CAL PERFORMANCES PRESENTS PROGRAM Sunday, September 27, 2009, 3pm Hertz Hall Christine Brewer, soprano Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) Cabaret Songs Calypso (1939) Craig Rutenberg, piano Tell Me the Truth About Love (1938) Johnny (1937) Funeral Blues (1937) PROGRAM arr. Roger Quilter (1877–1953) Ye Banks and Braes arr. Britten The Salley Gardens Alban Berg (1885–1935) Seven Early Songs (1905–1908) arr. Herbert Hughes (1882–1937) The Leprechaun Nacht Schilflied Echoes of Nightingales Die Nachtigall Sidney Homer (1864–1953) Sing to Me, Sing (1913) Traumgekrönt Edwin MacArthur (1907–1987) Night (1949) Im Zimmer Paul Sargent (b. 1910) Hickory Hill (1955) Liebesode Frank Bridge (1879–1941) Love Went A’Riding (1914) Sommertage Idabelle Firestone (1884–1954) If I Could Tell You (1940) Frank La Forge (1879–1953) Hills (1925) Richard Strauss (1864–1949) Ich liebe dich, Op. 37, No. 2 (1898) Breit’ über mein Haupt dein schwarzes Haar, Op. 19, No. 2 (1885–1888) Christine Brewer appears by arrangement with IMG Artists, Befreit, Op. 39, No. 4 (1898) 152 West 57th Street, Fifth Floor, New York, New York 10019, (212) 994-3500. Ms. Brewer can be heard on EMI, Telarc, Naxos, Hyperion, Chandos and Warner Classics Family of labels. INTERMISSION This program is part of the Koret Recital Series and is made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Margot and John Clements. Cal Performances’ 2009–2010 season is sponsored by Wells Fargo Bank. 34 CAL PERFORMANCES CAL PERFORMANCES 35 PROGRAM NOTES PROGRAM NOTES Alban Berg (1885–1935) the result of his class assignments, for which shared left-wing political beliefs. Through Auden, particular kind of vernacular music that resulted Seven Early Songs Schoenberg required counterpoint exercises and in- he met Christopher Isherwood and a number of from the collaboration between two brilliantly en- strumental compositions. It was from this substan- other like-minded young artists, and joined them dowed young men in the 1930s.” Composed in 1905–1908. Premiered on November 6, tial body of work that Berg culled the Seven Early in creating a venture known as the Group Theatre 1928, in Vienna. Songs for publication in 1928, at which time he to provide a platform for their views and their also arranged the original piano accompaniments art. Britten became the company’s musical direc- Ye Banks and Braes Alban Berg, the son of a prosperous salesman for a for orchestra. The Seven Early Songs, composed tor and resident composer, and between 1935 and Arranged by Roger Quilter (1877–1953) Viennese export firm, was introduced early to art between 1905 and 1908, were given their formal 1937 he provided incidental music for productions and theater and music, and given piano lessons as premiere in Vienna on November 6, 1928, though of Timon of Athens, Agamemnon of Aeschylus and Roger Quilter was a minor but endearing figure in a matter of course during his youth. Berg’s taste three of them—Die Nachtigall, Traumgekrönt and Out of the Picture by Louis MacNeice. the English musical renaissance of the early 20th and knowledge of music ripened rapidly, and by Liebesode—had been heard previously at a con- For the Group’s staging of The Ascent of F.6 by century. He was born into a prominent family in age 16, he had eagerly begun to try his hand at cert of music by Schoenberg’s pupils in November Auden and Isherwood in February 1937, Britten Brighton in 1877, and educated at Eton before composition, though a series of events during the 1907. Though they do not form an integrated cy- provided a score that included what became an im- undertaking five years of professional music stud- next few months—the death of his father; failure cle—each sets a poem by a different author—these mediate if temporary hit. “After the performance,” ies with Iwan Knorr at the Hoch Conservatory to pass his high school graduation examinations; songs all share the Late Romantic idioms in which Britten wrote, “we all have a good party at the the- in Frankfurt, where he was a fellow student of the collapse of a passionate love affair—resulted Berg was immersed at the beginning of his creative atre & then feeling very cheerful we all sing (all Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott, Balfour Gardiner and in a depression severe enough to cause him to at- life, from the conventional language of Brahms to cast & about twenty audience) my Blues, as well Norman O’Neill. Quilter was back in London for tempt suicide. He survived, and managed to fin- the avant-gardisms of Strauss’s Salome, which the as going thro’ most of the music of the play, while the start of the new century, and he soon began ish school in 1904, after which he went to work young musician attended a half-dozen times dur- the whole cast dances & sings & fools, & gets gen- establishing a reputation as a song composer with as an apprentice (i.e., unpaid) accountant in the ing 1906. The Seven Early Songs are the first works erally wild.” The Blues“ ” was a setting of Auden’s his tasteful settings of verses by several of the best Austrian ministry that oversaw pigs and distill- that Berg admitted to his mature oeuvre, and they poem Stop All the Clocks sung by Hedli Anderson English poets. His music is marked by delicacy of eries. Berg’s ambition to be a musician weathered possess the sensitivity to text-setting and vocal so- in the play, a piece of which Britten thought highly expression and sensitivity to the text, a style that these Kafkaesque difficulties, however, and he con- nority, the wide-ranging lyricism, the subtle har- enough to revise it into a more finished form in the musicologist and conductor Denis Stevens said tinued to compose, most notably a steady stream monic color and the sincerity of expression that June; a month before, he had set Auden’s Johnny represented “a peak in the English tradition of dec- of songs and vocal ensembles that he performed characterize his finest music. for Anderson as a companion to the earlier “caba- orous romanticism.” at home with his brother, Charley, and his sister, ret song.” At the beginning of 1938, Britten added Early in 1942, during the most dire time of Smaragda. In October 1904, Smaragda spotted an Tell Me the Truth About Love to his growing Auden World War II for Britain, Quilter’s beloved nephew advertisement in a local newspaper announcing Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) collection, and Anderson sang all three pieces at a Arnold Vivian, a member of the Grenadier Guards that Arnold Schoenberg, pegged as an iconoclastic Cabaret Songs farewell party for Auden and Isherwood before they and an avid singer of his uncle’s songs, was posted modernist by the premiere of his Verklärte Nacht left for the Far East to report on the Sino-Japanese to the Middle East. Arnold wrote to his uncle that (“Transfigured Night”) in 1902, was accepting stu- Composed in 1937–1939. War. The following January, the two were off again he could not find any good companions among the dents in composition. She passed the notice on to on another long journey, this one to America, in other soldiers, and that he hated the “friction and Charley, and he took some of Alban’s manuscripts In 1933, when he was 19, Benjamin Britten with- search of creative stimulation and freedom from constant bloodyness” of the conflict. Quilter be- to Schoenberg, who saw such promise in the works drew from the Royal College of Music, London, what Auden called the young English artist’s feel- gan making sensitive settings of traditional songs that he agreed to take Berg on as a pupil for free. A disillusioned by the hidebound conservatism he ing of being “essentially lonely, twisted in dying from England, Ireland, Scotland and France that fortunate inheritance in 1905 made it possible for encountered at the school. To provide a living roots.” With the promise of a performance of his he hoped to post to his nephew to relieve his un- Berg to leave his government job and devote him- while establishing himself professionally, he be- Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge by the New happiness, but Arnold was captured the following self assiduously to his lessons, and he began com- gan writing background music for documentary York Philharmonic in August 1939 and the pros- year in Tunisia. He managed to escape during his posing in earnest under Schoenberg’s guidance, films produced by John Grierson’s GPO (General pect of writing a score for a Hollywood film about transport to Germany in 1944, but he was never producing a Piano Sonata (Op. 1) in 1908 and a Post Office) Film Unit. In 1935, Grierson formally King Arthur, Britten decided to follow Auden, and heard from again. Quilter added five of his folk- set of Four Songs (Op. 2) and a String Quartet put Britten on staff, and assigned him to do the in May he left England to take up residence in the song settings from the early 1920s (Barbara Allen, (Op. 3) two years later. He discontinued formal scores for films titled Coal Face and Night Mail United States. The fourth of the Auden Cabaret Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, The Jolly Miller, lessons with Schoenberg in 1910, though the two about the northern mining industry and the na- Songs (Calypso) was written in New York in August Over the Mountains and Three Poor Mariners) to remained supportive friends and creative allies for tional rail service. In July, Basil Wright, the di- 1939. In his introduction to the score of the Songs the 11 that he made during the war, and published the rest of their lives.