Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra: Online Concert Programme | Mon 12 February 2024

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869): Roman Carnival Overture

Berlioz’s popular overture, Roman Carnival, was composed largely as a result of the failure of his first major opera, Benvenuto Cellini, in September 1838. Berlioz had poured heart and soul into that great project and was obviously disappointed by its poor reception after its Paris premiere.

Berlioz understandably did not want high quality music to be lost when his opera failed and so chose two of its main musical themes to fashion what he described as a new concert ‘ouverture caractéristique pour grand orchestre’. The main themes were taken from the first two Acts of the opera and one does not need to know the drama in order to appreciate this atmospheric celebration of the Roman carnival; Berlioz had experienced this spectacle himself when he visited the city in 1831 after winning the prestigious Prix de Rome. According to his Memoirs, Berlioz was actually disgusted by what he described as a degrading spectacle, the Roman carnival commonly having the reputation as the most licentious of all Italy’s pre-Lenten carnivals. However, his personal views about the Roman carnival are not evident in this lively musical portrait.

This was one of the first works which he composed after completing his Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration: both were published in the same year. Berlioz was the first great composer who was not proficient at performance on any musical instrument – consequently, he composed no music for the ubiquitous solo piano and no chamber music. He concentrated his skills instead on ‘playing the orchestra’ and he was always very precise in his demands for balancing orchestral instruments.

Berlioz adds a pair of cornets to the two trumpets, also employing four horns and three trombones, but no tuba. The bass sound is supplemented by the request for four bassoons (otherwise, only requiring double woodwind). Berlioz was also specific in his minimum requirement for the five parts of the string section (15 first and 15 second violins, 10 violas, 12 cellos and 9 double-basses). Percussion to celebrate the carnival includes cymbals, triangle, a pair of small snare drums (tamburi piccoli) and two conventional timpani.
He had already featured the cor anglais as soloist in the Scène aux champs movement from his Symphonie Fantastique; its distinctively plangent voice can now be heard in the overture’s slow introductory section (after the short advance taste of the dance music that makes up the main part of the overture).

After the slow introduction, based on two themes from the opening Act of Benvenuto Cellini, the main dance section is heralded by three (literal) gusts of wind. The saltarello dance (originally from the second Tableau of the opera, which takes place on Shrove Tuesday) steals in quietly with muted strings at first, before bursting forth in celebratory joy. Mendelssohn was similarly attracted to the saltarello dance and employed it to conclude his Italian Symphony, premiered in 1833, just a few years before Benvenuto Cellini.

Berlioz was most emphatic about the need for speed in the saltarello section, complaining about one performance in Vienna, ‘This is the carnival, not Lent. You make it sound like Good Friday in Rome.’ Berlioz maintains the infectious energy and high spirits through to the brightest conclusion; it is no surprise that he wanted to ensure that this music would not be buried in an unperformed opera. At the same time, he hoped that this concert overture would help to rehabilitate his beloved opera. It remains one of his most popular overtures.

© Timothy Dowling

Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943): Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor

1. Moderato
2. Adagio sostenuto
3. Allegro scherzando

Rachmaninov was devastated by the catastrophic failure of the premiere of his First Symphony when conducted by Alexander Glazunov, who was allegedly drunk on that fateful evening in 1897. He was full of self-doubt and described the ordeal that evening in his autobiographical writings; savage critical reviews only confirmed the depth of his sense of failure.

Consequently, Rachmaninov suffered with a period of profound depression and subsequent creative block. He was well supported during this period by his circle of friends and family. He struck up a close friendship with the great bass singer, Feodor Chaliapin who described Rachmaninoff as a ‘lively, cheerful companionable person’. Despite his creative impasse, Rachmaninoff was highly praised as a conductor, pianist and accompanist during these otherwise fallow years.

Rachmaninov’s close circle firstly encouraged him to meet with Tolstoy, with the vain hope that the great writer might inspire the younger composer, but his only advice was to extol the benefits of hard work. On a second visit Rachmaninov, accompanied by Chaliapin, performed before Tolstoy, only to be met by withering response, ‘Tell me, does anybody need music like that?’

Another approach was clearly needed and his family’s next suggestion was that he should consult Dr Nikolai Dahl, who specialized in psychological treatment, and in particular the use of hypnosis. It may have helped that Dahl was also a great music lover and violist and so discussions would have been far more sympathetic than his consultation with the austere Tolstoy.

The pianist Stephen Hough has written how Rachmaninov’s grandson Alexander told him that the presence of Dahl’s attractive daughter might have helped with the recovery process. Whatever the truth behind these accounts the outcome was that Rachmaninov’s creative block was spectacularly broken with the inspired composition of his Second Piano Concerto. Rachmaninoff dedicated the work to Nikolai Dahl in grateful thanks. Dahl, the violist, later participated in some of the first performances of the work and accrued especial acclaim when introduced to the audience on these occasions.

Rachmaninov started composition with the second and third movements, working whilst staying in Crimea and northern Italy with his friend Chaliapin and these two movements were first performed on his return to Moscow in December 1900. Incidentally, after a recital in Crimea when he accompanied Chaliapin, Anton Chekhov appeared afterwards to congratulate the famous singer and then turned to Rachmaninov and said, ‘Mr Rachmaninov, nobody knows you yet but you will be a great man one day.’ Rachmaninov was immensely pleased by this vote of confidence and it surely helped lessen the impact of Tolstoy’s less encouraging comments; he proudly recalled Chekhov’s words in later years.

In early 1901 Rachmaninov composed his Second Suite for Two Pianos, Opus 17, and then returned to the Second Piano Concerto, composing the first movement. This does sound surprising, as the famous opening of the Concerto does sound like the breaking of the dam; those portentous opening bell-like chords leading to the seemingly unending stream of melody with rich fortissimo strings playing ‘con passione’.

His friend and later fellow exile, Nikolai Medtner spoke about the sincerity of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto:
‘The theme of Rachmaninov’s inspired Second Concerto is not only the theme of his life but always conveys the impression of being one of the most strikingly Russian of themes, and only because the soul of this theme is Russian; there is no ethnographic trimming here, no dressing up, no decking out in national dress, no folksong intonation, and yet every time, from the first bell stroke, you feel the figure of Russia rising up to her full height.’ (Nikolai Medtner, as quoted in Barrie Martyn’s Rachmaninov, Composer, Pianist, Conductor)

If we are seeking possible structural models that may have inspired Rachmaninov, probably the two most significant concertos would be Grieg’s A minor Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto in B flat minor, but the end result remains, as Medtner suggests, quintessential Rachmaninov.

When Noel Coward, whose one-act play Still Life inspired David Lean’s classic 1945 film Brief Encounter, was consulted about possible music for the film, he was unequivocal: it had to be Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto and no other music was to be used. As a result, for many, the film and the music have since been inextricably linked together. And this is understandable, as both celebrate the intense feelings resulting from unattainable love – the classic British restraint perfectly complementing the dark Russian passion. The music thus sublimates the suppressed feelings of the two protagonists, adding extra depth and expression to the tragic story.

As a skilled conductor in the years following the debacle of his First Symphony, Rachmaninov was adept at orchestration and content to employ the conventional forces available to his predecessors. We can easily detect his preference for a darker overall sound, suggesting an endless November. Mostly, the orchestration is fairly dense, but when solo instruments do pierce through the texture, the effect is always like sunlight breaking through the clouds, even if the sun lies low on the horizon. Such moments come when the solo horn sings over tremolo strings towards the end of the opening Moderato, or when flute and clarinet introduce the main theme of the central Adagio.

The two published works either side of the Second Piano Concerto both reflect the same sense of creative re-awakening. Indeed Rachmaninov himself later said that the Second Suite for Two Pianos, Opus 17, ‘always remained symbolic of the renewal of life’.
Similarly, Rachmaninov composed his only Sonata for Cello and Piano, Opus 19, around the same time and it is possible to chart the road to psychological recovery when listening to that heartfelt work, as we travel along its 40-minute journey. Although often referred to as Rachmaninov’s ‘Cello Sonata’, he preferred it to be known as the Sonata for Cello and Piano, recognizing the major role for the solo pianist.

These three works, Opus 17, 18 and 19 appear at the start of Rachmaninov’s most prolific period of composition, the years from 1900 to 1915 when the large majority of his significant output was created; the rate of composition was afterwards interrupted by his departure from Russia at the start of the Revolution in 1917, as Rachmaninov had to concentrate on his pianistic career in order to earn his living. However, the silver lining is that we are able to hear his own recording of the Second Piano Concerto (in remarkably good sound for 1929) with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski.

© Timothy Dowling

César Franck (1822-1890): Le Chausseur Maudit, Poème Symphonique (The Accursed Hunter, Symphonic Poem)

Franck composed nearly all his orchestral works in the last fifteen years of his life, culminating with his Symphony in D minor in 1888. Apart from an early symphonic poem composed in the 1840s, his first major symphonic poem had been Les Éolides (1876). He turned to Der Wilde Jäger (The Wild Hunter), a gothic ballad written in 1777 by the German poet Gottfried Bürger (1747–1794). This ballad was freely translated into English 1796 by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832).

Musically, acknowledging the ballad’s structure, the story unfolds in four sections:

1. Le Paysage paisible du Dimanche (Peaceful Sunday landscape)
2. La Chasse (The Hunt)
3. La Malédiction (The Curse), supernaturally intoned by solo tuba and clarinet
4. La Poursuite des demons (The Pursuit by Demons)

It is Sunday morning. In the distance are heard the joyous ringing of bells and chanting of the faithful. Sacrilege! The savage Count of the Rhine sounds his hunting-horn. Tally-ho! Tally-ho! The hunt continues over fields, meadows and moors.
‘Stop, Count, I beg you! Listen to the faithful singing.’
‘No!’ Tally-ho! Tally-ho!
‘Stop, Count, I entreat you.’
‘No!’ And the hunt hurtles on its way like a whirlwind.
Suddenly the Count finds himself alone; his horse cannot move, his horn will not sound. A grim implacable voice curses him: ‘Accursed man, be hunted evermore by hell itself.’
Surrounded by flames from all sides, seized by terror, the Count flees – faster, ever faster – pursued by a pack of demons, by day across chasms, by night across the sky.

Fifty years ago, in 1973, Laurence Davies (in his Master Musicians book on the composer) was rather dismissive of Franck’s symphonic poem, writing that ‘it was probably meant to be taken seriously but has lapsed into a comic vein with time. About a count who forgoes St Hubert’s Mass to go hunting, it depicts the chase in blatantly imitative music and ends with the unfortunate huntsman being pursued into Hell by a horde of devils. Obviously, the work has a moral, but it is one that no longer holds much sway in a time when church-going is the exception rather than the rule.’

Whilst this might literally be the case according to the bare bones of the story and the (perhaps quaint) nineteenth century description above, we can still identify with the eternal struggle between good and evil, surely the emotional core of Franck’s symphonic poem. The arrogant hunter can then be seen as any person gripped by an obsessive addiction, caught in the relentless and inevitable downward spiral, whether through alcohol, drugs or gambling, or indeed any destructive, addictive behaviour.

Franck’s work can be heard as following in the line established by the Don Juan legend, immortalized in Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) and then continued with the Wolf Glen scene in Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) and the finale of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

In September 1882, when Franck embarked on the composition, he firstly called the symphonic poem La Chasse sauvage (The wild hunt), changing the name to La Chasse fantastique, before finally settling on Le Chasseur Maudit by the time of completion the following month. All three terms (“wild”, “fantastic”, “cursed”) convey the essence of the story of self-destruction.

A few years later, Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades (1890) similarly portrays the self-destructive path of the gambler Herman. Closer to home, perhaps the most famous work in the same vein as Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit was completed by Paul Dukas (1865-1935), not one of the composer’s many students, but who was a great admirer of Franck. His symphonic poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897), based on a poem by Goethe, was later immortalized by Disney’s Mickey Mouse depiction in the film Fantasia (1930).

© Timothy Dowling

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) Orchestral Suite

I. Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Pavane of Sleeping Beauty)
II. Petit Poucet (Little Tom Thumb)
III. Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes (Little Ugly Girl, Empress of the Pagodas)
IV. Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête (Conversation of Beauty and the Beast)
V. Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden)

The composition of Ma mère l’Oye came about as a result of the longstanding friendship between the Godebski (originally from Poland) and Ravel families; Maurice Ravel virtually adopted the Godebskis as his own family after his father’s death in 1908. He used to stay with them at their villa near Fontainebleau and he dedicated Ma mère l’Oye to Cipa Godebski’s two children Mimie and Jean who were six and seven at the time, with the intention that they give the first performance.

Ma mère l’Oye was originally a suite of five items for piano duet with a performance time of around 15 minutes; he composed the opening Sleeping Beauty Pavane in 1908, completing the other four pieces in 1910. The piano duet was clearly beyond the young children’s technical ability and so it was first performed by the 11-year-old Jeanne Leleu (who went on to compose and teach at the Paris Conservatoire and died in 1979) and Geneviève Durony in April 1910.

A year later Ravel orchestrated the original five movements, and then expanded the whole piece into a 30-minute ballet by adding a prelude, a new tableau and interludes between the original scenes. He also changed the running order; the whole ballet playing straight through as the new interludes link the individual items together and thus doubles the length of the original suite. The ballet version was first performed in Paris in January 1912. The orchestral ‘Mother Goose Suite’, however, keeps to the original five separate items as heard in the order of the original piano duet suite.

The stories for the five pieces come from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French fairy tales by Charles Perrault (1697) – nos. 1, 2 and 5; Madame d’Aulnoy (1698) – no. 3; Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1757) – no. 4. Ravel included quotes from the relevant tales at the head of the three central items as below (as translated in the Durand & Cie., Paris 1911 score):

I. Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Pavane of Sleeping Beauty) Lent
No words here quoted by Ravel, but this gentle pavane is similar in its mood of gentle resignation to his famous Pavane pour une infant défunte.

II. Petit Poucet (Little Tom Thumb) Très modéré
‘He thought he would be able to find the path easily by means of the bread he had strewn wherever he had walked. But he was quite surprised when he was unable to find a single crumb; the birds had come and eaten them all.’ (Charles Perrault)

III. Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes (Little Ugly Girl, Empress of the Pagodas) Mouvement de marche
‘She undressed and got into the bath. Immediately the toy mandarins and mandarinesses began to sing and to play instruments. Some had theorbos made from walnut shells; some had viols made from almond shells; for the instruments had to be of a size appropriate to their own.’ (Mme d’Aulnoy, Serpentin Vert). The oriental character of this tale is captured by the pentatonic scale and use of appropriate percussion.

IV. Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête (Conversation of Beauty and the Beast) Mouvement de valse très modéré
“When I think of your good heart, you do not seem so ugly.” “Oh, I should say so! I have a good heart, but I am a monster.” “There are many men who are more monstrous than you.” “If I were witty I would pay you a great compliment to thank you, but I am only a beast.” …
…
“Beauty, would you like to be my wife?” “No, Beast!”…
…
“I die happy because I have the pleasure of seeing you once again.” “No, my dear Beast, you shall not die. You shall live to become my husband.”…
The Beast had disappeared, and she beheld at her feet a prince more handsome than Amor, who was thanking her for having lifted his spell. (Mme Leprince de Beaumont)

Beauty is represented by the clarinet, the Beast by growling contrabassoon.

V. Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden) Lent et grave
As with the opening number, there are no introductory quotes by Ravel, but this scene completes the story as the prince awakens the princess and they all live happily ever afterwards.

Ravel explained the difference between ‘instrumentation’ and ‘orchestration’ to his student Manuel Rosenthal:
‘Instrumentation is when you take the music you or someone else has written and you find the right kind of instruments – one part goes to the oboe, another to the violin, another to the cello. They go along very well and the sound is good but that’s all. But orchestration is when you give a feeling of the two pedals at the piano: that means that you are building an atmosphere of sound around the music, around the written notes – that’s orchestration.’ (as quoted in Ravel Remembered by Roger Nichols, Faber 1987)

Whilst the orchestration of Fauré’s Dolly might by considered to be closer to straightforward ‘instrumentation’, Ravel’s process is clearly an example of radical re-composition, shedding new light on the original piano pieces. As can be expected from the masterful orchestrator of Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, Ravel achieves remarkable richness and luminosity with his carefully chosen orchestral forces; it is striking that he omits the major brass instruments from the score, so no trumpets or trombones.

Orchestration
Pairs of flutes (one doubling as piccolo), oboes (one doubling as cor anglais), clarinets, bassoons (one doubling as contrabassoon), horns;
Percussion: timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tamtam, glockenspiel and xylophone
Keyboard: celesta and glockenspiel (jeu de timbre)
Harp
Strings (14 first violins, 12 second violins, 10 violas, 8 cellos and 6 double-basses)

Undoubtedly, Ravel began this work with the children at the forefront of his mind and the piano duet is very much a children’s suite: the opening Pavane certainly presents no technical problems for a competent beginner. With the expansion into the full orchestral version and especially the ballet, however, the work seems to change in character so that it becomes more an adult’s reflection on childhood. Whilst children may still appreciate the ballet experience, Ravel seems to be looking back at his own childhood, possibly influenced by the death of his father shortly before he began work on The Sleeping Beauty Pavane. Thus, like Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Ma mère l’Oye becomes a reminiscence of childhood for adults, offering adults an achingly transfigured picture of lost innocence, as we journey towards the ‘happily ever after’ closure in glorious C major.

© Timothy Dowling

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): La Valse

On 28th January 1905, Ravel and his friend, the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943), went to the Opera Ball in Paris. Later Viñes wrote the extract below in his contemporary diary, perhaps after wandering the Paris streets and reflecting with Ravel in the small hours:
‘It was the first time I had been to the Opera ball, and as always when I see young, beautiful women, lights, music and all this activity, I thought of death, of the ephemeral nature of everything; I imagined balls from past generations who are now nothing but dust, as will be all the masks I saw, and in a short while! What horror, Oblivion!’ (Ricardo Viñes)

It was in the following year that Ravel first conceived the ideas for La Valse, which he called ‘Wien’ (Vienna) during its initial compositional process. Ravel first wrote La Valse as a piece for solo piano, later re-arranging it for piano duet, only orchestrating it after the First World War in 1919-1920. Ravel himself described his scenario for La Valse, which he hoped would be performed as a ballet:
‘Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter; one sees an immense hall filled with a swirling throng. The stage is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers reaches its peak at the fortissimo.
‘An imperial court, about 1855.’

Ravel repeated several times that his intention was to compose a tribute to the Viennese waltz tradition, and he purposely placed it in the year 1855, a time when the Viennese waltz was in its heyday. Coincidentally, this was also the decade when Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was published and a scene in the seminal French novel echoes Ravel’s scenario:
‘They began slowly, then moved faster. They turned: everything turned round them, the lamps, the furniture, the panelling and the floor, like a disc on a spindle. And as they came near the doors, the bottom of Emma’s dress clung to his trousers, their legs entwined with each other; he lowered his eyes to hers, she raised hers to him; a lassitude took hold of her and she stopped. They moved off again; and the Vicomte, moving more swiftly, swept her off and disappeared with her to the end of the gallery where, panting, she almost fell and for a moment, leant her head against his chest. And then, still turning, but more gently, he took her back to her place; she hid her head against the wall and put her hand over her eyes.’
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1923, page 97)

Ravel hoped that La Valse would be performed as a ballet with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, following the famous premiere seven years earlier of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913. The final pages of Ravel’s composition recall the Sacrificial Dance that concludes Stravinsky’s ballet.
Ravel organised a performance of the four-hand piano version with himself and Marcelle Meyer seated together on the piano stool, and with Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Poulenc in the audience. This took place at the apartment of Misia Sert, the dedicatee of Ravel’s composition. Diaghilev sat in stony silence and his judgment at the conclusion was damning, as regards its balletic possibilities:
“Ravel, it’s a masterpiece…but it’s not a ballet…It’s the portrait of a ballet…It’s the painting of a ballet.” The work was not staged until some eight years later by the troupe of Ida Rubinstein, with décor by Alexandre Benois and choreography by Bronislava Nijinska.

Ravel tried to clarify his purpose in composing La Valse in October 1922, writing to a fellow French composer Maurice Emmanuel:
‘I believe this work needs to be illuminated by footlights, as it has elicited so much strange commentary. While some discover an attempt at parody, indeed caricature, others categorically see a tragic allusion in it – the end of the Second Empire, the situation in Vienna after the war, etc. –
‘This dance may seem tragic, like any other emotion – voluptuousness, joy – pushed to the extreme. But one should only see what the music expresses: an ascending progression of sonority, to which the stage comes along to add light and movement.’

Furthermore, Ravel emphasised again his views, speaking during an interview with a Dutch newspaper, 1922
‘It doesn’t have anything to do with the present situation in Vienna, and it doesn’t have any symbolic meaning in that regard. In the course of La valse, I did not envision a dance of death or a struggle between life and death. (The year of the choreographic argument, 1855, repudiates such an assumption.) I changed the original title “Wien” to “La valse”, which is more in keeping with the aesthetic nature of the composition. It is a dancing, whirling, almost hallucinatory ecstasy, an increasingly passionate and exhausting whirlwind of dancers, who are overcome and exhilarated by nothing but the waltz.’

It can be hard not to think about the possible impact of the First World War on Ravel’s conception of La Valse and how this might have darkened the composition since he first thought about it in 1906. However, it is perhaps clear from the account by his Spanish friend, Ricardo Viñes, that there was probably already the potential for a tragic conclusion. Despite Ravel’s determination to compose a tribute to the Viennese waltz in its heyday, the early years of the twentieth century were awash with its deconstructions, for example, in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1913).

Despite Ravel’s comments, as quoted in 1922, it is hard to avoid thinking that the composer ‘doth protest too much’. Ravel was very affected by the First World War, during which he finally joined the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver in March 1915, when he had turned forty. He composed very few works in the war years. The most substantial of his wartime works is Le tombeau de Couperin, composed between 1914 and 1917; each piece of Le tombeau serving as a memorial for friends who died during the conflict. Ravel emerged from the War a weakened man, having been drained of both his mental and physical stamina. Ravel was also greatly affected by the death of his mother in January 1917, and it has been suggested that composing La Valse was part of his grieving process.

In 1906 Ravel had written to a friend: ‘You know of my deep sympathy for these wonderful rhythms, and I value the joie de vivre expressed by the dance….’ Eight years later, in 1914, Ravel was describing his piece as ‘a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz,’ intermingled with ‘the impression of a fantastic and fatal whirling.’ By 1919, this had been further transfigured into a nightmare scenario, the relentless 3/4 waltz rhythm giving way to 4/4 common time only in the devastating final two bars. The stark bleakness of Ravel’s final vision anticipates the relentless path to destruction taken in Boléro, just seven years later.

© Timothy Dowling