Tuesday March 5 & Wednesday March 6, 2013 • 8pm.
Pre-Concert talks at 7:15pm
Trinity St. Paul's Centre, 427 Bloor Street West, Toronto

Programme notes by Andrea Budgey

With the approach of spring, we are able to contemplate the inexorable progress of time with greater equanimity than in the bleak, contracting days of late autumn. The lengthening of days – and the poets represented in this concert – remind us that the great cycle of the seasons offers compensatory gifts alongside inevitable losses.

While Christine de Pisan and Joseph Haft lament, in philosophical as well as personal terms, the loss of beloved spouses, Thomas Hardy's reflections on death and the march of time are more general and more resigned, embedding the progress and decay of human life in the organic processes of the natural world. The loss of parting is treated by Henrik Ibsen with a simplicity which is almost transparent, allowing the hope of reunion, however distant, to transform the sorrow of the moment. And Dorothy Sandler Glick is able to see the trajectory of her children's growing up as a necessary, and even sometimes joyful, concomitant of their childhood, a process which brings her into a new relationship with them, even as she relinquishes the old.

The “tide” of our title brings to mind, for most of us, the image of ocean waves, moving irresistibly over the shore in response to the distant stimulus of the moon's gravity. At the time when the famous proverb took its shape, however, “tide” was a synonym for “time, season”; this meaning has all but died out in modern English, surviving only in such expressions as “Eastertide”.

Edvard Greig, arr. L. Jones: Solveig’s Song, poetry by Henrik Ibsen
Scott Good: Deuil angoisseuxs, poetry by Christine de Pisan
Ernst Toch: Poems to Martha, poetry by Joseph Haft
Walter Buczynski: Three Songs, poetry by Dorothy Sandler Glick
Gerald Finzi: By Footpath and Stile, poetry by Thomas Hardy

Edvard Greig (1843-1907): ‘Solveig’s Song’ from Peer Gynt, arranged for soprano and string quartet by Laura Jones

Henrik Ibsen’s idiosyncratic verse drama Peer Gynt, based on Norwegian folklore, was published in 1867 and first performed in 1876. Though it is essentially romantic in inspiration, it anticipates modernist approaches to theatre. Ibsen asked Grieg to compose music for this performance, and the ninety minutes of incidental music were later distilled by the composer into two suites which include the very popular movements “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, “Åse's Death”, “Morning Mood”, and “Solveig’s Song”.

In the play, “Solveig’s Song” is sung toward the end of Act III, when the eponymous hero, faced with consequences of his own earlier weakness and irresoluteness, determines to leave Solveig, the woman who has come to live with him, and travel abroad. Solveig’s song of farewell, with its simple reflection on the passing of the seasons, is a remarkably generous and hopeful blessing in the face of abandonment.

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Scott Good (b.1972): Deuil angoisseux, for soprano and string quartet

Scott Good is a composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal works, and a bass trombonist, based in Toronto. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Toronto, and has received numerous awards for his music, including the Howard Hanson Prize (1995), first prize at the Winnipeg New Music Festival Composers Competition (1996), the John Weinzweig Prize (1999) and two prizes in the SOCAN Competition for Young Composers (2000-01).

Deuil Angoisseux was premiered by the Toronto baroque ensemble I Furiosi in 2002. The text is by Christine de Pisan (1365 - ca 1430), the first professional female writer in Europe whose name we know. Well-educated and prolific, she celebrated the achievements and abilities of women in such works as Le Ditie de Jehanne d’Arc and Le Livre de la Cité des Dames. The elegy Deuil Angoisseux was composed on the death of her beloved husband Étienne du Castel, and already circulated in musical settings during the 15th century.

Good’s setting opens with a brief instrumental larghetto section, which climbs gradually into a contrapuntal, almost mock-baroque allegro furioso; the voice finally enters, more than 100 measures into the piece, low in the soprano register. The text is declaimed like a recitative, or a baroque arioso, arching to a climax of grief and loss at the end of the third stanza, on the refrain line Et si ne puis ne garir ne morir (“ … and so I can neither be cured nor die”). The final short stanza, in which Christine names death as the only cure for her anguish, returns gradually to the dark bleakness of the opening lines, and the work closes with the acerbic counterpoint of the allegro furioso.

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Ernst Toch (1887-1964): Poems to Martha, Op. 66, for baritone and string quartet

Born in Vienna in 1887, Ernst Toch taught himself composition by copying out the late Mozart string quartets, and before he was 20, his own string quartets were being performed by the renowned Rosé Quartet. He moved to Germany in 1909 and, except for a stint in the Austrian army during World War I, he remained there, teaching in Mannheim and Berlin. His style combined classical and modern ideas, and he was considered one of the leaders of the Neue Musik movement that electrified Europe in the 1920s and 30s.

After Hitler's rise to power, Toch went into exile in the United States, and spent most of his remaining career in southern California, where he died in 1964. He produced orchestral and chamber music, chamber operas, and, like his better-known contemporary Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a number of film scores (he received three Academy Award nominations). He also taught composition at the University of California, and wrote several textbooks and theoretical works. His style during this period was essentially late-Romantic, without the radicalism of his earlier years.

The Poems to Martha are settings of poems written by Joseph Haft, a businessman and amateur poet, on the death of his wife. Toch selected passages from these very simple but touching verses to create an elegiac, optimistic four-movement piece which he called a “quintet for strings and medium voice” – not a work for solo voice with accompaniment, but a piece of chamber music in which all the parts share equally in the expression and development of musical ideas.

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Walter Buczynski (b.1933): Three Songs for soprano and string quartet

Toronto-born composer, pianist, and musical educator Walter Buczynski numbered Godfrey Ridout, Darius Milhaud, Zbigniew Drzewiecki, and Nadia Boulanger among his teachers. He taught at both the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto, and, until 1977, had an extensive career as a solo pianist. He has resumed this career to some extent since his retirement from teaching in 1999, and has continued to compose in a variety of forms, including these settings of poems by Dorothy Sandler Glick.

While Buczynski’s early output was largely experimental, ironic, and satirical, his work has become more lyrical in recent decades. Sandler Glick’s reflections on her children’s growth into maturity, and on her own relationship with them, full of the delicate melancholy of parenthood, are set by Buczynski in long melodic arcs, sometimes intensely chromatic, with wide leaps, shifting metres, and occasional bursts of abrupt declamation. The string quartet provides the vocal line with sustained support in some passages, and with the resistance of complex textures and rhythmic interjections in others – the sort of balance of affirmation and challenge which conscientious parents offer their children.

Dorothy Sandler Glick, herself a distinguished pianist and concert series organizer, was married to the late composer Srul Irving Glick.

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Gerald Finzi (1901-1956): By Footpath and Stile, for baritone and string quartet

Gerald Finzi began studies with his first musical mentor, Ernest Farrar, at the age of fourteen in Harrogate, and later moved on to work with Edmund Bairstow, choirmaster at York Minster. In 1922 he resettled in Gloucestershire: the first versions of the Thomas Hardy settings in By Footpath and Stile date from this period. Hardy was without question the poet for whom Finzi felt the strongest affinity, and the texts, elegiac but unromantic, resonated with Finzi’s own experience: he had lost his father and three brothers, and Farrar had been killed on the Western front in 1918.

Finzi later withdrew the cycle, and began revising it, but it was not re-published until 1981, in an edition by the composer’s friend Howard Ferguson. Unlike most of Finzi’s song collections, this was conceived as a true cycle, with an overall unity, and the opening material is recapitulated in the final movement.

The melodies are largely based on the modes of English folk-music; their polyphonic implications, occasionally reminiscent of the techniques of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English part-music, are worked out in the instrumental accompaniments and interludes. The greatest variety of texture – and of chromatic development – is to be found in the fifth song, “Voices from things growing in a churchyard”, where musical contrasts serve to characterise the six individuals whom Hardy imagines having grown from their burial plots to inhabit the cemetery’s foliage. The themes of transience extend from the innocent pastimes of youth to the subsuming of fragile human life into the rolling seasons of the natural world.

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