A Concerto Which Spans the Emotional Universe

The work I have been listening to with as much pleasure as ever the last few days is one of the most surprising victims of an egregious double standard in the world of music.

This double standard decrees that the Great Composers are always great, even on their off days, while the Not-So-Great Composers are never great, even at their finest full stretch.

Utter hogwash.  Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert -- to name only three Great Composers -- all set pen to paper for numerous little potboilers and money spinners, and lavished little or none of their greatest gifts on such things as contradances, minuets, and folk song settings.  I'm sure they'd all kill themselves laughing at the holy reverence with which such chips from the workbench are often played and discussed in our times.

On the opposite side of the great divide, Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens are but two examples of composers whose art is often spoken of with an upturned, sneering nose by snobbish commentators.  Yet both composers achieved truly moving results in some of their finest works.

Camille Saint-Saens published five piano concertos in all.  They've never achieved much more than to hover on the periphery of the repertoire (at least in my lifetime), with the Fourth receiving rather more performances in recent years than any of the others.  I may be called on this, but I strongly suspect that these works have been slowly dropping off the radar in recent years -- even to the extent that there may be fewer recordings of them available now than was the case when I first heard them as a teenager.  

I submit that the time has come for a fair reappraisal of the Second Concerto, in G Minor, Op. 22.  It was composed in 1868 when Saint-Saens was 33 years old, and had already developed a strong musical personality all his own.  In many ways, I think this concerto is the perfect introduction to the wide-ranging art of this complex musical personality.

Saint-Saens was a composer who, much like his very different contemporary Brahms, lived with one foot firmly planted in the musical past.  Living and working in the height of the Romantic era, both men remained by temperament classicists, although taking much advantage of the harmonic and instrumental innovations of their times.

Nothing speaks to this classical pedigree quite so much as the fact that each of the three movements of this concerto -- wildly diverse in mood as they are -- is built on the classic sonata-form structure of first theme group, second theme group, development section, and recapitulation of themes.

This concerto opens in as classical a mood as you could possibly imagine: arising from a thunderous octave deep in the bass, the piano soloist plays a winding, majestic, almost improvisational cadenza, which owes a strong debt of style to Bach's organ fantasias -- particularly the famous G Minor fantasia (note the same key).  Nor is this surprising when we recall that Saint-Saens was one of the most notable French organist-composers of the late 1800s and early 1900s.  A brief eruption of the orchestra with a grand cadence is succeeded by a transition to the first actual main theme of the movement, a slow, mournful melody for piano which is then joined by orchestra.  

Although the original andante sostenuto tempo is in due course modified by more rapid passages in the development, with virtuoso fingerwork for the soloist, the mournful mood is never truly laid aside -- nor is the majestic aura which gives this music something of the flavour and dignity of a state or royal funeral.  The recapitulation brings the saddest, most world-weary sounds as the orchestra reprises that main theme and its sequels, slowly growing quieter and quieter until the music eventually dies away to a gentle recapitulation of the opening cadenza, this time played by piano accompanied by soft sustained notes in the orchestra.  Then, fortissimo, the grand cadence figure brings the movement to an abrupt but timely end.

The stylistic diversity of this concerto prompted Polish composer Zygmunt Stojowski to quip that it "begins with Bach and ends with Offenbach."  Actually, it's the second movement, a  lively, jolly scherzo, which brings the style of Offenbach ("the Mozart of the Boulevards") to mind.  Indeed, the piano part in this delightful confection is marked leggieramente (lightly).  Saint-Saens certainly had a fun-loving side to his personality, seen of course in the famous Carnival of the Animals but also apparent in such works as the Septet for trumpet, piano, and strings.  This triple-time firework set piece is in fact a miniature but well-organized sonata form movement, with a contrasting theme in the form of a lolloping march doing duty for a second subject while still appearing to be (at first blush) the trio of a scherzo-and-trio form.  As so often with this composer, apparent simplicity conceals considerable structural and musical skill and subtlety.  At any rate, the second movement in its light-hearted E-flat major jollity, forms a perfect foil to the darker solemnity of the first movement.

The finale, again a sonata form in G minor, holds to similar dimensions as the second movement, so that the second and third together match in weight and duration the first.  Inattentive listeners are apt to dismiss this finale as another lightweight faux pas, but this furious tarantella is every bit as apt to its place as significant predecessors like the finales of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony or Schubert's C minor piano sonata, D.958.  As with both of those distinguished forerunners, this finale remains firmly grounded in its minor key right to the finish line.

The immense propulsive energy of this music is best served by a pianist and conductor who understand that it is propulsive, and not a mere cream puff.  When the finale is played with that object in mind, it gains much more weight and strength -- and, by no means incidentally, shows off the immense skill of Saint-Saens the virtuoso.  The closing pages seize upon that motoric energy and use it to drive the piano through furious cascades of notes leading to the staccato final chords in G minor.

New Year's Resolution and Two Poems

The resolution first: 2019 is going to be the year when I pay more attention to this oft-neglected blog about rare and unusual classical music.  Okay, I know I've said this before, but this year I really do want to write more than I have been doing in this blog.

To start with, then, two poems.  Actually, one of these two works sets a pair of undistinguished poems to music; the other was inspired by a phrase from a novel by Turgenev.  The distinction between a workmanlike writer and an inspired composer is easy to discern when you read the texts of the poems, and then listen to this soaring, rich, sensuous tapestry of sound.

The composer is Ernest Chausson, a composer perhaps better known from the textbooks than from live performances or recordings.  Partly, this is due to the fact that he completed only 39 published works.  The act of composition was usually slow and arduous for him, but the quality of the results suggests that he was an aptly stern self-critic.  The other reason lies, perhaps, in the fact that his distinct style forms a bridge between his friend Cesar Franck and the later, sparer impressionistic style of Claude Debussy -- a fact which has led to his work being overshadowed by the achievements of those two great artists.  Yet Chausson definitely belongs in their company.

So, to the two works in question.  The great rarity is the Poème de l'Amour et de la Mer ("The Poem of Love and the Sea"), composed between 1882 and 1893.  It comprises two extended song settings of poems by Maurice Bouchor, a friend of the composer.  The two songs are set for voice and orchestra, connected by a brief orchestral interlude, and the entire work lasts for about 30 minutes in performance.  The first song is entitled The Flowers of the Waters, and the second, The Death of Love.  Yet this is certainly not just a song cycle, much as it may be rooted in the tradition of the French mélodie.  Equally, though, it is not a tone poem -- although the writing is both atmospheric and evocative.  Nor is it in any sense a "song-symphony" such as Mahler would later make his specialty.  Rather, this is a composition sui generis in which the orchestral and vocal parts are co-conceived as equal partners, and there is no suggestion at all that the orchestra serves merely to "accompany" the singer.  

The two parts of the text unfold a love story, using intensely visual, sensuous symbolism instead of direct statement.  It's this symbolic approach from the writer which allowed the composer to create his own tonal world in an endless stream of melody from both orchestra and voice.  The closest Chausson came to direct illustration in the first song was in supplying gently rocking figures in the orchestra which evoke the endless heaving of the sea, and the sparkle of the sunlight on the water.  Although there are certain common thematic figures woven through the music, especially in the first part, they don't draw attention to themselves in at all the same way as in the composer's Symphony in B-flat or in the tone poem Viviane, works which I previously covered here.

The brief interlude, lasting all of two and a half minutes, is just that.  The music is marked lente et triste ("slow and sad") and works quietly with some of the melodic figures heard in the first song.  The orchestra does not develop the music with any of the resources one might expect to find in a symphony.

The symbolic tone resumes in the second song, not at all dramatic.  The title, The Death of Love, sounds like some great tragic fate but the poem makes clear that the cause of the death of this love is forgetfulness.  The music here is less chromatic than in the first poem, with the opening melodic figure heard more persistently in the orchestra.  Then the sound suddenly darkens, and a series of quiet, bleak sustained chords accompany the singer's slow chanting of the lines describing the beloved's forgetfulness.  At this point, Chausson introduces a transcription of four verses from his earlier mélodie, Le temps des lilas ("The time of lilacs"), also to a text by Bouchor, to bring the work to its sad conclusion.

I've long felt that the Poème de l'Amour et de la Mer is best appreciated by first reading the text, then setting it aside and just letting the composer's assured, unique fusion of French romanticism and Wagnerian continuous melody just wash over you.

Better known, yet still not at all frequently performed, is the Poème for violin and orchestra, Op. 25.  The composition of this work happened unusually quickly, for Chausson, during the months of April to August in 1896, and it was first performed in 1897 by the dedicatee, Eugène Ysaÿe, a close friend of the composer.

A brief slow introduction leads to the solo violin's quiet statement of the principal theme, and this is immediately repeated piano by the orchestra.  There follows a lengthy rhapsodic section in which the music (shared between soloist and orchestra) unfolds in an almost Wagnerian continuous stream of melody.  A brief forte for the orchestra is succeeded by an almost folk-like passage for the violin, all in double stops.  A musing passage, almost a fantasia, leads to a new orchestral statement of the main theme -- differently orchestrated from its initial appearance.

The solo violin alludes to the theme, high up and quietly played, accompanied by tremolando strings, which continue through much of the remainder of the work.  The soloist continues developing the theme, gaining velocity and volume as the violin leads the way to an impassioned climax.  The brasses alternate in presenting phrases of the theme, and then the full orchestra transforms it into a grandiose, almost march-like climax.

Thereafter, the solo violin muses gently on the theme, underlain by gentler and gentler sounds from the orchestra.  The violin climbs to a high tremolando note above a rising and falling figure in the winds, and this gorgeous tone poem then gradually descends to a quiet ending on a sustained woodwind chord.