Program Notes
- Fall Concert
"DMCO Goes Solo"
L'Arlésienne Suite No. 1 (1872)
Georges Bizet (1838-75)
Best known as the composer of the opera Carmen, Georges Bizet
(1838-1875) was considered a child prodigy, entering the National Conservatory
in Paris at age nine. An early death cut short his promising career, but the
music he left is tuneful, approachable, and among the most frequently programmed
classical music.
Bizet was born in Paris, the son of amateur musicians. He was able to read
and write music at age four, and after his enrollment at the National
Conservatory, he earned a series of prizes for music theory, organ, piano, and
composition. His Symphony in C, written at age seventeen while he was still a
student at the conservatory, is considered a masterwork.
The incidental music to Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne (The Girl
from Arles) was composed in 1872. The play was a failure, with critics
complaining that there were "too many overtures." In other words,
Bizet's music overpowered the drama. Fortunately, Bizet rescued some of the best
music and assembled L'Arlésienne Suite No. 1, which has four movements:
- Prelude. Bizet borrows the French Christmas carol "The March of the
Kings" and offers it several ways: the strings, woodwinds and horns
open with a vigorous rendition; then the woodwinds alone play it as a quiet
chorale. The full orchestra with percussion and brass follows, presenting
the melody as a storm at sea, with rising and falling dynamics and a rolling
chromatic underpinning. Cello, horn and bassoon then offer the theme with
gently loping rhythms, and the final variant is a return to full orchestra
with military flourish. Bizet ends the movement with a second melody
featuring the saxophone, its first appearance in the standard orchestral
repertoire following its invention in 1844 by the fiery Belgian instrument
maker, Adolphe Sax.
- Minuetto begins with a sharp, rhythmic melody passed from section to
section within the orchestra before yielding to the soaring second subject.
The piece ends as any proper classical minuet should, by returning to the
first theme.
- Adagietto is scored for strings alone. The instruments are muted using a
device to dampen their sound, giving a hushed, veiled quality to the
heartfelt music.
- Carillon. As the name implies, the orchestra imitates the ringing of
church bells in the opening, quieting as the first theme is introduced by
the violins. The second theme is a gentle sicilienne, and the piece closes
with the return of the Carillon. [Steve Anthenien, ed. CJ]
Celtic Concerto (1999)
Laura Zaerr
Laura Zaerr began playing the harp at the age of ten. She studied at the
University of Oregon under the direction of Sally Maxwell where she obtained a
bachelor's degree in music performance and composition. She took her master's
degree in harp performance at the Eastman School of Music. While at Eastman she
recorded with Wynton Marsalis, Benita Valente, and James Galway.
In addition to harp performance, Laura studied composition at the University
of Oregon with Derek Healey. Her compositions include works for string quartet,
woodwind quintet, choir, and most recently the concerto for Celtic harp and
orchestra. Laura blends her strong classical background with her love of Celtic
harp music to achieve a dazzling showcase for the popular Celtic harp. Laura's
exquisite performances of little-known classical harp works on this unique and
beautiful instrument have gained national attention.
The concerto is in the form of a suite of seven Irish tunes arranged for solo
Celtic harp with chamber orchestra (strings, flute and oboe). The tunes included
are: Bonny Portmore, Oro se do Bheatha Bhaile, The Blazing Turf Fire, Kid on the
Mountain, My Lagan Love, College Grove, and Music in the Glen. They are
connected and performed without breaks. This is the famous performance piece
Laura played at the American Harp Society Conference in June 2000. It was a
historic event, and has helped put the lever harp in a predominant position
right next to the pedal harp. [Adapted and edited by CJ]
Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85 (1919)
Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Sir Edward Elgar was born in the village of Broadheath, just outside of
Worcester, England, on June 2, 1857, and died in Worcester on February 23, 1934.
He wrote the "moderato" theme of the first movement of the Cello
Concerto on March 23, 1918 (after returning home from hospital after a
tonsillectomy), began concentrated work on the piece that July, and completed it
on August 3, 1919. The composer conducted the first performance on October 27,
1919, with the London Symphony Orchestra and soloist Felix Salmond in the
Queen's Hall, London. The score is dedicated to Elgar's friends Sidney and
Frances Colvin.
In addition to the cello soloist, the score calls for an orchestra of two
flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.
Only for twenty of his seventy-six years did Elgar enjoy the simultaneous
benefits of fame and creative abundance. For the first forty-two years he was
unknown in the wider world, and for the last fourteen his muse was in
retirement, if not quite still. The work that closed this twenty-year period of
high creativity was the Cello Concerto, completed in the summer of 1919.
A year later, with the death of his beloved wife Alice, Elgar withdrew more and
more from public life and wrote no more masterpieces.
On September 26, 1918, with the war still on, Elgar's wife's diary recorded
"wonderful new music, real wood sounds & other lament wh. shd. be in a
war symphony." But this was to be a concerto, not a symphony, and as it
neared completion the following summer, Elgar described it as "a real large
work & I think good & alive." The Cello Concerto was
completed in August 1919 and first performed in the Queen's Hall, London, on
October 26 of that year with Felix Salmond as the soloist and Elgar himself
conducting. In the cello section of the orchestra (the London Symphony
Orchestra) was a future conductor, John Barbirolli, then aged nineteen, who was
later to conduct an historic recording of the work with Jacqueline du Pré. On
that first night Elgar had been given too little rehearsal time, and the main
impression was of orchestral incompetence. Ernest Newman reported that the
orchestra "made a lamentable public exhibition of itself." Later the
work came to be recognized as one of the handful of supreme concertos for the
instrument. In 1928 Elgar conducted a recording of the work with Beatrice
Harrison as the soloist. The original soloist, Salmond, moved to the United
States in 1922, and after a brief spell teaching at the Juilliard School he was
head of the cello department at the Curtis Institute from 1925 to 1942. Among
his pupils were Bernard Greenhouse and Leonard Rose.
We may discern in the Cello Concerto a sentiment of resignation and
even of despair generated from within by that strong vein of melancholy that had
always been an inescapable element of Elgar's music, and from without by the
desolating impact of the Great War. But the Cello Concerto is not a
threnody, nor even, so far as we can tell, a deliberately planned swansong. It
is reflective, playful, tearful, and energetic by turns, like all his best
music, and we underestimate the work if we attach too much to its autumnal
character. Many of its pages might have been summoned into existence by the Wand
of Youth.
Unlike the traditional concerto it has four movements, not three. Brahms's Second
Piano Concerto had expanded the form to four movements and taken on mighty
symphonic proportions, but Elgar here has four movements not for length and
weight but for diversity and contrast. The movements are all concise, especially
when compared to the expansive landscape of the Violin Concerto's three
movements. As in his two symphonies, the two central movements, a scherzo and a
slow movement, offer a complete contrast in momentum and temper. The declamatory
opening of the work recurs truncated at the beginning of the scherzo and in
full, this time with marvelously valedictory effect, at the end of the finale.
After a declamatory opening for the soloist, the first movement's gentle lilt
is far removed from any pomp or circumstance. Over the meandering first theme
Elgar wrote in his sketchbook: "very full, sweet and sonorous," and
although the whole orchestra tries to give it breadth, it ends as it began,
bleak and bare. The scherzo that follows is in 4/4 time with bustling sixteenths
reminiscent of the Introduction and Allegro for strings of many years earlier.
There is a brief expressive phrase offered here and there in contrast, but
lightness prevails.
For the slow movement Elgar indulges unashamedly in the yearning phrases and
sliding harmony that breathe nostalgia and tranquility. This is not a lament but
a private world of sweetness so direct and complete that it requires no
development or expansion. For all its heartrending beauty, the movement is
short, and its half-close leads directly into the finale. Here, after another
declamatory start, the movement settles into a sturdy rhythm which proceeds in a
businesslike and oddly impersonal fashion right through to the closing pages.
Then, as if yielding to some fatal destiny, Elgar adds an epilogue in slow tempo
as passionate as anything he had ever written, full of drooping phrases and
desperate gestures, like a dying man reaching up for help. There is asperity
too, in the harmony, and the music slides inevitably into a brief memory of the
slow movement followed by the work's opening statement and a brief energetic
(and surely ironic) close. [Hugh Macdonald, ed. CJ]
L'Arlésienne Suite No. 2 (1879)
Georges Bizet (1838-75)
Bizet died in the summer of 1875, on the night of the thirty-third
performance of his new opera Carmen. (He had fallen ill soon after the
premiere, which had a lukewarm reception; the night he died, the Carmen,
Célestine Galli-Marié, is said to have been so overcome with premonition in
the scene where she reads death in the cards that she fainted while leaving the
stage.) Four years later, Ernest Guiraud, a friend of Bizet and the composer of
the recitatives that were added to Carmen for the Vienna production in
1875, put together a second suite of music from L'Arlésienne. As a
composer, Guiraud paled next to Bizet-"I am trying to liven him up a
bit," Bizet once said, complaining that Guiraud's approach to music was
"a little soft, a little apathetic." But he understood Bizet's genius
perfectly, and his suite of excerpts from L'Arlésienne is a fitting
companion to Bizet's own set.
Guiraud begins with the lovely Pastorale that sets the early morning scene
for act 2 (the fully awakened middle section was originally a chorus of
off-stage revelers in the play). The Intermezzo, based on a Provencal folksong,
is the music that divides the two scenes of act 2. The minuet that follows isn't
from L'Arlésienne at all; perhaps jealous that Bizet had already taken
the best music for his own orchestral suite, Guiraud turned to Bizet's La
jolie fille de Perth, an opera written ten years earlier, for this charming
dance. The final, brilliant Farandole is a dance from act 3 of L'Arlésienne,
here magnificently expanded and embellished with the addition of "The March
of the Three Kings," a regional folk tune Bizet had originally used in
another number. Like Guiraud's version of Carmen, which reigned for
decades in opera houses, this suite from L'Arlésienne is Bizet filtered
through Guiraud's admiring eyes. As an introduction to Bizet's genius for color
and melody, and as a sample of his born sense for atmosphere and theatrical
flair, it is as irresistible as anything the master himself gave us. [Phillip
Huscher, ed. CJ]
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