Concert Series I, 2011-2012 Season
Gioacchino Rossini
The Thieving Magpie (La gazza ladra) Overture
Rossini is best known nowadays for his comic opera The Barber of Seville, whose overture, like this one, is full of motoric passages, perky woodwind tunes, and moments of grace. But whereas those features anticipate a bubbly comedy in The Barber of Seville, in The Thieving Magpie, this effervescent overture opens a sentimental drama about one Ninetta, whose attempts to save her father (a military deserter) from capture results in a death sentence for her. This sentence is partly because she is believed to have stolen a silver spoon; this theft actually turns out to have been the work of the local magpie and the discovery of said bird's cutlery-lined nest is what-at the last possible moment-saves the poor girl.
The opening of the overture, with its prominent use of the snare drum and its march-like rhythms suggests both the military (Ninetta's father) and her own march to the scaffold. This gives way relatively soon to a more stereotypically Rossini flurry of repetitive rhythms and slightly manic tunes. There's a solo oboe tune in the middle (later heard in the clarinet), which is difficult not to associate with the magpie.
Edvard Grieg
Piano Concerto in A Minor
Edvard Grieg is the most famous Norwegian composer and is still a national symbol in Norway. Like many non-Germans, he studied piano and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory. It was not a happy experience on the whole, though both his piano technique and his basic compositional skills improved. Grieg found his voice as a Norwegian nationalist during a period in Copenhagen (the cultural capital of Scandinavia at the time) when he not only spent summer vacation time with the famous Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, but met Rikard Nordraak, the great musical hope of Norwegian nationalists, who was passionate about Norwegian folk culture. Much of Grieg's music-especially his songs and small piano pieces, but also his dramatic works-are directly and deeply informed by the interest in his country's musical heritage.
The Piano Concerto, sometimes called "The Norwegian," was also influenced by the folk culture of that country, but it is harder to hear its Norwegian-ness than it is with the pieces more directly based on folk materials. As a relatively early work (1868), written only six years after Grieg's return from Leipzig, where he often heard Clara Schumann (Robert Schumann's widow) perform, it is also an explicit homage to the German Romantic tradition, particularly to Robert Schumann's piano concerto. That concerto is also in A minor and its opening shares the device of a loud orchestral chord, a big piano flourish, and then the orchestral iteration of the main theme. The fast demonic fairy-tale-like music that follows the movement's main theme (second solo piano entry) and a short dreamy passage might make us moderns think of Scandinavian folk tales and trolls, but it is also not unlike passages of Schumann.
The second movement-really an interlude between the outer two-begins with a long tune carried by the muted strings; its wandering quality is not unlike some of Grieg's songs and may relate to the melodic characteristics of Norwegian folk tunes. To this the piano responds with dreamy arabesques. The tune is eventually taken up by the piano and continues in the winds with decorations by the piano. The last movement is ushered in with a gesture rather like the opening of the first movement. The main material is a quick dance-like theme with gypsy elements. A sweet interlude with a long-breathed tune in the flute (and then the piano) interrupts the bacchanal, and then, as expected, the opening material returns. The movement does not end there, however: the main material is transformed into a little waltz, and the (formerly) sweet interlude returns as a kind of apotheosis in winds and brass with arpeggio elaborations by the piano and tremolo in the strings. The piano takes up this grand manner and ends the work with a flourish.
Modest Mussorgsky (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel)
Pictures at an Exhibition
Modest Mussorgsky was one of the "Mighty Handful" of five self-consciously Russian and modernist composers (Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, and Rimsky-Korsakov in addition to Mussorgsky) in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Having studied piano in his youth (and become an accomplished player), he studied composition privately with Balakirev and analyzed the works of many other composers, both Western-European and Russian. Although he wrote some purely instrumental works, including the well-known "Night on Bald Mountain," he is best known for his operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, and his songs. He was very interested in setting the Russian language in ways that respected its rhythms and intonations-"realistic" was a term he used. This attention to the sound of Russian, as well as to the melodic patterns of Orthodox church music, are evident throughout Pictures.
This work was written in 1874, originally for solo piano; like many of Mussorgsky's works it was not published until after his death and was revised (in this instance very slightly) by his mentor Rimsky-Korsakov. It is a suite, like Handel's Water Music, or Bach's solo cello suites, but rather than being based on dance rhythms, most movements are musical responses to pictures by Victor Hartmann, an artist/architect friend of Mussorgsky, who had just died. Linking these musical pictures is the "Promenade" refrain, whose irregular meter gives a wonderful sense of a leisurely meander through a museum. Only a few of the relevant Hartmann pictures are still extant, but there have been numerous attempts to complete the set and match Mussorgsky's music.
Because this piano work is so obviously picturesque, it has cried out to be orchestrated (set for orchestra). The first orchestration, by Mikhail Tushmalov, appeared only five years after the first publication of the piano work. The one we play today, by Maurice Ravel, is the most famous. Not all reworkings of the piece are for classical orchestra; there's at least one electronic version and a rock one, by the group Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Ravel's version is an amazing orchestral showcase, especially for the brass and winds. From the haunting saxophone solo in "Il Vecchio Castello" to the galumphing tuba in "Bydlo," (haywagon), or the brilliant trumpet work in "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" or the chirping flutes and oboes in the "Ballet of Chickens in Their Shells," the palette of sounds is always changing, but always perfectly calibrated to capture the colors of Mussorgsky's responses to these pictures.
Program notes by Mary Hunter