Boston Symphony Orchestra Concert Programs, Season 111, 1991-1992
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Boston Symphony Orchestra Seiji Ozawa MUSIC DIRECTOR JW*± \ 5? One Hundred Eleventh Season ^Hfl^HIHHEI^HI^^^Hfl^^HI^HHH^H^H LASSALE THE ART SEIKOOF .:. BBStat EBHORN Jewelers since 1839 f* d Our J52" year THE E.B. HORN COMPANY 429 WASHINGTON STREET, BOSTON, MA BUDGET TERMS ALL MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED AVAILABLE MAIL OR PHONE ORDERS (617) 542-3902 OPEN MON. AND THURS. TIL 7 . :__„ srara The Boston Symphony Orchestra presents a special concert honoring NED ROREM, recipient of the BSO's Horblit Award for distinguished composition by an American composer. Sunday, November 17, 1991, at 8 p.m. Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory KATHERINE CIESINSKI, mezzo-soprano VINSON COLE, tenor KURT OLLMANN, baritone LEONE BUYSE, flute MALCOLM LOWE, violin BURTON FINE, viola RONALD FELDMAN, cello RANDALL HODGKINSON, DONALD ST. PIERRE, PATRICK STEPHENS, and BRIAN ZEGER, pianists MUSIC OF NED ROREM The Santa Fe Songs (1980), for baritone, violin, viola, cello, and piano Twelve poems of Witter Bynner 1 Santa Fe 7. El Musico 2. Opus 101 8. The Wintry Mind 3. Any other time . 9. Water-Hyacinths 4. Sonnet 10. Moving Leaves 5. Coming down the stairs 1 1 Yes I hear them 6. He never knew 12. The Sowers KURT OLLMANN, baritone MALCOLM LOWE, BURTON FINE, RONALD FELDMAN, and DONALD ST. PIERRE Rain in Spring (Text by Paul Goodman) Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair (Stephen Foster) Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Robert Frost) Early in the Morning (Robert Hillyer) Little Elegy (Elinor Wylie) Love (Thomas Lodge) A Child Asleep in its Own Life (Wallace Stevens) VINSON COLE, tenor PATRICK STEPHENS, piano intermission program continues Trio for flute, cello, and piano (1960) I. Largo misterioso— Allegro II. Largo III. Andante IV. Allegro molto LEONE BUYSE, RONALD FELDMAN, and RANDALL HODGKINSON Poems of Love and the Rain (1963), A cycle of seventeen songs for mezzo-soprano and piano 1,17. Prologue, Epilogue; from The Rain (Donald Windham) 2, 16. Stop All the Clocks (W.H. Auden) 3, 15. The Air is the only (Howard Moss) 4, 14. Love's stricken "Why" (Emily Dickinson) 5, 13. The Apparition (Theodore Roethke) 6, 12. Do I love you more than a day? (Jack Larson) 7, 11. In the rain (e.e. cummings) 8, 10. Song for lying in bed during a night rain (Kenneth Pitchford) 9. Interlude (Theodore Roethke) KATHERINE CIESINSKI, mezzo-soprano BRIAN ZEGER, piano This concert is the closing event of "New Music Harvest," a city-wide festival of contemporary music, November 14-17. a ^HH Hfl NOTES Although he has composed in virtually every musical genre, including orches- tral, chamber, and operatic works, Ned Rorem (born October 23, 1923, Rich- mond, Virginia) is generally regarded as our finest composer of songs, of which he has created hundreds with piano accompaniment and many more with the accompaniment of a chamber ensemble. While studying in Chicago (piano with Belle Tannenbaum, theory and harmony with Leo Sowerby) when he was about fifteen years old, Rorem met Paul Goodman, beginning a friend- ship that lasted until the writer's death. Goodman's work inspired Rorem's first songs -and many others that followed. As the composer noted in his book Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary: That I have never in the following decades wearied of putting his words to music is the highest praise I can show him; since I put faith in my own work, I had first to put faith in Paul's. ... He was my Goethe, my Blake, and my Apollinaire. He explained once, in an interview with Philip Ramey, "I didn't write them from interest in the voice but from interest in poetry." Still, they marked the begin- ning of a lifelong activity with poetry and with singers, who enthusiastically wel- come new Rorem songs. It was a later Goodman setting, "The Lordly Hudson," that brought Rorem his first substantial public acclaim as a composer when, in 1948, the Music Library Association declared it the "best published song of the year." Rorem's interest in literature was always keen and perceptive; it has led him over the years to a wide range of poems. Before 1954 he drew widely from the poetic literature; since that date he has set mostly contemporary American poems, with the addition of Walt Whitman, who appears frequently in his work. And since about 1960 he has tended to write cycles— two of which are included on this program — rather than individual songs. Song writing has quite naturally affected Rorem's approach to instrumental music as well. Although he is a gifted orchestrator (a skill that he learned mostly from Virgil Thomson), he tends to think in terms of vocal lines even when writing for instruments. "Even when writing for violin or timpani, it's the vocalist in me trying to get out. Music is, after all, a song expression, and any composer worthy of the name is intrinsically a singer whether he allows it or not. Actually, when I'm composing an orchestral piece I try to write 'sing- ably,' in some sense giving a physical pleasure to the instrumentalists." Of course, the composition of a symphony or a chamber work generally takes much longer than the creation of a single song. The larger scope of the work, and the absence of a text as a formal framework, calls for a different kind of working-out of the musical ideas, even though the basic "songlike" approach remains. Rorem composed the Trio for flute, cello, and piano at Saratoga Springs, New York, in June and July of 1960 on a commission from flutist Bernard Goldberg for his Musica Viva Trio, which premiered the work in Pittsburgh. Goldberg suggested "something to challenge" his virtuosity and that of his colleagues in the ensemble. Rorem's response was a four- movement work that occasionally offers concerto-like roles to one of the participants. And so the first movement, based entirely on six notes, is a concerto for the flutist upstaging the other two players, while the third movement (con- ceived on the same six notes) becomes a vocalise for the cellist, who finally melts into a canonic reconciliation with his companions. The second and fourth movements also are built from similar blocks— squeezed sequence of four consecutive tones -but built on another esthetic, and featuring the piano's dazzle. The Largo presents a whispered idiotic conversation between flute and cello: whispered because both play muted and non-vibrato even at their loudest; idiotic because each voice says the same thing at the same time and neither listens to the other. The conversation is punctuated at increasingly frequent intervals by piano crashes formed from the previous tonal matter. The concluding Allegro equalizes the three players, each of whom unsqueezes the four-tone clus- ter and sprinkles it throughout his whole range like fireworks which ulti- mately explode into a unison. -Ned Rorem, July 1968 When writing a single song, Rorem generally works very quickly. The impe- tus for the song is, of course, the poem that strikes him for its musical possibil- ities, that (to use the parlance of his own Quaker tradition) "speaks to my con- dition." "Having the poem," he has said, "means that half the work is done, for the poem tends to dictate form." Beyond form, of course, the composer needs to find a musical mood or color, a particular sound world that will capture the feel of the poem in tone. Rorem has been particularly gifted at finding such expressive analogues. This point was illustrated strikingly by the tenor Paul Sperry when he gave a talk at Harvard a few years ago on the subject of American song with an example from the several individual songs on this program. Wishing to demonstrate that, even without the words, a good song evokes the spirit of the poem, Sperry performed Rorem's Early in the Morning, vocalising wordlessly to piano accompaniment, and asked everyone present to write down on a slip of paper the words that came into their minds as they listened. Almost unanimously the audience thought of words like "green," "outdoors," "nostalgia," "morning." After reading aloud the words that Rorem's music had evoked, Sperry sang the song with the words, including: Early in the morning Of a lovely summer day As they lowered the bright awning At the outdoor cafe, I was breakfasting on croissants And cafe au lait Under greenery like scenery, Rue Frangois Premier. The ability to create a vivid link between the mood of the poem and the mood of the music is the mark of a great song composer. The group of individ- ual songs covers some four decades of Rorem's song output: Little Elegy (1952), Love (1953), Early in the Morning (1955), Rain in Spring (1956), A Child Asleep in its Own Life (1971-72) and Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1990). Rorem composed The Santa Fe Songs, for medium voice with the accom- paniment of piano quartet, on a commission from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, of which he was composer-in-residence, for the 1980 season. The premiere took place in Santa Fe on July 27, 1980, with William Parker as the soloist. The work sets twelve poems by Witter Bymmer. Given the context of the commission, a chamber music festival, it is only natural that the work should be conceived not simply as "voice with accompaniment," but as a part- nership of equals in the true sense of chamber music; thus the interplay of voice with piano, violin, viola, and cello is a significant element in the work, .