Program notes for the November 4, 2016 concert

By Robert Howe

This program brings together three remarkable pieces with a common basis of pictoralism.

Felix Mendelssohn 1809-47
Hebrides Overture (“Fingal’s Cave”)
Orchestration: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings

Born into a wealthy, cultured and loving family, Felix Mendelssohn was fortunate to have his extraordinary musical talent recognized early. Felix and his sister Fanny enrolled as children in the Berlin Singakademie, where Felix studied piano and composition with the director.  By age 11 he had written over 40 works, many of them performed by a private orchestra that his father engaged for Sunday musicales.   His adolescent string symphonies are the equal of any others written at the time.  At 17 he wrote his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and at 21 he refused a music professorship of the University of Berlin.   An anecdote of his genius comes from this; before Midsummer Night’s Dream overture was published, he lost the manuscript score in a cab.  Undaunted, Mendelssohn, rewrote the score from memory.  When the original was found years later, it was identical in every detail to the copy.

His father sent him touring through Europe, encouraging him to make his name known even while traveling.  Thus, August 1829 found him visiting the Hebrides islands off the western coast of Scotland.  Mendelssohn and a friend rowed through choppy seas to the mouth of Fingal’s cave, a local landmark, to view the immense basalt forms inside.  Inspired, Mendelssohn wrote to Fanny, enclosing twenty bars that open the overture. Mendelssohn worked on the piece during his 1830 trip to Italy (which would inspire his Italian Symphony).  On December 11, 1831, he completed “Overture to the Lonely Island”, shortly renamed “Die Hebriden”.

The May 1832 premiere by the London Philharmonic, conducted by Thomas Attwood (himself a favorite pupil of Mozart) was a success; it entered the repertoire promptly, and Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann praised it as a masterpiece.  Mendelssohn further revised the piece, which was published in 1835 in the version heard tonight.

The Hebrides was one of the first concert overtures, a new genre which emerged during the nineteenth-century.  Concert overtures are not intended for a stage work or opera but are stand-alone works to be programmed in the concert hall.  Other well-known concert overtures are Berlioz’s Rob Roy and Roman Carnival, Tchaikovsky’s 1812, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Francesca da Rimini, and Brahms’ Tragic and Academic Festival.

Mendelssohn’s Overture does not tell a story but evokes the scenery of the Hebrides.  It is in sonata form, with a first subject in the tonic (B minor), a second subject in the relative major (D major), a development section and a recapitulation which returns us to B minor and the coda.

Low strings open the piece with a restless motif that rises and falls like the swelling sea, as held woodwinds and upper strings give off still sea air.  Mendelssohn is economical in his materials and will make much of this motif; like Beethoven in the Fifth Symphony, we find that almost every theme in the work derives from this germinal idea.  For example, the transition to the second theme, played by woodwinds, is the opening motif backwards. The lovely second theme, stated by cellos and bassoons, has a solid, calm tone; it also derives from the first motif, as do the interruptions in winds and brass that follow.

The development leads to a turbulent climax with calls between brass and woodwinds and virtuosic passagework for the massed strings; perhaps this is a storm?  Details bring out the atmosphere of remote islands; unprepared modulations evoke changes in the current, dramatic accents suggest waves crashing on rocks, a shimmer of spray sparkles in flutes and clarinets as the recapitulation begins. After a clarinet duet on the second theme, gull calls from the oboe return us to the “storm” then to a brief return of the opening. This coda dies away in the low clarinet while the flute ascends to fade away into nothingness, like a lone sea-bird vanishing from sight.  Even this last gesture derives from the opening motif, testimony to the young composer’s skill.

Daren Hagen (b. 1961)
Concerto for Oboe and String Orchestra

Daron Hagen is an American composer whose style ranges from lush romanticism to abstract electro-acoustic soundscapes.  Born in Wisconsin, Hagen taught himself to read music at age 11.  He studied composition with Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute and David Diamond at the Juilliard School and with Witold Lutoslawski and Lukas Foss.  After working as a copyist and editor for concert composers and Broadway shows, he taught at Bard College, the Curtis Institute, the Chicago College Conservatory, New York University, and the Princeton Atelier.  He now devotes his attention solely to fulfilling commissions. His music is recorded on Naxos, Albany, CRI, and Bridge.

The recipient of commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Seattle Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, and others, he has written more than 350 works including 9 operas, 14 concertos, 5 symphonies, 22 song cycles and dozens of chamber, band, and choral works.

Hagen is a frequent conductor, collaborative pianist, librettist, and stage director of his own theatrical works.  He has worked with Leonard Bernstein, JoAnn Falletta, Gerard Schwarz, Leonard Slatkin, and Stephen Wadsworth, among others. His numerous accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Friedheim Prize. In 2014 the American Academy of Arts and Letters chose Hagen for a Music Award on the basis of his “outstanding artistic achievement” as “a composer who has arrived at his own voice.”

A Manhattanite for 28 years, Hagen and his wife, composer Gilda Lyons, moved Upstate in 2011 to raise their sons Atticus and Seamus.

Of his Oboe Concerto, Mr Hagen writes:

“The paper was yellow and brittle, but the memories and emotions summoned up by the article, when I re-read it for the first time in twenty years, were as fresh and as exhilarating as they were the first morning I read it: ‘Young Composer Shows Promise’ announced the title of the August 1978 review of the premiere of my first orchestra piece, Suite for a Lonely City, which the Park Promenade Youth Orchestra had just performed at the Humboldt Park Chalet. The oboist who ‘gave the A’ that day was Linda Edelstein. That summer I promised that someday I would write her a concerto.

The work has three movements. The Elegy is a set of nine variations on a pair of interlocking six note pitch groups heard at the outset in the solo strings. This movement memorializes loved ones now dead. The Cradle Song celebrates the future. It begins with an oboe solo that represents a mother singing to her infant. The strings join the soloist for a tender, straightforward song. The Finale is a rondo about the not unpleasant hurly-burly of life in New York. The first idea is a chunky groove in seven; the second is a carefree, Broadway-style ‘walking tune.’ After a cadenza for the oboe draws together motifs of the three movements, the final variation of the first movement returns, followed by a quick coda.

The Concerto was commissioned by the Waukesha Symphony Orchestra and composed in July-September of 2000.  Linda Edelstein gave the premiere with the Waukesha Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Music Director Alexander Platt on 7 November 2000, thus completing the circle of a composition twenty-two years in the making.”

Modest Mussorgsky  (1839-81)
Pictures at an Exhibition
Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition is one of the best-known pieces in the orchestral repertoire.  Major orchestras play it regularly, often while on tour or in the summer season.  Audiences never tire of the varied moods and brilliant orchestration.

Mussorgsky wrote his piano suite, a work of dazzling virtuosity, as a memorial to his friend Victor Hartmann, an architect and artist who had died suddenly of an aneurysm at the age of thirty-nine.  Mussorgsky had met Hartmann in 1870, introduced by Vladimir Stasov, a prominent arts critic who followed both of their careers. Both sought to create an intrinsically Russian art and they became friends quickly.

Mussorgsky was shocked by the abrupt loss of his dear friend. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,” he asked, “and creatures like Hartmann must die?”  The idea for an exhibition of Hartmann’s work came from Stasov, who organized a show of more than 400 works at the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in the spring of 1874.  Saint Petersburg was the capital of Czarist Russia, a wealthy and very cosmopolitan city.

Stasov’s enormous show inspired Mussorgsky to write a suite of piano pieces.  These depict the composer “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come closer to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.”

Mussorgsky depicted eleven Hartmann works. He owned two sketches of Polish Jews, which he combined into one “picture”; the others were from the exhibition. Six of the original pictures have disappeared in the century and a half since; only six of those that Mussorgsky depicted can be identified.

Mussorgsky composed the piece in three weeks, using “Hartmann” as his working title.  Like Handel composing Messiah, he wrote in a frenzy of inspiration and perspiration. In a letter to Stasov, Mussorgsky wrote:

“Hartmann” is seething as Boris [his opera, Boris Godunov] seethed . . . sounds and ideas hang in the air, I am gulping and overeating, and can barely manage to scribble them on paper. I am writing the 4th number—the transitions are good (ie, the Promenades). I want to work more quickly and reliably. My physiognomy can be seen in the interludes. So far I think it’s well turned . . .”

No record exists of a performance of Pictures in Mussorgsky’s lifetime, not even in the composer’s extensive 1879 concert tour; perhaps he found it too personal for the stage.  Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the musical executor of Mussorgsky’s estate, would ultimately edit the manuscript and bring Pictures to public notice

As a piano work, Pictures is decidedly colorful.  It evidently never occurred to Mussorgsky, whose use of the orchestra was very idiosyncratic, to place it in orchestral garb. It has intrigued musicians ever since his death, and many have turned Mussorgsky’s black-and-white pieces into full color. The earliest version was that of Rimsky-Korsakov’s student, Mikhail Tushmalov, which, like most of Rimsky’s editions of Mussorgsky, takes great liberties with the text (this version was performed by the Connecticut Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra in 2012).  In 1915, Sir Henry Wood, an eminent British conductor, produced a version that was popular in Britain for a decade.   The Slovenian conductor Leo Funtek also orchestrated the work in 1922.

In 1922 the French composer Maurice Ravel told the Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky about this fascinating set of piano pieces and proposed to orchestrate them for the maestro.  Koussevitzky, who was famous for championing new works, provided the commission in return for exclusive rights of performance. Koussevitsky premiered the work in 1924 with the Lamoreaux Orchestra; upon hearing Ravel’s orchestration, Wood disavowed his own edition. Koussevitsky made Pictures a staple of his repertoire, making the first recording in 1930 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and at least two others. Through Ravel’s orchestration, Pictures at an Exhibition became an indispensable repertory item.

The success of Ravel’s version is understandable. Ravel was sensitive to Mussorgsky’s style from his 1913 collaboration with the young Igor Stravinsky on an edition of Khovanshchina.  Also, as most of Ravel’s own orchestral works started out as piano scores, the art of transcription was second nature to him. Ravel tried but failed to find a copy of Mussorgsky’s original and thus worked from the same Rimsky-Korsakov edition of Pictures that Tushmalov, Wood and Funtek had used.  Ravel added a bar to one movement, two bars to another and dropped one promenade, in the meantime correcting two painful errors that pianists sometimes honor.

The success of Ravel’s edition and Koussevitsky’s initial exclusive rights to perform it inspired other orchestrators, including Leopold Stokowski, Lucien Calliet, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Edwin Franco Goldman and Merlin Patterson.   Pictures has been scored for rock band by Emerson Lake and Palmer, for brass ensemble by Edgar Howarth, for synthesizer by Tomita, for pipe organ, for acoustic guitar, massed accordions, concert band, saxophone ensemble, saxophone and piano.  Vladimir Horowitz even re-arranged Ravel’s orchestration back for solo piano.  But Ravel’s orchestration remains the best-known guide to Mussorgsky’s picture album.  It is a model of psychological insight, technical brilliance and musical imagination.

Ravel’s large orchestra consists of three flutes and two piccolos, three oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, “Jeu de timbre” (a French bell instrument usually replaced by glockenspiel), chimes, triangle, tam-tam, rattle, whip, cymbals, side drum, bass drum, xylophone, celesta, two harps, and strings.

Mussorgsky referred to Pictures as “an album series,” but the score is a coherently designed whole, organized around a recurring theme and judiciously paced to progress from short pieces to a longer, majestic finale.  The harmonic frame of the work maintains a sense of motion.  In the first five pictures, Mussorgsky moves through the circle of fifths from Bb to Cb, using keys that are immediately adjacent to one another, as he peruses the first items; he then turns around by a tritone modulation and moves back, from D minor to Eb.

The pictures themselves are little gems.  Each is self-contained and most could be performed alone; yet, the numerous motivic connections within and between movements give the suite a wonderful sense of unity.

Mussorgsky begins with a Promenade, which takes him into the gallery and later accompanies him as he walks around the room, reflecting a change in mood from one picture to another.  Despite his limp and ample girth, Mussorgsky was a brisk walker—the tempo is marked allegro (fast), rather than andante (walking tempo).   The Promenade provides a thematic link between and among pictures that are shown.

Most of the Promenades feature solo winds, emphasizing the personal nature of the observer; the first opens with a trumpet solo..  Anytime you hear a trumpet solo in this piece, look for Mussorgsky, who chose the irregular meter of 5/4 for his stroll among the artwork (remember his limp!).  The trumpet melody consists of two three-note fragments (G-F-Bb; C-F-D) that spell out a pentatonic scale (five notes: Bb-C-D- F-G), which is a typical folk construction.  This is Mussorgsky’s Russian Nationalism on display. The melody begins on the sixth scale degree, another very unusual choice.

After a brief series of modulations, as if we behold many paintings as we walk into the gallery, the piece ends solidly in Bb.

In an abrupt change, the brave Promenade is replaced by a gruff melody in the low registers, halting, staggering and pausing to catch its breath.  This is Gnomus, in the adjacent key of Eb minor. Stasov wrote that Gnomus was “a child’s plaything, fashioned, after Hartmann’s design in wood. . . .  It is something in the style of the fabled Nutcracker, the nuts being inserted into the gnome’s mouth. The gnome accompanies his droll movements with savage shrieks.” Hartmann’s picture is lost, but the dark, malevolent music shows that Gnomus is not a garden gnome. Mussorgsky again starts the melody on the sixth degree and uses octatonic (eight-tone) and pentatonic scales to suggest the primitivism of the gnome.  Ravel obliges the music by alternating brilliant, light colors (flutes, high oboes, celesta, xylophone) with somber basses and low brass.

A second Promenade, moving again by a fifth to Ab, a tone below the opening, opens with solo horn.  The lower key and smoother timbre give the viewer a relaxed mood as he comes to the second painting,

Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle), in the parallel key of Ab minor (notated as G# minor).  Stasov tells us that the watercolor is of a medieval castle; a troubadour stands in the foreground. Two drawings of medieval French castles are listed in the exhibition catalog, both sketched shortly before Hartmann met Mussorgsky (should the title of this movement therefore be “L’ancien château”?). Mussorgsky’s evocative music paints a perfect castle in each listener’s mind.

Mussorgsky’s melody, aptly for a troubadour, sounds like folksong, gently accompanied by a rocking ostinato, the note G# being ever-present in the bass.  In one of Ravel’s strokes of brilliance he assigns the melody not to the obvious English horn or solo violin but rather, imports the exotic sound of the alto saxophone. This is the only use of the alto saxophone in Ravel’s oeuvre, although he used sopranino and tenor saxophones in Bolero, again as exotics. In 1922, before a century of jazz, the saxophone had different connotations than we hear today.  It was a guest to the orchestra, a handsome outsider with a sensuous, smooth timbre.

The troubadour’s last G# fades off in the moonlight and is picked up by the trumpet (heard for the first time since the opening Promenade, thus emphasizing its personality) in another Promenade, pivoting through the three-note germ of the tune to the bright sunshine of B, the relative major to G# minor.  We are at the beginning again, but walking a little taller and a little faster; perhaps Mussorgsky needs a brisk walk to wake himself up.  The melody strides along confidently . . . until a sudden halt, and a repeat of the characteristic three-note motif of the melody, as if something caught Mussorgsky’s eye mid-stride, causing him to pause and retrace his steps.

He views Tuileries park in Paris, swarming with teasing children and their nurses, “nah-nah-nahhing” at one another in the same key of B major.   After a gentle central section in the picture ends with a flick of sunlight from the clarinets and, without a Promenade, the viewer confronts an utterly opposite scene, moving from playful children to Bydlo (Polish for “cattle.”) Mussorgsky explained the picture as an ox-drawn wagon with enormous wheels.  The tenor tuba, playing in its highest register, imitates the bellowing of oxen. Mussorgsky’s subtle craftsmanship turns the descending minor 3rd motif of the preceding Tuileries’ melody and bass into the rising minor 3rds of Bydlo, giving an unconscious unity to the two pictures, heard next to each other without an intervening Promenade.

In the middle of Bydlo, simple phrases are heard again and again – there’s no movement; we’re going nowhere, the Promenade theme is taken up but is abandoned, as the wheels are stuck in a rut.  With a huge effort and a massive crescendo the cart pulls free and moves forward painfully, slowly, the oxen straining as they lumber out of sight.

We know from a letter to Stasov that Mussorgsky wrote Pictures up to here as a single unit. The harmonic plan, Bb-Eb minor-Ab (= G# minor)-B-G# minor supports this. Now he pulls a harmonic sleight-of-hand, which Ravel recognizes in his orchestration.  In moving from the G# minor of Bydlo to D minor in the next Promenade, the music goes as far from the previous tonality as is possible; the keys share only two common tones.  Previous modulations have always been to closely related keys sharing 6 or 7 tones, as if the pictures are next to one another; now we are not strolling along a wall of pictures but rather, turning on our heel or moving to another gallery.   Ravel matches this in his orchestration, introducing the flutes and oboes that we have not perceived in the din of the oxcart. This lamenting D minor promenade merges gently into its relative major of F in the

Ballet of Chicks in Their Shells. In this scene, child dancers portray canaries “enclosed in eggs as in suits of armor, with canary heads put on like helmets.“ With darting movements, quick chirps, deft trills and pattering staccatos, the little chicks pirouette, peck and dance their way through the piece, until with a final squawk and a quick bow they disappear offstage. This is the first picture for which we still have the original; one could not ask for a more apt, irresistible musical characterization.

Moving a fifth to Bb minor, we now see Samuel Goldenberg and Shmuel. Mussorgsky owned two drawings by Hartmann, one A Rich Jew Wearing a Fur Hat and the other, A Poor Jew: Sandomierz.  Stasov later added the names of Goldenberg and Shmuel.  The sumptuous Bb minor of Samuel Goldenberg, with its “Jewish” augmented seconds (which 15 years later Gustav Mahler would employ in the Klezmer music of his First Symphony) gives way to the wheedling of Shmuel. Mussorgsky contrasts the men by making an uncomfortable mediant modulation from Bb minor to Gb minor.  Shmuel’s nervous wheedling is brilliantly portrayed by a muted solo trumpet, in a passage of breathtaking verve and virtuosity—again the trumpet is used to personalize!   The two tunes play in counterpoint but Goldenberg has the last word as the piece ends firmly in Bb minor.

Here Mussorsgsky included yet another Promenade in Bb, a virtual repeat of the opening, which Ravel (unlike other orchestrators of the piece) excluded.

The Marketplace at Limoges—(Eb major) The busy music depicts women gossiping in the market.  Ravel uses orchestral color to show their characters and conversations. Listen to the clever delineation of tunes that he achieves by contrasting woodwinds with strings, muted trumpets with celeste and glockenspiel.  The effect is airy and warm.  With a great rush of wind, Mussorgsky plunges us directly into the

Catacombae. For centuries, Paris had buried its dead in an underground array, with the bones of thousands of Parisians stacked and piled in tunnels. Hartmann, a friend, and a guide with a lamp are inspecting a catacomb ; this is a somber, eerie scene.

Catacombae has two sections. The first, Sepulcrum romanum (Roman Sepulchers) begins atonally; another trumpet solo leads us falsely to Eb, but the key lasts for only a bar before the mood is lost; the music moves to simultaneous I and V chords of B minor. Cum mortuis in lingua mortua (With the Dead in a Dead Language) follows, a ghostly transformation of the Promenade.  Here Mussorgsky paints a sunrise tune reminding one of his Khovanshchina prelude; Ravel’s assignment of the final B major arpeggios to the harp suggests a heavenly transformation.

Out of this bliss comes another unsettling modulation between remote keys (B major, C minor). The Hut on Fowls’ Legs depicts a metal clock in the shape of a hut with a rooster’s heads and legs. Mussorgsky tells of the witch Baba Yaga, who flew about in a mortar chasing her victims; this hut is her home. Ravel’s orchestration is savage in the outer sections, disquieting in the middle, which is built on alternating pentatonic and octatonic scales.  A shortened repeat of the opening leads to a long bridge, as we pass under

The Great Gate of Kiev (Eb major).  This is a design for stoneworks, which were not built, to replace Kiev’s wooden city gates.  These would commemorate the escape of Tsar Alexander II from an attempted assassination in Kiev. Hartmann drew a structure in tinted brick, with the imperial eagle on top, a large icon of the Virgin and Christ in the center and, to one side, a three-story belfry with a cupola in the shape of a Slavic helmet.  In Mussorgsky’s majestic musical vision we hear the grandeur of the gate, the chanting of Orthodox priests and the pealing of bells, reminiscent of the bell effects in his opera Boris Godunov.

The transition from Hut on Fowls’ Legs to The Great Gate is electrifying.  After 45 years of knowing this piece, it still raises the hair on my neck every time I hear it.  Mussorgsky pushes the piano relentlessly; three times in the movement he writes long pedal points, thus permitting the pianist to sound more strings than he has fingers to strike.  Ravel slowly adds instruments to make an irresistible effect as the Promenade theme appears for the last time; the viewer has reached the end of the exhibition.  The grand ending, with its massed brass and percussion, is overwhelming.

Robert Howe has played oboe, English horn and other woodwinds with the MSOC since 1978.  He will receive a Master’s in Music Theory degree from UConn next month.