Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season May-June 2016 | Page 37

program notes {
Peter Pears, to form successful performing partnerships with English tenor Ian
Bostridge and cellist Steven Isserlis. Yet
Adès is a very different composer from Britten — far less traditional and more modern
in his musical language, more attuned to
the popular world around him, and more
extroverted in his expression.
Polaris: Voyage for Orchestra was commissioned by Miami’s New World Symphony
Orchestra for the opening of its Frank
Gehry-designed New World Center on
January 26, 2011. Adès said that since he
associated Miami with the sea, he was
drawn to a “marine theme” for this work.
Polaris is the North Star, the pole star that
mariners have traditionally used to guide
their voyages across the world’s oceans.
Adès used this idea of a stellar fixed point
as a principle in the creation of Polaris’
music: what he calls “magnetic attraction.”
Throughout the music, there is a pattern
of pitches to which all the other pitches are
attracted as if to a magnetic lodestar. The
music unfurls in three great sequences of
gradual expansion and elaboration of the
material culminating in a climax, then
falling back to a simpler state around the
magnetic pitches before moving into a new
expansive phase.
Listeners, however, will be more conscious of the dazzlin