Oklahoma City Philharmonic, CLASSICS 5: February 27, 2010
ARNOLD (1921-2006)
Four Scottish Dances, Op. 59 (1957)
Pesante
Vivace
Allegretto
Con brio
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958)
The Lark Ascending, Romance for Violin and Orchestra (1914-1920)
BERLIOZ (1803-69)
Roman Carnival Overture, Op. 9 (1843-44)
BERLIOZ (1803-69)
Symphonie fantastique: Episode de la vie d'un artiste (Fantastic Symphony: Episode in the Life of an Aritst), Op. 14 (1830)
Rêveries, Passions (Reveries, Passions): Allegro agitato e appassionato assai--Religiosamente
Un Bal (A Ball): Valse: Allegro non troppo
Scène aux champs (Scene in the Fields): Adagio
Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold): Allegretto non troppo
Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath): Larghetto--Allegro
Four Scottish Dances, Op. 59
Malcolm Arnold
Born: October 21, 1921 in Northampton, England
Died: September 23, 2006 in Norwich, England
Work composed: January 1957, on commission from the BBC Light Music Festival 1957 (to which it is dedicated)
Work premiered: June 8, 1957 at the Royal Festival Hall, London, with the composer conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra
Instrumentation: Piccolo and flute (doubling second piccolo in the Fourth Dance), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, snare drum, cymbals, wood block, bass drum, tam-tam, harp, and strings
If one had asked Malcolm Arnold which items in his vast catalogue he would most like to represent him in posterity, he would probably have pointed to his nine symphonies. They peppered his career at regular intervals from 1949, just when he committed to a full-time composing career, until 1986, by which time he was doing his best to reassemble a life that had been decimated by depression. These are the works in which Arnold grappled most overtly with personal, political, and strictly musical issues that interested him, and they are also the compositions that most clearly connect him to the mainstream of the European tradition, and particularly to the composers he cited as wielding influence on his style: Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams. Then, too, he might have pointed to his twenty-odd concertos, which he conceived as musical portraits of the figures for whom they were written, an A-list of instrumentalist friends that included the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the oboist Leon Goossens, the clarinetist Benny Goodman, the horn-player Dennis Brain, and the guitarist Julian Bream. 
The listening public, however, is not likely to be dissuaded from pigeonholing Arnold as an unusually adroit master of light music. If most of his 130 film scores have been forgotten along with the movies to which they were attached, a handful live on as classics, including those for the David Lean trilogy The Sound Barrier (1952), Hobson’s Choice (1953), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), an Oscar-winning score with an unforgettable march. British music-lovers of advancing maturity are sure to remember Arnold as a key collaborator of the tuba-playing humorist Gerard Hoffnung, for whom he produced his once famous A Grand Grand Overture (1956) for Organ, Three Vacuum Cleaners, Electric Floor Polisher, Four Rifles, and Orchestra—perfect ammunition for Hoffnung’s mock-serious skewering of musical pomposity.
His life was a roller-coaster marked by extreme behavior and emotional swings. He began his career as a trumpeter in the London Philharmonic. Declared ineligible for active service in World War Two, he was assigned to play in a military band; he found the job so appalling that he shot himself through the foot to earn a medical discharge. Although he actively encouraged composers who worked in the avant-garde, serialist vein that was nearly de rigueur in the post-War years, his own compositions inhabited an entirely tonal, melodious world that earned him the reputation of a reactionary. This nearly did him in. To quote from the 3000-word (!) obituary British Bandsman magazine ran in 2006: “The effects of a heavy work schedule, together with the apparent critical disdain of his serious works, caused Arnold to suffer a mental collapse. Like Elgar before him, he entered into deep depression and began to rely more and more upon liquid sustenance of an alcoholic nature. Several breakdowns and suicide attempts followed and, although he managed to continue writing substantial works, many of them … reveal a troubled inner world.”
His Four Scottish Dances, however, are innocent of such cares. The set displays a vocabulary rich in such characteristically Scottish sounds as pentatonic melodies and the accented short-long rhythmic pattern known as the “Scotch snap.” The latter are particularly woven into the opening dance, a swaggering strathspey that shows off Arnold’s deft abilities as an orchestrator. Particularly notable in this movement is his brass-writing, which gains decisive effect from triple-tonguing in the trumpets and trombones and glissando whoops in the horns before the piece ends with a comical “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits” cadence.
The sparkling second-movement reel, derived from Arnold’s 1949 film score for The Beautiful Country of Ayr, sets the toes a-tapping. The tune, borrowed from a Robert Burns song, repeats over and over without any real development, simply modulating up a half-step each time. Again Arnold keeps us captivated through clever orchestration, including an episode in which an obviously inebriated bassoon staggers by. The third movement ought to have found a place in a pastoral film score, with the flute’s gorgeous melody being surrounded by a halo of high strings and the harp’s arpeggios and glissandos. The suite concludes with another reel (or a Highland fling, say some) that may remind American listeners of the famous “Hoe-Down” from his friend Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo. As it happens, Copland acknowledged that his piece included “a few measures of ‘McLeod’s Reel’ played in folk fiddle style”—so if you don’t think Copland’s cowboy piece traces its ancestry to Scotland, awa’ an’ bile yer heid!
The Lark Ascending, Romance for Violin and Orchestra (1914-20)
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Born: October 12, 1872 at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, England
Died: August 26, 1958 in London
Work composed: From 1914 through December 1920
Work dedicated: to the English violinist Marie Hall
Work premiered: December 15, 1920, at the Shirehampton Public Hall, Bristol, England, by violinist Marie Hall with pianist Geoffrey Mendham, playing the composer’s own reduction of the score. The full orchestral version was premiered June 14, 1921, at Queen’s Hall, London, at a concert of the second Congress of the British Music Society, with Marie Hall again as the soloist and with Adrian Boult conducting the British Symphony Orchestra
Instrumentation: Two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, triangle, and strings, in addition to the solo violin
Ralph Vaughan Williams came of age as a composer in the years just preceding the outbreak of World War I--which is rather surprising, since he was already 41 years old when Great Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914. In his life, as in his music, Vaughan Williams seems rarely to have been in a great hurry; as it turned out, he had plenty of time, since he remained musically productive until the very end of his 85 years. 
He was born into a prosperous family that boasted quite a few lawyers on his father’s side, including some highly placed ones; and leaves on his mother’s side of the family tree belonged to such distinguished Britons as Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery fame) and Charles Darwin (well, more precisely, to Darwin’s sister). As a college student he studied at the Royal College of Music (RCM) for two years (1890-92) and then continued at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded the Mus.B. in 1894 and the B.A. in History in 1895. After that he was back to the RCM, now settling in to really hone his skills as a composer. Through these years he was guided by such august figures as Hubert Parry, Charles Wood (who thought him untalented), and Charles Villiers Stanford (who was known to dismiss his pupil’s composition exercises as “damnably ugly”). At the RCM he became good friends with his fellow student Gustav Holst, who would remain one of his closest composer colleagues. Vaughan Williams was not yet near the point of signing off on his formal education: in 1897 he would travel to Berlin to work with Max Bruch, in 1901 he would complete his doctorate in Cambridge, and in 1908 he would study with Maurice Ravel in Paris.
During the first decade of the 20th century he also became swept up in the nascent national passion for folksong. He was in the vanguard of the brigade of musicians who went “into the field” at that time to gather folksongs, personally collecting some eight hundred songs (counting variants), mostly in Norfolk, Essex, and Sussex. In his case folksong proved a potent inspiration for his own composition. Many of his scores incorporate authentic folk melodies. Those that don’t (such as The Lark Ascending) sometimes include melodic and harmonic allusions to British folksong, a stylistic fingerprint that supports his preternatural inclination towards a pastoral or even nostalgic esthetic.
The Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith (1828-1909) is not much extolled today, but his writing was immensely popular in its time, to the extent that he succeeded Alfred Lord Tennyson as President of the Society of Authors in 1892, and, in 1905, was appointed to the Order of Merit by Edward VII. A rural spirit informs much of his production, and this jibed perfectly with what Vaughan Williams was composing in the years immediately following Meredith’s death, such as the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and the opera Hugh the Drover (1910-14). Meredith’s poem “The Lark Ascending,” exhaustively descriptive of a lark in flight and song above a bucolic landscape, provided perfect inspiration for a musical work in this vein. Ursula Vaughan Williams, the composer’s second wife, would underscore the close connection between poem and the composition: “He had taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thoughts in The Lark Ascending and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating, the poem from which the title was taken.”
Vaughan Williams composed it as a vehicle for the English violinist Marie Hall, who had been a violin pupil of Elgar’s and a compelling champion of Elgar’s Violin Concerto. A Lark Ascending was effectively completed in 1914, but at the outbreak of war Vaughan Williams set it aside and went off to serve in France. Following his return he effected some slight revisions, and the piece was finally unveiled in 1920 in the composer’s own piano reduction, and in 1921 in its fully scored version for solo violin and chamber orchestra.
The Roman Carnival, Op. 9 (1843-44)
Hector Berlioz
Born: December 11, 1803 in La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, France
Died: March 8, 1869 in Paris
Work composed: June 1843 through January 1844
Work premiered: February 3, 1844, with Berlioz conducting in a concert he produced himself at the Salle Herz in Paris.
Instrumentation: Two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, four bassoons, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, timpani, cymbals, two tambourines, triangle, and strings.
Hector Berlioz’ father was a physician in a town not far from Grenoble, within view of the Alps; and since the father assumed to a certainty that his son would follow in the same profession, the son’s musical inclinations were largely ignored. As a result, Berlioz never learned to play more than a few chords on the piano, and his practical abilities as a performer were limited to lessons on flute and guitar, both of which he played with some accomplishment but short of true virtuosity. His unorthodox musical background surely contributed to his nonconformist musical language. 
He was sent to Paris to attend medical school, hated the experience, and enrolled himself instead in private musical studies and, beginning in 1826, in the composition curriculum at the Paris Conservatoire. The seal of approval for all Conservatoire composition students was the Prix de Rome, and in 1830 (after several failed attempts) he was finally honored with that prize. Apart from providing a measure of recognition for his skills and a welcome source of income, the award included a residency in Italy, a nation whose ancient cultural lineage was considered at that time to wield an indispensable influence over the formation of the creative intellect.
The 15 months he spent in Italy proved as inspiring to Berlioz as the Prix de Rome foundation could have hoped, though the grantors were disappointed that he produced rather little serious work while he was there. Both the remnants of antiquity and the vivacity of modern Italian life left an indelible imprint on his taste, and depictions of Italian history, art, and landscape would surface often in his music during ensuing decades, as witness such famous works as the symphony Harold in Italy, the “dramatic symphony” Romeo and Juliet, and the opera Benvenuto Cellini.
To qualify as truly successful, French composers of Berlioz’ day needed to meet a second requirement apart from winning the Prix de Rome: a hit in the opera house. Berlioz never quite managed to achieve that, although he completed three operas. Benvenuto Cellini (a two-act “opéra semi-seria,” Berlioz called it) was the first. For the plot, Berlioz and his librettists (Léon de Wally and Auguste Barbier, assisted by the poet Alfred de Vigny) went directly to the source: the autobiography of the 16th-century Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and musician. Cellini was an iconoclastic, egotistical artist, and Berlioz viewed him as a kindred Romantic soul, swept up in a rarefied world of art and ardor, a genius forever trying the limits of politics and social propriety. What’s more, they both played the flute. Benvenuto Cellini was not very successful at its 1838 premiere. It received only four performances at its initial run, though it did get a second life some years later after Berlioz effected severe revisions. In its revised forms it was unveiled in Weimar on March 20, 1852 and then, with further alterations that turned it into a three-act opera, it was re-introduced on November 17, 1852, both times with Franz Liszt at the helm.
Berlioz wrote The Roman Carnival in 1843-44 as a standalone piece to be performed in a concert of his own works he was producing. He fashioned it out of music from Benvenuto Cellini, and it later served as a prelude to the second act for productions of that work. The opera’s second act is, in fact, set in a carnival in Rome. The work’s introductory flourish is a quotation of the saltarello—a wild dance--that would soon be enacted onstage. Then we hear music from the love duet “O Teresa, vous qui j’aime,” which had been sung in the first act by Cellini and Teresa, the girl he is courting; here it is transformed into an extended, warm-hearted solo for English horn. After a passage of surging scales Berlioz quotes some choral material from the opera, and then the saltarello returns to mingle with the love aria as the overture progresses. In the end it is the spirit of the dance that wins out, and the overture concludes in a flurry of energy.
Symphonie fantastique: Episode de la vie d’un artiste (Fantastic Symphony: Episode in the Life of an Artist), Op. 14
Hector Berlioz
Work composed: 1830, incorporating some material sketched previously, perhaps as early as 1819
Work premiered: December 5, 1830 in Paris, with François-Antoine Habeneck conducting a large orchestra comprising members of the orchestras of the Nouveautés, Théâtre-Italien, and Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Berlioz revised the piece considerably after the premiere, and the new version (which is nearly always heard today) was unveiled on December 9, 1832, again with Habeneck conducting. 
Instrumentation: Two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets (first doubling E-flat clarinet), four bassoons, four horns, two cornets, three trombones, two tubas CK (taking the place of Berlioz’ original ophicleides, keyed brass instruments popular in early-to-mid-19th-century France whose ensuing absence from the symphony orchestra has not been widely regretted), timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, bells, two harps, and strings
The work that won Berlioz the distinction of the 1830 Prix de Rome, the cantata La mort de Sardanapale, is long forgotten; in fact, only a fragment of it survives. Ironically, Berlioz had already composed earlier in the same year the work that would most consistently forge his place in posterity, the Symphonie fantastique. It would be the first of four Berlioz symphonies, all of which leave the abstract realm of Beethoven’s symphonic ideal for the programmatic terrain that would find fruition later in the 19th century in the new genre of the symphonic poem.
The originality of Berlioz’ achievement in the Symphonie fantastique is simply astonishing; it has been truly observed that this must be the most remarkable First Symphony ever written, not to be rivaled in this regard until the appearance of Mahler’s First symphony six decades later. Even those rare listeners familiar with the excellent but neglected symphonies of Berlioz’ predecessors in Paris, including Etienne-Nicolas Méhul and Luigi Cherubini, will be compelled to acknowledge that those works do little to prepare the ear for Berlioz’ accomplishment. Certainly programmatic symphonies had been written before—Beethoven’s Pastoral is a famous example—but in the Symphonie fantastique the images are depicted with such vibrant specificity as to become downright cinematic. Furthermore, Berlioz’ sense of the programmatic goes well beyond the “merely” descriptive to enter the realm of the psychological—the image of a state of mind, one that is far from stable and that spills into hallucinations. (It is doubtless no coincidence that the modern Berlioz revival, which shows no sign of abating, began in the acid-tripping 1960s.) The Symphonie fantastique is an extraordinary example of self-exploration and self-expression, a work of autobiography underscored by the subtitle Episode de la vie d’un artiste (“Episode in the Life of an Artist”).
The episode in question was carefully described in a program note Berlioz prepared (see sidebar). The action is often accompanied by an idée fixe, a musical theme that surfaces throughout the piece in various transformations. It is first played by flute and violins at the beginning of the opening movement’s “Passions” section (following the “Rêveries” introduction), and it pervades the ensuing material. In succeeding movements the artist finds himself in a ballroom, where he waltzes with his beloved, and in the Alpine countryside, where memories of his beloved disturb his peace. Under the influence of a narcotic drug, he imagines himself being led to the scaffold, where he is executed for murdering his beloved, and finally to a Witches’ Sabbath convened in honor of his death, at which the idée fixe now appears as a grotesque dance heard along with a parody of the funeral chant Dies irae.
The Symphonie fantastique encountered considerable travails on the way to its premiere. It was supposed to be unveiled in May 1830, and a couple of rehearsals had already taken place when competing musical events were suddenly announced for the same time and Berlioz felt it wise to re-schedule his premiere. Already in May audience interest in the new work was high, thanks to an advance piece that ran in the newspaper Le Figaro on May 21. The article printed the complete literary program Berlioz had penned for the symphony, prefaced by an enthusiastic recommendation:
It often happens that a composer sits down at his piano, torments the keys of the instrument, strikes some chords, and scribbles notes onto staff-paper, without so much as glimpsing, in the entire course of his labor, the least glimmer of what is known in artistic parlance as an idea. … M. Hector Berlioz, a young composer with an original imagination, is determined to play a different game. He does not wish to be misinterpreted, so he has himself analyzed his own inspirations. The symphony of which he has written the program has not yet been performed in public. What effect it will produce one can, in advance, only guess; but the program of the different movements which compose it already constitutes an act of candor and whimsicality that cannot but impress the reader.
The Vaughan Williams and Berlioz notes appeared in an earlier form in the programs of the New York Philharmonic and are reprinted with permission; © New York Philharmonic. Arnold note, © James M. Keller
James M. Keller is Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. From 1990-2000 he wrote about music on staff at The New Yorker, and in 1999 he received the prestigious ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for his feature writing in Chamber Music magazine, which he serves as Contributing Editor.