Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Of sleep and dreams ... exploring the wonder and terror of the night.
Programme Notes
by Andrea Budgey
Andrew Ager: excerpts from Ellis Portal
Benjamin Britten: Evening, Morning, Night
Jean Coulthard:Two Night Songs
George Crumb: Night Pieces I
Laura Kaminsky: Twilight Settings
Camille Saint-Saëns: Violons dans le soir
Vally Weigl: Black Arch of the Night
Night is the time of rest and restoration, but also of shadows and uncertainty – sounds and movements are obscure, loneliness is intensified, and dreams can be both lovely and terrible. The selection of works on this programme covers an extraordinary range of the aspects of night, as seen in nature, in an Indonesian fishing village, in the city of Toronto, and in the extraordinary dream-images of interior landscapes.
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Andrew Ager (1962-) – Three songs from Ellis Portal, for soprano, baritone, clarinet/bass clarinet, and string quartet (2001)
Ellis Portal is a suite of songs based on poems by Rex Deverell, described by the composer as “...vignettes that describe the city, in all its beauty and squalour”. The complete set was commissioned by the Talisker Players, and first performed in February of 2002.
The Queen Car at Night depicts a ride “across the midnight city”, and the odd, isolated figures who populate the self-contained universe of the streetcar. The accompaniment alternates steady, almost mechanical, movement with sudden lurches and inexplicable stops. The David Dunlop Observatory, a duet, lifts our eyes upward in an effort to glimpse the seemingly eternal stars - an effort frustrated by the haze of the city’s more transitory lights. The sustained figures of the instrumental parts – particularly the bass clarinet – against the rapidly declaimed vocal lines remind us of the vast space which lies behind the stars. Another duet, entitled 3 A.M., conveys the broad expanse of the city as well as the particularity of one trudging pedestrian’s journey. Most of the accompaniment is steadily, inexorably rhythmic (more enervated than energetic), but its forward impetus finally slows and dissipates with the coming of dawn.
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Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) - Evening, Morning, Night, for voice & harp (1945)
The poet and dramatist Ronald Duncan wrote to Britten in 1944, asking the composer to provide music for a masque and anti-masque on the Temptation of Saint Antony. The two had already collaborated on a Pacifist March in 1937, and this earlier acquaintance may have persuaded the composer, then in the middle of work on Peter Grimes, to agree. His response included the protest:
...Here I am up to my eyes in opera & spiritual crises & you expect me to drop everything... Still, maybe I’ll have a shot (but no promises), if you’d be so gracious as to let me know what kind of background, accompaniment there’ll be...? What kind of voice...? – it makes a difference, you know. But seriously, I wish you’d give me more notice...
Despite Britten’s exasperation, he eventually produced music for the piece, including these three songs for the character of the novice Julian. These pieces are atmospheric but restrained evocations of the times of day for which they are named; the melody and accompaniment together seem to efface themselves in the service of Duncan’s richly allusive and elusive texts.
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Jean Coulthard (1908-2000) – Two Night Songs, for baritone, string quartet, and piano (1960/1972)
Jean Coulthard’s Two Night Songs are settings of two unrelated texts by the British poets Harold Monro and Hilaire Belloc. The first, The Nightingale, contrasts the apparent stasis of night with the uncontrollable world of dreams and the untrammelled singing of the nightingale, whose virtuosic melody is represented in the rapid figurations of the piano. These figures underlie much of the song, particularly those portions in which the bird’s song is described; the string quartet, on the other hand, echoes the more declamatory movements of the vocal part. All wind themselves to silence with the coming of dawn, in a final shimmer of tremolos.
Tarantella begins reflectively, but soon sweeps into a mood of ironically energetic nostalgia. The brisk, dancing alternation of 6/8 and 4/8 metres underlines the playfulness of the rhyme-scheme, and the almost inconsequential eccentricity of the words themselves. The final Lento dramatico recalls the opening, and emphasises that the swirling activity of the piece is merely a memory of figures now dead, overcome by the inexorable movement of history.
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George Crumb (1929 - ) - Night Music I, for voice, piano, celeste, and percussion (1963/1976)
Night Music I was the first of George Crumb’s famous settings of the poems of Federico García Lorca. The piece originally included improvisatory sections, but the composer became dissatisfied with the way in which these were realised in performance, and replaced them, in the 1976 version, with “quasi-improvisatory” interludes. The work is structured as a large arch: the outer instrumental movements (Notturno 1, 2, 6, and 7) are light and delicate, while the central Notturno (4) is full of wildly driving rhythms. The Lorca settings (Notturno 3 and 5) are the two “buttress points” of the piece. Crumb has written:
The work as a whole is a projection of the violently contrasting moods of the two poems: La Luna Asoma (The Moon Rises), with its aura of almost ecstatic lyricism, and the intense, sardonic Gacela de la Terrible Presencia (Gacela* of the Terrible Presence). The conflict of mood remains unresolved at the conclusion of the work... I have endeavored to enhance Lorca's surrealistic images by means of a highly coloured chromaticism and unusual juxtapositions of timbre, register and rhythmic forms.
The extraordinarily colourful variety of percussion effects and extended piano and vocal techniques used in this work were to become characteristic of what Crumb called his “mature and representative style.” *The gacela is an Arabic poetic form.
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Laura Kaminsky (1956 - ) - Twilight Settings, for soprano, string quartet, percussion, (1985/1988)
New-York-based composer Laura Kaminsky began Twilight Settings during a residency at the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts. This evocative and theatrical work consists of settings of Indonesian boat-songs (in English translation) about the coming of night, accompanied by string quartet, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, pitched drums, glass chimes, and gong; the vocal part includes speech and Sprechstimme as well as more lyrical melody, and the singer begins and ends the piece offstage. Kaminsky describes the overall movement of the songs:
The work depicts, on the most immediate level, a musical picture of the magic of twilight, the time when the earth gives off an eerie glow, when the sea sparkles, the sky shimmers, the animal kingdom retreats from activity, and the natural order of the universe during daylight hours is upset. Beyond that, it presents a human world devoid of that magic, a world where twilight, and the inevitable darkness which follows, are harbingers of death. The piece ends in the human world, where there is no singing, only a lonely dirge supporting an echo of the opening melody.
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Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) – Violons dans le soir, for baritone, violin, and piano (1907)
Violons dans le soir, despite its brevity, might be called a miniature cantata. It sets a text from Les Eblouissements, by Saint-Saëns’ younger contemporary, the Comtesse Anna de Noailles (1876-1933). The poem presents the evening music of the violin as a profound disturbance in the calm of the natural world – not unlike nocturnal human passion – la plus vive torture, without restraint, even explosive. The contrasting moods of the five short stanzas are differentiated in tempo, in tonality, and in texture – the voice and the violin obligato sometimes alternate, and at other times combine to intensify the description of the violin’s emotional effects.
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Vally Weigl (1894-1982) – Black Arch of the Night, for voice and clarinet/viola obligato (1979)
Vally (Valerie) Weigl studied piano and composition in Vienna, and was teaching at the university’s Institute of Musicology in 1938, when she and her husband fled the Nazi threat and settled in the United States. In addition to composing, teaching, and performing, Weigl took on a new career in music therapy, and played a major role in the development of the discipline; she was also deeply involved in the pacifist movement.
Black Arch of the Night was one of Weigl’s last works. It set five poems (four of them heard in this performance) on aspects of night, contrasting darkness and the brightness of the stars, stasis and the mysterious movements of the nocturnal world. The texture is spare – voice and a single obligato instrument (Weigl provided the option of clarinet or viola, and this performance uses them in alternation), but the instrumental figures create a rich variety of accompaniments to the recitativo style of the vocal part. Lethe, on a text of H.D. Doolittle, evokes the forgetful loneliness of night and death, but Under the Moon sets a poem of Denise Levertov’s, in which nature at rest is depicted somehow in balance with humanity. Weigl’s deep feeling for nature is reflected in The Screech Owl; poet Frances Brogan Richardson describes the owl’s cry as a call to human advocacy for the natural world. Horses at Night (on a poem of Rosalie Regen) represents the wild gallop of the heavenly bodies in their courses. The entire cycle moves from individual experience through engagement with nature, focusing finally on celestial movements too large for human beings to comprehend fully.
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