MasterWorks 4: Exotic Sketches Program Notes

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1 MasterWorks 4: Exotic Sketches Program Notes Gioachino Rossini ( ) Overture to La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) Written: 1817 Style: Romantic Duration: 10 minutes By the time Gioachino Rossini retired at the grand-old age of thirty-seven, he had slowed a bit. When he was in his twenties, he composed nearly three operas a year, but when he was in his thirties he wrote only one per year. Still, thirty-nine operas in thirty-seven years is a remarkable achievement. Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music, he supposedly said. His retirement brought a dramatic change. Continually ill and idle for nearly twenty-five years, he never wrote another opera. It wasn t until 1855, when he settled in Paris, that he regained both health and humor. He started composing again, but this time he wrote only little pieces that he called his sins of old age. The cream of Parisian society filled his salon where he continually pontificated on artistic matters. When he finally passed away, he was a revered elder-statesman of a musical style long gone. La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) was Rossini s twentieth opera. He wrote it when he was twenty-five! The plot of the opera comes from a real-life incident where a servant girl was sentenced to death for stealing some silverware. It turns out that the real thief was a magpie. In the opera, there is a happy conclusion when the real perpetrator is found. The overture begins with a real surprise, a solo snare drum roll! A rather bombastic march follows, with an occasional light-hearted woodwind utterance here and there. The march ends with a couple more snare drum rolls. The minor melody in the next section comes from the part of the opera where the hapless servant is in prison contemplating her fate. Stern trombones seem to indicate that the judge s decision is a serious one. A second theme comes from the scene where the judge is preparing the court. The melody begins softly, and in a typical Rossini fashion, with multiple repetitions, gets louder and louder. Both themes get a second statement and then there is a fast furious ending. Thomas Pynchon, the author of Gravity s Rainbow, seemed to prefer the music of Rossini over Beethoven. The point is... a person feels good listening to Rossini, he wrote. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. I tell you... there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part of La Gazza Ladra

2 than in the whole Ninth Symphony. Well... maybe. Regardless, Rossini s music has yet to lose its infectious wit and charm. Claude Debussy ( ) Danses Sacrée et Profane for Harp and String Orchestra Written: 1904 Style: Impressionistic Duration: 10 minutes To our ears, influenced by jazz, rock-and-roll, numerous other popular idioms, as well as the craziness of contemporary classical music, the music of Debussy may strike us as merely beautiful and colorful. But when he was writing it, Debussy was breaking the cherished rules of composition established through hundreds of years of practice from before the time of Bach, through Mozart and Beethoven all of the way up to Brahms. Dissonance, that tension-producing clash of sound that must be resolved properly into a relaxing consonance (according to the rules), became an opportunity for new color. Rhythm, the thing that organized music into neat little manageable packets, disintegrated under Debussy: Barlines are like children; they should be seen and not heard. Even the long soaring romantic melody of the nineteenth century was under pressure from Debussy. Debussy succeeded in using sound in a similar way that the Impressionist and later, Fauvist painters used color. Unlike a tone poem by Debussy s contemporary Richard Strauss (Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, A Hero s Life), where you can hear a story unfold in a narrative fashion, Debussy s music really is almost like a painting where you focus on different parts, reveling in the play of color. In 1904, the piano manufacturing firm of Pleyel commissioned Debussy to write a piece to show off the potential of a new type of harp they were making. At the time, a harp made by the Erard Company dominated the market. The strings of the Erard harp, known as the pedal harp, were tuned to a C major scale. A series of seven pedals could alter each note of that scale by a half step or a whole-step. To play highly chromatic music, or music where individual notes were sharped or flattened in rapid succession, required some fast and fancy footwork. The harp made by Pleyel was called the chromatic harp. It had a string for every note of the chromatic scale similar to a piano. (Curiously, however, it could only produce a glissando in C major, like running your hands up and down the white keys of a piano.) The key to selling this chromatic harp was to get harpists to be willing to change

3 their technique, and that meant convincing teachers at conservatories to adopt the new harp. Pleyel got the Brussels Conservatory to start a course in the new chromatic harp, but now they needed music that would show off its capabilities. Debussy obliged by writing these two dances for harp. The Danse sacrée (Sacred Dance) is slow and austere. It also has many parallel chromatic chords, a perfect vehicle for the chromatic harp. The Danse profane (Secular Dance), which follows the first dance without any interruption, is a lyrical waltz. Curiously, the chromatic harp by Pleyel never really caught on. Tonight, you will hear the two dances performed on the competitor, the pedal harp. Alberto Ginastera ( ) Concerto for Harp and Orchestra, Op. 25 Written: Style: Contemporary Duration: 24 minutes In the pantheon of South American composers most of whom are woefully unknown in this country Alberto Ginastera stands at the apex. He made his mark early on in his own country of Argentina and by the time the 1960s came along, he was something of a worldwide phenomenon. Ginastera received almost his entire musical education in his native Argentina. He entered the National Conservatory of Music when he was twenty, and barely a year later an orchestral suite from his ballet Panambi received its first performance. In 1941, the American Ballet Caravan commissioned Ginastera s second ballet, Estancia. (Americans are most familiar with this work.) He began teaching at about the same time, but when the Peron regime forced his resignation in 1945, he came to the United States. While here, he became friends with Aaron Copland who became an influential advisor. Upon his return to Argentina, he continued to hold various teaching posts while he continued to compose. He also started travelling to Europe and was an important figure in various musical societies, including the International Society for Contemporary Music. Continued run-ins with the Peronist government meant more job losses for Ginastera, so he supplemented his income by composing for film. In 1962, he became the head of the Latin American Centre for Advanced Musical Studies, which promoted avant-garde techniques in music. His opera Don Rodrigo, selected by the New York City Opera to open its new hall at Lincoln Center,

4 established Ginastera s reputation as a major opera composer. In 1971, he moved to Switzerland and devoted the rest of his life entirely to composition. Ginastera divided his musical output into three periods. He called the first period objective nationalism, where he concentrated on including Argentinean folk elements in his music. The second period he called subjective nationalism, where folk elements, while still present, were less obvious and his music gained a more personal style. Ginastera s third period mixed avant-garde styles (including twelve-tone techniques) with surrealism. His Harp Concerto, written in 1956 on request from Edna Phillips, the harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, falls right in between his second and third periods. The first movement bursts into action right away with jagged and insistent percussive rhythms. Diaphanous glissandi played by the harp shift the movement into a gentler section. The movement alternates between these two ideas until a final ethereal cadenza for harp ends it. The second movement starts with the strings playing a little fugue as an introduction. The harp and woodwinds then trade phrases of a lyrical melody. A central section has the harp playing sharp punctuations over orchestral night-music, soft and eerie sounds throughout. A return of the opening fugue, this time including the harp, concludes the movement. An extended but gentle harp cadenza, based on what sounds like the open strings of a guitar, acts as a link to the last movement. It is a wild romp featuring insistent dance-like rhythms with lots of percussion. The harp and orchestra play off against each other throughout, until the percussion finally overpowers everything with a dramatic ending. Ottorino Respighi ( ) The Pines of Rome Written: 1924 Movements: Four (played without pause) Style: Contemporary Duration: 23 minutes When it comes to the music of the twentieth century, scholars tend to focus on the giants those composers whose works break with the past and set music on new paths. Those giants like Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg produced most of their earthshattering works in the first thirty years of the century. They had a powerful influence on all music. But there are also the not-so-giants who were actively writing at the same time.

5 Their music, much of it very interesting and good, has had a difficult time making it into the standard repertoire. Because of his conservative nature, Ottorino Respighi never made it into the pantheon of the great composers. Nevertheless, in terms of mastering the craft of writing for orchestra, he has few equals. Respighi didn t want to be avante-garde. Instead he desired above all to compose music that would speak to his compatriots about all aspects of their beloved country in a musical language that was beautiful and easy for ordinary people to accept and enjoy. The works that he is best known for are a series of three symphonic pictures called tone poems. In each, Respighi handles the orchestra as if it were a canvas on which he places vivid sound colors. The first, written in 1916, is called The Fountains of Rome and the third, Roman Festivals was written in The second, The Pines of Rome, was written in Thankfully, these works are part of the standard repertoire and are audience favorites. Writing in the third person, Respighi provided the following comment for the first Philadelphia Orchestra performance of The Pines of Rome: While in his preceding work, The Fountains of Rome, the composer sought to reproduce by means of tone an impression of nature, in the Pines of Rome he uses nature as a point of departure, in order to recall memories and visions. The centuryold trees which dominate so characteristically the Roman landscape become testimony for the principal events in Roman life. For further clarification, he included the following explanation in the score: 1. The Pines of Villa Borghese. Children are at play in the pine grove of the Villa Borghese, dancing the Italian equivalent of Ring around a Rosy ; mimicking marching soldiers and battles; twittering and shrieking like swallows at evening; and they disappear. Suddenly the scene changes to 2. The Pines near a Catacomb. We see the shadows of the pines, which overhang the entrance of a catacomb. From the depths rises a chant which reechoes solemnly, like a hymn, and is then mysteriously silenced. 3. The Pines of the Janiculum. There is a thrill in the air. The full moon reveals the profile of the pines of Gianicolo s Hill. A nightingale sings (represented by a recording of a nightingale song, heard from the orchestra). 4. The Pines of the Appian Way. Misty dawn on the Appian Way. The tragic

6 country is guarded by solitary pines. Indistinctly, incessantly, the rhythm of innumerable steps. To the poet s fantasy appears a vision of past glories; trumpets blare, and the army of the Consul advances brilliantly in the grandeur of a newly risen sun toward the Sacred Way, mounting in triumph the Capitoline Hill John P. Varineau