|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
RIGHT HERE - WHERE WE LIVE |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
WINTER CONCERT 2012 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Winter Concert:
The Magic of Youth
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Paule Maurice Paul Dukas I N T E R M I S S I O N Nicholas Hooper/Jerry Brubaker Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) began work on his final opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) in April 1791 and completed the majority of it by the summer of that year when he took a break to compose a short opera to commemorate the coronation of Leopold II as king of Bohemia. That opera based on the libretto La clemenza di Tito debuted on September 6 in Prague, and after an initially poor reception, went on to a notable success by the end of its run. Mozart had little time to enjoy his success, for he had to return immediately to Vienna to complete the score for The Magic Flute and make preparations for its premiere. The initial impetus for Mozart to write the music for The Magic Flute came from a friend of his Salzburg days, Emanuel Schikaneder, a jack-of-all-trades in the theater business. Schikaneder, like Mozart, had made his way to Vienna in search of his fortune and soon found himself as head of a large theater, the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden. Schikaneder's theater specialized in German singspiels, often to Schikaneder's own librettos, scored by up-and-coming local composers. Schikaneder's theater catered to the poor and middle classes of Viennese society, and he sought through Mozart to attract a more aristocratic audience. Mozart, in dire need of money, saw in Schikaneder a means to increase his income by venturing into the commercial world outside the court theater. To help carry off this collaborative enterprise, Schikaneder had an impressive ensemble - a thirty-five piece orchestra and a fine corps of singing actors.
The premiere of The Magic Flute took place on September 30, 1791, at the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden with Schikaneder in the cast and Mozart in the audience. The opera, based on popular German stories and fairy tales and with strong Masonic overtones, did not capture the audiences immediately, but within a short time, it proved to be the rage of Vienna. Mozart and Schikaneder had a hit on their hands; sadly, Mozart died a little more than two months following the premiere. The Overture to The Magic Flute has long been a favorite of concert audiences, appearing on European programs almost from its inception. The first production of the opera in the United States was in New York City on April 17, 1833, but the Overture's earliest United States performance may have been in New Orleans in January 1806. The Overture begins with an ominous proclamation from the brass in the three notes of the tonic triad. Then the orchestra moves off in a lively jaunt until it is interrupted with a repeat of the opening proclamation. What follows is a brilliant example of Mozart's use of counterpoint and dynamics as he brings the piece to a satisfying conclusion.
Astonishingly little is known about French composer Paule Charlotte Marie Jeanne Maurice (1910-1967), considering that she was active during the twentieth century and was an instructor at one of France's leading music universities, the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, from 1933 to her death in 1967. She may well have fallen into complete obscurity save for two of her compositions that have received frequent performances, one for flute quartet and one for saxophone and orchestra. Maurice was born in Paris, the daughter of an office worker Raoul Auguste Alexandre Maurice and his wife Marguerite Jeanne Lebrun, and nothing indicates that her childhood was anything more than average. Nothing is known of how or when she became interested in music, who were her teachers, or where she attended school. What little we know of her life seems to have begun when she entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris as a student in 1929. Her teachers included Jean Gallon, for harmony, Noël Gallon, for counterpoint and fugue, and Henri Büsser for composition. From 1933 to 1947 Maurice was Jean Gallon's teaching assistant. During her time as teaching assistant, Maurice garnered several awards from the music establishment, including first prizes in harmony (1933) and in composition (1939). In 1934, she won second prize for fugue. She was appointed Professor of Sight-reading in 1942, and, in 1965, she received appointment as Professor of Harmonic Analysis at l'Ecole Normale de Musique, an adjunct school at the Conservatoire.
With her husband, composer Pierre Lantier, she coauthored a book on harmony to serve as a companion volume to Napoleon Henri Reber's Traite d'Harmonie (Treatise on Harmony) published in 1862. Their work entitled Complement du Traite d'Harmonie de Reber (Complement to the Treatise on Harmony of Reber) brought harmonic theory and analysis down into the twentieth century to include the impact of composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel. Although she authored nearly a hundred compositions, Paule Maurice's reputation rests on one composition, the Tableaux de Provence pour saxophone et orchestre written between 1948 and 1955. Maurice had composed the fourth movement of the suite in 1948 for legendary French saxophonist Marcel Mule to use as a classical showpiece for his instrument. A few years later when Mule suggested the piece was not difficult enough, Maurice revised the movement and added four additional sections to form the Tableaux. The complete work was premiered on December 9, 1958, with Jean-Marie Londeix as soloist and her husband Pierre as conductor of the Orchestre Symphonique Brestois. Oddly, of the eighty or more complete recordings of Tableaux since its first performance, Londeix recorded only the second and third movements. The complete suite comprises five sections, each one representing a scene from the Provence region of southern France.
Paul Abraham Dukas (1865-1935) has fared somewhat better than his countrywoman Paule Maurice in terms of recognition and prestige in the world of serious music. But like her, his fame primarily rests on the popularity of one composition, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. There exist several literary versions of a student magician who takes advantage of his master's absence to attempt magic on his own without fully understanding the possible consequences of his inexperience, but Dukas based his composition on Der Zauberlehrling, a popular poem from 1797 by the German intellect Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Dukas showed little interest toward a life in music until his teen years. Although he took some piano instruction from his mother, he did not begin composing until age fourteen while he was recovering during an illness. With his family's approval, he started to train as a musician and entered the Paris Conservatoire at age sixteen. He took harmony classes with Théodore Dubois, composition classes with Ernest Guiraud, and piano classes with Georges Mathias, as well as ensemble courses where he gained experience in orchestration and conducting. During this period he composed two overtures, one based on Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen and one based on Shakespeare's King Lear. He tried several times to win the Prix de Rome, but failed, and on his final attempt in 1889 he finished so poorly that in disgust, he left the Conservatoire and enlisted in the military.
When he returned to Paris following his military service, Dukas decided that his future lay in music criticism and composing. Consequently, he composed an overture Polyeucte, which received its Paris premiere in January 1892, and undertook one of his few trips outside Paris to London to review that city's production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. After an abortive attempt to compose an opera himself, he orchestrated, along with Camille Saint-Saëns, a five-act opera of his former teacher Guiraud entitled Frédégonde. Dukas followed the Guiraud orchestration with a three-movement Symphony in C of his own in 1894-96. He then wrote what has since become his most famous and enduring composition, L'apprenti sorcier, premiered by chance or by purpose in the centenary year of the poem's creation. The composer himself conducted the first performance at a concert of the Société Nationale on May 18, 1897. The Sorcerer's Apprentice was an immediate success and quickly established itself in the international orchestral repertory. This Symphonic Scherzo after a Ballad of Goethe clearly shows Dukas's debt to Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner in terms of symmetry of structure and orchestration, but it also points ahead to the colorful sonics of Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy. The number of compositions that Paul Dukas actually composed is unknown, for Dukas was a tough taskmaster, especially on his own compositions. Musicologists believe he destroyed most of his work either out of displeasure or insecurity. After 1912, he published only a handful of works. Ah, music! A magic beyond all we do here!
British film and television composer Nicholas Hooper scored two of the Harry Potter movies at the behest of his friend director David Yates. These two Potter movies were Hooper's first ventures into scoring music for blockbuster films. The majority of Hooper's prior work had been for television series and movies, for which he had garnered two British Academy for Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards - one for Original Score for The Young Visiters (2004) and one for Best Original Television Music for Prime Suspect: The Final Act (2007). Before Hooper signed on to the Potter project, the scoring for the previous Potter films had been handled by two other more notable film composers, John Williams and Patrick Doyle. Williams composed the music for the first three films in the series, and Doyle provided the music for the fourth film. Williams has the credit for creating the Hedwig's Theme, heard at the beginning of each movie. In his first foray into the Potter franchise Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hooper reused some of the Williams and Doyle music, but in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, he struck out on his own, relying less on the previous composers' work and more on his own musical instincts. The only theme of note that Hooper adapts from the previous scores is Williams' Hedwig's Theme, which appears at various junctures in the narrative. For Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Hooper chooses mood and atmosphere over memorable melodies. How successful was he in choosing this route? Successful enough; he was nominated for a Grammy award for his efforts. Hooper himself in describing his composing technique says that he "tend[s] to write instinctively, allowing things to develop in their own way. It would be easy to say that I meant to use such and such a theme in a 'brilliant stroke of genius.' But in fact a lot of what works comes out of trying things out first, and then discussing them later." Hooper declined to work on the final two installments in the Potter series. At the time, it was rumored that John Williams would return to the project, but composer Alexandre Desplat took the reins and scored the final two parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
When Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) arrived on the Russian music scene in St. Petersburg, he entered a world in which only a few true Russian operas existed. There were no private theater production companies, and what productions there were required the dispensation of the Imperial Theatres' Directorate, and in Rimsky's case, the approving authority in St. Petersburg was the Mariinsky troupe. At the time of his death, in contrast, several distinguished private opera theaters existed in St. Petersburg and Moscow in competition with the official government enterprises, and many 'home-grown' operas competed for the public's attention. In the Russian opera companies, Rimsky-Korsakov had several works that were well established as standard repertoire by the turn of the twentieth century. As a founding member of the Russian nationalist group of composers known collectively as 'The Five', Rimsky worked arduously to self-educate himself in the art of composition and orchestration. So successful was he in his endeavors that he came to viewed as the most talented of the group and as the first true Russian symphonist. And it is as a symphonist on which much of his international reputation rests. In concert halls, his brilliant, dazzling orchestrations are regularly represented in three works - Sheherazade, Russian Easter Festival Overture, and Capriccio Espagnol, all three from 1887-88, but none of which are derived from or related to his operas. Rimsky-Korsakov wanted, above all, to be regarded and remembered as an opera composer, at first as a Russian nationalist opera composer, and, later in his life, as an opera composer of international repute. He wrote operas covering a variety of styles and subjects: Historical dramas, operas on works by Nikolai Gogol, fairy tales, and epics, among others. In his epic operas, the composer tried through his music to draw his audience into the drama, to become, as it were, a part of the onstage action. For his three fairy tale operas - The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Kashchey the Immortal, and The Golden Cockerel - he did just the opposite. He wanted to maintain the mystical, magical qualities of the tales, and that could best be done by keeping the audience isolated from the action, on the outside looking in.
The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his Son the Renowned and Mighty Bogatyr Prince Gvidon Saltanovich, and of the Beautiful Princess-Swan is the full title of the opera and the Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) story from which it is drawn. Rimsky wrote the opera to coincide with the centenary of Russia's greatest poet Alexander Pushkin, and the premiere occurred on November 3, 1900, in Moscow conducted by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. Briefly the story revolves around three sisters, the youngest of whom the Tsar takes as his wife prior to him going to war. The other two sisters are jealous, and with the help of an old woman Babarikha, they plot to get revenge. In the Tsar's absence to war, his wife the Tsaritsa gives birth to a son, Gvidon, but the sisters and the old woman send word to the Tsar that the newborn is a monster. The Tsar orders that his wife and son be sealed in a barrel and cast into the sea. The two castaways are thrown ashore by a benevolent sea on the island of Buyan. When the two emerge from the barrel, the son has miraculously grown into a young man. He goes hunting for food, in the course of which he saves an enchanted swan from a kite. As a reward, the swan creates a city for Gvidon to rule, but he in time grows homesick. The swan, to alleviate the prince's melancholy, transforms him into a bee so that he can visit Saltan's court again where he stings the nose of Babarikha. Even the trip to his homeland fails to assuage the prince's despondency. It is only after he expresses a wish for a bride instead of his old home that he finds peace. The swan reveals herself to be a beautiful princess, a princess who proves to be the perfect mate for Gvidon. They marry, and the opera ends with a visit from Tsar Saltan who is overjoyed to once again see his wife and, for the first time, meet his newly-married son. Though Rimsky's operas are not standard fare for international opera houses, suites comprised of music from his operas have proven to be popular concert selections.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Clinton Symphony Orchestra PO Box 116 Clinton, IA 52733-0116 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
