January 2017 Program Notes by Steven Ledbetter
GIOACHINO ROSSINI
Overture to La gazza ladra [The Thieving Magpie] Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born in Pesaro, Italy, on February 29, 1792 and died at Passy, near Paris, on November 13, 1868. He composed La gazza ladra in the spring of 1817 for a production at La Scala, Milan. The overture calls for flute and piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, bass drum, triangle, two snare drums and strings.
DURATION IS ABOUT 10 MINUTES
Audiences today know Rossini primarily for his fresh and vivid stage works in the genre known as opera buffa, or comic opera, of which the finest example is The Barber of Seville, though he also composed serious opera. Some of his most interesting operas‑‑including La gazza ladra (“The thieving magpie”) —fall in between the stools, defined in his own day as “semi‑serious”— a serious subject treated in a melodramatic manner, with a happy ending. The opera’s plot hinges on a character accused of stealing silver tableware from her employers (who incautiously leave their lavishly-set table unguarded in the town square). At the climactic moment, the townspeople learn the truth, which the audience knew from the beginning: the real thief is the employers’ magpie. Rossini sometimes wrote an opera in two or three weeks, but this time took three months! La gazza ladra boasts one of his finest overtures. The striking antiphonal snare drum rolls and military march have little to do with the opera, but Rossini knew they would catch the ears of the audience. A section of music in the minor key is used in the opera during the heroine’s prison scene, and the whole concludes with an unusually effective example of the “Rossini crescendo.”
ALBERTO GINASTERA
Concerto for Harp and Orchestra, Opus 25
Alberto Ginastera was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 11, 1916 and died in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 25, 1983. The Concerto for Harp and Orchestra, Opus 25, was commissioned in 1956 by Edna Philips and her husband, Samuel R. Rosenbaum. The world premiere was given by Nicanor Zabaleta with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy, on February 18, 1965. In addition to the solo harp, the score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, four percussionists (tambourine, tam-tam, crotales, claves, woodblock, snare drum, guiro, tenor drum, whip, maracas, xylophone, glockenspiel, field drum, two triangles, four tom-toms, four cowbells, three suspended cymtals, three bongos), celesta and strings.
DURATION IS ABOUT 23 MINUTES
Alberto Ginastera showed precocious musical gifts and began piano lessons at age seven. By fourteen he was composing, though he eventually destroyed most of his juvenilia. He attracted widespread attention with the ballet score Panambi (1936), which dealt with Argentine life and musical folklore, enlivened by brilliant orchestral color and a strong sense of rhythm, while studying at the National Conservatory of Buenos Aires. World War II caused him to postpone accepting a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant to study in the United States, but by 1945, as a result of Péron’s rise to power, he was dismissed from the national military academy. He spent the next several years in the United States, including a summer studying at Tanglewood Music Center. Though he returned to Argentina and worked at reforming the musical life of his native country, he spent most of his last years abroad, in the U.S. and Europe, owing to continuing political unrest at home. By the late 1950s, he had established an international reputation.
The commissioners of the Harp Concerto intended it to premiere during the 1958 Inter-American Music Festival in Washington, D.C., with Edna Philips (then principal harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra) playing harp. By the time it was completed in 1964, Philips had retired from the Philadelphia Orchestra. Despite not being able to perform it, she declared it the best of the many works for harp she and her husband commissioned. As nationalism shifted to more abstract genres, Ginastera’s style tended toward 12-tone conposition techniques, though he preserved the coloristic imagination, which first captured the world’s attention.
The difficulty Ginastera found in writing so extensively for the harp was the conflict between his highly chromatic musical style and the limitations of the inherently diatonic instrument. It can play all the notes of the chromatic scale, but can be set to play only seven of those different task than writing for piano, violin, or clarinet,” particularly since he was determined to create a through its paces. The first movement is a kind of sonata form, which exploits, with great energy, the metrical game of alternating or simultaneous 3/4 and 6/8 time that plays such a characteristic role in Argentine (and other Latin and South American) music. The slow movement is shaped in a chain of musical ideas, each reveling in semitone harmonies or decorations of a main pitch in the melody, with sonorities ranging from the dark colors of the low strings at the opening, to the shimmering tones of the celesta, glockenspiel, and suspended cymbals in a slowly unfolding play of color. The harp introduces the finale with a long cadenza, ending on the downbeat of the lively Rondo. Its main theme is a simple pentatonic figure of marked folkloric character tossed back and forth between the solo harp and the woodwinds. This alternates with two other sectional passages, all of which drive forward with tremendous rhythmic propulsion.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Danses Sacree et Profane for Harp and Orchestra
Achille‑Claude Debussy was born at St. Germain‑en‑Laye, France, August 22, 1862, and died in Paris on March 25, 1918. He composed the two dances, “sacred and profane,” in 1903. The score calls for harp and string ensemble.
DURATION IS ABOUT 9 MINUTES
Until the development of the pedal system found on modern harps, it was extremely difficult for composers to write chromatic music, because the instrument’s strings were tuned diatonically (to the pitches of the major scale); the pedals allow the player instantly to change all the strings of a given pitch-class--all the Cs, for example by a half-step, allowing for easy modulations to new keys, and for the performance of music of greater harmonic complexity. In 1903, the Pleyel company commissioned from Debussy a test-piece for its new "cross-strung" harp. He composed his Danses in the spring of 1904; the work can be played on the standard pedal harp, which is almost invariably used for modern performances.
The two dances are subtly inspired by Spanish music, which Debussy had absorbed thoroughly. The Danse sacrée, slow and ritualistic, may have been inspired in part by a short piano piece of a Portuguese composer, Francisco de Lacerda (1869-1934), who shared a friendship with Debussy and Satie, but it also seems to breathe the same air as Satie’s Gymopédies, which Debussy loved. The second dance is a lively and lilting waltz, mostly in the key of D, but with chromatic alterations and a great deal of modulation to show off the chromatic possibilities of the instrument.
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Daphnis et Chloe: Suites No. 1 and 2 for Orchestra
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born at Ciboures, Basses‑Pyrenees, France, on March 7, 1875 and died in Paris on December 28,1937. Serge Diaghilev commissioned the ballet Daphnis and Chloé in 1909; the piano score was published in 1910. Ravel completed the full score in 1911, though there was some recasting of the “Bacchanale” after a private hearing, so that the present form was not ready until April 5, 1912. The first concert suite had been performed on April 2, 1911, at a concert in the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris under the direction of Gabriel Pierné. Pierre Monteux conducted the first stage performance at a production by Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet at the Châtelet on June 8, 1912. The score calls for two flutes, piccolo, and alto flute, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, E‑flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, snare drums, cymbals, antique cymbals, triangle, tambourine, tam‑tam, castanets, celesta, glockenspiel, wind machine, two harps, strings and optional wordless chorus.
DURATION IS ABOUT 30 MINUTES
The idea for a Daphnis and Chloé ballet was more or less thrust upon Ravel in 1909 by the impresario Serge Diaghilev, whose chief choreographer Michel Fokine had wanted to do a Greek ballet since 1904, when he saw Isadora Duncan dance in St. Petersburg. He created a two‑act scenario for Daphnis and Chloé. The Russians conquered artistic Paris in 1907, when Diaghilev presented five concerts at the Opéra. Thereafter they appeared annually, bringing still unknown works by Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov, and premiering new ones by Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Fallal, Satie and Prokofiev. Ravel was commissioned to write Daphnis and Chloé, his largest and finest orchestral score, even before the Ballets Russes became the artistic vanguard.
The typical ballet of the time comprised isolated musical numbers whose tempo, meter and length were determined by the choreographer’s dances. You can identify such ballet music after a single phrase, which is bound to be repeated, so that dance steps begun on the right foot can be repeated on the left. Such square-ness can leave the listener—especially with no dancing—utterly stupefied.
Daphnis and Chloé, however, when heard in its entirety, offers ample evidence to counter the canard that Ravel was a miniaturist, unable to sustain larger musical structures. Ravel called it a “Choreographic Symphony in Three Parts,” and considered it sensible to produce concert suites of selections from the ballet—the first containing music from the first half of the ballet, the second comprising the closing scene almost complete.
During the first part of the ballet, at a grotto in a sacred wood, the audience learns of the still-innocent yet powerful love of the shepherd Daphnis and the nymph Chloé, which holds firm despite the temptations of a young drunkard to catch the interest of Chloé and a lecherous married woman to seduce Daphnis. Six young men join a dance competition for the prize of a kiss from Chloé. Daphnis is declared the winner, and all are astonished at the innocence of their kiss. A band of pirates attacks and carries Chloé off with their spoils. As Daphnis laments his loss, an unreal light appears in the darkness around the statues of the gods of the grotto, and here the bulk of Suite No. 1 begins. The shepherds, with Daphnis, invoke Pan, the god of the woods. An interlude allows the change of scene to a warrior's dance in the pirates’ camp.Pan arrives, spreading panic, allowing the pursuing party to rescue Chloé.
Suite No. 2 begins with a ravishing musical depiction of sunrise. In one of Ravel’s most brilliantly achieved strokes, dawn arrives unmistakably, with the singing of birds, the splashing of the waterfall, and the sun increasingly penetrating the mists. Shepherds find and awaken Daphnis, who finds Chloé. They throw themselves into one another’s arms. Daphnis notices Chloé’s head is illumined by a mysterious glow, which he recognizes as the sign of Pan’s intervention. Daphnis and Chloé mime the story of Pan and Syrinx: Pan expresses his love for the nymph Syrinx, who, frightened, disappears in the reeds. In despair, Pan forms a flute out of a reed and plays upon it to commemorate his love. (During the ravishing flute solo, Chloé reappears and echoes, in her movements, the music of the flute.) The dance becomes more animated. Chloé throws herself into Daphnis’ arms, and they solemnly exchange vows. The celebration begins in earnest in the extended Danse générale, one of the most brilliant and exciting musical passages ever written.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)