Thursday April 8, 2010

Charley talks to cellist Ralph Kirshbaum and principal guest conductor Douglas Boyd about their Colorado Symphony concerts this weekend.
Johann Sebastian Bach: "Gigue" (6th movement) from Solo Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007
Ralph Kirshbaum, cello
Virgin 45086 CD1 Track 6 2:05
Also, Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor
Hector Berlioz: “Love Scene” from Romeo and Juliet Op.17
Peter Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture (1/15-17/10)
And, Charley talks with flutist Cobus Du Toit about the Antero Winds concert in Westcliffe Sunday.
David Maslanka: 3rd movement ("Very Fast") from Wind Quintet No.3
Antero Winds (Cobus Du Toit, flute; Sarah Mellander Bierhaus, oboe; Jerome Fleg, clarinet; Megan Garrison, horn; Kaori Uno, bassoon)
KVOD Performance Studio (Recorded 3/7/10 by Martin Skavish)



Program Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2010.

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869): Dramatic Symphony, Romeo and Juliet, Opus 17
I. Love Scene

``If you ask which of my works I prefer,'' Berlioz once said, ``my answer is that of most artists: the love scene in Romeo and Juliet.''
As early as 1827, Berlioz had seen the Irish actress Harriet Smithson in Charles Kemble's Shakespeare productions in Paris. ``This sudden and unexpected revelation of Shakespeare overwhelmed me,'' he wrote. ``The lightning-flash of his genius revealed the whole heaven of art to me, illuminating its remotest depths in a single flash.''
Then, in December, 1838, the violinist Niccolo Paganini--perhaps acting as intermediary for the publisher Armand Bertin--sent Berlioz 20,000 francs, with a note: ``Since the death of Beethoven, none but Berlioz has been able to make him live again.''
Berlioz was stunned. ``Paganini had given me money that I might write music,'' he said, ``and write it I did. I hit upon the idea of a symphony with choruses, vocal solos, and choral recitatives, on the sublime and ever-novel theme of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. I worked for seven months at my symphony, not leaving off for more than three or four days out of every thirty on any pretense whatsoever.'' The work was finished on September 8, 1839.
The first performance of Romeo and Juliet took place at the Paris Conservatory on November 24, 1839. Berlioz conducted an orchestra of 160 members and a chorus of 98. Richard Wagner was in the audience, and later recalled, ``This was a wholly new world for me...the grandeur and masterly execution of the orchestral part almost overwhelmed me....I was simply all ears for things of which till then I never dreamt, and which I felt I must realize....At that time, I felt almost like a little schoolboy by the side of Berlioz.''
The scenes involving Romeo and Juliet are entrusted to the orchestra alone. In his preface to the score, Berlioz explained: ``This is a symphony and not an opera. In addition, since duets of this kind have been treated vocally a thousand times and by the greatest masters, it was both prudent and interesting to try another means of expression. It is also because the very sublimity of this love made it so dangerous for the musician to depict, that I needed more latitude for my imagination than the definite meanings of a text would have allowed, and therefore I had recourse to the language of instruments which, in this case, is richer, more varied, less precise and, in its very vagueness, incomparably more powerful.''
One of Berlioz's biographers wrote of the Love Scene, ``Over the whole of the music, with its soft enchanting melodies, there lies a delicate bloom. It is music of a love untouched by eroticism; it wounds the heart as any contemplation of the pure and undefiled always must.''
The work is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, ophicleide (tuba), timpani, ``at least 15 first violins, at least 15 second violins, at least 10 violas, at least 11 cellos, and at least 7 double basses.''

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture

``I shall be thinking of something new and big to write,'' Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. ``I want to find an operatic subject that will be deep and exciting. What would you say to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet? The richness of that tragedy is fathomless.''
It was composer Mily Balakirev who suggested that Tchaikovsky write not an opera but a symphonic overture on the subject. ``Arm yourself with galoshes and a walking-stick,'' he advised, ``and set out for a walk along the boulevards, starting with the Nikitsky: let yourself be steeped in your plan, and I am sure that by the time you reach the Sretensky Boulevard some theme or episode will have come to you.''
The Overture occupied Tchaikovsky for most of October and November of 1869. He sent the main themes off to Balakirev, who complained that the music depicting Friar Laurence resembled ``the character of Haydn's quartet themes, the genius of petty bourgeois music, awakening a strong thirst for beer.'' What was wanted, in Balakirev's opinion, was something ``on the line of Liszt's chorales.''
Balakirev also commented on the love theme: ``I often play it, and would like to hug you for it. It has the sweetness of love, its tenderness, its longing....I have only one thing to say against this theme: It does not sufficiently express a mystic, inward, spiritual love, but rather a fantastic passionate glow that has hardly any nuance of Italian sentiment. Romeo and Juliet were not Persian lovers, but Europeans.'' Overall, he liked the piece: ``It is the first of your compositions that contains so many beautiful things one does not hesitate to pronounce it good as a whole.'' When Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov saw the full score in January, Tchaikovsky recalled, ``my Overture pleased them very much and it also pleases me.''
It was a different story when Nikolai Rubinstein conducted the first performance of Romeo and Juliet at a concert of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow on March 16, 1870. ``It had no success at all,'' Tchaikovsky complained. ``I longed for sympathy and recognition, but the Overture was wholly ignored. After the concert, a crowd of us supped at Gurin's Restaurant, and nobody spoke so much as a word to me about it!''
Tchaikovsky made the first revision of the score in 1870. When the work was introduced in St. Petersburg in 1872, Cesar Cui wrote: ``The composition is a most talented one. Its special merit lies in the excellence of its themes.'' Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky made another revision of the music in 1880.
``The characterization of the music is very good,'' writes biographer Edwin Evans, ``in fact the entire work is based upon characterization rather than action. Apart from the opening theme which typifies Friar Laurence, the work has two principal contrasted movements, the one representing the feud of the Montagues and the Capulets, and naturally all fire and animation, and the other the love-stricken pair, all sweetness and romance. It closes in a manner suggesting a reference to the final tragic scene.''
The score calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, English horn, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, harp and strings.