Program Notes

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Serenade to Music
Composed 1938

In 1938, British conductor Sir Henry Wood was planning a special jubilee concert to celebrate his 50 years of conducting. He turned to composer Ralph Vaughan Williams to write an original piece, with one condition. The piece must be able to be played anywhere at anytime.

Williams loved the pageantry of England. Everything he wrote is distinctively English, from his operas, ballets, chamber music, concertos, music for military bands and film scores. Of course, he turned to one of England’s greatest playwrights for inspiration.

Serenade to Music is based on William Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice.” Williams uses Lorenzo’s speech on music from Portia’s garden in Act 5, Scene 1. There are several arrangements of this piece, the most popular being the one for chorus and orchestra that usually features 16 singers.

From a solo violin setting the mood of a quiet garden, voices slowly enter and build to a rapturous mention of “sweet harmony.” From the “floor of heaven” to the lament that “the man that hath no music in himself,” the piece moves listeners on an emotional journey ending in peacefulness.

According to reports, the premiere at the Jubilee concert at Royal Albert Hall in London on Oct. 5, 1938, was so emotionally moving that composer Sergei Rachmaninoff was reduced to tears. (The premiere followed a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2).

Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999)
Concierto de Aranjuez
Composed 1939

Joaquin Rodrigo’s music is filled with references to Spanish traditions. Blind since age three, he was one of the most prominent Spanish composers of the 20th century. Rodrigo is best known for his guitar concerto, Concierto de Aranjuez, which met with immediate and lasting success.

The gardens at Palacio Real de Aranjuez were the inspiration for the Concierto de Aranjuez. The palace was built in the 16th century and rebuilt in the 18th century. Rodrigo’s compositional goal was to transport his audience to an earlier time by evoking the sounds of nature found in the gardens of Aranjuez. He said that he desired to draw forth “the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds, and the gushing of fountains” in the gardens.

Rodrigo, explaining his composition, said that the first movement is “animated by a rhythmic spirit and vigor without either of the two themes …interrupting its relentless pace.” The middle movement “represents a dialogue between guitar and solo instruments,” and the third movement “recalls a courtly dance in which the combination of double and triple time maintains a taut tempo right to the closing bar.”

Concierto de Aranjuez is arguably the most popular concerto ever composed for guitar and orchestra.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Symphony No. 4 “Italian”
Composed 1833

In 1832, the Philharmonic Society of London commissioned Felix Mendelssohn to write a piece. The composer, who was only 23 at the time, responded with the “Italian” Symphony, which, for many, is his best-loved symphonic work.

At the time of the composition, Mendelssohn was on an extended tour of Italy. Confident that the sights and sounds of Naples would inspire him, Mendelssohn waited until he had visited the city to write the music.Critics note the lightness and clarity of the music as characteristic of the music of Italy; indeed, by 19th-century symphonic standards, the piece is lightly scored and quite transparent in places.

The energetic opening movement of the symphony can be compared in style and form to Classical era composers Haydn and Mozart. Charming and carefree, this movement is reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s earlier work, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The orchestra presents the second movement’s first theme in unison; complementary melodic lines elaborate subsequent statements beautifully. This movement is said to have been inspired by the “sight of a pilgrims’ procession” Mendelssohn witnessed while in Naples.

The delicate melodic lines of the third movement are perfectly balanced in their construction. Mendelssohn used a saltarello, an energetic Roman dance similar to the tarantella, for the finale. According to legend, the tarantella was the dance performed by one who had been bitten by a tarantula. The dance steps of the saltarello were authentically demonstrated to Mendelssohn while on his trip. Mendelssohn utilizes the rhythms of both dances in the thrilling concluding movement.

Nico Muhly (b. 1981)
Two Motets by William Byrd
Composed in 2007

Notes by the Composer: William Byrd’s music has always fascinated me both as a composer and as an erstwhile choirboy; on the page it looks like so little, but then in its realisation, an enormous emotional landscape unfolds.

When Nick Collon asked if I might try to orchestrate a few motets for Aurora, I jumped at the chance. There is a moment in Byrd’s Miserere mei, Deus where the key suddenly shifts into an unexpected major, and the rhythmic footprint slows down. I aimed for an outrageous, but quiet, amplification of this moment that fascinated me as a treble; here, it is punctuated by registral extremes in the piano: gamelan gongs in the left hand and toy piano in the right.

The second piece I arranged is Bow thine ear, O Lord, which is said to be one of Byrd’s most personal expressions of faith and the turmoil surrounding it. It has in it one of the high-water marks of the choral tradition, namely Byrd’s setting of the phrase “Sion is wasted and brought low,” which he sets twice in two different octaves, and it is scandalously lush even when performed by the most austere of choirs. Here, it’s brass, marimba, and ghostly strings, a texture that expands into the celesta and woodwinds intoning the word “Jerusalem.” I should point out that these are very liberal arrangements of the originals; occasionally, I have rendered the effect of one alto holding onto a note too long, a wayward tenor, a day-dreaming treble.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor
Composed in 1868

In just 17 days, Saint-Saëns composed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, racing against the clock to meet a tight deadline. Conductor and pianist Anton Rubinstein, eager to collaborate, had only a brief stay in Paris. With little time to refine or rehearse, Saint-Saëns completed the piece quickly to make their collaboration possible.

Unlike traditional form, the piece starts slow and builds in tempo as the movement progresses. The first movement features the pianist performing a long cadenza (improvisational solo moment, not unlike someone scatting in jazz), then the orchestra enters playing a theme from Saint-Saëns’ pupil Fauré. It repeats in a louder motif again giving the pianist a long cadenza. The second movement fills in where the first movement would have traditionally been penned as an up-tempo scherzo. This movement can be compared with a movement and drive like his composition Carnival of the Animals.

The third movement picks up from the second movement in a very fast saltarella (a very quick Italian dance, usually faster than a tarantella). Both the orchestra and soloist move along a breakneck speed until they finally meld together in a whirlwind of sonorous splendor.

Although not widely known for his piano playing, like colleagues Franz Liszt or Robert Schumann, it was Saint-Saëns piano playing that was the impetus of this composition and was described by Hector Berlioz as “an absolutely shattering master pianist.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 7 in A Major
Composed in 1811-1812

While Beethoven’s first two symphonies were highly influenced by his mentor, Franz Joseph Haydn, they contain hints of his unique and eventual trademark style. Beginning with his third symphony, Beethoven utilizes “program music,” one of his many innovative contributions to developing romantic music. Program music is a term for compositions that tell stories, paint pictures, or describe human emotions. Though Symphony No. 7 does not have a “program” per se, it is a very energizing work, known for its many dance-like rhythms.

A year after it was composed, the seventh symphony premiered in Vienna at a benefit concert for soldiers who had been wounded in the Battle of Hanau in Germany. (The battle of Hanau was fought on October 30–31, 1813, between French and Austro-Bavarian forces.)

Beethoven conducted the first performance, and many talented and famous instrumentalists were among those in the orchestra. The second movement of the symphony, Allegretto, was enjoyed so thoroughly by the audience that the orchestra played it a second time. This movement is the best-known movement from Symphony No. 7 and has been used in movies including X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) and Immortal Beloved (1994).

Richard Wagner, speaking of the rhythmic dance-like movements in Symphony No. 7, called it the “Apotheosis of the Dance.” The second movement’s foundational ostinato consists of a one-quarter note followed by two eighth notes and two more quarter notes. Not to be forgotten, the first and third movements each hold memorable qualities within themselves: the first is memorable for its vivacious dance-like cadences and the third for its application of poetry to music in that the trio is based on an Austrian hymn. Of the seventh symphony, Beethoven himself said, “[It is] one of my best works.”

Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945)
Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana
Composed in 1889

When Pietro Mascagni’s name is mentioned, classical music fans immediately think of Cavalleria Rusticana. The one-act opera became an international hit after its debut performance in Rome on May 17, 1890.

After years of struggling as a composer and music teacher, Mascagni joined a competition sponsored by music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno for an original one-act opera. The opera, which is based on a short story by Giovanni Verga, won the prize and fame for the composer from Livorno, Italy. The story takes place on Easter morning as villagers gather for morning Mass. Turiddu has returned from military service to find his first love Lola married to Alfio. He seduces Santuzza to make Lola jealous. This begins a tale of love, betrayal and vengeance.

Cavalleria Rusticana, which means “rustic chivalry,” was one of the first verismo operas. Verismo is a style of Italian opera writing that originates in real stories and is full of high drama, violent plots, and emotionally charged harmonies and melodies

Amid this drama is a sweet interlude, the Intermezzo. The piece is brief, but it transcends the yearning of the first scene of the one-act opera as villagers leave an Easter Mass with the building animosity of the second scene. It is the calm before the storm and foreshadows the tragedy to come.

The Intermezzo is the most famous part of Cavalleria Rusticana and has been used in several films and television shows including “Raging Bull,” “The Godfather Part III” and “The Sopranos.”

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss
Composed in 1928

Igor Stravinsky was born in Russia to musical parents and grew up taking piano lessons. However, his parents expected him to become a lawyer and to his own admission, he was a terrible law student. While at the University of St. Petersburg, Stravinsky met Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, son of the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky began to study under the elder composer.

Stravinsky‘s social circle expanded at this time to include Sergei Diaghilev, founder of Ballet Russes. The two began collaborating on several projects including The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring.

In 1928, Ida Rubinstein, a former Ballet Russes star approached a number of composers to write ballets based on earlier masters. Stravinsky chose Tchaikovsky as the 35th anniversary of his death was in 1928. He penned The Fairy’s Kiss based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Ice Maiden.”

The story of “The Ice Maiden” centers on Rudy, an orphan raised by his uncle, who becomes a skilled huntsman and mountain climber and falls in love with Babette, the miller’s daughter.

However, their relationship faces challenges, and after a confrontation with Babette’s cousin, Rudy encounters the Ice Maiden, a mystical figure who took his mother’s life and claimed him as a baby. Despite reconciling with Babette, tragedy strikes on the eve of their wedding.

Stravinsky said, “I chose Andersen’s The Ice Maiden because it suggested an allegory of Tchaikovsky himself. The fairy’s kiss on the heel of the child is also the muse marking Tchaikovsky at his birth – though the muse did not claim him at his wedding, as she did the young man in the ballet, but at the height of his powers..”

Years later, Stravinsky rearranged the work as a Divertimento made up of four movements including the Sinfonia, Danses suisses, Scherzo, and Pas de deux.

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Cello Concerto in B Minor
Composed in 1895

In Antonin Dvořák’s early life, he found himself drawn to one of his piano students, Josefina Káunitzová. Although he professed his love for her, Josefina never returned his devotion and eventually married another man. Antonin later married Josefina’s sister, Anna, but it seems that his love for Josefina was still evident 22 years into his marriage to Anna. It was around this time, as Josephina became seriously ill, that Dvořák wrote his Cello Concerto in B minor as a memorial to her. Dvořák song “Lasst mich allein” was a favorite of Josephine’s, and he wove it throughout his Cello Concerto in B minor.

The concerto is influenced by both his Bohemian roots and his American experiences. Dvořák was living in New York with his wife at the time of its composition. Dvořák found writing a cello concerto to be quite a daunting task, one with which he was not particularly pleased even upon its completion. One hurdle to overcome was the relation of the relatively quiet cello to the boisterous orchestra. To solve this dilemma, Dvořák gave both the cello and the orchestra moments in the limelight and varied the texture of the sound when the cello and orchestra play together. He achieved this by switching up the combinations of instruments that played together, particularly pairing the cello with the winds, illuminating the beauty of the cello’s rich sound.

Dvořák was adamant that no one change any part of his composition not even his friend Hanuš Wihan, for whom the piece was written. Wihan suggested two cadenzas, but Dvořák rejected them, particularly, at the end of the piece, stating that the end should be “like a breath, … then there is a crescendo, and the last measures are taken up by the orchestra, ending stormily. That was my idea, and from it cannot recede.” The concerto premiered in 1896 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra featuring Leo Stern as the cello soloist.

Aleksandr Arutiunian (1920-2012)
Trumpet Concerto in A-flat Major
Composed in 1950

Along with Aram Khachaturian, Arutiunian is ranked among the most important Armenian composers of their generation. As with Khachaturian, his style is quite approachable, exotically colorful, and features folk-like Armenian traits and catchy melodies.

Arutiunian was appointed Artistic Director of the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra in 1954, a post he held until 1990. He managed to avoid falling into disfavor with Soviet cultural bosses in the post-Stalin era, not necessarily an easy task, by composing unadventurous, though well-crafted works like his Concertino for Piano and Orchestra (1951) and a symphony (1957). A horn concerto (1962), achieved some popularity.

In 1965, Arutiunian joined the faculty of the Yerevan Conservatory where he taught composition for many years. While there he produced his popular quintet for brass, Armenian Scenes, and his tuba concerto (1992).

Arutiunian composed his Trumpet Concerto in 1949-50. It is his sixth major composition, a virtuoso showpiece, featuring Eastern European lyricism and harmonic textures.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Symphony No. 1 in D major ‘Titan’ Composed 1884-88, revised 1893-99

What to Listen For:

• Mahler wanted the beginning of the symphony to evoke “the awakening of Nature from the long sleep of winter,” with birdsongs and hunting horns emerging from the stillness of a single note.
• In an echo of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, Mahler’s slow movement takes the form of a Funeral March, with a theme based on the nursery rhyme tune Frère Jacques (or Bruder Martin in German).

Gustav Mahler was born into a German-speaking, upwardly mobile Jewish family in what is now the Czech Republic. Although he focused on composition as a student at the Vienna Conservatory, his meteoric rise as a conductor soon crowded out his composing, leaving him only limited time to explore the two genres he was most attracted to in his own music: songs and symphonies.

Mahler’s First Symphony went through a particularly long gestation, beginning in 1884, when he was working in Kassel, Germany. Having become infatuated with a soprano in the choir he led, Mahler wrote her love poems, and he set some to music in the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), including melodies he later folded into the First Symphony.

The piece remained unfinished during Mahler’s brief tenure in Prague, and it progressed as far as a piano score by early 1888, when he resigned from an even more prominent position in Leipzig. The 28-year-old went on to head the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest, and before year’s end he had completed the orchestration of his symphonic debut.

Mahler conducted the first performance of the “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts” (as he initially titled it) in Budapest in 1889. It confounded critics, especially the second part with its mix of grotesque parody and raw power, leading Mahler to shelve the score temporarily. After moving on to yet another conducting job in Hamburg, he brought the symphony back for a second performance in 1893, with an expanded wind section and a new title: Titan, a Tone Poem in Symphony Form. Further revisions added more woodwinds and eliminated the slow Blumine movement, bringing the score to the form in which it was published in 1899 as the Symphony No. 1.

The symphony begins with the mystical resonance of the note “A” spread across the full range of the strings, joined by a slow motive of descending intervals based in D minor. Mahler’s 1893 program described this movement as “the awakening of Nature from the long sleep of winter,” an association supported by pastoral birdcalls and distant fanfares, as if from a hunting party. Besides the naturalistic tone painting, Mahler’s opening pays homage to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which likewise starts with a sustained “A” and motives based on similar descending intervals.

The second movement is a Ländler, an exuberant peasant dance in triple meter—music “with full sails,” as Mahler characterized it in his program note.

An emotionally ambiguous Funeral March follows, building from a minor-key rendition of the round-tune Bruder Martin (also known as Frère Jacques). Mahler described the inspiration as coming from “The Huntsman’s Funeral, from an old children’s book: the animals of the forest accompany the dead huntsman’s bier to the grave; hares escort the little troop, in front of them marches a group of Bohemian musicians, accompanied by playing cats, toads, crows etc. Stags, deer, foxes and other four-legged and feathered animals follow the procession in comic attitudes. In this passage the piece is intended to have now an ironically merry, now a mysteriously brooding mood.”

The finale, in Mahler’s design, is meant to enter “like the suddenly erupting cry of a heart wounded to its depths.” Upon reaching a terrifying climax, the music breaks off into a hushed recollection of the naturalistic scene from the symphony’s opening. When the movement reaches its ultimate peak, seven horns and four trumpets pushed to a fortississimo (fff) dynamic leave no doubt as to this symphony’s redemption, their bright fanfare in D-major cleansing away any doubts planted long ago in the symphony’s D-minor arrival.
© Aaron Grad

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Messa da Requiem
Composed 1874

Giuseppe Verdi was born in 1813 in Le Roncole, Italy, where he showed an early passion for music. His parents bought him a spinet at age four and he was filling in for the village church organist by age eight. Verdi continued his education and married, but sadly his two young daughters and first wife passed away. He emerged from this dark period composing operas that are still widely performed today including Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata and Aïda.

So how did a man who was considered an opera composer and agnostic end up writing a Catholic funeral mass?

The Requiem you will hear tonight was initially part of a project by 13 composers to honor the memory of Italian composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini after he died in 1868. Verdi penned the Libera me but the project was abandoned when conflicting opinions and egos clashed. A few years later, when the Italian writer Allesandro Manzoni died in 1873, Verdi was deeply affected by the loss and decided to write a complete requiem for the man he greatly admired.

From the sorrowful first notes of the Kyrie to the epic and thunderous Dies Irae to the swell of voices across the stage, Requiem has inspired and moved audiences since its premiere in 1874 at the San Marco church in Milan. An immediate success, performances followed across Italy, Paris and Vienna. While some critics said the work was too operatic, famed composer Johannes Brahms greatly praised the Requiem, stating “…only a genius could write such a work.”