THE FRIENDS OF THE COLLEGE Presents BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA SEIJI OZAWA, Music Director COLIN DAVIS, Principal Guest Conductor Ninty-fourth Season Monday evening, November 18, 1974 Tuesday evening, November 19, 1974 SEIJI OZAWA, Conductor William Neal Reynolds Coliseum 8 P.M. PROGRAM Le tombeau de Couperin Maurice Ravel Prelude Forlane Menuet Rigaudon Ostensibly this music represents neoclassic expression in its purest distillate. And it was, indeed, conceived as a pianistic idealization of the clavecin aesthetic exemplified by Francois Couperin le Crand. But that was in the fateful summer of 1914, and even Ravel's sleepy St. Jean-de-Luz was traumatized by the news of Archduke Francis Ferdinand's assassination at Sarajevo. France mobilized overnight, and by August was at war. By then the sketches for Le tombeau de Couperin were in a desk drawer. When he returned to them three wretched years later the composer was a very different man, broken in health and shattered emotionally by the loss of his mother, who had died barely a week after his medical discharge. Thus it was that the six movements became as many 'tomb- stones' (each one inscribed separately) for friends and regimental comrads who had been killed on the Western Front. As a work for solo piano—Ravel's last, incidentally—Le tombeau was not a notable success. Strictly speaking it could not have been because it marked a stylistic retrogression after the harmonic leaps forward in the Valse nobles et sentimentales and Gas-pard de la nuit. But fortu- nately that was not the end of the matter. Two years later, by which time Ravel was much healthier in body and spirit, he was de- lighted to hear that Jean Borlin wanted to choreograph Le tombeau for Rolf de Mare's, Swedish Ballet (actually the suggestion had come from Ravel's old Montmartre confrere, the conductor D. E. Inghelbrecht). Whereupon the composer himself scored four of the movements as a con- cert suite, omitting the Fugue and Toccata and also, significantly, omitting all of the dedications —as if to testify that in this orchestral guise Le tombeau was not a mere arrangement but a new work altogether, intended to have a life of its own. And so it has had, uninterruptedly, ever since its Paris premiere on February 28, 1920. Ironically, the orchestral version of Le tombeau de Cowperin probably has more neoclassic purity in its resplendence than the leaner-lined keyboard prototype; the modern orchestra, after all, was the instrument Ravel knew best. No matter, it is a masterpiece of its genre—whether or not one agrees with Edwin Evans that the composer incarnated 'the very spirit of the precise and ordered classicism of the eighteenth century.' The concert suite comprises a Prelude, Forlane, Menuet, and Rigaudon. The forlane is akin to the jig, but not to Bach's because, being Italian in origin, it is not contrapuntal. Admirers of Oliver Wendell Holmes will recall his use of 'rigadoon' as a synonym for 'sashy' in Elsie Venner; Rousseau had ascribed the form to a certain dancing master named Rigaud, but in fact no one can attest to its origins. Whatever the disparate natal circumstances involved, as importuned by Ravel these old dances become as one in their evocation—or simulation—of an unmistakably Gallic quintessence.—James Lyons The Cloud Messenger Loren Rush Born in 1935 in Southern California, Loren Rush currently resides in Point Richmond, California. He completed The Cloud Messenger in Rome during the summer of 1970, and its first performance was given the following year by the Rome Symphony Orchestra (RAI), Giampiero Taverna conducting. Seiji Ozawa and the San Francisco Orchestra gave the first American performance on April 8, 1973, in San Francisco, and the work was later performed, under the direction of Niklaus Wyss, during that orchestra's tour of the USSR. The instrumentation; three flutes, alto flute, two piccolos, three oboes, English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, fluegelhorn, four trombones, tuba, celesta, keyboard glockenspiel, amplified harpsichord, two harps, acoustic guitar, piano, tam-tams, glockenspiels, bass drums, marimba, cymbals, jazz set, tom-toms, vibraphone, xylophone, chimes, strings. Loren Rush began the study of piano at the age of six and gradually extended his studies to include bassoon, contrabass, percussion and the Japanese koto, the instrument he uses as a compositional aid. He studied composition with Robert Erickson and attended San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University, where he received a doctoral degree. His fellowships and awards include the Rome Prize, the Institute of Arts and Letters Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area both as a conductor and instrumentalist in the performance of new music. As Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project Visiting Scholar, he is currently a member of the Stanford Com- puter Music Project, where in his own words, 'a small group of composers is using a large computer as a musical instrument.' Mr. Rush wrote the following comments for the American premiere of The Cloud Messenger: 'If I were to refer to The Claud Messenger as "this difficult achievement with its infinitely demanding thorough details, strong in its means of expression, but extremely sensitive and in- formed throughout by mathematics, the creator of the ineffable mystery of space," I would be quoting Le Corbusier on his cathedral at Ronchamp at the benediction in 1955. 'I especially notice in the quote the early reference to details. Often the artist spends so much time on the details that when asked about a particular work he will neglect the primary formation and inspiration of the work and give an account of the details. (The painter Jack Bailey is capable of extremely fast execution. When once I asked how his painting was going he said that he had spent the entire day on an old woman's left nostril.) 'After the premiere of Nexus 16 at Tanglewood in 1964 Erich Leinsdorf asked me to write a piece for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. By the following summer in Point Richmond I had a fairly precise mental image of the piece and even a few sketches, and by the fall of 1967 I was able to show him in New York the score in nearly complete form, except for some of the detail. He agreed to program the piece as soon as he received the score in a form complete enough that the performance parts could be made. The Cloud Messenger was completed in the summer of 1970. By then I had been living in Rome for a year and Erich Leinsdorf had retired from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 'The Cloud Messenger was premiered in 1971 with the Rome Symphony Orchestra (RAI) conducted by Giampiero Taverna. It is in one movement and scored in ninety-nine individually defined instrumental parts. It is mainly dramatic, a sort of musical "theater of the mind" where several musical "characters" are developed in various dramatic relationships. Liszt probably would have called it a tone poem. 'The title is somewhat more evocative than descriptive.'— Loren Rush ^Symphony No. 2 in D op. 73 Johannes Brahms Allegro non troppo Adagio non troppo Allegretto grazioso, quasi andantino Allegro con spirito Looking back over the ninety-odd years which have passed since Brahms' Second Symphony was performed for the first time, one finds good support for the proposition that music found disturbingly 'modern' to day can become universally popular tomorrow. This symphony, surely the most consistently melodious, the most thoroughly engaging of the four, was once rejected by its hearers as a disagreeable concoction of the intellect, by all means to be avoided. In Leipzig, when the Second Symphony was introduced in 1880, even Dorffel, the most pro-Brahms of the critics there, put it down as 'not distinguished by inventive power'! It was a time of considerable anti-Brahms agitation in Central Europe, not unconnected with the Brahms- versus-Wagner feud. They were also repercussions in America. When in the first season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (February 24, 1882) Georg Henschel conducted the Second Sym- phony, the critics fell upon it to a man. They respected Mr. Henschel's authority in the matter because he was an intimate friend of Brahms. For Brahms they showed no respect at all. The Transcript called it "wearisome', 'turgid'; the Traveler, 'evil-sounding', 'artificial', lacking a sense of the beautiful', an 'unmitigated bore'. The Post called it 'as cold-blooded a composition, so to speak, as was ever created'. The critic of the Traveler made the only remarks one can promptly agree with: 'If Brahms really had anything to say in it, we have not the faintest idea what it is.' This appalling blindness to beauty should not be held against Boston in particular, for al- though a good part of the audience made a bewildered departure after the second movement, the courageous believers in Mr. Henschel's good intentions remained to the end, and from these there was soon to develop a devout and determined type who stoutly defended Brahms. New York was no more enlightened, to judge by this astonishing suggestion in the Post of that city (in November 1887): 'The greater part of the Symphony was antiquated before it was written. Why not play instead Rubinstein's Dramatic Symphony, which is shamefully neglected here and any one movement of which contains more evidence of genius than ah of Brahms' sym- phonies put together? Many years had to pass before people would exacdy reverse their opinion and look upon Brahms' Second for what it is—bright-hued throughout, every theme singing smoothly and easily, every development both deftly integrated and effortless, a masterpiece of delicate tonal poetry in beautiful articulation.