Alderley Edge Orchestra February 2017
Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) – Prelude: Hänsel und Gretel (1893)
Little of Humperdinck’s work is popularly known beyond his account of the brothers’ Grimm story, conceived during his time as professor at the Frankfurt conservatory in 1890. The preceding decade had seen a varied career taking him from Bayreuth, assisting Wagner in Parsifal and teaching his son, Siegfried, to a tutelage position in Barcelona. The first ideas for Hänsel und Gretel were born in four songs he wrote to accompany a home puppet show put on by his nieces. These evolved into a longer Singspiel before being fleshed out into the full opera, with a libretto by his sister. The first performance was given in Weimar, conducted by Richard Strauss in the days running up to Christmas 1893, followed soon afterwards by Mahler conducting the Hamburg premiere.
The opera is unmistakably Wagnerian (the children’s calls to a cuckoo in Act 2 directly invoke Wagner’s woodbird in Siegfried) but also finds great charm of its own. The prelude is much loved in its own right, demonstrating a burnished brassy chorale at its outset and more childlike frivolity and rich lyricism in its inner passages, often quoting from the opera itself.
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) – Peter and the Wolf, Op. 67 (1936)
After leaving amid the tumult of revolution in 1918 and achieving stardom in New York and Paris, Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union in 1936 and was welcomed as a national hero. It was no easy time for an artist; earlier the same year, Shostakovich had been denounced in Pravda for elitist and formalistic tendencies. Perhaps with this in mind, Prokofiev readily accepted a commission from Natalya Sats, director of the Central Children's Theatre in Moscow, for a 'musical symphony' for children. Turning away from the genres of symphony, opera and ballet which defined his career, he instead produced a unique, musically-illustrated story to introduce the instruments of the orchestra. The premise is simple: each character is denoted by a theme for certain instruments, telling the tale of the young Peter (strings), who meets a duck (oboe), bird (flute) and cat (clarinet) in the woods, to the displeasure of his grandfather (bassoon). A wolf (horns) appears and is caught by Peter, before being led away to the zoo by hunters (timpani).
Under this child-friendly veneer, Prokofiev was careful to weave in a few themes to appease potential critics. The story of an idealised young Pioneer challenging and bettering the old, un-Bolshevik world of his grandfather, and of man overcoming nature, would surely have appealed to Soviet sensibilities. The animals' themes all make aesthetic sense, but the grandfather's stern bassoon theme is pompous and faintly ridiculous – and is that a whiff of the leitmotif for Wotan's spear from Wagner's Ring halfway through? Wagner uses that theme to represent rules, treaties and the old world, and in Peter and the Wolf, the grandfather is left literally and figuratively hobbling at the rear of the victory procession.
Peter and the Wolf was completed in just a fortnight, and after a disappointing première, its second outing, narrated by Sats herself, fared much better. Sats was in the Gulag by 1938, though, and Prokofiev's reputation lasted only until his denouncement alongside Shostakovich and Khachaturian ten years later. His estranged wife was sentenced to twenty yeas' hard labour, and he accrued debts of 180 000 Rubles before dying the same day as Stalin in 1953.
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) – Boléro (1928)
Boléro came relatively late in Ravel’s career; only the two piano concertos and a song cycle followed it. He had set upon the idea of composing a Spanish dance some years earlier, but did not conceive the famously insistent side drum ostinato which underpins the work until a holiday in the Basque country in the late 1920s. By this time, the fifty-something Ravel was already experiencing the early stages of the progressive neurodegenerative disorder to which he would eventually succumb, progressively losing his memory, speech and piano abilities. This has been the subject of much medical fascination since his death. Various theories have been postulated, including frontotemporal and Alzheimer’s forms of dementia and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The most compelling recent theory, published in the European Journal of Neurology in 2002, points to the simplistic melodies in Boléro and the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and links this to Ravel’s loss of expressive faculties. The demise of these left-hemisphere functions, it is proposed, led to the dominance of timbre, thought to be a right-hemisphere concern, rather than melody, in these late works.
Speculation aside, Boléro essentially explores timbre through eighteen variations of a three-part theme: a two-bar rhythm first heard on the side drum, a simple crotchet/quaver accompaniment first given to plucked strings, and a beguiling melody initially heard on the flute. The result is a triumph of simplicity.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) – Suite: Swan Lake, Op. 20a (1877)
The genesis of Swan Lake, like much of tonight’s programme, lies in music written for children. In Tchaikovsky’s case, these were the children of his beloved sister Sasha, for whom Uncle Pyotr created an afternoon’s entertainment on summer holiday in 1871. When the Moscow Imperial Theatre commissioned a ballet in 1875 for 800 Rubles, Tchaikovsky returned to his earlier ideas and elaborated on them with music from two abandoned operas and a great deal of new material. The result would become the first of his great ballets, followed years later by Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. The various popular concert-hall suites were created later, without authorisation of the composer and bearing little relationship to the story, though capturing many of the best themes.
Under misguided orchestral direction, inadequate choreography and amateurish scenery, and unceremoniously placed alongside some pedestrian, if ‘safe’, ballet by a rival composer, the work’s premiere was predictably unsuccessful. It would not be until two years after the composer’s death that it would achieve any meaningful success. Today, its exceptional melodic brilliance and opulence of orchestral sound make it hugely popular in all formats.
© Rohan Shotton 2019. Programme notes may not be reproduced or edited without permission. Please contact me if you would like to use these notes.