This concert marks the return of conductor Carl St. Clair, a favorite of audience and members of the orchestra when he appeared with us two years ago, leading a memorable performance of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Our solist is internationally renowned mezzo-soprano Dawn Upshaw, singing a set of orchestral songs composed for her by one of today's most successful composers, Osvaldo Golijov. After intermssion, she turns to Canteloube's folk-inpired Songs of the Auvergne. The bookends of this program are two familiar orchestral works: Strauss's picturesque tone poem Don Juan, and the virtuosic Boléro of Ravel.
 

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Don Juan, Op.20

Strauss composed Don Juan in 1887-1888, and he conducted the premiere at the Weimar Opera House on November 11, 1889. We have played the work five times at these concerts between 1947 and 1992. Duration 18:00.

Strauss composed in virtually every musical genre, producing a huge collection of operas, symphonic works, ballets, songs, and chamber music during a musical career spanning more than seventy years. But his most frequently-performed works are a series of tone poems composed as a relatively young man. The tone poem, the most thoroughly Romantic of symphonic forms, developed in the nineteenth century as an expression of poetic or philosophical ideas in music, or frequently, as pure program music. Strauss's tone poems adapt his own dramatic interests, and frankly autobiographical details, into his distinctive and freely-developing musical style. The musical forms of these works transcend the old symphonic molds, as a twenty-four-year-old Strauss wrote in 1888:

"If you want to create a work of art that is unified in its mood and consistent in its structure, and if that work is to give the listener a clear and definite impression, then what the composer wants to say must be just as clear in his own mind. This is only possible through inspiration by a poetic idea, whether or not it is introduced as a 'program'. I consider it a legitimate artistic method to create a new form for each new subject; a task that is very difficult, but all the more attractive for its very difficulty..."

Strauss included three extended quotations from Lenau's poem at the beginning of the score, but did not provide a specific program for the music. Even so, it is almost irresistible to conjure up the outlines of the story from in Strauss's music. The opening music, fiery and passionate, can only represent Don Juan himself (and perhaps Strauss's own vision of himself as a twentysomething lover). The central section of the work is dominated by two amorous interludes. The first and shorter interlude is light and flirtatious in character, but tossed aside in fairly short order when the don spots other quarry. The second interlude is more serious--as if the woman in Don Juan's eye means something more than just another prize. The expansive main theme of this section is introduced by the solo oboe and developed extensively throughout the orchestra. After this theme is thoroughly elaborated, the music becomes disconsolate. The exuberant opening music returns as Don Juan apparently shakes off his depression, and goes in search of further conquests. The coda comes with a brilliant musical scene that recalls the climactic swordfight between Don Juan and Don Pedro. In Lenau's poem, Don Juan has victory in his grasp, but suddenly allows his enemy to run him through. Strauss's music comes to a tremendous orchestral crescendo, a grand pause, and a hushed postlude that recalls the don's dying words:

"It was a beautiful storm that drove me on; it has subsided, and left behind a calm. All of my hopes and desires are seemingly dead. Perhaps a bolt of lightning from the Heaven that I despised has struck down my powers of love, and suddenly my world becomes deserted and dark. And yet, perhaps not -- the fuel is all burnt and the hearth is cold "

Golijov composed these songs separately in 1999-2001. The orchestral set was premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra with Dawn Upshaw in March 2002. This is our first performance of Golijov's music. Duration 23:00.

Osvaldo Golijov was born in La Plata, Argentina and was raised in an Eastern European Jewish household. Growing up, he was exposed to an eclectic mix of classical chamber music, Jewish liturgical and Klezmer music, and the tango nuevo of Astor Piazzolla. He spent three years in Israel before moving to the United States in 1986, to complete a Ph.D in composition at the University of Pennsylvania. He now resides in Newton, MA. While his music has been commissioned by orchestras and traditional chamber ensembles--Golijov has particularly close associations with the St. Lawrence and Kronos String Quartets--he has also collaborated with an eclectic mix of musicians ranging from the Mexican Rock band Café Tacuba and Andalucian traditional musicians to tabla player Zakir Hussein and Argentine composer, guitarist and producer Gustavo Santaolalla. His musical relationship with Dawn Upshaw is particularly close. In addition to the work heard here, and several arrangements of popular songs, Golijov wrote the title role in his first opera, Ainadamar (2003) for her, and in 2004, Upshaw premiered his song-cycle Ayre.

The Three Songs were originally written for very different contexts. Night of the Flying Horses brings together music written for the 2000 film The Man Who Cried by British director Sally Potter. The text, a lullaby written by Potter herself, though translated into Yiddish, is a recurring theme in this film about Jews and Gypsies in the middle 20th century. Lúa descolorida was written in 1999 as an art song for Dawn Upshaw and pianist Gilbert Kalish, and later adapted in Golijov's St. Mark Passion. Dawn Upshaw also premiered the original version of How Slow the Moon (2001) for soprano and string quartet. Golijov brought these three songs together for a commission celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Minnesota Orchestra. There are differences in style--from the Klezmer-flavored music of the first movement, to the distinctly Galician style of the second to the tinges of both Jazz and Flamenco in the third. But they work perfectly as a set: these are songs of loss, sadness, and mourning.

Night of the Flying Horses begins with unadorned voice, only gradually accompanied by the orchestra. There is an extended orchestral passage at the end, becoming wilder and more disturbing at its conclusion. Golijov explains: "In her film Sally explores the fate of Jews and Gypsies in the tragic mid-years of the 20th century, through a love story between a Jewish young woman and a Gypsy young man. The lullaby metamorphoses into a dense and dark doina (a slow, Gypsy, rubato genre) featuring the lowest string of the violas. The piece ends in a fast gallop boasting a theme that I stole from my friends of the wild gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks. The theme is presented here in a canonical chase between two orchestral groups."

In the second movement, the voice sings to the barest accompaniment of pulsing strings. There is a brief violin solo before the final section. The music dies away to almost nothing before a soaring, passionate passage on the final line "neither in this world, nor in the heights above." The text is in in Gallego, the language of the Galicia region in northwestern Spain (much closer to Portuguese than Spanish). The poem, by the 19th-century Galician poet Rosalía de Castro, has that almost indefinable quality known as saudade in Galician and Portuguese songs: a kind of melancholy longing for that which is gone. According to Golijov "the strongest inspiration for Lúa Descolorida was Dawn Upshaw's rainbow of a voice, and I wanted to give her music so quietly radiant that it would bring an echo of the single tear that Schubert brings without warning in his voicing of a C Major chord." For her part, Upshaw calls it "the saddest C Major song I know."

How Slow the Wind--a response to the accidental death of one of the composer's friends--brings together two short poems by Emily Dickinson. According to Golijov, "I had in mind one of those seconds in life that is frozen in the memory, forever--a sudden death, a single instant in which life turns upside down, different from the experience of death after a long agony." It begins with a long, wistful introduction before the voice enters on a slow, measured melody. When she reaches the climactic line--"Is it too late to touch you, Dear?"--there is a sudden interruption, and the opening music returns. The voiceworks through the text again, as if she is fortifying herself to get beyond this line to the concluding text, a change in mood: a brief lightening of mood before a final lament.
 

Joseph Canteloube, (1879-1957)
Songs of the Auvergne (selections)

Canteloube composed and published his five books of Songs of the Auvergne between 1923 and 1929. The five selections heard here appear for the first time at these concerts. Duration 17:00.

The early 20th century was the golden age of the folksong-collector. In the British Isles, Cecil Sharp and his disciples (including composers Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Percy Grainger) collected and transcribed a vast number of songs and dance tunes. Zoltan Kodály and Belá Bartók published equally enormous collections of music from Hungary and the Balkans. Just a few years later John and Alan Lomax began carting primitive recording equipment over the back roads of the United States, documenting everything from Navajo chants to cowboy ballads, field hollers, and the Blues. Joseph Canteloube was among a group of dedicated musicians who drew upon the folk traditions of various regions of France. In his case, Canteloube had a lifelong passion for the music of his native region, the Auvergne. Born in the town of Annonay, he studied piano with an elderly woman who had herself studied with Chopin. He met Vincent D'Indy in 1902, and studied with him by correspondence before moving to Paris to study formally in 1906. D'Indy encouraged his interest in Auvergnat folk music, language, and culture, which infused nearly all of Canteloube's music. He was never interested in following the avant garde--according to biographer Richard Langham Smith: "Right up to his death, Canteloube continued to believe that contemporary music had lost its way because it had turned its back on folk music." He would later found and lead La Bourrée, a group dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Auvergnat music.

Canteloube's finest works are his Songs of the Auvergne. These are songs in Occitan, (or the "langue d'oc"), the language of the region, and are based upon songs that Canteloube collected throughout his life. They are not merely academic presentations of folk material, but colorful and imaginative arrangements. Canteloube suggested that the orchestral backgrounds to his songs stood in for "nature herself"--the accompaniment to the songs as they were originally sung.
La Fïolare (The Spinner) has an ever-changing orchestral accompaniment--perhaps the spinning wheel itself--as the singer flits above with her cheeky text and nonsense refrains. Baïlèro, the best-known song of the set, is also the first of the songs that Canteloube composed--written on a train in 1923. It is a flirtatious but serene dialogue between a shepherd and his lover, accompanied by a pastoral background of solo woodwinds and strings. The comical Oï ayaï (Oh dear) is also a dialogue, with each verse beginning with Marguerite's anguished cry as she languishes in bed, and ending with dutiful, but frustrated Pierre's "Come on Marguerite, get up!" In the end it is the cold and all of those new clothes that get Marguerite out of bed, not Pierre's nagging!  Brezairola (Lullaby) is a complete change of pace, atmospheric music and a gently murmuring melody of a mother to her child.
 

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Boléro

Ravel composed this work in 1928, and its premiere was at the Paris Opèra on November 22, 1928. The Madison Symphony Orchestra has played Boléro on six previous programs between 1935 and 1995. Duration 17:00.

Boléro is one of the later works of Ravel, and his most popular. In fact, Boléro is one of those pieces that is so popular it risks being a cliché. It has been used in movies --most famously in a memorable beach scene in the otherwise forgettable 1979 film 10--television, advertising, and even figure skating: usually to suggest something languorous and sexy. It has also inspired dozens of imaginative reworkings. [Note: My personal favorite is the Reggae-style cover performed on tour by Frank Zappa's band in the 1980s. M.A.]  But the work Ravel called his "only masterpiece" remains as exciting and musically satisfying as it was in its first performance in 1928.

Boléro was written as a ballet score by Ida Rubinstein. Her ballet, a solo dance set in a Spanish tavern, called for a Spanish idiom, and she originally suggested a transcription of pieces from Iberia by Isaac Albéniz. This proved impossible due to copyright restrictions, and instead Ravel produced an entirely innovative score based on a stylized boléro rhythm--a folk dance of southern Spain. The ballet production was successful, but Boléro proved to be phenomenally popular as a concert work, and it was promptly performed across Europe and America. Not everyone liked it, however--one American critic called it "...the most insolent monstrosity ever perpetrated in the history of music. From the beginning to the end of its 339 measures, it is simply the incredible repetition of a single rhythm....and above it is the blatant recurrence of an overwhelmingly vulgar cabaret tune..." Ravel was taken aback by the strong reactions--negative and positive--to the piece, and in 1931, wrote a letter to the London Daily Telegraph explaining his intentions:

"I am particularly anxious that there should be no misunderstanding as to my Boléro. It is an experiment in a very special and limited direction, and it should not be suspected of aiming at achieving anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does achieve. Before the first performance, I issued a warning to the effect that what I had written was a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral texture without music--of one long, very gradual crescendo. There are no contrasts, and there is practically no invention except in the plan and the manner of the execution. The themes are impersonal--folk tunes of the usual Spanish-Arabian kind. Whatever may have been said to the contrary, the orchestral treatment is simple and straightforward throughout, without the slightest attempt at virtuosity... I have done exactly what I have set out to do, and it is for listeners to take it or leave it."