Wunderkinds of Music
November 30, 2008 — 3 pm
Sanders Theatre
Beatrice Affron, Guest Conductor
Finalists, 2008 Concerto Competition, Guest Soloists
Ravel,
Le Tombeau de Couperin
1. Prélude
2. Forlane
3. Menuet
4. Rigaudon
Haydn,
Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major, First Movement
Eli Kaynor, Cello
Haydn,
Trumpet Concerto in E-Flat Major, First Movement
Nathaniel Meyer, Trumpet
Mozart,
Flute Concerto No. 1 in G Major, K. 313, First Movement
Katherine Griffith, Flute
Intermission
Resphighi,
Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite 3
1. Italiana
2. Arie di Corte
3. Siciliana
4. Passacaglia
Haydn,
Symphony No. 82
1. Vivace assai
2. Allegretto
3. Menuet e Trio
4. Finale: Vivace
Maurice Ravel
Le tombeau de Couperin
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure near Saint Jean de Luz, Basses Pyrénées, in the Basque region of France just a short distance from the Spanish border, on March 7, 1875, and died in Paris on December 28, 1937. He composed the Tombeau de Couperin as a suite for piano solo in six movements between 1914 and 1917; he orchestrated four of these movements in 1919; the orchestral suite was first performed in Paris on 28 February 1920, Rhené Baton conducting. The score calls for a modest orchestra consisting of two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, and strings. Duration is about 17 minutes.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French poets frequently wrote short poems or assembled collections of such poems commemorating the death of a notable person. Such poems were called tombeaux ("tombstones"). Usually the deceased person to be so honored was of the high nobility, though occasionally the death of a great poet, like Ronsard, might generate an outpouring of literary tributes. During the seventeenth century the tombeau tradition was adopted by French composers, who wrote their works most frequently for solo lute or solo harpsichord, usually in the form of a slow, stately dance movement. A group of French composers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concerned with recapturing some of the history of the French musical tradition, began reusing the neo classical dance forms in their compositions. Ravel was the first to reuse the term tombeau in his tribute to his great predecessor François Couperin (1668 1733), whose music shares with Ravel's own a characteristic concern for grace, elegance, and decoration.
The original piano solo version of Le tombeau de Couperin occupied Ravel some three years, on and off, during the devastating course of World War I, which was personally shattering to him. The piano work was a tombeau not only to the Baroque composer Couperin but also to deceased friends each of the six movements was dedicated to a victim of the war. The piano version contained the following sections: Prélude, Fugue, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet, and Toccata. When Ravel decided to orchestrate the work in 1919, he omitted the Fugue and Toccata entirely, and he reversed the positions of the Menuet and Rigaudon.
The music of Ravel's Tombeau is not really an evocation of Couperin's own style—not even in a very extended way. Ravel simply hoped to pay tribute to the entire French musical tradition (then evidently under attack, culturally as well as militarily, from Germany). In its orchestral guise, the Prélude, with its running sixteenth note figurations, makes extended demands on the articulation and breath control of the woodwind players, especially the oboist. The Forlane is fetchingly graceful, delicate, and highly polished. (Oddly enough, given Ravel's evident intention of commemorating French music, the Forlane is an old dance from Italy, not France!) Ravel was evidently especially fond of the Menuet, which was the last music to be seen on his music rack when he died in 1937. And the Rigaudon, with its brassy outbursts, brings the Tombeau to a cheerful and lively conclusion.
Ottorino Resphighi (1879-1936)
Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite 3
Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna, Italy, on July 9, 1879, and died in Rome on April 18, 1936. He composed three sets of Ancient Airs and Dances—in 1917, 1923, and 1931. The third suite calls for string orchestra. Duration is about 19 minutes.
Respighi wrote music of extraordinary color and orchestral brilliance, partly, no doubt, a consequence of his having studied orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov during the years he served as principal violist in the orchestra of the St. Petersburg opera. He continued to perform even after returning to Italy and making composition his principal activity. Though his best known works are the three large suites celebrating various facets of life in his native Rome (The Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals), Respighi also wrote eight operas. Moreover, he was interested in early music, and this led to a number of "archaizing" works like a Piano Concerto in the mixolydian mode, and a Concerto gregoriano for violin. Some of his energetic attention to early Italian music was turned to the act of arranging older works in a more modern guise. The best known of these hybrids between musicology and composition are arrangements of Italian Renaissance and Baroque music under the titles Ancient Airs and Dances and The Birds, derived from compositions for lute and harpsichord respectively.
They represented both a cheerful updating of the past and an assertion of nationalist pride, since each set drew upon the large body of Italian solo lute music published in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Respighi begins the third suite with an anonymous song of the time, which he labeled Italiana. The second movement is built of six Arie di Corte, or "airs of the court," all songs having to do with the pleasure, sadness, and transience of love, from the collections of the French lawyer, doctor, writer, and lutenist-composer J. B. Besard. Next comes a gently lilting anonymous Siciliana, a dance of pastoral character. Finally, from a little-known composer, Lodovico Roncalli, comes a Passacaglia, originally published in 1692.
Franz Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 82 in C (The Bear)
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. His Symphony No. 82 is one of six composed for Paris. The number bears no relation to the order of composition of the six works (Nos. 82 87); the present C major symphony was composed in 1786, probably the last of the six to be completed, and it apparently received its first performance in Paris in the series of "Le Concert de la Loge Olympique" in 1787. The score calls for one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns in C alto (at times replaced in these concerts by optional trumpets) in the first, third, and fourth movements, two horns in F in the second movement, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 27 minutes.
Paris before the revolution was one of the most musical centers in Europe, with music publishers, series of orchestral concerts sponsored by the nobility but attended by large general audiences, and many talented amateur musicians who played chamber music at home for the sheer pleasure of it. During the years that Haydn was living a quiet but very busy life in the service of Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy in Vienna and, especially, at the princely estate of Eszterháza (now in Hungary near the Austrian border), the composer had no inkling of how famous he had already become. As early as 1764 his works began to be published in Paris in editions he probably did not know about; he certainly never realized a cent from any Parisian publishers in the 1760s. His works sold so well that unscrupulous publishers published music by other composers under the name of Haydn.
His popularity continued through the 1770s and into the 1780s. Haydn learned in a letter from the director of the Parisian Concert Spirituel that his Stabat Mater had been performed there four times with great success. By this time the French were ready to approach Haydn directly for new music. In 1785 the young, handsome music-loving Count d'Ogny, Claude-François-Marie Rigoley, proposed to commission a group of symphonies from Haydn for the concert organization of the Parisian Freemasons called Le Concert de la Loge olympique. The concertmaster of the organization, the Chevalier Saint-Georges, wrote to Haydn to offer the sum of 25 louis d'or per symphony, with an additional five louis for publication rights. Up to this point Haydn had earned nothing from his eighty-odd symphonies, so the sum proposed by the Parisian musicians seemed princely indeed.
Of the six Paris symphonies, conventionally numbered 82 to 87, Haydn's own dated manuscripts survive for all but No. 85. We know that Nos. 83, 87, and probably 85 were composed in 1785, and that the even-numbered symphonies came the following year. They were probably all first performed in concerts of the 1787 season. So well received were all six works that they were quickly adopted by a rival orchestra as well.
Practically all the nicknames attached to various Haydn symphonies originated in the nineteenth century and have no basis in the composer's conception. Probably the only reasonable purpose they serve is to provide a convenient—if often silly—tag to label a few of the dozens of symphonies in Haydn's enormous output; it is easier to refer to The Bear than Symphony No. 82 in C major. In any case, The Bear has no more significance as a title for No. 82 than The Hen does for No. 83. Some imaginative soul described the finale with the image of a dancing bear and the nickname stuck.
Symphony No. 82 is one of a series of C major symphonies by Haydn, all of which are exceptionally brilliant in energy and festive sonority. The sweep of the first movement comes from the sharply etched rhythmic motives that provide strong continuity (the technique of imbuing his themes with an identifiable rhythmic profile is one of the things Beethoven learned from Haydn). This rhythmic life is combined with harmonic daring, including a stunningly bold dissonance just before the establishment of the new key (most of the instruments play the notes of the A-flat triad, emphasized by a sforzando, against a sustained G held in three different octaves by violas, horns, and oboes). Throughout this splendid movement the fanfare figures take on new life—and lead in unexpected directions—precisely when the listener expects them to be most stereotyped.
The Allegretto—a moderately fast "slow" movement—is laid out in one of Haydn's favorite schemes: a double variation form, alternating Theme I (major) with Theme II (minor), each being varied in turn. At first the major theme is scarcely changed at all, but after its second return, it is extended for further treatment. The Menuet in this case is a true minuet (unlike some of the examples in the other Paris symphonies), stately and pompous, with a Trio that is folklike with charmingly scored wind solos.
The high-spirited finale begins with a drone on the pitch of the home key (like that of Haydn's very last symphony, still nearly a decade in the future) before dancing away on a tune of clearly popular character. Yet for all its accessibility, the movement is replete with Haydn's technical refinement, including particularly the wide-ranging development, where drones introduce the folk dance in a dizzying series of unexpected keys before settling down for the restatement and the dazzling C major sunburst of the conclusion.
© Copyright 2008. Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)