Tuesday October 30 & Thursday November 1, 2012 • 8pm.
Pre-Concert talks at 7:15pm
Trinity St. Paul's Centre, 427 Bloor Street West, Toronto

Programme notes
by Andrea Budgey

The title of this programme is taken from the lyric of the same name by John Suckling (as set by Seymour Barab in Lovers). The lover of the title sardonically conceals the volatility of his affections under the name of constancy, while alerting the careful listener that the rhetoric of love is often highly deceptive. Flirtation, self-delusion, heights of impossible idealism alternating with depths of disappointment and disillusionment – all these combine in bewilderingly variegated patterns. The true source of our confusion, however, is the poet’s art – the poet’s love, not of a human object of desire, but of words and their ever-shifting possibilities of meaning. And to further the poet/lover’s obsession by adding the language of music, the composer plays the role of a lovelorn but clever and obliging Cyrano.

Seymour Barab: Lovers, poetry by Sir John Suckling
Karl Heinz Füssl (1924-1992): Cantiunculae amoris, text by Ovid and Petronius
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) – Sono liete, fortunate, text anonymous
John Plant (1945- ) - Sonetto di Gaspara Stampa
Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986) – Amoretti, sonnets by Edmund Spenser
Kurt Weill (1900-1950) arr. Laura Jones: Songs from One Touch of Venus, lyrics by Ogden Nash

Seymour Barab (1921-): Lovers, for voice, clarinet, viola, cello, and piano

The American composer Seymour Barab is known primarily for his more than 30 short operas – such as Chanticleer, A Game of Chance, Little Red Riding Hood and The Toy Shop - many of them for young or amateur performers. He also enjoyed a twenty-year career as a professional orchestral cellist and viola da gamba player, with a particular interest in early music.

Lovers, a suite of seven songs on texts by the Cavalier poet Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), blends a 17th-century style of text-setting reminiscent of the compositions of Thomas Morley, which Barab knew well as a viol-player, with a more contemporary instrumental idiom and tonal vocabulary. The smooth accompanying lines and blended instrumental colours provide an ideal foil for the poetry, which is artful and clever without being insincere.

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Karl Heinz Füssl (1924-1992): Cantiunculae amoris, for voice and string quartet

Füssl was an Austrian composer, teacher, music critic, and musicologist, whose creative and original writing was informed by a lifetime of detailed study of the works of earlier composers. He edited works by Haydn, Mozart, J.C. Bach, and Gustav Mahler, among others. His extensive compositional output includes a substantial body of vocal music, including several operas, of which Dybuk (1970) is the best known. His style combines the 12-tone techniques of Schoenberg and Webern with a more straightforwardly tonal lyricism.

The Cantiunculae Amoris sets three elegant and allusively erotic Latin texts, two by Ovid and one by Petronius. The declamatory, almost recitative-like character of much of the vocal line creates a faintly archaic, 18th-century flavour which underlines the stylized playfulness of the antique texts.

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George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) – Sono liete, fortunate, HWV 194 (Italian Duets, no. 3); continuo realized by Johannes Brahms, arranged for two voices and string trio by Laura Jones

Most of Handel's Italian duets were written between 1707 and 1710, while he was living and working in Italy, or immediately following his appointment as Kapellmeister to Georg, Elector of Hannover (later George I of England). The duets of this early period are thought to have been influenced in style by those of Agostino Steffani, Handel's predecessor in Hannover.

The fluid vocal lines of Sono liete, fortunate interweave effortlessly, with discreet text-setting, like the constrained figures on the word catene (chains), in the opening movement, and the freer running figuration on staccarle (unbind them) in the finale. It is interesting that Handel later incorporated the opening motif of this final movement into the Allegro section of the overture to his oratorio Judas Maccabeus, premiered in 1741). When the musicologist Friedrich Chrysander published the Italian duets for the Handelsgesellschaft’s edition of 1870, Johannes Brahms was asked to realize the continuo part, and it is this edition which cellist Laura Jones has adapted for string trio.

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John Plant (1945- ) - Sonetto di Gaspara Stampa for voice and piano quartet

American-born composer John Plant moved to Canada in his early twenties 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 voice. In 2008 he retired to Nova Scotia to concentrate on composition. Plant's Invocation to Aphrodite and La notte bella have been featured on earlier Talisker Players programmes.

Gaspara Stampa was a 16th-century Venetian poet known for the passion and intelligence of her 311 Rime, and Rimandatemi il cor is one of her most famous works. Plant sets the sonnet largely in recitativo style, with wordless interpolations of a more sustained and dramatic character. The agitation and yearning of the text are most effectively expressed in the broken figurations, irregular metres, and complex textures of the instrumental parts. Extremes of dynamics and shifting tempos highlight the poem’s oscillations between passionate attachment and bitter disappointment.

Sonetto di Gaspara Stampa is dedicated to Plant's wife Jocelyne Fleury, who recently retired from an active singing career. The composer says she is “an unending source of joy and renewal; every note I write is inscribed with her DNA as well as my own."

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Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986) – Amoretti, for voice and string quartet, op. 43

Although not as well known as Holst, Vaughan Williams, Britten, or Finzi, Edmund Rubbra enjoyed the respect and friendship of these colleagues and contemporaries, and taught composition at both Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His work included symphonies, choral music, and a substantial output of instrumental and vocal chamber music, some of which, like Amoretti, reflects his interest in the musical and literary culture of the English Renaissance.

Amoretti was Rubbra's second set of songs on lyrics of Edmund Spenser (the first was the Five Spenser Sonnets for tenor and string orchestra, op. 42), and some critics have seen it as an homage to the Elizabethan consort song, which set a solo vocal line against the restrained textures of a viol consort. The five movements are, however, very far from Elizabethan pastiche: the vocal line adapts the modal shapes of Renaissance song to the chromatic possibilities of the 20th century, with a fine balance of lyricism and declamation, while the quartet alternates between contrapuntal cohesiveness and more dramatic textural contrasts. The delicate courtly romanticism of Amoretti was probably inspired by his relationship with Antoinette Chaplin, the French violinist who had become his second wife in 1933.

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Kurt Weill (1900-1950) – Songs from One Touch of Venus, arr. for voice and string quartet by Laura Jones

When Kurt Weill left Europe in 1935, he more or less abandoned the aesthetic of rigorous social criticism which had informed his collaborations with such playwrights as Bertold Brecht and Georg Kaiser, and embraced instead the populist appeal – and commercial constraints – of the Broadway musical. What he retained from his earlier work, however, was his highly cultivated approach to theatrical forms and the development of character.

One Touch of Venus, a musical with lyrics by Ogden Nash, and book by Nash and S. J. Perelman, opened in October of 1943 and ran for 567 performances. Despite its broad comedy, it shares with Weill's European theatre works a vividly satirical approach to social values and customs. It tells the story of a shy barber who falls in love with a miraculously animated statue of Venus, and the complications which arise – both from the goddess’s dread of the tedium of suburban life, and from her decidedly mortal lover’s pre-existing engagement. This scenario allows for ironic and bittersweet comment on relations between the sexes in mid-20th-century America, presented in the relaxed and syncopated language of popular musical forms.

In Laura Jones’ arrangement, the string quartet fulfills the task of the theatre orchestra, while the clarinet (and bass clarinet) punctuate the vocal line, sometimes with offhand comments and sometimes with sympathetic agreement. It is worth noting that Marlene Dietrich, originally booked to play the role of Venus, decided that it was "too sexy and profane”, and withdrew from the production during rehearsals.

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