48th Season (2008-2009) Program Notes

Concert I: The Richness of Autumn - Saturday evening, November 15, 2008 at 8:00pm

“Par les rues et par les chemins” (In the streets and byways) from Images pour Orchestre: II. Ibéria by Claude Debussy (born in St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, on August 22, 1862, and died in Paris on March 25, 1918)

Spain, lying just south of France but effectively screened physically and culturally from it by the rugged Pyrenees mountain chain, fascinated many French musicians of the late 19th century and inspired some extraordinary compositions. Chabrier’s tone poem España is like taking a week’s vacation under the Spanish sun, Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole is more like two weeks (with his Boléro thrown in for nightclub atmosphere), and Debussy’s Ibéria can make the listener believe he has moved there for good.

Actually, Debussy never even visited Spain or anywhere else on the Iberian peninsula, except to dash across the French border to the village of St. Sebastian for about an hour one day so as to see a bullfight (which he hated, he said, so much that he walked out on it). What he did was to absorb the country’s flavors and colors so thoroughly, from paintings and dances and conversations with his Spanish friends, that he managed better than any other non-Spanish composer to evoke its characteristic chiarascuro of brilliant sunlight and black shadows in purely musical terms (So far as we know he never took a sea voyage either, but in his masterpiece La Mer, or “The Sea,” he was equally able to convey, with an incomparably authoritative palette of orchestral sounds, the grandeur and misty perspectives of the ocean.

After the success of La Mer in 1906 Debussy decided to begin three Images, or tone poems, each inspired by a different country. The first to be finished, in 1908, was Ibéria, in three movements, the opening one of which is heard at this concert (The other two Images, completed in 1912, are Rondes de printemps, “Round Dances of Spring,” based on a French folksong, and Gigues, “Jigs,” utilizing what the French had long considered to be a rather quaint English dance). As it turned out, the third, supposedly inspired by the English countryside, is hardly what most people think of as British at all.

Probably the greatest Spanish composer of the century, Manuel de Falla, also a close friendof Debussy’s, was sincerely in awe of his French comrade’s ability to, as he put it, “create spontaneously-without really knowing Spain-the kind of Spanish music that was bound to be envied by those who knew her only too well. . . . It was particularly the entrancing Andalucía [the country’s southernmost region, on the Mediterranean, near Gibraltar] that [Debussy’s] thoughts preferred to linger over. The first movement of Ibéria, “Par les rues et par les chemins,” attests to this preference.

It is a kind of sevillana, a dance originating in the glittering city of Seville. The music seems to float on the intoxicating spell of starlit Andalusian nights, the festive gaiety of people dancing to the joyous rhythms of guitar and bandurria. The snap of castanets and tambourines is heard amidst the dazzling burst of the opening chords. Melody after melody sings to us, a jaunty, perhaps slightly insolent one, bright with clarinets and trumpets, in contrast with, say, a tenderer one, for viola and oboe. Finally, after the opening themes have been heard once again in all their splashy brilliance, the movement begins to soften; ultimately it trembles away into echoes, the soft pulse of drums, and silence. Throughout Ibéria, we can easily hear what critic Roger Nichols refers to in his article on the composer in The New Grove Dictionary of Music: how Debussy, flirt though he might with a kind of good-humored vulgarity, never loses his aristocratic poise.

“Noël” fromSymphonic Sketches by George Whitefield Chadwick(born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on November 13, 1854; died in Boston on April 4, 1931)

Chadwick grew up in a well-do-do family; his father ran an insurance company and also taught voice and conducted local choruses-he had met his first wife in a singing camp. Thus it was no surprise when young George took up music as an avocation, though his father-his mother having died at George’s birth-made no secret of his desire that his son should go into business, preferably his father’s, to earn his principal income.

George’s interest in music grew stronger and stronger, however, and eventually he enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, following those years (he never completed a degree) by study in Leipzig, Germany, where his successes were immediate and far-reaching. At conservatory concerts his works always won top recognition, particularly a couple of string quartets and an orchestral overture, Rip Van Winkle, which continues even now to be one of his most frequently heard works. Its early performances in Leipzig, Dresden and Boston contributed to Chadwick’s decision to remain several years longer in Europe, where he became both a Francophile and a Germanophile, each influence contributing valuably to his composing.

When he came back to America in 1880, he took jobs as a church organist, though he was not a brilliant performer; through these church jobs, however, he located a number of composition students and became acquainted with several amateur choruses for whom he composed choral works that soon made his name a well-known one. In 1882 he was invited to become a faculty member of the New England Conservatory, where he had once been a student, and where he remained until his death, for his last four years being given the title of director. Among his students were a number of now-famous American musicians: Horatio Parker, William Grant Still, Daniel Gregory Mason and Edward Burlingame Hill.

American orchestras were not terribly receptive to compositions by native composers in those days, but Chadwick was luckier than most in having the Boston Symphony nearby and happy to embrace America’s contemporary music. Many of his earlier orchestral works were based on classical subjects, but with his four Symphonic Sketches, which he began in 1895, he turned to distinctly American subjects for inspiration. (He himself referred to this style as “Boston classicism.”

Chadwick composed the first two of eventually four sketches in 1895; one of these we hear this evening: “Noël.” It, along with its three companion works, “Jubilee,” “Hobgoblin” and “A Vagrom Ballad,” were published together in 1909; the latter two had been completed in 1905 and 1907, respectively.

“Noël” is partly an evocation of the very first Christmas at the manger in Bethlehem and partly an affectionate nod to the composer’s younger son, who had been named Noël when he was born at Christmas time in 1894. It is a tender movement in a serene tempo, with a poetic epigraph, translated from an old German Christmas carol:

Through the soft, calm moonlight comes a sound;

A mother lulls her babe, and all around

The gental snow lies glistening;

On such a night the Virgin Mother mild

In dreamless slumber wrapped the Holy Child,

While angel-hosts were listening.

The first performance of the entire set of four Symphonic Sketches was played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on February 7, 1908. The music “took all hearts by storm,” reported the Boston Evening Transcript in its laudatory review.

Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs), Opus 20, for solo violin and orchestra by Pablo Martín Melitón de Sarasate y Navascuéz (born in Pamplona on March 10, 1844; died in Biarritz on September 20, 1908)

In 1894, when James MacNeill Whistler painted his full-length portrait of the violinist Pablo Sarasate, which he called Arrangement in Black, it was thought to be an uncanny representation of the man whose only rival in the mastery of the violin might have been the legendary Niccolò Paganini who had lived three-quarters of a century earlier, except that Sarasate led a much happier life. Leopold Auer, the famous Russian violinist, characterized him in a letter as “always merry, always smiling and in good spirits.” (Whistler’s portrait-unsmiling-now hangs in the Carnegie Institute Art Museum in Pittsburgh, a city the violinist never visited, though his tours carried him practically everywhere else).

Sarasate was the son of a Spanish military bandmaster in the province of Navarro, and his violinistic talent showed so early that after a few lessons with Gaspar Saëz in Madrid, he was invited to play for Queen Isabella (he had started performing in public when he was eight), and she promptly packed him off on a royal scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. Once there it was just one first prize after another: in violin when he was 13, in solfège the next year, and tours to London and the Crystal Palace where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert listened and marveled. Sarasate’s gossipy youthful diary, now unfortunately out of print, records that Victoria wore a white lace cap with two mournful black bows that reminded him of ravens sitting on a fence.

He was the talk of Europe. Composers could not wait to dedicate their finest works to him; among these were Édouard Lalo with his Sinfonie espagnole, Max Bruch with his D minor Concerto and the Scottish Fantasy, Camille Saint-Saëns with his Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and Henri Wieniawski with his Second Concerto. Sarasate played them all, and added performances like those of the Beethoven Concerto that rivaled the ones by Joseph Joachim, reigning virtuoso of northern Europe. Sarasate never tried the Brahms Concerto in public, though he loved to play Brahms string quartets and other chamber masterpieces. His playing excited critics as much as his overflow audiences: “tone of unsurpassed purity,” they wrote, with “a frictionless bow stroke,” “superb technique” and “perfect intonation,” the whole “effortless” in effect.

As a composer Sarasate was no slouch either, though he was in such demand it is hard to imagine where he found the time to complete his 54 separate works, almost all of them for violin solo. Among the most famous today are Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs), which we hear this evening, and the equally celebrated Carmen Fantaisie, composed only a few seasons after the première in 1875 of Bizet’s opera bearing that name.

Zigeunerweisen gives a new dimension to the word moody. It is impossibly famous, one of the best known pieces of gypsy music ever composed. Its opening measures resemble those of a Lisztian Hungarian Rhapsody’s lassan (from the same language stem that gives us “lassitude”), eventually shifting to a frenzied friss, a dance-like evocation of the Magyar csárdás. Whenever possible, Sarasate inserts opportunities for throbbing heart-beats or stunning violinistic pyrotechnics.

Sarasate always led a charmed life and was the favorite of society hostesses everywhere, on account of his poetic good looks and conversational charm. But he knew when he was being imposed on, as witness the story related by Helen Henschel, daughter of the English conductor George Henschel: “Apart from the beauty of his playing,” she wrote, “I will always be grateful to him for his grand snub of the lady who invited him to dine “avec votre violon, pour sûr” (“with your violin, of course”), meaning that she would like him to give her and her other guests a little recital for free. “Chére Madame,” Sarasate replied, “I will come with pleasure, but my violin doesn’t dine, alas.”

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