October 27, 2007: Auspicious Beginnings

The three composers on this first concert of our Youthful Visions season had long careers and, while not exactly prolific, produced a substantial body of works now safely established in the repertory. Tonight we make an imaginative leap to encounter them as their earliest audiences did, as promising young composers.

Samuel Barber from West Chester, Pennsylvania, had a head start. His aunt Louise Homer, one of the greatest contraltos of her era, and her husband Sidney, a noted musicologist, encouraged his musical career in the face of typical parental misgivings. Besides being a nimble pianist, young Sam had a fine baritone voice and could have become a professional singer (his own recording of his setting of Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach is unbeatable). He studied composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia; there he met Gian-Carlo Menotti, who became his lifelong companion. He hit the ground running with his First Essay for orchestra and Adagio for Strings, both championed by Toscanini. Eventually came two symphonies, concertos for violin and piano, the ballet Medea for Martha Graham, Knoxville, Summer of 1915 for soprano and orchestra, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra. (The latter opened the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966.) His art songs and solo piano works soon established themselves in the standard recital repertory. In the beginning, though, was the Overture to The School for Scandal, his first orchestral composition and, in effect, his graduation piece from Curtis. He was 21. Sheridan's 18th century comedy served as a stimulus. Barber called the overture "a musical reflection of the play's spirit." The bustling opening material yields to a pastoral second theme with the flavor of English folksong; these contrasting sections alternate in a structure approximating sonata form. The School for Scandal overture received its premiere in 1933 at an outdoor concert in Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell. Reviews of that and other early performances sounded a note which dogged Barber throughout his career: the piece didn't sound "American." In a decade when writers, artists, and composers (notably Copland) vigorously mined American folklore and patriotic subjects, Barber seemed out of step. The irony is that Barber, with his small-town roots and Anglo-American family background, had a stricter national pedigree than almost any of his contemporaries.

In contrast, Leonard Bernstein — disciple of Copland, scion of immigrant Jewish parents, city boy from Lawrence, Massachusetts — personified American music in his time. For about a decade and a half from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s he was everywhere, from hi legendary debut conducting the New York Philharmonic as last-minute substitute for Bruno Walter, to his appointment as its music director, to his television appearances on "Omnibus" and the Young People's Concerts, to his successes as a composer of symphonies, ballets, and Broadway musicals. Probably no musician in American history was as prodigiously talented. His parents had wanted him to enter the family business: hairdressing products. In the fall of 1943 Bernstein met dancer/choreographer Jerome Robbins, who needed a composer for a proposed one-act ballet on an American subject incorporating elements of popular dance. The two hit it off immediately. Bernstein wrote much of the half-hour score (for which he was paid $300) in the studio, improvising as Robbins choreographed. The premiere, danced by Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera house, broke box-office records; impresario Sol Hurok had to extend the run by several weeks. Here's Bernstein's own plot summary: "The curtain rises on a street corner with a lamp post, a side street bar and New York skyscrapers pricked out with a crazy pattern of lights, making a dizzying back drop. Three sailors explode on the stage. They are on a 24-hour shore leave in the city and on the prowl for girls. The tale of how they first meet one, then a second girl, and how they fight over them, lose them, and in the end take off after still a third, is the story of the ballet." The centerpiece is a dance contest, each of the sailors performing a virtuosic solo to impress the girls. Wartime circumstances gave the story a particular poignance. Within a year Bernstein and Robbins had expanded it into a Broadway musical with text by Comden and Green, On the Town. Bernstein composed a completely new score, recycling none of the ballet's music, and the team had itself another smash hit. Bernstein and Robbins went on to collaborate on other ballets and, famously, West Side Story. But in Fancy Free Bernstein, age 25, had already found his distinctive voice: jazzy, tuneful, clever, extrovert. Lenny had arrived.

We cross an ocean and revert three-quarters of a century to ... a Puccini Mass? We don't usually think of Giacomo Puccini as a religious composer. But during his apprentice years he produced severalliturgical compositions, mostly for the feast of San Paolino, patron saint of his native Lucca, where Giacomo represented the fifth generation of a distinguished family of composers. The "Mass for Four Voices" (Messa a 4 voci) was written to comply with a requirement for final-year candidates at the local conservatory, and first performed in the church of San Paolino on July 12, 1880, to critical acclaim. Puccini was 21. (The title "Messa di Gloria" is spurious, having been arbitrarily affixed to an unauthorized 1952 edition; the real title appears on the official version from Puccini's own publisher, Ricordi.) Interestingly, Puccini could have met the requirement by composing an opera, but chose the liturgical option instead. The Mass incorporates a motet, "Plaudite, populi" he had written in 1877 (at age 18) and a Credo from the following year. Later he reused some material from the Mass in his early opera Edgar and, more significantly, for the madrigal in Act II of Manon Lescaut. The "Mass for Four Voices" is an ambitious work replete with complex counterpoint, and not "operatic" in style, as we might have anticipated. Some Puccini hallmarks are already evident: instrumental doubling of outer voices, for example, and emphasis on the orchestra, with a plethora of orchestral preludes, interludes, and postludes. Puccini could have remained a church musician. Instead, he took the route leading to "Boheme" and "Butterfly." Because we expect artists to grow in mastery and maturity, we often discount the works of their youth. But the trajectory is unpredictable. Barber's output was consistent in quality, and his earliest works do not suffer in comparison with his last. Bernstein, we are often told, peaked early, and his works from the 1960's onward range from uneven to embarrassing. (This view has its dissenters.) Puccini's student works and his first two operas, Le Villi and Edgar, are almost entirely forgotten; his reputation rests on the string of masterworks beginning with Manon Lescaut, which makes us curious to hear what he sounded like when young. Judgments are for hindsight; better to enjoy these youthful gifts for themselves alone.

Program Notes by Zeke Hecker

___________________________________________________

December 15, 2007: Holiday Pops Concert

Our 2007-08 concert season is called Youthful Visions, and where could the accent on youth be more appropriate than our holiday program? Christmas celebrates the miraculous birth of a child (for birth itself is miraculous) and anticipates not just a new year, but a new era. Hanukkah, the festival of lights, commemorates yet another miracle. It's a time for gifts, hope, and wondrous stories: a time for children.

For tonight's Holiday Pops concert, Santa Claus is indeed coming to town, with two bags of toys: one from Gioacchino Rossini (of "Barber of Seville" fame), by way of Ottorino Respighi (best known for "The Pines of Rome") the other from Wolfgang's dad, Leopold Mozart.

The ballet The Fantastic Toyshop (La Boutique Fantasque) was first performed in London in 1919 by Diaghilev's Russian Ballet company, with story and choreography by Leonid Massine (ballet master in the movie The Red Shoes). For the music, the brilliant orchestral colorist Ottorino Respighi (1879 - 1936) arranged assorted piano and vocal pieces by Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868). The complete ballet has an overture and nine dances. For tonight's performance Paul Phillips has selected the Overture and four dances (Tarantelle, Mazurka, Valse Lente and Galop). Debuting with the Pioneer Valley Symphony

Orchestra as noted on the program page, are young dancers from the Ballet Renverse school of Shelburne Falls, directed by Karen Shulda. In her choreography for tonight's performance the dolls in the toyshop come to life after the proprietor leaves for the night.

Perhaps some of the toys in The Fantastic Toyshop found their way into Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony (more properly known as Cassation in G for Orchestra and Toys). A "cassation" is similar to "divertimento" or "serenade." Actually, we're not sure who wrote it; it has also been attributed to either Joseph Haydn or his brother Michael. But Leopold wrote other playful "novelty" pieces, so he's a likely culprit. It suggests he wasn't quite the fearsome ogre of legend. A toy trumpet and drum, triangle and rattle, and three birdcalls (nightingale, quail and cuckoo) join the orchestra to make a lovely racket.

Perhaps it's that very same drum played by the little drummer boy in Carol of the Drum, one of Christmas's most popular songs. Composed by Katherine Davis, Henry Onorati and Harry Simeone in 1941 and purportedly based on a Czech melody, it came to wide attention through recordings in the 1950s, including a version by the Trapp Family Singers.

Two of our composers tonight are Bostonians. Leroy Anderson (1908 - 1975), whose Sleigh Ride is another holiday standard, was for decades house arranger for the Boston Pops, and his many original compositions (The Syncopated Clock, The Typewriter, Blue Tango, and so on) have become (oxymoronically) popular classics. His Christmas medley opens our program.

The other Bostonian, Daniel Pinkham (b. 1923), has had a distinguished career as teacher, organist, and composer. "The single event that changed my life," he said, "was a concert by the Trapp Family Singers in 1939, right after they had escaped from Germany. Here, suddenly, I was hearing clarity, simplicity. It shaped my whole outlook." He studied composition with such luminaries as Hindemith, Piston, Honegger, Copland, Barber, and Nadia Boulanger; harpsichord with Wanda Landowska; and organ with E. Power Biggs. He taught at most of the major Boston-area colleges and conservatories, and was music director of Boston's Kings Chapel for 42 years. He performed frequently as organist and harpsichordist with the Boston Symphony. An incredibly prolific composer, he said, "One of the most important influences on my music has been my contact with performers, and I am most happy when writing for a specific performance. This, I suppose, explains why I have no unperformed music. I have always been interested in making music technically accessible." A late (2003) work based on the children's book Make Way for Ducklings is one of his best-known, but the early Christmas Cantata (subtitled Sinfonia Sacra) is his most frequently performed. It has all those qualities: clarity, simplicity, and accessibility. In Italian Renaissance fashion, there are three "choirs," one vocal and two brass. Pinkham wrote the Christmas Cantata for the New England Conservatory Chorus and its conductor Lorna Cooke de Varon, who gave the premiere fifty years ago this month on December 1, 1957.

We close our program with the fourth suite entitled The Many Moods of Christmas arranged by Robert Shaw (1916 - 1999), acknowledged dean of American choral conductors, and Robert Russell Bennett (1894 - 1981), who occupies a similarly exalted position among Broadway orchestrators (notably for his work on the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows). We've performed the first three suites from this series in previous holiday seasons. They weave together both familiar and lesser-known Christmas songs in imaginative, often unexpected ways.

We hope you'll like the presents we have for you. Happy Holidays!

Program Notes by Zeke Hecker

___________________________________________________

March 9, 2008: Music for Chorus and Winds

Brahms, Verdi, Gounod, Stravinsky; German, Italian, French, Russian.  At first glance, it seems a motley assemblage for a choral concert.  On second glance, though, there are more connections among these composers than we might have suspected.

None was known primarily as a choral composer, yet each wrote a significant body of such music and contributed at least one large-scale work to the standard choral repertory:  the Brahms and Verdi Requiems, Gounod’s Saint Cecilia Mass, and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.  Their choral music was modelled on earlier sources, and intended “for use.”  Brahms wrote mainly for amateur choral societies, among which the usually solitary composer spent many congenial evenings.  His German Requiem was conceived as a “people’s” work, in the vernacular.  Verdi’s opera choruses were, of course, dramatically functional; beyond that, his first operatic hit, Nabucco, rode to fame on the chorus Va, Pensiero, which immediately became an unofficial Italian national anthem.  His Requiem itself was conceived originally as a memorial to Rossini (a collective one, with contributions by various composers), then as a memorial to the Italian novelist and patriot Alessandro Manzoni.  Though the demand for seats was so great that subsequent performances had to be held in theaters, Verdi insisted the premiere be given in a church.  The Symphony of Psalms was a response to a Boston Symphony Orchestra commission for a “popular” work, a term Stravinsky interpreted idiosyncratically.  His compact 1948 Mass incorporates the entire text in twenty minutes and employs a small choir and wind ensemble, because the composer wanted to make it suitable for liturgical use as part of a service.  Odd man out here is Gounod, since we are performing an instrumental piece, but this too is a miniature designed for the intimate pleasure of the players as well as the hearers, in contrast to his grandly scaled operas.

Brahms wrote his Begräbnisgesang (Burial Song) in 1858, and conducted its first performance in Hamburg in 1859.  It was his first published choral work with instrumental accompaniment.  During that period he was working on the German Requiem, which had a decade-long gestation period, and the two works are clearly related in subject matter and musical treatment.  (Consider, for instance, the funeral march drumbeat common to both.)  The sixteenth-century text by Michael Weisse offers a conventionally pious view of death; the music reflects the composer’s interest in Renaissance and baroque polyphony.  It begins in a gloomy C minor, acknowledges the text’s reference to the “last trumpet” with a powerful trombone passage, and closes in a peaceful C major, with the sure hope of resurrection.

Verdi’s rarely heard Pater Noster, despite its Latin title, is a setting of Dante’s freely dramatic translation of the Lord’s Prayer.  Composed in 1880 during the composer’s “retirement,” it was first performed at La Scala on the occasion of his being made an honorary citizen of Milan.  Verdi’s music matches Dante’s drama with five-part writing (SSATB) that alternates sixteenth-century style imitative polyphony with homophonic passages.  At the premiere the piece was paired with a new Ave Maria, also to Dante’s translation, for soprano and strings.  Verdi wrote that the two works “should be sung one after the other as though they were a single piece.”

We’re not doing that; instead, we offer Verdi’s other Ave Maria, subtitled su scala enigmatica (based on an enigmatic scale), which was later included in the group of Four Sacred Pieces.  The enigmatic scale (C, D flat, E, F sharp, G sharp, A sharp, B, with F sharp replaced by F natural in its descending form) was proposed in an Italian newspaper article.  Boito, librettist for Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff, called it to the composer’s attention and suggested he set an Ave Maria to atone for Iago’s blasphemous Credo (Verdi replied that the text of the Credo was Boito’s fault, not his).  Verdi nonetheless made the setting, giving the scale to each voice in turn but harmonizing it differently each time.  Like the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria is highly contrapuntal.  Verdi did not allow it to be performed at the premiere of the other three Sacred Pieces in 1898, perhaps because he considered it an experimental exercise.

Gounod’s Petite Symphonie (Little Symphony) for winds serves as the palate-cleansing sorbet before our final course.  Like the Verdi choruses, it is a late work (1895), coming well after the successes of the operas Faust and Romeo and Juliet.  Written for the famous flute virtuoso Paul Taffanel, it features that instrument, especially in the second  movement (Andante cantabile).  The piece as a whole has a Mozartean lightness reminiscent of the earlier composer’s serenades for wind octet.  Gounod devoted the last years of his life to religion, and almost all the works from his final decade were for the church.  They are seldom performed today; this uncharacteristic Petite Symphonie remains popular.

Neither Brahms nor Verdi was religious, and Verdi was vehemently anti-clerical.  Stravinsky, though, was devoutly Russian Orthodox.  Whereas Brahms and Verdi looked to Renaissance models for their liturgical works, Stravinsky harks back even earlier to medieval church music.  He decided to compose a mass after finding some scores to Mozart masses in a second-hand music store in Los Angeles.  “As I played through these rococo-operatic sweets-of-sin, I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one,” he later wrote.  He described his Mass as “liturgical and almost without ornament.  In making a musical setting of the Credo I wished only to preserve the text in a special way ... The Credo is the longest movement.  There is much to believe.”  That “special way” involves chant, a favorite device of Stravinsky’s.  The Credo is appropriately the central of five movements.  The two movements on either side use solo voices, rather more imaginatively than “without ornament” suggests.  The outer movements are stylistically the simplest.  The wind dectet doesn’t merely accompany the chorus, but “comments” upon it with various independent touches.  Coming chronologically between the ballet Orpheus and the opera The Rake’s Progress, both representative of Stravinsky’s long-established “neo-classical” style, the Mass  seems an anomaly, but also a foreshadowing of the austere music he wrote in his final years.  He said that he wanted to write “very cold music, absolutely cold, that will appeal directly to the spirit.”  Cold it may be, but with a purity and precision of unearthly beauty.

Program notes by Zeke Hecker

___________________________________________________

Friday, April 4 & Saturday, April 5: Child's Play

For our fifth concert this season, we retain our Youthful Visions theme: from Georges Bizet, music for and about children's games (Jeux d'enfants); from Mozart, the Concerto for Clarinet in A major K. 622 – admittedly a late work – though, like Bizet, he didn’t live long enough to justify describing anything he wrote as “late”; and from Tchaikovsky, an exuberant early symphony, his Second, quite unlike the more familiar (and portentous) final ones.

Bizet received his early musical education from his parents and was admitted to the Paris Conservatory at the young age of 10, where he developed into a virtuoso pianist. At age 17 he composed a delightful Symphony in C which remained undiscovered and unperformed until 1935; it has since become popular both in concert and as a ballet score. Bizet won the Conservatory’s Prix de Rome and spent three years in that city, but most of his attempts at composition were incomplete. He wrote several operas in his brief lifetime, all failures. Of them, only two are regularly performed nowadays: The Pearl Fishers (1863) and Carmen (1875). The latter, of course, has become one of the best-loved operas in the repertory. Its initial failure probably contributed to the composer’s untimely death at age 36, three months after the premiere. His other most frequently performed score is the incidental music to the play L’Arlesienne.

In 1871, near the end of his brief life, Bizet composed a set of twelve piano pieces he called Jeux d'enfants (Children’s Games). He was probably influenced by an earlier group of piano pieces about children, Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood). Two years later, Bizet arranged five of the twelve pieces into an orchestral Petite Suite, and this is the form in which they have become familiar to the public. This suite is made up of: Marche (Trompette et tambour /Trumpet and Drum); Berceuse (La Poupée/The Doll); Impromptu (La Toupie/The Top); Duo (Petit Mari, Petite Femme/Little Husband, Little Wife); and Galop (Le Bal/The Ball).

Mozart began writing for the clarinet around 1770 in various divertimenti for winds, but only near the end of his career did he make it an essential part of his sound world. Compared to its woodwind cousins the flute, oboe, and bassoon, the clarinet itself is a youthful vision. It wasn’t invented until the late 17th century and did not become a regular presence in orchestras until a century after that. For his final clarinet masterworks – the Serenade No. 10 “Gran Partita” K. 361, the Kegelstatt Trio K. 498, the Quintets K. 452 and K. 481, this Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622, and the prominent clarinet parts in his operas La Clemenza di Tito and The Magic Flute as well as the Requiem – we must thank Mozart’s friend and fellow Mason, the virtuoso player Anton Stadler. From him Mozart learned the beauty of the clarinet’s tone and the flexibility of its technique.

The Clarinet Concerto K.622 was Mozart’s last major completed work. (The Requiem, his very last, is notoriously incomplete.) The concerto's manuscript is lost; the work comes to us in a corrupt edition from 1801. The orchestration includes pairs of flutes, bassoons, and horns, but no clarinets to compete with the soloist and no oboes, trumpets, or timpani to brighten the music’s mellow autumnal sound. Mozart makes extensive use of the clarinet’s lowest, “chalumeau” register. (Modern clarinets lack a few of the notes available on the instrument Mozart wrote for, so some passages are customarily taken up an octave.) While there is plenty of passagework for the soloist, display seems secondary. None of the three movements provides, or requires, a cadenza; legato lines dominate, especially in the soulful middle movement. Despite two centuries’ worth of clarinet concertos by other fine composers, the pre-eminence of this one remains unchallenged.

Tchaikovsky started piano lessons at age five. He studied law in Saint Petersburg and at age 19 took a position at the Ministry of Justice, where he remained for four years. But in 1863 he began studies at the Conservatory in Saint Petersburg, and three years later became professor of harmony at the newly founded Moscow Conservatory. He composed prolifically and successfully despite periods of severe depression. His homosexuality was a source of inner conflict, and his disastrous attempt at marriage to a devoted young student lasted only a couple of weeks. He maintained a close relationship by correspondence with a wealthy patron, Nadezhda von Meck, whom he never met in person. Some scholars have claimed that his death, from cholera, was suicidal. While other important 19th century Russian composers concentrated on Russian folklore and history, Tchaikovsky was more “Western” in his outlook. His works include several operas (of which the best known are Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades), six symphonies, the concert overtures for Romeo and Juliet, Francesa da Rimini, and 1812, concertos for piano and for violin, chamber music, songs, and the three great ballets Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker.

“Little Russia” was how 19th-century Russians referred to the Ukraine, reflecting the imperial notions of that era. In the summer of 1872 Tchaikovsky visited his sister and her husband on their estate in Kamenka near Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. The folk songs he heard there inspired his second symphony, which incorporates actual folk material. The subtitle was not his choice; the symphony was dubbed “The Little Russian” by his friend and fellow professor at the Moscow Conservatory, Nicholas Kashkin. When Tchaikovsky showed the piece to the group of composers in Saint Petersburg known as the “Mighty Handful” and led by Rimsky-Korsakov, they were enthusiastic because the normally Western-oriented Tchaikovsky seemed here to endorse their Russian nationalist agenda. The first performance, in Moscow in 1873, was a great success. Nonetheless, he revised it thoroughly eight years later, and the new version was first performed in Saint Petersburg in 1881. The first movement begins and ends with a horn solo based on the Ukrainian folk song “Down by Mother Volga,” which then yields to the main Allegro section consisting of material that suggests, if it does not actually quote, other folk tunes. Instead of a conventional slow movement, Tchaikovsky then gives us a military march, the theme of which he took from his 1869 opera “Undine” (later withdrawn and destroyed), where it served as a wedding march. The whirlwind Scherzo in triple time is interrupted by a witty Trio in duple time. The Finale, Tchaikovsky’s own favorite movement, is built on a folk tune called “The Crane,” which is succeeded by a second, more complex theme of Tchaikovsky’s own invention. The folk tune returns to end the piece in a burst of excitement. Throughout, the “Little Russian” Symphony is joyous and lively, a youthful vision prophetic less of the Pathétique than of The Nutcracker.

Program Notes by Zeke Hecker

___________________________________________________

Saturday, May 17, 2008: New Horizons
The 6th Annual Nathan Gottschalk Memorial Concert

Our season has been radiant with Youthful Visions.  For our finale we look not back, but forward to New Horizons.  Each of these colorful works on tonight's program marked a breakthrough for its composer.

As a boy, Ulysses Kay enjoyed the guidance of his maternal uncle, legendary bandleader and classic jazz musician “King” Oliver (another of whose disciples was Louis Armstrong) who encouraged his nephew to study piano at age six, violin at age 10. At age 12 he took up the alto saxophone and soon organized a quintet with friends
who played clarinet, trumpet, violin, and drums. As a student at the University of Arizona, Kay also received encouragement from William Grant Still, the acknowledged dean of African-American classical composers.  A rigorous musical education followed, with studies at Eastman, Columbia, and Tanglewood, with Hindemith and Otto Luening as teachers.  Throughout his long career, Kay composed prolifically in all forms.   He received major awards (Ditson, Fulbright, Prix de Rome), and for several decades was a consultant to the licensing corporation BMI.  He composed the score to the Hollywood film The Quiet One (1948).  His operas (many on African-American subjects) include Jubilee (1976) and Frederick Douglass (1985).  Of New Horizons (1944), one of his earliest orchestral works, remains his most successful.  Note the year:  the music turns away from the gloom of the Second World War and anticipates the arrival of a more peaceful, more bountiful future.  Premiered that year by the New York Philharmonic, it won the American Broadcasting Company Award.  Here’s how Time Magazine reviewed a later performance (1954) in Tucson:  “Of New Horizons started and ended with plenty of brass, but in the middle it made appealing use of melodic interweavings in the strings.  And though Composer Kay's melody kept getting interrupted by conflicting ideas, it also kept coming back. When the nine-minute work was over, the crowd gave the home-town composer the biggest hand of the evening.”  Another notable performance was given in Moscow by the State Radio Orchestra in 1958, at the height of the Cold War. 

Concerto for Orchestra promises a stellar career for Takuma Itoh, winner of the 2008 PVS Young Composers Competition.  Here’s what he writes about it:  “The Concerto for Orchestra is an arrangement of a piece written in the summer of 2005 –- Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra –- which was commissioned and premiered by the New York Youth Symphony with the Shanghai Quartet as the soloists.  In tonight's version, the virtuosic music that was originally written for the string quartet is divided up amongst the orchestra members.  The piece is organized into a three-part ABA form.  After a short, slow introduction, it takes off into a fast and frenzied section, then proceeds into a slow middle section where the soloists in the orchestra are able to display their lyrical side.  The final section essentially recapitulates ideas from the first section, only at a faster tempo.  There is a cadenza near the end in which the principal players of the string section form a string quartet, reminiscent of the original version of the piece.”  What leaps out at the listener are the composition's youthful energy, structural elegance, and mastery of orchestration;  “virtuosic” applies not only to the demands on the players, but to the composer himself.

The two works on the second half of the program are interestingly linked.  With the exception of Edward Elgar, Vaughan Williams was the first English composer of international significance to emerge since the 17th century.  In search of a distinctive style, Vaughan Williams assiduously collected English folk songs and studied the works of the great Tudor composers.  He spent two years revising the English Hymnal and wrote many new hymns; even today, open an Episcopal hymnal and you’ll find his stamp everywhere.  His best-known works evoke the English countryside, making him the leading figure among the “pastoral” composers (or, as they were derisively called, the “cow-pat” school).  But his music has greater range than that label would suggest.  The Five Mystical Songs are settings of texts by the 16th century metaphysical poet George Herbert.  He began working on them in 1906.  But he had become dissatisfied with his skills as an orchestrator, partly in response to adverse criticism -- that his music was too thick and ungainly.  As a remedy, he crossed the channel to study with that master of transparency, Maurice Ravel.  “He showed me how to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines,” said Vaughan Williams.  When these songs were first performed at the Worcester Three Choirs Festival in 1911, Ravel’s influence was clear.  According to J. S. Whitehead, the work “was cited as evidence that Vaughan Williams had indeed ‘arrived’ as a composer...”  (On the other hand, when young Benjamin Britten heard them in 1934, he wrote to a friend, “the ... biblical songs of RVW finished me entirely; that ... artificial mysticism combined with, what seemed to me, technical incompetence sends me crazy.”)  The first four songs are meditative in character, the fifth jubilant.  Like Kay and Itoh, Vaughan Williams revels in the luxuriant sounds of a modern orchestra.  He finds no contradiction between such aural sensuousness and the austere spirituality of the text.

And sensuous is the word for Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, composed for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes.  Diaghilev assembled the most exciting young composers, designers, dancers, and choreographers for his startling productions, and so revolutionized the art of ballet.  According to the work’s librettist and choreographer, Fokine, “the rather youthful Ravel (he was thirty-five) was not yet the famous master, the leader of the modern French composers, which he was destined to become later ... I felt that the music would be unusual, colourful, and, most important, what I sincerely wished -- totally unlike any other ballet music.”  Daphnis was intended for the 1910 season, but the creators did not meet the deadline.  (Instead, Diaghilev snared a fledgling named Stravinsky to compose a score to The Firebird.)  Ravel interrupted work on it to attend to various other projects, including the Mother Goose Suite (which the PVSO performed in February).  According to Gerald Larner, “In agreeing to compose a ballet on the story of Daphnis and Chloe -- based on the second-century Greek pastoral romance by Longus -- he had put himself in an awkward artistic situation ... this was the first time he had undertaken to work on a subject he had not himself chosen and ... he did not like it.  He was not ready for the project and the project was not ready for him.”  The problem was the raw, overt eroticism of the Greek source, which did not suit Ravel’s more delicate aesthetic.  He saw the story filtered through a pastoral rococo lens, like the paintings of Boucher or Fragonard, and there were many disagreements between him and Fokine.  The ballet wound up with no real love scene, and a climactic pirate attack was reduced to a fleeting guerrilla raid.  The fiery bacchanal which ends the work gave the composer special difficulty.  When asked how he solved it, Ravel disingenuously replied, “It’s quite simple.  I put Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade on the piano and copied it.”  Sensing that the score was not especially suited to dance, he considered offering its premiere as a concert work.  Diaghilev, his faith in the project diminished, scheduled it for the end of the 1912 season and gave only two performances.  Despite Nijinsky and Karsavina in the leading roles and sumptuous decor by Bakst, it was a comparative failure.

The second suite is simply the final scene of the ballet, intact.  Larner again:  “The dawn beginning -- the dew running off the rocks in rippling arpeggios on flute and clarinets, the sun rising melodiously on lower strings and wind, dawn-chorus birdsong on flutes and violins, shepherds playing their pipes in the distance ? is magically atmospheric.  At the same time ... the sun-rise melody is gradually transformed into the love theme to assume its authentic shape just at the moment Chloé is restored to Daphnis ... The Pan and Syrinx episode, where an elaborately eloquent flute plays the part of the frustrated god’s panpipe soliloquy, is an ideally proportioned interlude before the bacchanal.  This last episode ... in its use of a pagan five-in-a-bar metre rather than a civilized three-in-a-bar ... remains one of the most exciting passages in the choral and orchestral repertoire.”  A wordless chorus saturates the texture; its groaning and shouting are anything but chaste.  

Program Notes by Zeke Hecker