Program Notes: October 7, 2007
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Haydn's Symphony #104, his final symphony, is often called the "London" because its first audience heard echoes of London street cries in the bustling finale--whose rustic theme actually derives, however, from Croatian folk music. The eagerness of Haydn's 1795 London audience to be gratified in this way reflects the special relationship he cultivated with them during his two extended trips to London (1791-92 and 1794-95), so that this--the twelfth symphony Haydn wrote expressly for them--exhibits a well-honed sense for what would please. Or, perhaps, like many audiences, they looked to music as if to a mirror, expecting to hear something of themselves reflected back. Why else would their equivalents, eighty-one years later, be so convinced they heard "Big Ben" in the Alphorn theme in the finale of Brahms's First Symphony? In any event, Haydn's finale is a gem with many facets. If it seemed to reflect "London" back from one of those facets, others produced sparkling reflections of their own, in finales by both Beethoven (Fourth Symphony) and Brahms (Second Symphony). The first movement begins portentously, in the minor, setting up an Allegro that delights in defusing melodrama with simple understatement. This pattern reverses in the second movement, whose variations sometimes threaten to get out of control before giving way to one of many returns to the quiet assurance of the opening. Like the finale, the third movement produced distant echoes across the nineteenth century, which would increasingly find a congenial model in its regression from the courtly Minuet to the rustic Lëndler. |
Music's ability to serve as a kind of mirror--reflecting in tonight's program a particularly English visage--allows us to gauge, if a tad simplistically, either the psychological toll World War I exacted from England (despite the continued growth of the British Empire), or Elgar's own personal journey, from his growing fame at the turn of the century to that combination of thoughtfulness and disillusionment that we like to call an artist's "late style." Thus, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 (1901), written as he was rising to international fame, bespeaks hope within a ceremonial form so effectively that it has come to seem, in America, inseparable from its annual role in graduation ceremonies (beginning with Yale in 1905, when Elgar received an honorary doctorate). His Cello Concerto (1919), on the other hand, announces its somber, reflective mode immediately, with a recitative for the soloist setting a stage that will frequently thereafter be given over to soliloquy. If much of the concerto might be taken as a lament commemorating both the devastation of the war and the era it brought to an end, there are also other moods, including a scherzo-like second movement (following the slow first movement without pause), and the elegiac third movement. Tonight, we offer both poles of Elgar's rich legacy to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth in June 1857, as a frame for the first half of the program.
Within that frame, we offer a kind of double image in Britten's Four Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes (1945). As one might expect, the sea here provides reflections of both the human and the divine, and serves to carry a specifically English profile. But the images are more disturbing than gratifying--particularly for those who know the opera, whose depiction of an ostracized fisherman is now widely understood, allegorically, as evoking the ostracized homosexual. "Dawn" thus seems bleak and threatening, rather than merely rosy. The bustle of "Sunday Morning," despite it pieties and church bells, reveals more pettiness than prettiness. "Moonlight" places its emphasis on what lurks in the shadows. And the "Storm"--departing from the tradition represented by Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony--offers no enduring respite from the angry face of God. Britten's choice to end his excerpted interludes with the storm is significant, since this is not the order they appear in the opera, which might in some ways seem more natural: dawn (Prologue) -- storm (Act I)-- Sunday morning (Act II) -- moonlight (Act III).
-- Raymond Knapp
Cécilia Tsan, cello
Born in Versailles (France) of Chinese musician parents, Cécilia Tsan began playing the cello at the age of five with the same teacher as her childhood friend Yo-Yo Ma, who was an inspiration for her. After being awarded her Baccalaureate Degree, she went on to study Philosophy and Chinese and was accepted as first in her class at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where she studied under the direction of André Navarra. In 1976, she graduated summa cum laude, with top honors in cello and in chamber music. She was then accepted for higher musical studies (3ème Cycle), which gave her the opportunity to study more chamber music with Jean Hubeau and to prepare international competitions. She also attended master-classes at the Accademia Chigiana of Siena (Italy) where she received the Diploma di Merito.
For more information on Cécilia Tsan, please visit the artist's website: http://www.ceciliatsan.com/
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