juxtaposition.
The range of inspirations for Zorn as a composer is very wide. One of the world premieres on this program, But Doth Suffer a Sea-Change, forms part of a long line of his works inspired by Shakespeare. Of this new work, Zorn says “I wanted to write a piece that began very gently, like a ballad that then goes awry.” “Beautiful” and “romantic” are words he uses to describe the affective quality of this piece.
The other world premiere, Zorn says, came from his desire to write the Junction Trio “a kick-ass encore piece that will knock people’s socks off.” When John Zorn says that, you can believe it will be a monster. The title of this second work is long and perhaps somewhat puzzling, Notes on the Assumption of Mystical Solidarity Approaching Nine Neological Approximations Illuminating the Eternal Return of the Same. The title, which nods towards Zorn’s fascination with many spiritual traditions, seems to come from some occult tract. In fact, the language is Zorn’s own. He told me he likes titles that “give hints from my inspirations–but I don’t want to give anything away, so it’s coded: I want to get people thinking.“
There are two works from 2022 that pick up Zorn’s interest in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I & II. When the Junction Trio were rehearsing the first of these, pianist Conrad Tao jokingly segued into Brahms’s B major piano trio. Delighted by the juxtaposition, Zorn immediately wrote a second part that begins by tipping its hat to Brahms.
In I am Your Labyrinth (whose title is the last line of Nietzsche’s poem “Dionysian Dithyrambs”), the Junction Trio will be joined by an improvising rhythm section in the persons of the great Jorge Roeder, bass and Ches Smith, drums. This work continues another longstanding Zorn project: finding ways to bring classical musicians together with improvisers.
Given Zorn’s status as one of the greatest living improvisers, one might think that his classical music has a lot of improvisation in it. In fact, most of it does not. A peek at this page from “Notes on the Singular Assumption . . .” shows how carefully notated his classical work is, and how formidable it can be to performers. And it shows how precise Zorn’s understanding of what these amazing players can accomplish.
Zorn is happiest composing for specific performers. He wrote all of the music on this concert for the extraordinary talents of these three musicians, whose capabilities Zorn knows intimately. He knows how far he can push them, and how to “set the table” for them to dazzle and move an audience.
But for Zorn, all of the significant demands for drama, intensity, quicksilver changes of style, and stillness open avenues to beauty.
by George Steel, Abrams Curator of Music at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Program:
Philosophical Investigations I (2022) Boston premiere
Philosophical Investigations II (2024) Boston premiere
I Am Your Labyrinth… (2022) Boston premiere
But Doth Suffer a Sea-Change (2025) world premiere
Notes on the Assumption of Mystical Solidarity Approaching Nine Neological Approximations Illuminating the Eternal Return of the Same (2025) world premiere