Oklahoma City Philharmonic, CLASSICS 6: March 20, 2010
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844-1908)
Capriccio espagnol (“Spanish Capriccio”), Op. 34 (1887)
Alborada (Vivo e strepitoso)
Variazioni (Andante con moto—Poco meno mosso—Tempo I)
Alborada (Vivo e strepitoso)
Scena e canto gitano (Allegretto)
Fandango asturiano
(The movements are played without interruption.)
FALLA (1876-1946)
Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain), Symphonic Impressions for Piano and Orchestra (1909-16)
En el Generalife (In the Generalife) (Allegretto tranquillo e misterioso)
Dansa lejana (Distant Dance) (Allegro giusto)
En los jardines de la Sierra de Córdoba (In the Gardens of the Sierra de Córdoba)
SCHUMAN (1910-92)
New England Triptych (1956)
I: Be Glad Then, America
II: When Jesus Wept
III: Chester
GERSHWIN (1898-1937)
Rhapsody in Blue, for Piano and Orchestra (1924; orch. 1926 by Grofé)
Capriccio espagnol (“Spanish Capriccio”), Op. 34
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Born: March 6 (old style)/18 (new style), 1844 in Tikhvin, near Novgorod, Russia
Died: June 8 (old style)/21 (new style), 1908 in Liubensk, near St. Petersburg, Russia
Work composed: Summer 1887
Work premiered: October 31 (old style)/November 12 (new style), 1887 in St. Petersburg, with the composer conducting a concert of the Russian Public Symphony
Instrumentation: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, castanets, harp and strings (including a prominent part for solo violin)
Scion of a family full of naval dignitaries, Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov initially embarked on a naval career himself. In the course of the 1860s he fell increasingly under the spell of music, and in 1873 he abandoned his nautical pursuits to pursue a career as a composer. The break was neither sudden nor complete; from 1873 until 1884, he combined both worlds by serving as inspector of the Russian Navy’s military orchestras. You might say he was combining two distinct strands of his genealogical heritage. A great-grandfather from the non-naval side of the family had been a priest, and from his daughter (that is, Rimsky-Korsakov’s grandmother) our composer claimed to have inherited his fascination with traditional Russian music and liturgy. Folk tunes, often associated with ancient pagan celebrations, surface constantly in Rimsky-Korsakov’s compositions, sometimes integrated closely into large-scale works like operas and symphonies, sometimes standing as the source for an entire standalone concert piece. These esthetic sympathies were greatly encouraged by Mily Balakirev, the composer who served as both Rimsky-Korsakov’s mentor and the organizer and intellectual conscience of the group of Russian nationalist composers who remain forever bonded as the Mighty Five or Mighty Handful: Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modeste Musorgsky, Balakirev himself, and Rimsky-Korsakov. 
Although these figures were linked through their common passion for Russian musical nationalism, their interests ranged beyond that, and they sometimes turned their nationalistic sights on the sounds and cultures of other countries. Spain was a particular favorite for late-Romantic composers of musical travelogues; it was far enough from the European musical mainstream to be deliciously exotic, and its musical gestures were so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable. For Russians, it didn’t hurt that Mikhail Glinka, revered as the “Father of Russian Classical Music,” had actually spent a couple of years living in Spain in the 1840s and had been inspired to produce such “Iberian” orchestral works as his Capriccio brillante on the Jota Aragonesa and his Recuerdos de Castilla (“Recollections of Castile,” later expanded into his Souvenir d’une nuit d’été à Madrid—“Recollection of a Summer Night in Madrid”), as well as a couple of smaller pieces based on boleros.
It was during his summer vacation in 1887, spent—as the composer recounted in his memoirs, My Musical Life--at a rented villa “on the bank of Lake Nyelay, at the Nikol’skoye estate, in the Looga canton,” that Rimsky-Korsakov was bitten by the Spanish bug. He was principally involved just then orchestrating Borodin’s uncompleted opera Prince Igor, but “in the middle of the summer my work was interrupted: I composed the Spanish Capriccio from the sketches of my projected virtuoso violin fantasy on Spanish themes. According to my plans the Capriccio was to glitter with dazzling orchestral color and, manifestly, I had not been wrong.”
The Capriccio espagnol (the French form of the title is usually employed, for no compelling reason) has gone into the annals of symphonic music as a touchstone of orchestration. But the composer insisted on putting a fine point on that idea:
The opinion formed by both critics and the public, that the Capriccio is a magnificently orchestrated piece, is wrong. The Capriccio is a brilliant composition for the orchestra. The change of timbres, the felicitous choice of melodic designs and figuration patterns, exactly suiting each kind of instrument, brief virtuoso cadenzas for instruments solo, the rhythm of the percussion instruments, and so on, constitute here the very essence of the composition, and not its garb or orchestration. The Spanish themes, of dance character, furnished me with rich material for putting in use multiform orchestral effects. All in all, the Capriccio is undoubtedly a purely external piece, but vividly brilliant for all that. I was a little less successful in its third section (Alborada, in B-flat major), where the brasses somewhat drown out the melodic designs of the woodwinds; but this is very easy to remedy, if the conductor will pay attention to it and moderate the indications of the shades of force in the brass instruments by replacing the fortissimo with a simple forte.
Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain)
Manuel de Falla
Born: November 23, 1876 in Cádiz, Spain
Died: November 14, 1946 in Alta Gracia, Argentina
Work composed: Between 1909 and March 27, 1916
Work premiered: April 9, 1916 at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Enrique Fernández Arbós conducting the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid, with pianist José Cubiles
Work dedicated: to the Catalan pianist Ricardo Viñes
Instrumentation CK: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, to bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, harp, celesta, and strings, plus the solo piano. In 1926 Falla adapted this piece for chamber orchestra, but this performance is of the full symphonic version CK.
As a teenager, Manuel de Falla y Matheu set his sights on becoming an author, but by the time he was 20 he acquiesced instead to a consuming passion for music. His youthful piano studies paid off, and he advanced quickly through conservatory instruction, graduating in 1899 from the Madrid Conservatory with a first prize in piano and a thorough education in harmony, counterpoint, and composition. Nonetheless, Falla’s first steps in his chosen profession were far from dynamic. Unable to scrape together a living by composing serious music and not quite a good enough pianist to find acclaim in the recital hall, he turned to the closest enterprise that might prove commercially viable, the composition of zarzuelas (peculiarly Spanish stage works that might be described as a regional variation on operetta). He composed six between 1900 and 1904; only one reached the stage, and it left him no better off than before. 
Still, those early experiences helped clarify his goals, and in 1905 he won an important prize for his first certifiable masterpiece, La vida breve, a true opera. But plans to produce it fell through, and Falla, recognizing that Spain was too far off the beaten path of culture for his restless talent, left in 1907 for where the action was—Paris. He would remain there until 1914, associating closely with Dukas, Debussy, and Ravel. During those years he refined his craft as a musical Impressionist without sacrificing the Spanish flavor that lay at the root of his inspiration. The outbreak of World War One forced his return to Spain, but this time Madrid proved more amenable to his talent. Further stage works rich in Spanish flavor flowed from his pen, beginning with El amor brujo (1915), and in 1916 Falla heard the premiere of his first major symphonic work, which had occupied him since 1909: Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain), a set of three “symphonic impressions”—his term—for piano and orchestra.
Most of his work on the piece had been carried out in Paris, where composers were swept up in a tempest of enthusiasm for sounds evoking Spain. Debussy’s Ibéria, for example, was premiered in Paris in 1910, and Falla, Debussy enthusiast that he was, was at the forefront of those who cheered its arrival. The disposition of Falla’s musical forces in Noches en los jardines de España also signals French precedents. Though the work is scored for piano and orchestra, it is not a concerto in the traditional sense. Instead, the piano plays an obbligato role that is not overtly virtuosic. This is not to imply that it is a simple piece for a pianist to play when, in fact, its technical and interpretative challenges are many. But rather than plumb the opposition of soloist and orchestra that is inherent in the traditional Romantic concerto, Falla creates a scenario in which the piano slips into and out of the symphonic texture with great subtlety, adding important highlights to the overall timbre. In this regard, Noches en los jardines de España might trace its ancestry to such French models as Franck’s Symphonic Variations (1885, which our audiences heard in January), Vincent d’Indy’s Symphonie cévenole (“Symphony on a French Mountain Air,” 1886) or Debussy’s Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra (1889-96).
Initially imagined as four nocturnes for piano, Noches en los jardines de España evolved over eight years into its final three-movement symphonic form. Falla’s first direct inspiration for this work seems to have been a book about Granada that he found at a Parisian bookstore in 1910. A native of Cádiz, he had never visited Granada (160 miles to the east), and his musical impressions of that city’s Generalife Palace and Sierra de Córdoba gardens therefore sprung from pictures and literary descriptions rather than from first-hand experience, a curious state of affairs one would never guess from the specificity with which he portrays them in his music.
New England Triptych
William Schuman
Born: August 4, 1910 in New York City
Died: February 15, 1992 in New York City
Work composed: 1956, on commission from the conductor André Kostelanetz
Work premiered: October 26, 1956 in Miami, Florida, with André Kostelanetz conducting the University of Miami Symphony Orchestra
Instrumentation: Three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, , two clarinets plus E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tenor drum, and strings
Nothing in the childhood of William Schuman suggested that he would grow up to become one of the most prominent figures of the American musical scene, influential not only through his music but also as a high-profile public advocate for American composers, as an educator, and as an arts administrator whose innovative visions continue to resound today. In high school he developed some facility playing violin and banjo, and for a while he and some friends played “semi-professional” gigs under the banner of Billy Schuman and his Alamo Society Orchestra. He also cultivated an intuitive skill as a songwriter, particular during his annual stays at summer camp in Maine, where one of his fellow-campers was Edward B. Marks, Jr., son of the music publisher who had issued such hits as “Sweet Rose O’Grady” and “Under the Bamboo Tree.” The junior Marks penned the lyrics and Schuman composed the music for their camp reviews, and a few of their pieces ended up being published. Soon Schuman started collaborating with another childhood friend, Frank Loesser, whose first published song, “In Love with a Memory of You” (1931), was yoked to a Schuman tune. Loesser would go on achieve his own eminence through the librettos for Broadway musicals like Guys and Dolls and The Most Happy Fella, and Schuman would boast wryly that he was the only composer who had ever managed to turn a Loesser lyric into a song that was a flop.
Schuman’s epiphany arrived in 1930, when his sister Audrey dragged him along to a concert by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Arturo Toscanini at Carnegie Hall. He had never been to a classical concert before and, despite his resistance, was absolutely captivated. The very next day he inquired at a neighborhood music school about what one had to do to become a composer.
From 1935-45 he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, an exclusive girls’ school that had recently been established in Bronxville, New York. A three-year stint as director of music publications for the august firm of G. Schirmer followed, and then the presidency of The Juilliard School, which he quickly subjected to a complete overhaul. Only a huge temptation could tear him away from Juilliard; but he couldn’t resist the invitation in 1962 to become the first president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which would become the model for “supermarket” performing-arts institutions that grew to dominate American high culture in the later 20th century. By the time he relinquished that post in 1969, Schuman had played an instrumental role in founding such endeavors as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the Mostly Mozart festival.
All of this would have been more than enough for a single career of exemplary distinction; but at the same time Schuman was also being recognized as one of the nation’s finest composers, an achievement that is almost unthinkable given his late start and desultory training. The New England Triptych is the most frequently performed of all his compositions, along with his orchestration of Ives’ Variations on America. You might say that it is not the work of just one American composer, but really of two: of Schuman and of his 18th-century predecessor William Billings. The most impressive of a group of indigenous composers of sacred music who achieved note in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, Billings (born in Boston on October 7, 1746; died there September 26, 1800) first earned his living as a tanner, seems to have attended to his own musical education, by the 1780s achieved repute as a singing-master, joined such of his friends as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere in supporting the American Revolutionary cause, and lived his final decade in financial distress until he was buried, it appears, in an unmarked grave in Boston Common cemetery. More than 340 compositions issued from his pen, nearly all of them short sacred pieces for four-part unaccompanied chorus. Each of the three movements in the New England Triptych is based on a different hymn-tune by Billings.
From the Composer
William Schuman provided the following comments about his New England Triptych:
William Billings is a major figure in the history of American music. The works of this dynamic composer capture the spirit of sinewy ruggedness, deep religiosity and patriotic fervor that we associate with the Revolutionary period. Despite the undeniable crudities and technical shortcomings of his music, its appeal, even today, is forceful and moving. I am not alone among American composers who feel an identity with Billings and it is this sense of identity which accounts for my use of his music as a point of departure. These pieces do not constitute a “fantasy” on themes of Billings, not “variations” on his themes, but rather a fusion of styles and musical language.
I. Be Glad Then, America
Billings’ text for this anthem includes the following lines:
Yea, the Lord will answer
And say unto his people—behold!
I will send you corn and wine and oil.
And ye shall be satisfied therewith.
Be glad then, America.
Shout and rejoice.
Be glad and rejoice.
Fear not O land.
Hallelujah!
A timpani solo begins the short introduction which is developed predominantly in the strings. This music is suggestive of the “Hallelujah” heard at the end of the piece. Trombones and trumpets begin the main section, a free and varied setting of the words “Be Glad Then America, Shout and Rejoice.” The timpani, again solo, leads to a middle fugal section stemming from the words “And Ye Shall Be Satisfied.
The music gains momentum, and combined themes lead to a climax. There follows a free adaptation of the “Hallelujah” music with which Billings concludes his original choral piece and a final reference to the “Shout and Rejoice” music.
II: When Jesus Wept
When Jesus wept the falling tear
In mercy flowed beyond all bound;
When Jesus groaned, a trembling fear
Seized all the guilty world around.
The setting of the above text is in the form of a round. Here, Billings’s music is used in its original form, as well as in the new settings with contrapuntal embellishments and melodic extensions.
III: Chester
This music, composed as a church hymn, was subsequently adopted by the Continental Army as a marching song. The original words, with one of its verses especially written for its use by the Continental Army, follow:
Let tyrants shake their iron rods,
And slavery clank her galling chains,
We fear them not, we trust in God,
New England’s God forever reigns.
The foe comes on with haughty stride,
Our troops advance with martial noise
Their vet’rans flee before our youth,
And gen’rals yield to beardless boys.
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Rhapsody in Blue, for Piano and Orchestra
George Gershwin (orchestrated by Ferde Grofé)
Born: September 26, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York
Died: July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California
Work composed: Between January 7 and February 3, 1924, with Ferde Grofé creating the work’s original scoring for solo piano with jazz band. Ferde (Ferdinand Rudolf von) Grofé was born in New York City on March 27, 1892 and died in Santa Monica, California on April 3, 1972. In 1926 Grofé followed up with the version for solo piano and full symphony orchestra, heard in these performances. 
Work premiered: February 12, 1924, at New York’s Aeolian Hall, with Paul Whiteman leading his orchestra and the composer as piano soloist.
Instrumentation: Grofe’s symphonic arrangement calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, two alto saxophones and one tenor saxophone, three horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, triangle, gong, banjo, and strings, in addition to the solo piano.
George Gershwin, his brother Ira, and the lyricist “Buddy” De Sylva were killing time in a pool-hall on January 3, 1924 when Ira, engrossed in the New York Tribune, happened on an article announcing that the bandleader Paul Whiteman, a one-time violist with the Denver and San Francisco Symphonies but now a leading light of popular music, would shortly present a concert in New York that promised to broaden concert-goers’ conception of what serious American music could be. Neither Ira nor his brother were prepared for the article’s revelation that “George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto, Irving Berlin is writing a syncopated tone poem, and Victor Herbert is working on an American suite.” A new Gershwin jazz concerto was news to Gershwin.
A phone call to Whiteman the next day elicited the explanation that the bandleader had been planning such a concert for some time in the future; but a rival conductor had suddenly announced plans for a similar program of pieces drawing on both the classical and jazz styles, a development that forced Whiteman to move up his schedule if he didn’t want to look like a mere copy-cat. Whiteman also reminded Gershwin that he had broached the idea of such a work a year and a half earlier, when his orchestra had unveiled Gershwin’s song “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” in George White’s Scandals of 1922. Later Gershwin would come around to allowing that there was at least some connection between the two projects, when he wrote of the George White’s Scandals: “My association with Whiteman in this show I am sure had something to do with Paul’s asking me to write a composition for his first jazz concert. As you may know, I wrote the Rhapsody in Blue for that occasion, and there is no doubt that this was my start in the field of more serious music.” 
He rose to the challenge, though not without extracting certain concessions from Whiteman. Given the short lead-time (not to mention the novelty of such a piece), a full-length concerto was out of the question. But Gershwin would commit to a free-form work, a rhapsody of some sort, that would spotlight him as the soloist backed by the Whiteman band, which was to be expanded for the occasion by quite a few instruments. Furthermore, Gershwin was uneasy about the prospect of orchestrating his piece; in his Broadway work, he had always followed the customary practice of simply writing the tunes and leaving the instrumentation to an arranger. “No problem,” Whiteman responded—and promptly informed Ferde Grofé, his own staff arranger since 1920, to clear his desk for a new project.
On January 7, Gershwin began setting down notes for his rhapsody, which he notated in a score for two pianos—one representing the solo part, the other the orchestra (including certain suggestions about possible instrumentation). Grofé later recalled, “I practically lived too in their uptown Amsterdam and 100th Street apartment, for I called there daily for more pages… . He and his brother Ira had a back room where there was an upright piano, and that is where Rhapsody in Blue grew into being.”
It was Ira, the family wordsmith, who came up with the title, inspired by a visit to a gallery showing an exhibit of paintings by James Abbot McNeill Whistler. Whistler was drawn to titling his paintings—no matter how representational—with completely abstract titles, such as the famous “Arrangement in Gray and Black” (popularly nicknamed “Whistler’s Mother”). The Gershwin brothers took a shine to the concept, and found a musical equivalent in the title Rhapsody in Blue. The word “blue” naturally evokes “the Blues,” and, by extension, jazz. Various aspects of jazz vocabulary certainly are prominent in the Rhapsody in Blue—this was the point of the repertoire Whiteman programmed in his “Experiment in Modern Music”—but at heart this is a symphonic work, and its ancestry lies more in the direction of Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Liszt than Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and W.C. Handy.
Listen For...
The famous ascending glissando with which the clarinet launches this piece is one of the most instantly identifiable sounds in all of music. It is said to have been essentially the invention of Ross Gorman, the clarinetist of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Gershwin had written the opening measure as a low trill followed by a scale rising rapidly through 17 notes. The tale is told that Gorman, growing either exhausted or bored as the piece began yet again in the course of a long rehearsal, simply elided the disparate notes into a sweeping, rather suggestive ribbon of uninterrupted pitches—after which there was no turning back.
--JMK |
Earlier versions of these notes originally appeared in the programs of the New York Philharmonic and are reprinted with permission; © New York Philharmonic.
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.