Alderley Edge Symphony Orchestra 18 May 2019
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880): La belle Hélène – Overture (1864)
Despite being born in Cologne, Offenbach became the master of French operetta in the golden Parisian years leading up to the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Brought to Paris by his father to study cello aged 14, he was playing in the Opera Comique pit the next year. In almost 100 comic operas he chronicled and satirised Parisian life from every angle, frequently through the proxy of classical mythology. They are unabashedly enjoyable, shying away from the high-minded goings-on at the Grand Opera, and came to be an unmistakeable influence of Arthur Sullivan and Johann Strauss the younger.
La belle Hélène is less well remembered that the likes of The Tales of Hoffmann, at least in this country, but is full of its own unique charms and some biting side-swipes at Parisian life. Like most of Offenbach’s creations, it is a lavish piece full of scandal and frivolity, and describes the eponymous Helen (of Troy) on the receiving end of lusty advances from Paris. The brief prelude was expanded into a more substantial 10-minute overture during the opera’s first Viennese run, and is full of entertaining tunes which later feature in the show.
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), arr. Lennox Berkeley 1903-1989): Flute Sonata (1957/1973)
The flute is surprisingly poorly represented in the concerto catalogue. Mozart was famously scathing of the instrument (“I am quite powerless to write for an instrument which I cannot bear”), though his own efforts remain the most commonly performed examples of flute concerti. The early twentieth century composer Francis Poulenc became part of the Parisian composers’ group known as ‘Les six’ and achieved most success in writing for piano and organ. In his latter years he wrote sonatas for flute, clarinet and oboe, together with piano, and the first of these remains a music examination staple. After being composed from the comfort of a Cannes hotel, written to an American commission, it was first performed by the celebrity flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal at the Strasbourg Festival. The sonata was orchestrated into a concerto by the English composer Sir Lennox Berkeley, at the suggestion of Sir James Galway. A student of Nadia Boulanger and acquaintance of Poulenc, Stravinsky and Milhaud, Berkeley was no stranger to Parisian sounds and worked out the sonata in a very convincingly Poulencian voice.
The opening movement is an unsettled ‘Allegretto malincolico’, in a round based on a chromatic descending figure, with rich ornamentation making high technical demands on the soloist. The Alberti bass, here transcribed from piano to orchestra, references the composer’s classical influences. A soulful Cantilena follows, with a set of variations on an elegant theme, before the high-spirited Presto giocoso finale.
Aaron Copland (1900-1990): Rodeo (1942) – Saturday Night Waltz and Hoe-Down
For a composer so inextricably linked to the concept of ‘American music’, it is perhaps a surprise that Copland was born to Russian parents, his father having anglicised the name ‘Kaplan’ to ‘Copland’ while working for his boat fare in Scotland, en route from Russia to America. The youngest of five and the only one not to receive formal musical tuition, Aaron, like Poulenc, eventually found is way to the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Rodeo was commissioned by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942, and as Copland’s second cowboy ballet, followed Billy the Kid from four years previously. The story is a simple though old-fashioned tale of a young (cow)girl finding herself a suitor, described by the choreographer as “The Taming of the Shrew with cowboys”, though modern audiences may feel slightly uncomfortable at the concept of the tomboyish cowgirl having to put on a dress in order to attract any male recognition. Copland’s bold use of American folktunes extends to their direct quotation in the ballet. In the Saturday Night Waltz, the cowgirl is eventually paired up and dances to ‘I ride an old paint’. The Hoe-Down, the most recognisable of the ballet’s five sections, is a foot-stomping romp through a potpourri of recycled folktunes, including ‘Bonaparte’s retreat’, ‘McLeod’s Reel’ and ‘Gilderoy’. The hijinks and all-American brand may have suited wartime audiences in 1942, but Rodeo remains an entertaining listen today.
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Symphony No. 9 in E minor Op. 95, From the New World (1893)
At the height of his powers in 1893, Dvořák attracted a salary equivalent to around £250,000 as director of the US National Conservatory of Music. There was a simmering awareness of the lack of musical heritage in the ‘new world’, and so Dvořák’s principal task was to lay the foundations for such a tradition by writing an expressly American symphony. He was perfect for the job: bucolic in his Bohemian roots, egalitarian in outlook, and a ‘cultural nationalist’ above all. When the New York Philharmonic commissioned the symphony, Dvorak wrote that ’The Americans expect great things of me…to show them to the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to create a national music.’ In creating a national voice, he later wrote that ‘The future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.’
During his travels in the early 1890s, Dvorak familiarised himself with a smattering of American-Indian and African-American folk music. He was already familiar with Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, and the adventures of the eponymous Native American hero provided the inspiration for the symphony’s inner. Although much of the symphony readily conjures images of the Mid-West, the only identifiable folk tune appears in a strain of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Elsewhere there is widespread use of the pentatonic scale, which omits the fourth and seventh notes of the scale, and which the composer noted to be common to African-American, Native-American, Czech, and, interestingly, Scottish music.
In hindsight, it was remarkably enlightened of both Dvořák and his New York commissioners to choose and endorse such music as the foundation of American classical music. As late as 1890, the massacre of some 300 Lakota Native-Americans, mostly women and children, took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for which US forces were rewarded with Medals of Honour. Three years later, Dvořák’s ground-breaking symphony was derided as ‘barbaric’ and ‘negrophile’ in the altogether more Anglo-Saxon Boston. Fortunately, it was rapturously received in New York, already an ethnically diverse city.
The first movement (Adagio – Allegro molto) opens with a slow introductory theme, given by the cellos and then flute, before some violent timpani outbursts precede a dramatic pause. The principal theme is then given, initially by the horns and then by the full orchestra. A dancing woodwind motif acts as bridge into the distinctly Slavonic second theme, which is subtly passed around the orchestra. Dvořák’s melodic generosity then gives us the only apparently unoriginal theme in the symphony, a soft and atmospheric variation on Swing Low, Sweet Chariot:
After the repeat, the early themes are developed in an unsettled, skittish passage. It takes a broad, aggressive reassertion of the Swing Low theme by the horns to find a solution. The movement closes in a blaze of brass and timpani.
The famous cor anglais melody of the Largo has variously been misappropriated for ersatz spirituals and bread adverts. Dvořák attached this theme to chapter ten of Longfellow’s poem, depicting Hiawatha’s journey home with his new wife, Minnehaha. The subsequent processional passage evokes her death and funeral. The movement’s climax provides a momentary bright climax, in which hints of the first movement are heard again, before the cor anglais melody reappears. It is finally given to progressively small numbers of string players, eventually leaving just a solo violin and cello. The music chokes on itself, much like the funeral march in Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, before the soft brass chords which began the movement reappear.
The Scherzo, Dvořák wrote, ‘Was suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where the Indians dance’. It is an energetic flurry, demonic in places, interrupted only by an attractive trio. The coda gives an ominous warning in the form of distant horn calls recollecting the first movement. In the Allegro con fuoco finale, Dvořák shows his masterly abilities in bringing together motifs from the remainder of the symphony. All of the themes shown above reappear in various guises, with the addition of a striking motif first heard in the horns and trumpets. A second melody, altogether more lyrical and free-flowing, appears in the clarinet and low strings. The quick tempo continues unabated, the music becoming progressively more skittish and unsettled as the cellos and violas search for resolution. After a militant restatement of the movement’s main theme, a softer, slower passage ensues. Horn fanfares intervene, though, signalling a return to the wilder theme. This is eventually repeated in full orchestration before resolving to the bright sounds of E major, followed by discordant juxtaposition of the principal themes from the two outer movements. The final word is a quiet one: after the last, stabbed chord, pairs of instruments sustain the last chord, the texture slowly thinning into a soft pause.
