Program Notes
Program Notes – Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic - April, 2010
Click here to download a PDF copy of the Program Notes
Northeastern Pennsylvania
Philharmonic
Thirty-eighth Season / 2009/10
Friday, April 30, 2010 / Scranton Cultural Center / 8:00 PM
Saturday, May 1, 2010 / F.M. Kirby Center / 8:00 pm
Lawrence Loh, Music Director
Robert Gardner, baritone
Melanie Vaccari, soporano
Matthew Garrett, tenor
Dr. Steven Thomas, Chorus Master
Bloomsburg University Concert Choir, Dr. Alan Baker, director
Marywood University Campus Choir, Dr. Rick Hoffenberg, director
Choral Society of NEPA, Dr. Alan Baker, director
Wilkes University Chamber Singers, Dr. Steven Thomas, director
The Kantorei Choir of the Choral Society of NEPA, Leslie Mason Moran, director
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) The Firebird: Suite (1919 Version)
Introduction
The Firebird and Her Dance
Round Dance of the Princesses
Infernal Dance of King Kastchei
Cradle Song
Finale
INTERMISSION
Carl Orff (1895-1982) Carmina Burana
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (Fortune, Empress of the World)
1. O Fortuna (Chorus)
2. Fortune plango vulnera (Chorus)
I
Primo vere (In Springtime)
3. Veris leta facies (Chorus)
4. Omnia sol temperat (Solo Baritone)
5. Ecce gratum (Chorus)
Uf dem anger (On the Lawn)
6. Tanz (Orchestra)
7. Floret silva (Chorus)
8. Chramer, gip die varwe mir (Chorus)
9. Reie (a: Orchestra. b: Chorus.)
10. Were diu werlt alle min (Chorus)
II
In Taberna (In the Tavern)
11. Estuans interius (Solo Baritone)
12. Olim lacus colueram (Chorus and Solo Tenor)
13. Ego sum abbas (Chorus and Solo Baritone)
14. In taberna quando sumus (Chorus)
III
Cour d'amours (The Court of Love)
15. Amor volat undique (Children's Choir and Solo Soprano)
16. Dies, nox et omnia (Solo Baritone)
17. Stetit puella (Solo Soprano)
18. Circa mea pectora (Chorus and Solo Baritone)
19. Si puer cum puellula (Chorus)
20. Veni, veni, venias (Chorus)
21. In trutina (Solo Soprano)
22. Tempus est iocundum (Chorus, Children's Choir, Solo Soprano and Baritone)
23. Dulcissime (Solo Soprano)
Blanziflor et Helena (Blanziflor and Helena)
24. Ave formosissima (Chorus)
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (Fortune, Empress of the World)
25. O Fortuna (Chorus)
By Peter Wynne
Tonight, music director Lawrence Loh and the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic essay two of the most popular concert pieces written during the 20th century -- works that were originally created for the theater, rather than the concert hall.
We open the program with the enchanting suite Igor Stravinsky fashioned in 1919 from the score for his ballet The Firebird. Then, we wind up both this concert and our 2009-2010 Masterworks season with the vocal and orchestral fireworks of Carl Orff's 1937 Carmina Burana, which bowed before the public at an opera house.
Stravinsky: Firebird Suite (1919 version)
In 1908, Russian ballet producer Sergei Diaghilev was getting ready for the opening season the following year of his Ballets Russes company. His top priority was a new ballet based on Russian folklore called The Firebird, which was to premiere during that first season in Paris.
Choreographer Michel Fokine had fashioned a detailed scenario from a number of Russian folktales, and Diaghilev had commissioned a score from composer Nikolai Tcherepnin. However, for reasons that remain unclear to this day, Tcherepnin withdrew from the project. Diaghilev next turned to Anatoli Liadov, then Alexander Glazunov, and couldn't get a score from either one of them.
The producer may even have approached yet a fourth important composer of the day, Nikolai Sokolov, before agreeing to ask a newcomer named Igor Stravinsky (born Oranienbaum, Russia, 1882; died New York, 1971). Stravinsky had no experience at writing a ballet score, but was eager to try. On a hunch, he had actually begun working on music for The Firebird more than a month before he got Diaghilev's invitation.
Stravinsky composed the ballet between November 1909 and May 1910. The first performance was given by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes at the Paris Opéra on June 25th, 1910. The ballet and its score were huge successes. The music was rich and varied in it colors and, while some of Stravinsky's rhythmic effects were innovative, the piece rested squarely on 19th-century Russian musical traditions.
Over the years, the composer fashioned three concert suites from the ballet score -- in 1911, in 1919 and, again, in 1945. The original suite used about half the music and essentially preserved the lush original orchestration. The 1919 suite, the one we'll hear tonight, called for an orchestra considerably reduced in size. The third suite called for the same sort of orchestral forces as the 1919 version, but took additional music from the full score.
Using six selections from the ballet, the suite parallels the original story line, which the listener can more or less follow in the music.
The Tsarevich Ivan is out hunting (Introduction) and sees a fantastic bird with fiery plumage. He catches it, but the Firebird wins her freedom by giving Ivan a magic feather (The Firebird and Her Dance). Ivan now comes upon a castle with a courtyard full of lovely maidens (Round Dance of the Princesses). The maidens tell Ivan they're the prisoners of the evil King Kastchei, who turns hapless travelers to stone.
Undaunted, Ivan enters the castle and is confronted by Kastchei and his retinue. He's about to end his days as a statue when he remembers the magic feather and pulls it from his tunic. The Firebird appears and magically forces Kastchei and his ogres into a wild dance (Infernal Dance of King Kastchei).
Collapsing in exhaustion, the monstrous crew is lulled to sleep by the Firebird's song (Lullaby). The Firebird then leads Ivan to the place where Kastchei's soul is hidden, a huge egg, which the tsarevich smashes. Kastchei and his minions crumble to dust; his victims are freed from their stony spells, and Ivan wins the hand of the loveliest princess (Finale).
The Philharmonic last played the Firebird Suite under the direction of Clyde Mitchell back in May 2004.
Carl Orff: Carmina Burana
A good place to start a discussion of Orff's Carmina Burana is with its title, which originally referred to a collection of medieval verse -- mostly song lyrics and most of them in Latin -- which gathered dust for roughly six centuries in a monastery library in Bavaria.
"Carmina" means "songs" in Latin, and the accent goes on the first syllable. "Beuern" is one way of saying "Bavaria" in German, and "Burana" is its equivalent in Latin, when the word is used as an adjective. So "Carmina Burana" can be translated "Bavarian Songs."
The poems, more than 200 of them, didn't all originate in that southern German state, far from it, but that was the title chosen by Munich librarian and philologist Johann Christoph Schmeller when he published the collection in 1847. The original was a hand-bound volume of 122 handwritten parchment leaves, many of them illuminated and all of them covered with verses composed mostly by wandering scholar-poets known as "goliards" and covering an astonishing range of topics.
Some of the poems were pious; others were satires or parodies; still others were love songs or erotic verses filled with racy double entendres. There were stories taken from classical literature and lyrics about drinking and gambling and the tyrannical rule of Lady Luck who, in Latin, went by the name of "Fortuna." There was even a pair of plays about the birth and death of Christ that would have been performed in churches.
In 1934, the collection came to the attention of composer Carl Orff (born Munich, 1895; died Munich, 1982). That spring, he happened upon a catalog from a bookseller in Würzburg, about 130 miles from his home in the Bavarian capital, and one of the items offered for sale was a used copy of the Schmeller volume.
The catalog description (quoted here in English) drew him in with what he called "magical force": Carmina Burana: Latin and German Poems of a 13th-Century Manuscript from Benediktbeuern." ("Benediktbeuern" is the name of the monastery where the manuscript was found.)
He ordered the book, and it arrived on Holy Thursday and, on opening it, his eyes fell on the poem that would open his masterpiece. It began with the words "O Fortuna/velut Luna/statu variabilis..." -- "O Fortune/like the moon/always changing..."
With the poem was an illustration from the original volume: A crowned female figure sat at the center of a wheel that had four male figures along its circumference. One man is clambering upward; another is enthroned at its peak; a third is toppling downward, his crown falling from his head; a fourth is crushed beneath the wheel. A notation near each figure make the meaning clear: "Regnabo; regno;
regnavi; sum sine regno" -- "I will be king; I am king; I have been king; I'm without royal power."
Before the day was over, Orff had sketched out the music for "O Fortuna" in "short score" (that is, without orchestration). He didn't sleep that night and instead pored over the poems and pictures in the book.
By Good Friday, he had completed the second number in the score as we know it: "Fortune plango vulnera" -- "I weep for the wounds of Fortune." By Easter morning, he had written yet a third chorus, "Ecce gratum et optatum Ver" -- "Behold pleasant and longed-for Spring," which ended up as the fifth number in the finished score.
Most importantly, Orff recalled years later, he could now envision a work for the stage with choruses that would be sung and danced and, instead of having a story line, would simply follow the pictures and poetry of the Carmina Burana. The score would be straightforward, tuneful in a folksong sort of way, most of it in major keys, and it would gain its forward thrust from strongly accented rhythms and repetition, rather than traditional symphonic development.
To organize the text for what would be an hourlong stage presentation, Orff turned to librarian and poet Michel Hofmann for help. The pair chose some twenty-odd lyrics, and the opening "O Fortuna" would return at the finale, with two iterations of that powerful, percussive number serving as sturdy musical bookends to hold and support the piece.
Orff classified his creation a "szenische Kantata" -- a "scenic cantata" -- and gave it a lengthy descriptive subtitle in Latin: "Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choria cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis." It summed things up quite well: “Secular songs to be sung by singers and choruses accompanied by instruments and magic pictures.”
A few years earlier, Orff had served as director of the Munich Bach Society and experimented with "semistaged" performances, which typically use limited stage movement, costumes, a few props and nothing like a full-fledged setting. One of these was a presentation of the St. Luke Passion, then thought to be the work of J.S. Bach. It was accompanied by slide projections of 15th-century woodcuts. Perhaps something like this was what Orff had in mind for the "magic pictures" of his subtitle.
I. Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi
Orff's "scenic cantata" begins with booming tympani strokes and a choral invocation "O Fortuna" that urgently addresses the goddess of chance. The text, sung in quietly forceful unison, describes how chance, like a turning wheel, lifts some to heights of wealth and power and dashes others to the ground. A constant, repeating rhythmic pattern in the orchestra, something called an "ostinato," underscores the voices, accelerating and growing louder through the length of the number.
Next comes "Fortune plango vulnera" -- "I weep for the wounds of Fortune," which again has a chantlike beginning and is rather like a variation on "O Fortuna."
As they picked their poems, Orff and Hofmann emphasized the earthy ones and arranged them under three headings: "Primo Vere" -- "In Springtime," "In Taberna" -- "In the Tavern" and "Cour d'Amours" -- "The Court of Love."
II. Primo Vere
"In Springtime" begins with flourishes of what could be birdsong in the high woodwinds, followed by a semichorus singing in unison the lyric "Veris leta facies" -- "The merry face of spring," which Orff set to a wistful, chantlike melody. The tune uses a five-tone musical scale and sounds like something the goliards might have heard in the 12th or 13th centuries.
The next number, "Omnia Sol temperat" -- "The Sun temperately rules all," is a rumination on love and separation for solo baritone. That's followed by "Ecce Gratum et optatum Ver" -- "Behold pleasant and longed-for Spring," which has the merriment and verve of a Middle European carol, and centuries ago carols weren't for Christmas only. Until now, Orff has lingered in minor keys, but at this point the music turns emphatically toward the major.
Within the "In Springtime" section is a subsection titled "Uf dem Anger," which can be translated either as "In the Meadow" or "On the Green." Either way, it's a place for dancing, and begins with "Tanz" -- "Dance," a sprightly round dance for orchestra that can call to mind something by Igor Stravinsky with its constantly changing meters -- sometimes four beats to the measure, sometimes three beats or two, and even one measure each of twelve and six.
The merriment continues in "Floret silva nobilis" -- "The noble forest is in bloom," a charming folksong-inspired chorus in which a young woman wonders where her lover has gone, and in the number "Chramer, gip die varwe mir" -- "Shopkeeper, give me some rouge," which makes it clear that young women then, as now, knew what to do when a lover wanders.
Toward the end of "Floret silva nobilis," the language shifts from Latin to an old German dialect, and the use of what's called Middle High German continues through "Shopkeeper, give me some rouge" and the three lyrics that follow.
A gentle round dance for orchestra only -- "Reie" -- introduces a section built around two lyrics where male and female voices sing alternately: "Swaz hie gat umbe" and "Chume, chum, geselle min" -- "Here they go round and round" and "Come, come, mistress mine" -- the first energetic, the second languid. Orff had made a study of centuries-old Bavarian folk dances, and it shows here.
Blaring trumpets launch "Were diu werlt alle min" -- "Were the whole world mine," where the poet declares he'd trade anything to have the queen of England in his arms, almost certainly meaning Eleanor of Provence, the wife of King Henry III, a woman renowned for her beauty and learning and for holding a court of love, where participants were said to debate questions of love and play at flirtatious word games.
The medieval "taberna" was a male domaine, and this raucous, sometimes ribald section of the cantata, "In the Tavern," features male voices only.
III. In Taberna
In its unyielding defiance, "Estuans interius ira vehementi" -- "With such rage within" -- could pass muster as a spot-on portrait of today's punk rocker or the "angry young man" of a few decades back. It's hard to believe the lyric was composed eight or nine centuries ago. Here, Orff pushes the soloist to the limits of the baritone voice.
"Olim lacus colueram" -- "Once I dwelt on lakes" -- is a swansong of a special sort and is the only major section of the cantata assigned to the tenor soloist, who sings the part of a roasting swan. Once again, Orff tests the singer's mettle with music that lies extremely high in his voice range.
Closely related to geese, swans were once considered choice articles of food, and roasting them on a spit over an open fire was a favorite way to prepare them. If you listen closely as the number begins, you'll hear the turning spit.
The goliards -- mostly university students and hangers-on -- traveled from town to town, singing their lyrics for anyone who'd give them a coin, shelter, or something to eat or drink. A favorite subject of both singers and audiences was the misbehavior of hypocritical clergy and renegade priests and friars.
"Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis" -- "I am the abbot of Cockaigne" -- presents just such a character. He's drunken, blasphemous and ready to fleece all comers in a game of dice. Decius is his "patron saint," the imaginary protector of dice throwers, and the monastery of this "abbott" stands in the Land of Cockaigne, where houses are built of barley sugar and cake, roasted geese roam the streets and public fountains run red with wine.
The soloist, again the baritone, intones the verses in speechlike fashion; it's a parody, to be sure, of the chanting of a biblical text -- a lesson or a sequence.
The final number of the section is "In taberna quando sumus" -- "When we're in the tavern," and it's the perfect student drinking song, ebullient and inclusive. You can imagine the youthful drinkers pounding the old wooden cups on the tables as they sing.
Ten numbers, most of them brief, make up the "Court of Love" section of the cantata, and most of the lyrics are quite openly erotic, although never crude about it. When choosing lyrics, Orff and Hofmann passed over some of the raciest poems in the original collection, but what they included still raised eyebrows in the late 1930s and continued to do so for twenty-five years or more.
IV. Cours d'Amour
The section begins with the children's chorus sweetly singing "Amor volat undique" -- "Love flies everywhere." The midsection of this number becomes quite agitated and marks the first appearance of the soprano soloist.
Next the baritone sings a lover's complaint, "Dies, nox et omnia/michi sunt contraria" -- "Day, night and everything are against me" and, if you look closely at the text, you'll see that the poet is switching back and forth between Latin and Old French. It's called "macaronic" verse and was fairly common back then.
The number also includes a trio of melismas that usually are sung in voix mixte or falsetto and sound very exotic, as Orff reminds us of the impact of the Middle East on Europe and its music some eight or nine centuries ago. And this number flows without pause into the soprano's charming "Stetit puella/rufa tunica" -- "A girl stood in a red shift."
The baritone next complains of his lover's absence and asks divine assistance in the seduction he's planning in "Circa mea pectora" -- "Around my heart," and this sets up a droll a capella exchange between the baritone and the male choristers over the invigorating nature of lovemaking -- "Si puer cum puellula moraretur" -- "If a boy tarries with a girl." A lively double chorus, "Veni, veni, venias" -- "Come, come, do come," now quickly follows, accompanied by piano and percussion only.
After a pause, the tempo slows markedly with the soprano soloist's "In trutina mentis dubia" -- "On the uncertain balance scales of my mind." She's torn between love and modesty, but ready to submit to the yoke of love. It's a passage you might be tempted to describe as operatic.
Everyone but the tenor now joins in an exhuberant celebration of the erotic impulse, "Tempus est jocundum" -- "The time is joyful," which is suddenly pierced by the soprano's ecstatic, stratospheric "Dulcissime! Ah! totam tibi subdo me" -- "Sweetest one, I give myself to you completely."
The "Court of Love" now ends grandly with "Blanziflor et Helena," a choral paean to two legendary beauties, Blanziflor and Helen, one from the Middle Ages, one from classical antiquity.
Actually, two Blanziflors can be found in medieval legend -- Blanziflor, the sister of King Mark of Cornwall and the mother of the great knight and lover, Tristan, and the Christian maiden Blanziflor, beloved of the Saracen Prince Floris and the heroine of a once hugely popular rescue tale, when she ends up confined in an emir's seraglio.
Both Blanziflors were renowned for their beauty, as was the immortal Helena -- Helen of Troy, to be sure. And more than that, all three were willing to sacrifice all for love and could qualify as incarnations of the love-goddess
herself, whom the classically trained goliards (and perhaps Carl Orff) would have known was sometimes called "the oldest of all the fates."
This now brings the cantata full circle and leads directly into the reprise of "O Fortuna" and a moment that can literally take one's breath away with its sudden, unexpected shift back to the minor key. And while the crashing chords that end the piece may suggest an easy triumph, the final words are more nuanced: "mecum omnes plangite" -- "weep with me, all of you."
Carl Orff's Carmina Burana premiered at the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937, in a production staged by Otto Wälterlin, with sets and costumes by Ludwig Sievert. The custom of offering the work as a concert-hall piece began after World War II and is, by far, the more common approach today.
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Program Notes – Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic - March 2010
Click here to download a PDF copy of the Program Notes
Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic
Thirty-eighth Season
2009/10
Saturday, March 13, 2010 / F.M. Kirby Center / 8:00 PM
LAWRENCE LOH, Conductor
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): Overture, The Hebrides, Opus 26
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924): Pelléas and Mélisande Suite, Opus 80
Prélude
Second Entr’acte
Sicilienne
Mélisande’s Death
INTERMISSION
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Opus 55, “Eroica”
Allegro con brio
Funeral March-Adagio assai
Scherzo-Allegro vivace
Finale-Allegro molto
By Peter Wynne
Tonight, music director Lawrence Loh and the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic explore three works that have meanings and associations that go far beyond the realm of what's often called "pure music."
Felix Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture was inspired by a visit to a wind-swept Scottish island and has long been seen as a picture in music of that visit. The Pelléas et Mélisande Suite was drawn from incidental music Gabriel Faure wrote to accompany a play -- pieces that "set the scene" for the stage action that would follow. On the title page of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony, when it was published in 1806, was a description in Italian that in our tongue would read "Heroic Symphony Composed to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man."
Mendelssohn:
Hebrides Overture, Opus 26,
"Fingal's Cave"
Felix Mendelssohn (born Hamburg, 1809; died Leipzig, 1847) began work on his celebrated concert overture during a visit to Scotland in 1829. That summer he and his friend Karl Klingemann journeyed to the west of Scotland and the coastal town of Oban. Good sightseers that they were, they boarded a paddle-wheeler to visit several of the Inner Hebrides, islands lying along the Scottish coast.
One of those isles, Staffa, was and is a tiny uninhabited outcropping of volcanic rock. Less than a mile and a half around, it has been pounded and eroded by the sea since time immemorial. The rugged beauty of the place drew visitors from far and wide during the 1800s, and the 19th-century Chamber's Encyclopaedia described the island's chief attraction this way:
"The most remarkable feature of the island is Fingal's Cave... The entrance is 33 feet wide and 60 feet high, and the length of the cave is 212 feet. The floor of this marvelous chamber is the sea, which throws off flashing and many-colored lights against the pendent columns whitened with calcareous stalagmite, which form the roof, and against the pillared walls of the cave."
The paddle-wheeler anchored off Staffa, and Mendelssohn and his friend rowed a little boat right into Fingal's Cave, which is named after a legendary Celtic warrior and hunter. The surf was rough that day, and the composer was seasick, but the sights and sounds dazzled him, as they had or would a long procession of visitors that by century's end would include poets John Keats, William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson, writers Walter Scott and Jules Verne, painter J.M.W. Turner and even England's Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Staying that evening in Tobermory on the nearby Isle of Mull, Mendelssohn wrote his sister Fanny, a gifted pianist and composer who was five years his senior: "That you might understand how deeply the Hebrides have affected me the following came into my mind here." He enclosed a sketch of the first twenty-odd measures of the piece we know as the "Hebrides Overture."
The overture's principal musical idea is a haunting six-note descending theme cast in a minor key. First stated by the lower strings and bassoon, this restless figure is repeated in various altered versions and will return again and again through the length of the overture.
The overture's second musical subject now appears and Mendelssohn explores this more tranquil major key theme, contrasts it with the opening theme, then proceeds through a fanfare-like passage to a section where the various musical ideas introduced so far are recalled, examined and developed. This section builds to a roaring climax that gradually recedes.
A return to the restless subject that introduced the overture occasions the arrival of a peaceful new theme offered by the clarinet. The relative calm is briefly interrupted by a return of turbulence before the overture ends on quiet note.
Whether Mendelssohn saw his music as a kind of tone painting of a windswept island, a wave-scoured cave, a steamer ride, or the feelings one might have on such a journey is really conjectural. Over the years, commentators have heard in the piece surging waves, seabirds, a storm at sea, salt air and even the exploits of the hero Fingal. Truth be told, Mendelssohn left behind no musical program for the piece beyond its descriptive title.
The Philharmonic last played the Hebrides Overture in November 2003, under the baton of then music director Clyde Mitchell.
Fauré: Pelléas et Mélisande Suite
What many feel is Gabriel Fauré's finest orchestral work began as music for a London theatrical production. The composer (born Pamiers, France, 1845; died Paris, 1924) was asked to write incidental music for the English-language premiere of Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas and Mélisande, one of the most important French dramas of the late 19th century.
Maeterlinck's fairy-tale tragedy had premiered in Paris in the spring of 1893. The critical reception had been disdainful, but the play's impact on the theater of its day was substantial and far-reaching. Both play and production were the antithesis of the realism then popular in the theater.
The drama had been mounted by avant-gardist Aurélien Lugné-Poe, who placed a gauze curtain in front of the proscenium and shone a single light downward onto the stage from the scenery loft above. The performers drifted in and out of view in a dreamy, otherworldly fashion.
Within two years, Pelléas and Mélisande had crossed the English channel for private performances in London in the original Lugné-Poe production.
Three years went by, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell -- arguably the biggest star on the London stage in 1898 -- decided to present the first public performances of Pelléas and Mélisande in England, and she wanted music to accompany the presentation.
Composer Claude Debussy had witnessed the world premiere of the play and had immediately secured the rights to set it to music as an opera. (A project he wouldn't complete until 1902.) Mrs. Campbell approached Debussy and asked whether she might use some of his music, but the composer turned her down flat, saying his music couldn't be adapted that way.
Mrs. Campbell then turned to Fauré, who happened to be in London that spring. In her admittedly rusty French, she read him the passages in the play she felt should have music. The composer, she recalled years later, listened sympathetically and promised to do his best.
In just three weeks, Fauré composed 17 numbers for the play, entrusting their orchestration to his gifted pupil Charles Koechlin. Fauré presided over the orchestra pit at the premiere and, shortly afterwards, he selected three numbers from the score, revised and reorchestrated them, and fashioned them into a concert suite, adding a fourth section, "Sicilienne," about a decade later. The suite we'll hear tonight was first played by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in Paris on December 1st, 1912.
I. Fauré's suite begins with the music he wrote as the Prelude to Act I. Tender and melancholy, the music immediately sets the mood. Near the end of the movement, distant horn calls signal the approach of Prince Golaud, who has gotten lost while hunting and will soon find the mysterious and inarticulate Melisande cowering at the edge of a pool deep in the forest.
II. The second movement -- "La Fileuse" ("The Spinner") -- served as the introduction to Act III. Mélisande, now married to Golaud, is at her spinning wheel, working as she talks with Pelléas, Golaud's half-brother, and Yniold, the prince's little son by his first marriage. The gently whirling music captures Mélisande's essential innocence.
III. The "Sicilienne" served as the prelude to Act II, which begins with Pelléas bringing Mélisande to visit an abandoned well in the palace garden. Mélisande, childishly playing with her wedding ring, drops it into the seemingly bottomless pool. Fauré originally composed the music for an 1893 production of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, but never finished that score.
IV. The final movement of the suite -- "La Mort de Mélisande" ("The Death of Mélisande") -- served as the prelude to the final act of the drama. Having slain Pelléas in a jealous rage, the now remorseful Golaud loses Mélisande, who has just given premature birth to their daughter. Pensive and filled with longing, the music was played at its composer's funeral.
Beethoven:
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Opus 55, "Eroica"
Ludwig van Beethoven (born Bonn, 1770; died Vienna, 1827) typically put his first thoughts about a new work into one or more sketchbooks, and these reveal that he began work on his third symphony in 1802, completed it in all essentials the following year and gave it a final polish in the spring of 1804. However, something he began in late 1800 may have been the real start of the piece.
Beethoven had been invited to compose a ballet score, a light entertainment for the Imperial Court Theater in Vienna. It would be called "The Creatures of Prometheus" and would retell the ancient Greek myth of the titan who stole fire from the gods, gave it to mankind and was sorely punished for doing so.
During the French Revolution, Prometheus had been seen as a symbol of freedom, the unrepentant rebel who defies mindless authority. And during the latter half of the First French Republic, he had come to be associated with Napoleon Bonaparte, the leader of the revolutionary party, the Jacobins.
Beethoven's Creatures of Prometheus contained some lovely music; the choreography by Italian dancer and ballet master Salvatore Viganò found instant favor, and the ballet was a hit, seen 14 times at the Court Theater in 1801 and 13 times the year after. This was Beethoven's first big success as a composer, but Viganò and his ballets fell from favor, and Beethoven's score was soon forgotten, except by the composer.
Several years earlier, Beethoven had noticed a buzzing in his ears and, by 1798, he was clearly losing his hearing Within three years, he was mentioning this in letters to friends, swearing them to secrecy. By 1802, even as he began sketching his third symphony, he was so distraught over this he evidently considered suicide. He wrote a will that left his meager estate to his brothers and prefaced the will with a description of the anguish his infirmity was causing him:
"...It was impossible for me to say to men, 'Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.' How could I possibly admit such an infirmity in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in highest perfection...
"...What a humiliation, when someone stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing... Such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but a little more and I would have put an end to my life. Only art withheld me; it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence..."
Beethoven experienced a spiritual rebirth as he launched himself into a new stage of his career. He had absorbed the innovations of the French Revolutionary composers -- François Gossec, André Grétry and Étienne Méhul among them -- and his musical idiom changed as he turned away from the legacy of Mozart and Haydn and began what musicologists call his "Middle" or "Heroic" period, which established his reputation as a great composer. The "Eroica" Symphony is reckoned the first major work of this period.
As Beethoven worked on the symphony, perhaps from the get-go, he determined to dedicate the piece to Napoleon and to even name it after him. The composer was a believer in humanitarian ideals and saw in the French Revolution a genuine effort to achieve the goals of classical democracy. As leader of the revolutionary party, Napoleon was the embodiment of those ideals, a modern Prometheus working to bring liberty, equality and fraternity to all.
However, in the spring of 1804, Napoleon declared himself emperor. Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries brought the news to the composer and related the scene that followed in a biography written years later:
"Beethoven held [Napoleon] in extremely high esteem at that time and compared him to the greatest Roman consul. Both I and several of his closer friends saw this symphony lying on his table, already copied out in score; at the very top of the title-page was the word "Buonaparte" and at the very bottom "Luigi van Beethoven" -- and that was all...
"I was the first to bring him the news that Buonaparte had declared himself emperor -- whereupon he flew into a rage, shouting, 'Is even he nothing but an ordinary man! Now he will also trample upon human rights and become a slave to his own ambition; now he will set himself above all other men and become a tyrant.'
Beethoven went to the table, Ries continued, grabbed the top of the title-page, tore it in two, and threw it to the floor. That original manuscript has long since disappeared, so it's hard to know how accurate Ries's account might be, but there's no doubt that when the symphony was published, it was presented as an "Heroic Symphony Composed to Celebrate the Memory of a Great Man."
In terms of length and musical variety, the "Eroica" (that's "heroic" in Italian) was the first of its kind, and yet Beethoven stuck closely to late-Classical models in using a four-movement structure and an orchestra that differs from the standard Classical ensemble only by the addition of a third french horn.
Still, if the exposition section of the first movement is repeated, as Beethoven wanted, that movement alone is half as long as an average mature Mozart or Haydn symphony. And if the funeral march of the second movement sounded familiar to opera-goers, nothing like had been heard before in a symphony.
I. The opening movement, marked "Allegro con brio," is full of surprises. The introduction, for example, is reduced to two striking chords which usher in the principal subject of the movement in a sweet cello melody. At least five more themes will turn up over the course of this much extended movement, all of them just as vigorous and succinct.
II. The second movement (Marcia funebre: Allegro assai) is built around a somber marching tune played first by the violins over a hammering drum-like bass. Most of the movement is in minor key, but there are major key passages where the tone markedly brightens. At the end of the movement, the opening theme returns, broken into fragments.
III. The mirthful, energetic Scherzo, marked "Allegro vivace," contrasts sharply with the preceding movement and is interesting rhythmically in that it can be counted in two or three. The contrasting "trio" section gives a trio of horn players the chance to really put on a show.
IV. The Finale (Allegro molto) is a set of variations on a theme first heard in the finale of The Creatures of Prometheus. Some musicologists suggest that the principal themes of all the movements are derived from this one theme, that the entire symphony is in some sense a set of variations on the Prometheus theme, and that the ballet was the ultimate inspiration for the symphony.
If Napoleon were the inspiration, as the original title might have suggested, Beethoven's making the second movement a funeral march, then following it with a merry scherzo and a triumphant finale wouldn't make much sense. But if the symphony parallels the story of the ballet, things begin to add up.
The version of the myth used for the ballet had Prometheus breathing life into pair of statues, making them humans, albeit ignorant savages. The titan entrusts their education to Orpheus and the Muses, and it's Melpomone, the muse of tragedy, who slays Prometheus as punishment for creating mankind. However, Apollo realizes that humans really aren't so bad and restores the titan to the world of the living. The humans, now "humanized" by the arts and sciences, are ready for the journey of life.
In schematic terms, the plot can be summarized as heroic action followed by death, resurrection and triumph, and the four movements of the symphony can be summed up in the same fashion. In this light, the "Eroica" Symphony is not the life story of Napoleon or some other "great man," so much as it is an allegory in music about heroism, including the composer's own in facing deafness, thoughts of suicide and finding a new life and triumph in his art.
Program Notes – Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic - November 2009
Northeastern Pennsylvania
Philharmonic
Thirty-eighth Season
2009/10
Concert:
Friday, November 6, 2009 / Scranton Cultural Center
Program:
Berlioz: Roman Carnival Overture
Mozart: Clarinet Concerto, Pascal Archer, clarinet
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4
_______________________________________________________________________
Download Masterworks 2 Program Notes
By Peter Wynne
Our players -- especially in the woodwind section -- get another chance to shine tonight as music director Lawrence Loh leads the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic in luminous works by Berlioz, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, among them one of the finest clarinet concertos in the literature.
Berlioz: Roman Carnival Overture
Although French composer Hector Berlioz (born La Côte Saint-André, 1803; died Paris, 1869) fashioned his Roman Carnival Overture as a free-standing concert piece, it was rooted in an opera that had failed at its premiere. His Benvenuto Cellini had been based loosely on the autobiography of the celebrated Renaissance sculptor, and its failure could be blamed in large part on conductor François-Antoine Habeneck.
Berlioz and Habeneck just couldn't get along. The conductor basically ignored the composer's wishes, and their struggle came to a head over a number Berlioz had included in the opera's second act, which is set in Rome at Carnival. It was music for a saltarello, a lively Italian folk dance.
Habeneck couldn't or wouldn't conduct the piece fast enough. The dancers complained to Berlioz, and the composer repeated their complaint to Habeneck during a rehearsal, urging him to put more life into the music. The conductor became so infuriated he broke his baton in two. In his memoirs, Berlioz recalled what happened next:
"After witnessing four or five similar outbursts, I remarked with a sang-froid that infuriated him, ‘My God, sir, if you were to break fifty batons it wouldn't keep your tempo from being half what it ought to be.' Habeneck stopped and, turning to the orchestra, said, ‘Seeing that I can't satisfy Mr. Berlioz, we'll leave it at that for today. You may go, gentlemen.’ And with that the rehearsal ended."
Habeneck's conducting remained listless and, at that time, composers were not allowed to conduct their own works in French theaters. Some of the players were openly hostile to the piece, and a couple of them even tried to sabotage a performance one night by playing music Berlioz had never written. Benvenuto Cellini premiered in September 1838 and, after a few repeats, was dropped, never to be staged again in Paris during Berlioz’s lifetime.
About five years later, Berlioz decided to salvage some of the music, choosing the saltarello and the lovely melody he'd written for a duet for Cellini and the young woman with whom he has fallen in love.
The overture, which has two large sections, is introduced by a flourish based on the saltarello; then the theme of the first section -- the duet melody sung in Act I of the opera -- is presented by the English horn. The English horn and the violas explore the theme; then the full ensemble comes in to present the melody in canonical fashion, where one group of players sounds the melody, then a second group chimes in, imitating the first. With Berlioz's soaring tune and his shimmering orchestration, the effect can be rapturous.
Suddenly the woodwinds return in a whirl, three times racing up and down the scale, announcing that big doings are about to begin. The saltarello returns in merry triumph, and yet before long the love duet melody is heard once more, sounded by the bassoons and trombones. Berlioz briefly sets the two melodies one against the other -- something that never happened in the opera -- then brings all to a glorious conclusion.
Berlioz completed the Roman Carnival Overture toward the end of 1843 and chose February 3rd, 1844, as the date of its first performance, which would be at the Salle Herz in Paris. The composer would conduct, but there would be only one rehearsal. And to make things more difficult, on the day of the performance, the woodwind players he had hired were called away for several hours of National Guard duty.
The players would be free to perform that night but were reluctant to do so with no rehearsal. Berlioz, undeterred, assured them they'd be able to pull it off. "Your parts are correct, and you're all excellent players," he told them. "Look at my baton as often as you can, count your rests carefully, and everything will be fine."
The audience loved what it heard and demanded an encore. The second time was better than the first, Berlioz recalled, savoring a little triumph: Habeneck, whom he had never forgiven, had come to the Salle Herz, prepared to witness a fiasco. He had heard about the woodwind players and was standing in the foyer when Berlioz left the stage.
"Habeneck was there, a bit disappointed," Berlioz recalled in his memoirs, "and, as I passed, I spoke just four words: 'That's how it goes,' and he made no reply. I've never enjoyed conducting my own music more than I did that night, and my pleasure was doubled, recalling what Habeneck had made me endure."
Berlioz was so pleased with the overture that he suggested Franz Liszt use it as a prelude to the second act of Benvenuto Cellini when Liszt revived the opera successfully in Weimar in 1852. Liszt agreed and, to this day, most producers of the opera do the same.
Mozart: Clarinet Concerto in A, K.622
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (born Salzburg, 1756; died Vienna, 1791) composed more than 40 concertos during his sadly brief life, but only one for the clarinet, completing it less than two months before his death. He wrote the piece for virtuoso clarinetist Anton Stadler, a friend and fellow Freemason.
The concerto was intended for performance on an instrument Stadler had helped develop. The so-called "basset clarinet" could sound all the notes of the "standard" B-flat instrument, plus four lower notes, and it produced a particularly rich and mellow sound in its lowest register.
The basset clarinet never caught on, however, and when the concerto was published in 1801, it appeared in an arrangement for the "normal" instrument. And even though publication came a decade after Mozart's death; musicians believe the composer himself had prepared the version for the B-flat clarinet.
Unlike his earlier concertos, this one is very soulful and probing, with a minimum of flash. "Poignant" is probably the best word to describe the piece, as if Mozart knew his life was drawing quickly to a close. He wrote the concerto in October of 1791 and by the start of December he was dead. The piece has a degree of emotional content that sets it apart from most other concertos of the period.
Even though the piece is light on bravura, it makes some heavy demands on the soloist, who tonight is Pascal Archer, principal clarinetist of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic. The clarinet playing has to be very clean, articulate and light, and if the soloist doesn't have all the refinements and subtleties in place, it shows up instantly. There are no technical tricks or virtuoso displays to distract the listener from the facts of the music.
What's intriguing is that the instrument Mozart wrote for --however it may have been pitched -- was primitive by today's standards, typically having five keys and eight holes that someone like Stadler would have stopped with his fingers. In contrast, today's clarinet usually has 17 or 18 keys and seven holes. Also, clarinet pitch in Mozart's time frequently was inaccurate, and it almost seems the composer was prescient in writing a piece that really required an instrument far better than anything available in his day.
Tonight, Pascal Archer will be playing an A clarinet, which is pitched slightly lower than the more common B-flat instrument and which many listeners feel has a fuller, warmer tone. Most clarinetist don't have access to a basset clarinet or to the so-called basset horn, a clarinet that's pitched even lower. And players have little incentive to acquire these instruments because so little music has been written for them.
Typical of a classical concerto, the piece is in three movements that follow the familiar fast-slow-fast pattern.
I. The brisk opening movement, marked "Allegro," is in sonata form, with the entire orchestra offering the themes the composer will develop before they're heard from the clarinet. Following the practice of the day, Mozart left the cadenzas up to the soloist and, in this movement, Mr. Archer will play some bravura music of his own devising.
II. The slow movement, the "Adagio," is based on a tender songlike melody that Mozart treats in a decidedly operatic way in the movement's central section. The composer of more than a dozen operas, Mozart had just completed The Magic Flute when he began writing the concerto. In this movement, Pascal Archer will play a cadenza composed by his favorite clarinetist, German virtuoso Sabine Meyer.
III. The finale is a cheery rondo. Again marked "Allegro," it's the most virtuosic movement of the entire piece.
The Mozart clarinet concerto was last heard at the Philharmonic in November 2004, when the orchestra was searching for a new music director and guest conductor Gisele Ben-Dor took the podium. The soloist was Stephen Williamson, principal clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. The Philharmonic also performed this concerto in January 1997, when Todd Levy, who was then our principal clarinetist, soloed under the baton of Hugh Keelan.
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36
When Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (born Votkinsk, 1840; died St. Petersburg, 1893) began work on his fourth symphony in the spring of 1877, he had been experiencing life's ups and downs in spades.
On the up side was his work: Over the two preceding years, he had completed his first piano concerto; a slew of songs and solo piano pieces, a third string quartet, the symphonic fantasy Francesca da Rimini and his ballet masterpiece Swan Lake.
His financial situation, long a problem, had taken a considerable change for the better. In 1876, he had attracted the attention of an eccentric but very wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, who first commissioned a number of works from him, then began giving him an allowance of 6,000 rubles a year. By mutual consent, the two never met.
However, in May of 1877, and despite his homosexual leanings, Tchaikovsky had contracted a hasty marriage with a former pupil, Antonina Milyukova. It was a grave mistake from which the composer soon fled. In late September, he returned to Moscow to face Antonina, but soon fled again, this time to Switzerland, then Italy, where he finished Symphony No. 4 by the end of the year.
The symphony is in four movements and follows classical tradition: a sonata-form first movement, a songlike slow movement, a scherzo for the third movement and a festive finale based on a Russian folk tune.
I. The first movement, marked "Andante sostenuto -- Moderato con anima," has for an introduction a powerful brass fanfare that returns in the middle and at the end of the movement, as well as in the final-movement finale. Tchaikovsky identified this fanfare as the germ of the entire symphony. Following the introduction, the strings play a melancholy waltz as the first theme and the woodwinds play the more lilting second theme before they are interrupted by the fanfare, which drives the movement to its conclusion.
II. The second movement (Andantino in modo di canzone) begins with a lovely and bittersweet melody from the oboe. The strings take up the tune, trying to change the mood, but the melancholy mood comes back, with the movement finishing softly with the main melody on the bassoon.
III. The very lively third movement (Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato -- Allegro) is one of the most original and unusual in the symphonic repertoire. The members of the string sections play a repeating bass figure by plucking their instruments, rather than bowing them, for the entire movement. It's what's called a "pizzicato ostinato," meaning “plucked” and "obstinate” or “persistent.”
There are episodes with thrilling, virtuosic woodwind playing, followed by the brass and timpani in a more martial style. The party atmosphere (as Tchaikovsky describes the movement) gradually dies away, with the strings softly plucking to the end.
IV. In the fourth and final movement (Finale: Allegro con fuoco), Tchaikovsky seems to admonish his listeners to cheer up and forget about the earlier sadness. Fate intervenes momentarily (that fanfare once again), but Tchaikovsky closes the symphony affirming that life is bearable after all.
The Tchaikovsky Fourth was first performed in Moscow on February 22nd, 1878, and was dedicated "to my best friend." Soon after the premiere, that "best friend," Nadezhda von Meck, wrote Tchaikovsky asking whether his new symphony had an implicit program. The composer responded with a long letter in which he described the "meaning" of the piece.
He identified the opening fanfare as a representation of "that fateful force which prevents the impulse to happiness from attaining its goal." The various themes of the first movement, he wrote, were fruitless languor, a retreat into vain hopes and daydreams. "Thus all life is an unbroken alternation of hard reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness."
Setting out his thoughts about the slow movement, Tchaikovsky next evoked "that melancholy feeling that arises in the evening as you sit alone, worn out from your labors." Tchaikovsky described contrasting themes as memories of "blissful moments when our young blood seethed and life was good."
Three main ideas mark the Scherzo, and to the composer these were "fugitive images that pass through one’s mind when one has had a little wine to drink and is feeling the first effects of intoxication."
The early movements may be dark, but the final movement, based on the folk tune “In a Field a Birch Tree Stood," provides more than a glimmer of hope: "If you can find no impulse for joy within yourself, look at others," the composer wrote. "Go out among the people. See how well they know how to rejoice and give themselves up utterly to glad feelings. It is a picture of a popular holiday festivity."
Over the years, commentators have made much of Tchaikovsky's letter to Mme. von Meck, but it seems one could easily make too much of it. The composer warns his patron early in the letter that with him such programs evolve after the fact of composition and that this explanation was for her alone.
Interestingly, he also wrote about the symphony in a letter to composer Sergei Taneyev, another former pupil. Taneyev had criticized the first movement, which he felt was disproportionately long (approaching half the length of the entire symphony) and which reminded him of a symphonic poem. Taneyev had also taken note of the brass fanfare that opens the work and returns at crucial moments in the first and final movements. Along with the frequent changes of tempo, which suggested a ballet to his mind, these things had convinced the younger composer that the work must have some kind of program.
"Of course my symphony is programmatic," Tchaikovsky wrote, "but it would be impossible to give you the program in words... Oughtn't a symphony -— the most lyrical of all forms —- to be such a work? Shouldn't it express everything for which there are no words, but which the soul wishes to express, and which require expression?...
"Please don't think I imagine I'm presenting you a depth and grandeur of thought that can't be easily understood in words. I wasn't trying to express any new idea. In essence, my symphony imitates Beethoven's Fifth. I was not imitating its musical content, but I did borrow its central idea.
"Do you think there is a program in the Fifth Symphony? Not only is there a program, but there's no question about its efforts to express itself. My symphony rests on nearly the same foundation, and if you haven't understood me, it's only because I'm not a Beethoven, a fact I've never doubted."
The Philharmonic last performed the Tchaikovsky Fourth at the start of its 25th anniversary season in September 1996.
# # #
Northeastern Pennsylvania
Philharmonic
Thirty-eighth Season
2009/10
Friday, September 11, 2009
Scranton Cultural Center / 7:00 pm
Saturday, September 12, 2009
F.M. Kirby Center for the Performing Arts / 7:00 pm
LAWRENCE lOH, Conductor
Jon Nakamatsu, Piano
Georges Bizet, arr. Loh Suite from the Incidental Music for L'Arlesienne
(1838-1875)
Pastorale
Menuetto
Carillon
Adagietto
Farandole
Richard Strauss Don Juan, Opus 20
(1864-1949)
INTERMISSION
Sergei Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 in D Minor for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 30
(1873-1943)
Allegro ma non tanto
Intermezzo
Finale-Alla breve
Jon Nakamatsu, Piano
Program Notes by: Peter Wynn
We'll have drama and showstoppers from start to finish as music director Lawrence Loh and the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic raise the curtain on the 2009-2010 season, the orchestra's 38th, with works by Georges Bizet, Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Opening the program is a suite from the music that Bizet wrote to accompany a drama by Alphonse Daudet. It was called L'Arlesienne -- The Girl from Arles -- but she was the one character who never turned up in the play. This is followed by Strauss's tone poem Don Juan, a wonderful piece that offers an offbeat take on the world's most notorious womanizer.
After intermission, Van Cliburn Competition gold medallist Jon Nakamatsu performs the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3, one of the pieces that catapulted Van Cliburn to fame in 1958, when he won top prize in the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. Jon Nakamatsu first performed with the Philharmonic in March 2008, playing Beethoven's majestic "Emperor" Concerto.
Bizet: Suite from the Incidental Music for L'Arlesienne
In 1872, Leon Carvalho, the impresario at the popular Theatre du Vaudeville in Paris, was looking to revive a kind of theater presentation that had fallen into disuse. It was called "melodrama," but it shouldn't be confused with our idea of something simple-minded, sentimental and emotionally overwrought.
The melodrama Carvalho had in mind was a stage play in which important bits of action and spoken dialogue were underscored with music to heighten and make clear their meaning. It's an approach to drama that every moviegoer knows well. Carvalho had acquired a play he thought would thrive with such treatment, Alphonse Daudet's L'Arlesienne, and invited Georges Bizet (born Paris, 1838; died Bougival, 1875) to write the music.
Daudet's drama, based loosely on a true story, is set in a region of Provence known as the Camargue. The young farmer Fréderi has fallen desperately in love with a girl from Arles, who's spoken about in the play but never even given a proper name. Fréderi and she become engaged, but she was long involved with another man, who comes to Fréderi's father with proof of this earlier relationship.
The wedding is called off, but Fréderi can't stop thinking about his girl from Arles, brooding night and day. Finally, his mother tells him that if he must have this girl, she and his father will agree to it.
Fréderi now affects a cheerful air to spare his parents' feelings. He agrees to marry a young woman named Vivette, and the wedding is planned for St. Eloi's Day, a great holiday in the Camargue. But when the day arrives, Fréderi realizes he can't face life without his girl from Arles. He climbs into the hayloft and throws himself out a window to the paving stones below.
A secondary story revolves around the chance meeting of the elderly, widowed Mère Renaud and the old shepherd Balthazar. The two had once been deeply in love, but she was married off to someone else. Now they're seeing each other for the first time in 50 years and share a tender kiss.
Carvalho's budget was limited, and Bizet was constrained to write for a theater orchestra of just 26 pieces, including a piano and a kind of reed organ known as a harmonium. But even with such limited resources, he wrote a splendid score that included 27 numbers. Some of these were large set pieces -- choruses and instrumental interludes -- while others were just bits of underscoring a few bars long.
L'Arlesienne bowed at the Theâtre du Vaudeville on September 21st, 1872, and fell flat on its face. Carvalho had become preoccupied with other projects and fumbled the publicity. The Vaudeville's audience didn't know what to make of either Bizet's music or Daudet's play, and the show closed after 21 performances. However, musicians who saw the production recognized the quality of Bizet's score, and composer Jules Massenet, for one, urged Bizet to put the music to some further use.
Bizet selected four of the longer numbers from the score. He reorchestrated his selections and fashioned them into what we now know as the L'Arlesienne Suite No. 1. The suite premiered November 10th, 1872, in a concert by the popular Orchestre Pasdeloup, the oldest symphony orchestra in France. It was an instant success. Sad to say, it was also one of the few successes Bizet enjoyed during his brief lifetime.
When Bizet died less than three years later, composer Ernest Guiraud, Bizet's longtime friend, took additional numbers from the L'Arlesienne score, reorchestrated them and assembled a second suite. Philharmonic music director Loh has now drawn from both suites to put together what we'll hear tonight.
Pastorale comes from the suite fashioned by Ernest Guirard and is the morning music that introduced Act II, which begins at dawn.
Menuetto, also from Suite 1, is from the festivities that precede the wedding.
Carillon, the final number in Bizet's own suite, suggests the bells ringing in honor of St. Eloi and for the wedding of Vivette and Fréderi. To this Bizet added a second section, using music associated with Mère Renaud.
Adagietto, once again from Suite 1, was written to underscore the scene where Balthazar and Mère Renaud meet after so many years and admit how each had longed to see the other.
Farandole was fashioned by Ernest Guiraud from music from Bizet's overture to L'Arlesienne and dance music from the pre-wedding party for Vivette and Fréderi. A farandole is an traditional Provençal dance in which a long line of dancers, linked by the handkerchiefs they hold, wend their way through the streets, following a musician playing pipe and tabor.
Bizet used three old Provençal tunes in his L'Arlesienne score, and the farandole boasts two of them: The first is entitled "Marcho dei Rei" -- "The March of the Kings" -- and is said to be an old Christmas song. The second is called "Danso dei Chivau-Frus" -- "Dance of the Hobbyhorse," which is led by a dancer wearing a horse's head made of papier mache or the like.
Strauss: Don Juan, Opus 20
Richard Strauss (born Munich, 1864; died Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1949) was just 23 years old when he began work on his tone poem Don Juan in the fall of 1887. The title will no doubt sound familiar, but the story that inspired Strauss was not the version found, say, in Mozart's Don Giovanni or in the 17th-century Spanish drama that informed it, Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla -- The Libertine of Seville.
What captured the imagination of the young composer was a drama about Don Juan that was written in verse in 1844 by a poet who published under the pen name Nikolaus Lenau. (His real name and title were Nikolaus Franz Niembsch, Edler von Strehlenau.) Lenau was born of the Austrian nobility, but in Hungary in 1822. He died in a Viennese mental asylum in 1850, leaving his Don Juan unfinished.
Lenau's hero pursues women, to be sure, but his goal is not to add one more name to a list of conquests. He's searching for a woman who is the embodiment of femininity, the perfect complement to himself. He's absolutely self-centered, perhaps, but not simply a cad. He glories in the romance of the moment and is stricken when each falls short of his ideal. Increasingly frustrated and weary of life, he finally accepts a challenge from the brother of one of his victims and allows himself to be killed.
In performance, Don Juan takes off like a rocket as the don rushes forth to find fulfillment in romance. He is exuberance and impetuosity personified, but Strauss quickly contrasts that energy with an episode that begins as a gentle flirtation but quickly becomes more intense -- until it goes awry, as it must.
Soon, however, an exchange between the low strings and the flute signals that the don has found someone else to woo. Strauss now gives us another love scene, but this affair, too, is doomed to failure.
After one more vigorous assertion of self -- a heroic theme given to the horns -- comes the inevitable melancholy and a sudden silence. A quick but quiet denouement reveals that Don Juan's world has come to an end with neither a bang nor a whimper.
Strauss conducted the Weimar Opera orchestra in the premiere of Don Juan on November 11th, 1889. The applause was loud and long, and Strauss found himself among the ranks of the most important composers of the day. In 1890, Don Juan became the first of Strauss's orchestral works to see print.
The composer had earlier written two other tone poems -- Aus Italien and Macbeth -- and a half-dozen more would follow -- Tod und Verklärung, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben. Today, Richard Strauss may be considered a 20th-century master for his operas -- Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier and Die Frau ohne Schatten among them -- but it's his tone poems that are the most frequently performed.
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Opus 30
During the summer of 1909, a 36-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff was wrapping up plans, albeit reluctantly, for his first visit to the United States and Canada. He had made a name for himself in Europe as a virtuoso pianist and conductor and also as the composer of two much-admired concertos and any number of works for solo piano, including the Prelude in C-sharp Minor, which had become immensely popular on this side of the Atlantic.
His Symphony No. 2 in E minor had just won the 1,000-ruble Glinka Award, and he was planning to bring that one to Philadelphia, where he'd make his American conducting debut. But he needed a musical calling card for the tour, and it would be a concerto that he'd introduce in New York.
Rachmaninoff would write most of the piece at Ivanovka, the country estate of his aristocratic cousins, the Satins. The composer went there every summer to work on his music. It was a quiet retreat near the city of Tambov, about 300 miles southeast of Moscow. Evidently Rachmaninoff found the task quite difficult. In mid July he wrote to a friend that he was worried: Time was running out and he wasn't pleased with what he'd written so far. His only consolation, he said, was that he wasn't idling.
Rachmaninoff didn't complete the concerto until September and ended up practicing it on a silent piano which he brought with him on the ship he was taking to America. It was the first time he had done anything like that. Actually, the whole situation had the composer more than a bit edgy: The tour had been postponed once; the impresario offering it had died, and the tour schedule itself was more than a bit sketchy.
Still, his conducting debut and the performances of the concerto came off as planned. Rachmaninoff introduced the his Piano Concerto No. 3 on November 28th, 1909, in a performance with the New York Symphony under Walter Damrosch. And the composer played the piece a second time in Manhattan on January 16th, with Gustav Mahler conducting the New York Philharmonic.
Critical reception was mixed, but nearly everyone remarked on the extraordinary technical and musical challenges the concerto presented the soloist. For a while, no other pianist took up the piece. The great Józef Hofmann, to whom it was dedicated, never played the concerto in public, but eventually Vladimir Horowitz made it part of his repertory and others gradually followed suit.
I. The concerto begins with a movement marked "Allegro ma non tanto," which might be freely translated "Be brisk, but don't go overboard." Rachmaninoff was writing this concerto for himself -- and he was a virtuoso in the grand Romantic tradition, another Franz Liszt -- and yet he began this piece with what you can only call classical restraint.
The strings play a muted, rocking sort of figure, then the piano comes in with the principal theme, a long minor-key melody that calls to mind a folksong in its simplicity. The composer once wrote that he had wanted to "sing" the melody on the piano as a singer might sing it and to find a suitable orchestral accompaniment that wouldn't muffle this singing. As the movement continues, Rachmaninoff begins to explore and develop both that melody and its accompaniment.
The strings now introduce a more lyrical second theme, which the piano takes up and freely examines. A restatement of the music that began the movement signals the start of a development section that's based mostly on the principal theme and its accompaniment. This segues into a lengthy cadenza for the solo piano with occasional comments from the woodwinds. This cadenza takes the place of the usual recapitulation of what has gone before, but at the last moment, piano and orchestra briefly return to the opening theme to bring the movement to a close.
II. The slow movement (Adagio) is entitled "Intermezzo" and is mostly written in major keys, although the mood remains fairly somber. The orchestral opening is in the key of A, which is closely related to the D minor of the first movement, but then the piano jumps in and heads in an unsettlingly different direction, finally reaching the very "distant" key of D-flat, which is not where your ear would expect the music to go. The piano now expands upon the theme the orchestra had first explored.
Toward the end of the movement, the clarinet and bassoon introduce a lively little waltz tune. This can seem quite new, but the theme of the waltz is actually a cleverly disguised version -- very nearly note for note -- of the folksonglike principal theme of the concerto's first movement. As the Intermezzo draws to a close, the piano launches into a brief cadenza which returns to the "home key" of the concerto, D minor, and lays the way for the finale, which proceeds without a pause.
III: The last movement (Finale: Alla breve) offers the display of fiery piano technique that Rachmaninoff's admirers no doubt expected in 1909 and which pianists still love serving up today. The movement includes variations on many of the themes found in the first movement, which unites the whole concerto in cyclical fashion. Invention abounds, especially in the playful, extended Scherzando section that fills the middle of the movement.
Rachmaninoff launches the drive to the concerto's climactic conclusion in march tempo, as he begins piling drama upon extravagance. Tempos accelerate, technical demands escalate and the big tune of the movement surges to an apotheosis. The conclusion tests the limits of virtuosity and, if done right, it pulls audience members to their feet.
In the years since its premiere, the Rachmaninoff Third has become a repertoire item for most piano virtuosos, with people like Martha Argerich, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Van Cliburn achieving worldwide fame for their performances of the work.
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