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There is no one better to lead you on a musical tour of France than Bruno Ferrandis himself. SRS commissions a World Premiere by French composer Aubert Lemeland, known for creating works of great beauty and contemplation. This glorious holiday program features vocal stars Cyndia Sieden and Marcus DeLoach in choral gems that include an orchestra illuminated with dramatic strains of the organ.

 

Aubert Lemeland: In Memoriam

Following the composer's death on November 15, 2010, Pascal Ianco of Lemeland's Paris publisher wrote:

The homage of his native city La Haye-du-Puits and the commission of the Santa Rosa Symphony were the last joys he had in a long and busy life. I saw him shortly before his passing and he was still in high spirits. Aubert compared himself to the wounded American soldiers he met when he was a child. Somehow, he considered himself as "wounded in action," and was very emotional when he thought of the coming premiere in Santa Rosa. He was sure that, through music, time and space, will be created an affective tie, a link of solidarity between him and the audience.

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

Aubert Lemeland: Battle Pieces, Opus 174
World Premiere

The five pieces grouped under the general title Battle Pieces are composed for string orchestra and piano after my piano cycle, Les Ballades du soldat, Opus 171. This work was inspired by poetry written by American soldiers during WWII and published in the military newspaper Yanks.

Bernard Sugarman, a WW II veteran and longtime SRS audience member, will narrate the Lemeland world premiere composition. Sugarman, a former English teacher and actor, makes the piece come alive by reading poetic excerpts from soldiers' letters which introduce each movement.

The general title Battle Pieces was borrowed from the book Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War written by Herman Melville, a giant of world literature during the Civil War.

Battle Pieces is the result of a very long maturation, and it took a lot of time and trials until it arrived to its definitive form. The first versions, which were quite different, were only played on CDs and broadcasted, and performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Orquestra do Porto, the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne.

This definitive version is specially written for the string section of the Santa Rosa Symphony. This instrumentation allows for the most expressive musical approach. For like flowers or trees spreading out of their seeds, the five pieces that comprise the cycle grow out of these marvellous, heroic and deeply moving poems written by American soldiers during the most difficult circumstances.
—Aubert Lemeland

 

BATTLE PIECES (…and Aspects of the War…), Opus 174

 

1. Citizen Army

We are not professional soldiers,
Bullets were strange to us a year ago

We were the farmer – the teacher
We were the clerk – the businessman
We were the actor – the mechanic

Yes we were the citizens of last year
Now we are the citizen army

Since leaving peace
and our loves –
We have been taught:
to sleep as the warrior –
to eat as the soldier
to march as the fighter.
We build bridges – we students
We repair bombers – we artists
We cook food – we fathers
We shoot well, we butchers, we plumbers
We of the citizen-army.

Private Harold Feigenbaum
Lowry Field, Colorado


3. We are Young Men

We are young men; we love the youth of spring.
The warm, sweet April wind might be a choir,
Singing of other April loves (the sting
Of memory made soft with new desire).
In spring, when promises become a net
To catch the words we spoke for speaking's sake,
It seems to us we almost could forget
That death's the only promise we may make.

We are young men, and love's a young man's food,
And moonlight makes two shadows sharp and small
When lovers breath more magic into night.
But bombers need the moonlight for their mood:
A mood untender when their half-tons fall
And sing of love's destruction in their flight.

Sergeant Philip R. Benjamin
Maxton Army Air Base, North Carolina

5. On Permanence

These things shall not pass in the thunder –
The new grass,
The dandelion,
The breeze touching our ears.

Steel cannot obliterate
The quick bird,
Cotton in the sky,
The cricket song one hears.

They will be the same after the smoke –
The yellow hay,
The autumn leaf,
The thoughtful mountains.

The roar of death is weak against
A rain tattoo
The wind's howl,
Flirting of string mountains.

What bayonet can wound
Thick brown mud,
Ice fringe on an evergreen,
An incredulous waterfall?

There is no bullet
To shatter lightning,
Put out the sun,
Stop the silver magic of nightfall!

They will not pass in the thunder –
These things,
The mystery,
The power,
The omniscience we know.

But we may pass in the thunder,
Taking with us
The memory
Of them,
As we go.

T-4 Stan Flink
Iles Mariannes, 1945

Francis Poulenc: Gloria for Soprano, Orchestra and Chorus

Francis Poulenc was born in Paris on January 7, 1899, and died there on January 30, 1963. He composed the Gloria on a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation between May 1959 and June 1960. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Charles Munch, gave the world premiere on January 21 and 22, 1961; soprano soloist Adele Addison was joined by the Chorus pro Musica, Alfred Nash Patterson, conductor. The score calls for soprano soloist, mixed chorus, and an orchestra consisting of piccolo and two flutes (second doubling second piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, harp, and strings. Duration is about 28 minutes.

French composers have rarely been bashful about writing music whose main purpose was to give pleasure. It was French composers who began openly twitting the profundities of late Romantic music (especially Wagner and his followers), in the cheeky jests of Satie and in many works by the group that claimed him as their inspiration, the "Group of Six," which included Francis Poulenc.

During the first half of his career, Poulenc's work was so much in the lighter vein that he could be taken as a true follower of Satie's humorous sallies. That changed in 1935, when, following the death of a close friend in an automobile accident, Poulenc reached a new maturity, recovering his lost Catholic faith and composing works of an unprecedented seriousness, though without ever losing sight of his lighter style as well. From that time on, he continued to compose both sacred and secular works. Often he could shift even within the context of a single phrase from melancholy or somber lyricism to nose‑thumbing impertinence. But the more serious works include some of his largest, and the sheer size of them tends to change our view of the man's music from about the time of World War II, when he composed the exquisite a cappella choral work La Figure humaine, an underground protest to the German occupation.

He became an opera composer, first in the surrealist joys of Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias") in 1944 (performed 1947), but later in the very different religious opera Dialogues of the Carmelites (1956), set during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, and the one-woman opera La Voix humaine (1958), in which a woman talking to her lover for the last time on the telephone tries vainly to hold on to him. Critic Claude Rostand once wrote of Poulenc that he was "part monk, part guttersnipe," a neat characterization of the two strikingly different aspects of his musical personality, though the monk seemed more and more to predominate in his later years. Still, as Ned Rorem said in a memorial tribute, Poulenc was "a whole man always interlocking soul and flesh, sacred and profane."

As a composer with special gifts in setting words to music, Poulenc had already composed a great deal of choral music, in French and Latin, before turning to the Gloria. Many of his earlier unaccompanied sacred choruses had an intensely mystical quality. Of his major choral‑orchestral works, the Gloria is the only one that is predominantly festive and exuberant.

The text of the Gloria is regarded as one of the great prose hymns of Christian literature. Normally sung in the Latin Mass immediately after the Kyrie on festive occasions, the Gloria has also been used separately as a hymn of praise. As it is now employed, the text grew over an extended period until it reached its present form in the ninth century. Poulenc chooses to repeat a number of phrases in his setting in a way that is not liturgically appropriate; he evidently thought of his Gloria as a concert piece and not a work for the church service. The choral writing is far less contrapuntal than in the unaccompanied motets and choral songs. The voices instead form a block of timbral color around which the orchestral instruments weave their colorful parts.

The range of expression in the Gloria is so broad that some parts of the work attracted critical reactions when it was first performed. The second movement is among the most lighthearted movements in Poulenc's output. As he recalled:

The second movement caused a scandal; I wonder why? I was simply thinking, in writing it, of the Gozzoli frescoes in which the angels stick out their tongues; I was thinking also of the serious Benedictines whom I saw playing soccer one day.

The second and fourth movements are both rhythmically alive and generally lively in character, while the third and fifth sections are filled with that special mystical quality that was so much a part of Poulenc's personality. All in all, the Gloria, in its directness of approach, perfectly captures the faith of the man who said, "I want the religious spirit to be expressed clearly, out in the open, with the same realism that we see in romanesque columns." The Gloria may not be his most profound work, but it is assuredly among the most brilliant and life-affirming.

Gabriel Fauré: Requiem for Soprano, Baritone, Organ, Orchestra and Chorus, Opus 48

Gabriel Fauré was born in Pamiers, Ariège, on May 12, 1845, and died in Paris on November 4, 1924. The history of the Requiem, which extends between 1877 and 1900, is detailed below. Fauré conducted the first performance of the bulk of what we now know as the Requiem at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris on January 16, 1888, in memory of his parents. The final version with full orchestral accompaniment received its premiere at the Trocadéro on July 12, 1900, with Paul Taffanel conducting the Lamoureux Orchestra. In its fullest version the score calls for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed chorus, two each of flutes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, one harp organ, and strings. Duration is about 39 minutes.

Gabriel Fauré stands apart from almost all the significant composers of his age. His long life spans the period from Berlioz (who was composing La Damnation de Faust at the time of Fauré's birth) to Berg, who had completed Wozzeck three years before Fauré's death). The late romantic era and the rise of modernism was a time of noisy excess; Fauré's music, though, is quiet, subdued, even tentative in effect. When other composers were writing gigantic symphonies and tone poems or lengthy operas, he was turning out songs and chamber music. A composer of such artistic reserve is not likely to attract hordes of enthusiasts or to claim an important role for himself and his works. But the support that Fauré did attract was at the most exalted level—on the part of his fellow composers and his pupils, including Maurice Ravel, George Enescu, and Nadia Boulanger.

Born in the south of France, Fauré studied in Paris not at the hidebound Conservatoire but rather at the École Niedermeyer, where he received an unusually broad musical education in three respects that set him apart from the products of the "official school": a thorough understanding of older music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras, familiarity with the German tradition, including Bach and Beethoven, and a more-than-nodding acquaintance with such dangerous moderns as Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner—this last element through the good offices of the young Saint-Saëns, who from 1861 on was professor of piano at the school.

French music in the late nineteenth century was divided into highly politicized camps—the Wagnerians, the Franckists, the followers of Massenet, and others. Fauré kept largely to himself; even after making the customary pilgrimage to Bayreuth to hear the Ring, he revealed almost no influence of Wagner in his own work. He left virtually no big works of the kind that attract general audiences, but singers have always delighted in his exquisite songs, and chamber music performers have reveled in the range and variety of his work for various small ensembles. The two largest works to achieve general popularity are the suite arranged from his incidental music for a London production of Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, which dates from the late 1890s, and his largest choral work, the Requiem, the composition of which, in one stage or another, covered most of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Fauré's Requiem is absolutely typical of his work in its avoidance of melodrama or overblown effect. His conception was an intimate one, as far as possible from the heaven-storming theatrics of Berlioz's Requiem, which he detested. His careful selections from the liturgical text omitted all of the melodramatic images of the Last Judgment that had been dramatic high points for Berlioz and Verdi. When the work was first performed in 1888, in memory of the composer's parents, it consisted only of the following movements:

Introit et Kyrie Sanctus Pie Jesu Agnus Dei In Paradisum
It was scored for a small orchestra of low-pitched instruments (violas, cellos, double basses, harp, timpani, and organ) for a somber sonority brightened only by an unmuted solo violin in the Sanctus soaring high above the ensemble like an angel of grace. Almost at once he expanded on this original plan. By June 1889 he had completed the Offertoire, which now comes after the first movement. And he decided to make use, just before the end, of a Libera me for baritone and organ that he had composed as early as 1877 (this brings in the one brief passage that recalls the dramatic "Dies irae" of the full Requiem text). This version, complete in its number of movements and with an orchestra enlarged to include horns, trumpets, and trombones, was performed at the Church of Saint-Gervais on January 28, 1892. The third and last version (and the first to be published) involved the addition of woodwind parts and the reduction of the prominence of the organ; it has become the standard version of the work.

Even in its largest version, Fauré's Requiem is singularly tranquil, a work almost of classical elegance in its serenity and restraint. The chorus often sings in a chantlike manner with only a few outbursts ("Hosanna" in the Sanctus). One would be hard put to think of music more serene than the Pie Jesu or more graceful than the unison violins and violas—so similar in character to the ritornello of a Bach cantata aria—introducing and underlying the Agnus Dei. Only once, and very briefly at that, are we reminded of the fear of death that was the central image of other Requiem settings as the somber D-minor thread of the strings underlies the baritone's Libera me and the horns (but not the trumpets!) provide a nervous rhythmic background to the choral "Dies illa, dies irae"—the only explicit evocation of the Last Judgment in the score, and which flows, almost without break, into the delicate tranquility of the In Paradisum, where the harp and organ add a touch of celestial brilliance to the quiet close.

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