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On October 7, 8, and 9, 1976, Sir Georg Solti led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere performances of David Del Tredici’s Final Alice. Twenty-seven-year-old Barbara Hendricks was the soprano soloist.
The work was performed again on October 26 and 27, 1979, and recorded by London Records with sessions on October 27, 1979, and January 29 and 30, 1980. The recording was produced by James Mallinson; James Lock, John Dunkerley, and Michael Mailes were the recording engineers. It recently was released on CD for the first time.
The composer supplied comments for the recording’s liner notes: “Final Alice, commissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the National Endowment for the Arts in celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial . . . is dedicated to Sir Georg Solti. Scored for huge forces—an amplified soprano/narrator, a solo concertante group of folk instruments (mandolin, banjo, accordion, two soprano saxophones) and a very large orchestra—Final Alice unfolds a series of elaborate arias interspersed and separated by dramatic episodes from the last two chapters of [Lewis Carroll‘s] Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the Trial in Wonderland (which gradually turns to pandemonium) and Alice’s subsequent awakening and return to ‘dull reality.’ To these I have added an Apotheosis. The work teeters between the worlds of opera and symphonic music, and were I to invent a category I would call Final Alice an ‘Opera, written in concert form.’
“Final Alice tells two stories at once; primarily, it is the tale of Wonderland itself, with all its bizarre and unpredictable happenings painted as vividly as possible. But between the lines, as it were, is the implied love of Lewis Carroll for Alice Liddell, as suggested by ‘Alice Gray’ and the Acrostic Song. By introducing these additional poems into the Trial as depositions of evidence, given by the White Rabbit (acting as a kind of chief prosecutor), I wished to bring that love story closer to the surface—not so close as to disturb the amusing, eccentric, sometimes terrifying story, but close enough to leave a recognition. I wished, that is, to add what one might call the human dimension of the man, seen only intermittently to be sure, but, hopefully, always affectingly—perhaps lingering in the memory after the dream of Wonderland itself has faded.”
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February 15, 2012 at 11:40 AM
Gregory Nigosian
I’m a great fan of Final Alice, so am glad to see you take note of those Solti performances. That performance (I was there on Saturday) probably is the single most enjoyable evening of music-making I’ve ever heard from anyone, anywhere.
1. “It recently was released on CD for the first time.”
That all depends on what you mean by “recently.” I bought the CD by mail order a few years ago from a store in Perth. It has a copyright date of 2008.
I’ve heard that a CD was briefly released some years earlier, but I’ve never been able to pin down that story. The cover art of the imported version Amazon is now selling is the same as the one I bought previously, so I’m guessing it’s the 2008 Australian CD they are selling.
2. Several major American orchestras also performed Final Alice after the CSO world premiere. As I recall, the NEA plan at that time was for each of the participating orchestras to do one world premier, and then for all of the other orchestras to perform all of the other works.
3. The Detroit Symphony will be performing Final Alice March 1 and 3, with Leonard Slatkin conducting. Soprano Hila Plitmann will sing the Alice role. (I think I’ve heard Plitmann somewhere in the past, maybe in Chicago, but I can’t recall the details.)
Slatkin lead Final Alice performances in Pittsburgh last fall. There may have been other reprised performances in the intervening years, but I don’t have a list of them.
4. And then there’s the problem of the missing minutes.
This recording was made in Medinah Temple three-plus years after the premiere. Richard Freed, in a 1981 Washington Post review of the digital LP release, noted that several minutes were cut because they would have made the work too long for one LP.
(He also claimed that this was true for many of the performances by other orchestras, though why an LP-length limitation would have mattered to live performances, Freed didn’t explain.)
I don’t know if the truncated-for-LP explanation is true, but the CD is the same 59′ 07″ as the LP. So if there really are missing minutes (somewhere I heard 10 minutes’ worth mentioned), I wonder if the Medinah sessions included them. And if they were recorded at that time, where are they? Could they be released online to HD Tracks or some similar outlet? For that matter, who owns those missing minutes? The CSO? Or Decca?