Program Notes: March 22, 1998
Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 "Pastorale"
Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony was composed as a more easygoing companion to his heaven-storming Fifth, and the two were premiered together at a mammoth concert of his works held in Vienna on December 22, 1808. That the event was not altogether successful may be easily understood in terms of the coldness of the hall, the extreme length of the mostly unfamiliar program, and the inadequate rehearsals from which Beethoven himself had been banned for his unruly behavior. But the paired symphonies have emerged, along with the Ninth, as his most popular. The task Beethoven set himself in the "Pastoral" was to organize the various components of the pastoral tradition~rustic music-making, country dances, animal sounds, storms, and the like ~ into a genuine symphony. This he managed through a suitably symphonic handling of a few recurring musical motives, and by arranging the later movements into the semblance of a story, a story that we, in this season of El Nino, may take some comfort in. Thus, he depicts a rural concert in the third movement ~ performed, it would seem, by barely competent village musicians ~ which twice gives way to a wild peasant-dance before it is interrupted by a storm (fourth movement); as the storm subsides, the country-folk re-emerge, encouraged by a rainbow-like hymn tune and summoned by yodeling horn-calls, to sing an extended song of thanksgiving (fifth movement). Although Beethoven claimed the symphony was more concerned with feelings than tone-painting, he was not shy about using descriptive music at nearly every turn, most famously in the bird calls near the end of the second movement ("Scene by the Brook"), which combine a rather abstract nightingale (flute) with a more recognizable thrush (oboe) and cuckoo (clarinet). In the buoyant first movement, which only once strays into minor- mode harmonies, we hear a multitude of "images," including a shepherd's pipe, bleating sheep, and, perhaps most remarkable, a central depiction of bustling nature, evoked through long stretches of repeated motives over static harmonies.
Liszt: Les Préludes
Liszt's Les Préludes, the third and most famous of his thirteen "symphonic poems," was premiered at Weimar in 1854, and, like the others, it grew out of his desire to use literature as a basis for symphonic music. But there was a deception involved in this case. Officially, Les Préludes was based on Alphonse de Lamartine's long poem of the same name, and it is easy enough to hear a relationship between Liszt's music and Lamartine's account of life as a series of "Préludes" leading up to death, the main event. Thus, the episodic structure seems to depict such a series, with each episode, or "prelude," stamped with its own distinct character. Moreover, when the most famous passage in Les Préludes ~ familiar to most of us from having heard it in countless movies and science fiction serials ~ returns near the end, we sense in its heroic tone an affirmation of an indomitable life force. Despite these affinities to Lamartine's poem, however, the work was originally conceived as an overture to a series of choruses Liszt had written some eight years earlier on poems by Joseph Autrans, which Liszt had grouped together and called "The Four Elements." Accordingly, the music of Les Préludes cycles through themes that Liszt had originally fashioned from a single three-note melodic germ in order to represent the subjects of Autrans's four poems: Stars (the introduction), Floods (the returning heroic theme), Earth (the main lyrical theme), and Wind (the central stormy passage). Undoubtedly, Liszt renamed the piece partly to trade on Lamartine's greater "name-recognition," but the change also reflects his transformation of the earlier overture from a mere collection of contrasting themes into a more continuous and focused sequence of musical "events," which could convey the sense of a narrative involving epic forces.
Martin: Concerto for 7 winds, timpani, percussion and strings
Frank Martin's multi-cultural Swiss heritage and strong religious background (he was the tenth and youngest son of a minister) are strikingly manifest in his music, with its captivating mix of a Bach-derived counterpoint, a modernist flirtation with intricate rhythms, and a typically French exploration of unusual combinations of instrumental colors, and of traditional harmonies used in untraditional ways. In his Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion, and String Orchestra (premiered 1949 in Bern) ~ reassuringly, the only piece on tonight's program that does not include a substantial "storm" section ~ all instruments are called upon to contribute both individually and in various imaginative blends, but it is the winds (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trombone, and trumpet) that typically dominate in the more densely written passages. After the solo instruments are introduced in the first movement, the strings provide a conversational background for a free interplay of winds and timpani that moves easily between two-part dialogue and splashes of more densely written counterpoint. A pungent string sound introduces the Adagietto (second movement), which never quite transcends its pervasive funereal tread, sometimes suggesting a gloomy version of Ravel's Bolero in its use of instrumental color and harmony to vary its repetitive discourse. The playful, often dance-like finale gradually achieves a sustained intensity through another, somewhat livelier march before returning to its opening material and concluding with a driving coda, again modestly evocative of Ravel.
--- Raymond Knapp
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