of sleep and dreams...exploring the wonder and the terror of the night
Tuesday January 31 & Wednesday February 1, 2012
Pre-Concert talks at 7:15pm
Trinity St. Paul's Centre, 427 Bloor Street West, Toronto
Programme notes
by Andrea Budgey
Camille Saint-Saëns: Violons dans le soir, poetry by Anna Comtesse de Noailles
Othmar Schoeck: Notturno, Op. 47, poetry by Nikolaus Lenau & Gottfried Keller
Larysa Kuzmenko: Nocturne and Dance, text by Gary Kulesha
John Plant: La notte bella, poetry by Giuseppe Ungaretti
Gwyneth Walker: Songs of the Night Wind, poetry by Louise Bogan & H.D.
Roberta Stephen: Nocturnes, poetry by Archibald Lampman, Kristjana Gunnars, Shakespeare
Benjamin Britten: Serenade, Op. 31, poetry by Tennyson, Blake, Keats & others
Winter nights, before technology made it possible for us to banish the long darkness, have always been a time for dreams, both waking and sleeping, for stories, and for explorations of the unconscious, both collective and individual. The texts and readings of this programme – although not all set in winter – share a focus on the possibilities of night: the inward journey imposed by darkness, and the broader perspective to be gained by gazing upward into the starry firmament. The poets and composers are Canadian, American, English, and European, and the texts span a period from the 15th-century “Lyke-Wake Dirge”, in which night and death are equally inexorable, to the turn of the 21st century: Kristjana Gunnars' lament for the loss of darkness in the modern world.
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921): Violons dans le soir, for voice, 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’ much younger contemporary, the Comtesse Anna de Noailles (1876-1933), a Romanian-French aristocrat, novelist, and poet. This lyric presents the evening music of the violin as a profound disturbance in the calm of the natural world – representative of 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 obbligato sometimes alternate, and at other times combine to intensify the description of the violin’s emotional effects, while the piano remains gently supportive of their dialogue throughout.
Top
Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957): Notturno, Op. 47 (excerpts) for baritone and string quartet (1933)
Othmar Schoeck is known primarily for songs and song cycles, although he also produced several operas. He studied briefly with Max Reger in Leipzig, but spent most of his career in Zurich, where he was influenced by Ferruccio Busoni. Between 1918 and 1923 his relationship with the pianist Mary de Senger led him into contact with expressionism and Parisian neo-classicism, and these styles also made an impact on his work. At the time when Notturno was composed, Schoeck's marriage was particularly unhappy, and some think that part of the work's inspiration was nostalgia for his lost relationship with de Senger.
The cycle is composed, for the most part, of poems on loneliness and grief by the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau. Der Traum is a setting of a single poem, a terrifying and morbid night-vision, whose relentless movement – in both voice and strings – is strangely at odds with the muted pianissimo dynamic. The middle section combines a declamatory vocal style with strongly rhythmic accompaniment, while the opening and closing sections are ironic transformations of the late-classical scherzo.
Milde Sterben is a brief meditation on the ubiquity of death; save for one fortissimo outburst, its tone is hushed and constrained. The final movement, marked Rasch und kräftig (rapid and forceful) at the start, sets three poems: the first is a riotous drinking song which descends rapidly into melancholy, the second an ironic epigram on loneliness, a brief vocal intrusion into a substantial instrumental section. For the final poem, the resolution of the work, Schoeck chose a lyric by Gottfried Keller: he once remarked, “I’ve never been able to end with Lenau. I wanted to lead myself and the listener out of the depression.”
“Heerwagen” (the German name for the constellation Ursa Major) turns the speaker's attention toward the stars, achieving some perspective on his own emotional turmoil. The instrumental textures become more transparent, the declamation simpler, and the cycle finally winds to an end in a quiet C major cadence.
Top
Larysa Kuzmenko (1956- ): Nocturne and Dance for soprano, flute, and piano (1980)
Larysa Kuzmenko is a Toronto-based pianist and composer, whose compositions have been performed throughout Canada and internationally; she has performed in many Canadian concert venues, and at Carnegie Hall. She currently teaches piano, harmony, and composition in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto.
Kuzmenko’s music is classical in inspiration and inclination, with strong melodies and clear tonal structures, although she sometimes ventures into more extended tonal language. Nocturne and Dance is a relatively early work, premiered at Scarborough College by Lynn Blaser, soprano, Eileen Fawcett, flute, and the composer herself on piano.
The “Nocturne” sets a brief lyric on the transformation of consciousness at night, by composer Gary Kulesha (also Kuzmenko's husband); voice and flute discourse in unforced counterpoint and occasional unanimity. The lines “In the night, images walk the mind as ghosts upon the earth / In the night we are all dancers on the edge of twilight” give way to the “Dance” for flute and piano alone – a highly unstable waltz punctuated by measures in duple metre – and the same couplet returns to close the work.
Top
John Plant (1945- ): La notte bella for baritone, violin, cello, and piano (2001/2007)
American-born composer John Plant moved to Canada in his early 20s to study with Bruce Mather and Charles Palmer at McGill University. Most of his career has been spent in Montreal, where he taught at Concordia University from 1993-2008. He has also been deeply involved in the study of classics, language, and comparative literature, and these interests have been extremely important in shaping his works for the human voice. In 2008 he retired to Nova Scotia to concentrate on composition.
The text of La notte bella was written by the Italian modernist poet and essayist Giuseppe Ungaretti in the trenches of World War I. As Plant puts it, the poem “traces the mysterious emergence of joy out of the stagnation of despair. Given the extreme conciseness of the poem, much of this emotional progress is articulated by the cello and violin.” The piano is also an active interlocutor in these dense and dramatic passages, including the section which Plant characterizes as the “sombre and lyrical threnody at the heart of the piece”. The “ecstatic vocalise” which marks the upwelling of joy in the “pool of stagnant darkness” soars upward in intoxication with the cosmos, but it is the violin and cello which close the work, moving from sustained high harmonics to a pianissimo conclusion.
Top
Gwyneth Walker (1947- ): Songs of the Night Wind (excerpts) for baritone and cello (1982)
Gwyneth Walker studied at Brown University and the Hartt School of Music, and taught for a number of years at the Hartt School, the Hartford Conservatory, and the Oberlin College Conservatory, before devoting herself to composition full-time. In 2000 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Vermont Arts Council.
Songs of the Night Wind has been published and performed in several versions, including some with piano, but the original was for voice and cello. Walker commented, “These musical settings are unusually delicate, and are intended for recital performance by skilled musicians”. The two parts complement one another in perfect balance, making full but subtle use of idiomatic possibilities, and setting the texts with great flexibility and effectiveness. Both Louise Bogan and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) were American poets active in the first half of the 20th century, important in the development of explicitly feminist literary criticism. H.D. spent most of her life in Europe, where she was associated with the Imagist movement, while Bogan's career was centred in New York.
Top
Roberta Stephen (1931): Nocturnes for baritone, flute, piano (2003)
Alberta composer, singer, teacher, and publisher Roberta Stephen has been celebrated by the Canadian Music Centre for her role in creating and supporting new music in western Canada; she has been president of New Works Calgary, and through Alberta Keys Music, published numerous works by her Canadian colleagues. Her own oeuvre includes compositions for solo piano, vocal and choral music, and chamber music for various instrumental combinations.
Nocturnes was written for the ensemble Das Chicas, and premiered at the University of Calgary New Music Festival in 2004. It sets texts by two Canadian poets – the 19th-century “Confederation poet” Archibald Lampman, and the contemporary Icelandic-Canadian Kristjana Gunnars – and a brief excerpt from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.
Lampman's depiction of nightfall in the country contrasts sharply with Gunnars' lament for the loss of darkness in the contemporary urban night. The Shakespeare text deals with cultural perceptions about the forces unleashed by darkness. Voice and flute are in conversation with one another throughout all the songs, sometimes overlapping, but never overbearing, while the piano provides consistent support and accompaniment. Very sparing use is made of extended techniques – a breathy tone on the flute, and using a mallet to strike the strings inside the piano.
Top
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, op. 31 (1942)
In 1939, with the outbreak of war in Europe, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, both committed pacifists, left England for the United States, where Britten's contact with new musical influences made for a highly productive period of composition. In 1942, however, they returned home and were recognized as conscientious objectors. The Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings represents, in many ways, a re-engagement with English identity during wartime. It was written at the request of Dennis Brain, then principal horn with the RAF Orchestra, and premiered by Brain and Pears in October 1943.
The cycle incorporates English poems spanning five centuries, with prologue and epilogue to be played by horn alone, using the instrument's natural harmonics (early critics complained of the “out of tune” effect this technique creates). The texts move from the languid late afternoon of Cotton's pastoral landscape to Tennyson's wilder image of a more remote and precipitous natural world; with Blake's “O Rose, thou art sick”, from the Songs of Experience, corruption and decay encroach on the idyll – a powerful comment on the interior state of a nation at war.
The “Lyke-Wake Dirge” is a bleakly explicit meditation on death and conscience, after which Jonson's “Queen and Huntress” serves almost as an antidote – a display of intellectual quickness and classical proportion. Keats' sonnet “To sleep” draws together the reflective threads of the cycle in quiet resignation. The role of the horn as scene-setter and critic is suspended in this movement to allow the player to move off-stage; this also gives the “poetic voice” space for a moment of collected interiority before giving way to the solo horn epilogue.
Britten once characterized the Serenade as “not important stuff, but quite pleasant, I think,” but this self-deprecation is misplaced. The settings are beautifully balanced as well as contrasted, and the textual threads which unite the poems are picked up and subtly re-woven into a comprehensive, clear-eyed meditation on human identity. The American musicologist Will Crutchfield called it “one of the most nearly perfect song cycles in existence ... with nothing essential unsaid and nothing superfluously repeated.”
Top
|
