Who's Afraid of the Rite of Spring?

This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony, conducted by Stuart Malina, opens the new season with their first concert  – Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg (with a highly-recommended pre-concert talk with Truman Bullard free to ticket-holders an hour before each performance).

Tickets are available starting at $12 at the door and student tickets are 50% off before the concert.

The program opens with one ballet, premiered in 1912, and closes with another, premiered in 1913 - not a large time-frame - but music that may seem (at first hearing) a world apart. Ravel's Daphnis & Chloe is lush, gorgeous and evocative with an exciting finale – while Stravinsky's Rite of Spring may seem chaotic, harsh and provocative with an exciting finale.

In between are some of the most gorgeous songs ever composed – and yet, as lush and emotional as they are, they were composed in 1948 – the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss with soprano Janice Chandler-Eteme (who has sung Mahler's 2nd and Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with us in past seasons).

You can read more about Strauss' last songs in this earlier post, here.

While we might joke about “seeing” a concert, this is one to “see.” It will involve one of the largest orchestras you're likely to see shoe-horned onto the stage of the Forum: 105 players with a larger than usual contingent of woodwinds and some additional instruments rarely encountered live – like the gentle sounds of an alto (sometimes called a “bass”) flute, or the added depth of a bass trumpet – which will leave no room for dancers. These are “concert performances” of music originally heard in ballet theaters but considering most of the orchestra pits I've ever played in, it amazes me there'd be one large enough to hold 105 players, some wielding pretty large instruments!

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Igor Stravinsky

One hundred years ago, the world first heard Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and it surprises me that, a century later, the title itself is still enough to cause fear in the hearts of some concert-goers. It has that kind of reputation.

Yet, as often happens with unfamiliar music that may appear “formidable” to some – a single Mahler symphony on a program can likewise seem daunting – invariably the general audience response is extremely enthusiastic.

There is no doubt The Rite of Spring is a powerful work. I think an adjective that best describes it would be “visceral.” It may not be a “pretty” work but it is a dramatic and exciting work.

When the Harrisburg Symphony first performed this music in 1989, under the direction of music director Larry Newland – it was the boldest challenge the orchestra had yet taken on – I remember talking to the parents of a friend of mine (they were probably the age I am now) and asked if they “liked” it and they both said “no, I had no idea what was going on.” To them, it lacked the melodies they enjoy in Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, the beautiful harmonies they expect from most classical music whether it's Mozart or Wagner – and “really, wasn't the rhythm a bit much?” “Couldn't tap your foot to it?” “Well, no, could you...?”

It's a challenge to take in for the first time if you're listening to a recording and know nothing about the story of the ballet, what is “motivating” the music you're hearing.

Basically, unlike your typical love-story plot involving a princess or a flock of swans, this is about a community in pagan times celebrating the arrival of spring, choosing a virgin who will then be sacrificed to propitiate the gods who, if they look favorably on this ritual, will grant them a bountiful harvest in the fall.

What's “pretty” about that?

(And if someone wonders about programming spring music in an autumn concert, don't forget the weather this week is being described as “summer-like.”)

Before the curtain would go up (the opening several minutes of music is like an “overture” or “prelude”), we hear sounds of the awakening of the earth – a primeval song arising from the ground beneath our feet, perhaps, in that famous bassoon solo: so unearthly sounding even today, it must strike listeners as “what kind of instrument is that?”

Have you ever watched those stop-action time-elapsed films that show the germination of a seed and the resulting seedling that emerges from it? In a sense, that's how I hear the opening of this music: a bit of an image which perhaps quivers a bit in anticipation then gradually unfolds and proceeds to reveal itself, ever-changing, ever-similar but rarely the same.

To this are added other lines of sound, seemingly unrelated: an English horn fragment, deep clarinets supporting the texture, a clarinet cry, a rapid morse-code like call from an oboe, some quaking from two bass clarinets, a chorale of flutes, twittering piccolos, rhythmic pulses that seem to have no relationship to what's going on around them.

It's not unlike waking up on a spring morning and hearing the sounds of birds which are rarely known to sing in four-part harmony in ¾ time. As with the arrival of spring, it sounds like a whole new world.

And I'm not sure the audience in Paris, on May 29th, 1913, was quite ready for it, either.

In Russia – where Stravinsky grew up, born on a country estate where he would spend part of his childhood – spring arrives suddenly, unlike the way we're used to in our region of the world where it seems to creep endlessly out of the frozen wastes and snows of winter and may occasionally slip back and forth until eventually we're aware things are becoming green again.

In Russia, spring can also arrive with a kind of violence – the frost covering the ground breaks open (we might be more used to this when dealing with pot-holes in our roads) and the ice covering ponds and streams may crack and heave upwards with a resounding noise that can be heard for miles in the middle of the night, a phenomenon the locals call “the ice-break.”

This is what I hear as the first part of the ballet concludes with the “Adoration of the Earth” – the ending which isn't really an ending comes to a sudden stop. And the anticipation can be frightening. “What will the future yield after this?”

The first half of the ballet is all fun-and-games – teams of boys compete, girls dance, the Old Sage (the village's high priest) is ushered in to remind us there is a serious side to these festivities, and he calls upon the gods as he blesses the ground.

The second half of the ballet is now the serious side of the story, the reason for the festival – the propitiating of the gods with a human sacrifice.

It is night. Where frenzy was the focus in the first part, concentration of purpose is now the focus of the second.

The selection of the “Chosen One” may be a little atypical from your usual ancient culture – the village's virgins dance slowly in a mysterious circle. One girl stumbles – not once, not twice – and this is taken as a sign. She has been chosen.

With that, the villagers then begin to celebrate the coming sacrifice. We return to a sense of frenzy but where the first part was chaotic and seemingly disorganized, musically, now it is like communal frenzy.

The girl stands in the center, immobile, shaking with fear, as everyone whirls around her, pounding the earth and gesturing wildly.

If you imagine this music from the viewpoint of the sacrificial victim, it can be some of the most frightening music you can imagine.

Hardly likely to be full of romantic melodies and soaring harmonies. This is brutal music – and it matches the violence of the story.

This being a ballet – instead of being torn open by knives and her blood strewn all over the ground, her heart held aloft as an offering to the gods (as might have happened to a sacrificial victim in the Aztec civilization in the 1500s) – she dances herself to death to a series of violently repetitive rhythmic patterns that never seem to repeat themselves, building to a horrific climax.

Then, at the end, a sudden deafening silence, a wisp of smoke in the flutes and then a crashing chord. She is dead. The gods have their sacrifice. The world can now continue for another year.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

So, keeping that story in mind, listen to this concert performance of the ballet with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Part One, “A Kiss of the Earth” (in the composer's original Russian):


The Awakening of the Earth – at 3:30, “The Augurs of Spring, Dances of the Young Girls” – at 6:38, the steady repeated rhythms and the joyful folk-song-like fragments abruptly turn into the “Ritual of Abduction” – at 7:57, this now becomes the “Spring Rounds” which continues into the next clip.



The “Round Dances of Spring” continues, beginning almost caressingly then builds to a climax – at 2:55, the dance is disrupted by war games in “The Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes” – at 4:40, a slow procession builds up with the arrival of “The Oldest and Wisest One,” the high priest – interrupted by a mysterious chord (at 5:20), where the Old Sage bends down to kiss the earth – at 5:41, this then erupts into “The Dancing Out of the Earth” in which the community responds to the priest's blessing with a religious ecstasy building to the musical equivalent of the “ice-break” heralding the arrival of spring.
= = = = =

Part Two, “The Exalted Sacrifice”:

It is night. The curtain goes up to reveal (at 4:32) the “Mystic Circle of Young Girls” as they walk endlessly in their circle – at 7:04, one of them stumbles; and again (at 7:25), she stumbles – then at 7:42 she is taken from the circle: she becomes The Chosen One and is honored by the villagers...


At 0:37, the mysterious “Ritual of the Ancestors” begins as the men of the village circle the Chosen One who at 4:14 begins her Sacrificial Dance, the famous “danse sacrale,” dancing herself to death by the final chord.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

So yes, following an evening of delightful romantic ballets with music by Carl Maria von Weber, for instance, the audience that night in Paris a century ago was not prepared for this.

And yes, let's get it out of the way – there was a riot.

I was joking about – having seen the celebrations around the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg – if we would have “re-enactors” to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Rite of Spring's historic premiere.

The trouble is, there is so much mythology woven into this event, it's hard to tell which if fiction and which were simply the results of different factions in the audience. The stalls (the cheap seats) were filled with people who were there to be entertained. They probably knew nothing about what to expect and the sounds they heard were nothing like anything they'd heard before.

Let's face it, even if you've never heard the Rite of Spring before, you've heard more dissonant music simply by watching movies and television – but there it's in the background and – oh, guess what? – it supports the visual element you're primarily focused on, the foreground.

But a hundred years ago? Not a chance!

I can't imagine, sitting in that theater, not being confused at the beginning of the music – if the curtain didn't go up until 3½ minutes into this seemingly unorganized, chaotic disturbance that was being called music. And then, once the curtain did go up, to be seeing dancers dressed like that, dancing like that!?

Keep in mind, most people's image of ballet (then as now, probably) is young women in tutus wearing pointe-shoes where the extension of bare arms and legs was about as close to erotic art as many men in the audience could get and remain respectful (as great paintings often celebrated the nude body as art), this in an age where a woman in public showing a bit of ankle was considered scandalous.

The Original Dancing Virgins from The Rite of Spring, 1913

Then to see this – dancers draped head to foot in primitive costumes – their bodies completely hidden from view (I mean, aren't they supposed to be virgins? Shouldn't this be at least a little salacious?) And, in the foreground, an old woman hunched over, carrying a bundle of sticks, who suddenly leaps in the air, gesturing wildly as if struck by an electric spark who then begins hobbling around the stage?

From 1987 reconstruction

Who wouldn't have laughed?

And we're only a few minutes into a ballet that will be a little over a half-hour long.

The cat-calls and whistles – and those who wanted to listen or who were excited about something so amazingly new shouting back at them – were supposed to have been so loud, the dancers on the stage could not hear the orchestra in the pit in front and below them. Nijinksy, who had choreographed the ballet – many were disappointed this great star of the day was not dancing in it (that's what many thought) – stood in the wings, shouting out the count so his dancers could keep together.

And yes, Stravinsky recalls his growing mortification when all this began, shortly to get up from his seat, work his way out to the aisle (and telling someone who was booing “Go to hell!”) to witness the debacle from backstage.

It is said that the cat-calls began when the Grand Old Man of French Music, the conservative Camille Saint-Saens (born eight years after Beethoven died and who was now in his late-70s), got up and stomped up the aisle, muttering something about “that's no way to treat a bassoon.” The truth is, Saint-Saens wasn't even at the premiere of the ballet: he attended a later performance.

Some argue that Diaghilev himself – the man whose ballet company was presenting this performance – had arranged a clacque to start the riot (once begun, it would take on a life of its own) simply to create a success de scandale. And if that were the case, he succeeded – because ever since, the first thing anybody says about the music is “it started a riot.”

(By the way, Truman Bullard, professor emeritus from Dickinson College, did his doctoral dissertation on this very riot and is often quoted in discussions and other writings about this historic events. He will be giving the pre-concert talk an hour before each of the HSO's performances, so you can find out what research has proven to sift fact from myth.)

Well, actually, a lot of new music provoked often vociferous reactions from the first-night audiences. Schoenberg organized several concerts in Vienna or Berlin where booing during the performance led to fist-fights and the calling of police. Another seminal work of the 20th Century – Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire premiered in 1912 – was met with a similar riot.

In fact, if you read the accounts, Claude Debussy's Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” started a riot at its premiere in 1894, only nine years earlier than Stravinsky's premiere.

What?? That gentle, gorgeous diaphanous music???

Yes – but it was because of the choreography.

The story of the ballet itself was controversial: the erotic dreams of a faun (part animal, part human) who, by the end of the nine-minute scene, was pantomiming the act of... well, masturbating to his fantasies! (To this gentle, gorgeous diaphanous music???) And that's what caused the riot, not the music.

But the way people talk about, you'd think it was the music people were reacting to.

We forget that the piece of music itself is only part of the experience in both cases: music to accompany the dance, in this case, and to hear people natter on about the “Riot of Spring” is to ignore the fact that, the newness of the music aside, the choreography and the costumes as well as the disappointed expectations of the audience might have had something to do with it.

Yes, people were and continue to be startled by this music. It has a power to astound listeners to the point its reputation frightens them. And while it might not be to everybody's liking (especially those seeking light entertainment), there's no denying its power and the impact it had on 20th Century music.

Elliott Carter, a composer used to having people walk out of his concerts, attended the American premiere at Carnegie Hall in January, 1924, when he was 15 with a vague interest in music, listening to a piece of music given its world premiere only 10 years earlier.

Here, Carter reminisces about his experiences hearing new music as a student in New York City, recorded shortly before he turned 100 himself – he died a year ago a few weeks before his 104th birthday and was still composing, by the way:



He loved it for any number of reasons but he's often quoted as saying he wanted to write music like that, music that was powerful enough to drive people out of the hall not because he wanted to annoy them (which he and many other contemporary composers were accused of doing), but because the music was so visceral that it could create such a strong reaction that people would respond that way.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

But it wasn't just a one-night stand: there were five further performances of the ballet over the next two weeks – relatively peaceful but always a bit on the edge. Puccini, the composer of such lyrical masterpieces as Tosca and La Boheme, attended the second performance three days later and described the choreography as “ridiculous” and the music “cacophanous” – “the work of a madman. The public hissed, laughed – and applauded.”

When the Ballet Russes took the production to London (considering Paris was the center of “what's it,” London was a cultural backwater for new art), the Times' critic was “impressed how different elements of the work came together to form a coherent whole,” though not as enthusiastic about the music itself: complaining that the composer had sacrificed melody and harmony for rhythm he wrote, “If M. Stravinsky had wished to be really primitive, he would have been wise to... score his ballet for nothing but drums.” A ballet historian described the "slow, uncouth movements" of the dancers, which he thought were “in complete opposition to the traditions of classical ballet.”

A concert performance in Paris less than a year later – without the dancers – was met with considerable enthusiasm.

Here is a scene from a BBC dramatization of the Paris premiere that, like any kind of account must rely on fiction as much as fact to fill in the details. But it will give you an idea what “might” have happened – and it incorporates a recreation of the original choreography and costumes to give it at least some semblance of historical accuracy.



*** ***** ******** ***** ***

And what about that original production?

Here is a performance by the Joffrey Ballet of the historic reconstruction of the original sets and costumes but most importantly (and the most difficult to recreate) Nijinsky's original choreography from a 1987 broadcast:



Many in my generation were first introduced to this music through Fantasia, one of the most magical films Walt Disney ever created, but though he chose to end with The Rite of Spring, instead of “pictures of pagan Russia” as Stravinsky imagined it, we see dinosaurs – from the famous battle between the T-Rex and the stegosaurus to the cataclysmic earthquakes that brought their age to an end.

Disney's Dinosaurs

Curiously, when Disney informed Stravinsky of his plans to incorporate his ballet into his film, assuming he would be honored to have his music made available to a wider mass audience, the composer was immediately opposed to the trivialization of his music. Disney (or agents from his studio) reportedly then informed him it didn't matter whether he approved or not because there was no copyright treaty with Russia and so therefore they could use it if they wanted to without his permission.

More curiously, then, when I went to search on-line for scenes from this movie, many of them came up as “withdrawn” because the Disney Studio was defending its use of copyright material (its images). Did they not see the irony, here?

I had to admit, as a kid of 7 or 8 when I first saw this movie, I was in love with dinosaurs and thought this was incredible! Now, looking back on it, I dislike what Disney did to the music – at the end, going back to reprise the opening bassoon solo? – and after seeing several productions of the ballet (which you can read about here, included in this post from 2009 on my other blog) – it seems quite tame (though I still tear up at the death of the Stegosaurus) but for several years, I found thinking of dinosaurs made it easier for me to come to terms with the challenges of this music. Now, I no longer need the visual crutch to appreciate the music alone.

Another way of "seeing" the piece, especially for those who cannot read musical notation much less follow a very complex score, is to follow one of those fascinating "animated graphical" scores: here's a complete performance of the ballet score:



= = = = =

If this music is new to you, I think if you see the images of this production – as the music “looked” to its first audience – or this "animated score," it may help you listen to and appreciate the music as a more total experience. It has a specific structure, dramatically, though it's not like a Beethoven symphony: like most dramatic, theatrical music, the music exists on the skeleton of its drama but contains all the elements of music we expect in Western art, even abstract art (music that is purely music).

There is tension (a good deal of it, created in various ways) which is then released (in various ways) or which explodes (as the end of the first half) into non-resolution, creating further anticipation. Only at the end is this tension resolved – in one of the most astounding final chords ever written!

By now, The Rite of Spring has become standard repertoire, a war-horse, that can be performed in concert halls and ballet theaters around the world, whether it needs to be trotted out to celebrate its birthday anniversary or not.

But it still has the power to frighten people and I can understand that. But I could also say that, if a hundred years after Beethoven wrote his Eroica Symphony, a work that is often given credit for turning the 18th Century into the 19th, imagine if people still were afraid to go into a concert it was programmed on in 1903 - given everything that happened in between?

If you can turn on your TV and watch, say, NCIS with its car bombs and physical violence (ooh, look, he just got slugged with a tire-iron, cool!) or go to the movies for the latest action-thriller, chances are there's little in The Rite of Spring that could frighten you, musically or dramatically.

It is amazing how violent our entertainment has become – not to mention how our children amuse themselves with computer games. I'm not saying listening to The Rite of Spring is going to be the same experience but it can certainly relate – and if you accept that it doesn't have to be the musical equivalent of Last Man Standing (or at least Last Virgin Standing), it can really be a very amazing thing to experience.

Really – there's nothing to be frightened of. And if you don't like it after you've experienced it the first time, perhaps another attempt at familiarity will help make it easier the next time, if you accept it according to its own terms.

Dick Strawser

Richard Strauss and the Last of His Songs

This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony begins its new season of Masterworks Concerts on Saturday, October 5th at 8pm and Sunday, October 6th at 3pm, with a program that includes the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss.

Richard Strauss was 84 when he composed a set of songs he did not call his “Four Last Songs.” That was the doing of his publishers but it made sense: at the time, they were not only his last songs, they were his last completed works.

Janice Chandler-Eteme & Stuart Malina in 2011

Janice Chandler-Eteme returns to Harrisburg to sing them with the orchestra and Stuart Malina on a program admittedly of 20th Century Music – the other works on the program are Ravel's ballet Daphnis and Chloe (premiered in 1912) and Stravinsky's epic Rite of Spring (premiered in 1913). These songs were composed in 1948 but not premiered until 1950.

Despite being written when they were, a casual concert-goer may be surprised to find they are 20th Century (a.k.a. “modern”) works at all. Certainly, compared to what was going on during the past century with works by Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Bartók or Elliott Carter – or even Philip Glass and John Adams – these sound very old-fashioned, indeed.

Late in his life, Brahms, of course, was complaining about the cess-pool modern music was headed toward with these new works by the then young Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler (a conductor Brahms very much admired; as a composer, not so much).

Alfred Stieglitz's portrait, 1904

Certainly, Strauss had set people's ears on edge with passages in Don Quixote (the bleating of sheep, really?) or the screaming textures and psychological drama of Salome which had proved such a shocker in 1905 on any number of levels.

But around the time other composers were going even further afield, moving past the harmonies and modulations of Richard Wagner's Tristan into a realm devoid on tonal and eventually even harmonic references to anything familiar – something that seemed to occur around 1911 between Debussy's Jeux (which contained no melodies in the traditional sense and a more intense tonal ambiguity than his Impressionistic style had attempted before), Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and especially Stravinsky's Rite of Spring – Richard Strauss returned to Mozart.

The whole idea behind Der Rosenkavalier, premiered in January, 1911, was to do his version of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, even though his music may sound quite different from Mozart's own. But it already a world apart from Strauss's immediate past with the shrieking intensity of his Elektra, premiered two years earlier.

This return to the aesthetic of the past would be more pronounced in his music for Moliere's play, Le bourgeois gentilhomme which the symphony will perform at November's concert which harkens stylistically back to the late-17th Century, although always sounding like Richard Strauss (at least to us, in hindsight).

Strauss, 1947

The Four Last Songs, grouped together and given that name by his friend Ernest Roth, an editor at the publishers, Boosey & Hawkes, are not performed in chronological order – in fact, the order itself is still being debated, so you may find recordings or performances with a different sequence. Still, it's pretty hard to not end with Im Abendrot (“At Sunset”) even if it was the first of the songs to be written.

Here are four different singers with each of Strauss's songs, followed by translations of the texts:

= = = = =
Frühling
Lucia Popp, London Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (1993):

In shadowy crypts / I dreamt long / of your trees and blue skies, / of your fragrance and birdsong. // Now you appear / in all your finery, / drenched in light / like a miracle before me. // You recognize me, / you entice me tenderly. / All my limbs tremble at / your blessed presence!
= = = = =
September
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Berlin Radio Symphony/George Szell (1965):

The garden is in mourning. / Cool rain seeps into the flowers. / Summertime shudders, / quietly awaiting his end. // Golden leaf after leaf falls / from the tall acacia tree. / Summer smiles, astonished and feeble, / at his dying dream of a garden. // For just a while he tarries / beside the roses, yearning for repose. / Slowly he closes / his weary eyes.
= = = = =
Beim Schlaffengehen (Falling Asleep)
Gundula Janowitz with Berlin Philharmonic/Herbert von Karajan (1971):

Now that I am wearied of the day, / my ardent desire shall happily receive / the starry night / like a sleepy child. // Hands, stop all your work. / Brow, forget all your thinking. / All my senses now / yearn to sink into slumber. // And my unfettered soul / wishes to soar up freely / into night's magic sphere / to live there deeply and thousandfold.
= = = = =
Im Abendrot (At Sunset)
Renee Fleming, London Symphony/Christoph von Dohnanyi (London Proms, 2001):

We have through sorrow and joy / gone hand in hand; / From our wanderings, / let's now rest in this quiet land. // Around us, the valleys bow / as the sun goes down. / Two larks soar upwards / dreamily into the light air. // Come close, and let them fly. / Soon it will be time for sleep. / Let's not lose our way / in this solitude. // O vast, tranquil peace, / so deep in the evening's glow! / How weary we are of wandering – / Is this perhaps death?
= = = = =

These are very personal songs, their subject aside, given the composer's age and awareness of his mortality. His wife, Pauline, had been a soprano – and most his great roles and his songs were written for sopranos. His father, Franz, had been one of the greatest horn players of his day. Is there a nostalgia recalling his father's horn playing in all the great horn solos that permeate these songs? (The composer's son, by the way, was named after his father.)

But more direct are the quotations from one of Strauss's earlier works, the tone-poem Tod und Verklärung (“Death and Transfiguration”) recalled in the final moments of Im Abendrot.

There are other quotations and references to works by his idols – for instance, the Adagio of Beethoven's 3rd “Razumovsky” Quartet, Op. 59/3 – but “for Strauss's admirers at least,” Matthew Boyden writes in his biography of the composer, “the melancholy of Eichendorff's verses” in Im Abendrot, “allied to the soaring pathos of the music, is almost unbearably sad.”

And, I would add, immensely consoling.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Many listeners have no idea how old a composer may have been when he or she wrote a particular piece: usually it has no bearing on the music itself, but often it can be rather surprising to know Mendelssohn was 17 when he wrote the Overture to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream or that Beethoven was 57 when he died (having passed that age, myself, I'm now tempted to add “was only 57...”).

When American composer Lou Harrison wrote his 4th Symphony in 1990 and called it his “Last Symphony,” he was 73 and would live another 13 years. Someone asked him what he would do if he decided he would write another symphony. “Then I would call that one my “Very Last Symphony.”

Does it matter that Beethoven wrote his “early” string quartets around the time he was pushing 30 – Schubert, after all, only lived to be 31 – or that Elliott Carter was still composing when he died last year at the age of 103?

To most people, probably not, but to someone who's interested in the stories behind the music – whether it helps “explain” the music is not the point: nothing but listening (and listening actively) can “explain” music, if even that is possible (and besides, even then, the more you listen to it, the more you might discover in the music) – there has to be something going on here. After all, composers are people, too, and have the same kind of things to deal with as normal people.

So Richard Strauss had been one of the great composers of the late-19th and early-20th Centuries, starting off as a prodigy who could write a masterful horn concerto for his father when he was 17 that is still a major part of any horn-player's repertoire. He wrote a series of tone-poems like Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero's Life”), then a series of operas: the scandalously modern Salome and Elektra and then, around 1911, reverted to a Mozart-like nostalgia in Der Rosenkavalier.

1938

After a successful career, then came World War II which created additional problems, particularly for his reputation. He's often been condemned as a Nazi sympathizer because, unlike many other composers, he did not leave Germany nor did he speak out against Hitler's government and policies.

Yet his son had married a Jewish woman and in order to protect her and his two half-Jewish grandsons, Strauss had to be fairly conscious what he could and could not do.

Still, there was something about having one of the greatest composers of the day representing if not the government, the culture of the German nation. And so both sides treaded lightly around these issues. Had Strauss's daughter-in-law been the daughter-in-law of probably any other composer, she would probably have been sent to a concentration camp as millions of others had. Had Strauss spoken up against the Nazis, she might have, anyway...

While that's not the topic, here, it is part of the background and cannot be ignored. To think of any composer writing in the midst of such an environment is one thing; to imagine the Four Last Songs came out of that, in a sense, is almost unbelievable.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Strauss was in his mid-70s when the war began. He had, essentially, viewed himself as an old man who would probably not write much more. When the war was over and he had composed one of the saddest pieces of music ever written in honor of the city of Dresden, destroyed in the Allied bombing – Metamorphosen – he was now in his 80s.

After the war, American soldiers arrived at his villa in southern Bavaria (the legendary Garmisch-Partenkirchen) and Strauss met them on the steps, announcing himself as “Richard Strauss, the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome.” The commander put an “Off Limits” sign on Strauss' lawn.

There was an American soldier named John deLancie, an oboist who before the war was the principal oboist of the Pittsburgh Symphony and later of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who met Strauss and talked “shop” with him during the occupation and eventually asked him to consider writing an oboe concerto. Strauss dismissed the idea but later completed one by the end of the year. It is perhaps one of the most Mozartean pieces he ever composed.

Matthew Boyden in his biography describes life for Strauss during his final years, a period sometimes referred to as his “Indian Summer.”

Skipping ahead a couple of years after the war, a tour had been arranged for Strauss in October of 1947 with a Strauss Festival in London, giving his music a chance to be heard again so Strauss the composer could earn some respect and Strauss the conductor could earn some money. The month before, he and his wife relocated to a hotel in Montreaux, Switzerland, which remained their “home-base” until they returned to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in May, 1949.

Thomas Beecham conducted a suite from Le bourgeois gentilhomme, (a work the HSO will be playing on its November concert), a scene from an early opera (premiered in 1901) and Don Quixote. A second concert included Ein Heldenleben and Macbeth and the final scene from the opera Ariadne auf Naxos.

A week later, the 83-year-old Strauss himself conducted a program with the tone-poem Don Juan, the Burleske for piano and orchestra, waltzes from Rosenkavalier and the Sinfonia domestica. As he waited backstage to begin the concert, he said, “So the old horse ambles out of the stables once more.”

There were two broadcast performances of Elektra with Beecham and then Strauss made his last appearance at the festival conducting Till Eulenspiegel on a program where Adrian Boult conducted Mozart's “Jupiter” Symphony and Holst's Planets. Strauss left London two days later with ₤1,000 in his pocket and returned to his wife in Montreaux at the end of October.

The next month, he experienced the first signs of a bladder infection but despite the pain and in defiance of his doctors' advice, he set about composing again, no doubt more fully enlivened by the experiences in London. He wrote a delightful “Duet-Concertino” for clarinet and bassoon which Radio Lugano's orchestra premiered the following April.

But then “Strauss appeared to shrink into himself.” Other than thoughts about a children's opera written for his grandchildren (The Donkey's Shadow), “his sketchbooks remained closed.” Instead, he began reading – Goethe and Nietzsche, and the theoretical works of Wagner the composer, but all this only reminded him of what German culture had lost during the war and “his depression spiraled.”

In the new year, his son Franz tried to cheer him up and “almost in an aside he told him to stop brooding and write some songs, suggesting that since many of the country's opera houses had been destroyed [in the war] there would be an increased demand for concert music.”

The year before, Strauss had copied the text of Joseph von Eichendorff's poem “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset) into a diary, beneath a newspaper clipping he'd pasted in it about the destruction of Dresden.

“The poem tells the story of an old couple who, after a lifetime together” – not unlike he and his wife Pauline who'd been married, now, for 53 years – “look to the sunset and ask, 'Is this perhaps death?'”

He'd set the poem then but, after his son's advice touched him, he returned to it and completely reset it, not just as a song for voice and piano but with the accompaniment of the full orchestra, and completed it in May.

Then he got out his volume of Herman Hesse poems and chose four that he liked, creating a cycle of songs all dealing with the subject of death.

He completed “Frühling” (“Spring”) on July 18th, “Beim Schlaffengehen” (“Going to sleep”) on August 4th, and “September” on September 20th.

He never finished the fourth of Hesse's poem he had selected.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

In June, he had been cleared by the de-nazification tribunal, exonerated as much by the circumstances as his admiration he was held in by the world as much as the Allies' wish to demonstrate “forbearance and humanity.” It was unlikely at his age – 84, now – they would expect him to endure prison or forced labor. His property nor any of the “harvests of his collaboration” with the Nazi government “were seized in reparation.”

Then, in December, he underwent bladder surgery and his recovery was slow and painful. He wrote to a friend, “I have actually outlived myself.” He studied scores by Mozart and Beethoven (particularly, the late quartets) and Wagner's Tristan. He began sketching a choral work based on one of Hesse's poems and read volumes of Greek philosophy (in the original Greek). He spent a lot of time reminiscing – his wife, Pauline, had begun her memoirs.

It wasn't until May 10th, 1949, that the Strausses returned to their Bavarian home and many friends were surprised to see how much he had aged. “His eyes, once described by [his friend and librettist Stefan] Zweig as the 'most wide-awake in the world,' were huge and watery; his hearing was now seriously impaired (he told [the conductor] Karl Böhm that everything was a [half-step] higher) and many pictures taken at the time how him straining to hear his photographer.”

But at times his face could still light up. Though he had been advised to rest, he wanted to attend rehearsals in Munich (an hour away) for a new production of Rosenkavalier which Georg Solti was conducting. Overcome by this, he asked to conduct the “Presentation of the Rose” scene at the end of Act II and the glorious trio and duet that concludes the opera. Fortunately, someone was on hand with a camera and caught the Act II finale on film.

Preparing for his 85th birthday, a film crew shadowed him, now, for a documentary film to be called A Life in Music. He was caught playing a bit of his opera Daphne at the piano and walking about the villa.

Henrietta Schirach, a member of the film crew, later recalled,

= = = = =
“Strauss enjoyed it hugely. Neither the chaos of cables nor the bright lights disturbed him. He had never seen a sound film in his life.” [She was] struck by his silky, tender skin. His blue eyes... blinked suspiciously as he faced the crowd of people. Suddenly he stopped. It was the spotr on which the urn with his ashes was [later] to stand.”
– Boyden: Richard Strauss (p.366)
= = = = =

A month later, he was driven to Munich by the American Military Governor so he could conduct the “Moonlight” music from his last opera, Capriccio with the Radio Orchestra as part of the documentary.

He never conducted again.

Another month passed and Strauss was now ill and confined to his bed, nursed by his son Franz and Alice, his daughter-in-law. He told them “I hear so much music.” When Alice brought him manuscript paper, he was to tired and unable to write anything down.

Talking to a friend, he reminisced about many things:

= = = = =
“I think I did a good job of conducting Wagner's works.” He described at length a scene from Siegfried after the Idyll [Forest Murmurs] where “a powerful animation must begin and continue through to the end and all the slow tempi must be taken only in a relative sense, but hardly anyone does that... You know the passage I mean?” Then he lifted his arms and began to conduct it, singing the orchestral melody in a loud voice. “The face,” [his friend wrote later], “is slightly flushed; his shining eyes are gazing far, far beyond the walls of the room. Now he is leaning back on the pillows, his eyes moist with tears. 'You must forgive me,' [Strauss] says, 'but when you lie here so alone and there is so much to think about you become a little sentimental.' Then he is silent for a long time...; softly his voice sounds again... 'Grüss mir die Welt' – where does that come from?'”
– Boyden: Richard Strauss (p. 367).
= = = = =

His friend thought perhaps Walküre but Strauss said, “No, no, that's not it – somewhere else...” Actually, Grüss mir die Welt (Greet the world for me) is from Tristan, Act I, perhaps Strauss's favorite opera - Isolde's farewell in scene 4.

A few days later, Strauss whispered to Alice, “It's a funny thing, but dying is exactly like I composed it sixty years ago in Tod und Verklärung [his famous, early tone-poem, Death & Transfiguration].”

Uremia, angina and constant pain “wore the old man down,” Boyden writes, and then following a series of “increasingly severe heart attacks, he died at 2:12pm on September 8th, 1949.”

Pauline, who had been his beloved if often combative wife during their long marriage, “no longer complained,” Boyden writes; “there was nothing left to fight for.” She would sit on his deathbed and weep and died eight months later, only nine days before Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the world premiere of her husband's Four Last Songs with soprano Kirsten Flagstad.

= = = = =
Here, Kirsten Flagstad sings Strauss's Last Song recorded at the world premiere performance (some sources indicate it was from the dress rehearsal which others say is incorrect), May 22nd, 1950:

= = = = =

Considering these songs had been composed more than a year before his death, it surprises me that they weren't rushed out for their premieres almost immediately. I've never found any explanation why Strauss or his family or his publisher never did anything with them.

More surprisingly, these were, in fact, not the last thing he composed. Malven, a very brief and rather inconsequential song, was composed for one of his favorite singers, Maria Jeritza, who had performed so many of his great soprano roles. It's a slight piece for voice and piano setting a rather inadequate poem about garden flowers (the title refers to a rose-mallow) by a Swiss novelist, Betty Knobel, which one source describes as “not being worthy of the honor.” He wrote it in late November 28th, 1948, a full two months after completing “September” and, with an effusive dedication, sent it off to Jeritza who stored it in her safe with her other mementos. No one was aware of its existence until 37 years later, after Jeritza died in 1983.

Even then, it took a while till it was first heard in public – at a New York Philharmonic concert in 1985 with Kiri Te Kanawa. Apparently, the manuscript only became available to them days before the concert, but the composer's grandson, Christian, was able to be in the audience.

So here is an audio clip of Richard Strauss' “Very Last Song.”
= = = = =

= = = = =

It may not be even close to the rapturous beauty of the only slightly earlier songs, but for anyone interested in an artist's “final thoughts,” interesting, nonetheless.

– Dick Strawser

The 2013-2014 Season: Hear the Preview!

The Harrisburg Symphony's new season gets underway the first weekend in October and will include seven “Masterworks” Concerts at the Forum. Stuart Malina conducts each concert and this post is just an introduction and overview to each program. Closer to the specific concert-time, I'll be posting more information about the music, the performers as well as video clips (if they're available) of each piece.

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 – was discovering lute music from around 1600, give or take a decade. He liked them so much he thought he would arrange some of them for a small orchestra so that other people could hear them. In those days, before recordings and the proliferation of “early music groups,” this music was almost totally unknown. While it's Respighi's clothing, the music is originally by Simone Molinaro, Vincenzo Galilei (better known because of his son, Galileo Galilei, the famous mathematician and astronomer), Michael Pretorius and good old Anonymous.
= = = = =

= = = = =

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!

Stuart & Friends 2013: Bloch, Mozart & Arthur Foote

Chamber Music is something I like to describe as “music made by friends for friends.”

This year’s edition of “Stuart & Friends” combines conductor Stuart Malina with principal string players of the Harrisburg Symphony – violinists Peter Sirotin and Nicole Sharlow, violist Julius Wirth and cellist Fiona Thompson – for works by Ernest Bloch, Mozart and Arthur Foote.

The program is Tuesday evening, May 21st, at the Rose Lehrman Center at the Harrisburg Area Community College, beginning at 7:30.

Ernest Bloch, born in Geneva, Switzerland, became an American citizen in 1924 and his being given the first prize in a competition for American composers three years later turned out to be a controversial decision. His best-known work is the Hebraic Rhapsody Schelomo, a meditation on the biblical figure of King Solomon for cello and orchestra, written in 1916 in the midst of World War I. While writing this work, Bloch first came to the United States and finished the piece in New York City. It was premiered in Carnegie Hall the following year with the New York Philharmonic’s principal cellist, Hans Kindler, as the soloist.

After he was appointed director of the newly formed Cleveland Institute of Music, Bloch wrote another work inspired by his Jewish heritage, the Three Sketches for Cello & Piano known as “From Jewish Life” which he dedicated to Kindler. It is part of a series of works generally referred to as his “Jewish Cycle” which included Baal Shem for Violin & Piano (with its famous movement, Nigun), the Méditation Hébraïque for Cello & Piano (both also composed in Cleveland).

Here is a performance by Wassili & Nicolai Gerassimez. It’s in three movements – Prayer, Supplication and Jewish Song.



Critic Erik Levi suggests it is important to remember that "Bloch's Jewishness derived from an inner impulse, not through a conscious absorption of Hebraic folk elements." The composer himself said, "it is neither my purpose nor desire to attempt a reconstruction of Jewish music, nor to base my work on more or less authentic melodies... I am not an archaeologist; for me the most important thing is to write good and sincere music."

This question of “cultural identity” – especially considering Switzerland had no outward identity of its own, being part-German, part-French, and part-Italian – is something that has informed a lot of soul-searching among American artists as well. When Antonin Dvořák advised his students in New York City in the early-1890s to look to their folk music to find their “American Voice,” the question was “what is American folk music?” It may have worked for the nationalists in Europe who, after centuries of “high art” with their music, painting and literature, by the mid-19th Century became conscious of their ethnic heritage, particularly in countries that weren’t German, French or Italian.

When you listen to many of the composers writing in America during the 19th Century, it’s hard to hear anything we would consider “American.” Being a nation of immigrants, much of this cultural identity came with them from the Old Country. Amy Beach, writing a symphony two years after Dvořák wrote his “New World” Symphony, found her inspiration not in American folk songs but in those of her own Scots-Irish heritage, giving it the nickname, the Gaelic Symphony.

For Arthur Foote, it was enough for him that he was the first composer born in America to be fully trained in America. When he graduated from Harvard in 1874, he was among the first class of students that didn’t have to go to Europe to get advanced training in composition.

Yet his music, to us, still sounds a great deal like Johannes Brahms and Antonin Dvořák, not surprising since Brahms, especially, was the most imitated composer with most American and English composers at the end of the 19th Century.

His Piano Quintet in A Minor was composed in 1897, the year Brahms died. For anyone not familiar with Foote’s name, he predates most of the more innovative composers who would later eclipse his fame – composers like the Yale graduate Charles Ives or, ironically, Aaron Copland who, dissatisfied by his studies with one of Dvořák’s students, chose to go to Europe anyway and became the first of a long string of American students working with Nadia Boulanger in Paris during the years following World War I.

Here is a recording of Foote’s Piano Quintet with pianist Mary Louise Boehm, violinists Kees Kooper and Alvin Rogers, violist Richard Maximoff, and cellist Fred Sherry, a recording currently available on the Albany label but which I’d owned years ago on the Vox label. It’s in four movements which was posted on YouTube in three clips:

1st Mvmt

2nd Mvmt

3rd & 4th Mvmts


You can read more about Foote and his Quintet in this post at my blog, Thoughts on a Train.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Mozart probably never thought much about “cultural identity” which was more of a 19th Century Romantic issue. He was, culturally speaking, German who grew up in Salzburg, one of hundreds of city-states in German-speaking Europe, that was allied with what we now think of as Austria in what was at the center of some vague political identity known as the Holy Roman Empire (neither Holy nor Roman) which, after centuries of existence, would collapse a generation later under the weight of Napoleon’s political force. Mozart wrote operas in Italian because that was the language of aristocratic culture; German operas were more for the popular appeal.

Here is the ensemble known as the Faure Piano Quartet performing Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-flat, K.493:
1st Mvmt

2nd Mvmt

3rd Mvmt

Between October, 1785, and April, 1786, Mozart focused on his newest opera, Le Nozze de Figaro (“The Marriage of Figaro”) based on a French play that already showed the cracks in the ancient regime of the aristocracy. Though the Austrian Emperor enjoyed Mozart’s music and saw the need to reform the aristocracy before his nation, too, would go the way of France – its Revolution which would begin only three years later – the noblemen of Vienna found little sympathy with Mozart’s opera or his music.

The fact it was not a financial success proved a problem for Mozart who had just turned 30 and was realizing the economic situation was getting a little tight.

A few weeks after Figaro’s premiere, Mozart composed his Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, K.493, for the publisher Hoffmeister. It’s not certain exactly why he wrote this piece: the previous year, Hoffmeister had approached him for three piano quartets – then, a new and unfamiliar instrumental combination – and the first one Mozart submitted, the G Minor Quartet, K.478, proved to be so challenging and difficult for amateur musicians to play, Hoffmeister released Mozart from the agreement.

This G Minor Quartet was one of the reasons Mozart was generally considered a composer of “difficult music.” Not just difficult to play, but difficult to listen to – the way many people in the 20th Century (and still today) react to, say, Schoenberg or Elliott Carter. We may think of it as one of the great works of the chamber music repertoire, but we forget that in Mozart’s day, the primary market for his music was not the concert hall (which, technically, did not yet exist) but amateurs playing in their homes not for large audiences but for a handful of friends and family. This music was far too dramatic and challenging for such a situation and Hoffmeister saw no point in publishing something that would make no money.

Given the failure of this work – completed shortly before he began composing Figaro – it’s unclear why Mozart would write another one except perhaps to prove to Hoffmeister he could write something that would have more popular appeal.

While neither of them proved very popular with Viennese public, the reception in other parts of Germany was a little different: here's a critic writing in 1787.

= = = = =
The cry soon made itself heard. ‘Mozart has written a very special Quartet and such and such a Princess or Countess possess and plays it!’ and this excited curiosity and led to the rash resolve to produce this original composition at grand and noisy concerts and to make a parade with it… Many another piece keeps some countenance even when indifferently performed; but this product of Mozart’s can in truth hardly bear listening to when it falls into mediocre amateurish hands and is negligently played. – Now this what happened innumerable times last winter… What a difference when this much-advertised work of art is performed with the highest degree of accuracy by four skilled musicians who have studied it carefully, in a quiet room when the suspension of every note cannot escape the listening ear and in the presence of only two or three attentive people?
= = = = =

The only surprising thing – at least to us – might be “if Mozart was aiming at an amateur audience, why did he overestimate them and risk losing this income?” Naturally, we would (these days) assume everything Mozart touched, regardless of its target demographic (to use modern attitudes), would have been a work of the highest art. But is this really music for amateurs?

This Quartet was only the first of a string of new works Mozart produced following the unsatisfactory success of Figaro which he admitted to writing for the need of making money, including the String Quartet in D, K.499, written specifically (again) for Hoffmeister the publisher, written that August. But at the same time, he composed the Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, K.498, the famous “Kegelstatt” Trio, which he tossed off for a musical evening with some of his closest friends without any thought to financial success or posterity.

In the meantime, he began planning a tour of Germany and England for the Lenten Season in 1787 for the purpose of increasing his income. For various reasons, this fell through, replaced then by a trip to Prague which he felt could prove monetarily lucrative. By December 6th, he’d completed a new symphony for them known today, logically, as the “Prague” Symphony, K.504. Later that year, he would write a new opera for them, following his success there: Don Giovanni.

Maynard Solomon points out in his biography of Mozart that

= = = = =
“For three or four years, Mozart had tasted the freedom of being his own master, of being a concert promoter who reaped the profits of successful ventures. Now, once again, he was at the mercy of the concert promoters and theater managements who controlled the avenues through which music reached audiences in Vienna. Once again, he was compelled to rely for his living primarily on fees from producers, publishers and patrons. Although he did not yet know it, Mozart’s [happy] impresario period had come to a close.” [Maynard Solomon, Mozart, HarperCollins New York 1995, p.304]
= = = = =

Listening to it as it unfolds so effortlessly and flawlessly, one could hardly imagine the reality just beyond the doorstep.

- Dick Strawser

A Mother's Day Treat: Hear the Harrisburg Symphony Youth Orchestra

There are three concerts this month: the last Masterworks of the season featuring Beethoven's 'Pastoral' Symphony (which you can read about here) on May 18th and 19th; this year's edition of "Stuart & Friends" which comes up right afterwards on Tuesday, the 21st at 7:30 at HACC's Rose Lehrman Center; and this weekend, the symphony's Youth Orchestra will be giving its spring concert on Mother's Day - this Sunday at 3pm at the Forum.

The program includes a suite from the "wild west" ballet by Aaron Copland, Billy the Kid, which the Harrisburg Symphony played last season on a program of musical tales called "The Don's Deeds" which also featured Strauss' Don Quixote, the "Don" in question. You can read more background about Copland's ballet in this earlier post which also includes video clips of a recording of the suite.

Also, there are two very lively pieces to open and close the program: in keeping with the perhaps completely fortuitous tradition of programming lots of Russian and Slavic music (Borodin's and Tchaikovsky's 2nd symphonies, Dvorak's New World Symphony among shorter works), Woodbridge has chosen an overture by the Soviet-era composer Dmitri Kabalevsky (best known in the West for his light-hearted "Comedians" Suite). The story of Colas Breugnon takes place in 16th Century France rather than having anything to do with Stalinist politics, but you don't need to know any of that enjoy a thoroughly good romp when you hear it.

Here's a recording by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Vasili Sinaisky from their Chandos disc:


The program concludes with a popular work by Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, his Danzón No. 2.

Gustavno Dudamel conducts the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra from Venezuela in this performance recorded at the London Proms: this orchestra is itself a youth orchestra, the "apex of the nation's system of Youth Orchestras" in the world-famous arts program known as El Sistema.

Katy Downs

This year's winner of the Harrisburg Symphony Youth Orchestra Concerto Competition is Katy Downs who'll be playing Cecile Chaminade's Concertino for Flute and Orchestra with her colleagues of the Harrisburg Symphony Youth Orchestra, conducted by Gregory Woodbridge.

Katy has been a member of the Harrisburg Symphony Youth Orchestra for two years. She has also been a part of Cedar Cliff High School’s wind ensemble, marching band, and orchestra. Katy has spent three wonderful summers at the Luzerne Music Center in the Adirondack Mountains in New York State. In tenth grade she attended District Band and then State Band playing piccolo. This year she earned first chair in the PMEA All-State Wind Ensemble. Although music is a huge part of her life, Katy also likes to relax with British television: Doctor Who, Downton Abbey, or Sherlock.

Outside of school, Katy has been a part of many other musical ensembles. She went to Europe with American Music Abroad and was featured on piccolo in Sousa’s famous march, Stars and Stripes Forever. In 2011, she was selected to be in the NAfME All-National Honor Ensemble and was first chair. She was also selected to be a part of the 2013 American High School Honors Performance Series, an honor which sent her to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Katy hopes to graduate from a music conservatory with the ambition of being a member of a professional orchestra.

Cecile Chaminade

Cecile Chaminade wrote this brief concerto (a concertino rather than an actual, all-out "concerto") in 1902 as a competition piece for students at the Paris Conservatoire when she was 45. Though she wrote a great many short piano pieces and songs and was very popular in her day, she had been largely forgotten by the time she died in 1944 at the age of 86.

This concertino is probably her most frequently performed piece and is available as a work for flute and piano as well as in other arrangements.

Given how difficult it is to find sometimes reasonable performances or recordings on YouTube, I decided to choose this video by the Hong Kong Wind Philharmonia with soloist Matthew Wu:


The concert is at the Forum this Sunday, May 12th, at 3pm. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for students.

Hope you can join us and realize how the future of classical music is in good hands.

And thanks, of course, to all the musicians for their hard work, to their teachers for all their guidance and inspiration, and especially to the students' parents and family who have supported them in their studies, in their practicing and in just schlepping them around to lessons, rehearsals and concerts!

- Dick Strawser

= = = = = = =
Photo credits for the Youth Symphony musicians: Stephanie Dutton

A Weekend in the Country: Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony

Beethoven, walking in the countryside

Hard to believe the end of the season's already here, but here’s Stuart Malina talking about the three works on May’s Masterworks Concert: Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Millennium Fantasy” and Franz Liszt’s 1st Piano Concerto (both with soloist Jeffrey Biegel) and the Sixth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, the Pastoral Symphony, which starts off with a movement called ‘Pleasant Impressions on Arriving in the Countryside,’ continues with a ‘Scene by the Brook,’ a ‘Merry Gathering of Country-folk’ (interrupted by a thunderstorm), then concludes with a ‘Song of Thanksgiving After the Storm.’

The performances are Saturday (May 18th) at 8:00 and Sunday (May 19th) at 3:00 in the Forum with a pre-concert talk an hour before each concert. Don’t forget Student Tickets are available at a 50% discount (and this is a great concert to take young listeners to) and Student rush tickets are available for $5 a half-hour before the concert begins.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Last fall, Stuart Malina offered a “pre-season preview” at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore where he talked about each concert on the up-coming Harrisburg Symphony season. After talking about the three works on the last program of the season, Stuart responded to a listener in the audience who said this music was “like heaven” and that he was listening to a recording of it in his car.

“As great as it is on a recording,” Stuart responded, agreeing with him that this was indeed “heavenly” music, that, still, “nothing can compare to hearing it live.” Turning to the rest of us, he continued, “if you like what you’re hearing, you need to come to the concert – because it’s apples and oranges. There IS no recording as good as a performance… doesn’t exist… even if it’s a great performance. Once it happens, it’s over. You make the recording and that experience of ‘creation in the moment’ is gone. When you’re in the audience, you’re an active participant in the creation… or rather the re-creation of art… Every time we re-create it and breathe human life into it, that’s when the magic happens. And the audience is part of that.”

= = = = =

= = = = =

I wasn’t able to find a recording of Zwilich’s Fantasy on-line but Stuart plays enough of the opening during the video to give you an idea what to expect.

Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto probably needs no introduction: it’s often played and very much liked, though a lot of Liszt’s critics didn’t care for it at first – one took exception to the [over]use of the triangle and called it a Triangle Concerto; a famous art-loving lawyer in New York wrote in his diary in 1870 that “the Liszt [first piano] Concerto is filthy and vile.” Since he went on to write “it suggests Chinese orchestral performances as described by enterprising and self-sacrificing travelers” (considering what sense Westerners could make of music from China at the time), here is a performance of the concerto with Yundi Li and the Beijing Philharmonic conducted by Zuohuang Chen:



To us, it may not seem at all problematic, listening to it today, but in the 1850s, Liszt’s “Music of the Future” was a far cry from what most people thought music ought to be – given that musical tastes in much of Europe were far more conservative than we’d think given Wagner’s popularity today (keep in mind, Liszt premiered his concerto five years after Wagner’s Lohengrin first saw the light of day).

While we might think Beethoven’s “Pastoral” is a “kinder, gentler” symphony than his dramatic 6th or his titanic Eroica, there is one comment I found in Nicholas Slonimsky’s excellent collection of bad reviews, The Lexicon of Musical Invective, that in 1823, a couple of years before the premiere of his 9th Symphony, thought the 6th was too long:

= = = = =
“Opinions are much divided concerning the merits of the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven, though very few venture to deny that it is much too long. The Andante alone is upwards of a quarter of an hour in performance and, being a series of repetitions, might be subjected to abridgement without any violation of justice, either to the composer or his hearers.” (anonymous critic in London, June 1823)
= = = = =

For those people with shorter attention spans, perhaps this version of the first movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral – which introduced many young listeners to the beauty of Beethoven’s symphony (myself, included) – seen through the eyes of Walt Disney’s amazing animators, will suffice. It may take the countryside around Vienna which inspired Beethoven’s music and places it for some reason in mythological Greece, it is still beautifully choreographed animation: I always smile when the little pegasuses – pegasi? – dive into the water at 3:44 to 4:04).

LvB6th: Fantasia – 1st Mvmt


For a complete performance (it is so difficult finding a decent performance and recording on YouTube to embed in these posts, and this would not be my top choice for “definitive performance”) here is the legendary Carlos Kleiber with the Bavarian State Orchestra recorded live in 1983:

= = = = =

= = = = =

One can argue about taking Beethoven’s own metronome markings so literally (the metronome being fairly new and apparently not very consistent technology at the time), but it still better than many performances out there.

Dick Strawser