All concerts are Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg's Capitol Complex and each performance is preceded by a pre-concert talk an hour before.
OCTOBER 5th & 6th:
So, we'll begin with a concert aptly titled Rite of Spring because, with Stravinsky's epic ballet on the second half, what else could one call it? While the entire season is called “Hear the Color,” this is a very colorful program with two ballets famous for their orchestral colors and a set of songs by a composer who was a master at creating orchestral colors, himself.
The concert opens with the sound of flowing water and a beautiful sunrise that opens the third act of Maurice Ravel's ballet, Daphnis & Chloe. We're playing the “2nd Suite” which is really a concert adaptation of Act III of the entire ballet. Just to give you a bit of background to the story, Daphnis is a shepherd who falls in love with Chloe who, in the 2nd Act, is abducted by pirates and rescued by the god, Pan (the inventor of Pan's Pipes but also the source of our word “panic”). The 3rd Act's “plot” can be summed up as “General Celebration after Chloe's Return.” But the music is a lot more interesting than that.
Here's a concert performance of the entire 2nd Suite with Gustavo Dudamel conducting Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony:
= = = = =
= = = = =
Though the stage of the Forum is small enough (at least in terms of its depth) and there is no pit, you won't see any dancers for this ballet. But just to give you an idea, here's a performance of the ballet's final scene with the Royal Ballet in Frederick Ashton's choreography:
= = = = =
= = = = =
You may have heard soprano Janice Chandler-Eteme in November, 2011, when she came in at the last minute to sing Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. This time, she's back with four ravishing songs composed for voice and orchestra by Richard Strauss.
Now, he didn't call them his “Four Last Songs” because... well, who knew? But since they were the last songs he composed when he was 84 the year before he died, they've become known as “The Four Last Songs.” Actually, there was to be a fifth, but Strauss was unable to complete it before his death. There are three songs setting poems by Hermann Hesse all dealing with the process of dying. He had already composed a setting of Joseph von Eichendorff's “Im Abendrot” (“At Sunset”) earlier that spring, but because of the nature of the poem and the conclusion of the song itself, it's usually performed as the last of the Four Last Songs even though it was the first of them to be composed. The last music he completed is officially “Beim Schlafengehen” (“Going to Sleep”).
In this video, soprano Renee Fleming sings “Im Abendrot.” (You can read the translation of the poem here.)
= = = = =
recorded with Claudio Abbado at the Luzerne Festival in 2004.
We don't really need an anniversary to program Igor Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring (also known by its French title, Le sacre du printemps) but since it was first heard on May 29th, one hundred years ago, why not celebrate its centennial? It is one of the most significant works for the start of 20th Century Music and in addition to its colors and unique technical aspects, it brought rhythm and the percussive use of the orchestra into the possible palette a composer could use. Before then, melody and harmony had been the primary aspects of 19th Century music – there is not much in the way of tunes in this piece, but you can't escape its colors and, above all, its rhythms.
Especially in the ending, the famous “Sacrificial Dance.”
The story takes place in ancient pagan Russia and a village is celebrating the advent of spring and with it, the need to propitiate the gods to give them a good crop and a bountiful harvest. To this end, they must sacrifice a virgin who, then, dances herself to death (at least, that's what she does in this ballet: less bloody, that way...).
Here's the opening of the ballet with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony in a live concert broadcast:
= = = = =
= = = = =
If you find yourself at a loss – missing your Beethoven or Brahms – think of being outside on a day in early spring: what do you hear? Birds, perhaps, and maybe insects – not as individual songs and sounds but perhaps as a growing texture, becoming more complex and shifting depending on where your attention lies. That's sort of what Stravinsky seems to be doing with his instruments.
Here's the final scene, the Sacrificial Dance, in one of those “animated graphical scores” that help listeners who can't read music to follow what's going on (and make it easier even if you do):
= = = = =
= = = = =
In the next post for this concert, I'll post three versions of the complete ballet for you: a live concert performance; this animated score; and then the ballet as it might have looked if you'd attended that famous (or infamous) first performance 100 years ago as the Joffrey Ballet reconstructs the original production's scenery and costumes and, most importantly, Vaclav Nijinsky's amazing choreography. Trust me, if you've never seen this before, it will be an eye-opener just as the music so often can be an ear-opener even for those who've heard the work before.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
NOVEMBER 9th & 10th
This concert is called Suite Sounds if only because there are two suites on the program. A suite is a collection of excerpts from a larger work (perhaps highlights or more famous selections) or it can be a collection of otherwise unrelated pieces. The Suite from Richard Strauss' incidental music for Moliere's play Le bourgeois gentilhomme is a selection of highlights and the Respighi “Ancient Airs & Dances” is a collection of Renaissance and Early Baroque lute pieces arranged for orchestra.
Those are the “suites.” But the sounds, perhaps, are very different, especially considering the opening work on the program, another important work for the 20th Century not because of what it sounds like but because of how it made us think about music and sound in general.
Now, I don't want to give away what seems to be the “gimmick” in John Cage's 4'33” (which is pronounced “Four Minutes & Thirty-three Seconds”) but it was written for any instrument or instruments but since it was first performed by pianist David Tudor in 1952, it is usually considered a piano piece. But an orchestra can play it, too.
The standard definition of music is “organized sound.” We try to distinguish between sound that is music and sound that is noise. But John Cage wasn't sure music needed to be so “organized” as it used to be – he would champion an improvisatory approach usually called “chance music.” And much music in the early 20th Century incorporated non-musical sounds in a piece of music: not just the sirens of Edgar Varese's Ionisations or the banging of percussion (or the use of instruments percussively, like in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring), but also Paris taxi horns in Gershwin's American in Paris or the singing of a nightingale by way of a recording in Respighi's Pines of Rome.
So I've already spent more time talking about this piece than it might take to play it. The musician(s) sit and play nothing – nothing – for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Silence? In a sense, but there is, scientifically, no such thing as “silence,” really. As Cage said, following the premiere, about those who didn't understand the piece:
They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.
So what will you hear in the acoustics of the Forum?
The music Richard Strauss composed for Moliere's classic play, Le bourgeois gentilhomme sounds nothing like the Strauss of the Four Last Songs composed in 1949. In fact, this sounds nothing like what Strauss was writing before 1909, with his blood-curdling operas, Salome and Elektra, or his gigantic tone poems like Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben, all very familiar works.
Somewhere around 1911, several composers started breaking away from the past in ways that shocked the public – but Strauss (who'd “been there/done that”) went in the opposite direction, inspired more by his beloved Mozart than what was going on among his contemporaries. It was as if he ignored everything that had happened since Mozart – Beethoven and Wagner, especially, much less his own music.
The action of the play takes place in the home of a “would-be gentleman” who, having made his fortune, is trying to act like those who've inherited theirs. He throws a lavish party. That's all you need to know: there are dances for the tailors and the servants as the evening is prepared – even the dinner gets its own music. But it sounds so different – like French music of the Baroque period, when the play was originally written. In fact, Strauss even uses some of the compositions of Jean-Baptiste Lully who wrote the music for Moliere's original production in 1670!
Here's a bit of the opening music with Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe – gone are the huge orchestras with vast string sections and incredible washes of sounds that we might be familiar with from his earlier tone poems: this is Strauss in his “neo-classical” mode (though we might call it “neo-Baroque” in a way), writing between 1911 and 1917 before he finally finished the music (and an opera that went with it!). Incidentally, this was being written in Germany at the same time Stravinsky was in Paris and Switzerland composing The Rite of Spring.
= = = = =
= = = = =
Meanwhile, in Italy at the same time, Ottorino Respighi – best known for his large-scale music portraits of Rome, The Pines of Rome, The Fountains of Rome and Roman Festivals
= = = = =
= = = = =
Johann Sebastian Bach hardly needs an introduction to even the most casual music-lovers, but he's not often heard in symphony concerts any more, especially since these “period instrument” groups or other ensembles specializing in “historically accurate” performances have put us off hearing music originally composed for a handful of players being played by orchestras of 75 to 100.
Perhaps Bach's most famous “orchestral” works are his Brandenburg Concertos – six of them, in all, and each one a different instrumentation. The famous 5th Concerto features a solo group of a flute, a violin and a harpsichord with the “orchestra” which might have been played four or five players. Surprisingly, it's also possibly the first “keyboard” concerto – the harpsichord, predecessor of the piano, was usually relegated to the background – necessary and ever-present (which is one reason it's called “continuo”) but rarely getting a chance to shine as a soloist. Accompanist, yes; part of the ensemble, of course. And this is no delicate sliver of a concerto to accommodate the usually pale sounds of your typical harpsichord: it's quite a long work and it's the keyboard player who gets to show off in a honkingly huge cadenza near the end of the first movement – just like any pianist might get to do a century later in the days of Beethoven and Liszt.
Here's one of those early music ensembles, La petite bande, playing the first movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D Major:
= = = = =
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
JANUARY 11th & 12th:
We throw a spear into the new year, 2014, with a short work by American composer Michael Torke called, appropriately, Javelin, composed for the opening of the Summer Olympics in 1996 (wait... what? That's right!) Now, as it happens, it's not always possible to find performances of everything on YouTube – despite its abundance of cat videos and footage of would-be child prodigies playing “Chopsticks”). I wasn't able to find a good performance with good sound (with orchestra) of either Javelin or a reasonable facsimile, Bright Blue Music. Maybe I'll have better luck by the time the concert rolls around...
Another ballet on the program and another of those works that shocked its audiences when it was first performed in the so-called Roaring '20s. If people had trouble with Stravinsky's music and Nijinsky's choreography when The Rite of Spring hit the stage, Bartók's music was one thing but the story of a prostitute used by thugs to lure victims into their lair to rob them was quite another – especially when you consider the last would-be victim, the Mandarin of the title, refuses to die when the thugs try to kill him. In fact, his wounds only begin to bleed when the girl kisses him – and he dies.
The first time I heard this music, when I was in college, the opening practically pulled me up out of my seat. It was a live performance with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra playing a concert up at Bucknell University's gymnasium (before they had a concert hall) – I've never heard anything quite like that performance.
Here's the opening of the suite from this ballet with Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony in an over-produced broadcast from 1986. The actual performance begins at 2:32 if I can't get the clip to start there automatically (you may want to avoid the boring announcer at the beginning, but hey...):
= = = = =
= = = = =
The second half of the program is one of the great Romantic piano concertos from the 19th Century, the second one Brahms composed and one that was inspired by two separate holidays in Italy. That's probably most evident in the last movement, which I've selected for this preview. The whole concerto is enormous – about 50 minutes long – and unlike the typical 3-movement concerto, Brahms added a short scherzo (if you can call it that) after the vast expanse of that opening movement. The concerto is sometimes described as a Symphony with Piano Obbligato, and it require a special touch to balance such piano writing against Brahms' symphonic orchestration.
Here's a young Russian-American prize-winning pianist, Kirill Gerstein, with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Symphony in the finale of Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2:
= = = = =
= = = = =
Our soloist is a young German prize-winning pianist, Markus Groh, who was here six years ago to play Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto (a work that had a lot of influence on Brahms when he was writing his 1st Piano Concerto). Here's a TV interview (with English subtitles) with Markus:
= = = = =
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
FEBRUARY 8th & 9th:
This program opens with a special occasion: the world premiere of a work by Steve Rudolph especially commissioned to celebrate our maestro's recent 50th Birthday. Of course, now, he has to learn to play it and conduct it, too, so it's perhaps a double-edged birthday present. Of course, we don't have any audio or video of it yet – it hasn't been completed yet and Stuart hasn't seen it yet – but you can hear the first performance anywhere of these piece in February, 2014, with Stuart Malina and the HSO at the Forum.
So, why else would a program in the month of Valentine's Day be called “Romancing the Cello”? Well, it's one of the great Romantic concertos of all time and certainly the most famous and popular cello concerto in the repertoire. And Zuill Bailey, our soloist, is making a return appearance to Central PA, familiar to fans of past seasons with Next Generation Festival and Market Square Concerts as well.
Here's a video of Zuill coaching a student in the opening of the concerto:
= = = = =
= = = = =
...and from Telarc recent recording with Zuill and the Indianapolis Symphony conducted by Jun Markl, here's the 2nd Movement from the concerto:
= = = = =
= = = = =
Beethoven completed nine symphonies – and while they're all masterpieces, some of them are more popular than others: the 9th because of its universal message and inspiring finale; the 5th because... well, does it need a reason? And of course the heroic Eroica and the celebratory 7th, probably one of the happiest creations from any genius.
The 4th of Beethoven's symphonies is, alas, one of those that doesn't get as much attention as the others so here's your chance to hear it live. This performance of the complete symphony is taken from a DVD that includes both the 4th and the 7th, and while I'm not going to tell you don't listen to the 7th, you can sample the 4th here with the legendary Carlos Kleiber: the performance begins at 0:53 after that long walk down the steps, and ends at 34:32.
= = = = =
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
MARCH 22nd & 23rd
This program begins with a French composer I wasn't familiar with when I saw the name on the brochure, but I went to YouTube and found several of his pieces available there. Unfortunately, the movement “Aleph” from Guillaume Connesson's Cosmic Trilogy which opens our March concert is not one of them (though there is a recording of it available commercially). But to give you an idea of what the composer sounds like, here is a clip of his piano concerto called “The Shining One” written in 2009:
= = = = =
= = = = =
The cosmos aside, the Schein of Schein on Chopin is the legendary pianist and teacher, Ann Schein, who may not (but should) be a familiar name despite her career as a teacher and performer. This concert is part of a special combination with Market Square Concerts: she'll perform a solo piano recital a week after the symphony concert at Whitaker Center featuring music by Ravel, Liszt and Chopin.
In this concert, she'll be performing the F Minor Piano Concerto by Frederic Chopin and here's an audio-clip of a performance of its last movement she made in 1960 when she was 20 years old:
= = = = =
= = = = =
Here, she plays Chopin's Ballade in F Minor at Aspen last year:
= = = = =
= = = = =
Sergei Rachmaninoff may be a 20th Century composer by his dates, but he is a Russian romantic in the tradition of Tchaikovsky. He wrote three symphonies, the first of which was one of the great disasters in the history of bad premieres (but not for the music, apparently, though Rachmaninoff never published or performed the work again) and the second of which went on to become a very popular work despite its enormous length. The 3rd has not benefited from the 2nd's fame and, first heard in 1936 in Philadelphia, it was too conservative for people who expected something a little more contemporary in the 1930s, and too modern for people who preferred their music to sound like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Well, it's a great work – and Stuart Malina loves it. Judging from his performance of it here a few seasons ago, I think you'll understand why it should be heard more often.
Here's a recording with Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsertam from 1997:
= = = = =
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
APRIL 12th & 13th
We hope you'll save a place for Elijah in your calendar when the Susquehanna Chorale and the Messiah College Concert Choir directed by Linda Tedford join Stuart and the orchestra for one of the great choral works of the 19th Century, Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio, Elijah.
I'll save the background material for the concert post, but here are two short excerpts that will give you an idea of what to expect. The 1st is just the last few minutes of the work, from a 2010 performance with Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducting the Boston Symphony and Tanglewood Chorus:
= = = = =
= = = = =
...and one of the arias in Mendelssohn's trademark simplicity with the legendary alto, Kathleen Ferrier, singing “Oh, Rest in the Lord”, recorded in 1946 (keep in mind, this was right after the ordeal of World War II):
= = = = =
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
MAY 17th & 18th:
Going "Out with a Bang" would seem a given, considering a concerto featuring a stageful of percussion instruments and a big noisy symphony like Tchaikovsky's 5th. But the concert opens with some quiet music – in fact, the only thing quieter this season would be John Cage's 4'33”.
Aaron Copland's Quiet City was initially conceived for incidental music for a stage play in which a young man plays a bluesy trumpet on the roof of his New York apartment building (keep in mind, his cowboy ballets notwithstanding, Copland described himself as “just a Jewish boy from Brooklyn”), answered in the distance by the night-time silence of a sleeping city – and an English horn.
Here's a performance by an orchestra from another great city, the Santa Cecilia orchestra from Rome, conducted by Antony Pappano:
= = = = =
= = = = =
One of the works we've gotten a lot of requests to bring back was the Percussion Concerto by Jennifer Higdon which our principal percussionist Chris Rose played a few seasons ago. It was the first performance by a soloist other than Colin Currie for whom she'd written it and she was so impressed by Chris' performance, she arranged the work for band – and he's since played it with his “other gig,” the President's Own Marine Band.
So they'll be back to end our season – we're hoping Ms. Higdon can join us, but she's amazingly busy (and just a couple weeks ago, finished her first opera, a setting of Cold Mountain, two years in the making), so I make no promises, but Chris Rose will be back to play her Perucssion Concerto on this program.
Here's a video of a concert with the University of British Columbia and soloist Jeremy Lawi – I love the camera work so you can get a great idea of just what kind of instruments the soloist is playing: the set-up itself is amazing. And then you get to hear it, too.
= = = = =
= = = = =
While Tchaikovsky and his 5th Symphony probably don't need much of an introduction, one of the more popular symphonies in the repertoire and one of those "Fate" symphonies like Beethoven's 5th, Mahler's 5th, Shostakovich's 5th and also, for that matter, Tchaikovsky's 4th but unlike its predecessor which gives in to fate and the hero is defeated, Tchaikovsky ends his 5th with a victory celebration. Here's a clip of the finale with Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra:
= = = = =
= = = = =
And if that's not “ending with a bang,” I don't know what is!
No comments:
Post a Comment