Program Notes: December 14, 2003
In this evening's selection of "Music From Around the World," the closest to home is Carlos Chávez's Second Symphony, Sinfonia India, written in 1935-1936. In basing the Symphony on Mexican-Indian melodies, Chávez seems to have used Dvorák and Stravinsky as models for how to present this kind of "primitive" material in an orchestra, shaping the whole within four broad sections: a highly rhythmic opening section with piquant shifts in meter (derived from the Huicholes in the Nayarit region), a lilting pastoral Sonoran melody given in variations, a haunting Adagio based again on a Sonoran source, and a frenzied final section (from the Seri), interrupted briefly by a recollection of the pastoral melody.
Two of tonight's works amount to something of a family reunion. If Franz Strauss, principal hornist of the Munich orchestra (the "Joachim of the Horn"), could not keep his son Richard from becoming a disciple of Richard Wagner (whom he detested), at least tonight's pairing of the father's Horn Concerto in C Minor with his son's deceptively conservative Waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier (arranged from the 1911 opera) may be counted as an attempt at reconciliation. The Concerto traces the familiar three-movement structure, but truncated so as to form a single extended movement with a central lyrical episode; along the way, it demonstrates both the virtuosic and lyrical sides of Franz Strauss's own talents as a hornist and, perhaps, the genetic basis for Richard's melodic gifts. As an opera, Der Rosenkavalier is a kind of high-style--and extraordinarily decadent--version of Viennese operetta, deriving in part from both the earlier generation of Viennese operettists, dominated by the "other" Strauss, Johann II (the "Waltz King") and Franz Lehár's hugely successful The Merry Widow, just a few years before. Tonight's arrangement outwardly conforms to the tradition of waltz sets, while retaining the "decadent" harmonic language for which Richard Strauss is famous.
Only the first of the two familiar suites from Georges Bizet's three-act Mélodrame, L'Arlésienne ("The Girl from Arles," 1872) is by the composer himself. The Second Suite, on tonight's program, was originally arranged by Ernest Guiraud, a friend of the composer; both suites are free adaptations of the original music. The libretto/scenario for the Mélodrame, by Alphonse Daudet, is adapted from a true story, a family tragedy of young love despoiled by disillusionment and parental intervention, which ends in the young hero's suicide, but in his younger brother's salvation. The suites seem to tell less tragic stories, in this case beginning with a folk-like pastorale and ending with a Farandole. The latter is based on a familiar Provençal Christmas tune ("La Marche des Rois"), with an interlude derived from what seems to be the French answer to Morris dancing; actually, it's a traditional Provençal tambourine dance, "Les Chevaux des Feux," in which the dancer wears a cardboard horse.
Peter Sculthorpe is a much-honored Australian composer noted for his ability to project powerful ideas in musical terms, often rooted in nature. His Memento Mori proposes Easter Island as an object lesson, reminding us both of our deplorable penchant for despoliation, and of the resiliency of our creative spirit. The piece is based on two intertwining musical ideas, the Dies Irae from the Requiem mass, and a sharp, lamenting dissonance derived from what Johann Kepler believed to be earth's "sound" within his projected "music of the spheres."
-- Raymond Knapp
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