|
Concerts > Program
Notes
|
|
Click the note icons
to hear music clips!
|
40th Anniversary Concert
Saturday, December 1, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, December 2, 2006, 2:00 p.m.
 Program Notes
CAPRICCIO SINFONICO
Giacomo Puccini 1858-1924
Born into a musical family with strong ties to the Church, Giacomo Puccini began his musical career as a church organist at age 14. But at 17 he discovered opera and decided to break with family tradition and become a theatrical composer. Like many opera composers of the Romantic era, including Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Verdi, Puccini rarely composed for instruments alone. He never attempted a major instrumental composition on the scale of Verdi's String Quartet in e minor. Rather, Puccini's instrumental compositions are modest and seldom performed most of the orchestral works dating from his student days.
 Puccini moved to Milan in 1880 to enroll in the Conservatory. He graduated in 1883, with the Capriccio sinfonico, composed as part of his diploma. It was performed that year by the conservatory orchestra with great success. When one considers the rigidity of conservatory training, it's a wonder Puccini got out alive, much less with a degree. The work is capricious in the sense of
"quixotic," rather than carelessly lighthearted. It conforms to no recognized musical form – except perhaps the rhapsody or fantasy – both of which are the nearest thing in Classical music to free association. But then, Milan wasn't Paris, but Italy, home of the opera, (or in Italian, melodrama). There is a seemingly endless flow of new tunes in the piece, some of them foreshadowing the most poignant, sinister and dramatic moments of the composer's operas. And there are also quite a few signs of Wagnerian influence.
In many ways the Capriccio comes across as an opera without words – a tone poem without an associated text. An interesting exercise while listening to this work is to make up a suitable plot scenario to account for its many shifts of mood, all of them with exclamation points.
The Capriccio opens "on a dark and stormy night."
After some transitional material, Puccini alights on a passage known to any opera lover.
Unwilling to let good themes go to waste, Puccini recycled some of them 13 years later for the beginning of La bohème. It is this set of musical ideas that he choose to develop most fully in his student work.
The next bit shows up in considerably more altered form in the second act of Tosca as one of the several "death" motives.
And of course, no drama is complete without some love interest; fragments of the following theme show up in more than one place in the composer's later oeuvre.
LIEUTENANT KIJÉ SUITE, Op.60A
Sergey Prokofiev 1891-1953 Eastern European cultures are fond of folk tales about simple people bamboozling the military establishment. The Czechs have their Good Soldier Schwyk, the Hungarians Háry János, and the Russians Lieutenant Kijé.
Lieutenant Kijé is the story of a clerical mistake that has created a non-existent hero-soldier. When noticed by the Tsar, he acquires a life of his own since no one dares tell the Tsar about the mistake. In addition to his very existence, Kijé acquires a fictitious biography including love, marriage, promotion and finally, to get rid of him, a hero's death cum pompous burial.
 In 1918, with civil war raging in his native Russia, Sergey Prokofiev decided that for him at least, composing was more important than politics. He left Russia and, for the next fifteen years, made his home in the USA, Germany and France. But the nostalgia for his native land drew him back, and by the early 1930s he returned to his homeland. One of the first commissions he received on his return in 1933 was for music for the film Lieutenant Kijé, which never materialized. A year later Prokofiev salvaged his music, creating the five-movement suite which, with its mixture of satire and sentimentality, has become one of his most popular works. It can be performed with or without a baritone solo.
The playful suite opens and closes with a fanfare – as befits the birth and death of a hero – by an off-stage cornet.
A piccolo solo sets the satirical tone in the mock military march describing Kijé's creation. The second movement, Romance, describes Kijé's wooing of his fair maiden and is modeled after a sentimental 19th century ballad. Kijé's Wedding is intentionally pompous and banal.
The following Troika (the three-horse sleigh with bells) portrays the wedding festivities. Kijé's funeral is decidedly cheerful – recapping in a musical hodgepodge the events of the hero's life – since everyone is glad to finally get rid of the fictitious character.
The distant cornet fanfare closes the suite.
CONCERTO FOR BANDONEÓN
Astor Piazzolla 1921-1992 Everyone knows
that it takes two to tango, but no one can agree on where the dance
originated: African-Argentinean slaves? Andalusia? Gypsy? Cuba? Cataluña?
For 150 years the characteristic Latin rhythm has been shaped and
adapted to nearly every Spanish-speaking national culture.
The arrabal, the squalid immigrant slums
of the late nineteenth century outside Buenos Aires, bred its own
version of the tango: a popular song, laced with bitter urban protest,
which by the 1930s had developed into an expression of pessimistic
fatalism and a melodramatic outlook on love and life. It was into this
world that the parents of Astor Piazzolla arrived in Buenos Aires from
Italy. And it was the music of the arrabal that shaped Piazzolla's
entire career.
 During
the Depression, Piazzolla's family moved to New York, where he learned
piano and the bandoneón, a type of concertina with 38 notes that had
become the central instrument in the tango ensembles of his native
Argentina. After a stint in Paris, studying composition with no less an
eminence than Nadia Boulanger (tutor and muse to two generations of
American composers), Piazzolla returned to Argentina to form his first
Tango Octet and later his renowned Tango Quintet, featuring bandoneón,
violin, piano, electric guitar and bass.
Influenced by his studies in Paris and by
classical forms, Piazzolla's compositions were a cut above the
traditional tangos. No longer dance music, they had been transformed
into concert music, although for the nightclub rather than the concert
hall. And over the decades, his name has been inseparably associated
with the tango. Nevertheless, the psychological intensity and
sophistication of his music so infuriated tango traditionalists that he
was repeatedly physically assaulted and even threatened with a gun to
his head during a radio broadcast.
Piazzolla not only garnered inspiration from
classical, folk and jazz music but has also provided an influence on
such jazz artists as Jerry Mulligan and Chick Corea. His tangos have
been arranged for classical violinist Gidon Kramer and for the renowned
eclectic Kronos Quartet.
The Concerto for Bandoneón, composed in 1979,
demonstrates Piazzolla's ability to blend the world of the tango with
that of classical music. It combines the insistent drive of Latin rhythm
with the abstract melodic vocabulary of the contemporary concert hall,
punctuated by nightclub riffs.
The first movement is the least melodic, beginning by using melodic fragments rather than full themes that emphasize, even on the solo instrument, the tango rhythm in combination with other Latin beats. In a sense, the bandoneón is used more as a percussion instrument here than as a melodic one.
Nevertheless, the movement is in classic sonata form. The rhythmic ostinato becomes hypnotic, persisting as a rhythmic undercurrent as the soloist finally breaks free with a sultry melodic solo that takes us into the nightclub.
The Moderato second movement is a nostalgic melody for bandoneón that opens with a minimal two-note rhythmic ostinato accompaniment. Its lyric flow contrasts sharply with the complex rhythms and irregular phrasing of the preceding movement.
The bandoneón embarks on a set of free variations, subtly expressing different aspects of the same emotion as filtered through the haunting melody. Each variation is accompanied by a different orchestral soloist. The middle section brings in the rest of the orchestra with a counter-melody.
A true tango, the final movement, presto, is a high-spirited energetic tour de force. Once again, the bandoneón is used more rhythmically than melodically, but it eventually rises over the orchestra with more melodic strains.
As in the first movement, the momentum of suddenly comes to halt to let the bandoneón hold forth with a lyrical melody.
The movement ends with a slow repetitive rhythmic buildup, adding volume and instruments for the climax.
ROMEO AND JULIET FANTASY OVERTURE
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840-1893 The
plays of William Shakespeare were one of the major literary influences
on the Romantic composers of the nineteenth century, including
Tchaikovsky, who wrote fantasy overtures based on three of them. Two of
these, to Hamlet and The Tempest, are seldom heard today, but the
third, the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, has become one of
the most popular orchestral compositions ever.
 Composed
in 1869, it was one of Tchaikovsky's earliest orchestral works, written
at the suggestion of his friend and mentor, the composer Mily Balakirev,
who wrote out a detailed scenario for the composer to follow. Balakirev
criticized Tchaikovsky's original version, especially the lack of
musical reference to Friar Laurence: "You need something here along the
lines of a Liszt chorale...with old Catholic character," he wrote the
composer, who rewrote the work to his mentor's satisfaction.
The psychological drama of youthful passion and
thwarted love consummated in death was an ideal theme for Tchaikovsky,
resonating through many of his subsequent works. He always considered
the overture highly and once referred to it as his best orchestral work.
Tchaikovsky's Overture is not a tone poem; there is no attempt to tell the story of the doomed lovers, only to present the major themes of the play in musical guise. The chorale-like introduction recalls the serenity of Friar Laurence's cell, followed by the Friar's theme – transformed from a Roman Catholic into a Russian Orthodox – in the woodwinds.
But this serenity is broken by a fiery allegro representing the recurrence of the old enmity between the warring families.
Finally, the love theme is introduced by the muted violas and English horn.
In the development, the tender love music is harshly interrupted by the street brawls that are combined with the Friar Lawrence theme to great outbursts of fury.
The fury is overcome by the love theme, only to fade away into a despairing, broken lament, a distortion of the love theme.
Program notes copyright ©
Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2006
|
