Concert I Program
Notes
by Robert
Hurwitz
G. F. Handel (1685–1759)
Hornpipe, from the Water Music
The Water Music both was and was not written for a
royal water pageant down the Thames in July of 1717. Although a
royal water pageant did occur at that time, and Handel most likely
composed some special pieces for it, we now know that the set of pieces
which forms what we call the Water
Music was not all written at one
time, but over a period of several years. The entire work is made
up of some twenty-one pieces, many of which were composed from 1715 to
1720, but others of which likely appeared somewhat later.
The pieces making up the Water Music were not
collected for publication until 1740. As published, they
represent a collection, and not a uniform composition. The
twenty-one works were surely not meant to be performed as a single
composition, and they are not performed as such in our own times.
Rather, the most common manner of performance is in one or another
suite, in which pieces which form a natural group by scoring and key
structure are played together. There is good reason, however, to
perform individual pieces as stand-alone works, as is the case on this
concert with the Hornpipe.
All of this factual information notwithstanding,
romantic stories of barges floating on the river to Handel’s music die
hard, and we must refer to at least one of them. The event, in
July, 1717 was described in the London Daily Courant of July 19, 1717
as follows:
“On Wednesday evening about
8:00, the King took water of Whitehall in an open barge ... and went up
the river toward Chelsea. Many other barges with persons of
quality attended, and so great was the number of boats, that the whole
river in a manner was covered. A city company’s barge was
employed for the music, which were fifty instruments of all sorts, who
played all the way from Lambeth ... the finest symphonies, composed
expressly for this occasion by Mr. Handel; which His Majesty liked so
well that he caused it to be played over three times in going and
returning.”
W.A. Mozart (1756–1791)
Concerto for Flute and Harp
Mozart composed the Concerto for Flute and Harp in
Paris in 1788 on a commission from the Duc Adrien-Louis de Guines
(1735-1806), a fine flutist, and his daughter, a highly talented
harpist. Mozart had written to his father Leopold, telling him of
the daughter, who was his pupil in composition. She “plays the
harp magnifique,” he
wrote. “She has a great deal of talent and
even genius, and in particular a marvelous memory, so that she can play
all her pieces, actually about two hundred, by heart.”
Mozart’s motivation for composing the concerto was
not exclusively artistic. He was having a horrible time making
financial ends meet in Paris, and the prospect of earning a sizable fee
for a new concerto was an important consideration.
The Concerto was composed for the home rather than
the concert stage. The combination of soloists is a rare one. The
harp itself had not yet won its place as a standard instrument in the
symphony orchestra. Technical improvements that allowed for
special harp effects like the glissando were not yet in place.
The harp, in the time of Mozart, was mainly a plucked version of the
piano, and the music written for it was essentially piano music.
Even after the harp was technically perfected, no later major composer
had the desire or incentive to write a concerto for flute and harp, and
Mozart’s remains exceptional in the repertoire.
Charm and brightness permeate the music from start
to finish. Mozart’s inevitable flair for the dramatic intrudes
upon the development section of the first movement and a reprise of the
rondo theme in the last. Without several turns to the minor and
the occasional use of dissonance, the unmitigated sunny character of
the bulk of the composition might have grown tiresome, but careful
balance of these elements allows the work to emerge as a charming,
optimistic and well-constructed piece of music.
Unfortunately for Mozart, the Duc was not impressed
enough to follow through on his promise. Mozart’s fee for the
composition of the concerto was never paid.
Glen Cortese (b.
1960)
Apollo’s Fire
(notes by the
composer)
The inspiration for Apollo’s
Fire comes from multiple sources, practical, poetic and
narrative. I
have conducted the Mozart Concerto for Flute and Harp many times and I
have often thought it would be useful to have a companion work that
could be performed on the same program. Having the pair of flute and
harp soloists is rare, and except for a handful of works, there is
little repertoire outside of the Mozart. Given the length of the Mozart
(almost thirty minutes) it eliminates all the other possibilities, as
they are longer works that stand on their own. When the Oregon Mozart
Players commissioned a new work for their Silver Anniversary, the only
limitations were orchestra size and a time length of about eight
minutes. When we decided to have Carol Wincenc and Nancy Allen as
guests for the Gala Celebration Concert playing the Mozart, the idea
crystallized immediately.
The next step was finding an inspiration for the
work, which has ultimately come from two sources, the first of which is
the legend of Apollo. In short, Apollo was the son of Zeus and Leto,
and the twin brother of Artemis. Apollo was the god of music—his
principal instrument was the lyre, and he directed the choir of the
Muses—and also of prophecy, colonization, medicine, archery (but not
for war or hunting), poetry, dance and, intellectual inquiry, as well
as the caretaker of herds and flocks. He was also a god of light, known
as “Phoebus” (radiant or beaming), and he was sometimes identified with
Helios the sun god. Among his attributes are the bow and arrows, a
laurel crown, and the cithara (or lyre) and plectrum, but his most
famous attribute is the tripod, the symbol of his prophetic powers.
The second source for this piece was an excerpt by John
Lyly, A Hymn to Apollo from
his play Midas, written in
1592. John
Lyly was born in Kent in 1554 and brought up in Canterbury, where he
likely attended the King's School at the same time as Marlowe. He
received his master’s degree at Magdalen College, University of Oxford,
in 1575 and shortly after moved to London, where he became instantly
famous with the publication of the prose romance Euphues, or The
Anatomy of Wit (1578) and its sequel Euphues and His England(1580).
Lyly's style had a marked impact on contemporary writers, not the least
on Shakespeare. Polonius in Hamlet,
Moth in Love's Labour's Lost,
and the repartees of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing
show signs of Lyly's influence.
Apollo’s Fire
is a miniature tone poem loosely based
on the spirit of Lyly’s poem and the legend of Apollo. There are no
literal references, just a musical painting of the moods conveyed in
both the sources.
Hymn to Apollo
Sing to Apollo, god of day,
Whose golden beams with morning play,
And make her eyes as brightly shine,
Aurora's face is called divine;
Sing to Phoebus and that throne
Of diamonds which he sits upon.
Io pæans let us sing
To physic's and to poesy's king!
Crown all his altars with bright fire,
Laurels bind about his lyre,
A Daphnean coronet for his head,
The Muses dance about his bed;
When on his ravishing lute he plays,
Strew his temple round with bays.
Io pæans let us sing
To the glittering Delian king!
Vaughan Williams
(1872–1958)
Toward the Unknown Region
Following the death of Purcell in 1695, English music went
into a long period of decline that was not reversed until the emergence
of Edward Elgar in the late nineteenth century. This rebirth continued
in the next generation following Elgar, which boasted a number of young
and talented composers. The leading figure of this younger group was
Ralph Vaughan Williams, who for nearly sixty years remained one of the
most influential figures in English music. Like Elgar, he was a late
developer, and did not publish his first composition until he was
thirty. In his mid-thirties he began to attract serious attention
as a composer with his ‘Song for chorus and orchestra’, Toward the
Unknown Region. The composition resulted from a suggestion from
his
friend and fellow composer Gustav Holst that they select the same poem
to set in an informal competition. The text they chose was Walt
Whitman's 1868 work Darest thou now,
0 soul, which Vaughan Williams
completed as Toward the Unknown
Region in1905.
For such an early work, Vaughan Williams found his own
voice to a remarkable extent. To be sure, the influences of Brahms and
Wagner are there, but the extended melodic lines and the delicate
sensitivity with which all the text is handled are quintessentially
Vaughan Williams.
There are two principal themes: a serious opening passage
and a beautifully spacious melody (“nor touch of human hands”). The
music builds to a huge climax and concludes with an inspiring anthem.
Darest Thou Now o Soul
Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?
No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.
I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.
Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.
Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfill O soul
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Symphony No. 2 in C
Schumann began work on his Second Symphony in
December of 1845, at a time when he was suffering from an ailment which
proved to be an early stage in the development of a severe mental
illness, an illness which was to plague the composer to the end of his
days. The distress and discomfort Schumann was suffering at this
time were, at least in part, alleviated by his tireless and
concentrated work on the symphony. Within just a few days of
feverish activity he had a sketch of the entire composition completed.
The symphony remained in this state for several
months due to Schumann’s impediment, but he was eventually able to
return to the work, completing the orchestration shortly before the
scheduled first performance. The symphony’s premiere took place
on November 5, 1846 in a Leipzig Gewandhaus concert conducted by Felix
Mendelssohn.
In later years Schumann remarked that the piece
reminded him “of a dark time. ... I sketched it when I was still in a
state of physical suffering; ... I must say it was ... the resistance
of the spirit which exercised a visible impact here ... through which I
sought to contend with my bodily state. The first movement is
full of this struggle and is very erratic and restive.”
Indeed, the idea of struggle is a predominant theme
of this symphony, struggle, contention, and ultimately, triumph.
The first movement begins with a slow and solemn introduction in which
two themes appear together, one for the brasses of the orchestra and
the other for the strings. The mysterious brass fanfares recur at
strategic spots in both the first and second movements, and make a
final appearance in the coda of the finale, thus creating a unified
frame for the work.
As the introduction proceeds, the pace gradually
quickens, uneven rhythms appear in the wind instruments, and out of the
oppressive murkiness emerges, like a shaft of light, the energetic main
theme which marks the beginning of the Allegro. Soon this theme
is replaced by another, but it reemerges at the end of a succinct
exposition. The development section skillfully combines elements
of all the thematic material heard thus far in an impressive
contrapuntal web. The recapitulation, a strict one by Nineteenth
Century standards, begins with the theme again in its home key, and
ends, as did the exposition, with this same. Finally an extended
coda gradually gathers momentum until the brass call from the
introduction is sounded, like a portentous signal above the din of the
orchestra.
The second movement is a scherzo which closely
resembles the perpetuum mobile,
or “perpetual motion.” The
helter-skelter sixteenth-note activity in the strings is interrupted by
a pair of trios, each of which contrasts with the scherzo in both mood
and texture. When the scherzo
theme is heard for a final time, it
includes, at its close, the brass fanfare from the first movement.
The third movement is dominated by a single theme, a
soaring and exalted melody, full of pain and longing. A fugato
which appears at the center of the piece provides great contrast, but
the first theme soon undermines it and is sounded again in full
recapitulation to close the movement.
The finale is a sparkling and buoyant piece which
incorporates motives from the previous movements in subtle and
ingenious ways. After beginning is a simple and unpretentious
manner, the first theme, a cheerful march, appears, followed by a
series of scalar runs in the violins. In the midst of these runs
a bass figure materializes that is based on the melody of the slow
movement. The music surges forward to a climax of great power and
enthusiasm, only to give way to a solo oboe and a brand new
section. A woodwind theme begins very softly, but soon the brass
fanfare which is the keynote of this symphony reappears, gradually
growing in both volume and power until a noble and monumental ending is
accomplished.
Concert II Program
Notes
by Robert
Hurwitz
Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart
(1756–1791)
Overture to La Finta
Giardiniera K. 196
In 1775, the
nineteen-year-old Mozart was literally mad about opera, and although he
did not express his enthusiasm on paper until some years later, we can
be reasonably certain that the following expresses feelings akin to
those he must have been experiencing in 1775: “I have an inexpressible
desire to compose another opera. ... I only need to hear talk about
opera ... and I am quite beside myself”.
It had been in the late summer or autumn of 1774
that Mozart had received a scrittura
(commission) for an Italian comic
opera for the Court theatre in Munich for the Carnival season of
1774–1775. The libretto, which was prescribed as was the custom,
was to deal with pat comic situations: disguises, confusions of
identity, revelations and tearful situations, surprises of all sorts,
and parody. The title was to be “The Counterfeit Gardener.”
All of Mozart’s passion for opera writing was
applied to the composition of this work, and his exhilaration can
easily be heard in the sprightly opening portion of the overture, which
was played in its first performance by a small orchestra of 23
musicians. Mozart’s energy seems almost unstoppable here.
Following the brief con spirito movement,
a slower and more graceful
piece is heard to close the overture, but the first act opens again in
a grand and energetic style. The work as a whole was received
enthusiastically. “Thank God! My opera ... went so well that I
cannot possibly describe to Mama how great the noise was,” Mozart
wrote. “Early this morning the Prince Bishop of Chiemesee sent a
message to congratulate me saying that the opera had been thoroughly
enjoyed by everyone.”
Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart
(1756–1791)
Violin Concerto No. 5, K. 219, “Turkish”
The five violin concertos of
Mozart are all youthful works, composed in Salzburg between April and
December of 1775, when Mozart was just turning twenty. As a
professional musician and son of a violinist, the young Mozart had
been rigorously trained in both the piano and the violin, and although
his preference was for the piano, he found himself, in the year 1770,
appointed Concertmaster and official violinist to the Archbishop,
a position he both considered necessary and detested. The violin,
for all Mozart’s technical mastery of it, was associated in his mind
with the hated years in Salzburg, and these circumstances likely
account both for the large volume of violin music he produced in his
native town, and for its virtual absence once Mozart relocated in
Vienna.
Although the five concertos were written so close to
each other, the rapid growth and development of Mozart’s style is
apparent. Each of the successive concertos is longer and more advanced
than the one that preceded it, and by the time he reached the Fifth
Concerto, he managed to produce something very special. Though the
piece itself remains clearly within the constraints of the Classical
style, its length and difficulty mark it as something new. The dramatic
scope of the Concerto No. 5 is truly impressive: it is very nearly an
opera in concerto guise, with
the soloist as protagonist.
A clear example of this occurs with the initial
entry of the soloist in the first movement. After the orchestral
introduction, marked allegro aperto,
the solo violin enters in a sudden
slower tempo, playing a kind of operatic arioso. This is a new,
and arresting effect, one of many encountered in the concerto.
This concerto bears the nickname Turkish. “Turkish
music” was music loosely based on the military band music of Turkey
(also known as Janissary music). In Mozart's concerto, it refers to
forceful and aggressive playing by the lower strings in the orchestra
using the wood of their bows on the strings to create a percussive
sound. This takes place in the middle of the finale of the
concerto, which is otherwise a graceful minuet, a striking
juxtaposition! Mozart adapted this passage from an earlier
ballet, “Le gelosie del seraglio” (“The jealous seraglio women”) K.
135a, composed for Milan in 1772.
Despite the excellence of his 1775 concertos and the
urging of his father, Mozart could not develop a liking for playing the
violin. After the “Turkish” concerto he produced no more solo concertos
for the violin. After leaving Salzburg in 1781, he did not he
play the violin at all. In the “string quartet parties” he participated
in with Haydn, Dittersdorf and Vanhal in Vienna, Mozart's chosen
instrument was the viola.
Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart
(1756–1791)
Symphony No. 40 in G
minor, K. 550
In the summer of 1788, following
an extremely successful premier of “Don Giovanni” in Prague, Mozart
returned to Vienna to face what was now that city's usual response to
him: indifference. True, the Emperor had appointed him Kammer-compositeur,
but the salary, which amounted to about $200 per
year, was more of an insult than a benefit. In dire financial
straits, and struggling with “gloomy thoughts which I must repel with
all my might,” Mozart that summer penned, without commission or hope of
financial gain, three extraordinary symphonies in the space of about
six weeks. How he was able to perform such a feat in the midst of
appalling conditions remains a mystery.
Of the three symphonies, the G minor is by far the
darkest and most dramatic. The first movement, which opens
directly without a slow introduction, seems apprehensive and nervous
from the very start. The repeated pulsations in the lower strings
support music which is both throbbing and pessimistic, and this mood
continues through the course of the highly concentrated piece.
The second movement, which is slow and lyrical, contrasts greatly with
first, but even here an undercurrent of disquiet pervades the
atmosphere. Many chromatically twisted passages convey a continued
sense of grief. The minuet is strong and resolute, with square
rhythms and solid accents. A profound unrest and vulnerability
seems once again to lie very close to the surface, which the trio's
calmness and reassuring qualities fail to allay. The finale
discloses to the full extent Mozart's fury and anguish. Wild,
almost brutal outbursts drive the music forward without relief.
Extreme chromaticism, bordering occasionally on the atonal, heighten
the passion, and the music drives to its powerful conclusion like a
hammer to its nail.
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