MasterWorks I: Organ-ic Brilliance

HERE WE GO!!

Year twenty-one with this incredible orchestra is about to get off and running this evening. But instead of a bombastic, “in your face” beginning to the season, I have been inspired to bring you a more intimate program that we can share on a potentially deeper level.

Preparing for the Poulenc Concerto for Organ with Dr. Gregory Hand, (and having an amazingly talented pianist wife) I wanted to delve into works of music that were inspired or even transcribed for orchestra from keyboard instruments—piano and organ.

What I‘ve discovered is some truly amazing music. Gorgeous harmonies and intimate orchestrations that I believe will become truly existential here in this space of Wesley.

This season will bring all sorts of works to the concert stage. Descriptive music could be considered a prevalent theme for our journey this season. Exploring how composers utilized concert ‘suites’ to tell their stories will continue into our classically inspired concert of love and adoration.  Symphonic music has always been a ‘go-to‘ when you want to set the mood with your partner for a romantic evening. This year‘s “A Delicious Combination” will most assuredly give you some ideas.

And then I get to piece together multiple movements from my favorite Beethoven symphonies into one cohesive, exciting concertthat will also showcase our young artist competition winner for this year. Awesome combination!

We‘ll close out the season with a wonderful collaboration with the Muscatine Art Center and bring you music that was inspired by rivers. Artwork from their expansive collection will connect us to the visual inspiration as the music connects us aurally.

I hope you‘re as excited as I am for this MasterWorks season and I look forward to seeing each and everyone of you this year!

Lyric Pieces, nos. 1 & 2, op. 68 – Grieg

• Evening in the mountains
• At the cradle

Intermezzo, no. 1, op. 117 – Brahms/Colnot

• Andante moderato
• Piu Adagio III. Un poco piu andante

[movements played without long pause in between]

Eight Short Pieces, nos. 1-4 – Franck

• Trés lent
• Andantino poco allegretto
• Poco lento
• Molto moderato

INTERMISSION

Minuet, op. 21 – Elgar
Concerto for Organ in G minor – Poulenc
Dr. Gregory Hand, organ

Lyric Pieces, nos. 1 & 2, op. 68 – Grieg

In a letter to a friend, Grieg wrote, “…although I am currently out of the country, my thoughts are only about Norway and Norwegians, about all our youthful pugnacity up there. Yes, it is like the music of strong triads compared to all the sugary seventh chords down here.”

Grieg contemplated writing an article titled “What is Norwegian?” His definition suggested that “when Norwegian music is performed in such a way that it has the effect of strengthening the love of our country, so that people develop a better understanding of our native art, then the effort to achieve this result is dictated by nationalism. This I say from the bottom of my heart.”

In 1897, Grieg was involved in planning a large Norwegian music festival in Bergen. Grieg was looking to engage Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam; however, critics suggested that a Norwegian Festival should feature Norwegian musicians. Grieg was adamant, declaring that Norwegian music should be played as excellently as possible, “whether this goal requires Norwegians, Germans, Japanese, or Dutchmen makes no difference to me.”

The initial committee disbanded, and the Festival was cancelled. However, wheels started turning behind the scenes, and Grieg was given authority to engage the Concertgebouw the very next morning. Thus, the Bergan Music Festival was born and first held from June 26th to July 3rd, 1898. It was a huge success, and “now, in both Bergen and Oslo, people are saying we must have a better orchestra! That, for me, is the greatest triumph!”

In terms of composing, however, Grieg was starting to feel the weight of his years as he completed the ninth and penultimate collection of Lyric Pieces.  Published in 1899, the set contains a mixture of salon compositions laced with harmonic subtleties, such as “At Your Feet,” and the “Melancholy Waltz.” Here, Grieg leaves Norway behind and presents small gems of expressive beauty.

“At the Cradle” is a tender nursery song that only Grieg could have written; it almost cries out for lyrics. The star of the set, however, is the tender “Evening in the Mountains.”

Grieg went on to arrange “Evening in the Mountains” for oboe, horn, and strings. He reports home from a concert in Amsterdam. “In Evening in the Mountains, I was thinking of you. It was an absolute mirage. Even I was thrilled. I had seated the oboist far back on the platform so no one could see him. He played so beautifully, so freely, so like an improvisation that when the magnificent string orchestra came in, it was as if they took their cue from the oboe, and the conception was identical.”

Intermez- zo, no. 1, op. 117 – Brahms/Colnot

Composed in 1892, the three Intermezzi for solo piano, Op. 117 are among the final works of Johannes Brahms. Filled with wistful nostalgia, they were written two years after Brahms‘ formal retirement at the age of 57.

The critic Eduard Hanslick described these brief autumnal works as “monologues” of a “thoroughly personal and subjective character…pensive, graceful, dreamy, resigned, and elegiac.” Brahms once described them as “three lullabies to my sorrow.”

Along with their Op. 116-118 companion pieces, they are filled with echoes of the famous “Clara Theme” which ran as a motivic thread throughout the music of Robert Schumann. Brahms sent each newly written intermezzo to Clara Schumann, with whom years earlier he had had a relationship “bordering between friendship and love.” After playing the music, Clara noted, “In these pieces, I at last feel musical life stir once again in my soul.”

There is a visceral sense of the gentle rocking motion of a lullaby in the first Intermezzo, set in E-flat major. The score contains two lines from an old Scottish ballad, Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament: “Balow, my babe, lie still and sleep! It grieves me sore to see thee weep.” An occasionally canonic conversation unfolds amid sensuous, wide-open inner voices.

In tonight‘s performance, we hear an orchestration for strings only written by conductor and composer Cliff Colnot.

Minuet, op. 21 – Elgar

Sir Edward Elgar occupies a strange position in his own country. For many he is associated with British, or, more specifically, English Imperialism, epitomized in ‘Land of Hope and Glory‘, a patriotic anthem now sung with gusto and tongue in cheek on the last night of the London Promenade Concerts each year.

The image of an Edwardian country gentleman, with his dogs and horses is misleading. Elgar was the son of a shopkeeper, in the days when to be in trade marked a man for life and escape from this background earned a man the name of counter-jumper. He married the daughter of a retired Indian Army general, a pupil of his, nine years his senior, and it was she who gave him the necessary support, morally and socially, that finally helped him to make his way in Edwardian society. Nevertheless, musically Elgar was far nearer to the German romantic composers of his time than to the developing vein of English music, with its pastoral reliance on newly collected folk-song.

Edward Elgar was born near Worcester, in the West of England, in 1857. His father was a piano-tuner, organist, violinist and eventually a shopkeeper, and it was from him that Elgar acquired much of his musical training. He at first made his living as a free-lance musician, teaching, playing the violin and organ, and conducting local amateur orchestras and choirs. His first success away from his own West Country, after earlier abortive attempts, was in 1897 with his Imperial March, written for the royal jubilee celebrating sixty glorious years of Queen Victoria. His reputation was further enhanced by the so-called Enigma Varia-tions of 1899. The oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, which followed in 1900, was less successful at its first performance in Birmingham, but later became a staple element in British choral repertoire. His publishers Novello had not always been particularly generous in their treatment of him, but he came to rely on the encouragement of the German-born Augustus Johannes Jaeger, a reader for the firm, who found in Elgar‘s music something much more akin to the music of his native country.

Public recognition brought Elgar many honours, his position sealed by the composition of music for the coronation of King Edward VII. He was awarded honorary doctorates by universities old and new and in 1904 received the accolade of a knighthood. Later official honors included the Order of Merit in the coronation honours of 1911 and finally, in 1931, a baronetcy. Acceptance, as represented by the musical establishment of the country, was confirmed by the award of the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1925, after an earlier award to Delius.

Elgar‘s work had undergone significant changes in the later years of the 1914-18 war, a development evident in his Cello Concerto of 1919. His wife‘s death in 1920 removed a support on which he had long relied, and the last fourteen years of his life brought a dimin-ishing inspiration and energy in his work as a composer, although he continued to meet demands for his appearance as a conductor in both the concert-hall and recording studio. He died in 1934.

Inspired by his country‘s culture and landscape as well as his colleagues on the Continent, English composer Edward Elgar produced an impressive output of music throughout his career. Elgar was born into a family of little means; his father, an organist, owned a small music shop, and made sure that all of his seven children received a musical upbringing.

The Minuet, Op. 21, was originally a piano piece, written in 1897 for the son of a friend, Paul Kilburn. The following year Elgar made an orchestral version of the piece, which was first heard in New Brighton in 1899, conducted by Granville Bantock.

Concerto for Organ in G minor – Poulenc

Francis Poulenc will forever be remembered by students as a member of the French group, ‘Les Six,’ of the nineteen twenties–a coterie of close friends who had little in common stylistically. This misleading appellation was given to a group of young French composers with connections to Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau who espoused a musical style that was the very antithesis of the impassioned, heavy style of late Romanticism. Typical of the country and time, they were a cheeky lot, with a penchant for light, simple, even sarcastic compositions that were heavily influenced by French popular music. Of the so-called six, only Poulenc, and, of course, Darius Milhaud, went on to significant careers as composers, although Arthur Honegger enjoyed some success.

Poulenc had a gift for melody, and the evidence is in his many songs; he was a connoisseur of poetry, and his songs are a valuable contribution to the genre. On the other hand, he evinced little interest in exploring the limits of twentieth-century harmonic style he famously once said that there was no harm in “using other people‘s chords.” He also made significant contributions to the century‘s chamber, solo piano music, and orchestral music. His big operatic success is the dark drama, Dialogues des Carmélites (1956), the story of Carmelite nuns guillotined during the French Revolution. But, his other side is represented by the delightful and witty satire, Les Mamelles des Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresa, 1944)–an irreverent comment upon feminism and the French government‘s encouragement of family growth. Perhaps his most lasting contribution, however, is in sacred choral music, to which he turned in the late 1930s. The death of a close friend, as well as the grimmer world situation, led Poulenc to a closer commitment to Catholicism, and the result was a decided change from the earlier roguish the Gloria, are familiar to many.

His organ concerto was written in 1938, on commission by the Princess Edmond de Polignac, an American-born member of the Singer sewing-machine fortune who played the organ. It consists of seven sections, played without a break, in the style of a fantasia, with the organ participating, not so much as a contrasting soloist, but more or less taking the place of the absent brass. The opening flourish alludes to J.S. Bach‘s famous G minor Fantasia, which gesture returns from time to time. Other sections are lighter, some would say “popular” in nature–a very real reflection of the acknowledged ambivalence in Poulenc‘s personality between depression and gaiety. The debt to Baroque composers also extends to the famous North German predecessor to Bach, Dietrich Buxtehude, but, of course, all of this is filtered through the lens of a complex, intellectual Parisian. All in all, the concerto, while certainly characteristic of the turn toward the serious undergone by Poulenc, nevertheless maintains throughout fleeting evocations of the irreverent rogue of his youth and his gift for lyricism.