Love Letters
An unabashed celebration of love, in all its many forms
Tuesday February 1 & Wednesday February 2, 2011 • 8pm.
Pre-Concert talks at 7:15pm
Programme notes
by Andrea Budgey
STEPHEN BROWN: Shadow of a Leaf, text by Li Po, Hsin Ch'i-chi and others
ARVO PÄRT: Es sang vor langen Jahren, poetry by Clemens Maria von Brentano
ANDRÉ PREVIN: Two Remembrances, poetry by Else Lasker-Schüler and Frau Ava
ROGER QUILTER: To Julia, poetry by Robert Herrick
ROBERTA STEPHEN: Seven Words of Love, text by Hadjewitch of Brabant and Roberta Stephen
ROGER C. VOGEL: Love Letters, text by Gustave Flaubert, Margaret Laurence, Ogden Nash and others
In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, this evening’s programme presents works about love: not simply love-poems, but communications between lovers, or texts framed as such. They cover a remarkable emotional territory, from romantic sensuality to ecstasies of mystical love. The form of a love-letter presupposes the absence of the beloved (or, in the spiritual texts, an impression of absence), so longing is perhaps the most consistently recurring theme of the programme. It is interesting to observe that the featured composers have almost all made frequent use of duet texture in the instrumental accompaniment, as if to focus attention more closely on the interplay of personalities. There is also significant alternation of duet and trio textures, not necessarily to suggest the complication of jealousy, but in acknowledgement that human relationships (even with the Divine) are, in themselves, living, dynamic entities, which can leave traces in literary form.
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Stephen Brown (1948- ): Shadow of a Leaf for voice and marimba (2005)
Stephen Brown spent 20 years as a private music teacher, jazz piano player, and taxi driver before turning to composition. He has been head of the Theory and Composition Department at the Victoria Conservatory of Music since 1996. He is the artistic director and conductor of the Sidney Classical Orchestra in Sidney, British Columbia, and is also busy as an examiner and adjudicator.
Shadow of a Leaf, a 10-movement through-composed song-cycle for soprano and marimba, was commissioned by Darryl and Dianne Edwards as a wedding gift for soprano Jennie Such (who performed Brown's elegy MAXWELL, Larry Douglas on an earlier Talisker programme) and percussionist Nicholas Coulter, in 2005. The text is assembled from Chinese poems dating between 800 BC and 1900 AD, and describes, as the composer puts it, “the awakening, desires, frustrations, and dreams of a young woman falling deeply in love for the first time”. The vocal part moves, for the most part, in smoothly declamatory eighth- and quarter-notes, in largely conjunct patterns, while the marimba accompanies, punctuates, and varies the mood, with suggestions of “oriental” gapped scales in its figurations.
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Arvo Pärt (1935- ): Es sang vor langen Jahren for voice, violin, and viola (1984)
Since the 1970s, Pärt's work has been characterised by a style which critics have designated “mystic minimalism”, influenced by the melodic shapes of Eastern Orthodox chant and the tonal structures of medieval and Renaissance polyphony. The composer himself refers to the slowly-changing transparent sonorities – heard most strikingly in his choral works – as “tintinnabuli”, the sonorous ringing of bells.
Es sang vor langen Jahren employs many of the “tintinnabuli” techniques on an intimate, even miniature scale. The violin and viola support the vocal line intermittently with delicate sustained chords, with silence playing a role of almost equal importance in the texture. The vocal line itself is both modal and angular, like a folk tune which has been stretched to draw attention to the deeper resonances of Brentano's superficially simple text. The interlude and coda (for strings alone) feature greater rhythmic movement, but preserve an overall impression of stillness, while the long absence of the voice from the texture seems to underline the lover's absence from the scene.
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André Previn (1929- ): Two Remembrances for voice, alto flute, and piano (1995)
Previn's Two Remembrances was first performed at the renowned American musical venue Tanglewood by Sylvia McNair, soprano, and Sandra Church, alto flute, with the composer at the piano. The two texts are by the German-Jewish expressionist poet, playwright, and essayist Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) and the medieval religious poet Ava (1060-1127), the first named female writer in German.
The texts are a study in contrasts, and Previn's treatment underscores the difference in tone, while creating a coherent whole. The dark sensuality of Lasker-Schüler's “Ein Liebeslied” is highlighted by chromaticism, rhythmic complexity, and rapid changes of texture and tempo, suggestive of the friction between personalities bound by desire. The spiritual eroticism of Ava's “Lyric”, reminiscent of the Song of Songs, receives a more transparent setting, in which the material shared by the voice and instruments is more smoothly related and interwoven.
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Roger Quilter (1877-1953): To Julia for voice, string quartet, and piano (1905)
This quintessentially English composer of art song first came to prominence at the age of 23, when his Songs of the Sea were premiered in London. The cycle To Julia was first performed five years later by Gervase Elwes, accompanied by the composer. It sets six love lyrics by the Cavalier poet Robert Herrick, with an instrumental prelude and interlude. The text-setting is fluid and sensitive, following the delicate rhythms of the poems, and presenting each song as a small jewel of lightly-worn sensuality. Quilter later made an instrumental arrangement of the piano accompaniment, and it is this rarely-heard version which is featured on this evening's programme.
Quilter's later life was plagued by physical and psychological distresses of various kinds, but he was a supporter of younger musicians, and in the 1930s helped to finance the escape of Austrian Jews from the Nazis. His dramatic works never achieved much public acclaim, in part because they fell between genres of opera and musical comedy, but his songs – wistfully lyrical with colourful chromatic harmonies – were extremely successful during his lilfetime.
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Roberta Stephen (1931- ): Seven Words of Love for voice, clarinet, and violin (2005)
Roberta Stephen, currently president of New Works Calgary, is also an award-winning teacher of singing, vocal pedagogy, theory, and composition. Her vocal, choral, and chamber works have been widely performed, with recent performances in Calgary and New York.
According to Stephen, Seven Words of Love began as “a calligraphic idea”, inspired by the manuscripts of the 14th-century French composer Baude Cordier: the heart-shaped design of one of his polyphonic chansons suggested the structural use of words for love in various European languages. The outer movements feature such words, and abstract sounds, and they, along with the seven inner movements, include texts by the 13th-century mystic Hadewijch of Brabant, who borrowed the erotic vocabulary of her secular counterparts to portray the soul’s relationship with God. Stephen has selected and arranged the lyrics so that they might equally effectively depict the troubled course of a human relationship.
The accompanying instruments, violin and clarinet (both B-flat and bass), are used with restraint: movements 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are duets for a single instrument and voice, and even in the tutti movements, the textures are, for the most part, austerely transparent.
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Roger C. Vogel (1947- ): Love Letters for voice, violin, and piano (2002)
The American composer Roger Vogel has been a professor at the University of Georgia since 1976, and his works have been performed in recitals and festivals in the United States, South America, and Europe. The eponymous work for this programme, Vogel’s Love Letters sets excerpts from letters by an extraordinary variety of famous (and not-so-famous) writers; the selections featured in this programme are by Margaret Laurence, Pliny the Younger, Catherine the Great, John Steinbeck, a Beatles fan known only as Mary L., Ogden Nash, and Gustave Flaubert.
As the composer puts it, these texts were chosen “to represent many different aspects of the universal emotion of love: from longing, exuberance, excitement, and playfulness to sorrow and despair”, and the settings are accordingly richly varied, replete with contrasts of tempo, texture, and tonality, even in those movements in which a single instrument accompanies the voice. The cycle begins and ends with lyrics which depict the sheer physicality of letters and their effect on the emotions, from the point of view of the recipient (in the case of Laurence) and the sender (Flaubert).
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