Performances at: Wells Fargo Center for the Arts
50 Mark West Springs Rd. Santa Rosa, CA 95403

Single tickets $27-$55 (senior and student discounts available)
Mini Series Subscriptions still available
54-MUSIC (707-546-8742)

 

 

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

Carter:Holiday Overture for Orchestra

Elliott Cook Carter was born in New York City on December 11, 1908, and now lives in Waccabuc, New York. He composed his Holiday Overture on Fire Island, New York, in the summer of 1944 to celebrate the liberation of Paris. The first performance was given by the Frankfurt Symphony under the direction of Hans Blumer in 1946. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, slapstick, tam-tam, triangle, piano, and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes.

Elliott Carter, who reached his 101st birthday last month, was never a “fast” composer, but he has consistently moved forward, starting rather slowly and carefully, finding his own unique voice as he entered his forties, and becoming gradually more prolific as he has grown older. Indeed, since his 90th birthday, he has continually surprised the musical world with the originality and fecundity of his invention. His long career has taken him from a youthful friendship with Charles Ives, who encouraged him to pursue music, to his present preeminent stance among American composers.

Some hint of where his music would go in later years is already apparent here and there in his early compositions. The Holiday Overture, for example, though in many respects close to Aaron Copland’s populist scores of the same period, involves rhythmic complexities and Ivesian disruptions that Copland would not have used. It opens in a deliberately popular style owing, surely, to Carter’s desire to make a public and festive musical statement at the news of the liberation of Paris—where he had studied with Nadia Boulanger—by the Allied armies. Serge Koussevitzky was one of the judges that selected Carter’s work as the winner of the Independent Music Publishers’ Contest in 1945. Copland tried to persuade Koussevitzky to perform the piece in Boston Symphony programs, but, though he had the score and parts in the BSO library, he kept postponing the performance (trained in the old Russian school about the turn of the century, Koussevitzky was uncomfortable with complex modern rhythms). In the end the work received its premiere, ironically, from a German orchestra that had been reestablished by the American Occupation Army in Frankfurt and that chose to perform American music at least in part to present itself as denazified.

The overture opens with a bright diatonic fanfare that does not prepare us for its extraordinarily complex conclusion. Over the course of its length, the overture passes from the cheerful assertiveness of its opening to an astonishing degree of complexity—in the words of David Schiff, “a carefully built musical time-bomb.” Already Carter employs complicated syncopations, polyphonic figures at odds with the basic meter. Different layers move at different speeds, and some of these create counterpoint within themselves, thus further enriching the texture. The muted trumpets introduce a chorale-like figure against more rapidly moving string parts. It continues to take on added significance in long note values in a line that moving in the brass instruments. Still the texture grows more rhythmically complex, but the chorale theme appears simultaneously at several different speeds so that fast music and slow music combine in a powerful and violent sonic experience.

Corigiliano:Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, The Red Violin

John Paul Corigliano was born on February 16, 1938, in New York, where he lives. The concerto was composed in 2003 for Joshua Bell, using material derived from his score to the 1998 film The Red Violin. It was first performed by Bell with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Marin Alsop on September 19, 2003. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for three flutes (doubling two piccolos, alto flute), two oboes, two clarinets (second doubling bass clarinet, two bassoons (second doubling contrabassoon), four horns, two trumpets (second doubling piccolo trumpet), three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano/celesta, harp, and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes.

Though he frequently transforms music conceived for one purpose to an entire new use, John Corigliano has created at least three complete scores out of material first conceived for the fascinating 1998 film The Red Violin. Much of the soundtrack for The Red Violin was composed before the film was shot, because the actors playing the roles of the violin’s various owners over three centuries had to mime playing this music on the striking instrument. The violin is shown being built by a great (fictitious) 17th-century instrument maker, whose wife, Anna, dies in childbirth as the instrument is nearing completion; Anna’s soul is somehow felt to have entered into the instrument, making it unusually responsive to all those who play it later.

To depict the continuity of the instrument over changing generations, Corigliano composed a modern chaconne, a form known from the Baroque era, in which a sequence of chords is repeated over and over to provide the basis for variations. These variations reflected the performers who owned the instrument at different times, playing the variations in a style contemporaneous to them. Joshua Bell was booked to perform the solo part on the soundtrack (which won the Academy Award in 1999), and he began to perform the Chaconne in concert with various orchestras even before the film appeared. Later Corigliano turned the film score into a 24-minute suite, offering a kind of survey of the film’s dramatic arc with the solo violin as leading character. And finally, in 2003, at the request of Joshua Bell, he reworked the material yet again for a formal concerto.

The concerto’s opening movement is that Chaconne, which, by itself, is almost as long as the other three combined. Regarding this music, the composer has written,

The Chaconne had given me the opportunity to strip away any inhibitions and write a passionate and romantic essay that I probably would not have written had it not been accompanying a film. It bypassed my ‘censor button,’ I liked what I heard, and it came very naturally.

The second movement is a fleet ‘Pianissimo Scherzo’ in which the dynamics are soft, but the action is wild and colorful. I wanted to break the romantic mood of the first movement with sonoric and timbral effects that create a sparkling, effervescent energy. A central trio is distantly related to ‘Anna’s theme,’ here heard in knuckle-breaking double harmonics by the soloist—high, ethereal, and dance-like.

The third movement ‘Andante Flautando’ starts with an intense recitativo that is more closely related to the film’s main theme, but soon gives way to a gentle rocking melody played by the soloist in an unusual manner.

The final movement ‘Accelerando Finale’…is a rollicking race in which the opposed forces of soloist and orchestra vie with each other. They each accelerate at different times and speeds, providing a virtuoso climate befitting a last movement. Some other unusual techniques are used here: the violin (and orchestral strings) are asked to press so hard on their strings that there is not a pitch at all, just a crunch. This percussive and unusual sound provides energy, especially during the races. A major theme from the film that was not used in the Chaconne was that given to Morritz, the contemporary violin expert who discovers the mystery of the Red Violin. [Winding and twisting], it is a sadly romantic theme and becomes the lyrical counterpoint to the high spirit of this finale. Near the end of the work, the original Chaconne from the first movement comes back to complete the Concerto’s journey.

— John Corigliano

Copland:El Salón México for Orchestra

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900, and died in New York on December 2, 1990. He composed El Salón México between 1933 and 1936, partly in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and partly in Mexico. Carlos Chávez led the first performance with the Orquesta Sinfónica de México on August 27, 1937. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and optional English horn, two clarinets, optional E-flat clarinet and optional bass clarinet, two bassoons and optional contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets (3rd optional), three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, wood block, guiro, cymbals, bass drum, xylophone, suspended cymbal, temple blocks, tambourine, piano, and strings. Duration is about 11 minutes.

Aaron Copland always enjoyed traveling, and Mexico was a favorite goal. On his first trip there in 1932, he conceived the idea of an orchestral piece based on Mexican themes, connecting the idea with popular dance hall in Mexico City called Salón Mexico. He was not trying to reflect “the more profound side of Mexico... All that I could hope to do was to reflect the Mexico of the tourists.” The dance hall was a particularly wild place, where guards casually frisked everyone entering to confirm that all weapons had been checked at the door. Copland actually found the basic Mexican tunes (which he treats very freely) in books. He chose the tunes partly for their local color, particularly for the lively rhythmic variety so characteristic of Latin music—and especially fit for Copland’s own tricky rhythmic play.

The piece was first performed in a two-piano version (Copland and John Kirkpatrick) at the New School for Social Research in New York on October 11, 1935. That winter, in the distinctly un-Mexican town of Bemidji, Minnesota (a town famously as cold as Mexico is hot), he completed the orchestration. He worried that the piece might not sound at all Mexican to the orchestra and conductor who premiered the score, but the Mexican orchestra was honored that a foreign composer had found their melodies worthy of orchestral treatment.

El Salón México was equally popular in Boston when Serge Koussevitzky led the first Boston Symphony performance, recording it soon after—the first recording of any orchestral work by Copland). It marked the beginning of a “populist” stage of Copland’s creative career that established him firmly as the favorite American composer of his generation. El Salón México is not simply a medley, but a freely constructed orchestral work imaginatively based on Mexican source material and demonstrating (as Leonard Bernstein wrote after hearing the Boston performance in 1938) that “a composer is just as serious when he writes a [lighter] work, even if the work is not defeatist...and Weltschmerzy and misanthropic and long.” Copland’s short and sprightly piece bristles with energy, color, and life.

Barber:Symphony No. 1 in One Movement,
Opus 9

Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died in New York on January 23, 1981. He began his first symphony in the summer of 1935 in Maine and finished at Roquebrune, in the French Alps, on February 24, 1936. The score is dedicated to Gian-Carlo Menotti. Bernardino Molilnari led the first performance with the Rome Philharmonic on December 13, 1936. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, harp, and strings. Duration is about 19 minutes.

Samuel Barber grew up in a musical family (his aunt was the great contralto Louise Homer; her husband, Sidney Homer, was a composer), and he began play the piano at six and compose the following year. Uncle Sidney encouraged his composition with letters full of advice, and by the time the boy was seventeen, his aunt had begun including some of his early songs on her recital programs to great success.

Barber’s style was always conservative, emphasizing the long lyrical line and relatively traditional tonal harmonies. His setting of language was felicitous, and his ear for color acute. All of these strengths made him for many years one of the most popular of American composers. Though by the time of his death he felt himself to be an outsider in the musical world, his music has been heard more frequently in recent years and appreciated for its craft and expressive directness.

In 1934 Barber submitted samples of his work in an application for the Prix de Rome, which would let him study for two years at the American Academy in Rome with an annual stipend, a free studio, and residence. But the jury turned him down. A year later, he resubmitted the same pieces (under the pseudonym “John Brandywine”), and the same jury awarded him the prize! During the summer of 1935 he had begun his first symphony before leaving for Rome then (having done some sightseeing in the Eternal City) finished it by February 24, 1936, dedicating the score to his long-time friend Gian-Carlo Menotti.

The premiere took place in Rome on December 13. The following summer Artur Rodzinski opened the Salzburg Festival—a stalwart bastion of European music—with Barber’s work, the very first time a piece by an American composer had been performed there.

Though the symphony is officially cast “in one movement,” Barber has arranged it to suggest a traditional four-movement symphony, though a very compact one. Barber described his plan for the New York premiere:

It is based on the three themes of the initial Allegro ma non troppo, which retain throughout their fundamental character. The Allegro ma non troppo opens with the usual exposition of a main theme, a more lyrical second theme, and a closing theme. After a brief development of the three themes, instead of the customary recapitulation, the first theme in diminution [i.e., played in smaller note values, making it faster] forms the basis of a scherzo section (vivace). The second theme (oboe over muted strings) then appears in augmentation [i.e., played in larger note values, so that it sounds slower], in an extended Andante tranquillo. An intense crescendo introduces the finale, which is a short passacaglia based on the first theme (introduced by violoncelli and contrabassi), over which, together with figures from other themes, the closing theme is woven, thus serving as a recapitulation for the entire symphony.

Barber modestly avoids praising the romantic richness of his orchestration, the variety of moods and sonorities that he extracts from his basic materials, or the sense of dramatic energy that his compact symphony achieves—a remarkable creation for a composer just in his early adulthood and on the verge of a major career.

back to top