Dreams of Childhood
Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Program 7

Suite from Ma Mère L’oye (“Mother Goose”)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Composed for piano in 1908; orchestrated in 1911.
Orchestral version premiered on January 28, 1912 in Paris, conducted by Gabriel Grovlez.

“I would settle down on his lap, and tirelessly he would begin, ‘Once upon a time ...’ It was Beauty and the Beast and The Ugly Empress of the Pagodas, and, above all, the adventures of a little mouse he invented for me.” So Mimi Godebski reminisced in later years about the visits of Maurice Ravel to her family’s home during her childhood. Ravel, a contented bachelor, enjoyed these visits to the Godebskis, and he took special delight in playing with the young children — cutting out paper dolls, telling stories, romping around on all fours. Young Mimi and her brother Jean were in the first stages of piano tutelage in 1908, and Ravel decided to encourage their studies by composing some little pieces for them portraying Sleeping Beauty, Hop o’ My Thumb, Empress of the Pagodas and Beauty and the Beast. To these he added an evocation of The Fairy Garden as a postlude. In 1911, he made an orchestral transcription of the original five pieces, added to them a prelude and added an opening scene and connecting interludes to create a ballet based on the old tale of Sleeping Beauty.

The tiny Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty depicts the Good Fairy, who watches over the Princess during her somnolence. Hop o’ My Thumb treats the old legend taken from Perrault’s anthology of 1697. “A boy believed that he could easily find his path by means of the bread crumbs which he had scattered wherever he passed; but he was very much surprised when he could not find a single crumb: the birds had come and eaten everything up,” noted Ravel. Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas portrays a young girl cursed with ugliness by a wicked fairy. The tale, however, has a happy ending in which the Empress’ beauty is restored. In the Conversations of Beauty and the Beast, the high woodwinds sing the delicate words of the Beauty, while the Beast is portrayed by the lumbering contrabassoon. At first the two converse, taking turns in the dialogue, but after their betrothal, both melodies are entwined, and the Beast’s theme is transfigured into a floating wisp in the most ethereal reaches of the solo violin’s range. The closing Fairy Garden is Ravel’s masterful summation of the beauty, mystery and wonder that pervade Mother Goose.

Distant Dreams of Childhood for Violin, Viola, Piano and Strings
Alexander Chaikovsky (born in 1946)

Composed in 1988.

Alexander Chaikovsky, born in Moscow on February 19, 1946, is unrelated to one musical namesake — Peter Ilyich — but the nephew of another: the modern Russian composer and student of Shostakovich, Boris. Alexander Chaikovsky began his professional training at the Music College of Moscow before entering the Moscow Conservatory in 1967 to study piano with Heinrich Neuhaus and Lev Naumov and composition with Tichon Khrennikov. He continued his studies at the Conservatory until 1975, and joined the school’s faculty two years later. Chaikovsky has since become one of Russia’s most eminent musicians, having served as director of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, chairman of the composition department at the Moscow Conservatory, composer-in-residence and long-time consultant for St. Petersburg’s renowned Maryinsky Theater, and founder of Russia’s Youth Academies, which promotes the work of young Russian composers; in 2005, he became rector of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Chaikovsky’s compositions, distinctly modern yet respectful of the great traditions of Russian music, include ballets (one from 1980 is based on Gogol’s satirical play The Inspector-General; another, from 1986, concerns the 1905 sailors’ mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin, also the subject of Sergei Eisenstein’s epochal 1926 silent film), operas (Three Sisters after Chekhov [1994] and Tsar Nikita and his Forty Daughter [1996] after Pushkin), three symphonies, numerous concertos, chamber and choral music, piano pieces and film and theater scores. He has also produced The Anthology of Russian Cinema, a ten-part documentary about Russian cinematography. Among Chaikovsky’s awards are First Prize at the International Forum of Composers Hollybush Festival in Glassboro, New Jersey (1985) and Merited Worker of Arts of Russia (1988); he has also been Principal Composer at the Nova Scotia Festival in Canada, and toured and participated in international music events in Europe, America and Japan.

The following note was written for a performance of Distant Dreams of Childhood in 1994 by the Storioni Ensemble of Northwestern University, conducted by Victor Yampolsky, by Huw Edwards, a former doctoral student at NWU and now Music Director of the Seattle Youth Symphony, Columbia Symphony Orchestra (Oregon) and Olympia Symphony Orchestra (Washington): “Childhood experiences and memories of former days have always been sources of inspiration for composers of all nationalities. The music of Gustav Mahler contains numerous references to his memories as a boy living near a military barracks, and many of his dreams were actually traumatic nightmares — alienated visions that returned to haunt him in later life. Composers such as Elgar and Britten attempted to recapture a childlike innocence in their music; for them, childhood was a paradise lost, or at any rate corrupted by the monstrosities of two World Wars. Russian composers have often used vivid dreams and memories of childhood in their music: Mussorgsky’s song-cycle The Nursery, the ‘children’s scene’ in Boris Godunov, and parts of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker are just three examples.

“Alexander Chaikovsky continues this tradition in his Distant Dreams of Childhood for Solo Violin, Solo Viola, Piano and Strings of 1988, with its slowly materializing themes and points of focus. The work opens (Moderato) with the violin and viola soloists playing an agitated theme in unison. The solo lines are abuzz with activity, their parts roaming skittishly above the insidiously moving accompaniment in the low strings. The music becomes calm (dolcissimo) as Chaikovsky recalls a pleasant dream, but the feeling of peace is short-lived as the piano’s entry returns to the truculent music of the opening. The second movement (Presto), which follows without pause, opens with a cadenza-like passage of febrile nervousness for the solo viola. The solo violin joins the viola as the strings provide a percussive undercarriage. Dazzling condiments are introduced by the strings to flavor the music, including rapidly vibrating glissandi, col legno (tapping the strings with the wooden back of the bow) and quarter-tone shifts. After a held tone, the tempo slows to Andante for the third section (piano chords) which, again, continues without interruption. Rich string sonorities (molto appassionato) preface another expansive and elaborate cadenza for the soloists. The coda is a tranquil Adagio that slowly dissolves into silence as the childhood dream fades away in the mind’s eye. As Edgar Allan Poe prophetically remarked: ‘All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.’”

The Seasons, Ballet in One Act and Four Tableaux, Op. 67
Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936)

Composed in 1899.
Premiered on February 7, 1900 in St. Petersburg.

By the turn of the 20th century, Russian music had become a mature art. The works of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Borodin, having been played at home and abroad, established a national character and tradition that those masters wanted to see passed on to succeeding generations. The most important Russian musical torchbearer of the two decades after 1900, the time between the deaths of Tchaikovsky and his contemporaries and the rise of the modern school of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, was Alexander Glazunov.

Glazunov was gifted with an exceptional ear and musical memory (after Borodin’s death, he completely reconstructed the Overture to Prince Igor from recollections of Borodin’s piano performance of the piece), and early demonstrated his gifts in his native St. Petersburg. By age nineteen, he had traveled to western Europe for a performance of his First Symphony. During the 1890s, he established a wide reputation as a composer and a conductor of his own works, journeying to Paris in 1889 to direct his Second Symphony at the World Exhibition. In 1899, he was engaged as instructor of composition and orchestration at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. When his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was dismissed from the Conservatory staff in the wake of the 1905 revolutionary turmoil, Glazunov resigned in protest in April and did not return until December 14th, by which time most of the demands by the faculty for the school’s autonomy had been granted. Two days later he was elected director of the Conservatory. He worked ceaselessly to improve the curriculum and standards of the Conservatory, and made a successful effort to preserve the school’s independence after the 1917 Revolution. In the final years of his tenure, which lasted officially until 1930, Glazunov was criticized for his conservatism (Shostakovich, one of his students, devoted many admiring but frustrated pages to him in his purported memoirs, Testimony) and spent much time abroad. In 1929, he visited the United States to conduct the orchestras of Boston and Detroit in concerts of his music. When his health broke, in 1932, he settled with his wife in Paris; he died there in 1936. In 1972, his remains were transferred to Leningrad and reinterred in an honored grave. A research institute devoted to him in Munich and an archive in Paris were established in his memory.

Glazunov’s greatest period of creativity came in the years before his Conservatory duties occupied most of his time and energy. He produced much music in all forms except opera — his last major work, the Saxophone Concerto of 1934, bears the opus number 109. His best-known piece is the Violin Concerto, written just before he was installed as director of the Petersburg Conservatory, but a few other works, notably the ballets Raymonda and The Seasons, the Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Symphonies and the atmospheric tone poems The Kremlin and Stenka Razin, occasionally grace concert programs. “Within Russian music, Glazunov has a significant place because he succeeded in reconciling Russianism and Europeanism,” wrote Boris Schwarz. “He was the direct heir of Balakirev’s nationalism but tended more toward Borodin’s epic grandeur. At the same time he absorbed Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral virtuosity, the lyricism of Tchaikovsky and the contrapuntal skill of Taneyev.... He remains a composer of imposing stature and a stabilizing influence in a time of transition and turmoil.”

Glazunov’s three ballets — Raymonda, Les Ruses d’Amour and The Seasons — were all produced between 1898 and 1900. The Seasons was premiered in St. Petersburg on February 7, 1900 with libretto and choreography by Marius Petipa, who had collaborated with Tchaikovsky on The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. The ballet has no distinctive plot, but is arranged as a series of four divertissements. In the First Tableaux, the Spirit of Winter enters with his attendants, Frost, Ice, Hail and Snow; each has a solo variation. Two gnomes suddenly enter, and set fire to some kindling. Unable to resist the warmth, Winter and his band approach the fire and disappear. In Tableaux Two, Spring dances joyfully with Zephyr amid a sunny field of flowers. Tableaux Three (Summer) begins with the appearance of the Spirit of Corn. The spring flowers wilt and their petals droop. Several Naiads enter, symbolizing refreshing streams. The flowers revive and dance with the Naiads. Suddenly, satyrs invade the grove, attempting, without success, to carry off the Spirit of Corn. Autumn (Tableaux Four) celebrates the grape harvest with a stirring bacchanale, with solo variations for Winter, Spring and Zephyr. The dance grows wilder until a deluge of autumn leaves ends the revels. The starlit sky is revealed as a reminder of the constancy of the universe that serves as the backdrop for the changes of the earthly seasons.

©2006 Dr. Richard E. Rodda