Loving Oz and the US (thoughts on Australia and America)

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Richard Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier" (extracts)

Continuing my series of program notes:

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Der Rosenkavalier, Op.59 – extracts

Der Rosenkavalier was the fifth of Richard Strauss’ operas, the second written in collaboration with librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The title (The Knight of the Rose) derives from a bit of stage business (purported to be an 18^th century custom, but invented by Hofmannsthal) whereby a knighted emissary presents a silver rose to a woman on behalf of her suitor.


Robert Sterl's 1912 painting of Ernst von Schuch conducting Der Rosenkavalier

When it first appeared, Der Rosenkavalier was seen by many critics as a retreat from the atonal modernism of Strauss’s two immediately previous stage works – Salome and Elektra. Strauss had wanted to write a ‘Mozartian opera’ after Elektra, but Der Rosenkavalier has a sumptuousness which exceeds classicism. Its plot possesses some similarities with The Marriage of Figaro, but this ‘comedy for music’ is elevated by character portraiture that has rarely been surpassed in opera. It remains Strauss’ most popular, indeed best-loved, work.

Set in Vienna in 1740, Der Rosenkavalier, tells how the 17 year-old Octavian outwits the bullish Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau in his quest for the hand of the young convent girl, Sophie. But that is not all: it is a story of the magic of love at first sight; of nostalgia, self-sacrifice and the passing of time. Octavian, the ‘Knight’, first lays eyes on Sophie during the presentation of the Rose. Strauss’s orchestra wonderfully expresses the slow-motion intoxication of the moment. Octavian must first be given up by his older lover, the Feldmarschallin, Marie-Thérèse, who has known all along, somewhere inside, that one day he would fall for someone his own age, and whose realisation accounts for the change in the first act from amorous enthusiasm to mood of regret, and whose proud surrender is the background for the glorious Trio which climaxes the opera.
Strauss’ score retains a Mozartian level of beauty throughout (not even compromised by scenes of raw burlesque such as the stage-managed outwitting of Ochs in the Third Act). The ‘Viennese waltzes’, though anachronistic, are of such quality that, by this opera alone, Richard Strauss could almost challenge his unrelated namesake for the title of ‘Waltz King’.
Tonight’s extracts revolve around the three main characters – the Feldmarschallin, Octavian (sung by a soprano) and Sophie. During the orchestral introduction we can imagine the passionate love of Octavian and the Feldmarschallin between the sheets. The curtain rises. There is some minor bickering as when Octavian leaves his sword where Mahomet, the Feldmarschallin’s pageboy, might see it when he brings in her morning chocolate, but the big rift is yet to happen. They are still calling each other: ‘Mein Schatz!’ and ‘Mein Bub!’ After the Marschallin’s morning levée after everyone has left, including Ochs (‘der aufgeblasne, schlechte Kerl’), the Marschallin realises that she is growing older, and she tells Octavian that sooner or later (‘heut oder morgen’) he will leave her for a woman his own age. Vehemently denying it, he leaves in a huff. But Ochs and the Marschallin have arranged for Octavian to present the silver rose to Ochs’ fiancée, Sophie. Almost as if fated, he and Sophie fall in love. After the predatory Ochs has been driven off, Octavian finds himself face to face with the Marschallin who sees immediately that he has transferred his affections. She releases him to love the girl she said he would find ‘heut oder morgen’, and Octavian and Sophie express their disbelief at what has happened so quickly in ‘Ist ein Traum’. The Marschallin takes her leave, but Mahomet comes in once last time to collect the handkerchief she has left behind.

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

A bit of drama

I loved this article by Hugh Laurie on what he likes about Los Angeles. He shares a lot of my enthusiasm.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/northamerica/usa/losangeles/10260419/Hugh-Lauries-Los-Angeles.html

But I guess I shouldn't be too Pollyanna-ish.

Today as I walking past the local high school I noticed three police cars parked outside the school. They were in a formation (two parallel either side of the entrance arches, one perpendicular on the kerb) which suggested regular attendance at hometime.

And then, the other day I saw this:

Curfew sign, LA

I don't recall seeing anything like this in benign Australia (perhaps the prohibition on liquor signs or anti liquor trafficking signs in Central Australia are closest). On the other hand, these are among the features that give this city its friction and intruiguing drama.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Christopher Rouse's "Der gerettete Alberich"

Continuing my series of program notes:

Christopher Rouse (born 1949)

Der gerettete Alberich – fantasy for percussionist and orchestra (1997)

At the end of Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s ‘Ring cycle’, Brünnhilde has ridden her horse into Siegfried’s funeral pyre, Valhalla has burned to the ground killing the gods and the Rhine has flooded the world, leaving the earth ripe for renewal. But what has happened to Alberich, the Nibelung-king, who set the chain of destruction in motion by cursing the ring? Wagner doesn’t say. Is he free to wreak havoc all over again?

Arthur Rackham's illustration of Alberich driving the Nibelungs

This is the question that inspired Christopher Rouse when he composed Der gerettete Alberich. What you have here is part-concerto. Composed for Evelyn Glennie, the work demands the soloist’s skill on a different set of percussion instruments in each movement – guiros and a bank of bongos, wood blocks, and other drums in the first; marimba and steel pan in the second; drum kit in the third. But the work is also programmatic. The title can be translated into English as ‘Alberich Saved’ and critic Colin Anderson has outlined the three movements in terms of ‘Alberich plotting his nefarious schemes, then reflecting on his mis-spent and, in some ways, tragic life, and then...on the rampage to once again seek the ring of power to make him lord of the world’. Rouse himself has described the work as ‘more of a fantasy for solo percussionist and orchestra’. But it’s also ‘a fantasy...on themes of Wagner’.

Use of quotation is nothing new in Rouse’s work – his Symphony No.1 incorporated the Adagio from Bruckner’s Symphony No.7; the Trombone Concerto cited music of Leonard Bernstein who had recently died. But Rouse’s use of quotation is not gimmickry. Rather it is a Mahlerian embrace of the world. Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed has spoken of Rouse incorporating ‘ uncontrived, the range of the musical experience typical of his generation’, and this includes Rock ‘n Roll, which no doubt inspired ‘Alberich’’s drum kit workout at the beginning of movement three.

You can cite impressive facts about Rouse. He’s currently the Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his Trombone Concerto and has won a Grammy Award for his Guitar Concerto, Concert de Gaudi (2002). What is perhaps more impressive is the genuine emotional experience he can provide to an audience. Early works could be speedy and harrowing; a change of direction saw him master the slow movement. Many listeners have remarked on a darkness in Rouse’s vision. The last page of his Symphony No.1 carries the inscription ‘de profundis clamavi’ (From the depths I have cried out to you, O Lord). But works from the late 1990s marked a ‘look towards the light’. Der gerettete Alberich could be thought to straddle both dark and light visions.

The work opens with the closing bars of Götterdämmerung (the ‘Redemption through Love’ motif). Then Alberich insinuates his return on the guiro. This segues into music to which Alberich slipped on rocks at the bottom of the Rhine in Das Rheingold. The return of this motif later, after much development of themes, signals a kind of recapitulation. The second movement is one of Rouse’s ‘wondrous’ slow movements. The appropriateness of Alberich’s ‘Renunciation of Love’ motif, played by a forlorn solo oboe after a downward string glissando, is almost uncanny. The dawn music followed by the baleful pronouncement of the ‘Power of the Ring’ motif leads into the third movement which begins sounding almost like an American high school football marching band. In this movement ‘Alberich’ wreaks maximum havoc, most obviously in timpani and percussion cadenzas on the Nibelung motif. It’s terrifying but not without humour when you realise that Rouse has used the ‘Alberich turning himself into a serpent’ motif to wind up tension in the bass.

It is marvellous the way Rouse weaves Alberich-related motives from Wagner’s masterwork into his own composition. But the work is not really an excuse to play ‘spot the quote’ (although you get the impression Rouse would not begrudge any audience that fun). It’s probably enough to acknowledge that this work exemplifies Rouse’s music as some of the most compelling, enjoyable and satisfying around today and that Der gerettete Alberich is a spectacular showcase for a percussion soloist.

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013

Dots on the literary map

San Francisco, on the weekend: Cutting down to Market Street, we came across this 'grill'.

"Why is it called 'the home of the Maltese Falcon'?" I asked the concierge. The answer: because Dashiell Hammett lived next door and it was in this establishment that he wrote most of the 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon.

Okay, fair enough, I know that in Australia you can still see where Patrick White lived in Centennial Park or the swimming pool in Fitzroy where Helen Garner's characters in Monkey Grip hung out, but it seems to me that in the US the literary map is much more densely populated.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

A reminder

I interviewed the San Francisco-based composer John Adams recently, ahead of concerts he's doing with the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras. One of the pieces he'll be conducting is his 2009 symphonic work, City Noir, partly inspired by the jazz-inflected scores of noir films set in Los Angeles in the 1940s.

I saw this sign in Reseda yesterday and it reminded me of one of Adams' statements that didn't make it into the final interview: "Los Angeles is one of the most ethnically-rich urban environments in the world"

Several decades of signage

Downtown LA

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Scriabin's Piano Concerto

Continuing my series of program notes:

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)

Piano Concerto in F sharp minor, Op.20

Allegro

Andante

Allegro moderato

The Russian Alexander Scriabin pursued a fascinating musical career. Beginning as a composer of Chopinesque piano miniatures, in his last works he entered the realm of atonal harmony that was soon to be filled by Schoenberg and Bartók. Moreover he sought impossible goals inspired by a vision that continued on where Wagnerian music drama left off. The older Scriabin wasn’t content just to create a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk blending all the arts into an operatic festival that could inspire the whole community, as Wagner intended with his Ring cycle; Scriabin sought to blend massive orchestral sound with colours and eventually fragrances in a work so powerful it might end the world. 1912’s Prometheus did in fact use a ‘colour organ’, but, ironically, Scriabin died of blood poisoning from a pimple on his lip before he could realise his more messianic visions. In the meantime, he had experienced probably the most extreme stylistic progress of any composer in the western repertoire.

Alexander Scriabin

Grandiosity might not be apparent in music of the younger Scriabin, who, like Chopin, was also a superb miniaturist. In listening to this concerto you can understand contemporary pen portraits of Scriabin as an effete dandy, brought up by two coddling grandmothers and a maiden aunt. Although Scriabin went to the military academy that his father had attended, he was spared some of the more rigorous duties. He ended up at the Moscow conservatory, studying with Zverev the hard task-master who also taught Rachmaninov and gaining second place to Rachmaninov on graduation in 1892.

Like Rachmaninov, Scriabin was a fantastic pianist. This concerto was written for his own repertoire. It was conceived in the throes of an infatuation with ‘M.K.F.’, a girl from Düsseldorf. By the time it was ready for scoring and copying Scriabin was on the verge of marriage to Vera Ivanovna Isakovich, a fine pianist herself who prepared the two-piano version of this concerto, but not someone approved of as a match by Scriabin’s guardians. Indeed, the changes in Scriabin’s personal life measured against the unprecedented high-speed at which this concerto was composed gives you some sense of how quickly Scriabin’s emotional moods and allegiances swung at this time; how rudderless he could seem. Scriabin’s aunt, Lyubov’ Aleksandrovna, sought the publisher Belayev’s help in discouraging the marriage to Vera. She ended a December 1896 progress report on that score by telling Belayev that Scriabin had just cut his fingernails without her having to remind him!

Despite the speedy conception of this work, Belayev had continually to cajole Scriabin for the orchestrations, corrections and other more tedious preparations prior to publication. He also wanted Scriabin to send the score to Rimsky-Korsakov for comments and ‘everything must be done by the 20^th of May [1897], if Safonoff is to try the Concerto out on his pupils before vacation’. Scriabin eventually supplied movement one. After quickly looking through it, Rimsky confessed to incomprehension and criticised ‘its disorder and inaccuracies of musical etiquette.’ Mortified, Scriabin answered with a pledge to exterminate his carelessness, but placed the letter in an envelope addressed to the composer Liadov, while Rimsky got Liadov’s letter. ‘Is it possible that you find yourself blowing your foot when you mean to blow your nose?,’ his frustrated publisher Belayev bellowed.

Rimsky was equally critical of the second and third movements, but it’s difficult to understand why he was so scathing. More successfully than his idol Chopin, Scriabin achieves an orchestration that complements the fulsome solo part.

Scriabin’s biographer, Faubion Bowers, describes the work as one of ‘elegance, grace and ineffable delicacy of craftsmanship....a concerto for soloist and fifty other musicians with constant rubato or irregular rhythmic flow, and much of it to be played con sordino [muted], with the soft pedal down as well. Yet, it is written in shade, as the opening horns announce and few shafts of sunlight penetrate...’ Those that do, however, have an intensity which we have come to expect from Russian romanticism.

The work’s second movement consists of four contrasting variations ‘full of ingenious melismata and crystalline figuration’. Bowers describes the folktune-like theme as the Russian soul speaking softly but audibly. The last movement is a polonaise, although perhaps not obviously so. The second theme provides some of the few instances of sweeping Russian lyricism in this urbane work.

In the end, those who opposed Scriabin’s marriage to Vera failed in their quest to stop it. Scriabin and Vera married in August 1897. In Odessa on their Crimean honeymoon, Scriabin premiered the concerto with a local orchestra conducted by Safanoff.