• Abstract and Figures
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BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA James Levine, Music Director Bernard Haitink, Conductor Emeritus Seiji Ozawa, Music Director Laureate 125th Season, 2005-2006 CHAMBER PRELUDE I Saturday, October 15, at 6 COMMUNITY CONCERT I Sunday, October 16, at 3, at Bethany Congregational Church, Foxboro This free concert is generously supported by the State Street Foundation. ELIZABETH OSTLING, flute KEISUKE WAKAO, oboe IAN GREITZER, clarinet RICHARD RANTI, bassoon RICHARD SEBRING, horn YA-FEI CHUANG, piano RAVEL he Tombeau de Couperin, arranged for woodwind quintet by Mason Jones Prelude Fugue Menuet Rigaudon TANSMAN Suite for Wind Trio Dialogue Scherzino Aria Finale POULENC Sextet for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn Allegro vivace Divertissement: Andantino Finale: Prestissimo FRAN^AIX L'Heure du berger, for piano and wind quintet I. Les Vieux beaux II. Pin-Up Girls III. Les Petits nerveux Steinway and Sons Pianos, selected exclusively for Symphony Hall. Week 3 Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Le Tombeau de Couperin, arranged for woodwind quintet by Mason Jones Maurice Ravel was the consummate piano composer, although he is better known to a wide audience for his brilliantly and imaginatively scored orchestral music. Influenced by Debussy, he is usually aligned with the musical Impressionism of which Debussy was the creator, but throughout Ravel's music we find an interest in the abstract, purely musical ideas of Classical and Baroque models. Ravel's piano music reflects both sides of his aesthetic concern. In works like Jenx d'eau ("Play of water") and the suites Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, he paints tone-pictures with piano textures every bit as imaginative and varied as those of his instrumental scores. On the other hand are the abstract genre pieces, such as the Sonatine and a number of works based on dance forms, including the Pavane pour line infante definite and the suite of Valses nobles et sentimentales. The present piece, Le Tombeau de Couperin, expands the genre piece to the level of the Baroque suite. In spring 1914 Ravel had transcribed a Forlane (a dance form found in the typi- cal French Baroque suite) from Francois Couperin's Concert royal. This engagement with the Baroque master touched off Ravel's homage, which he began in 1914 but didn't finish until 1917 because of a stint in a non-combatant role in World War I (a voluntary choice—Ravel was thirty-nine, in addition to being physically small and weak). In the interim the piece went from being an homage to Couperin, or as Ravel put it, to 18th-century French music as a whole, and gained further gravity as a memorial to seven of Ravel's friends who had died in the war. The movements of the original Tombeau are Prelude, Fugue, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet, and Toc- cata. Each is dedicated to a different deceased friend, with the exception of the Rigaudon, which is inscribed to the brothers Pierre and Pascal Gaudin. The pianist Marguerite Long (the wife of the dedicatee of the Toccata) gave the suite's first performance in 1919; that same year Ravel chose four of the six move- ments for orchestration, leaving out the non-dance movements (the Fugue and Toc- cata). The arrangement for wind quintet that we hear tonight is by former Philadel- phia principal horn Mason Jones, who chose to include the Fugue movement of the original piano suite and to omit the Forlane and Toccata. The oboe takes the principal melody in the Prelude, as it does in Ravel's orchestration. There is a constant flow of sixteenth-notes throughout. The Fugue features a tentative but lyric theme. Jones opts to position the quietly stately Menuet as the third movement, then ends the piece with the Rigaudon, a lively French dance. Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) Suite for Wind Trio Alexandre Tansman was born in Lodz, Poland, but moved to Paris in 1920, where he remained for most of the rest of his long life. Having begun composing at nine, he had attended the Lodz Conservatory before earning a doctorate in law at Warsaw University. Although he had some early success in Poland, seeing several works per- formed while still in his teens and winning three prizes in the 1919 Grand Prize of Poland competition, he found his home country's musical culture too conservative for his style, which incorporated elements of polytonality and atonality. In France he became part of a scene that included Stravinsky, Ravel, and Martinu , the latter arriving fresh from Bohemia in 1923. Future Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky took up Tansman's music for his Paris concerts, conducting the Scherzo of his he could shift even within sinfonico in 1923 there and leading the BSO in first performances A minor Sym- the context of a single phrase from melancholy or somber phony (No. 2) in March 1927 and his Piano Concerto No. 2, with the composer as lyricism to nose-thumbing impertinence. As Ned Rorem said in a memorial tribute, soloist, in December 1927/January 1928. Poulenc was "a whole man always interlocking soul and flesh, sacred and profane." Tansman became a French citizen in 1938, also that year marrying Colette Cras, Possessing the least formal musical education of any noted 20th-century composer, daughter of the French composer (and naval admiral) Jean Cras. Soon, however, like Poulenc learned from the music that he liked. His own comment is the best summary: Martinu and so many others, he and his family were compelled to flee the country The music of Roussel, more cerebral than Satie's, seems to me to have opened a after being blacklisted by Nazi authorities. In 1941 he settled in Los Angeles, mixing door on the future. I admire it profoundly; it is disciplined, orderly, and yet full with other expatriate European musicians there, renewing his acquaintance with of feeling. I love Chabrier: Espana is a marvelous thing and the Marche joyeuse is Stravinsky and Milhaud, and getting to know Schoenberg. He even wrote a few film a chef-d'oeuvre. ... I consider [the Massenet operas] Manon and Werther as part of scores, including music for Flesh and Fantasy (starring Edward G. Robinson) and French national folklore. And I enjoy the quadrilles of Offenbach. Finally my Paris Underground. In 1946, though, he returned to Paris. gods are Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Chopin, Stravinsky, and Mussorgsky. You may Following his return to France, career fortunes for the still respected Tansman suf- say, what a concoction! But that's how I like music: taking my models every- fered a perhaps inevitable, albeit ill-deserved, decline in the face of the nearly over- where, from what pleases me. whelming push for the "new" among younger, and a few older, composers. (The BSO hasn't played Tansman's work since 1956, when Vladimir Golschmann gave the first Poulenc originally composed his Sextuor for piano and winds in 1932, but he was American performances of his 1954 Concerto for Orchestra.) His style in the 1920s dissatisfied with the work and rewrote it entirely in 1939. It is a composition of enor- and '30s shared much with that of his progressive contemporaries, being a harmoni- mous charm, hardly profound, but brilliantly written for the participating instru- cally adventurous neoclassicism touched by his love of Chopin and the music of his ments. The piano—Poulenc's own instrument—is without doubt the leader, with home country, also fashionably borrowing now and then from jazz. His Jewish back- scarcely a measure of rest in the entire work. The winds carry on a cheeky dialogue ground figures in some works, including a Hebraic Overture. He wrote prolifically in throughout. The work is essentially a divertissement; though sudden turns of mood all genres, including seven operas, nine symphonies, and much chamber and choral and feeling recall the serious side of the composer, the overall spirit remains funda- music, and in 1948 wrote a book on Stravinsky. In 1983 he won the Polish Medal of mentally lighthearted. Cultural Merit. He died in Paris on November 15, 1986. Tansman's Suite for Wind Trio (oboe, clarinet, and bassoon) dates from 1949, follow- Jean Francaix (1912-97) ing his return to Paris from the United States. It is a masterfully crafted little work in L'Henre du berger, for piano and wind quintet four movements (slow-fast-slow-fast), using chromatically colored modality along Jean Francaix was a precociously gifted musician whose parents were themselves the lines of Stravinsky or Milhaud. Tansman's smooth melodic and contrapuntal professional musicians and music teachers. He was born in Le Mans, France, where writing in the slow, lyrical movements lacks the affectedness that French neoclassi- his father was director of the Le Mans Conservatoire, and was immersed in a musical cism often deliberately courted, and the fast passages have a bounce and verve trace- environment from an early age. His parents were encouraged by Ravel to foster the able, perhaps, to his Polish heritage. The first (Dialogue) and third (Aria) movements youngster's gifts, and while still young he began studies with Nadia Boulanger, the are both mournful and bittersweet, with fine balance among the three instruments. famous pedagogue. Francaix became a scintillating performer as solo pianist and ac- In the somewhat more chromatic Aria, a middle section, set off by short bassoon companist, and a prolific composer, writing several operas and ballets, a few film cadenzas, refers obliquely to the first movement. The second movement (Scherzino), scores, numerous orchestra works and concertos, a wide range of chamber pieces, based on a quick, aggressive five-beat measure, begins with a bassoon ostinato, over and both choral and solo vocal works.

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