Ports of Call
Sunday, November 8, 2009 - 3:00 p.m.
Monday, November 9, 2009 - 8:00 p.m.
Shaftman Performance Hall, Jefferson Center
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Roanoke Symphony Orchestra
DAVID STEWART WILEY Music Director & Conductor
Ravel - Tombeau de Couperin
Debussy - Berceuse Heroique
Dvorak - Carnival Overture
J. Strauss, Jr. - On The Beautiful Blue Danube
Tchaikovsky - Romeo & Juliet Fantasy Overture
Abridged Program Notes - [Complete Program Notes]
Romeo & Juliet Overture-Fantasy
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(b. 1840, Votkinsk, Russia; d. 1893, St. Petersburg, Russia)
Though now more than 400 years old, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet still reigns as the most compelling of all love stories. And it holds as much allure for composers as for movie directors. "God! What a fine subject!" wrote the French composer Hector Berlioz. "How it lends itself to music!"
In 1869, the 28-year-old Tchaikovsky was just recovering from the breaking off of his only love affair with a woman - the fascinating Belgian opera singer Desiree Artot - when he was urged to use this subject to transform his pain into art by his fellow Russian composer Mily Balakirev.
On a long walk together, Balakirev suggested [to Tchaikovsky] Romeo and Juliet as the perfect program for a symphonic poem and followed that up with a letter detailing how the work should be laid out. Tchaikovsky latched onto the idea immediately, but used his own artistic discretion about Balakirev's suggestions. The first version of his "Fantasy-Overture" was written in just six weeks at the end of 1869. But when he heard it performed in Moscow in March 1870, Tchaikovsky decided it needed considerably more work. In revisions made soon after, he added the brooding opening that so perfectly establishes a mood of tender pathos, and before publishing it in 1880, he devised the startling conclusion that confirms the tragic denouement with eight searing B-major chords.
The musical events of Tchaikovsky's first masterpiece are so well known they need little explanation; they convey virtually all the dramatic elements of Shakespeare play except the scenes of comic relief. Some commentators have linked the dark chant-like theme that opens the work with the character of Friar Laurence who marries the young lovers. This theme plays an important role in the middle development section - striving in the horns against the jagged principal theme representing the battles between the Capulets and Montagues, just as in the play Laurence tries vainly to bring the families together. Notice how craftily Tchaikovsky introduces his famous love theme, one of the most inspired this great melodist ever wrote. He first presents it with very subdued scoring - an English horn solo over violas - saving its full passion for later when it returns soaring aloft in the violins.
Le Tombeau de Couperin
Maurice Ravel
(b. 1875, Ciboure, France; d. 1937, Paris)
During the 16th century, a literary tradition developed in France of creating poetic tributes to deceased luminaries that were known as tombeaux or "tombstones." By the 17th century, composers had adopted the concept as well. So when Maurice Ravel decided to compose his own tombeau in honor of the French Baroque composer Francois Couperin (1668-1733), whose music he very much admired, he was reaching back to a very old form.
However, by 1917 when the composer created his first version of Le Tombeau de Couperin - a suite of six short piano pieces based on Baroque dance forms - he was thinking of tombeau in a much broader sense. The First World War had been an agonizing time for him (too small to be a soldier, he enlisted as a frontline ambulance driver and medic), and he was now literally surrounded by tombstones. Ravel decided to dedicate each movement to a different friend who had been killed in the war. He also stated that his suite was not so much a tribute to Couperin "as to 18th-century French music in general." All his life, the 18th century represented Ravel's aesthetic ideal, and it seemed particularly precious to him at this time of death and destruction.
Thus, when Ravel decided to orchestrate four of Le Tombeau's movements in 1919, he chose a small orchestra that, except for the addition of a harp and an English horn, closely resembled the standard 18th-century court orchestra. And master orchestrator that he was, he knew exactly how to use the tint of each instrument to perfection.
Abridged notes, taken from Janet E. Bedell.
© Janet E. Bedell 2009
[Complete Program Notes]
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November |
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Sat 7, 10:30 a.m. |
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Open Rehearsal
Shaftman Perf. Hall
at Jefferson Center
$5 at-the-door.
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Sun 8, 2:00 p.m. |
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Illuminations,
pre-concert event
with David Stewart Wiley.
FREE to ticketholders
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Mon 9, 7:00 p.m. |
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Illuminations,
pre-concert event
with David Stewart Wiley.
FREE to ticketholders
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Inside The Music |
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Episode 8 |
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Inside Masterworks 2
Listen to the Podcast...
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