Sibelius III
Thursday - August 19, 8:00 pm

Winston Choi, Piano
Rogene Russell, English Horn
Faure - Pelleas et Melisande: Suite, op. 80
Ravel - Piano Concerto, G major
Sibelius - The swan of Tuonela
Sibelius - Symphony no. 3, op. 52, C major

Program 8

Suite from the Incidental Music to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Composed in 1898.
Premiered June 21, 1898 in London, conducted by the composer.

Gabriel Fauré was one of the great figures of French music at the turn of the 20th century. A student of Saint-Saëns, a master organist, the teacher of Ravel, Enesco, Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger, director of the Paris Conservatoire, and a composer of immense skill and refinement, Fauré was best suited to composing in the small forms of song and chamber music. Among the most successful of his handful of works for orchestra is the beautiful suite that he drew from his incidental music to Maeterlinck’s symbolist play, Pelléas et Mélisande, which he created for a production of the drama at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London in 1898. (Fauré generally disliked writing for large ensembles, and often entrusted his most talented students with the orchestration of his pieces. Charles Koechlin was assigned the original theatrical version of Pelléas; Fauré based his 1901 suite upon the orchestration of his pupil.) This haunting and haunted drama, which premiered in Paris in 1893, embodied the Symbolists’ philosophy that mood is more important than plot. Such dramatic incidents as occur often defy logical continuity, seeming rather to be isolated events intended to suggest associations and feelings to the audience through the use of language and setting. Robert Layton summarized the drama’s plot: “Pelléas is set in mythical Allemonde, the protagonists in the drama remain shadowy and we are left knowing little or nothing of their background. Prince Golaud out riding one day discovers Mélisande, weeping and lost in the forest, and takes her under his protection. Maeterlinck’s play charts her growing infatuation for his younger half-brother, Pelléas, and Golaud’s ensuing jealousy.” The play inspired incidental music from Jean Sibelius for a 1905 production in Helsinki (in Finnish!), a concert overture from Cyril Scott in 1912, and a vast symphonic poem from Arnold Schoenberg in 1903. It also proved to be the perfect subject for the wispy, Impressionistic idiom of Debussy, and was equally well suited to the art of Fauré, whose incidental music preceded Debussy’s opera by four years.

Fauré’s musical style, though looking forward in some of its techniques to Impressionism, is more refined, classical and understated than that of Debussy, concerning itself with purity of line and precise formal balance rather than with mood-painting through unconventional harmonies and indistinct structures. Julien Teirsot described the elegant essence of Fauré’s music in these words: “It is the spirit of Hellenism that is reborn in him He thrusts himself beyond the spheres to bring back pure beauty.” Such terms as “taste,” “unerring judgment,” “delicacy,” “impeccable workmanship” and “sensibility” attach themselves easily and appropriately to the music of Fauré, and they certainly apply to this lovely Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande. The Prélude was intended to be played before the curtain rises on Pelléas to evoke the play’s aura of melancholy and mystery. There is a meditative quality about this music, a deep stillness that rises only briefly to peaks of tension before again subsiding. The horn-calls near the end invest the music with a suggestion of the antique, sylvan setting of the drama. The second movement (Fileuse) depicts Mélisande at her spinning wheel. The whirring of the wheel is portrayed by the steady rhythmic filigree in the strings, which serves as background for the heroine’s plaintive song, intoned by the oboe. The third movement, Sicilienne, is one of Fauré’s most famous inspirations, though it was not originally composed for the incidental music for the play. Pressed for time during his preparations for the opening night of the London Pelléas, the composer borrowed this work from a chamber piece first written for cello and piano. In the London production, its quality of bittersweet nostalgia was used to underline the touching love scene between Pelléas and Mélisande. The finale, The Death of Mélisande, is a mournful elegy of quiet intensity.

Milton Cross wrote of the exquisite art of Gabriel Fauré, “In Fauré’s music, we have the art of understatement. The pure and classic beauty that pervades his greatest works is derived from simplicity, restraint, delicate sensibility, refinement, and repose.”

Piano Concerto in G
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Composed in 1929-1931.
Premiered on January 14, 1932 in Paris, with Marguerite Long as soloist and the composer conducting.

Ravel’s tour of the United States in 1928 was such a success that he began to plan for a second one as soon as he returned to France. With a view toward having a vehicle for himself as a pianist on the return visit, he started work on a concerto in 1929, perhaps encouraged by the good fortune that Stravinsky had enjoyed concertizing with his Concerto for Piano and Winds and Piano Capriccio earlier in the decade. Both to polish his keyboard technique and to extend his repertory — he seems to have harbored a desire to be a virtuoso pianist into his last years — Ravel spent much time and effort in those months practicing the works of Liszt and Chopin. However, many other projects pressed upon him, not the least of which was a commission from the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the First World War, to compose a piano concerto for left hand alone. Ravel set aside the tour concerto for some nine months to work on Wittgenstein’s commission.

Ravel commented to a friend, the musicologist M.D. Calvocoressi, about having both scores on his desk at the same time: “Planning the two concertos simultaneously was an interesting experience. The one in which I shall appear as interpreter is a concerto in the truest sense of the word: I mean that it is written very much in the same spirit as those of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. The music of a concerto should, in my opinion, be light-hearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or dramatic effects I had intended to entitle this concerto ‘Divertissement.’ Then it occurred to me that there was no need to do so, because the very title ‘Concerto’ should be sufficiently clear. The concerto for left hand alone is very different” As it happened, Ravel was unable to find time to prepare the solo part when the new two-hand Concerto was finished in autumn 1931, so he approached his long-time interpreter Marguerite Long with the request that she undertake the premiere. Having prodded Ravel for some time to write just such a work, she readily accepted. Ravel was so excited by the fine reception given to the Concerto at its first performance in January 1932 that he told Calvocoressi he wanted to take it on an around-the-world tour. He and Madame Long did not get quite that far, but they did have a four-month tour that spring that went to several important cities in central Europe and England. Despite Ravel’s initial enthusiasm for traveling with the Concerto, however, the rigors of the trip seem to have taken a heavy toll on his always-delicate health, and later that summer he started suffering from a number of medical setbacks that culminated the following year in the discovery of a brain tumor. His health never returned, and the Concerto in G was the last major score that he completed.

Ravel told John Burk, program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, that “he felt that in this composition he had expressed himself most completely, and that he had poured his thoughts into the exact mold that he had dreamed.” In addition to the spirit of grace and pure entertainment that he hoped to achieve with this work, Ravel also drew on another important influence — that American export then sweeping Europe like wildfire, Le Jazz Hot. The jazz-inspired effects of rhythm and instrumentation in the Concerto’s outer movements pay homage both to the music of George Gershwin, whom Ravel had met several years before, and to Ravel’s past and projected tours of America. Robert Kotlowitz commented, however, that these qualities may also reflect a wider social phenomenon: “Gershwin’s Concerto in F had been composed five years before Ravel’s and there is little doubt that Ravel was familiar with it. But the G major is not Gershwin slavishly followed. It is not even Gershwin used as a model. It is the period itself — a little giddy, daring in a playful way, impertinent, sentimental, restless — that fills Ravel’s Concerto as it fills Gershwin’s.”

The sparkling first movement of the Concerto in G opens with a bright melody in the piccolo that may derive from an old folk dance of the Basque region of southern France, where Ravel was born. There is even some evidence that this movement and the finale trace back to an aborted piano concerto on Basque themes on which Ravel had worked right after the First World War. There are several themes in this exposition: the lively opening group is balanced by another set that is more nostalgic and bluesy in character. The development section is an elaboration of the lively opening themes, ending with a brief cadenza in octaves as a link to the recapitulation. The lively themes are passed over quickly, but the nostalgic melodies are treated at some length. One melody is given as an atmospheric cadenza for harp; another as a trill-filled solo for the pianist. The jaunty vivacity of the beginning returns for a dazzling coda filled with flashing figuration shared by the upper winds and the solo trumpet.

When Ravel first showed the manuscript of the Adagio to Madame Long, she commented on the music’s effortless, flowing grace. The composer sighed, and told her that he had struggled to write the movement “bar by bar,” that it had cost him more anxiety than any of his other scores. It is impossible to hear Ravel’s toil in this lovely, ethereal music, whose haunting simplicity is reminiscent, according to Arbie Orenstein, of the “archaic lyricism” of Eric Satie’s works. The movement begins with a long-breathed melody for solo piano over a rocking accompaniment. The piano weaves delicate strands of filigree around the lovely theme as it passes into the orchestra. The central section of the movement does not differ from the opening as much in melody as it does in texture — a gradual thickening occurs as the music proceeds. The texture then becomes again translucent, and the opening melody is heard on its return in the plaintive tones of the English horn. Tender string harmonies bring this magical movement to a quiet close.

The finale is a whirling showpiece for soloist and orchestra that again recalls the energetic world of jazz. Trombone slides, muted trumpet interjections, shrieking exclamations from the woodwinds abound. The episodes of the form tumble continuously one after another without time for even a breath on their way to the abrupt conclusion of the work.

In her biography of the composer, Madeleine Goss wrote, “In none of his compositions is Ravel more completely master of his art than in this Concerto. It has been said to embrace all the essentials of his music: brilliance, clarity, elegance, originality; tenderness and simplicity in the middle part, and, in the last movement, daring vigor and brittle perfection.”

The Swan of Tuonela (No. 2) from Four Legends of Lemminkainen, Op. 22
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

Composed in 1893; revised in 1896 and 1900.
Premiered on April 13, 1896 in Helsinki, conducted by the composer.

The influence of Richard Wagner was virtually inescapable for a European musician in the closing decades of the 19th century, and Jean Sibelius was certainly not among those few who were immune. As a young man, he studied in Vienna and traveled through Germany, where he came under the Wagnerian spell. He was influenced not just by the orchestral ingenuity and harmonic audacity of the music dramas, but also by their foundation in the great nationalistic myths of Germany. Sibelius, who early discovered his calling as a musical spokesman for his native Finland, thought the Wagnerian glorification of country could be adapted to the sweeping legends of his homeland, and he sought the opportunity to compose a nationalistic opera.

In the summer of 1893, Sibelius met the writer J.H. Erkko while staying at Kuipio in the Finnish interior. As material for an operatic subject, Erkko awakened Sibelius’ interest in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, on which the composer had previously based his Kullervo Symphony (1891-1892) and Karelia Suite (1893). In collaboration with Erkko, Sibelius devised a libretto titled The Building of the Boat, based on the Kalevala legend. He worked on the music for a short time, but, finding the operatic idiom uncongenial and not at all convinced that he had the talent to compete successfully in the high-powered post-Wagnerian sweepstakes (“I went to hear Tristan the day before yesterday; nothing, not even Parsifal, made as overwhelming an impression,” he lamented on August 10th), he abandoned the project. His only other attempt at opera was a one-act piece, The Maiden in the Tower, written for a school benefit in 1896. It enjoyed little success, was never published, and was regarded even by the composer as an unimportant work. Following this abortive attempt at opera during his 30s, Sibelius’ major compositions for the rest of his life were all instrumental.

The time spent on The Building of the Boat, however, was not wasted. The music that had been intended as a prelude was reworked as an exquisite and haunting miniature for small orchestra in 1893 — The Swan of Tuonela. Two years later, Sibelius again returned to the Kalevala as the inspiration for three additional tone poems: Lemminkainen and the Maidens of Saari, Lemminkainen in Tuonela and Lemminkainen’s Return. These four were grouped together as Four Legends of Lemminkainen, Op. 22, a sort-of Finnish equivalent of Smetana’s cycle of nationalistic tone poems, Ma Vlast (“My Country”), and premiered in Helsinki under the composer’s direction on April 13, 1896.

Lemminkainen, Sibelius’ protagonist and one of the heroes of the epic, is a reckless adventurer, always getting into serious scrapes from which he escapes through brazen exploits or magic. A note in the score of The Swan of Tuonela describes the setting of the work: “Tuonela, the land of death, the hell of Finnish mythology, is surrounded by a broad river with black waters and rapid currents, on which the Swan of Tuonela floats majestically, singing.” Lemminkainen, as one of the requirements for wooing a maiden of Pojho, is charged with killing the sacred Swan. He fails, and is slain by an aged enemy. His body is cut to pieces by one of the guardians of Tuonela. Lemminkainen’s mother hears of her son’s fate, and restores him to life by magic charms and salves. Sibelius’ tone poem depicts the legendary Swan and its darkly mysterious habitat. The instrumentation utilizes the somber spectrum of the orchestra. Oboe, bass clarinet, bassoons, horns, trombones, timpani, bass drum, harp and strings (divided as many as seventeen ways) — the bright sounds of flutes, high clarinets, trumpets are absent — are used to paint the “black river” upon which glides the Swan, whose strophe is sung by the solo English horn. The Swan’s melody is a typically Sibelian creation — and one suggestive of the mythical bird itself: an opening long note is followed by a quick rhythmic flourish and another sustained note, all in the shape of an inverted arch, as though the Swan, floating silently, suddenly but gracefully cocked its neck, rippled the smooth surface of the water with a quick turn, and then resumed its majestic progress. Though the music, like the river, flows continuously, Edward Downes suggests its structure follows the ancient “Bar” form (A–A–B) used by the minstrel poets of forgotten days. The long melody of the Swan is played twice, the beginning of its repetition marked by the first entry of the horns. The third section starts with the pizzicato chords of the violins.

The Swan of Tuonela demands — and repays — careful listening. It is brief, slow in tempo, with a dynamic range that seldom rises above a whisper, and it is easy to overlook its haunting beauties on first encounter. It is one of Sibelius’ earliest masterworks, “the first sign of [his] absolute genius,” wrote Robert Layton, and casts a spell like few other pieces. “Nowhere else,” concluded Cecil Gray, “has Sibelius more perfectly realized the strange magical beauty that lies at the heart of Finnish mythology. The whole work, indeed, although it consists of no more than a hundred bars, is one of the most deeply poetic and imaginative things in modern music.”

Symphony No. 3 in C major, Op. 52
Jean Sibelius

Composed 1904-1907.
Premiered on September 25, 1907 in Helsinki, conducted by the composer.

The successful premiere of the Second Symphony in March 1902 confirmed the genius of Jean Sibelius to the international musical community. The composer’s personal life at the time, however, was not without difficulty. Though he received sizeable royalties from his compositions and an annual stipend from the Finnish government, he was a poor money manager, and mired his family, which then included two young daughters, in continuous debt and some financial distress. Exacerbating his unsettled state of mind was a painful ear infection that did not respond to treatment. Thoughts of the deafness of Beethoven and Smetana plagued him, and he feared that, at the age of 37, he might be losing his hearing. In June 1902, he also began having trouble with his throat, and jumped to the conclusion that his health was about to give way, even wondering how much time he might have left to work. He continued to persevere, however, and completed his Violin Concerto in 1903. (A benign tumor in his throat was discovered in 1909, and successfully removed. Sibelius enjoyed sterling health for the rest of his days, and lived to the ripe age of 91.) For relaxation during that anxious period in his life, Sibelius frequented the local drinking establishments in Helsinki, and his generous and uncomplaining wife, Aino, often found him unaccounted for after a day or two, when he would resurface with apologies. In addition to the concern such profligacy caused his family, Sibelius also regretted the time stolen from creative work that his excessive drinking caused. By early 1904, he and Aino had determined to face the problem. “It was necessary for me to get away from Helsinki,” Sibelius told his biographer Karl Ekman. “My art demanded another environment. In Helsinki, all melody died within me. Besides, I was too sociable to be able to refuse invitations that interfered with my composition. I found it very difficult to say no. I had to get away.” He scouted out a lot for a new country house overlooking Lake Tuusula, some twenty miles north of Helsinki, but found the waterfront property too expensive, and settled instead for a nearby forest site at Järvenpää (“Lake’s End”; Hallwag’s atlas of Europe lists twelve towns by that name in Finland). He engaged a builder, approved plans for a log house, and followed the progress of the project eagerly through the summer of 1904. His new home, named Ainola in honor of his wife, was ready in September, and the move to new surroundings renewed his spirit and fired his creative imagination. Ainola was to be his home until he died more than fifty years later. Almost before the boxes were unpacked, he notified a friend, “Have begun my Third Symphony.”

After starting the Third Symphony with enthusiasm in September 1904, Sibelius laid the project aside during the following year to revise the Violin Concerto, to compose the incidental music for a production in Helsinki of Maeterlinck’s Pélleas et Mélisande, and to undertake conducting tours to Germany and Britain. He was particularly gratified at his reception in England in November 1905, his first visit to that country, where his host was the composer and conductor Sir Granville Bantock, who had been introducing the local audiences to his music. (Bantock entertained him so liberally that Sibelius said he “never made the acquaintance of English coinage.”) While conducting in London, Sibelius met Henry Wood, director of the popular Promenade Concerts, and he agreed to lead the London Philharmonic in the premiere of his still gestating Third Symphony in that city in March 1907. The year 1906 was devoted not to the Symphony, however, but to the tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter and the incidental music for Hjalmar Procopé’s Belshazzer’s Feast, in which event the Symphony was not completed in time for its scheduled introduction in London. Sibelius finally finished the score during the summer of 1907, three years after its conception, and conducted its first performance in Helsinki on September 25th; London did not hear the piece until the following February. The score was dedicated to Bantock upon its publication.

Sibelius’ Third Symphony coincided not just with his move to a new home, but also with the beginning of a new manner of composition. The first two symphonies had been heavily indebted in their idiom, scoring and construction to the music of the late Romantic tradition. The C major Symphony signaled a fresh start for Sibelius, a movement into a revitalized musical language that was more concentrated in its expression and form, more logically coherent and inherently profound in its development, and more adventurous and inclusive in its harmonic and tonal structures. “[The Third Symphony] marked a rejection of the late 19th-century style of expansive emotionalism, of epic sweep, of folkloristic color, of the almost Tchaikovskian piling of climax upon climax which had so greatly enhanced the popular appeal of his First and Second Symphonies,” wrote Edward Downes. “In the Third Symphony ... Sibelius launched his own trend toward a more laconic style of disciplined power.” The method that Sibelius demonstrated here, which also served as the stylistic foundation for his four later symphonies, was a sort of mirror-reversal of classical procedure: rather than beginning with a fully stated theme and then breaking it into its component motives during the course of a movement (the characteristic method of Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and most other 18th and 19th-century symphonists), Sibelius first presents melodic fragments and then spins them into a whole theme as the music progresses. “The result,” according to Professor Donald Tovey, “is that, in works of no inordinate length, Sibelius achieves climaxes on the biggest Wagnerian scale without any redundancies, hesitations or confusions from the habits of older art-forms.” Sibelius’ dictum that “the essence of the symphonic form lies in its severity and style and the profound logic that creates an inner connection between all the motives” finds its first full realization in the last movement of the Third Symphony.

“The predominating feature of the Symphony,” wrote Karl Ekman, “is the Apollonian joy in light, clarity, strength and chaste form.” The opening Allegro is the most purely classical structure in any of Sibelius’ symphonies. Its sonata form begins with a simple but beautifully proportioned main theme given unaccompanied by the low strings and then shared with the rest of the orchestra. A diatonic passage of increasing animation leads to three unison notes from trumpets and trombones to herald the cellos’ presentation of the subsidiary theme, a typically Sibelian melody comprising a long-held note followed by a quick flourish. A quiet phrase of slow string scales in contrary motion serves as the gateway to the development section. The recapitulation of the earlier themes is signaled by the loudest dynamic climax of the movement and a drone pedal note in the basses. A hymnal coda closes the movement.

The gently melancholic second movement is a lovely intermezzo with delicately shifting rhythmic accents. There are no strong contrasts to disrupt the easy flow of this music, just short chordal passages for divided cellos and woodwinds to mark the movement’s mid-point.

The two-part closing movement fuses the formal functions of scherzo and finale. Its first section, in spirited 6/8 meter, begins the process that the composer called “the crystallization of ideas from chaos.” It comprises thematic bits and fragments, sometimes melded, sometimes diffused, which arrange themselves into no obvious formal pattern save the continuous accumulation of energy as the music unfolds. Continuity and thematic integrity are achieved in the movement’s second section, the Symphony’s finale, which is based on a short-breathed theme intoned by the low strings. The melody acquires a rhythmic ostinato as it proceeds, and grows to a stentorian statement by the full orchestra before reaching its heroic close with a broad proclamation of the notes of the C major triad.