Wednesday March 31, 2010

Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Jeffrey Kahane, conductor; Kelley O’Connor, mezzo-soprano
Hector Berlioz: Beatrice and Benedict Overture
Peter Lieberson: Neruda Songs (1/15-17/10)
Also, Charley anticipates the recital Saturday by violist Matthew Dane and guitarist Jonathan Leathwood at the Rocky Mountain Center for Musical Arts.

Franz Schubert: "Allegro moderato" (1st movement) from Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, D.821

Matthew Dane, viola; Jonathan Leathwood, guitar 11:50
KVOD Performance Studio 3/24/10 MS


Hector Berlioz (1803-1869): Overture to Beatrice and Benedict

Berlioz first got the idea of setting Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing while on vacation in Italy in 1833. He didn't do much with the idea until 1860, when the Baden-Baden summer music festival commissioned an opera. Suffering from chronic intestinal neuralgia, Berlioz set to work in earnest, titling the piece Beatrice and Benedict, after the principal characters in the play. ``I have been working so hard,'' he told his son, ``that the distraction of actually composing helps to keep me well. I can barely keep up with the music of my little opera, so fast do the pieces come to me; each one hurries after the next; sometimes I start one before the other is finished.''
By February, 1862, the opera was finished. Berlioz conducted the first performance on August 9 of that year in Baden-Baden. During rehearsals he described the work as ``a caprice written with the point of a needle, and it requires an extremely delicate performance.''
The Overture was composed last, and incorporates several themes from the opera proper, notably the Duettino from the last act and Beatrice's musing song as Benedict goes off to war. Biographer Jacques Barzun says the Overture ``establishes the recurring contrast between lively coquetry and gentle melancholy--the melancholy of humor. The instrumentation is filigree work, tonal pointillism which acts upon us like champagne and prepares us for a drama that occurs in fantasy.''
The score calls for piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, cornet, 3 trombone, timpani and strings.