WAR r. Classical. Series BR IT TEN S EQUIEM. Friday & Saturday, May 29 & 30, at 8 pm

Transcription

1 AEGIS SCIENCES FOUNDATION EST Classical Series C L ASS ICAL Friday & Saturday, May 29 & 30, at 8 pm BR IT TEN S S ERIES EQUIEM WAR r with the NA SH V ILLE S Y M PHON Y & CHORUS Nashville Symphony Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor Nashville Symphony Chorus Kelly Corcoran, chorus director Blair Children s Chorus Mary Biddlecombe, artistic director Erin Wall, soprano Anthony Dean Griffey, tenor Phillip Addis, baritone BENJAMIN BRITTEN War Requiem, Op. 66 Requiem aeternum Dies Irae Offertorium Sanctus Agnus Dei Libera me This concert will run with no intermission. Mary C. Ragland Foundation Weekend Concert Sponsors Media Partner Official Partner InConcert 43

2 tonight s concert at a glance C L ASS ICAL S ERIES BENJAMIN BRITTEN WAR REQUIEM, Op. 66 Benjamin Britten composed his War Requiem in 1961 for the consecration of St. Michael s Cathedral in Coventry, England. The cathedral had been destroyed in 1940 during a German bombing raid that destroyed more than 4,000 homes. The premiere took place in the rebuilt cathedral on May 30, One of the Nashville Symphony s performances will take place on the very same day 53 years later. Best known for The Young Person s Guide to the Orchestra, Britten was one of England s most beloved composers, and his War Requiem was a huge public success fueled, in part, by the momentousness of the occasion for which it had been written. A lifelong pacifist, Britten was a conscientious objector during World War II and spent part of those years living as an exile in the U.S. The threat of global conflict still loomed when Britten wrote the War Requiem, as the Bay of Pigs invasion had ratcheted up Cold War tensions, and the Cuban Missile Crisis would take place just a few months after the premiere. Britten adapted text from the Latin Requiem Mass and interspersed it with poems by the British poet Wilfred Owen, who wrote of his own experiences in World War I. On the cover of the War Requiem score, Britten included the following quotation from Owen: My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do today is warn. The piece includes three solo vocal parts. For the premiere, Britten had three singers in mind, each representing countries who fought in World War II: Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, British tenor Peter Pears (who was also the composer s life partner) and German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Vishnevskaya, who was the wife of the great conductor and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, was barred by the Soviet Union from performing at the premiere, though she later performed and recorded the work. Britten s orchestration is wholly unique: The performers are divided into three groups, each representing different aspects of the work: First is the orchestra, along with chorus and soprano, who sing the Latin Requiem; second is a children s chorus, accompanied here by harmonium, who also sing parts of the Requiem; and third is a chamber orchestra with tenor and baritone, who sing Owen s poetry. The result is a multilayered construction in which the striking musical and thematic contrasts build to a powerful conclusion. The work is divided into six movements, each based on a portion of the Requiem. Britten uses the tritone the pairing of two notes separated by three whole tones (in this case, C and F-sharp) as an underlying musical conceit. This particular sound feels unnatural and unsteady to the ear, which underscores the themes of Britten s work. Listen as well for the sound of tolling bells. In the fourth movement you can also hear the influence of Indonesian gamelan music. 44 M AY

3 BENJAMIN BRITTEN Born on November 22, 1913 in Lowestoft, England; died on December 4, 1975, in Aldeburgh, England War Requiem, Op. 66 Composed: 1961 First performance: May 30, 1962, at Saint Michael s Cathedral, Coventry, England First Nashville Symphony performance: January 23 & 24, 2004, with Music Director Kenneth Schermerhorn, soprano Twyla Robinson, tenor Don Frazure and baritone Dean Elzinga Estimated length: 85 minutes In this spring marking the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, there s much to gain from experiencing this masterpiece. Benjamin Britten s War Requiem demonstrates the power of art to confront humanity s failings and at the same time to offer hope. The War Requiem also stands out as a rare instance of a new work in the 20th century that was greeted from the start with overwhelming approval by critics and audiences alike. It even pointed ahead to the longing for a peaceful society that would define the 60s, just as [Britten s first major opera] Peter Grimes had harmonized with the mood of the 40s, biographer Humphrey Carpenter observes. The War Requiem, from first note to last, holds true to Britten s conviction about the important role music should play in society. Here, in a work designed for the most public of occasions, Britten found an ideal outlet for his deepest, innermost concerns. The ethical perspective of this lifelong pacifist, who had been a conscientious objector in World War II, converges with the remarkable gifts that made him one of the supreme musical dramatists of the past century. In taking up one of the most tradition-laden texts of Western music, the Latin Mass for the Dead, Britten challenges and reinvigorates the very meaning of this ritual. After World War II, Britten had considered Requiem-like works to commemorate the victims of the atomic bombings in Japan and, later, the assassination of Gandhi, but these plans never crystallized. A commission to supply a new score as part of the consecration of the newly rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed by German bombing raids in 1940, at last provided Britten with the stimulus he needed to embark on a large-scale choral-symphonic composition. Britten wasn t interested in reinforcing platitudes about the sacrifices of war let alone patriotic sentiments that whitewashed its horrors. For the words of the War Requiem he therefore decided to combine the traditional Latin Requiem texts (with one telling change, in the Agnus Dei) with the English poetry of Wilfred Owen ( ). Before Owen was killed on the battlefield in France, precisely one week before the Armistice ended World War I, the poet had responded to the madness of his frontline experience by writing bitterly ironic antiwar poetry that subverted the use of verse as a tool for patriotic propaganda. Christ is literally in no man s land. Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism, the young poet wrote to his mother. The latent homoeroticism of Owen s poetry also resonated with Britten. As an epigraph to the War Requiem, Britten quoted a passage by Owen: My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do is to warn. Britten moreover conceived the three solo parts specifically for singers who would stand for three of the nations in the worldwide conflagration: the Soviet Union (soprano Galina Vishnevskaya), Germany (the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) and England (his life partner, the tenor Peter Pears). To anchor his antiwar message, Britten tapped into a tradition of sacred music that carries a plea for peace amid turmoil (such as Haydn s Missa in tempore belli or Beethoven s Missa solemnis). His juxtaposition of CLASSICAL SERIES InConcert 45

4 CLASSICAL SERIES Latin liturgical texts with secular poetry also had precedent, yet Britten interwove Owen s poems in such a way that they serve as a provocative commentary on the familiar Requiem. The result is a complex yet ingeniously lucid six-movement structure embedded with an ongoing song cycle for tenor and baritone, who between them sing the Owen poems. This fusion of the ancient and the modern with the latter commenting on the former might be interpreted as the composer s musical and textual counterpart to architect Basil Spence s bold design for Coventry Cathedral. WHAT TO LISTEN FOR The vast resources Britten calls for clue us in to the architectural and spatial breadth of his conception. The scoring is divided into three groupings that are perceived to emanate from three distinct spheres. First is the more conventional sound world of full orchestra (including enlarged brass and percussion sections) and mixed chorus, which sings only the Latin texts. The soprano solos belong to this sphere as well. If these performers represent the world of humanity facing our mortal condition, the boys choir, accompanied throughout by organ or harmonium, exists suspended beyond it as the voice of eternal, angelic innocence. Britten specifies that their sound is to be distant. The composer draws on his operatic experience for the entire work, but the third level, with its reduced satellite orchestra and two male soloists, recalls textures from his chamber operas in particular. This is the very real world of violence and meaningless death the plane on which ideals and innocence are corrupted. Britten s settings dramatize not only the Owen poems, but also their relation to the surrounding Requiem: most tellingly in Owen s ironic comment on the Offertorium s reference to Abraham and his seed. Throughout the War Requiem, the tone alternates between involvement and cold detachment, compassion and despair, fear and irony. Yet Britten devises powerful musical metaphors to steer us through this emotionally and psychologically complex landscape. Foremost among these is the sound of the tritone, which permeates the opening Requiem aeternam in the form of C-F-sharp. This inherently unstable interval, the harmonic pivot of the entire work, can resolve in widely distant directions and thus underscores the pervasive feeling of ambivalence. (The tune of Maria from West Side Story also pivots on the tritone.) The first movement introduces other key musical ideas, too. The erratic, unpredictable rhythmic pulse is a nervous variant of a death march (the grim textures here are reminiscent of Shostakovich and, to a lesser degree, Mahler), while the solemn bell sounds prompt the first intersection with Owen s poetry. Concluding the movement is an extraordinarily compressed setting of the Kyrie, which all too quickly resolves from its unstable harmonies into a soft F major chord. All of this sets the stage for the vastly differentiated and dramatic canvas of the Dies Irae. Britten acknowledged his debt to Verdi s well-known setting, and indeed the entire movement can be experienced as a miniature opera, with its shift of focus from the dread of universal apocalypse to the solo tenor s heartrending question, Was it for this the clay grew tall? After the soprano s oracular first entry in the Liber scriptus, the tone turns sardonic as the tenor and baritone intrude with more of Owen s poetry. More contrasts accumulate until bells resound once again with the unstable tritone in the final chorus. The traditional fugue setting of the Offertorium text is suddenly disrupted by Owen s dark retelling of the sacrifice of Isaac, in which Abraham disobeys the divine voice and proceeds to murder his son. Immediately following, with its echoes of both Monteverdi and Indonesian gamelan music, is the shockingly triumphant Sanctus, though the baritone solo counters this with Owen s poetic denial of the afterlife s consolation. Briefest of the six movements, the Agnus Dei reverses the textual pattern and begins with Owen, juxtaposing his moving image of a warshattered roadside crucifix with the Latin prayer in a haunting scalar melody. Swerving from the traditional Requiem version, Britten here inserts the line dona nobis pacem his most straightforward plea for peace. The final movement frames Owen s dramatic 46 MAY 2015

5 vision of two wartime enemies meeting after death within settings of the Libera Me and In Paradisum. Here the catastrophe of the day of reckoning yields to the most personal encounter in the parallel universe of Owen s poetry. Britten dissolves this scene into the final Latin prayer In Paradisum, for the first time joining all the performing forces together. The chorus s final measures repeat the harmonic sequence that ends the opening movement: is this the attainment of final rest, or the start of humanity s eternally recurring pattern? The War Requiem is scored for soprano, tenor and baritone soloists, mixed choir and boys choir, with three separate ensemble groups: full orchestra (with soprano) comprising 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets (3rd doubling E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (4 players), piano and strings; a chamber orchestra (with tenor and baritone) comprising flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), clarinet, bassoon, horn, timpani, harp and a small group of solo strings; and a harmonium (with the boys choir). Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com. CLASSICAL SERIES ABOUT THE ARTISTS ERIN WALL, soprano Soprano Erin Wall is acclaimed for her musicality and versatility, with an extensive opera and concert repertoire that spans three centuries, from Mozart and Beethoven to Britten and Strauss. She has sung leading roles in the world s great opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, the Vienna Staatsoper, Opéra National de Paris and Lyric Opera of Chicago, and she appears in concert with leading symphony orchestras and conductors worldwide. Recent career highlights include the title role in Strauss Arabella and Helena in Britten s A Midsummer Night s Dream with the Metropolitan Opera; a highly acclaimed debut as Clémence in L amour de loin with the Canadian Opera Company in 2012; the title role in Thaïs at the Edinburgh Festival; and the 50th anniversary performance of Britten s War Requiem with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra led by Andris Nelsons at Coventry Cathedral. Wall has recently sung Beethoven s Ninth Symphony with the Boston Symphony under Bernard Haitink and the Vienna Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann, and she has sung Mahler s Eighth Symphony with the Hessischer Rundfunk under Paavo Järvi, Houston Symphony under Christoph Eschenbach, and NHK Philharmonic under Jacques Dutoit. Wall s discography includes Strauss Vier Letzte Lieder with the Melbourne Symphony, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, Mahler s Eighth Symphony with the Berlin Staatskapelle conducted by Pierre Boulez and the GRAMMY -winning recording of the same work with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. She has recorded Beethoven s Ninth Symphony with the San Francisco and Montréal symphonies, and sings Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte on DVD, recorded live at Aix-en-Provence. ANTHONY DEAN GRIFFEY, tenor Anthony Dean Griffey has appeared in the world s most prestigious opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Los Angeles Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Paris Opera, Teatro Comunale di Firenze, Teatro dell Opera in Rome, and the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan. His many roles include the title roles in Peter Grimes, Idomeneo and Oedipus Rex; Florestan in Fidelio; Erik in Die Fliegende Holländer; Male Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia; and Alfred in Die Fledermaus. Griffey is noted for his portrayal of the title role in Peter Grimes. He debuted the role at the InConcert 47

6 CLASSICAL SERIES Tanglewood Festival under Seiji Ozawa, and has since performed it all over the world, most recently with the Atlanta Symphony in Carnegie Hall as part of its Britten Centenary celebrations. A supporter of new works, Griffey has won acclaim for creating the role of Mitch in the world premiere of André Previn s A Streetcar Named Desire at the San Francisco Opera and for his performances of Lennie in Carlisle Floyd s Of Mice and Men. A four time GRAMMY -winner, Griffey has made numerous recordings, including the Metropolitan Opera s Peter Grimes (EMI Classics), the Los Angeles Opera s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Euroarts) and the Metropolitan Opera s Tristan und Isolde (DG/Universal). He holds degrees from Wingate University, the Eastman School of Music, and The Juilliard School and was a member of the Metropolitan Opera s Lindemann Young Artists Program. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Artist in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. PHILLIP ADDIS, baritone Canadian baritone Phillip Addis is praised for his creamy, bright, smooth voice as much as for his spell-binding yet sensitive interpretations. He has performed in opera, concerts and recitals throughout Canada, the U.S., Europe and Japan. Recent seasons have included appearances as The Ferryman in Curlew River and Demetrius in A Midsummer Night s Dream, both at the Opera di Roma; his house debut at l Opéra National de Paris as Roderick Usher in Debussy s unfinished opera The Fall of the House of Usher; his debut at the London Proms in the title role of a concert version of Pelléas et Mélisande; as Marcello in Calgary Opera s La Bohème and as Gugliemo in Così fan tutte with the Atlanta Opera. He has performed Britten s War Requiem in Cincinnati, the Duruflé Requiem with I Musici de Montreal, and Handel s Messiah in Ottawa with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Among Addis awards and honors are First Prize in the 2004 Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal s Standard Life Competition, First Prize in the 2004 Orchestre Symphonique de Quebec s Canadian Concerto Competition, and the 2005 Joseph Rouleau award from the Montreal International Music Competition. He received grants from the Jacqueline Desmarais Foundation for Young Canadian Opera Singers support program from With a Bachelor of Music from Queen s University and a diploma in operatic performance from the University of Toronto s Faculty of Music, Addis began his operatic career in the apprenticeship program at the Atelier Lyrique de L Opéra de Montréal with further studies at the Steans Institute at Ravinia, the Britten-Pears School and the Canadian Vocal Arts Institute. BLAIR CHILDREN S CHORUS MARY BIDDLECOMBE, artistic director Asa Abbot Kamryn Boyd Mary Byrd Sophie Camardo Becca Culley Katherine Deegan Will Growdon Anna Hunley Isobelle Kabiling Raphael McKerley-Geier Kendra Marin Swasti Mishra Donald Pierce III Claire Ritter Jessica Schreiber Garrett Scott Cecily Z. Shi Jaden Smith-Borne Jennie Mae Sprouse Ben T. Strobel Margot Suchet Rebecca Sullivant Cameron Thompson Clara Warford Haviland Whiting Sergei K. Wright Victoria Zamora 48 MAY 2015