March 9, 2012 Rochester Oratorio Society—Program Notes by Katherine A. Clark
We’re singing about dancing this irresistibly energetic evening. Our unique Spring program features a lighthearted and joyful mix of modern dance, familiar choral masterworks and instrumental chamber music.
Georges Bizet (1838–1875) Valse avec Choeur
Best known to contemporary audiences for his operas Carmen and The Pearl Fishers, Bizet was famous in his own day as an extraordinary pianist and composer even in his youth, winning the Prix de Rome for composition at age nineteen. His parents were both Parisian singers and sent Bizet to be educated at the Paris Conservatory. Valse avec choeur, written in 1855 and adapted for chorus and piano by Marie-Françoise Caillard, is a frothy collaboration of voice and dance. The text simply asserts that “the lighthearted waltz pleases lovers” as the vocal lines dance forward at breakneck speed. Though Bizet wrote this piece earlier than his famous operas, the choir functions here much as an opera chorus, breaking into extended passages of “la la las” where the voices become background to the main drama of the piece: the romance that occurs on the dance floor between waltzing partners.
Arthur Bliss (1891–1975) The Naiads’ Music from Pastoral (1929)
Born to an English mother and an American father and raised in England, Arthur Bliss’ defining characteristic as a Romantic composer was to combine the elements of both sides of his heritage in his music: European Romanticism and American optimism. He completed studies at Cambridge and began training in composition at Royal College of Music just prior to the outbreak of World War I, but interrupted his studies to serve in the Grenadier Guards. After the war, Bliss’ career accelerated rapidly and he was noted for vocal and orchestral compositions that were much influenced by contemporary composers Stravinsky and Debussy. In his later works, Bliss developed a more characteristically English style and also ventured into composing for films as well as concert music.
Bliss’ Pastoral is a paean to Spring. Inspired by the composer’s travels in Sicily, it narrates a shepherd’s holiday through a series of poems from different styles and eras but linked by the common theme of love and its pleasures. Bliss recalled that “the southern light, the goatherds, the sound of a pipe, all evoked the image of some classical, pastoral scene …[In ‘The Naiads’ Music] water-nymphs invite the shepherds to seek rest and solace with them. This poem by Robert Nichols…might be an evocation of some picture by Poussin.” The work is dedicated to Edward Elgar, whom Bliss greatly admired. Elgar had a taken an interest in the young composer’s work, but was somewhat critical of Bliss’ eagerness to compose for commercial gain. Bliss’ work is clearly indebted to Elgar’s influence: the exchange between the male and female voices in the “Naiads’ Music,” for example, recalls a similar pattern in Elgar’s fifth movement of From the Bavarian Highlands, “On the Alm.” In both pieces, the composers use siren-like melodies to illustrate female charms and the longing they arouse in men.
Paul Valjean (c. 1935–c. 2000) Dance Suite (1955)
Paul Valjean was a bassoon student of Professor K. David Hoesen at the Eastman School of Music during the 1950's. Although trained as a bassoonist, Valjean pursued a career as a dancer and choreographer in Copenhagen. He composed the “Dance Suite” in 1955 for “The Bassoonists Ballet,” a show organized by Eastman bassoon students. Most of Valjean’s music has never been published and exists only in manuscript copy, but this piece nevertheless became a favorite among woodwind players and ensembles and has been published recently in an edition by K. David Hoesen. The five movements of this charming suite explore dance styles of different periods and countries.
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
selections from Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op. 52 and New Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op. 65
Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna. Through instruction from his father and a series of famous teachers, Brahms became a virtuoso pianist and also learned the cello and mastered choral and orchestral conducting. The Love Song Waltzes demonstrate Brahms’ interest in folk and dance melodies (well known through another famous Brahms piece, the Hungarian Dances) as well as Vienna’s love affair with the waltz genre. Brahms was also an avid reader and possessed an impressive library of classical and modern poetry and fiction that inspired his compositions. Whenever Brahms created art songs from poetic texts, he sought out lyrics specifically for their flexibility and potential for lush vocal effects. While well known for setting some of the most beautiful poetry in the German language, at times Brahms sought out texts that were less than great but well suited to musical adaptation because such poetry allowed the singer and listener to concentrate on a beautiful line rather than a complicated lyric.
Brahms was also keen on sentimental texts such as those featured in the Love Song Waltzes, taken from a collection by the poet Georg Friedrich Daumer, which borrowed from German folk verses and stories. Brahms particularly liked setting Daumer’s poetry because it offered the Romantic composer melodramatic material that could be further enlivened by rich, passionate music. The themes of the poems in both suites range from celebrations of nature and its beauty as the perfect setting for love, to the enchantment of young love, to the obstacles, heartbreak and despair that inevitably follow, made worse by the rude comments of gossips whose mouths the poet would gladly clamp shut with “locks without number.” The final movement of the New Love Song Waltzes concludes, in the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, that the wounds of love can never be healed, but relief from their pain can be found in the comfort of the Muses, the goddesses who created love songs in the first place.
The selections from these two suites of waltzes are performed tonight with original choreography by Missy Pfohl Smith for BIODANCE in a new setting for piano and woodwind quintet created for the Antara Winds by ROS Artistic Director Eric Townell.
Brahms Scherzo, Allegro molto from Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op. 8
BIODANCE takes the stage for the world-premiere performance of Scherzo, based on the second movement of Brahms’ first piano trio, which he composed 1854 and revised in 1891. In this new presentation of the work, internationally recognized choreographer and SUNY-Brockport artist Bill Evans interprets Brahms’ changeable and dramatic phrases of the Scherzo for the dance stage. The piece comprises a variety of moods, from jaunty fortissimos to long adagio lines that resonate with other pieces on tonight’s program, both Brahms’ own waltzes and the German sentimental style Elgar recreates in From the Bavarian Highlands.
Edward Elgar (1857–1934) From the Bavarian Highlands, Op. 27, No. 1
Edward Elgar was the greatest English composer of his time. He is best known in the United States for the instrumental march Pomp and Circumstance, but he in fact composed works in every major genre (except opera, though he left a draft manuscript of one, The Spanish Lady, unfinished at his death) and was particularly adept at vocal composition. While Elgar criticized his fellow musician Bliss at times for being too commercial, Elgar himself adapted to modern innovations in music such as the gramophone, and was one of the first English composers to write with the idea in mind that his works could be reproduced by recording as well as performed live.
Although well regarded and known as his nation’s foremost composer, Elgar, who was Catholic, self-taught, and a native of Western England, sometimes characterized himself as an outsider from English society and the London “smart set.” He felt particularly at home in Germany, especially rural Bavaria. Written in 1895, From the Bavarian Highlands was a collection of compositions inspired by Edward and Alice Elgar’s holidays near Garmisch, where Elgar enthusiastically observed the folk songs and dances he saw locals performing in the villages they visited. Alice, a poet in her own right, wrote lyrics for Bavarian Highlands as remembrances of their vacation in 1894, based on motifs from Tyrolean folk songs and dances they enjoyed on their travels. The dance melodies and sentimental lyrics echo the mood of Brahms’ Love Song Waltzes and the holiday spirit of Bliss’ Pastoral.
