the Great Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, in words and music
Tuesday and Wednesday, April 17 and 18, 2012
Programme notes
by Andrea Budgey and Laura Jones.
Alexander Rapoport: Shakespeare’s Aviary
Igor Stravinsky: Three Songs from William Shakespeare
Mark Richards: That Time of Year
Jean Coulthard: Sonnet 91
Howard Blake: Shakespeare Songs
The Breath of Kings
In Act V of The Merchant of Venice, the young lovers Jessica and Lorenzo meet by moonlight, and Lorenzo responds to the performance of musicians:
The man that hath no music in himself
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils,
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Given the importance of music in Shakespeare's writing – in allusion, description, and the use of live music on stage – it seems safe to imagine that the views Shakespeare attributed to Lorenzo were not far removed from his own. Original (or near-contemporary) music for most of the lyrics in the plays survives, And since the 18th century, composers of many lands have also been moved to creativity by Shakespeare's work, on the one hand by the plots and characterizations of the plays – in roughly 400 operas – and on the other by the beauty and precision of Shakespeare's language itself. The songs from the plays have been set with sweetness, pathos, and humour, and the intellectual toughness and implicit drama of the sonnets have inspired music of great sophistication and complexity.
This evening's programme presents all these facets of the relationship between the texts of Shakespeare and the music of others: lyrics set by Blake, Stravinsky, and Rapoport, sonnets by Coulthard and Richards, and dramatic structures explored and juxtaposed with musical commentary in The Breath of Kings.
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Alexander Rapoport (1957- ): Shakespeare’s Aviary for voice, clarinet, viola, and piano
Toronto composer Alexander Rapoport studied at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, and at the University of Toronto. He teaches composition and music theory at the Royal Conservatory of Music and at the University of Toronto. Rapoport has received commissions for chamber, vocal and orchestral music, musical comedy, and incidental music for theatre and film. The Talisker Players performed his Northscapes in 2001, Chicago Portraits in 2002 and 2009, and Jabberwocky in 2011. Of Shakespeare’s Aviary, the composer writes:
The imagery and language of English verse are often so rich that the composer must struggle to find a justification for setting a poem: Why not simply read it? … I chose the easy way: I looked for poems that were intended to be sung. I was immediately attracted to song texts in Shakespeare’s plays. … All I needed was a unifying concept, and I hit upon birds. This gave me the two songs from Love’s Labours Lost that frame the cycle, and "Hark! Hark! the Lark" from Cymbeline. I added Marcellus's lines from Hamlet, about the cock crying at night, even though they were not intended as a song text, because of the beauty and simplicity of the image.
The outer two movements, both from Love's Labours Lost, echo one another musically, using much of the same musical material, and contrasting the rising call of the owl with the falling one of the cuckoo (the same notes, reversed). "Bird of Dawning" features an interrupted canon between the voice and the clarinet/viola combination, against an eerily atmospheric piano accompaniment. "The Lark" is the most exuberant song of the set, its effervescent instrumental figuration a perfect vehicle for Shakespeare's lovely aubade.
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Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Three Songs from William Shakespeare, for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet, and viola (1953)
Stravinsky's Shakespeare settings are dedicated to the "Evenings on the Roof" concert series in Los Angeles, which premiered the songs in 1954, under the direction of Robert Craft. Craft had become an associate of Stravinsky's a few years before (he had, in fact, moved into the composer's house), and had persuaded him to develop an interest in the serialism of the Second Viennese School – in particular the work of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern.
The three songs in this set are among the first fruits of Stravinsky's exploration of serialist techniques, which he applied in a highly individual manner: melodic and rhythmic sequences are both tightly controlled, although not in quite as thorough and mathematical a way as that employed by some exponents of the movement – the critic Paul Griffiths referred to the songs as "proto-serialist". They are also the composer's first work for solo voice in roughly three decades.
Throughout "Music to hear", the voice and instruments give way to one another with exquisite deference, while in "Full fathom five", the closer interlocking of parts evokes the inexorable weight of water. "When Daisies pied" is the most varied of the songs in texture, as well as the briskest in tempo; the final passage for flute and clarinet duet provides a rapid but nevertheless restrained conclusion to the set.
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Mark Richards: “That Time of Year” from The Blackening Landscape for voice, flute, piano, and cello (2008)
Toronto composer Mark Richards is currently on faculty at the University of Lethbridge, and working on two operas: one on Laura Secord, for Music Niagara, to be performed in a workshop in 2012 and in a fully staged version in 2013; and a children's opera on the story of Thumbelina, commissioned by Off Centre Music Salon. His opera Hamlet was performed as part of Stratford Summer Music in 2008. At the same time, he was working on The Blackening Landscape, a song-cycle depicting the “exploitation and pollution of the natural world since the Industrial Revolution”, which premiered in 2009, and from which "That Time of Year" is excerpted. The sonnet describes the human decline of old age, but it also gives an apt account of the desolation of the environment. The text is declaimed over slowly-unfolding instrumental textures which shift back and forth between transparency (including frequent use of open fifths) and chromatic complexity.
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Jean Coulthard (1908-2000): "Sonnet 91" from Three Sonnets of Shakespeare for voice and string quartet (1977)
British Columbia composer and teacher Jean Coulthard was a major force in Canadian music composition for several decades, during which time she not only taught, but continued to refine her own work by seeking the advice of other composers, most notably Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Béla Bartók, and Nadia Boulanger. The Three Sonnets of Shakespeare were composed for Maureen Forrester, and first performed in Vancouver in 1978. "Sonnet 91" matches Shakespeare’s acerbic and mercurial text with driving rhythms, sweeping melodic arcs, and dense and dissonant textures, making the tranquillo interlude and the final whispered "turn" doubly effective. The poem is part of the series of sonnets addressed to a mysterious "Fair Youth", about whose identity there has been a great deal of inconclusive speculation.
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Howard Blake (1938- ): Shakespeare Songs, opus 378, for mezzo-soprano and string quartet, (1987)
British composer, pianist, and conductor Howard Blake has produced a substantial body of choral and orchestral music, although he is best known for his film music, including the scores for The Duellists, The Snowman, A Month in the Country, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Several of his Shakespeare Songs began life in simple settings for use in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1985 production of As You Like It. The first published version was for tenor and string quartet; this performance has been adapted for mezzo-soprano.
The songs combine a gentle lyricism with restrained syncopations and metrical variety to point the text, and Blake employs dissonance with similarly effective economy to create atmosphere, as in the interaction of the voice with the violins in the sparser sections of "Lament". The overall tonal palette is reminiscent of some of Benjamin Britten's works in the same genre. Blake has described his own philosophy of composition:
I believe … that the composer's function is to try to balance and reconcile the conflicting elements of society within his music, and that by doing so in an accessible and comprehensible language he may then hope to have the vision to uplift and inspire society at large. I believe that the composer can only achieve this function by working with humility as a craftsman responding to the requirements of the day.
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The Breath of Kings: Text from Richard II, Henry IV, parts I and II, and Henry V. Music adapted by Laura Jones, from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi
The Breath of Kings grew out of a project that has long beguiled Groundling Theatre Company founder Graham Abbey: a unification of the four plays comprising what's come to be known as the Henriad – Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. The piece is essentially a distillation of the Henriad – a series of key scenes which map the arc of the story. Intended as the starting point for a more expansive project, it was developed in workshops at Massey College, and given a private performance there in March 2011.
From the beginning of Talisker's collaboration in this project, Mr. Abbey discussed with us how the metaphor of the passing seasons applied to these four history plays – from the wintry desolation of Richard, rhyming himself out of a crown and eventually out of his life, to the bright summer of Henry V's dual victories on the battlefield of Agincourt and in the boudoir of French Kate.
Vivaldi's Four Seasons seemed a natural musical match for this concept. Like the famous language of these plays, Vivaldi's music has lodged in our collective unconscious, connecting us immediately to the emotional tone of each scene. Unsurprisingly, we soon found that Shakespeare will not suffer himself to be wrestled into a single overarching metaphor, and we began to observe seasons unfolding differently on the political and personal levels. For example, as Harry's political sun rises, the sun sets on his relationship with the jovial Falstaff – possibly the most poignant falling-out ever seen on stage. For each moment, though, we were able to find an excerpt from the Four Seasons that illuminates and enriches the drama, resulting in a truly pleasing synthesis of music and words.
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