2009-2010 Classics Concert

Classics Concert I
PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter

JENNIFER HIGDON
blue cathedral
Jennifer Higdon was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 31, 1962, and now resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She composed blue cathedral for the 75th anniversary of the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia. Robert Spano conducted the Curtis Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere on May 1, 2000. The score calls for two flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), oboe and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and three percussionists (crotales, marimba, tamtam, vibraphone, glockenspiel, belltree, sizzle cymbal, suspended cymbal, chimes, bass drum, tomtom, two triangles), plus harp, piano/celesta, and strings. In addition the brass players also play eight crystal glasses, and most of the orchestra plays the 60-70 Chinese bells called for. Duration is about 12 minutes.

Jennifer Higdon is rapidly becoming one of the most highly regarded and frequently performed composers of her generation. Her music is immediately accessible to concert audiences in a way that might be called “conservative” (she employs familiar harmonies and colors), yet she creates them in such a way that they never sound like imitations of something we have heard before, but take the possibilities of the symphony orchestra, for which she writes brilliantly, and regenerates them for our time.

The recognition of her standing among composers was made explicit in June 2002, when the Philadelphia Orchestra chose to give the world premiere of her Concerto for Orchestra for a meeting of the American Symphony Orchestra League in Philadelphia, a gathering of musical and administrative leaders from virtually all fo the symphony orchestras in the country. The event was little short of sensational, and members of the audience who had not known of Jennifer Higdon before that night certainly did not forget her afterward.

Higdon was an obvious choice for the Philadelphia Orchestra because she had been living and working in the city for some years, and her music was well known there. Born in Brooklyn, she first became a flutist, earning her bachelor’s degree in that instrument from Bowling Green State University. But interest in composition predominated, and, although she still plays the flute (and writes a great deal for the instrument), she pursued composition in her master’s and doctoral programs at the University of Pennsylvania. She also earned an Artist’s Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she currently teaches.  Her composition teachers have included George Crumb, Wallace DePue, James Primosch, Jay Reise, Ned Rorem, and Marilyn Shrude.

If the Concerto for Orchestra has become her “break-out” piece, winning new acclaim all over the country, blue cathedral clearly set the stage. Higdon was commissioned to write an orchestral work for the 75th anniversary of the Curtis Institute. At the time she started work on the piece for the commission, her thoughts were particularly filled with memories of her younger brother, who had died exactly a year earlier, so (as she has written):

...I was pondering a lot of things about the journey we make after death. I had a lot of very crystal clear images in my head which contributed to the composition process. I was imagining a traveler on a journey through a glass cathedral in the sky (therefore making it a blue color). The traveler would at first float down the aisle, passing giant pillars, which would reflect the sun at prismatic angles. Along the way they would pass stained glass windows in which the figures would be moving about, speaking and singing. I imagined that there would be some sort of other‑worldly music sounding throughout, along with distant bells ringing periodically. The journey up the aisle would carry the viewer/listener closer to the altar which would be some large, magnificent scene like heaven, open and welcoming. I wanted the music to sound like it was progressing into this constantly opening space, feeling more and more celebratory, moving from introverted to extroverted awareness. As the journey progresses, the individual would float higher and higher above the floor, soaring towards an expanding ceiling, where the heart would feel full and joyful. A sense of fullness would fill the traveler and the thoughts would become again more introverted in the awareness of peace and closure.

The imagery that the composer offers in this description need not be taken literally by a listener to the work, but certainly a sense of space and light, of constantly expanding into a space ever-more richly decorated—not unlike the effect of the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages—provides enough of a guide for the first-time listener to this wonderfully affirmative score. 
Robert Spano conducted the Curtis Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of blue cathedral on May 1, 2000. Since that time it has become Jennifer Higdon’s most frequently performed score—and no one who hears it will need to ask why.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43
Sergey Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born in Semyonovo, Russia, on April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943. He composed his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in July and August 1934 and gave the first performance, in Baltimore, on November 7 that year with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, side drum, triangle, cymbals and bass drum, harp, and strings. Duration is about 22 minutes.

Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is one of those rare works that impresses even the snobbish types who customarily turn up their noses at the compositions of this Russian émigré who wrote such unabashedly romantic, heart‑on‑sleeve music. Generally regarded as a reactionary in a world dominated by the new ideas of Stravinsky’s neo‑Classicism on the one hand and Schoenberg’s twelve‑tone technique on the other, Rachmaninoff has, until recent years, been largely written off by the musical intelligentsia. Times have changed, though, and his star has risen again.

The variation form was not one to which Rachmaninoff had shown any particular predilection, though he had in 1931 written a set of variations on a theme of Corelli for solo piano. But the idea of variations was clearly churning in his mind when he arrived at his Swiss summer residence in 1934, because he began to compose with extraordinary energy and imagination the work that is surely his finest essay in the medium of piano and orchestra.

It was a bold step to choose a theme so thoroughly treated by earlier composers. Paganini himself had started the tradition by varying the theme of his twenty‑fourth caprice for solo violin eleven times; later in the nineteenth century both Liszt and Brahms had a go at it. And in our own century, following Rachmaninoff, Witold Lutoslawski and Boris Blacher have continued the tradition. Yet Rachmaninoff came up with fresh treatments presented in a score that is dashing, brilliant, romantic, and witty by turns.
The first variation actually precedes the formal statement of the full theme; it is a kind of bare‑bones, stripped‑down version, tense, bony, hushed, but with a sardonic touch of wit. The theme itself is first given (appropriately) to the violins, immediately evoking echoes of Paganini’s original.

The title “Rhapsody” might lead us to expect great freedom in the treatment of the Paganini material, but ironically Rachmaninoff here gives us the most classically shaped of all his compositions. Each variation is complete in itself, each has a marked, evident connection to the Paganini theme. As a whole, the treatment becomes freer as the work progresses, but that is entirely normal in classical practice. The first six variations maintain strict tempo, stay in the same key (A minor) as Paganini’s caprice, and even hint at Paganini’s own variations. The first major change in character comes with the seventh variation, in which Rachmaninoff introduces one of his favorite musical ideas as a second thematic idea. This is the old plainchant melody Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead, a tune widely used by romantic composers since Berlioz. We hear it first in sustained chords in the piano against thematic segments in bassoon and cellos. It will play a large role in the score, possibly designed to suggest Paganini’s supposed bargain with the devil (just as it was used to suggest diabolical activities in the “Dream of the Witch’s Sabbath” in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique). Rachmaninoff plans its several reappearances in his Rhapsody with a keen sense of telling effect.

By the ninth variation, Rachmaninoff is no longer so much playing with the thematic outline or its harmonic pattern as he is exploiting the colors and the rhythms of its diabolic character with special coloristic effects in the orchestration. A grotesque march presents the Dies irae like a slow tolling of funeral bells.

The eleventh variation, a reflective solo cadenza with a mysterious accompaniment, leads off to a new key and the beginning of a middle part in which the tonality is freer. The modulations end in the lush, romantic key of D‑flat major for the most famous variation in the set, the eighteenth. This sounds, at first hearing, as if Rachmaninoff had thrown Paganini to the winds and invented the kind of rich Russian melody that had made his Second and Third piano concertos so popular. And yet this theme, in Rachmaninoff’s most popular style, is derived from Paganini by the simple device of turning the notes upside‑down and playing them more slowly and lyrically. The result is an outpouring of lyric melody that soars climactically and then dies gently away.

The remaining five variations return to the home key to provide a finale of great brilliance  à la Paganini, then turning to intimations of the satanic, with a dark march erupting in a piano cadenza and a variation (No. 23) in which the soloist begins in the unlikely key of A‑flat; the orchestra promptly takes matters into its own hands by jerking the soloist up to A and continuing into the last variation, with a kaleidoscopic outburst of fireworks and a final reference in the brass to the Dies irae. Finally, just as Rachmaninoff seems to be building up to his mightiest peroration, the score ends with the wittiest touch of all—one last quiet reference to Paganini.

NIKOLAY RIMSKY‑KORSAKOV
Sheherazade, Symphonic Suite, Opus 35
Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky‑Korsakov was born in Tikhvin, Novgorod government, on March 18, 1844, and died in Lyubensk, St. Petersburg government, on June 21, 1908. He composed Sheherazade during the summer of 1888; it was first performed in St. Petersburg under the composer’s direction on October 28 of that year. The work is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam‑tam, harp, and strings. Duration is about 42 minutes.

During the winter of 1887‑88, Rimsky‑Korsakov was engaged in one of his many generous acts of pious devotion to a deceased Russian master: he was orchestrating the opera Prince Igor, left unfinished at the death of its composer, Alexander Borodin. A few excerpts played in concert—among them the overture and the famous Polovtsian Dances—demonstrated the effectiveness of the work. He had to put off original composition while engaged in this labor of love, but he did manage to conceive two new orchestral pieces, the working out of which was to be left to the following summer, spent on an estate in Nyezhgovitzy, near Looga. The two new pieces turned out to be among his best‑known compositions. One was based on episodes from The Arabian Nights, the other on themes from the obikhod, a collection of the most frequently used canticles of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both were finished that summer: the first was Sheherazade, Opus 35, and the second was the overture Svetlïy prazdnik (The bright holiday), generally known in English as the Russian Easter Overture.

As it happens, they were very nearly the last purely orchestral works Rimsky was to write; for the remaining two decades of his life, he devoted his attentions almost totally to operatic composition. Moreover they are the last works that he composed with virtually no Wagnerian influence. There was a sudden dramatic change in Rimsky's style the following winter, when he was bowled over by a performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen given by a visiting German company in St. Petersburg, and Rimsky's next opera, Mlada, revealed the composer to have been converted into quite the thorough‑going Wagnerian. (Over a period of years he did work his way back to a musical language of his own; his last and best‑known opera, Le Coq d'or, shows few traces of his Wagnerian fling.)

The massive collection of tales known as The Arabian Nights or The Thousand-and-One Nights is built on a framework reflected in the orchestral score of Rimsky‑Korsakov's musical treatment: the Sultan Shakhryar, discovering his wife's infidelity and convinced of the inconstancy and faithlessness of all women, has sworn henceforth to marry repeatedly in rapid sequence, putting each wife to death after the first night in order to avoid another betrayal. To put an end to this bloodbath, Sheherazade, the daughter of the Sultan's most trusted adviser, seeks to become his wife (even though she had been exempted from this fatal position because of her father's rank at the court). She saves her life after her wedding night by telling a story that captures the Sultan's interest, breaking it off just at dawn, with the promise of continuing it the next night. Each night, as she continues, her story puts out roots and branches, becoming an intricate network of tales, some told by characters within other tales, so that at no point do all the stories in progress come to their conclusion. Each day at dawn the Sultan puts off her execution for another day in order to hear the end of the story first. Gradually her seemingly artless and endless series of colorful fairy tales softens the cruel heart of the Sultan, and, at the end of one thousand-and-one nights, he abandons his sanguinary design and accepts Sheherazade as his one, permanent, loving wife. (A few years ago Bruno Bettelheim's study of fairy tales analyzed the Thousand-and-one Nights as a particularly clear example of the way these traditional stories help mold and shape a mature, integrated personality.)

Of course, The Arabian Nights is much too long and work and much too intricate‑‑in its complex networks of tales-within-tales‑‑simply to be translated into music as a story-telling program. Analysts and program annotaters have expended a great deal of ingenuity in attempts to identify precisely which tales Rimsky-Korsakov had in mind, especially since the traditional movement titles are not especially specific: the introduction purports to represent the stern Sultan Shakhryar (in the opening unison phrase) and Sheherazade the storyteller (in the solo violin); the remainder of the first movement is identified with the sea and the ship of Sinbad the sailor; the second movement is the tale of the Prince Kalendar; the third is simply "The Prince and the Princess"; and the finale is a festival at Baghdad and a shipwreck (quite a combination for a single movement!). But it is vain to seek for specific stories as the inspiration of this music. There is, for example, more than one Prince Kalendar with a story to tell in The Arabian Nights, and, as the composer himself noted, he did not by any means reserve the very first theme‑‑the so‑called "Sultan's theme"‑‑for that grim personage, but rather wove it into the entire fabric of the score without regard to the details of storytelling. It becomes the rolling ocean beneath Sinbad's ship in the first movement, and it appears as an element in the Prince Kalendar's tale, where the Sultan himself does not appear at all.

Even so, the theme presented first (and most often) by the solo violin quite clearly represents Sheherazade herself, telling her colorful tales and here and there inserting her warm‑hearted personality into them. But the composer, after first specifying the traditional titles, wrote in his memoirs, My Musical Life, that he had actually removed all hints as to the subject matter of the tales from a later edition of the score. He added that, in composing Sheherazade,

I meant these hints to direct but slightly the hearer's fancy on the path which my own fancy had traveled, and to leave more minute and particular conceptions to the will and mood of each. All I had desired was that the hearer, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy‑tale wonders and not merely four pieces played one after the other and composed on the basis of themes common to all the four movements. Why then, if that be the case, does my suite bear the name, precisely, of Sheherazade? Because this name and the title The Arabian Nights connote in everybody's mind the East and fairy‑tale wonders; besides, certain details of the musical exposition hint at the fact that all of these are various tales of some one person which happens to be Sheherazade) entertaining therewith her stern husband.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

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