Pops Concert - May 8, 2009
- Spring Scape for Orchestra - Joseph Gerakines
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Spring Scape for Orchestra is a celebration of the changing of season in New England. After winter has stretched on for what seems like an eternity, there is that first warm day when outdoor life seemingly springs to life, and all of the frustrations of cold weather disappear instantly. From the spring thaw, represented by the strings in the introduction, to the first optimistic sounds of nature, represented by the woodwinds, the piece aims to capture the happiness that lies ahead from the very beginnings of spring through the summertime.
The piece is in sonata form in the key of C major, and borrows heavily from the parallel minor. After the first and second theme are established, the piece features a duet between the cellos and violas using thematic material from the exposition in the key of Eb. The development section builds up to the eventual climax back to C major before the second theme returns to begin the recapitulation, followed by the first theme and coda.
- - Joseph Gerakines, composer and LPO member
- Overture to "L'Italiana in Algeri" - Gioacchino Rossini
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Opera is a fine art, but it's also show business: this was never more true than in the Italian-speaking cities and towns of the early nineteenth century. By this time opera had existed for two hundred years, though its sounds had morphed from madrigal to sung declamation to ballad to virtuoso trillfest—audiences always wanted something new. And so a twenty-one-year-old composer, working in Europe's most singable language, spent his life on the road, overseeing new productions of his work or revivals of old ones (he had ten titles to his credit already) in as many cities or towns as had the forces to hire him. "The Italian Girl in Algiers" was a comic piece, but it went deeper than musical cartooning: its cheery, resourceful heroine has an expressive homesick moment…but the overall atmosphere is set in tonight's Overture. How quietly it begins (I wonder how long it took the average 1813 opera audience to realize that the music had started, when they'd finally hush their conversations to hear the charming plucked melody from the strings), how suddenly the whole pit-ensemble erupts…and then comes the pliant song of solo oboe. The main part of this Overture is an effervescent playoff of two different themes, offset by pulse-racing repetitive buildups that eventually pull the orchestra's full forces into joyous cascade.
- Overture to "All About Eve" - Alfred Newman
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Speaking of show business…it delights me to start the core of our "Celebrate Lowell!" presentation with this music from All About Eve. What is a star? A little girl who first saw sunlight on Chester Street brought a tough New England work-ethic to Hollywood glamour in becoming the Bette Davis we know; this 1950 movie brought her and other actors, writers, and the rest of the picture people to their best combined moment in this story of the great desire of glory on stage. Listen to the fanfare that starts this music and recurs: that is the crown to be reached for; hear the singing line that reaches up again and again… That is something that joins three women: the stage star Margo Channing (Ms. Davis), Eve Harrington, who longs to be one, and another woman who just observes—dear Karen Richards, who brings Eve to meet the stellar Margo, eventually helps Eve play a mischievous trick on the great star, and almost loses her own beloved husband in Eve's grand plan. Once or twice a melody in rich slow three, for Margo's own heart…and you also hear intermittently a serpentine, quirky little tune: a critic who watches the tale unfold and tells us All About it.
- Moxie One-Step Song - Norman Leigh
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Alfred Newman had been head of the music department at Twentieth Century Fox for ten years when he scored Eve; he also wrote the ubiquitous fanfare that preludes so many Fox movies. Earlier in the twentieth century, the ubiquitous musical element was song—ditties, serenades, and topical tunes were turned out in job lots (another movie character, Charles Foster Kane: "You buy a bag of peanuts in this town, you get a song written about you") for just about any conceivable reason, including advertising. For every imperishable, like 1905s "In My Merry Oldsmobile," hundreds must have been lost; we bring back, in our own Joe Gerakines's scoring, one which was just temporarily mislaid—you can hear that, in the sixteen years between the Oldsmobile song and tonight's paean to Moxie, Tin Pan Alley had started making at least a little room for ragtime. The sheet-music cover for this song depicts an earnest-looking young pharmacist, in key with Moxie's origin (in Lowell!) as an herbal tonic but rather at odds with the cheery tune.
- Noël from Symphonic Sketches, Suite for Orchestra - George Whitefield Chadwick
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Frequenters of these concerts might remember George Chadwick's story—born in Lowell, pulled out of high school by his father, studying music at home and then abroad through his own perseverance, returning to the U.S. with an offer of a job at New England Conservatory, compositions reliably programmed by the Boston Symphony. His weightier orchestral works, including three symphonies, belong to the earlier years of his mature production: once he had risen to the directorship of the Conservatory, his composing time was reduced to his summers on Martha's Vineyard, and shorter-form pieces became more predominant. Of the four pieces comprising the Symphonic Sketches (Chadwick indicated they could be performed in sequence or as separate events, and we have, more than once, opened concerts with the shimmering, rumbustious "Jubilee"), tonight's "Noël" acts as a tranquil slow movement. The sound of the English horn, singing the main melody at the start, breathes a pastoral air befitting the birth of the Good Shepherd. One of Chadwick's innovations at the Conservatory was the study of orchestration using actual pieces rather than conceptual models; when this melody returns after a masterly expansion of the instrumental forces, it is carried by mellow high trumpet—and the nature of the music, in its turns of harmony, blends artistic finesse with honest sentiment, at one with any nineteenth-century Boston Irishman singing about his mother.
- The Lark Ascending - Ralph Vaughn Williams
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What follows is more pure song, this time Ralph Vaughan Williams's from the heart of his beloved English landscape, bright with summer. This was music which Vaughan Williams had put into his desk in 1914, where it rested (along with his Second Symphony, an opera, and several other works) until he returned from war. Though past forty, the composer went to France to do his bit as a wagon orderly; though the world might have gone smash around him, when he returned to his desk to revise The Lark Ascending he did not draw brutal smudges across the open-air harmonies—he had assimilated English folk song as part of his own musical language. This is not to say that he lived in an unbreakable fairy-tale bubble: the Second Symphony (the "London") involved severe harmonic clashes in intermittent mood-pictures of the "city of dreadful Night." But that was not what he was doing with The Lark: this presents rapturous birdsong, not in mere imitation but including the breath-caught response of a rapt hearer whose own spirit rises into the limitless blue. Interestingly, Vaughan Williams's next symphony—whose first ideas moved through his mind when in France fetching and carrying for the Medical Corps—was his "Pastoral."
- "The Little Train of the Caipira" - Heitor Villa-Lobos
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A rather different countryside is evoked in our next music, from another composer in his forties. Heitor Villa-Lobos began writing the series of pieces called Bachianas Brasileiras on his return to Brazil at age 43, after years of travel —he had spent the years from 1923 to 1930 mostly in Paris. The responsibilities of a "national composer" met him on his return; in contrast to his earlier life, which had something of the bohemian to it, he was now concerned with, among other official matters, questions of musical education and training. The series of nine Bachianas was not without precedent: he had earlier written fourteen Choros for widely assorted ensembles from solo guitar on up to chorus-plus-orchestra. But where the Choros stem chiefly from Brazilian popular music, the Bachianas demonstrate the meeting-place Villa-Lobos found between his native folk idiom and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. "The Little Train" is one movement of the second Bachiana, and though the good-humored mechanical evocation was always part of the score (those high string harmonics like escaping steam, the busy percussion section, and that obvious slow swinging into action from the lowest voices at the piece's very start), the movement's formal name is Toccata. Very much in use in Bach's Baroque period, a toccata is free in form and is primarily concerned with brilliant figure-work at a keyboard instrument. Villa-Lobos's orchestral translation keeps the figures primarily in low strings and percussion—they are the train's engine, and sometimes display the catches and sputters of the sort of hard-working machinery you'd find in the back of beyond. Over this disciplined rumbling, scraps of song and dance tunes are floated…until the cellos gently power down; last exhalations of steam, and then a final punchy samba chord.
- Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral" - Ludwig van Beethoven
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Beethoven issued a disclaimer that went along with the descriptive movement-titles of his Sixth Symphony— "more a description of feeling than the painting of pictures." Perhaps he wanted to make sure his listeners were prepared for a symphony rather than a story…but a symphony, generally speaking, is a kind of story whose characters are musical themes. In this instance, Beethoven does not subject his"characters" to the trials of violent contrast, fragmentation, disorienting hurtles from key to key—we hear events and motion, but in a broader, calmer sweep. Beethoven's work on this symphony overlapped with the Fifth: taken together, the two symphonies act out the essential drama of contrast on which much long-form music is built.
And the two pieces were indeed "taken together" on the night of their first performance, two hundred years ago next month. This was a famously chaotic evening in a cold theater, with under-rehearsed forces: in those days, one didn't hire an orchestra—one first got a contract to use a theater, and then canvassed for players; in the scarce rehearsal time (imagine also the clusters of singers on site, waiting to rehearse the sections of the C Major Mass, which also got a hearing that same night) Beethoven's fierce temper overflowed to such an extent that he was ordered out of the hall at one point. At the concert itself, the Sixth Symphony came first on the program—the players were probably at their best for it, before cold fingers and fatigue set in (the last piece on the concert, the "Choral Fantasy" Beethoven threw together for this event, actually fell apart).
A creature of town and city, Beethoven consciously sought out intervals of country peace—and yes, he carried along a sheaf of note-paper to jot down his illegible musical thoughts as he walked. In shaping the piece he allowed his thunderstorm to breach the expected order of symphonic business: it makes an unexpected extra movement between scherzo and finale. (Tonight's performance, in celebration of the new complete set of four kettledrums, features Arturo Toscanini's amplification of Beethoven's original thunderstorm, which only used the two drums which were customary in 1808.) Yet it bridges the movements, and further grants the philosophical listener an image of Nature impinging on human-made structure; similarly, Beethoven put in the customary exposition-repeat in the first movement, but I choose not to take it tonight, for reasons attached to his description: one can have only one first impression, first arrival, first sigh of relief.
- - V. R. Taylor
Fanfare for the Common Man - Aaron Copland
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- They didn’t call themselves the "Greatest Generation"—all the people I know in the cohort who fought World War II, kept the conveyor-belts running at home, and collected scrap metal are kind of abashed at the title given them by grateful juniors. Their own attitude is typified in the title of Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," written on commission from the Cincinnati Symphony in 1942. Copland was one of eighteen composers invited to write a fanfare for the orchestra, each performed as part of regular-season concerts in an ongoing hurrah for the war effort—what happened to the other seventeen pieces? This, obviously, is the one that lasted, with its clear strong utterances in a clean American rhetoric (European fanfares, even by the middle twentieth century, still preserve something of a doff to royalty) over intermittent, powerful percussion blows. The "Fanfare" comes from the same year as Copland's second "Western" ballet, Rodeo, and a year before the first version of his Appalachian Spring ballet; as the war rolled to a close, he used it as the core of the finale of his Third Symphony… much in the way the "common men," returning home from the war, set about the more complex, extended work of building the peace.
- Son and Stranger Overture - Felix Mendelssohn
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For a composer who gave us such a volume of well-loved and much-played pieces—the Midsummer Night's Dream music, the "Hebrides" Overture, Elijah, the Italian, Scottish, and Reformation Symphonies, the ineffable Violin Concerto—Mendelssohn's two-hundredth birthday last month passed by with remarkably little festivity. Possibly institutional planners were afflicted by a kind of embarrassment: isn't there something suspect about music that charms us so readily? And Mendelssohn's own story—where is the drama, the fearful struggles and hard-won triumph? His family life was too happy, privileged, and loving for the standard narrative; his talents flowered early and were supported, even nourished, at home; the only real disappointment in his professional life was the new King of Prussia's failure to push through certain artistic reforms… but when Berlin failed Mendelssohn, Leipzig was waiting with open arms. And how hard did he find the work of creation? Difficult to tell, from his tidy manuscripts; we've accepted an image, erroneous and incomplete, of a serenely smiling sphinx.
Tonight's Overture, "Son and Stranger," has a late opus number (89), but this is another erroneous impression: only the first seventy-two in the catalogue were numbered by Mendelssohn and published while he lived. (The next forty-nine opus numbers, from work early and late in his life, were prepared for publication after his death, and well over a hundred other works remain unnumbered.) Chronologically, its nearest neighbors include the overtures "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" and "The Hebrides": while these two are stand-alone concert pieces for orchestra, tonight's piece is the prelude to a choral stage-work. It comes from the year Mendelssohn was twenty: his parents pressed him to leave the nest and travel, and so he crossed salt-water for the first time, concertized in London, and then pressed north into Scotland, whose sights and atmospheres gave him the inspiration for "The Hebrides" and the Scottish Symphony. But the young man made sure to be back in Berlin in time to stage a present for his parents on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary—the song-play whose Overture we present, and whose title, "Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde," can be more literally (if lumpily) translated as "Turning Home from Foreign Parts."
- Piano Concerto No. 2 - Sergei Rachmaninoff
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At the head of the title page of the score of Sergei Rachmaninoff's ever-green Second Piano Concerto stands a dedication: "A Monsieur N. Dahl." If this sent one to lists of musical notables in Moscow and St. Petersburg of the time around 1901, the search would come up empty, or put one on the wrong track—the dedicatee, Nikolai Dahl, was a doctor, with an interesting sideline in what might now be called auto-suggestion. Rachmaninoff had graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892 in composition and piano performance, at the top of his class, yet his formidable piano technique (aided by nature's gift of singularly large and flexible hands) combined with his drive to create put him, repeatedly, in the genius quandary: when practicing and adding to his repertoire, he wanted to be writing; when pursuing a compositional idea, he wondered if his hands were going slack… When the 1897 première of his first large orchestral composition, his Symphony No.1, was a complete failure, the result was not only depression but a three-year creative drought. He could still play, and made his London debut during this period; he also began conducting (at an opera company, the best school of all for conductors!), yet his friends were troubled at his continued downheartedness, and brought him in the end, in 1900, to Dr. Dahl. Rachmaninoff remembered weeks of visits to the doctor's study, where he sat relaxed in an armchair while Dr. Dahl gently intoned, "You will begin work on your new concerto… the ideas will come readily… you will work easily and well… " and further variations on this heartening theme. That summer, he did indeed commence the Second Concerto, and the second and third movements were ready for performance before the end of the year. The first movement, which we present tonight, joined them in the next few months—the pianist is alone at the beginning, tolling the instrument like a primal clock before the orchestra begins unrolling the first theme, towing its load across the landscape like a spiritual Volga boatman. The movement varies this and a second theme, which aspires upwards only to fall lower again with a kind of sigh—this is music, certainly, by one who knows gloom, but he has made of it such sumptuous, glamorous gloom…
- Concerto Grosso, Opus 6, No. 12 in B minor - George F. Handel
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As we know, a concerto signifies a work—usually, but not always, in multiple contrasting sections—for solo instrument and orchestra; in the eighteenth century, multiple soloists turned such a work into a "concerto grosso." A supreme master of this form, a generation before Handel, was Arcangelo Corelli; fortunately he was still alive during Handel's years in Italy. Then in his early twenties, Handel had brought with him from the German North excellent keyboard skills and a keen sense of fugal counterpoint; his melody-writing, though, was relatively weak. This was gloriously mended in Italy, the land of the singing voice; in Rome, where opera had been forbidden by Papal decree, some of the melodic urge was transferred to the violin. Here it was that Corelli played off bright solo lines against the warm dark of larger groups of players, and here it was that Handel met the older man and imbibed this sense of texture. The twelve concerti grossi (or "Grand Concertos," as they were called in London, where Handel wrote them) of which tonight's is the last were written in less than a month, when Handel was roughly the same age Corelli had been when they met; here the form is infused with Handel's own drama in the stark, strong rhythms of the opening section, and with the noble, profound breadth of melody the Italian muse had awakened in him—the E major middle movement is the chief reason I chose this concerto. But Handel, as man and musician, also had flashes of humor: the last movement is a fugue and a jig at the same time.
- Symphony No. 2, "Little Russian" - Peter I. Tchaikovsky
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By the time Tchaikovsky was aware of himself as a creative musician, the continuing dispute in Russian thought between people open to ideas from further West and those who were for the Slavic in all things—an argument which began around 1703 when Peter the Great uprooted the government from ancient Moscow and transplanted it to his new city on the Baltic, and started calling himself Emperor instead of Tsar—had made its way into music. A clutch of composers around Tchaikovsky's own age made up a self-aware and cockily dogmatic club of Slavophiles ("the Mighty Handful"), and were inclined to dismiss Tchaikovsky because he had not only been schooled in the new Conservatory in St. Petersburg, but (even worse!) taught composition at its newer sibling school in Moscow. But one evening, according to the diary of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (one of the Handful), Tchaikovsky visited the apartment where the group was gathered, and when asked what he was working on, sat down at the piano and played a sketch version of the first movement of tonight's Symphony. The slowish introduction begins with a folk melody, "Down by the Volga"—and its use and transformations astounded his hearers. (This theme returns in the main body of the movement, but the five-note motif which first gets the Allegro-vivo engine cranking is identical to the church-chant opening of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Russian Easter" Overture, which followed the Tchaikovsky symphony by some fifteen years. Rimsky-Korsakov's take, though, is intoned at priestly length, Tchaikovsky's is sharply uttered, and tossed rapidly around the orchestra.)
The writing of this Second Symphony was blessedly easier than that of the First, a protracted, obsessive labor of almost two years; looking back on the summer of 1872, Tchaikovsky noted with amusement that, despite the round of country-house visits, he'd managed to sketch and organize practically the whole piece. After six years of conservatory teaching, he was an expert vacation-taker; he also was fortunate that his sister had married into a large, generous family with manor-houses out in the country. Specifically, in the province of Kiev, part of the region which has gained autonomy as Ukraine but in Tchaikovsky's time was known as "Little Russia"—in the days when "folk music" was not carefully transmitted in elementary schools but was part of the natural atmosphere of living, it was by a kind of osmosis that tunes in the air made it into Tchaikovsky's pen: not only the one in the first movement, but a fast dance that pops up as the "Trio" theme in the helter-skelter third movement, and "The Crane," which essentially takes over the last movement. The Mighty Handful rejoiced when the Symphony was first performed, but some of the conservatory set were rather disdainful—it may be in answer to that latter reaction that Tchaikovsky revised the piece six years later before publication. To those in the audience (and among the players!) who reach the end of the last movement out of breath, allow me to say that the first version of it was even longer!
- - V. R. Taylor
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