Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Wagner's "Götterdämmerung" (Immolation Scene)

Continuing my series of program notes:


Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Götterdämmerung: ‘Starke scheite…’ (Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene)
Hanfstaengl's 1871 portrait of Wagner
‘Let great logs be brought to the bank and heaped in a mighty pile. Let the flames…consume the noble corpse of this first of all men.’ So sings Brünnhilde in the spectacular end not only to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, but his entire Ring cycle. Here, Wagner must not only fulfill the premise of his great drama, but close off the largest harmonic structure in the history of western music - one that began three nights ago in the depths of the Rhine with three minutes of E flat major, representing the undisturbed gold on the bed of the Rhine, an image of unalloyed purity.

Since then the dwarf Alberich has obtained the gold by renouncing love; Wotan, king of the gods, has stolen the ring fashioned from that gold, to pay the giants who built his citadel; Alberich has cursed the ring, and Wotan has created humans, who, through free will, will save the gods from the destruction attached to the gods by the curse. Now the mortal hero, Siegfried, Brünnhilde’s beloved, is dead, murdered by Hagen in his quest for the world-domination accorded by the ring. But Brünnhilde possesses the ring and plans to immolate herself in Siegfried’s funeral pyre; the Rhinemaidens may retrieve the ring from her ashes.

This scene completes one of the great operas. Wagner was the towering figure of 19th century music. But his aim was to raise the dramatic integrity of opera, by using lessons learnt from Beethoven to inform dramas based on Teutonic myth constructed along the lines of Classical Greek Drama. His Ring cycle is the fullest expression of that achievement.

Note: The Ring is meant to be experienced as Music Drama. But the ‘Immolation Scene’ is a favourite item on the concert platform. Brünnhilde’s peremptory utterances are overwhelming in their command. As Brünnhilde rides her horse into the flames, Wagner reviews some of the Ring cycle’s best-loved themes (his famous lietmotifs) in a mini tone poem which depicts the burning down of Valhalla, the flooding of the Rhine, the curse motif, and, as the floodwaters recede, the Rhinemaidens’ high-spirited theme, expressing renewed gaiety, combined with the melody Sieglinde had sung when she discovered she was pregnant with Siegfried.

It’s a triumphal ending, or is it? The translation of the work’s title is Twilight of the Gods. Wagner actually struggled with this scene. By 1874 when he completed the score, he had greatly changed his 1848 concept of Siegfried as the hero who unerringly saves the gods. Wotan, a god who willed his downfall, had become more fascinating. Now Brünnhilde emerges as the cycle’s heroine.

Vengefully, Brünnhilde deliberately starts the fire that will consume Valhalla and the gods. The aged Wagner is a pessimist. But his music tells a different story. In Music Drama, we are meant to read music and action simultaneously. But the music tells us ‘love will conquer all’. Wagner’s aim may have been to raise the dramatic integrity of opera, but he became the towering figure in 19th century music. Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene works spectacularly well in the concert hall.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2007


Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013 
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013  
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Air Raid Sirens

Every so often, as you're getting around Los Angeles, you find old air raid sirens. This one's in Tarzana.


These sirens were put up during World War II and then revived and expanded during the Cold War. They were put out of use in the 1980s, but some people who lived here in the 1950s and 60s can remember them being tested on the last Friday of every month at 10am. They can remember nuclear attack drills too, like 'duck and cover'.

These sirens are not only a reminder of the Cold War, but that California (and the entire West Coast) shares a Pacific with Australia, because - after all - the Japanese attacked Australia (air raids on Darwin and the north 1942-3, shelling Sydney and Newcastle from the sea 1942).


 

Monday, July 29, 2013

Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies


Continuing my series of program notes:


Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No.6 Pastoral
Symphony No.5

Beethoven himself premiered these two symphonies on the same evening in1808. Then the running order was as listed above. Six came first, followed by five, numbered the other way round (ie at that stage, the 'Pastoral' Symphony was numbered as no.5); Beethoven had worked on both almost simultaneously.
Beethoven also crammed other works into the same program – two choruses from his Mass in C, his Piano Concerto No.4, a scena for soprano (from 1796), and a new work for piano, chorus and orchestra, the Choral Fantasia. All up, the concert lasted four hours. What was he thinking?
In the Vienna of 1808, Beethoven was struggling. His benefit concert, or ‘Akademie’, at the Theater an der Wien on December 22nd, was his last chance to score a surplus for the year. Might as well impress the influential people in the audience – at least those not going to the Burgtheater, to the Society of Musicians’ Benefit concert; those not about to miss out on the premiere of two of the greatest works in the classical repertoire.

Symphony No.6 in F, Op.68 Pastoral
1. Awakening of happy feelings on arrival in the country (Allegro ma non troppo)
II. Scene by the brook (Andante molto mosso)
III. Peasants’ merrymaking (Allegro ) –
IV. Thunderstorm (Allegro) –
V. Shepherd’s song: Thanksgiving after the storm (Allegretto)

In character, Symphonies nos.5 and 6 are quite different. Whereas the Fifth is a determined struggle against fate emerging in victory, the Sixth expresses the feelings of pleasure Beethoven experienced in the countryside, even during thunderstorms which refresh the summer fields and give cause for thanksgiving. True, there is a similar creative process at work in both symphonies. Beethoven was clearly toying with ‘atomised’ transitions at this time. The Fifth’s passage from ominous Scherzo to jubilant finale is analogous to the Sixth’s transition from ‘peasants scurrying for cover’, so to speak, to cloudburst. But the Sixth’s earlier movements express a more easy-going side to Beethoven - Beethoven when breathing the country air.
The nickname ‘Pastoral’ first appeared on one of the violin parts used in rehearsal for the 1808 concert. But how specifically does the Sixth express any rural subject? We could see the Sixth as the beginning of the ‘tone poem’ genre that was to become so important to the later 19th century, though we must not press this claim. Beethoven himself said, ‘All painting in music is lost if it is pushed too far…’ But the Sixth reminds us that Beethoven came up with many of his ideas ‘en plein air’. ‘He was never found on the street,’ said violinist Ignaz von Seyfried, ‘without a small notebook in which he recorded his passing ideas.’
In June 1808, Beethoven moved out of his regular abode just inside Vienna’s city walls, and went again to the rural village of Heiligenstadt, for the summer. At No.8 Grinzingerweg he continued working on the Sixth. His neighbours were the Grillparzers. Their son, the poet Franz, remembered seeing Beethoven entranced by a peasant girl, Liese, who used to pitch hay from the back of a cart while Beethoven walked by the fields. (Beethoven helped Liese’s father get out of jail for drunkenness, but almost ended up in jail himself for the way he addressed the village council.)
The first movement of the Sixth is not so much a portrayal of country life as, in Beethoven’s own subtitle, ‘an awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country’. The classical era’s standard sonata form structure, which had become a model of purposeful working out of ideas, here relaxes into a deep-breathed traversal of musical landscape. We can hear Beethoven’s basking in sheer delight in the calm negotiation of key changes through easeful repetitions - long before Minimalism had shown how to take the driven-ness out of classical music.
The ‘Scene by the brook’ is a bucolic andante which ends with the literal imitation of birds – nightingale (flute), quail (oboe) and cuckoo (clarinet). Yet, even here the imitations arise from a musical consistency; an almost ecstatic treatment of winds throughout the first two movements. Once again, we ponder the extent to which life impinges on a composer’s output.
In 1823 Beethoven took his biographer Schindler to where Schindler says Beethoven had composed the Sixth. They walked in the direction of the Kahlenberg to the valley between Heiligenstadt and Nussdorf. In the woods, Beethoven lay down against an elm by a brook and said this was where he had composed the second movement. By now totally deaf, he asked Schindler if there were any yellow-hammers around. ‘The yellow-hammers up there, the quails, nightingales and cuckoos round about, composed with me,’ said Beethoven. Schindler asked why yellow-hammers had not been included in that famous second movement. They had. Beethoven sketched an arpeggio, a beautiful rising motif on the flute which colouristically marks a change of key as the theme continues in the strings.
The Sixth Symphony is suffused with local colour, according to Schindler. Beethoven had made it customary to cast the third movement of a symphony as a scherzo (out went the more poised minuet and trio of Mozart’s era!). But Schindler said this third movement’s evocation of country musicians was meant to be ‘realistic’. Have you ever noticed, Beethoven apparently asked, how village musicians might fall drunk asleep and then wake up and resume playing, often in the right spot and same key. He’d tried to mimic that.
But of course it wouldn’t be Beethoven if there wasn’t a ruffling of the surface. And in the Sixth Symphony, with Beethoven’s insertion of an extra movement, we get one of the most graphic depictions of storm in the history of music. This is Hollywood’s Beethoven, who shakes his fist at the heavens. But the music emerges from it into radiant thanksgiving.
‘Nature’ symphonies were not new in Beethoven’s day; but Beethoven’s expression of feelings is unique. How interesting from our vantage point in the 21st century, where we have seen the effects of human imposition on nature (and let’s note: Beethoven’s brook has now been cemented) that Beethoven, who gave greatest musical expression to willpower (as he struggled against the fate that made him deaf), should also be so receptive to nature.

Beethoven's brook today - straightened into a cement channel
The Sixth Symphony dubbed a ‘“Recollection of Country Life”, in F major (No.5)’ was advertised as the opener to Beethoven’s forthcoming concert in the Wiener Zeitung on 17 December. A ‘Grand Symphony in C minor’ was to begin the second half.

Symphony No.5 in C minor, Op.55
Allegro con brio
Andante con moto
Allegro -
Allegro

If the Sixth reflects Beethoven’s habit of drafting outdoors, his Fifth proclaims mental habits of working out. We have here the most famous symphony of all. It must have had overwhelming effect on listeners accustomed to Haydn and Mozart.
The novelist E.T.A. Hoffmann writing his famous review in 1810 said this work revealed a new world before which the listener could only stand in awe and terror. Hector Berlioz’s teacher Lesueur said the work was wonderful but that such music ‘ought not to be written’.
In its titanic struggle, wrestling its way out of darkness into the blazing light of success, Beethoven’s Fifth has been a model for later symphonies such as Tchaikovskys Fifth and Mahlers First. The first movement’s clawing forward from the beginning clearing up details as problems come into focus (not as common a writing process as you’d think) is a particularly striking testament to the shaping power of the musical mind of this most architectural of composers.
Beethoven did most of his composing of the Fifth in 1807, though ideas can be dated back to his arrival in Vienna looking for fame and fortune. Somewhere in his 1792 sketchbooks was a theme foreshadowing the ‘spectral’ rising cello arpeggio that would begin this third movement. As he sketched out the Eroica Symphony (No.3) Beethoven continued working on ideas that would surface in both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Around 1804/5 he considered a turbulent minor key ending for what would become the Fifth, not the blazing quick-march we know today. But the idea of a funeral piece in C minor bursting into a triumphant C major conclusion was something he’d had in mind from his earliest extant composition – the Dressler Variations.
Beethoven’s Fifth bears the imprint of years of deep concentration and study, particularly in its first movement where Beethoven mines the expressive maximum from the tersest minimum statement (those famous four notes, which have come to be associated with victory or ‘fate’). Nearly all of his material – including long phrases – comes from extensions of those four notes. Even the singing second subject is underpinned by them. The motto provides perfect raw material for developmental turmoil. But, just as we arrive at recapitulation of the main material, there is an oboe cadenza. A diversion? Another transcendent incorporation of diverse elements, thought Hoffmann. Beethoven’s humanity and poetic depth, thought critic, A.B. Marx.
Beethoven plunges on until one single chord, born of the motif, is furiously repeated 20 times. And then again. One can almost hear the furious scratching of Beethoven’s pencil over the thickly-ruled manuscript paper (with its bottom staves left blank for the finale’s four extra instruments), as Beethoven keep ups with the flow of his thoughts and immediate rethinks. ‘Aus’ (out) he writes on bars that aren’t working, then writes on, then ‘aus’ again, occasionally ‘gut’, ‘meilleur’, ‘bleib’ (good, better, remains). After those reiterated notes, Beethoven plunges back into turbulence before finally reaching a re-emphasised statement of his opening motto. Then at his desk, Beethoven suddenly changes his mind about the ending to this movement. Twenty-two bars are struck out and Beethoven substitutes the present-day’s terse three-chords. If Classical music is, by definition, tight argument, then no other music clinches debate as decisively as this.
The second movement’s double variations are a relief after the drama of the first movement, though even here militant outbursts ruffle the surface. In the third movement Beethoven returns to innovation. Now he finds a place for 1792’s ‘spectral’ figure!
Scherzo means ‘joke’ but Beethoven plays with the listener’s expectations in a sinister, rather than playful manner. The lower strings’ scrubbing ‘false starts’ to the second part of the Trio had threatening overtones to early critics. We don’t get a straightforward repeat of the opening material. Instead the theme is virtually deconstructed, reduced to quiet timpani taps over which a fragment twirls upwards creating eerie discords.
It was this transition that Beethoven was still worrying over at a late stage of the symphony’s gestation. Now he crosses out the woodwinds so that only the violins wind sinuously up. Finally he writes in piccolo, trombones and contrabassoon on the bottom four staves of his manuscript paper. ‘[They] will make more noise than 6 timpani’ he wrote Count Oppersdorf on 27 March 1808. Then he launches into blazing C major as he has intended for many years. The presumptive dedicatee, Oppersdorf, might have been tantalised, but Beethoven, strapped for cash, flogged the symphony to his publishers on 18 September and offered Oppersdorf the dedication of Symphony No.4 instead.
With this last movement Beethoven altered the relative importance of symphonic movements. Previously musical weight had tended to reside in the first movement; here the last movement is the culmination of a psychological program. The motto idea returns, but reduced to an accompanying role, and Beethoven introduces several important new themes. Stravinsky thought Beethoven had loosened his control. Perhaps. He must indulge in near-‘overkill’ to ground the work in its home key of C at the end.
Richard Strauss, perhaps the greatest composer of tone poems, once told the conductor Otto Klemperer that he couldn’t conduct the second movement of the Fifth without imagining a scenario: the love of a man and his wife and then along come trumpets and drums and he must go off to war. Klemperer was appalled. Although Beethoven stood on the cusp of Romanticism, he was never as programmatic as that. Yet, he stretched the expressive capabilities of music as far as any ‘Romantic’ was to do.
And in another respect he presaged the Romantics. No liveried servant of aristocratics, he was his own agent. Beethoven was so glad to finally get an Akademie for himself that night. He had been angling for one for months. So how did he go? On 18 January 1809, at least Prince Esterhazy directed his pay office to transfer to Beethoven the sum of 100 gulden in support of his ‘musical Akademie’.

Gordon Kalton Williams ©2008


This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013 
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013 



Sunday, July 28, 2013

J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80

Continuing my series of program notes:



Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV.80 - cantata


In 1723 Bach arrived in Leipzig to begin what was to become his 27-year tenure as the town’s kapellmeister or ‘kantor’. He would be responsible for music at the Thomaskirche, Nikolaikirche, Matthäeikirche and Petrikirche, as well as the university church, the Paulinerkirche, which housed his favourite Leipzig organ.
Bach’s work for the town’s churches involved the preparation of music for the weekly services. It was a gruelling workload. Bach wrote enough church cantatas during his time in Leipzig to cater for nearly five years’ worth of Sundays; and that on top of selecting, preparing and rehearsing music by other composers and instructing the students of the Thomasschule. No wonder he refused to teach Latin as well, as had been the custom with past kantors.
For the Paulinerkirche, Bach provided music for the major festivals of Christmas Day, Easter Day, Whit Sunday and Reformation Day, celebrated on October 31 in remembrance of the Protestant Reformation launched by the founder of the Lutheran Church, Martin Luther in 1517 when he nailed his 95 theses on indulgences on a Catholic church door in Wittenberg.
Cantata no.80 was, therefore, written to celebrate a Reformation Day probably between 1727 and 1731, not for a regular Sunday. It followed the usual structure of a cantata, however, based on a chorale (or hymn) whose message reflected the theme of the day’s Bible reading. The musical structure consisted, as was usual, of choruses, arias, and duets, sometimes employing the chorale melody as a cantus firmus, descant, or some other thread, and ending with a straightforward rendition of the chorale, with which the congregation possibly joined in.
It was appropriate that the chorale for this Reformation Day’s cantata was Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. It was one of the most popular chorales, and written by Luther himself. Bach used the chorale text and melody in movements one, two, five and seven. For the other verses he used a text by Salomo Franck (1659-1725), a former Weimar colleague, which complemented the idea of God as a mighty fortress, or ‘feste Burg’.
Though Bach’s cantatas were, by necessity, written in haste, they followed a neat and aesthetically-satisfying structure. Ein feste Burg begins with a chorale fugue in which the chorus, singing the first verse of the hymn, ornament and paraphrase the tune. The tune itself appears as a cantus firmus in the oboes (Bach’s son, Wilhelm Friedemann, later added trumpets.)  In the second number, the soprano threads the melody and text of the chorale’s second verse into the bass’s rendition of Franck’s Alles, was von Gott geboren. Erwäge doch, Kind Gottes sets Franck’s text as a bass recitative followed by arioso; there is no hint of the chorale melody. Nor is there, in the soprano aria Komm in mein Herzens Haus.
As a kind of structural pivot, the chorus returns in the next number singing the third verse of the chorale in unison. Bach now presents the remaining solo voices. The tenor sings Franck’s So stehe denn bei Christi blutgefärbter Fahne. Then the tenor and alto sing another duet Wie selig sind doch die. In such a short space of time does Bach provide his congregation with a pattern of the familiar and newly-interesting. Finally the choir sings the last verse of the chorale, Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn.
Cantata no.80 did not mark the first time Bach had used Franck’s text. He had previously set it in a cantata known as Alles, was von Gott geboren on 15 March 1716 (in Weimar). At that time, he ended the cantata with the second verse of Luther’s hymn. Thus, through comparison of these slight variations, may we glimpse the almost infinite variety with which Bach invests this standardised repertory.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2011


This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013 
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013



Friday, July 26, 2013

Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto "Concentric Paths"

Continuing my series of program notes: 
                                                                                                 
Thomas Adès (born 1971)
Violin Concerto ‘Concentric Paths’

I.                    Rings
II.                 Paths
III.               Rounds

 Thomas Adès is still young enough to attract the sort of praise lavished by critics on rising stars. Critics praise his conceptual ambition, the energy of his ideas, his mastery of technical intricacy...
But Adès is now an established artist. The ‘Promising New Voice of British Music’ has reached his 40s and his music has the assurance of a long-burning beacon rather than a flash in the sky. ‘Not unlike the Prospero so memorably characterized in his Tempest opera,’ says writer Thomas May, ‘Adès has learned to tame the maelstrom of energies churning through his earlier scores; at the same time, his work of recent years seems to enrich the composer’s unassailable gifts for colour, lyricism, and jump-cutting excitement with a more sustained, humane coherence.’
Adès is best-known for works such as 1997’s Asyla, the Grawemeyer Award-winning work programmed by Sir Simon Rattle, in a sign of his high estimation of Adès’ talent, as part of Rattle’s final concert as Music Director with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and his first concert as Principal Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Adès’ two operas have also attracted great attention. Powder Her Face is an irreverent satire drawn from tabloid stories that chronicled the fall from grace of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, the centre of a scandalous divorce trial in 1963. Powder Her Face was followed up with a Covent Garden commission, Adès’ sensational adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose Ariel is echoed in the high-pitched violin part of this concerto. One of the great pleasures of listening to Adès’ music (even in the ‘scintillating ferocity’ of his early music) is the feeling of tradition behind it. The echoing-through of older concertos gives this work a great deal of its poignancy. The opposing tug of freedom also generates a great deal of the power of Adès’ music.
‘Concentric Paths’ was a joint commission of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Berliner Festspiele and was premiered in September 2005 at the Berliner Festpiele and BBC Proms by Andrew Marwood and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under the baton of the composer.
It is a leaner and more austere work than many of Adès’ earlier pieces. As with other Adès works, its brief duration possesses ‘a high density of musical thought per square inch’ and requires intense concentration on the part of the soloist.
In three movements, the work’s traditional references are altered by Adès when he throws the emotional weight on the middle movement ‘Paths’, more than twice the length of the outer movements. Why is the work subtitled ‘Concentric Paths’? As Adès points out, each of the movements proceeds according to its own circular design.
‘Rings’, the first movement begins with pinched high notes, and revolves around aerial oscillations and gliding instrumental lines. The stratospherically high violin part will remain characteristic of the work throughout its shimmering length but may also hark back to Ariel’s part in The Tempest.
Adès describes the second movement, ‘Paths’, as involving ‘two large, and very many small, independent cycles, which overlap and clash, sometimes violently, in their motion towards resolution.’ The intensity of the movement is signalled at the outset by the intermittent outbursts of compressed (simultaneous) solo violin and brass timbres. There is a sense of huge movement and weight. Thomas May speaks memorably of the movement’s ‘seismic, grinding, relentless energy.’ Critics have noted the strain of lyricism which has come through in recent Adès’ works and this movement ends in virtual song.
Songlike lyricism appears also in the final movement, not long after the lumbering opening. As the first movement came to a sudden, though appropriate end (we sense the closing of the circles), so too does this concerto.
Mention has been made of the way Adès’ music reflects tradition. Given that the lyrical modernism of this work may at times remind the listener of Berg, Ligeti, or even, perhaps, Prokofiev, this work belongs comfortably in the pantheon of great modern concertos.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2012


This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013


Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The Winds (Las Vegas)

Surely you would have to class an overnight stay in Las Vegas as an intense experience. So here are my seven lasting first impressions.

- Somewhere as busy as Times Square rises out of the desert and - puff - is gone again;




- We arrived in 107F heat


and then, an hour later,  there was an inch or more of rain;


two hours later the sidewalks were dry;


- Each hotel had its own odour - their own particular choice of detergents and carpet cleaners? And then it occurred to me: detergent brands are some executive somewhere's decision (or whim)!
 
 - Hopping desert birds must wonder what happened to the desert, but do the pigeons stop scavenging at the city limits?

- Parts of it look like any other tumble-weed blown desert town. It could be South Australia, and in fact Barstow in California on the way out reminded the composer Percy Grainger of the South Australian outback;



- We walked five miles up Las Vegas Boulevard to Main Street and quite often there was piped music along the way. Was it always the same music - it seemed so - but on this corner, it was the Overture to Handel's Messiah;



- In the mornings the streets seem to be full of short-skirted girls carrying their shoes. On hot sidewalks, some of them begin to hop too.


Monday, July 22, 2013

John Williams' "Escapades"

Continuing my series of program notes:


John Williams (born 1932)
Escapades

Closing In
Reflections
Joy Ride

Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Catch Me if You Can follows the exploits of confidence trickster Frank W. Abagnale who from 1964 to 1969, when he was arrested by the FBI at the age of 21, had successfully passed himself off as an airline pilot, surgeon and lawyer and made many millions in forged cheques. John Williams’ concert work, Escapades, successfully creates a saxophone concertino from three fairly complete sections of Williams’ soundtrack – his 20th film collaboration with Spielberg. The concert work’s title Escapades neatly captures the film character Abagnale’s career.

Catch Me if You Can made a virtue of 1960s stylisation (pool parties, James Bond, the use of Eero Saarinen’s futuristic TWA Terminal at JFK airport for locations). Williams’ original score matched the visual style superbly. Under the opening titles animation, the orchestra evoked, not only a sense of furtive hide-and-seek (complete with orchestral ‘shh’s), but an atmosphere of Cool Jazz that was just then coming into fashion. This depiction of FBI pursuit becomes the concertino’s opening movement, Closing In. The chromatic saxophone solo may remind listeners of the Bebop improvisations of Charlie Parker but is in fact completely written out. 

Ostensibly a film about scamming, Catch Me if You Can gained an added depth from the portrayal of Frank’s parents’ divorce and custody battle which are the immediate catalysts of Frank’s need to turn to crime to survive on the streets. The melancholy second movement begins in the film as Frank’s family life begins to fall apart.

Prominent use of hemiolas (alternation of duple and triple time) denotes the joyous, up-tempo character of the last movement. This music is created basically by lifting the underscore for a five-minute sequence from the film where Frank’s first attempts to pass off cheques fail until he sees a couple of Pan Am pilots (1960s heroes) emerging from a taxi with a bevy of air hostesses. Frank successfully masquerades as an assistant pilot, finds a way to cash Pan Am payroll cheques, and even takes his first flight in the ‘deadhead’ seat of a cockpit.

The music John Williams has provided for his 100+ films (Jaws was score #43) has often been recognised as being of a higher quality than much film music which remains anonymously subservient to its film. Escapades is one of the rare examples of music that can be lifted straight from a film to the more intense scrutiny of the concert hall. 

Gordon K. Williams © 2012


This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013 
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013