Nashville Symphony and Giancarlo Guerrero release Tobias Picker: The Encantadas & Opera Without Words

The third of three world premiere recordings from Guerrero and Nashville this year is out August 28, 2020

“For some people, art is a kind of riddle, to which they don't always know the answers. This view of art was certainly supported by Tobias Picker's seductive yet enigmatic orchestral suite Opera Without Words...You can hear that a lot of story is going on, with solos and duets and conversations, but you are kept at bay, behind a fence, feeling you don't actually know what's happening. It's an interesting conceit, since imagined words in such a context take on an aura of profundity the real words lack.” – The Washington Post

Nashville, TN/New York, NY – July 1, 2020 – On August 28, 2020, Naxos will release a world premiere recording of music by composer Tobias Picker (b. 1954) performed by the GRAMMY®-winning combination of the Nashville Symphony and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero. This is the last of three new Nashville Symphony recordings of contemporary American music to be released on Naxos this summer, following collections dedicated to Aaron Jay Kernis in June and the late Christopher Rouse in July. The release of these albums coincides with the 20th Anniversary of the recording partnership between the Nashville Symphony and Naxos.

Hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “our finest composer for the lyric stage,” Tobias Picker has garnered critical acclaim for his opera writing and boasts a rich catalog of works in every genre that have been commissioned and performed by the world’s leading musicians, orchestras and opera houses. Opera imbues much of his work, and both works on this album are rooted in the genre.

Picker’s most widely performed score, The Encantadas was composed in 1983 to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the Albany Academy, which Herman Melville attended as a boy. The Encantadas draws on Melville’s book of the same name, which collects ten prose “sketches” depicting the Galápagos Islands. In this six-movement work, Picker employed the now rarely used “melodrama” tradition, in which text is narrated dramatically alongside the score (in this case, by Picker himself, who recited the entire work by memory). In this conversation between Picker and Giancarlo Guerrero, the composer recounts narrating the piece when he wrote it 36 years ago. “I knew one day I would be narrating it when I would be old and that it would be more natural. Because it’s actually the story of an old man looking back on his journey.”

Nashville Symphony music director Giancarlo Guerrero’s connection to The Encantadas dates back to 2003, when the Minnesota Orchestra — where he was serving as associate conductor at the time — programmed the piece. “The Encantadas is a piece that touches on climate change,” explains Guerrero. “The 19th century explorers recognized the fragility of our ecosystem, and Melville’s words presciently capture the enchanting beauty of the Galápagos in a work that could not be more timely.”

“Ever since I was first introduced to Picker through The Encantadas,” Guerrero went on to say, “I knew I wanted to commission something from him one day.” That commission would emerge as Opera Without Words, in which Picker developed a radically new form: a purely instrumental work that conveys a secret opera. In the piece, co-commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and the Nashville Symphony, and performed and recorded by the latter in 2017, Picker called upon the ideas of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, Lorin Maazel’s Wagner adaptation The ‘Ring’ Without Words, and former teacher Milton Babbitt’s Phonemena, in which the soprano has no words, just phonemes. Picker says he approached his first purely orchestral work in 22 years as he would an opera. He hired librettist Irene Dische and “set her words not to voices, but to musical instruments, unfettered by considerations of vocal range and technique.”

“There’s a gap between these disparate worlds of the symphony orchestra culture and the opera culture,” Picker explains. “I’ve inhabited these two worlds for a long time and have seen how they tend to be unaware of each other. So by returning to one of those worlds, I wanted to bridge that gap for myself and, hopefully, for others.”

“I cherish my friendships with each composer whose music we have recorded,” says Guerrero. “I am honored to champion all of them. The greatest reward for us is that they have become a part of the Nashville Symphony family through the efforts of our community to catalog the music of our time.”

About the Nashville Symphony: One of Tennessee’s largest and longest-running nonprofit performing arts organizations, the Nashville Symphony has been an integral part of the Music City sound since 1946. Led by music director Giancarlo Guerrero and president and CEO Alan D. Valentine, the 83-member ensemble performs more than 160 concerts annually, with a focus on contemporary American orchestral music through collaborations with composers including Jennifer Higdon, Terry Riley, Michael Daugherty, John Harbison, Jonathan Leshnoff, and the late Christopher Rouse. The orchestra is equally renowned for its commissioning and recording projects with Nashville-based artists including bassist Edgar Meyer, banjoist Beĺa Fleck, singer-songwriter Ben Folds, electric bassist Victor Wooten, and composer Kip Winger. The Nashville Symphony is one of the most active recording orchestras in the US, with more than 30 releases. Together, these recordings have earned a total of 25 GRAMMY® Award nominations and 13 GRAMMY® Awards, including two for Best Orchestral Performance. Schermerhorn Symphony Center is home to the Nashville Symphony and widely regarded as one of the finest concert halls in the US.

About Giancarlo Guerrero: Six-time GRAMMY® Award-winning conductor Giancarlo Guerrero is music director of the Nashville Symphony and the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic in Poland, as well as principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal. He has championed contemporary American music through numerous commissions, recordings and performances with the Nashville Symphony, presenting eleven world premieres of works by Jonathan Leshnoff, Michael Daugherty, Terry Riley, and others. As part of this commitment, he helped guide the creation of Nashville Symphony’s Composer Lab & Workshop initiative. In North America, Guerrero has appeared with the orchestras of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Toronto, and the National Symphony Orchestra. He has developed a strong international profile working with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Brussels Philharmonic, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. An advocate for music education, he works with the Curtis Institute of Music, Colburn School, the National Youth Orchestra (NYO2) in New York, and the Nashville Symphony’s Accelerando program, which provides intensive music education to promising young students from diverse ethnic backgrounds.