Music in the service of depicting magic at work -- it's been one of the great preoccupations of composers throughout the history of European music from the birth of opera in the early 1600s right to the present day. Even such apparently staid and un-pictorial composers as Brahms had a go at it. Sometimes magic is depicted as happening at quicksilver speed (think Mendelssohn in A Midsummer Night's Dream). In the particular cases I want to consider today, the power of magic is quiet, immense, gentle and awe-inspiring all at once.
I've always found it curious that more composers weren't inspired by the vast trove of legends accumulating around King Arthur. These stories have always seemed to me to be made to order for operatic or symphonic treatment, with their wealth of dramatic incident and their vividly colourful characters and settings. Well, Wagner dipped into the edges with the operas Lohengrin and Parsifal, both of which draw on the legends of the Holy Grail that figure so prominently in the tales of Arthur and his knights. Other examples, though, have been few and far between and mostly have remained relatively unknown.
What would a Wagnerian Arthur have sounded like? Well, we can get a bit of a taste by listening to Ernest Chausson's opera Le roi Arthus, his last completed work. No, it's not pure Wagner by any means, but if you combine the twin influences of Wagner and Cesar Franck with a French environment in the late 19th century, you've pretty much described the musical style in which Chausson was working. From Wagner, he derived first the idea of creating his own libretto, and it is full of the positive spirit of the man who wrote it. Even though it is framed as a tragedy, the tragic downfall of the man Arthur happens even as his great ideal promises its own future redemption.
Like Wagner, Chausson also composed in lengthy scenes, six in all for an opera lasting a little under 3 hours. There are no detachable set pieces, arias, etc. The continuous flow of the music shows how much he learned from the master of Bayreuth, even though he makes but slight use of leitmotifs. There is a lyrical quality to the score, not at all Wagnerian, but definitely in line with other French composers of the late 19th century. All in all, a joy to the ear.
Now, what about the magic? Well, there's plenty of that in the Arthurian legendarium; which moments would Chausson choose to include? There are two main scenes of magic. In Act II the distraught Arthur cries out to Merlin to help him, and Merlin appears upstage, imprisoned by magic in the apple grove, to foretell, in dark bass tones, Arthur's death. The music here is spare, lightly scored, with muted strings and occasional quiet phrases from the winds.
At the end, Arthur is left alone after the death of Lancelot, with his entire world in ruins. As he pleads for God to end his life, a mysterious, mystical sequence of common chords is heard from an offstage chorus, ushering in the final scene where Arthur is taken away in a magical boat to be healed of his wounds and to sleep in peace until the future time when is to return. Those beautiful common chords have an interesting history -- fittingly enough, one where the present circles around to join hands with the past.
Chausson's Op. 5 is a masterly symphonic poem entitled Viviane, the name of the fairy/witch who tricks Merlin into surrendering his magical powers and then imprisons him in the tree. These events are clearly depicted in the music, which opens with that same beautiful sequence of common chords, scored lightly for strings.
There's no question that this magical sound deserves a place in his magnum opus. By placing it in the mouths of the mystic celestial singers at the end of Arthus, Chausson retroactively conferred on this potent musical idea a stature of the divine, or of good or "white" magic if you prefer. In the opera, the chorus continues singing in the background throughout Arthur's magnificent concluding arioso, and finally leads the way as his body at last appears in the magical boat, sailing into the distance.
It seems to me little short of scandalous that Le Roi Arthus has only been recorded in full (as far as I can find out) two times. The older recording from 1987 is the one I have, on three Erato CDs, and is conducted with great passion and fire by Armin Jordan. The three leads are all first-rate: Teresa Zylis-Gara as Genievre (Guinevere), Gosta Winbergh as Lancelot, and Canadian baritone Gino Quilico as Arthus.
Like most of Chausson's output, Viviane has not fared much better in frequency. My recording is a re-release of an EMI France CD conducted by Michel Plasson with the Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, and comes together with the Symphony in B flat and another symphonic poem, Soir de fete. All these works are well worth having, especially in you like Cesar Franck's lone symphony and wish he had written more of them!
Friday 25 October 2013
Monday 21 October 2013
Scandinavian Rarities # 2
Hi there, loyal readers -- sorry it's taken me so long to get back here for the second installment of this little mini-series.
Ask most music lovers to name two Norwegian Romantic composers, and this is what you will likely get in answer:
[1] Edvard Grieg
[2] uhhhh....
This is especially unfortunate, because Grieg's art (masterful as it became) was strongly tilted towards the production of small character pieces and songs. In this kind of musical lyricism he was truly unequalled. But the composition of larger musical structures was not his métier. Apart from the famous Piano Concerto, there is an early symphony of relatively little interest (to me at any rate) and that's about all. Almost all of Grieg's most noteworthy musical inspirations tell their tale within a span of five minutes or less.
I'm making a point of this reality, because Grieg himself regarded today's composer as his natural counterpart, excelling in the larger symphonic structures which Grieg himself preferred to leave to others.
The saddest point of this story is that Johan Svendsen's composing career came to a premature end after a quarrel with his wife led to her burning the manuscript of his Third Symphony. He simply lacked the motivation to re-write it from memory, and just dried up as a creator of new music. For the rest of his career he scored notable successes as a conductor, but composed nothing.
If that story sounds familiar, it may be because you've seen or read Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler. The quarrel and burning story made the rounds of artistic circles in Oslo (then called Kristiania) and Ibsen put the incident almost unaltered into his newest play!
So, today's recording contains the two existing Symphonies and a Polonaise for orchestra. The symphonies have been recorded before, but certainly not often, nor are they likely to be known to most music lovers outside of Norway. The Polonaise is a premiere recording.
The first thing that strikes you right at the opening bar of the Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Op. 4 is the sheer energy and driving force of the music. This is a work that hits the ground running and keeps right on going. If the opening theme perhaps sounds a bit naïve, it's worth remembering that opus number and realizing that Svendsen was still a young man (age 25) when he wrote it in 1865. In the first minute he has already given a balancing second statement to the first one, and begun to put the first few bars through a fugato passage. This movement is nothing if not eventful!
The succeeding slow movement is imbued with poetic sounds of the horns. The scherzo brings us into the world of folk music, mixing it with a kind of mock-Mozart ambience in a very winning combination. The finale opens with a slow introduction which accelerates into another energetic burst of good-natured melody. Again, as in the first movement, the music surges onward at speed, with occasional cross-rhythms to add spice to the mixture.
The Symphony No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 15 was composed eleven years after No. 1, and surprisingly shows not as much development as you might expect. Does that matter, when the music is just as zippy and ingratiating as its predecessor? The first movement is composed in an energetic triple time, which produces memorable musical ideas with as much flair as many of Dvorak's first movements. The succeeding slow movement also reminds me of Dvorak.
The Intermezzo third movement is inspired by the Halling or Springdans, a Norwegian folk dance which calls for the dancers to leap frequently into the air. The bass line is a kind of drone bass familiar from many of Grieg's dance inspirations, but here less overtly reminiscent of the droning understrings on the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. The finale again has a dark slow introduction, but this soon speeds up into another brightly-lit, high-spirited finale with a main theme which anticipates by two decades one of the dances in Act 1 of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker.
The Polonaise No. 2, Op. 28 is a suitable encore to the two symphonies, with the classic polonaise rhythm underlying another characteristically bright and cheerful string of melodies. The central trio is charmingly scored for flute and strings, a good contrast to the grandiose ending of the main theme.
Again, thanks to the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard for another sparkling collection of music that deserves to be heard, and heard often, not neglected on a dusty library shelf. The full, warm Chandos sound again presents this music most effectively.
Ask most music lovers to name two Norwegian Romantic composers, and this is what you will likely get in answer:
[1] Edvard Grieg
[2] uhhhh....
This is especially unfortunate, because Grieg's art (masterful as it became) was strongly tilted towards the production of small character pieces and songs. In this kind of musical lyricism he was truly unequalled. But the composition of larger musical structures was not his métier. Apart from the famous Piano Concerto, there is an early symphony of relatively little interest (to me at any rate) and that's about all. Almost all of Grieg's most noteworthy musical inspirations tell their tale within a span of five minutes or less.
I'm making a point of this reality, because Grieg himself regarded today's composer as his natural counterpart, excelling in the larger symphonic structures which Grieg himself preferred to leave to others.
The saddest point of this story is that Johan Svendsen's composing career came to a premature end after a quarrel with his wife led to her burning the manuscript of his Third Symphony. He simply lacked the motivation to re-write it from memory, and just dried up as a creator of new music. For the rest of his career he scored notable successes as a conductor, but composed nothing.
If that story sounds familiar, it may be because you've seen or read Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler. The quarrel and burning story made the rounds of artistic circles in Oslo (then called Kristiania) and Ibsen put the incident almost unaltered into his newest play!
So, today's recording contains the two existing Symphonies and a Polonaise for orchestra. The symphonies have been recorded before, but certainly not often, nor are they likely to be known to most music lovers outside of Norway. The Polonaise is a premiere recording.
The first thing that strikes you right at the opening bar of the Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Op. 4 is the sheer energy and driving force of the music. This is a work that hits the ground running and keeps right on going. If the opening theme perhaps sounds a bit naïve, it's worth remembering that opus number and realizing that Svendsen was still a young man (age 25) when he wrote it in 1865. In the first minute he has already given a balancing second statement to the first one, and begun to put the first few bars through a fugato passage. This movement is nothing if not eventful!
The succeeding slow movement is imbued with poetic sounds of the horns. The scherzo brings us into the world of folk music, mixing it with a kind of mock-Mozart ambience in a very winning combination. The finale opens with a slow introduction which accelerates into another energetic burst of good-natured melody. Again, as in the first movement, the music surges onward at speed, with occasional cross-rhythms to add spice to the mixture.
The Symphony No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 15 was composed eleven years after No. 1, and surprisingly shows not as much development as you might expect. Does that matter, when the music is just as zippy and ingratiating as its predecessor? The first movement is composed in an energetic triple time, which produces memorable musical ideas with as much flair as many of Dvorak's first movements. The succeeding slow movement also reminds me of Dvorak.
The Intermezzo third movement is inspired by the Halling or Springdans, a Norwegian folk dance which calls for the dancers to leap frequently into the air. The bass line is a kind of drone bass familiar from many of Grieg's dance inspirations, but here less overtly reminiscent of the droning understrings on the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. The finale again has a dark slow introduction, but this soon speeds up into another brightly-lit, high-spirited finale with a main theme which anticipates by two decades one of the dances in Act 1 of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker.
The Polonaise No. 2, Op. 28 is a suitable encore to the two symphonies, with the classic polonaise rhythm underlying another characteristically bright and cheerful string of melodies. The central trio is charmingly scored for flute and strings, a good contrast to the grandiose ending of the main theme.
Again, thanks to the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard for another sparkling collection of music that deserves to be heard, and heard often, not neglected on a dusty library shelf. The full, warm Chandos sound again presents this music most effectively.
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