ࡱ> OQNa vKjbjbA]A] .\+?+?tE |8 |L44444,Rh  44< 4 4 d<@  ( Kd0L ||D||Gilmore Festival Chamber Orchestra The piano is certainly one of the most versatile musical instruments, yet it still often fails to get credit for its role outside the concerto, the solo recital and chamber music. All four compositions on this program feature the piano, but each in a different role. The third work, Janceks Capriccio, most closely approaches the standard concerto although the composer didnt use the standard genre title, nor the traditional classical structure. Most unusual is Messiaens Couleurs de la cit celste, in which the piano is part of a large percussion section, its only melodic role the birdsong imitations scattered throughout the work. Poulenc, in the acerbically witty Aubade, creates something like a parody of the piano concerto, using it in broadly ironic gestures, while maintaining its personality for virtuosity. In Appalachian Spring, the piano is so integrated into the fabric of the chamber ensemble that it is does not even qualify as an obbligato instrument. AUBADE, Concerto Chorographique Francis Poulenc For Piano and Eighteen Instruments 1899-1963 Francis Poulenc was one of the youngest members of the six young French rebel composers of the 1920s, disciples of the iconoclastic Erik Satie, known as Le groupe des six. Their only uniting credo was the right to express themselves in their own personal way. They resisted what they considered the phony sublimity of the Romantic style, especially the legacy of Wagner, which Satie called sauerkraut music. Their goal was, as Poulenc wrote, to create music that was clear, healthy and robust music as overtly French in spirit as Stravinskys Petrushka is Russian. Poulenc came from an affluent family of pharmaceuticals manufacturers (the forerunners of Frances giant chemical conglomerate Rhne-Poulenc SA). He was regarded as the black sheep of the family, although his artistic tendencies were supported by his mother, if not his industrialist father. At least the family fortune allowed him to follow his muse. Urbane, sophisticated, witty and easy-going, the model of the Paris boulevardier whose idea of a day in the country was a stroll down the Champs lyses, his public persona was reflected in his music. In Poulencs late 30s his music became more serious as he turned increasingly to religious subjects. His style owed much to Ravels impressionism and to neoclassicism, always with a clear sense of melody. He never participated in the musical experimentation with atonality and serialism so popular among his colleagues in Paris between the wars and after. Conceived both as a piano concerto and a ballet, Aubade (Morning song) was composed and premiered in 1929 on commission from Vicomtesse Marie-Laure and Vicomte Charles de Noailles, French art patrons known for their lavish parties. In light of the space constraints of the salon, Poulenc limited the orchestra to 18 members. The work also falls into the category of the masque, or staged allegory with all the trimmings: dance, music, and elaborate scenery. Most masques were based on a Classical subject, which often complimented symbolically the guest of honor or the aristocrat footing the bill. The scenario (see below) is sufficiently vacuous to suggest that the whole enterprise was to be taken tongue in cheek. Poulenc laces his music with a slew of musical clichs: exaggerated melodrama, cloying sentimentality, plus a few oblique allusions to everyone from Mozart to masters of ballet music, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky all to celebrate the virgin goddesss unresolved amatory confusion. Poulenc provided the following scenario: A clearing at dawn (in the style of painters of the Fontainebleau school: Toccata). One by one Diana's entourage awaken, troubled by sad forebodings (Recitative). Diana, burning with a love that consumes her purity, moves among them, her clothes disheveled (Rondeau). Her friends busy themselves dressing her. She submits begrudgingly (Presto). Clasping to her breast the bow they have given her (Recitative) she dances a variation at once pathetic and resigned (Andante). Throwing away her bow she falls into despair. She escapes into the woods but soon returns (Allegro feroce). Her entourage surrounds her but she begs them to leave her. Suddenly, taking advantage of the confusion, she again flees into the woods. Dismayed, her companions stare at the space she has left but see only her hand waving a final adieu. Exhausted, they sink to the ground and fall asleep. It is morning {Conclusion}. Aubade has, however, become more popular as a witty orchestral piece than a ballet. COULEURS DE LA CITE CELESTE Olivier Messiaen 1908-1992 A Catholic by religion and a mystic by nature, French composer and organist Olivier Messiaen linked his music intimately to his religious beliefs and mystical experience. He claimed that the three cornerstones of his music were first, the theological truths of the Catholic faith...perhaps the only aspect of my work that I will not regret at the hour of my death; second, the greatest theme of human love, referring to the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseult; and third, the sounds of nature. The son of an English teacher and the poet Ccile Sauvage, he demonstrated both musical and aesthetic sensibilities from early childhood, mounting productions of Shakespeare in translation and composing at the piano when only seven years old. He entered the Paris Conservatory at the extraordinary age of ten and was trained according to that institutions rigid methods. At 22, in 1930, he became organist at the church of La Sainte Trinit in Paris. But the musical scene in Paris of the early twentieth century encompassed more than the conservative music of the Conservatoire and the Church. Messiaen was exposed to the music of Debussy, Les six and especially Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring had made a deep and lasting impression on him and influenced his rhythmical style. In the winter 1940 Messiaen was a prisoner of war in Grlitz, Germany (now Poland) where under freezing conditions and severe deprivation he composed what became his most famous work, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. A sympathetic German guard smuggled him paper and pencil to compose and hid him while he worked. He and three other musicians, including the famed cellist Etienne Pasquier, premiered the Quartet in front of a crowd of prisoners and prison guards on a bitter cold day in January 1941. Messiaens musical output is extensive and stylistically eclectic. His broad interest in Gregorian chant, Hindu rhythms and oriental mysticism also influenced many of his works. Since his youth Messiaen had been a passionate collector of birdsong and in the 1950s began painstakingly and accurately transcribing birdsongs from around the world, transcriptions which were regularly cited in standard reference works in ornithology. He tried to create faithful instrumental replications of birdsong, which form a component of many of his religious works. In addition to his fame as composer and organist, Messiaen was also one of the centurys most respected teachers. In 1943 he began teaching privately and from 1966, at the Paris Conservatory. His students included a veritable whos who of mid-century composers, including Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Alexander Goehr. Although he experimented with 12-tone music and even early electronic music, he adhered mostly to a personal musical language that few of his students sought to emulate. His works are replete with a personal symbolism associated with certain chord progressions and melodies. The majority of his compositions refer to images or ideas, most of them religious, the best known being the piano cycle Vingt regards sur lEnfant Jsus (Twenty perceptions of the Infant Jesus). In 1948, on a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestras famed conductor Sergey Koussevitzky, Messiaen composed his most ambitious and controversial orchestra work, Turangalla-symphonie, one of three works inspired by the Tristan legend, in which the composer equates intense sensual passion with Divine Love. It features flamboyant percussion and sensuous rhythms. Messiaen composed Couleurs in 1963. The orchestration consists of a double ensemble of winds (3 clarinets, 1 small trumpet in D, 3 trumpets, 2 horns in F, 3 trombones and 1 bass trombone) and percussion (piano, xylophone, extended range xylophone, marimba, set of Cuban cowbells, set of tubular bells, 4 gongs, 2 tam-tams). While the work is played without pause, it is possible to discern the parts by the abrupt changes in texture and timbre of the ensemble. Messiaens description of his music suggests that he had a benign neurological condition known as synesthesia, that enabled him to experience an endogenous association of specific tones and chords with colors. Synesthesia is not that uncommon in ordinary individuals; many people unconsciously associate colors with numbers, letters of the alphabet or days of the week from early childhood. Since everyones associations are unique, we cannot expect to understand in detail those of the composer. Nevertheless, careful attention to the kaleidoscopic mixing and remixing of the instrumental timbres creates a collage of sounds that, for Messiaen had visionary significance. Of his own work he writes: Couleurs de la Cite Celeste (The Colors of the Celestial City), composed in 1963, originates from five quotations from Revelation. 1. "A rainbow round about the throne" (Revelation 4:3). 2. "And the seven angels which had seven trumpets" (Revelation 8:6). 3. "'A star... and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit" (Revelation 9:1). 4. "That great city... and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal" (Revelation 2:11). 5. "And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a calcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardony; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacynth; the twelfth, an amethyst:' (Revelation 21:19, 20). The form of this work is based entirely on colors. The melodic or rhythmic themes, the complexes of sounds and timbres, all evolve as would colors. In their constantly renewed variations, one finds (by analogy) varying colors - warm or cold; complementary, each influencing its neighbor; colors blending to white; depressed by the proximity of black. One could also compare these transformations to characters acting on several stages, one above the other, and playing several different dramas simultaneously. Plain-song halleluiahs, Indian or Greek rhythms, permutations of time-scales, bird-song of various countries - all the musical material - is accumulated and put to serve color, and the combinations of sound that represent and evoke it. In their turn, the sound-colors are the symbol of the Celestial City, and of He who inhabits it. Beyond time, beyond place, in a light without light, a night without night, in what Revelation, more terrifying still in its humility than in its visions of glory, simply calls a dazzle of colors. The bird-song of New-Zealand (Tui-bird and bell-bird) is contrasted with the "bottomless pit; with the pedal-notes of the trombones and the resonance of the tam-tams. With the cries of the araponga of Brazil contrasts the "colored ecstasy" of the fermata: the red of the sard-stone, red spattered with blue, orange, milky-white, emerald green, violet amethyst, purple violet and blue violet. The piece no more comes to an end than it had a beginning, but it turns round on itself like a rose window of flamboyant and invisible colors. CAPRICCIO Leos Jancek For Piano left hand 1854-1928 Born into a family of schoolteachers and amateur musicians, Leos Jancek grew up in Hukvaldy in Moravia, now the Czech Republic. Although he planned to become a teacher, music always beckoned, and he finally gave in to his first love. He studied at the Organ School in Prague and later taught there as well. In 1881 he moved permanently to Brno, Moravias main city, and founded an organ school that eventually became the Brno Conservatory. Janceks early compositions were strongly influenced by Antonn Dvork and the style of late Romantics. About the time he moved to Brno he began studying the Moravian and Slovak folk music, concentrating on reproducing the rhythm, pitch and the inflections of Czech speech. His research contributed to his distinct operatic style, which came to fruition in his opera Jenufa (1904). While his hometown valued his music, especially his operas, his work was rarely performed beyond Brno. Then, in 1916, when Jancek was 62, a concurrence of events changed his life and his art, giving him the inspiration and the impetus to write the music on which his fame now rests: the successful performance of Jenufa in Prague; his embracing of the nationalist movement in what was to result in the creation of Czechoslovakia from the ruins of the now defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the same time Jancek, a married man, fell in love with 24-year-old Kamila Stsslova, the wife of an antique dealer. For the next twelve years Kamila maintained a warm but Platonic relationship with the composer there was no physical affair and served as inspiration for an unceasing flow of important works: four operas, the Glagolitic (old Slovenian) Mass, two string quartets, the Sinfonietta, the wind sextet Mldi (Youth), the Concertino for Piano and chamber Ensemble, and Capriccio for Piano (left-hand), Flute (Piccolo), 2 Trumpets, 3 Trombones and Tuba. Capriccio was indirectly a product of World War I. In a parallel to noted Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm on the Russian front and for whom Maurice Ravel composed the Concerto for the Left Hand, Czech pianist Otakar Hollman (1894-1967) returned from the War, his right arm paralyzed. In 1926 he commissioned of Jancek a work for the left hand. Although Jancek originally titled the Capriccio Defiance, he later insisted that the work was nothing but pranks and puns. Perhaps, but pranks and puns that thumb their nose at the establishment. One of the signatures of the composers chamber music is the complexity of rhythm, meter and tempo. There is a jerkiness in all four movements of this piece, a sense of almost flitting from one idea to another without following them to their logical conclusion. Melodically, the work is full of ethnic modal motives, reminiscent of both Kodly and Bartk, but without the latters dissonance and mathematical development. Taken together, all these qualities create a gamut of moods, yet always attenuated by an overall playfulness. APPALACHIAN SPRING Aaron Copland 1900-1990 Aaron Copland composed the original ballet Appalachian Spring in 1944 for the great pioneer of modern dance, Martha Graham, to be performed at an evening of modern ballet at the Library of Congress (Other ballets on the program were by Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud.) Copland originally named it "Ballet for Martha," but Graham gave it its final title after a poem by Hart Crane (although the ballet bears no relation to the text of the poem). The size limitations of the stage at the Library dictated a small ensemble; consequently the original version was scored for thirteen instruments only (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano and strings). Soon after the successful premiere, Copland arranged the ballet as a suite and also arranged a somewhat shortened version for full orchestra. In the preface to the score of the Suite, Copland summarized the story of the ballet using the words of the New York Herald Tribune review by Eric Denby, written after the New York premiere: ...A pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites... A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house. The sections of the suite merge into each other without pause, but reflect distinctly different moods and scenarios. The haunting but peaceful opening gives way suddenly to an outburst of excitement comprising several different musical motives, and demonstrating the open octaves and fifths that became the hallmark of Copland's style. After building up to a frenzied climax, a solo clarinet interrupts plaintively with the Shaker tune Simple Gifts. Copland uses the song as the theme for a set of variations, which themselves increase in intensity as more and more instruments are added with each new variation. And then, with another sudden shift in mood, we are transported back to the quiet introduction, and the Suite ends as it began. Simple Gifts was composed by Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, Jr., in 1848 for dancing during Shaker worship. Coplands five variations never veer far from the original melody, which he found in a 1940 collection of Shaker songs compiled by Edward D. Andrews. While the tune was certainly perfect for Grahams choreography, it didnt exactly fit the story line, as the Shakers themselves were dedicated to a life of celibacy. Program notes by: Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn Wordpros@mindspring.com www.wordprosmusic.com #$IRb t  g h   JVgmGIP{ ;pq,H$$%%%%&&++++4448"8f9l9c;o;|;;;;;;;<h6CJOJQJhCJOJQJh6OJQJhOJQJ h5hR#$/ h 6|G qft!y& `x^`` $ X a$ $]^a$ X x x&dPx0$a$0tKuKy&G(+++,\,,.j144468P<=@@@DFqIK $ X a$ & 0`  O@x^x^x<P<Y<==@@@%A8A{DDDD~GGKHLHtKuKvKhhOJQJhCJOJQJh6OJQJhOJQJKK-KFK^KtKuKvK X x,00P:p/ =!"#$%1T@T Normal1$7$8$H$ CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH J@J  Heading 1 <@&5CJ"OJQJJ@J  Heading 2 <@&5CJOJQJF@F  Heading 3 <@& 5OJQJF@F  Heading 4 <@& 5OJQJDA@D Default Paragraph FontZiZ  Table Normal :V 4 l4a _H(k(No List HOH Contents 1Q^`QOJQJHOH Contents 2Q^`QOJQJHOH Contents 3pQ^p`QOJQJTO"T Lower Roman ListQ^`QOJQJ\O\ Numbered Heading 1 @& 5CJOJQJ\O!\ Numbered Heading 2 @& 5CJOJQJlORl Square ListQ7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH 4+@b4 Endnote TextFB@rF Body Textx X CJ OJQJHOH Contents 4@ Q^@ `QOJQJnOn Diamond ListQ7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH pOp Numbered ListQ7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH B*@B Endnote ReferenceCJH*pOp Triangle ListQ7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH XO1X Numbered Heading 3 @&  5OJQJlOl Dashed ListQ7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH <O< Upper Roman ListjOj Heart List Q7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH fOf Box List!Q7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH :O": Upper Case List"lO2l Bullet List#Q7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH hOBh Hand List$Q7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH 6@R6 Footnote Text%hObh Tick List&Q7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH XOX Contents Header'$xa$5CJ OJQJ:O: Lower Case List(LT@L Block Text)x]^OJQJ8Z@8 Plain Text*OJ QJ DO1D Section Heading + 0nOn Implies List,Q7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH hOh Star List-Q7$8$H$^`Q CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH D&@D Footnote ReferenceCJH*DO1D Chapter Heading / 0<>@< Title 0$xa$ 5OJQJvE\ z z z z z z '~5qCvE)#$/h6 | G qfty G"%%%&\&&(j+...02P67:::>@qCEE-EFE^EwE00ʀ000ʀ0ʀ0ʀ0ʀ000000ʀ0000000000ʀ0000000000000000000000000000ʀ<vK(,y&KvK)+-uK*8@0(  B S  ??H T [ ,3 ''''''''%(1(C(J(,,M-U---G/O/>>tEwEw &():4>489tEwE::::::sEwE@[ [ p[ [ 2vE` @Unknown GTimes New Roman5Symbol3 ArialgMTimesNewRomanMSTimes New Roman3Times;HelveticaMM Arial-BoldMTArialKM Times-RomanTimesC MArialMTArial]MCourierNewPSMTCourier New "hxFr D9z$"xxdSFy@"@ AUBADE, Concerto Chorographique Joseph KahnStaff Oh+'0x  4 @ LX`hp'$AUBADE, Concerto Chorographique Joseph KahnNormalStaff5Microsoft Word 11.3.8@G@{@ǣ D9 ՜.+,0 hp  'Word Pros, Inc.zSF !AUBADE, Concerto Chorographique Title  !"#$%&'()*+,-.0123456789:;<=?@ABCDEGHIJKLMPRoot Entry F0*OR1Table/WordDocument.\SummaryInformation(>DocumentSummaryInformation8FCompObjXObjectPool0*O0*O FMicrosoft Word DocumentNB6WWord.Document.8