BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL PRESENTS Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music PROGRAM FOUR SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2020 Bard BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL PRESENTS Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music PROGRAM FOUR UPSTREAMING 5:30 pm The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein DUKE ELLINGTON (1899–1974) “Solitude” (1934; arr. Gould) “Sophisticated Lady” (1933; arr. Gould) JOSEPH BOLOGNE, Symphonie Concertante in G Major, CHEVALIER DE SAINT-GEORGES Op. 13 (1782) (1745–99) Allegro Rondeau Cyrus Beroukhim and Philip Payton, violins BÉLA BARTÓK (1881–1945) Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) Andante tranquillo Allegro Adagio Allegro molto Rehearsals and performances adhere to the strict guidelines set by the CDC, with daily health checks, the wearing of masks throughout, and musicians placed at a safe social distance. Musicians sharing a stand also share a home. This program is made possible in part through the generosity of our donors and the Boards of the Bard Music Festival, The Orchestra Now, and the Fisher Center at Bard. Programs and performers are subject to change. PROGRAM FOUR NOTES DUKE ELLINGTON Edward Kennedy Ellington, known as “Duke,” first came to prominence in the late 1920s when his band played at the Cotton Club, a major venue for African American music in the middle of Harlem, performing with his band for an exclusively white audience. By the next decade, his band was touring internationally, and Ellington was soon recognized as the greatest jazz musician in America, giving voice to the Black experience in his works. He was a creator who always wanted to do more than simply provide musical entertainment for the dance hall. His music was deeply rooted in the blues, and he was an indefatigable innovator who was always open to new forms of expression, eventually crossing boundaries of genre and writing longer compositions for symphony orchestra. As jazz historian Ralph J. Gleason wrote, “Ellington has created his own musical world, which has transcended every attempt to impose category upon it and has emerged as a solid body of work unequalled in American music. His songs have become a standard part of the cultural heritage.” Ellington’s career, which took him all over the globe, spanned more than half a century and earned him the nickname “Ambassador of Jazz.” The two pieces featured at this concert, “Sophisticated Lady” and “Solitude,” quickly became popular jazz standards. They were introduced in 1933 and 1934, respectively, and recorded by Ellington’s band on the Brunswick label. The pieces exude the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, which brought a veritable explosion of Black creativity in all artistic fields. Ellington was a great arranger, but it wasn’t long before his own music began to be arranged by others. Morton Gould’s arrangements of these two Ellington tunes were made for a collection entitled String Time that was released by Columbia Masterworks in 1946. As a composer, Gould excelled at boundary crossing himself, writing both serious symphonies and lighter “symphonettes,” Broadway shows, and the tragic ballet Fall River Legend, which was premiered at the Met. His Ellington arrangements mark the meeting of two great creative minds. The younger musician applied a whole range of 20th- century “classical” orchestration techniques to Ellington’s melodies: mysterious string tremolos, sensitive solo passages, and highly effective interjections by the harp and celesta. —Peter Laki, Visiting Associate Professor of Music, Bard College 4 JOSEPH BOLOGNE The illegitimate son of Nanon, a Senegalese slave, and George Bologne, a plantation owner in the South Caribbean, Joseph Bologne benefited from opportunities, experiences, and an elite education that allowed his multiple gifts, not limited to musical ones, to thrive. Among the many gaps in biographical information about him is when he was born, perhaps on Christmas Day in 1745, on a small island in the archipelago of Guadeloupe. After being falsely accused of murder, George fled to France with his family, taking along Nanon and their young son. The talent that first brought the teenage Joseph attention was in athletics, most notably fencing, which proved an entrée into high society and led King Louis XV to name him the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. While not much is known of his musical training, by his mid-20s he was playing in the newly formed Concert des Amateurs. He soon became concertmaster, eventually music director, and helped elevate the orchestra to one of the continent’s best. In 1772 he was featured soloist with the ensemble performing his technically challenging violin concertos, Op. 2. The pace of his composing increased, primarily instrumental music, including string quartets, sonatas, violin concertos, and ten symphonies concertantes, a new Parisian genre. Pieces dedicated to him by prominent musicians of the time, including Antonio Lolli, François-Joseph Gossec, and Carl Stamitz, suggest the high esteem in which he was held. In a diary entry from May 1779, John Adams (the future American president, who had just completed duty as Envoy to France) called him “the most Accomplished man in Europe in riding, running, dancing, music.” When Saint-Georges began to switch his energies to composing operas he faced obstacles in that arena due to racist singers who objected to having to “submit to the orders of a mulatto.” After the Concert des Amateurs folded for financial reasons, Saint-Georges joined the Concert de la Loge Olympique, the orchestra that commissioned Haydn’s six so-called Paris symphonies, of which he helped arrange the premieres. His career continued to mix athletics and music, and added military service amidst the French Revolution, joining the National Guard and for some 18 months being a prisoner during the Reign of Terror. The designation symphonie concertante (or sinfonia concertante in Italian) gives a good idea of its form: a combination of symphony and concerto. The genre was popular in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and to some extent derived from the earlier Baroque concerto grosso. Part symphony, part concerto (more the latter), such pieces prominently offer two, three, four, or more soloists who relate to one 5 another to a greater degree than to the full ensemble. The prominence and inde- pendence of the soloists are central. In Saint-Georges’ two-movement Symphonie Concertante in G Major, Op. 13, there are two violin soloists. Mozart wrote several such pieces, the most famous being in E-flat major (K. 364) featuring violin and viola, which biographer Gabriel Banat believes owes a debt to Saint-Georges. The two composers lived in the same house in Paris in 1778 and must have known each other’s music. —Christopher H. Gibbs, Artistic Codirector, Bard Music Festival BÉLA BARTÓK In the summer of 1936, the 55-year-old Béla Bartók, having by then achieved con- siderable international fame as a performer, composer, and ethnomusicologist, tack- led a formidable array of compositional challenges in his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, a work of astonishing synthesis, organicism, and technical brilliance. The synthesis is to be found in Bartók’s ability to integrate his profound knowledge of Western musical tradition, immediately evident in the fugue that opens the piece, with his pathbreaking research of folk music, not limited to the region of his native Hungary but extending farther afield to North Africa. The organ- icism of Music for Strings comes from the way in which a four-movement piece grows out of, and is also unified by, the melody that begins the work. The Swiss conductor and music patron Paul Sacher commissioned the piece for the 10th anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, which premiered it in January 1937. Unlike Bartók’s other most famous orchestral work, the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), which gives many instrumentalists a chance to shine, the orchestral means are much more limited in this instance. Aside from the full string orchestra, which is divided into two equal groups on either side of the conductor with the basses in the back, there is a battery of percussion instruments as well as piano, harp, and celesta. The celesta is a keyboard instrument—it looks like a miniature upright piano— invented in the mid-19th century. (Tchaikovsky was the first famous composer to use it, in his ballet The Nutcracker.) Its hammers hit not tightly wound strings, as they do in a piano, but rather metal plates, producing a bright, tinkling sound. Bartók began his First String Quartet (1908–09) with a slow fugue—successive entries of each of the string instruments in complex imitation. This was a clear hom- age to Beethoven, who started his late String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131, the 6 same way. Bartók returned to the idea in Music for Strings, but took it to a greater extreme by making the entire first movement (Andante tranquillo) a slowly unfolding exploration of the opening theme; he recycles elements of the same melody in the following three movements as well. Muted violas begin by stating the fugal “subject,” a serpentine melody that slithers up and then back down. The range from highest note to lowest is extremely limited, with most pitches next to one another. The melody is chromatic, not diatonic, meaning that if it were played on the piano in C major it would use both white and black keys, not just the white ones. “Chromatic” derives from the Greek word for color, and this movement, even though primarily for strings, is nonetheless particularly colorful because of the inflections of the melodies. The other strings imitate the viola’s lead, first violins then cellos, with these higher and lower instruments alternating back and forth around the anchoring violas in the middle. Because Bartók has divided the string orchestra into two groups, twice as many entrances are possible, which produces some striking antiphonal effects.