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RIGHT HERE - WHERE WE LIVE |
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AUTUMN
CONCERT 2010 |
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Autumn Concert:
Rustic Nuances Béla Bartók Ernest Bloch Igor Stravinsky
The three composers on tonight's program were born within two years of each other, in different European countries, and were looked upon in the first half of twentieth century as the avant garde of composers who would shape the 'new music' of a new age, come of age in Old World Europe on the brink of committing its most horrific act - the First World War. Each of these composers contributed to that 'new' music in his own way, and each found his way to the New World, as it were, to live, work, and die in the United States.
The first decade of the 20th century was a decisive period of discovery in the musical development of Hungarian composer Béla Viktor János Bartók (1881-1945). During this span he came under the influences of several strands of musical invention which led him to recognize his own musical core values. In 1902, while a student at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, Bartók met German composer Richard Strauss at the Budapest premiere of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra, and the composer and his music had an immediate effect on Bartók, for the young man set to work on his first major orchestral composition, a piece to honor his countryman Lajos Kossuth. The resulting piece Kossuth is a late-Romantic work of the first order, clearly reflecting the influences not only of Strauss, but those of Hungarian Franz Liszt as well. He completed the work in short order during the spring and summer of 1903; Kossuth was accepted for performance by the noted conductor Hans Richter for his orchestra at Manchester, England, which led the Budapest Philharmonic Society to beg Bartók for the privilege to hold the premiere in Budapest in January 1904. The Manchester performance took place the following month, the 18th of February. These were the only two performances of Kossuth during the composer's life.
Bartók's fascination with Strauss was short lived. In mid-decade Bartók met fellow composer Zoltán Kodály with whom he forged a lifelong friendship. It was through Kodály that Bartók came to know the music of Claude Debussy. Bartók was so captivated by the French master's use of harmonics that Debussy's influence is present in the Fourteen Bagatelles of 1908 and in Bluebeard's Castle (1910-11), Bartók's only opera. Critical and public reception of the opera was so negative that Bartók took a hiatus from composing to concentrate his musical talents in another field - that of folk music research. Even as he struggled to find his own musical 'voice' through attachments to Strauss, Liszt, and Debussy, the young composer and his colleague Kodály undertook 'field trips' into the Hungarian back country to collect and research old folk melodies. To their surprise, they discovered that the Gypsy songs performed in cafés and salons and popularized by Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsodies had little correlation to authentic Gypsy folk melodies as performed by local bands. Based on their findings, both Bartók and Kodály began to incorporate folk elements into their music. Bartók believed that a composer has three options in the use of folk music - he can quote the music literally; he can write imitation folk tunes; or, he can strive to embody the essence or 'spirit' of a peoples' music in his compositions. Bartók followed the third option, sure that on the foundations of his studies he could base his original music on folk elements. That first foray into the Hungarian hinterland in 1907 also took the two composers into Transylvania, a largely Roumanian district which at the time was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here, Bartók observed, listened and took notes which he later transcribed and embellished into several collections of folk-song arrangements. One of these sets is Roumanian Folk Dances (1915), a suite of six short piano pieces which he later orchestrated for chamber ensemble (1917). The suite is based on seven Roumanian fiddle tunes from the Transylvanian region (The last dance incorporates two tunes).
Ernest Bloch (1880-1959), Swiss by birth, came to the United States in 1916, after a spotty music career in Europe, as a conductor with the Maud Allan dance company, to seek his fame and fortune. From his major works - two symphonies and an opera - he had reaped only modest success with the second of the symphonies. His opera Macbeth on which he had expended great effort in composing and getting performed proved at its premiere to be a devastating failure. After the Maud Allan tour was forced to close because of a lack of finances, Bloch was unsure of his future, but he accepted an offer to teach theory and composition at the newly-established David Mannes College of Music in New York while at the same time he began to accept private students. With an assured income, Bloch was able to bring his wife and children to the United States. The arrival of his family seemed to buoy the composer's spirits, and his compositions began to reflect a renewed confidence and a leaner texture as he moved toward a neoclassical style. The four years 1916-1920 saw a succession of notable works coming from the pen of the composer. With the praise for his cello rhapsody Schelomo and for his String Quartet No. 1 came offers to perform his orchestral compositions in several American cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. The success of Three Jewish Poems in 1917 gave Bloch the notion that America was a more hospitable environment for him than that of Europe. He was further encouraged when he conducted a program of his 'Jewish' works to broad acclaim in Philadelphia. After contracting with G. Schirmer to publish his compositions, Bloch worked to become an active participant in the musical life of his adopted country by composing, teaching, and discussing his art in forums both large and small. In 1919 he won the Coolidge Prize for his Suite for Viola and Piano (Orchestra). With success came recognition and offers for new ventures. Bloch was approached in early 1920 by a group of Cleveland entrepreneurs to found a music school in that city. He accepted and thus was born the Cleveland Institute of Music with an initial enrollment of less than ten students. That number increased in two years to over four hundred under Bloch's tireless recruitment and leadership. Yet, despite the obvious rewards of mentoring a growing institute, divergent philosophical views on music education worked from the beginning of their relationship to almost guarantee an eventual parting of the ways for the composer and the founders of the new school. Bloch wanted to do away with textbooks and examinations and have his students study at the source, i.e., the actual scores of the great composers. The board of directors favored a more traditional curricula and approach to music education. This difference became a rift, and Bloch felt compelled to resign in 1925. He then moved on to become director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, a position he maintained until 1930. It was at Cleveland that Bloch composed the piece on tonight's program. The Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Strings with Piano Obbligato came about as an object lesson for his students. Composed in the last year of his tenure at the Cleveland Institute, Bloch proposed to prove with an example that indeed composers in the neoclassical school of his day "could still write alive and original music with the means that had existed for so long." The result was the Prelude which, according to Bloch's daughter, when the student orchestra played the piece, Bloch gleefully remarked, "What do you think now?...It has just old-fashioned notes!" Bloch added three additional movements to complete the classical concerto grosso invested with a twentieth-century flair.
For Igor Feyodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971), the year 1905 was a very good year. Despite the political turmoil that was raging through the tsarist government, on university campuses, and among the laboring classes, the young Igor was, except for a few minor utterances favoring reform, totally uninvolved with the larger world outside himself. And he had good reasons for being so self-absorbed. His mentor Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov had assumed greater charge over the young composer's composition and orchestration studies; he had completed his first major composition, a Piano Sonata in F minor, first played in February at a Rimsky-Korsakov "Wednesday" musical gathering; and, he had fallen in love with his first cousin, Yekaterina Gavrilovna Nosenko, "Katya." Katya was "a girl of rare spiritual beauty...intelligent, profound and exceptionally warm-hearted...with her quiet charm...Katya attached little importance to appearances, dressed modestly, and was very shy." No doubt of singular import to young Igor, she was "mad about music and art." Igor and Katya had met during summer retreats at Ustileg, the Nosenko family residence, but love did not enter the picture until the summer of 1905 when the two met again after an absence of four years. Their attraction to each other was immediate, and in August, they announced their engagement. They were married in January the following year. The Piano Sonata in F minor was the first significant work Stravinsky composed under the guidance of Rimsky-Korsakov, who had taken him under his wing after convincing the young composer not to enter the conservatory of music, but to pursue his passion outside the staid halls of academia. Why Rimsky encouraged Igor along this unusual path is unknown, but perhaps he sensed a free spirit in the young man, a spirit that need not be confined to the orthodox music methodology. The sonata, a four-movement work, was crafted in the fashion of two of Rimsky's approved composers - Alexander Glazunov, a former student, and Peter Tchaikovsky, a composer who Rimsky had come to respect before Tchaikovsky's untimely death in 1893. As stereotypical as the sonata may be, Stravinsky imbued the score with a degree of polish that pleased his mentor greatly, revealing as it did great advances over his earlier work. The sonata was premiered on February 9, 1905, with the dedicatee Nikolai Richter at the keyboard. Those at the premiere, including Glazunov, expressed their admiration for the Sonata, and Rimsky immediately requested Stravinsky's assistance with his own score, the opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. In the early spring, Rimsky assigned Igor a final assignment to compose a four-movement symphony.
The young Stravinsky approached the task with enthusiasm and the first draft of the symphony was completed in September. A model for his symphony may have been Sergei Taneyev's Symphony No. 4 which he and Richter had performed in a four-hands piano reduction at one of Korsakov's Wednesday evenings. While Taneyev's symphony might serve as an overall guide, Rimsky-Korsakov's hand can clearly be seen in the working out of the symphonic structure, and most notably in the orchestration. Yet, to the finer points of symphonic writing, Rimsky utilized the scores of Alexander Glazunov, whose Symphony No. 8 in E-flat major had just been performed by the composer at a Wednesday gathering, to inform Igor in good accepted practice and in keeping with the latest models. This is clearly seen in the first movement of Stravinsky's symphony which follows a standard set by Glazunov in the first movement of his work. If the symphony was drafted in a white heat, then the working out of the details of structure and orchestration took place at a leisurely pace of two years before its public premiere in January 1908. To be fair to Stravinsky, he did work on other pieces during this period - a vocal setting of three Pushkin poems entitled The Faun and the Shepherdess, a song, Vesna, and a little Pastorale, among others. The Scherzo and the Largo were completed first and performed by the Imperial Court Orchestra in a quasi-private concert in April 1907, probably arranged by Korsakov. The Scherzo was particularly admired by those present, encouraging Stravinsky to think he had a flair for writing scherzi. He broke off work on the symphony to begin composing a Scherzo fantastique which was finished shortly after the premiere of the symphony in 1908. The first movement of the Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, Op 1 was the hardest for Stravinsky to complete, but the work was done in July 1907. At its first public performance six months later, the symphony premiered along with The Faun and the Shepherdess with the Imperial Court Orchestra under the direction of Hugo Wahrlich. The concert was widely reviewed by the press with generally favorable impressions of the two works, particularly the scherzo of the symphony. Stravinsky himself reports that Glazunov "came up to me afterwards saying, 'very nice, very nice'." And added, as he was leaving, "Rather heavy instrumentation for such music." One critic, however, noted "the cheerful, joyous turn of musical thought that is characteristic of Stravinsky in general, and that distinguishes him from...the newest composers."
Program Notes © 2010 William H. Driver and Clinton Symphony Orchestra Association
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