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Sunday, October 15, 2017

Program Notes

Prelude and Quadruple Fugue, Op. 128

Alan Hovhaness (Born in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1911; died in Seattle, Washington in 2000)

Born to an Armenian father and a Scottish mother who had emigrated to the Boston suburbs, the young Hovhaness learned “world music” early in a familial mix of Scottish folk tunes and Armenian Church chants in the midst of an American musical culture.  He found that his own music was running around in his head at the age of four and presumed that he should write it down, coming up with his own notation system to do so.  Of course, he then learned music through private teachers and schools, but his earliest experience with music rather sets the tone for Hovhaness’s career: that of a free thinker, keenly interested in music from other cultures, and driven to compose.  Alongside this was Hovhaness’s lifelong passion for astronomy, mysticism and a very deeply felt spirituality.  By the time he wrote his last work in 1995, Hovhaness had written over 500 works, 67 of them Symphonies, and throughout them all is a devotion to tonality and a desire to express his mystical wonderment.

In 1936, American avant-garde composer and friend, Lou Harrison, challenged Hovhaness to write a “proper” two-voice fugue such as Bach would have done.  Hovhaness doubled the bet and wrote a quadruple fugue in his String Quartet No. 1.  He later revised that Quartet’s Prelude and its four-voice fugue for full orchestra in 1954, saying that, he needed the “instrument” of the orchestra to fully expose the colors of his piece.  This is especially so in the Prelude where the main theme is accompanied by wispy group strums on the violins (as if they were guitars) and seemingly random glissandi (pitch sliding) plucks on the lower strings.  The Prelude is a pensive meditation – a slow ambling in the way a person walks while deep in thought or prayer.  Its main theme is a lovely Hovhaness creation, sensual and Eastern in flavor (Hovhaness would turn first to Armenian, and then to Eastern melody and modes more and more in his life’s work) and it’s a moment out of time, mysteriously lovely.  The inner reverie builds to a brass-filled climax – beautiful and expansive.  The quadruple fugue is then launched and it’s quite the tour-de-force, but despite its academic rigor, Hovhaness makes it feel effervescent.  The last two themes are marked increasingly faster and the closing bars are a whirlwind of excitement.

Hovhaness was always a maverick in exploring different ways of making music well before the rest of American musicians.  For example, it was Hovhaness who introduced sitarist Ravi Shankar to the American music scene in 1956.  Likewise, Hovhaness admired Sibelius long before he became so wildly popular in the United States.  Sibelius appreciated Hovhaness’s music as well, and the two composers became lifelong friends; Hovhaness named his daughter Jean Christina in homage (to Jean Christian Sibelius) and Sibelius was her godfather.  The Sibelian influence can be heard in the ending to Hovhaness’s Prelude particularly, and then again in the ending of the Fugue, when magnificent block brass chords organically arise out of the fabric of the music, echoing a technique that Sibelius was famous for.

Violin Concerto in D-minor, Op. 45

  1. Allegro moderato
  2. Adagio di molto
  3. Allegro ma non tanto

Jean Christian Sibelius (Born in Tavestehus (Hämeenlinna), Finland in 1865; died in Järvenpää, Finland in 1957)

Sibelius’s Violin Concerto is one of the most popular, most performed, and most recorded concertos in the repertoire.  It’s undeniably one of his crowning achievements, which is fitting, given his first love was the violin.  Before taking up his composer’s pen Sibelius desperately wanted to become a violin virtuoso but it never happened.  Perhaps he started too late, having begun his quest at the rather late age of 16, or perhaps he simply didn’t have the heart of a virtuoso; but when he came to the realization that he would never be a star, he was crestfallen.  Even at the age of 50, Sibelius still pined about it in his diary.  But his unfulfilled journey as a violinist eventually turned Sibelius’s sights to writing this masterpiece Concerto in honor of his beloved instrument, a “Concerto for himself,”  as some have called it.   Begun in 1899, Sibelius completed the first version in 1904, then revised it to its current form in 1905.  It’s a composer-violinist’s work, filled with compositional mastery with ingenious and natural solo writing.  When it was nearing completion, Sibelius was “on fire,” as his wife, Aino, described it:

“J[ean] … has such a multitude of themes in his head that he has been literally quite dizzy. He stays awake all night, plays [the violin parts] incredibly beautifully, cannot tear himself away from the delightful melodies…”

Indeed, the work is a dizzying piece of magic.  It opens with a quiet, pulsing orchestra, evoking the dead of the arctic night with the Finnish northern lights glittering in the heavens.  A lonely solitary voice ruminates as the violin soloist slowly unfolds a main theme.  From then on the concerto becomes one of the most unique works in the repertoire. American composer, John Adams, more generally described it as filled with “thematic deliquescence, ever-evolving forms, [and] unearthly timbres.”  Sibelius makes it prance between being a full showcase for the soloist (as one of the most difficult in the violin repertoire) and a symphony with a soloist.  It’s a marvelous bit of writing, where the music is structured like a symphonic movement yet sounds like a violin rhapsody.  And the themes are beautiful and rich – they are indeed the “delightful melodies” his wife said kept him awake with composing.

The second movement remains in dark timbres, generally, and feels at first like an orchestral extension of the first movement’s opening rumination.  The solo violin soon joins in with a sweet and longing tune.  Interestingly, it takes almost four minutes for the dark hues to rise above the human speaking range, as Sibelius deeply explores shadows and night hues in this Concerto.  There are several touching moments in this Adagio, filled with a kind of Tchaikovskian pathetique, amidst an overall gentleness and lyricism.  It ends with a fragility that is rare for Sibelius.

The finale is wonderfully matchless.  Sibelius described it once as a danse macabre but musicologist Donald Francis Tovey delighted in it as a “polonaise for polar bears.”  It begins rowdily with the orchestra and the timpani playing a rumbling hocket – each playing part of a larger rhythm – while the soloist jangles and invents all manner of virtuosity in its playful themes.  Listen for a particularly fun moment where the bassoons play a long, climbing chromatic line, like a slow-motion siren, creating the feeling of a capsizing iceberg.  It’s a splendid and unforgettable movement, filled with quirkiness and an earthy kind of grace.  And it’s a terrific showstopper for the soloist to end one of the great Concertos in Western music.

Symphony in C

  1. Allegro vivo
  2. Adagio
  3. Allegro vivace
  4. Allegro vivace

Georges Bizet (Born in Paris in 1838; died in Bougival, France in 1875)

The son of musicians, Bizet gravitated towards a career in music very early.  He was a prodigy in the heritage of Mozart and Mendelssohn, and he entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 9.  By 1855, age of 17, he had begun studying with Charles Gounod, France’s most eminent composer (creator of the opera Faust and St. Cecilia’s Mass).  Bizet was star-struck, it seems, saying some years later to his teacher “You were the beginning of my life as an artist. … You are the cause, I am the consequence.”  Bizet’s talents were not lost on Gounod, either.  Although there is no direct evidence telling us the reason why Bizet wrote this ambitious youthful work that is his Symphony in C, it seems that in order to prep Bizet to compete for the extremely coveted Prix de Rome for composition, Gounod assigned his student the task of writing a symphony, one of the prerequisites for the competition.  It wouldn’t be surprising in this scenario, then, that Bizet modeled his student homework after his idol’s own – Gounod’s Symphony No. 1 in D (1855).  Bizet did indeed win the Prize in 1857, with this Symphony and the other required compositions.

Bizet finished his symphony-assignment in less than a month, but it was quickly put aside.  Although writing a symphony might be a good exercise for winning the Prix de Rome, in Paris, theater music and operas were all the rage.  It might also have been that Bizet’s Symphony so resembled Gounod’s Symphony that to publish it would have been disrespectful and detrimental to his career.  Whatever the reason, the Symphony was forgotten about until 1933 when it was discovered in the Archives of the Paris Conservatoire’s library.  It was immediately recognized as one of Bizet’s early masterpieces, and even with its similarities to Gounod’s Symphony, critics agree that Bizet’s far outshines his teacher’s work.

The first movement is bright and fast-paced, much like an early Mozart or Haydn symphony would be.  What is clearly Bizet, though, is the wonderful main theme featuring the oboe, and later, the flute – two instruments that will dominate in Bizet’s music later in life.  The movement ends leaving us with a feeling of charm and grace.

While the first movement will convince us of how charming Bizet can be, we only begin to understand how musically gifted he was with this remarkable Adagio movement.  The opening chords transport us away from the bustle of the first.  The main theme follows and features the oboe again; by now you’ll notice Bizet’s love of exotic sounding melodies which meander and snake about, charming us into his unique musical world.  This early work gives strong hints of the kind of themes and orchestration that will make his great masterpiece, the opera Carmen, come to life in 1875.  When we recall that Bizet was just 17 when he composed this, comparisons to Mozart and Mendelssohn are justified.

The next movement is vigorous and spirited, a two-step dance with splendid accents and forward motion.  The middle portion is rustic but graceful, again featuring oboe and flute, with some rich harmonic moments.

The last movement is an “off-to-the-races” kind of finale, bristling with energy and joyfulness.  Again, it’s a remarkable work for a 17 year old – a marvel in the lovely way Bizet uses the whole array of orchestral colors to imbue this finale with ever-changing color and exciting effects.  It’s a bit of a devil to perform for both strings and winds, but so very delightful for the audience.

Program Notes by Max Derrickson