OTTORINO RESPIGHI — Trittico Botticelliano (Three Botticelli Pictures)

OTTORINO RESPIGHI — Trittico Botticelliano (Three Botticelli Pictures) Though he was born in Bologna, the composer Ottorino Respighi is inevitably and forever associated with Rome thanks to his so-called “Roman Trilogy” of orchestral tone poems: Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals. For his Trittico Botticelliano, however, we must travel north to Tuscany and the Renaissance capital of Florence. It was there at the Uffizi Gallery that Respighi encountered three paintings by Sandro Botticelli: La Primavera (“Spring”), L’Adorazione dei Magi (“The Adoration of the Magi”), and La Nascita di Venere (“The Birth of Venus”). These three pictures don’t seem to have much in common other than the artist and gallery, but Respighi’s style, especially in his tone poems, often thrives on juxtaposition and contrast and he uses their divergent subject matters to maximum effect here to create a dynamic collection of snapshots. The opening movement provides an exuberant depiction of spring with the bassoon first introducing a dance tune that is subsequently echoed and ornamented by the full ensemble. In addition to his work as a composer, Respighi was also a scholar of Italian music history, so it is no accident that his dance tune closely resembles one that might have accompanied the Renaissance festivities of Botticelli’s day. The second movement is really the centerpiece and is built around the ninth century Latin antiphon “Veni Emmanuel,” better known to us as the advent hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The mournful and mysterious opening gives way to more colorful musical textures as each of the three Magi arrive at the manger and present their gifts. Finally, the last movement attempts to capture Botticelli’s most well-known painting in which the newly-born goddess Venus stands nude inside an oversized scallop shell. Respighi captures the birth through the slowly coalescing melodic materials that seem to drift from foreground to background as if carried on the waves. The piece ends with the gentle undulations of the waves slowly receding as the goddess departs. AARON COPLAND — Lincoln Portrait During the final years of the Great Depression, composer Aaron Copland was finding a new sound. After spending his childhood years in the Conservative Jewish milieu of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, Copland had received his musical training from famed composer and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Paris. When he returned to his hometown of New York City in 1925, many of his compositions were imitations of the modernist French style he had learned during his years abroad. By the early 1930s, Copland was increasingly disenchanted with the elitist institutions of classical music and desired to write simpler music with a broader appeal. He also wanted to create something in classical music that would be distinctly American. He experimented with these new sounds in a series of American-themed ballets, beginning with El Salón México in 1936. Copland certainly includes American folk melodies—primarily drawn from collections of “cowboy songs” he checked out of the New York Public Library—but by the end of the sequence, he seems to do something more. Copland’s ballets and concert pieces from this period actually begin to establish a sound to the American landscape that would be copied and reproduced in almost every subsequent musical representation. The wide-open harmonies, tough lyricism, and rhythmic vitality of Copland’s music provide a musical grammar that is used to encapsulate the American experience even today. Lincoln Portrait comes from this immensely productive wartime period in which Copland was perfecting his new American style. In just four years between 1942 and 1946, Copland would produce nearly all of his most enduring compositions including ballet scores for Rodeo and Appalachian Spring as well as concert pieces like Lincoln Portrait, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Symphony No. 3. Each of these compositions seems designed to encourage and admonish a nation at war to hold fast to its most sacred principles. It seems natural, then, that Copland would look for inspiration to the president who had shepherded the country through its most trying hours, Abraham Lincoln. The piece hinges on a written part for narrator that includes excerpts from some of Lincoln’s most famous speeches: his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, his 1862 State of the Union address, and of course, the 1863 Gettysburg Address. Copland remarked that he ultimately decided to include spoken words in the piece because “no composer could possibly hope to match in purely musical terms the stature of so eminent a figure.” In the orchestral texture, Copland weaves his newly honed American sound with clever melodic quotations of folk songs and popular tunes from Lincoln’s day including “Camptown Races” and “On Springfield Mountain.” MODEST MUSSORGSKY — Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated by Ravel) Given its unmistakable color and grandeur, it seems strange to think that Modest Mussorgsky originally composed his masterpiece for solo piano. In fact, the thought of orchestrating Pictures at an Exhibition seems never to have occurred to Mussorgsky before his death in 1881. Several composers attempted to create a version for orchestra beginning in 1891, but the piece existed primarily in its piano form for a half-century until French composer Maurice Ravel produced his orchestral version in 1922. Almost immediately upon its debut with the Boston Symphony, Ravel’s version became the definitive version of Pictures at an Exhibition, with other candidates like British conductor Henry Wood even going so far as to formally condemn their own arrangements after hearing Ravel’s. When inspiring pianist Vladimir Horowitz wanted to play the piece in his solo piano recitals, he created a new version for solo piano based on a transcription of Ravel’s orchestration rather than the original piano score. But despite Ravel’s extraordinary gifts as an orchestral colorist, the contours of the piece belong purely to Mussorgsky’s design. Mussorgsky wrote the piece in honor of his friend, visual artist Victor Hartmann, who died unexpectedly at the age of thirty-nine. In the spring of 1874, for a memorial show organized in Hartmann’s honor at a gallery in St. Petersburg, Mussorgsky selected eleven pictures as the basis for his collection of miniatures he referred to as “an album series.” At first glance, this would seem to be a challenging ad hoc structure to carry off, especially with no clear themes to unify the disparate pictures into a single whole. But Mussorgsky proved to be a skilled curator by building his composition around a recurring melodic idea that he designed to represent his own gait as he moved around the room considering each picture in turn. The shorter movements at the beginning of the piece gradually grow and develop in complexity, bringing the listener forward through each successive picture to a satisfying climax in the majestic finale. In the end, Pictures at an Exhibition is not only a colorful and charming composition, it is also a touching tribute to Mussorgsky’s friend who cannot have imagined that 150 years later, audiences might still be standing in the shadow of his Great Gate of Kiev. .

Load more