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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
January 21-22-23, 2022
96th Season
Michael Allsen
This
midwinter program opens with a bit of liveliness and fun from
Dmitri Kabalevsky, the overture to his opera Colas Breugnon. We then welcome
violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins, who is making her first
appearance with the Madison Symphony Orchestra. She is
featured in the eclectic 2015 Concerto in D by
Wynton Marsalis. We close with the familiar and powerful Organ Symphony by
Saint-Saëns, a showpiece for the orchestra and for organist
Greg Zelek and the Overture Concert Organ.
The 1938 opera Colas Breugnon tells
the story of a peasant looking back on a mischievous
and enjoyable life. The opera’s bubbly overture is a musical
portrait of the irrepressible main character, filled with good
humor and country dancing.
Dmitri Kabalevsky
Born:
December 30, 1904, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Died:
February 14, 1987, Moscow, Russia.
Colas
Breugnon Overture, Op. 24
• Composed: 1936-1938.
• Premiere: The opera Colas Breugnon was
first produced in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on February 22,
1938.
• Previous MSO Performance:
1987.
• Duration: 5:00.
Background
Dmitri Kabalevsky was one of the leading
composers of the old Soviet Union, and worked comfortably for
his entire career in the restrictive atmosphere of Soviet music.
Kabalevsky’s musical style was never even remotely “modernist,” and perfectly suited the Soviet
ideal that music should be
uplifting and in service of the people. A loyal member of the
Communist Party, he enthusiastically supported Soviet musical
policies, and held several important political positions and
editorships. Interested in the cause of education, Kabalevsky
also helped to formulate the Soviet music education system,
writing dozens of works for children’s choir, and later in his
career, influential books on teaching music. As a composer, he
was also known for his six operas—rarely produced today, but
nearly all were very successful in the Soviet Union. His first
opera, Colas Breugnon,
was based upon a 1919 novel by Romaine Rolland written in the
form of reminiscences of a 16th-century Burgundian peasant,
looking back on a life well-lived, and mostly enjoyed. Rolland
granted Kabalevsky the rights to use the novel, but was
disappointed by how it was turned into a libretto. Kabalevsy
worked over a span of three decades revising the opera,
eventually premiering a new version in 1970 that won him the
prestigious Lenin Prize, though its lively 1938 overture
remained unchanged.
What
You’ll Hear
Though the opera is seldom heard in the west,
the brief Colas Breugnon
Overture has long been a favorite concert-opener. It is a
musical portrait of the opera’s irrepressible main character,
beginning with a flourish and launching immediately into a
manic, strongly-accented main theme. Kabalevsky introduces a
second, more ponderous idea, and a slightly more serious central
section. Towards the end, there is a wry little country dance
episode before the brilliant coda.
This is our
first performance of music by Wynton Marsalis. His violin
concerto, completed in 2015, is both a virtuoso showpiece and a
work that displays an amazingly eclectic range of musical
influences across its four movements.
Wynton Marsalis
Born:
October 18, 1961, New Orleans, Louisiana
Concerto
in D for Violin and Orchestra
Background
Duke Ellington, one of America’s great
20th-century musicians, was often frustrated when the music that
he was creating was pigeonholed as “Jazz”—Ellington was fond of
saying that good music and good musicians, whatever the style,
were “beyond category.” This
may be the perfect description of Wynton Marsalis, one of
America’s great 21st-century musicians. Marsalis was born into a
musical family in New Orleans and began playing trumpet as young
child—he apparently received his first trumpet at age six as a
gift from the great New Orleans trumpeter Al Hirt. As a kid, he
began performing in church and with traditional “second line”
street bands, but also appeared as a soloist with the New
Orleans Philharmonic at age 14. As a teenager, he studied at
Tanglewood and the Juilliard School. At 19, Marsalis burst
onto the nationwide Jazz scene as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz
Messengers...though just a year later, he also won a Grammy
Award for his recording of trumpet concertos by Haydn, Hummel,
and Leopold Mozart. Over the course of a long career he has
continued to perform, touring with his own band, and beginning a
particularly close partnership with New York’s Lincoln Center in
1987. Since 1996,
Marsalis has served as the director of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Inspired in part by the role Art Blakey played as a mentor,
Marsalis has fostered the careers of many younger
musicians. He has also
become a prominent media figure.
Beginning with his 1995 PBS series Marsalis on Music and
his prominent role as an interviewee in the huge Ken Burns
documentary Jazz
(2001), he has frequently appeared as a commentator on music and
a wide range of social issues.
In the past 25 years, Marsalis has also
emerged as a leading American composer. Perhaps the most
striking thing about his compositions is the vast range of
musical styles he is able to channel. Marsalis as a
performer has mastery of the Western Classical tradition, but
also the Blues and Jazz—and Jazz in a wide spectrum of styles,
from Ragtime and early New Orleans styles through Bebop. He brings all of these
to bear at various points in his compositions, but he is also
able to access a huge variety of American roots music styles,
African American traditions, and African traditional music.
Marsalis composed his Concerto in D for the
Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti. According to the
composer: “Nicky asked me to ‘invite a diverse world of people
into the experience of this piece.’” Successfully premiered by
Benedetti in 2015, it was the result of close collaboration
between composer and soloist. Benedetti later performed the work
widely on tour, and recorded it with the Philadelphia Orchestra
in 2019. Kelly
Hall-Tompkins, who performs the work here, is one of a few
violinists who have since taken up the formidable challenge of
this concerto.
What
You’ll Hear
Marsalis has explained
the concerto as a whole as a representation of a dream, with
each of its four movements “revealing a different
aspect of [the] dream, which becomes reality through the public
storytelling that is virtuosic performance.” He describes the
opening movement, Rhapsody,
as a “complex dream that becomes a nightmare, progresses into
peacefulness and dissolves into ancestral memory.” Beginning
with a lush, bluesy melody for the solo violin, it progresses
freely though a series of ideas: first an easygoing episode with
a Caribbean feel, and a middle section that is dominated by
harsh orchestral textures and disjointed answers by the soloist.
The mood eventually returns to the opening calm, though the
movement ends with a brief Celtic dance that serves as a kind of
hint what is to come at the end.
According to the composer, the Rondo
Burlesque is “a syncopated, New
Orleans jazz, calliope, circus clown, African gumbo, Mardi Gras
party in odd meters.” Like a good pot of gumbo, this movement
blends a huge range of flavors: furiously aggressive music, and
a series of rhythmic grooves set up by the orchestra, and
frequent flashes of humor. The second half of this movement is
given almost entirely to the soloist. The solo violin line
explores a series of ideas, sometimes in combination with
percussion, until finally moving directly into the more relaxed
Blues. Marsalis
describes this movement as a “progression of flirtation,
courtship, intimacy, sermonizing, final loss and abject
loneliness that is out there to claim us all.” Filled with “blue
notes” and working into a relaxed groove, this music is led by a
soulful solo part throughout. In the second half of the movement
violin begins a kind of call-and-response “sermon,” urged on by
shouts and whoops from the orchestra, before a quiet closing
passage.
The concerto ends with a wild Hootenanny.
Marsalis calls this “a raucous, stomping and whimsical barnyard
throw-down. [The soloist] excites us with all types of virtuosic
chicanery and gets us intoxicated with revelry and then…goes on
down the Good King’s highway to other places yet to be seen or
even foretold.” Beginning with claps and foot stomps, it
explodes into a hoedown of Celtic- and American-style fiddling.
At the end, the solo line returns to the quirky dance tune
introduced at the end of the first movement, this melody
eventually fading away into nothing.
The grand Symphony No. 3 of Saint-Saëns
has clearly earned its place as the most popular of all works
for organ and orchestra. Over the course of two extended
movements, it works its way gradually from a nervous and dark
opening to a triumphant conclusion.
Camille Saint-Saëns
Born:
October 9, 1835, Paris, France.
Died:
December 16, 1921, Algiers, Algeria
Symphony
No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 78 (“Organ”)
• Composed: 1886
• Premiere: Saint-Saëns conducted the premiere in
London, at St. James’s Hall, on May 19, 1886.
• Previous MSO Performances:
1958, 2004, and 2010.
• Duration: 36:00.
Background
By the late 1880s, Saint-Saëns was a
thoroughly respected figure in French music: a prolific
composer, journalist, pianist, and longtime organist at the
Madleine church in Paris. However, his music was being played
less and less often in his homeland, in favor of less
conservative composers. While his reputation as a composer was
declining in France, both Saint-Saëns and his music remained
wildly popular in England and America. Many of the large-scale
pieces he wrote in the last forty years of his long career were
commissioned by English and American ensembles. (His very last
completed orchestral work, for example, was a concert overture,
Hail! California.) The
“Organ” symphony was written for the London Philharmonic
Society. Its premiere was a huge success, and it remains the
most popular of his three published symphonies, and the single
most popular work for the combination of organ and orchestra.
Saint-Saëns was always something of a
conservative, writing works along “Classical” lines, but the Symphony No.3 has
several innovations, above and beyond its unusual orchestration.
(In addition to the organ part, there is also a prominent role
for piano, four hands.) Though it has the usual four-movement
outlines of a classical symphony, Saint-Saëns has absorbed those
sections into two large movements: the first combining a
traditional, though incomplete sonata-form first movement and
slow movement, and the second bringing together a kind of
scherzo and majestic finale. The symphony is also highly
unified, with close connections among its themes, and hints of
the grand closing theme sprinkled throughout the earlier
sections. It was published with a dedication to one of the
greatest Romantic innovators, Franz Liszt. Saint-Saëns met Liszt
for the first time when he was a 10-year-old prodigy, and Liszt
was already the preeminent pianist in Europe. They remained
friends for forty years, until Liszt’s death just a few months
after the symphony’s first performance.
What
You’ll Hear
After a short and dark Adagio introduction,
the unsettled main theme enters (Allegro). There is a clear reference in this
nervous melody to the Dies
irae. This chant melody from the Latin funeral Mass had
famously appeared some 56 years earlier in the Symphonie Fantastique
of Hector Berlioz. However, where Berlioz quoted the melody
quite clearly, as a prelude to his hellish Witches’ Sabbath,
Saint-Saëns used it more subtly, to create a sense of
foreboding. The second theme is actually taken from the
introduction. Both ideas are developed and combined, but where
we expect a full recapitulation, the mood turns calmer, and the
organ enters for the first time, as a quiet background to a
lovely Romantic melody (Poco
adagio) presented in a series of gentle variations. There
is a brief moment of darkness when the main Allegro theme returns,
but serenity wins out in the end, until a rather mysterious
closing passage.
The second movement (Allegro moderato)
begins with astringent music for strings and timpani, which is
developed in intense counterpoint. The Presto that follows is
in true scherzo style, with quick woodwind and string lines
above rolling piano figures. This music is developed thoroughly,
and there is a repeat of the second movement’s opening theme.
The scherzo returns briefly in combination with a solemn low
brass theme. Then the organ, silent or in a supportive role so
far in the symphony, suddenly takes control: a colossal C Major
chord that sets up a transition to the final section. The
majestic theme that closes the piece is a triumphant,
transformed version of the dark Allegro melody of the
first movement. This is developed in a great fugal finale that
closes in joyous fury. Saint-Saëns reportedly said of this
ending: “I have given everything that I had to give; what I have
done here I shall never do again.”
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program
notes ©2021 by J. Michael Allsen