PROGRAM NOTES

Written by Bill Hemminger

 

Aaron Copland

Duration: 10 minutes

 

Aaron Copland (1900-90) was an American composer whose music has become synonymous with quintessential American themes and sonorities.  Copland did not benefit from a rich musical or social background, and his musical development—at least in comparison with other composers in this program—was relatively slow.  But as a young man he was nonetheless able to travel to Paris where he studied with famous pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in 1921 (who was still teaching in 1971 when I was studying in Paris).  He was Boulanger’s first American student and became one of her greatest.

 

After some years and several important commissions, Copland returned to the US and experimented with jazz, the distilled neo-classicism of Stravinsky, and other compositional forms.  By the 1930s he began to sense “the increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer.  It seemed . . . that living composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.”  So Copland felt that he had to adapt his musical esthetic to an American audience. 

 

What followed that realization was nothing short of tremendous.  He began to incorporate folk tunes in his works of the 1930s and 40s and write harmonically approachable works on themes familiar to members of his audiences.  Compositions of this period include “Appalachian Spring” (1944) and “Rodeo” (1942).  Like many other musicians of the time Copland turned toward Hollywood with its burgeoning film industry and wrote scores for “Our Town,” “The Red Pony,” and “Of Mice and Men.”

 

In 1954 he composed an opera, “The Tender Land”; it was followed by a number of song cycles and settings.  Many of his later works were not well received, but until the end of his long life the composer was in great demand as teacher, conductor, lecturer, and writer. 

 

Tonight’s work was begun in 1939 and completed in 1941.  Copland summons up the spirit of New York City with sussurant strings.  This background musical landscape gives way to a mournful English horn solo punctuated by the sound of a petulant trumpet.  The music was part of what would have been a film score for a play of the same title.  In the play, the central character belatedly realizes that his life—although successful if measured in terms of wealth and prestige—has not been truly meaningful.  As the man walks reflectively in Central Park in the midst of the City he feels that he hears his brother practicing the trumpet as he did at home years before.  The man asks a passer-by if he had heard the trumpet.  No, there is no trumpet sound:  it is the voice of a long-buried past.

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“Adagio” from Clarinet Concerto

Duration: 7 minutes

 

Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) is generally considered one of the greatest of all western composers.  He wrote music in almost every genre and excelled in every one.  Like Camille Saint-Saëns, Mozart was a veritable wunderkind, achieving great proficiency in both concert performance and composition when he was a child.  Sensing a marketable potential, Mozart’s father Leopold took his seven-year-old son as well as his equally precocious daughter Nannerl on a tour of the musical centers of western Europe.  For these concerts, the young musicians played piano and violin and improvised for their astonished audiences.  Amazingly, Amadé (his preferred nickname) composed his first three symphonies at this time.

 

Surely there have been few individuals for whom their field of work has been so perfectly suited to their extraordinary abilities.  The list of Mozart’s compositions is astonishingly varied and long.  Just for starters:  at least 22 operas, of which “Don Giovanni” and “Le nozze di Figaro” are among the most well-known; a corpus of sacred music that includes a host of masses, oratorios, and cantatas as well as the unfinished (and about which much speculation still exists) “Requiem”; a number of ballets; a great list of arias and music for vocal ensembles; at least 41 complete symphonies (the official tally); 27 piano concertos; five concertos for violin, four for horn, tonight’s A-major work for clarinet (which was originally conceived for basset horn); at least 36 sonatas for violin, a number of flute quartets, and at least 13 “Serenades” including “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.”  And this is a partial list.  And then to think that the composer lived a mere 35 years—which makes many of us wonder what we have been doing our entire lives.

           

The Clarinet Concerto, K.622, was the last major work that Mozart composed, in 1791 just two months before he died.  The clarinet had been invented earlier in the 18^th century; Mozart’s was the first composition of a major composer written for that instrument.  In fact, Mozart wrote the composition for a chamber orchestra featuring the basset horn, a clarinet with an extended lower range—though the music has been adapted for modern instruments.  Composed in 1791, the music appeared to be lost; it resurfaced later and was first published in 1802.  Mozart wrote the concerto for his friend, fellow Freemason, and gifted clarinetist Anton Stadler.  Sandwiched between two fast movements, the Adagio is expectedly plaintive, almost prayerful.  One critic notes that “profound loneliness resides in this languorous elegy.”

 

Camille Saint-Saëns

Duration: 10 minutes

 

Born in Paris, France in 1835 Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a virtuoso pianist, organist, and well-known composer in his lifetime.  A polymath and child prodigy, Saint-Saëns also wrote essays, criticism, poetry, and plays in his long life. Like many French people of means, he spent  winters in warmer and drier Algeria where he died suddenly in 1921. 

 

Saint-Saëns is now known chiefly for his symphonic works—among them “Danse macabre” (1874), “The Carnival of the Animals” (1886)— as well as an opera, “Samson and Delilah” (1877).  But the complete list of his works is fairly encyclopedic and includes five concertos for piano, two for cello, and three for violin in addition to a host of compositions for choir and for solo piano.

 

In the midst of his career Saint-Saëns met and befriended Franz Liszt, who remained a life-long friend and influence on the French composer, whose interest in the symphonic poem owed much to Liszt.  Though he lived well into the twentieth century, Saint-Saëns remained an ardent if conservative practitioner of classical forms and traditional harmonies. 

 

The “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” was written in 1863 for superstar violinist Pablo de Sarasate.  The first performance, in 1867, featured the composer as conductor along with the redoubtable Spanish performer.  The piece begins Andante malinconico, with the soloist playing arpeggios and difficult scalar passages to chordal accompaniment in the orchestra. The relative melancholy does not last for long, however, as Saint-Saëns ratchets up the tempo to Allegro and then provides a dazzling technical work-out for the violinist. The Allegro section begins with a bouncy syncopated figure in the violin; in the finale this rhythmic and melodic figure is given to various instruments as the soloist races to a thrilling conclusion.

 

Jean Sibelius

Symphony No. 5

Duration: 32 minutes

 

In many ways, the life of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) paralleled the birth and development of the country of Finland.  For many centuries a part of the Kingdom of Sweden, then in the 19^th century an autonomous duchy of the Russian Empire, Finland declared its independence in 1917 as the Russians were busy becoming Soviets.  Sibelius (whose given names were Johan Julius Christian, all of which he chucked in preference for the French “Jean”) was lucky to attend the only Finnish-language school in the Russian-managed country, and it was there that he came into contact with Finnish literature, particularly the Kalevala epic tale.  A member of the Uralic language family, Finnish shares little with Swedish (the official language throughout the 19^th century) or Russian, both imposed Indo-European tongues.  So in his music Sibelius strove to define and then affirm the Finnish spirit, which was weaned on a rugged natural environment of evergreen trees and crystalline lakes.  Success came early to the composer: in recognition of his musical contributions to Finnish cultural expression the government granted the young composer a lifetime pension in 1899; in 1915 his birthday became a national holiday.

 

Now known primarily for his seven symphonies and elegant tone poems, Sibelius produced his Symphony No. 5 in E-flat Major in 1915 in his fiftieth year.  Always a very careful craftsman and exceedingly self-critical, Sibelius completely redid the symphony during the years Europe was destroying itself in the Great War and the Russians—who acted then as now as if they owned all contiguous territories—invaded the “renegade” state of Finland.  Happily, the Russians were repelled, and the Great War ended (though only to be eclipsed by an even-greater war).  The final version of the symphony—and the one played today—appeared in 1919. 

 

Sibelius called his later symphonies “confessions of faith,” and Symphony No. 5 surely earns that description.  Famously, the theme of the third and final movement stems from the composer’s witnessing 16 swans flying overhead on one of his rambles.  In his diary Sibelius wrote:  “One of my greatest experiences.  Lord God, that beauty!”  The magnificent swan (and not minute, either:  swans may easily weigh 30 pounds) figured in an earlier work, “The Swan of Tuonela.”   In the symphony, the third movement begins with rapid, fluttering strings that give way to an expansive, rocking theme sung by the brass section as a long melody stretches above.  The movement slows and slows, the rocking theme recurs, and giant chords announce the end.  The darkness of the Great War and the incursion of the Russians give way to a heroic—and musical—affirmation of faith in this work and in this nascent nation.