Monday September 7, 2009

Colorado Music Festival Orchestra
Larry Rachleff, conductor
Claude Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun 11:52
Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite 25:21 (7/18/08)
Also, Charley anticipates this week's George Crumb Festival at CU Boulder.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op.109 18:32
Hsing-ay Hsu, piano
KVOD Performance Studio 110708 MS
Claude Debussy: Etude ("For Eight Fingers")
Hsing-ay Hsu, piano
Nutmeg "Hsing-ay Hsu 2008 Live" CD Track 12 1:38



Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Prélude à aprés-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun)
In 1876, Stéphane Mallarmé published The Afternoon of a Faun, a dreamy evocation of a faun (half man-half goat) and his lusty pursuit of nymphs. One admirer of the poem was Claude Debussy, who planned a Prelude, Interlude and Paraphrase Finale on the work. Apparently he originally intended some sort of declamation of the text, along with the music.
What finally emerged in 1894 was the orchestral Prelude only. When Mallarmé heard it, he was unexpectedly pleased. "It is music that brings out the feeling of my poem, providing it with a warmer background than color," he said to Debussy. "Your illustration…presents no dissonance with my text; rather does it go further into the nostalgia and light with subtlety, malaise and richness."
The first performance of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun took place on December 22, 1894 at a National Society of Music concert. The conductor, Gustave Doret, found the audience "completely captivated" by the new work and promptly encored it.
There were reports of scattered hissing and booing, though, and the more traditional musicians were not amused. Saint-Saëns, for one, admitted the music's "pretty sonority, but it contains not the slightest musical idea in the real sense of the word. It is as much a piece of music as the palette a painter has worked from is a painting."
In his preface to the score, Debussy described the music as "a very free illustration to Stéphane Mallarmé's beautiful poem. It does not follow the poet's conception exactly, but describes the successive scenes among which the wishes and dreams of the Faun wander in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the fearful flight of the nymphs and naiads, he abandons himself to the delightful sleep, full of visions finally realized, of full possession amid universal nature."
The score calls for 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 harps, antique cymbals and strings.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): The Firebird Suite No. 2 (1919)
I. Introduction; The Firebird and Her Dance;
Variation of the Firebird
II. The Princesses' Round: Khorovod
III. Dance of King Kashchei
IV. Berceuse and Finale

When the great impresario Serge Diaghilev needed a new piece for his Russian Ballet, he turned to his former teacher Anatol Liadov, a notorious procrastinator. The subject was to be the Russian folk tale of the Firebird. Liadov estimated the composition would take a year. By mutual consent, the task was given to the twenty-seven-year-old Igor Stravinsky.
Stravinsky finished The Firebird music on May 18, 1910. A French critic described the composer playing through the score at an informal gathering in St. Petersburg: ``The composer, young, slim, and uncommunicative, with vague meditative eyes, and lips set firm in an energetic looking face, was at the piano. But the moment he began to play, the modest and dimly lit dwelling glowed with a dazzling radiance. By the end of the first scene, I was conquered: by the last, I was lost in admiration. The manuscript on the music-rest, scored over with fine pencilings, revealed a masterpiece.''
At one of the rehearsals, Diaghilev observed: ``Mark him well. He is a man on the eve of celebrity.'' Stravinsky's celebrity was assured at the first performance at the Paris Opera on June 25, 1910. Gabriel Pierné conducted. ``The first Firebird!'' Stravinsky recalled. ``I stood in the dark of the Opera through eight orchestral rehearsals....The stage and the whole theatre glittered at the première and that is all I remember.''
Tamara Karsavina danced the title role. The choreography was by Mikhail Fokine, ``easily the most disagreeable man I have ever worked with,'' said Stravinsky, who was modest about the work's success. ``The performance was warmly applauded by the Paris public,'' he said. ``I am, of course, far from attributing this success solely to the score.'' After the first performance, he went out to dinner with Debussy.
Stravinsky made three orchestral suites from The Firebird music. The first, in 1916, was followed by a version for smaller orchestra in 1919. A third suite appeared in 1945.
The story of the ballet concerns the young Prince Ivan hot in pursuit of the Firebird, finally capturing her in the garden of the ogre Kashchei. She begs him to set her free and gives him a magic feather when he does so. Ivan observes the dances of the captive princesses and is himself captured by the ogre, who tries to turn Ivan into a stone. But Ivan waves the magic feather, summoning the Firebird, who then reveals how to kill the ogre. This done, the princesses are freed and Ivan marries their leader, with the blessing of the Firebird. According to Stravinsky, Ivan succeeds ``because he yielded to pity, a wholly Christian notion which dominates the imagination and the ideas of the Russian people.''
The 1919 Suite is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, percussion, timpani, xylophone, harp, piano and strings.