Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Anne Manson, Music Director and Conductor
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
19 January 2010

 

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Appalachian Spring (suite for 13 instruments)

Intermission

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Symphony for strings and woodwinds, op. 73a
(after string quartet no. 3) — trans. Rudolf Barshai

1. Allegretto
2. Moderato con moto
3. Allegro non troppo
4. Adagio …
5. Moderato — adagio

Season sponsor / The Great-West Life Assurance Company
Print media sponsor / Winnipeg Free Press
Radio media sponsors / CBC Radio 2 98.3, CBC Radio One 990,
Espace musique 89,9 and Golden West Radio

 

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Ralph Vaughan Williams

Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585) was one of Tudor England’s most celebrated musicians. In 1567, he contributed eight themes to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s hymn book, the Metrical Psalter. When Vaughan Williams helped edit a new version of the English Hymnal in 1906, he used the opportunity to restore to circulation the third of those melodies. He used it as the tune for the text that begins, “When rising from the bed of death.” Tallis’s lovely, sorrowful theme, set in the antique Phrygian church mode rather than the more common major or minor, moved Vaughan Williams to create a piece based upon it, one that would expand and intensify its inherent qualities. He composed the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in 1910.

Reflecting his studies with master orchestrator Maurice Ravel two years earlier, he richly and ingeniously scored the fantasia for three string groups: solo quartet and two orchestras of different sizes. He used them in strikingly antiphonal ways throughout the fantasia. The music explores a wide range of emotion and texture, from whispered intimacies to bold, compelling grandeur.

Vaughan Williams conducted the highly successful premiere himself, in the vast, imposing space of the thousand-year-old Gloucester Cathedral, on September 6, 1910. His wife Ursula wrote, “With the Norman grandeurs of Gloucester Cathedral in mind and the strange quality of the resonance of stone, the ‘echo’ idea of three different groups of instruments was well judged. It seemed that his early love for architecture and his historical knowledge were so deeply assimilated that they were translated and absorbed into the line of the music.”

That fantasia’s premiere, and the debut of A Sea Symphony one month later, laid the foundation of Vaughan Williams’s international reputation. He revised and shortened the fantasia twice before it was published in 1920.

On the evening of the composer’s death, his close friend and superlative interpreter, Sir John Barbirolli, conducted a performance of the fantasia in Vaughan Williams’s honour, at a Henry Wood Promenade concert in the Royal Albert Hall, London. A lovelier, more heartfelt tribute would be difficult to imagine.

Appalachian Spring
Aaron Copland

Although Copland composed in a variety of styles, including the moderately avant-garde, he won his most enduring successes with compositions that celebrate (and directly quote from) the folk culture of America. Topping his list of ‘hits’ are the ballets Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and above all, the pure, glowing miracle that is Appalachian Spring.

The interests in simple, natural expression and American folk culture that Copland shared with choreographer Martha Graham inspired a mutual sense of admiration. In 1942, Graham’s partner, dancer Erick Hawkins, persuaded the noted philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge to sponsor an evening of new Graham ballets, set to newly commissioned scores. Coolidge’s only stipulations were a maximum length of about 30 minutes and an orchestra of no more than a dozen players. Graham gave Copland a bare outline of what became the final plot of Appalachian Spring. He found this sufficient to work with. “I knew certain crucial things,” he wrote, “that it had to do with the American pioneer spirit, with youth and spring, with optimism and hope.”

As the music evolved, he referred to it simply as Ballet for Martha, its eventual subtitle.

Graham suggested that Copland quote American folk tunes in the score. He chose just one: Simple Gifts, a song associated with the Shakers. Due to religious persecution, the members of this Protestant sect (officially the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) had emigrated from England in the late eighteenth century and settled in the north-eastern United States. They lived simple, communal lives that advocated pacifism. They became notorious for their religious services, during which they shook and trembled to rid themselves of evil. The inclusion of Simple Gifts is the only connection between the Shakers and Appalachian Spring. It is also the source of the song’s now widespread popularity.

Copland finished the piano score in the spring of 1944. Graham found it entrancing. He completed the scoring that summer, choosing an ensemble of double string quartet, double bass, piano, flute, clarinet and bassoon. The ballet remained nameless until Graham announced, shortly before the debut, that she had decided to call it ‘Appalachian Spring.’ She admitted that she had chosen it simply because she liked the sound of it, and that it had no connection with either the location or scenario of the ballet. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Copland. “Over and over again,” he said in 1981, “people come up to me after seeing the ballet on stage and say, ‘Mr. Copland, when I see that ballet and when I hear your music I can just see the Appalachians and I just feel spring.’ Well I’m willing if they are!”

The first performance took place at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on October 30, 1944. It scored a major success, with audiences and critics alike. Copland’s tender and exuberant music, the finest achievement on the ‘populist’ side of his output, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Although Appalachian Spring continues to be staged as a ballet, it is best known through the concert suite. In preparing this, Copland expanded the instrumentation to a moderately sized symphony orchestra, without losing its freshness and transparency. He also shortened the music by roughly eight minutes and made minor adjustments to the remainder. Tonight’s performance will present the suite version, but will use the original chamber scoring.

The scenario unfolds during the early nineteenth century, on the site of a Pennsylvania farmhouse that has just been built as a pre-wedding gift for a young couple. Here is Copland’s own synopsis: “The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, which their new domestic partnership invites. An old neighbour suggests, now and then, the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.”

‘Tis the gift to be simple,
`Tis the gift to be free,
`Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
to bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed
To turn, turn, turn will be our delight,
`Til by turning, turning, we come round right.

Symphony for strings and woodwinds, op. 73a
Dmitri Shostakovich

The 15 string quartets that Shostakovich composed between 1938 and 1974 offer as virtually complete a portrait of the composer as do the equal number of symphonies. At times they provide even deeper insights, speaking as they do a more intimate language.

The Russian conductor Rudolf Barshai (b. 1924) enjoyed a close personal relationship with Shostakovich, dating back to Barshai’s studying composition with Shostakovich. The bond continued as Barshai, first as a violist (he was a founding member of the prestigious Borodin Quartet) and subsequently as a conductor, has performed his teacher’s music frequently and with compelling insight. In 1969, he conducted another ensemble he founded, the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, in the world premiere of Shostakovich’s fourteenth symphony.

Barshai received Shostakovich’s permission to transcribe string quartets nos. 8 and 10 for full string orchestra. He has continued to produce such arrangements in the years following the composer’s death. To date he has prepared transcriptions of three further quartets. This arrangement of Quartet No. 3 takes the process a step further, shifting the music closer to orchestral territory by adding woodwinds to the previously all-string texture. Barshai makes particularly effective use of the English horn’s dark, at times unsettling throatiness.

During the reign of Joseph Stalin, Soviet artists were expected to produce straightforward, optimistic creations that would inspire the population to support communist ideals. However Shostakovich may have felt about this attitude (his memoirs, Testimony, state that he opposed it), he dutifully composed works that at least superficially support the state.

The ninth symphony (1945) proved to be a cheeky, small-scaled frolic rather than the heroic postwar apotheosis which officialdom demanded. Had the events of the war emboldened Shostakovich to compose the kind of music he truly wanted to write? A brutal repression of what Soviet officials saw as a dangerous, anti-Soviet tendency toward personalization began the following year. In 1948, the subversive attitudes that the ninth symphony presented instigated another of the public denunciations that benighted Shostakovich’s career.

The Beethoven Quartet (who premiered every Shostakovich quartet except the first and last) gave the first performance of No. 3, in Moscow on 16 December 1946. It was the only piece Shostakovich had composed that year, and the final instrumental work to be heard before Stalin’s new acts of repression began.

As if predicting the future, the five movements trace an emotional arc from light to darkness. Even from the first bar, the jauntiness of the first movement is shadowed by an underlying unease. It’s as if you were attending a party where the only guest you don’t recognize starts acting suspiciously. Anxiety continues to intensify in the second movement, until it erupts in the relentless rhythms and sarcastic themes of the third. In the fourth movement, the woodwinds sing doleful elegies, interspersed with terse declamations by the strings. The concluding movement, by far the longest of the five, follows without a pause. It gradually hints that a return to the at least veiled optimism of the first movement may be possible. A shattering return of the doleful theme of the fourth movement terminates such speculation. You really can’t go home again.

Fyodor Druzhinin, the violist of the Beethoven Quartet, recalled, “Only once did we see Shostakovich visibly moved by his own music. We were rehearsing the Third Quartet. He’d promised to stop us when he had any remarks to make. Dmitri Dmitriyevich sat in an armchair with the score opened out. But after each movement ended he just waved us on, saying ‘Keep playing!’ So we performed the whole quartet. When we finished playing, he sat quite still in silence like a wounded bird, tears streaming down his face. This was the only time I saw Shostakovich so open and defenceless.”

 

 

Anne Manson / Music Director and Conductor

MCO's 2010/11 season is sponsored by The Great-West Life Assurance Company.
Support has been received from Media sponsors The Winnipeg Free Press, CBC Radio One 990,
CBC Radio 2 98.3, Espace musique 89,9 and Golden West Radio. Heartstrings gala sponsor:
Mann Financial Assurance Limited. Sponsor of open dress rehearsals: Canadian Bridge Federation.
Arts Accessibility Program: Sun Life Financial.

© 2010 Manitoba Chamber Orchestra