Illinois Symphony Orchestra Fantastic Finale Program Notes Andrew Sewell, Conductor Jason Vieaux, Guitar

May 5, 2017, 7:30 PM Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, Bloomington, IL

May 6, 2017, 7:30 PM Sangamon Auditorium, UIS, Springfield, IL

Carnival Overture, Op. 92

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

B. 1841, Nelahozeves, Czech Republic

D. 1904, Prague, Czech Republic

Premiered on April 28, 1892 in Prague under the direction of the composer. (approx. 9’)

A wanderer reaches the city at nightfall, where a carnival of pleasure reigns supreme. On every side is heard the clangor of instruments, mingled with shouts of joy and the unrestrained hilarity of people giving vent to their feelings in the songs and dance tunes.

One can only imagine how Antonin Dvořák must have felt when he arrived at his new flat on East 17th street in New York City in 1892. His new surroundings could hardly have resembled his native Czech Republic, and Dvořák would soon experience extraordinary homesickness. Music served as a kind of bridge for the composer. One composition in particular – his recently competed orchestral work Carnival Overture – was featured on a farewell concert in Prague shortly before Dvořák left for the States and was performed in his welcome concert at Carnegie later that year.

The Carnival Overture was part of a trilogy of concert overtures all based on the same musical material. Initially, the overtures bore the respective titles Nature, Life and Love, which Dvořák soon changed to Nature’s Realm, Carnival and Othello. Initially intended to be performed as a set, today only the Carnival Overture remains part of the standard orchestral repertoire. However, it is perhaps best understood as part of the original trilogy. The first overture features delicate bird song and other soothing natural sounds, likely a musical description of the serene beauty of nature; the second overture inserts the human presence into nature depicting joy, festivity and perhaps debauchery: “A wanderer reaches the city at nightfall, where a carnival of pleasure reigns supreme.”; the final overture deals with the darker elements of human nature, offering a commentary on the tragedy of love and loss through the experience of Shakespeare’s Othello.

The Carnival Overture offers a musical rendition of a street carnival whose participants revel in the temporary suspension of social restraint. The piece begins with a wash of sound rife with energy that persists and grows until a brief respite in a reflective violin passage. The brief lyrical intermezzo that follows features a melody harkens back to the “nature motif” of the first overture in the trilogy. This is followed by the development section in which the mood darkens as a haunting English horn and flute duet – what Dvořák described as “a pair of straying lovers” – pulls the listener to a moment of melancholic reflection. Dvořák soon lifts our spirits once more as the festive music returns and builds increasing momentum. The spirited final coda in a faster tempo brings the work to a close in an extraordinarily energetic pounding of chords as brass and percussion sparkle, decorated by the tambourine. Has Dvořák managed to participate in the gaiety of the Carnival or does he see himself in the muted lyrical intermezzo straying from his beloved homeland?

Concierto de Aranjuez

JOAQUÍN RODRIGO

B. 1901, Valencia, Spain

D. 1999, Madrid, Spain

Premiered on November 9, 1940 in Barcelona Spain at the Palau de la Música Catalana by the Orquesta Filarmónica de Barcelona featuring guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza. (approx. 28’)

In 1938, Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo took a trip to Paris where he enjoyed the company of the well-respected Marqués de Bolarque. One evening at dinner, Bolarque quite unexpectedly requested of Rodrigo that he write a brand new composition, a “concerto for guitar and orchestra,” that would “go straight to my heart.” Describing this as a lifelong desire that only Rodrigo could truly fulfill, Bolarque convinced the composer to write the piece. Two years later, the well-received premiere of the Concerto de Aranjuez would establish Rodrigo as a leading twentieth-century Spanish composer.

The Concerto de Aranjuez is a programmatic musical rendition of the beautiful valley that lies between the Jarama and Tagus rivers. A popular resort for the royal families of Madrid, the Palace also served as the summer residence of numerous international royal families including the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. The 16th century Royal Palace of Aranjuez still stands as a remarkable architectural embodiment of the splendor of the Spanish Crown. Surrounding the palace is a series of extraordinary island gardens, beautifully landscaped to transport the observer to an otherworldly experience.

Rodrigo hoped to embody in music the ethereal beauty of the gardens. He described the Concerto de Aranjuez as “the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds, and the gushing of fountains… It should sound like the hidden breeze that stirs the treetops in the parks, as strong as a butterfly, as dainty as a veronica [a bullfighting term].” Rodrigo achieved this effect not only through brilliant programmatic compositional technique but also through the incorporation of elements of Spanish folk music that he inserted quite organically into a neo-classical style composition for guitar and orchestra.

The three-movement concerto opens with the brilliant Allegro con spirito that, according to Rodrigo, is “animated by a rhythmic spirit and vigour without either of the two themes… interrupting its relentless pace.” Its Spanish flavor is felt from the outset: the concerto begins with a characteristic strumming pattern in the solo guitar that resembles the complex sesquilatera rhythm that can be understood as two groups of three beats or three groups of two beats – this is the most common element of the characteristic flamenco rhythm. The sonata form movement is decorated by passionate strumming and vibrant scale passages in the solo guitar: the neoclassical foundations ground the work allowing the guitar to dazzle the listener with virtuoso technique over syncopated folk rhythms.

Rodrigo remembers how easily the second and third movements of the concerto flowed from his pen. He remembers:

…standing in my small studio on Rue Saint Jacques in the heart of the Latin Quarter, vaguely thinking about the concerto, which had become a fond idea given how difficult I judged it to be, when I heard a voice inside me singing the entire theme of the Adagio at one go, without hesitation. And immediately afterwards, without a break, the theme of the third movement. I realized quickly that the work was done. Our intuition does not deceive us in these things...

The second movement Adagio is best understood as a gentle dialogue between the guitar and solo orchestral instruments. The highlights of this movement are the cadenzas in which the guitar sings an improvisational recitative of increasing virtuoso technique. The last movement Allegro gentile features a jaunty childlike melody. But closer inspection reveals an underlying sophistication: the music shifts constantly between duple and triple meter adding to its simplistic nature an air of subtle humor and wit.

SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE: AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST

HECTOR BERLIOZ

B. 1803, La Côte-Sainte-André, France

D. 1869, Paris, France

Premiered on December 05, 1830 at the Paris Conservatoire by an Orchestra hired by the composer under the direction of François-Antoine Habeneck. (approx. 54’)

In 19th century Europe, program music – instrumental music written in association with an external literary source – was staggeringly popular. Fulfilling the romantic penchant for transcending boundaries between the arts, instrumental music was believed to become even more meaningful when associated with extramusical ideas. While some composers searched for literary inspiration in the writings of Shakespeare and Faust, others wrote their own narratives. French composer Hector Berlioz wrote his own story to accompany his Symphonie Fantastique: An Episode in the Life of an Artist. However, Shakespeare did prove to be a major influence on this composition in quite an unusual manner: Berlioz wrote the symphony in an effort to attract the attention of the popular Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whose interpretation of Shakespeare had left Berlioz hopelessly in love.

Symphonie Fantastique tells the story of an artist who in a fit of lovesick despair poisons himself with opium. Yet the dosage is too weak to kill the artist and instead induces a heavy sleep filled with strange visions. In his sleep, each vision, emotion and memory is transformed into a musical idea. Even the object of his affection becomes a melody – an ideé fixe [obsession] that he hears again and again. Musically, the five-movement symphony is an extraordinary tour de force: the score calls for over ninety instrumentalists and narrates in music this most powerful and grotesque story. Berlioz was adamant that the audience read the narrative before every performance of the symphony:

Mvt 1: The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognizes a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.

This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations – all this forms the subject of the first movement.

Mvt 2: The artist finds himself in the most diverse situations in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.

Mvt 3: One evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their ranz des vaches; this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring. He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own… But what if she betrayed him!... This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his ranz des vaches; the other one no longer answer. Distant sound of thunder…solitude…silence.

Mvt 4: Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The does of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned , led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes somber and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Mvt 5: He sees himself at a witches’ Sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the Sabbath … Roar of delight at her arrival … She joins the diabolical orgy … the funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.

© Yona Stamatis, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois Springfield