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Saturday 2 PM & 8 PM March 6, 2010 KING CENTER, Melbourne
Symphonic Tributes! |
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"Conductor Choices CD Recommendations"
Foss - Night Music for John Lennon
No commercial recording currently available
Saint-Saens - Piano Concerto No. 2
Cecile Licad, piano
London Philharmonic Orchestra /Andre Previn, conductor
SONY 46506
Beethoven - Symphony No. 7
Vienna Philharmonic/Carlos Kleiber, conductor
Deutsche Grammophon 447400
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PROGRAM NOTES |
Brevard Symphony Orchestra 2009-10 Season - Symphonic Tributes:
Notes provided by: David R. Glerum, Music Director - WMFE-FM/NPR, Orlando, FL. (1990-2009); Music Director - WXXI-FM/NPR, Rochester, N.Y. (1980-1990)
Lukas Foss (1922 - 2009) - Night Music for John Lennon:
John Lennon was born in Liverpool, England on October 9, 1940. He achieved worldwide acclaim as one of the founding members of The Beatles. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney was one of the most acclaimed and influential pairings of the 20th century, producing some of the most popular music in the history of rock and roll. He was fatally shot by Mark David Chapman at the entrance of the building where he and his wife, Yoko One, lived, The Dakota, New York, N.Y., on Monday, December 8, 1980. The news of the murder spread quickly and crowds gathered at Roosevelt Hospital (where Lennon was pronounced dead) and in front of The Dakota, engaging in prayer and singing Lennon's songs. The following day, Ono issued a statement: "There is no funeral for John. John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him. Love, Yoko and Sean."
Lukas Foss's Night Music for John Lennon was begun the morning of the day of Lennon's death. With the collective shock and mourning felt around the world, Foss was moved and so influenced by the tragic event. The following inscription appears on the score:
Lukas Foss
Night Music for John Lennon
(Prelude, Fugue, and Chorale)
For large or small Orchestra with Brass Quintet concertante
In memory of John Lennon's death, December 8, 1980
The composition does not quote or make stylistic reference to Beatles music; however, it does contain allusions to Lennon and to rock music in general: including the tonal nostalgia of the Prelude, the inclusion of a plaintive rock guitar line, the choice of major chords (though in serial order) in the Fugue, and the homage implied by the final Chorale.
The unique instrumentation of Night Music for John Lennon - orchestra with brass quintet - stems from the involvement of the Canadian Brass, for which the work was written on commission from the Northwood Symphonette.
Born in Berlin in 1922, Lukas Foss came to the United States in 1937, studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and became a citizen in 1942. In 1957, while professor of composition at the Univ. of California, Los Angeles, he founded the groundbreaking Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, which performed many of his experimental works. From 1963 to 1971 he was music director and conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, where he gained notoriety for performing avant-garde compositions. Teaching at the State Univ. of New York at Buffalo during this period, he also founded (1963) its Center for Creative and Performing Arts. In 1971 he was named music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, remaining in the post until 1990; from 1981 to 1986 he also was the conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. As a composer, Foss' oeuvre passed through three stylistic periods, from tonal, neoclassical writing through experimentation with dodecaphonic, electronic, aleatoric and other methods, eventually returning to complex but more accessible works. Fellow American composer Aaron Copland once called Foss' works "among the most original and stimulating compositions in American music."
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) - Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22:
I. Andante sostenuto
II. Allegro scherzando
III. Presto
The history of music has not been stingy in giving us astonishing child prodigy composers. Several come immediately to mind, including Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Bizet, and Korngold. But none of these young geniuses had anything on Camille Saint-Saëns. Here was a phenom who picked out tunes on the piano at two and a half, began composing at three (you can view the manuscript on exhibit at the Paris Conservatory), gave his first piano recital at the tender age of five, and made his professional debut as pianist at ten, offering to play any Beethoven piano sonata you would care to name by memory as an encore! After entering the Paris Conservatory in 1848, Saint-Saëns won several prizes. He may very well have earned the Prix de Rome, but he was considered too young. To top it off, this wunderkind was endowed with perfect pitch and a photographic memory for music. No wonder Saint-Saëns was known as the "second Mozart." Hector Berlioz could only marvel: "That youngster knows everything, all he lacks is inexperience."
So precocious was Saint-Saëns' genius that his talents extended well beyond music. At the age of only seven he was reading Latin and mastering botany, geology, and lepidoptery. Soon he progressed into studying archaeology and the occult sciences and eventually was elected a member of the Astronomical Society of France. With every passing year he added more and more interests to his palette, delving into caricature, drawing, mathematics, poetry, literature, and theater. Loving the written word, he published two volumes of poetry, some plays, and a philosophical tract, Problems and Mysteries. It can be said without exaggeration that Saint-Saëns developed into a "Renaissance Man."
But as far reaching as Saint-Saëns' interests were, his greatest facility was as a musician. He composed effortlessly, turning out compositions in his words "as an apple tree produces apples." Berlioz went on to say that Saint-Saëns was as formidable a musical mechanism as he had ever encountered. Today we know him as composer, but in his time Saint-Saëns was also admired and much sought after as a virtuoso pianist. Reports are that he played much the way he wrote, approaching music with the aesthetic of a classicist. Important to him were the qualities of clarity, elegance, fluid technique, restraint, and dignity. He remarked: "He who does not get absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music." And again: "To me, art is form above all else…The artist who does not feel thoroughly satisfied with elegant lines, harmonious colors, or a fine series of chords, does not understand art." It comes as no surprise, then, that the much-loved Piano Concerto No. 2 is a work of "restrained passion" - some would argue to the music's detriment, but for others it is this very restraint that sets off and makes more effective its intensity and passion.
Concerning the Second Piano Concerto, one thing on which all can agree is that Saint-Saëns created a work requiring remarkable virtuosity. It was written for fellow virtuoso and friend, the eminent Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. After attending a concert together in April of 1868, Rubinstein turned to Saint-Saëns and said: "I haven't conducted an orchestra in Paris yet. Let's put on a concert that will give me the opportunity of taking the baton." Saint-Saëns was to be the composer and soloist. Even after discovering that the intended venue - Paris' Salle Pleyel - had as its only open date a slot just three weeks later, Saint-Saëns was undaunted and accepted the challenge. Always a quick and facile composer, Saint-Saëns managed to give birth to his G minor concerto in just seventeen days. Despite the short timetable, the concerto went off without a hitch on May 13, 1868, with Saint-Saëns at the piano and with Rubinstein on the podium. Rubinstein was so pleased that he added the concerto to his repertoire and praised it lavishly for having "served me for many years as a first-rate warhorse! It has everything—dash and elegance, dazzling brilliance and temperament; it is good music, too."
Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No. 2 is cast in the usual number of three movements. The opening Andante sostentuto gets underway with an impressive cadenza in the style of Bach, displaying the solo instrument with impressive splashing arpeggios and forceful chords. Eventually the orchestra enters with a short and forceful interruption. But soon the piano is back at it and takes center stage again with a broad and lovely lyrical principal theme. As the themes are developed and recapitulated, the piano continues to shine lyrically and with virtuosic runs and pyrotechnics. One would expect a slow movement next, but what follows is a witty scherzo in the form of a rondo - Allegro scherzando - providing us with a dashing main theme and a hard-to-resist beguiling second theme. The concluding Presto is an all-bravura and dazzles us with its quicksilver flow and perpetual motion propelled by the rhythmic drive of a tarantella.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) - Symphony No. 7 in a major, Op. 92:
I. Poco sostenuto-Vivace
II. Allegretto
III. Presto
IV. Allegro con brio
The first performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 took place in the auditorium at the University of Vienna on December 8, 1813, with the composer conducting. Although Wellington's Victory was the drawing card and received the biggest buzz (much to the composer's consternation), the Seventh Symphony was also enthusiastically received, the Allegretto achieving such success that it was immediately encored. A Vienna newspaper reported that the "applause rose to the point of ecstasy." Beethoven's first biographer, Anton Schindler, wrote: "All persons, however they had previously dissented from his music, now agreed to award him his laurels."
Beethoven disavowed all programmatic interpretations of his Seventh Symphony, but that did not prevent his contemporaries from attaching all manner of extra-musical associations and explanations. They range across the board and are sometimes comical. Some have compared the Seventh to a rustic wedding with peasant dances; a knightly festival; a royal hunt; a masquerade party; a bacchic orgy; "a pastoral symphony that has truly nothing of the dance about it" (a comment perhaps induced by consuming too much valerian root!); a wedding or celebration of a warrior people; "the love dream of a sumptuous odalisque"; a celebration of the dissolution of Napoleon's empire; "the upsurge of a powerful dionysiac impulse; a divine intoxication of the spirit"; and the list goes on and on. Diverse as these descriptions are, celebration and movement seem most often to be the common denominators. The Seventh Symphony is not Beethoven taking on and struggling with an adversary; rather, this is Beethoven the reveler, full of boundless energy and exuberance pouring forth music both festive and light-footed.
Perhaps the most famous such explanation - and the one that has held up best over time - is that of Richard Wagner, who called the Seventh "the apotheosis of the Dancer in its highest aspect…the loftiest deed of bodily motion incorporated in an ideal world of tone." Wagner suggested that upon hearing it "tables, and benches, cans and cups, the grandmother, the blind and the lame, aye, the children in the cradle, fall to dancing." Wagner gets right to the heart of the matter: rhythmic energy and impulse dominates the symphony throughout, with each of the four movements built around a different rhythmic pattern. There is a sense of forward propulsion throughout which has a cumulative effect on the listener. One senses an extraordinary feeling of growing dizziness and giddiness. Beethoven may have looked notoriously clumsy when conducting, but he sure could dance!
Almost as if the orchestra is stretching in preparation for the dance party that is to follow, the Seventh opens with a lengthy and richly developed introduction - Poco sostenuto - in which great harmonic spaces are traversed. Two themes are presented: the first is passed down through the woodwinds and is majestic and serene in character; then follows a graceful and warm second theme stated by the oboe. Gradually, and with a great feeling for suspense, Beethoven leads us to the main part of the movement - the Vivace - by a carefully calculated reiteration of a single pitch. With the door now opened we are then treated to an ebullient dance dominated by a continuous dactylic rhythm (HEAVY/light/light pattern).
The Allegretto (moderately fast) functions as the symphony's slow movement, but it is only slow in relation to the other movements. It opens and closes with a subtly unstable wind chord cast in a minor. The walking theme set in motion by the lower strings is for the most part rooted on one note, suggesting that its mission is to serve less as a melody and more as a sort of inexorable rhythm. Pervading the theme and the set of continuous variations that follow, the heartbeat of the rhythmic pattern persists. This was the movement that was encored at the first performance and subsequent performances. Such a compliment was just about unprecedented for a "slow" movement.
The ensuing Presto is a bubbling scherzo that bustles along at break-neck speed. Beethoven's use of contrasts of sonority and dynamics in this movement is highly effective. Loud and vigorous outbursts are alternated with soft and delicate responses. Following is a lyrically beautiful and slightly slower Trio (horn dominated) that may have been inspired by an old Austrian pilgrim's hymn. The Scherzo returns, the Trio is brought back, the Scherzo returns once again. Beethoven brings in the Trio for a third time, but it is yanked in favor of five imperious chords that bring the movement to a gruff and humorous end.
If the preceding movements have moments of energy and vigor, the finale - Allegro con brio - must then be termed delirious. Here Beethoven takes the inertia from what came before and lets it move forward and swell unimpeded. Somehow, all within the framework of a Classical sonata form, climax rises to climax and the symphony ends with a coda that is positively inebriating. It is not surprising that at about the time the Seventh Symphony was written, Beethoven said: "I am the Bacchus who presses out for men this glorious wine and intoxicates their souls!"
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