Program Notes

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)
España
Duration: ca. 8 minutes

What to listen for:

• Note how Chabrier makes use of two dances indigenous to Spain, the fiery jota of Aragon and the sultry malagueña of Málaga.

Anyone who visits Spain, much less lives there, knows its all-consuming beauty. Barcelona, Madrid, Toledo, Sevilla, Cordoba, Valencia and countless small towns seem as if painted in oils under a warm sun, impressions that stay with you for the rest of your life.

Emmanuel Chabrier apparently thought so during a vacation with his wife in 1882, evident in his evocative letters to friends. He also took a keen interest in the indigenous folk music of various regions, noting the tunes and rhythms of street musicians. Inspired, after returning to Paris, he began composing a Spanish-infused fantasia he called Jota, later renaming it España.

This musical postcard made Chabrier famous overnight. Composers as diverse as Manuel de Falla and Gustav Mahler praised it, and the work further whetted the French appetite for Spanish exoticism, along with Bizet’s Carmen, Debussy’s Iberia, and Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole. Performances of Chabrier’s brilliant orchestral showpiece − and the incoming royalties − allowed him to live comfortably until his death from syphilis at age 53.

The work opens with pizzicato strings mimicking a plucked guitar, then muted trumpets introduce a punchy main theme four times, followed by a flurry of horns, bassoons and cellos. A spirited rhythm quickens the pace before the strings play an expressive tune that evolves into fragmentary variations and a rousing, fiery climax. Note how cleverly Chabrier folds in the traditional Spanish jota aragonesa and malagueña dances.

With its bubbling colors, cadences and organic orchestral textures – all tightly bound into six minutes of perpetual motion − España is equally at home on masterworks and pops programs, making it a cross-over favorite among listeners of different tastes. It’s not surprising that moments after its premiere in Paris in 1883 the audience insisted it be played again as an encore.

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
Nights in the Gardens of Spain
Duration: ca. 23 minutes

What to listen for:

• This eloquent work for piano and orchestra unfolds as three distinctive nocturnes, each depicting a garden, the music hinting of the French impressionism of Debussy.

As a boy, Manuel de Falla was a voracious reader, determined to become a famous writer. His fondness for tales and myths grew alongside his interest in music, and he realized that the two were hardly incompatible. He wrote the story lines, or librettos, for his own operas, as well as cultural criticism and political commentary, giving him access to prominent figures in the arts and government.

Although a competent pianist, de Falla was no virtuoso, and large symphonic forms also forced him out of his comfort zone. So, in his mid-20s, he settled into a routine as a pedestrian composer of Spanish musicals known as zarzuelas, a sort of poor man’s comic opera. He also was going broke.

In frustration, he left for France, and was in Paris when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring provoked a riot. Reveling in the excitement of such new sounds, de Falla turned his visit into a lengthy stay and began writing stylized Spanish music with a French flavor. One of his finest creations is Nights in the Gardens of Spain, three nocturnes for piano and orchestra that might be considered a model for Respighi’s Pines of Rome from a decade later.

The music is full of dark colors and a sense of mystery – like any garden at night. The three symphonic impressions include:

In the Generalife – We visit a jasmine-scented garden in Alhambra, a region that profoundly influenced the composer.  A rippling piano suggests the sound of a flamenco guitar.

A Distant Dance – It may not depict a specific garden, but the music includes an exotic dance drawn from material heard in the opening section, led by the piano.

The Sierra de Córdoba – The final movement, tinged in melancholy, suggests a garden in this ancient Andalusian city, the piano playing intimately against the full orchestra.

The composer said the titles guide the listener but shouldn’t be taken literally. Rather, they serve to “evoke places, sensations and sentiments. The music has no pretensions to being descriptive − it is merely expressive.’’

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
Chôros No. 10
Duration: ca. 12 minutes

What to listen for:

• A solo flute imitates the song of a rare Amazonian bird called the blue-black grosbeak, which the composer heard during his travels into Brazil’s deep interior.

No one can accuse Heitor Villa-Lobos of being lazy. He composed some 2,000 works, ranging from solo guitar pieces to sprawling musical canvases for chorus and orchestra. Arguably the most significant Brazilian composer of the 20th-century, he blended the music of urban musicians (chôroes) with the European classical tradition to form a unique and commanding voice.

Villa-Lobos was a poor student and showed little interest in his classes at the music conservatory in Rio de Janeiro. But with a flair for the guitar, clarinet and cello, he earned money by playing in movie theater orchestras. He also was drawn to the “dark interior’’ of Brazil, where he absorbed influences of African and Portuguese folk tunes that became part of his dynamic style.

Villa-Lobos is best known for two musical sets: the nine Bach-inspired Bachianas Brasileiras, and the 14 pieces that make up Chôros, a form of popular music. The most famous of the latter is the Chôros No. 10 for orchestra and chorus, known as Rasga o Coração (Rend the Heart), from 1926.

The music reflects the atmosphere of a rainforest, and we hear an exotic bird call played on the flute, then a wash of woodwinds in their highest registers. The brass add their tonal weight before the entire orchestra and percussion section celebrate with jarring rhythms right out of a Stravinsky ballet.

Finally, the chorus sings an Indian chant the composer heard during his travels along the Amazon. Note the sonorous treatment of the words Ja-ka-tá ka-ma-ra-já that Villa-Lobos creates from the folk song Rend the Heart. The music ends on a rousing, full-throttled note guaranteed to wake anyone who happens to be dozing off.

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)
Polovtsian Dances
Duration: ca. 14 minutes

What to listen for:

• Broadway musical fans will recognize the 1953 Tony Bennett hit, Strangers in Paradise, as the soaring melody Gliding Dance of the Maidens from Act II of Borodin’s opera Prince Igor.

Like many of us who struggle to make a living and pay our bills, Alexander Borodin was a moonlighter. By day, he worked as a chemist and by night he composed music. The late shift didn’t pay well, if at all, but Borodin was more interested in dabbling in music than profiting from it.

He puttered in a laboratory attached to his home in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida), and after dinner retired to his study, joined by his wife, numerous cats and friends who always seemed to be stopping by. Some were fellow composers, and conversations might focus on Bach one night, the tenets of orchestration the next.

“As soon as he was free (working) he would take me into his living room, where we occupied ourselves with music and conversation,’’ said Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a frequent visitor. “In the midst, Borodin would rush off to the laboratory to make sure that nothing was burning or boiling over. Then he would come back again for more music and talk.’’

Borodin composed slowly and intermittently, and left behind a relatively small catalog of works when he died in 1887. He spent five years composing a first symphony, and another seven years piecing together a second. His large-scale folklore opera Prince Igor, an epic effort and his prized opus, tells the story of the battles of a Russian prince against the invading Polovtsy khans in the 12th century.

He died before finishing it, so Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov teamed up to edit and complete the work for its premiere in 1890. It soon fell from favor, except for two excerpts: the Overture, and the Polovtsian Dances from Act II.

The tune Gliding Dance of the Maidens – often with chorus − is among the most rib-sticking tunes ever written, comparable to the best of Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter or Paul McCartney. The orchestra tosses an exotic theme in F-sharp minor back and forth among woodwinds and brass before queuing a rhythmically driven dance as contrast, then concludes with a timpani-pounding coda. Tony Bennett popularized the music in the song Stranger in Paradise, from the 1953 Broadway musical Kismet, which borrowed a number of themes from the opera.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Bolero
Duration: ca. 13 minutes

What to listen for:

• The music is an incessant crescendo, the volume slowly increasing to the rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum.

Ravel was a small man, precise in routine, well-groomed and impeccable in manners and dress. His musical tastes leaned toward traditional form and structure when much of the world around him was genuflecting over Wagner or debating the merits of atonality.

While in many ways he mirrors his fellow countryman, Debussy, Ravel wasn’t a modernist or ground breaker, preferring to build off the scaffolding of Mozart or draw on the bounce of a baroque dance. He was a master orchestrator in the vein of Rimsky-Korsakov, and this allowed him to spin shimmering webs of fantasy and sensuousness, kaleidoscopes of color that varied from exotic to grotesque. Listen to Daphnis et Chloe and you hear nature awakening at dawn; with La Valse, a Viennese waltz goes mad; and Pavane for a Dead Princess rides on a melody few composers could ever match.

Then we have Bolero. Written in 1928 for an obscure ballet, it was intended to support dancers, not serve as a stand-alone in the concert hall, one reason Ravel expected it to fade into oblivion. He called it “orchestration without music,’’ but harsher sentiment followed the premiere, when an American critic slammed it as “the most insolent monstrosity ever perpetuated in the history of music.’’

Today, Bolero enjoys unflagging popularity, a hybrid of both serious and light programs. Yes, Ravel gave us a study in repetition – the same C major pattern repeats itself 13 times against a snare drum − but it would be an injustice to call it simplistic. A long crescendo based on two themes in the flavor of Spanish flamenco, it moves forward on an insistent rhythm that grows in volume, intensity and brilliant color.

Bolero begins quietly and ends demonically, a traditional form turned on its head, with exhilarating effect. The music makes few demands on listeners and performers – except the poor snare drummer, who never gets a break.

Program notes by Kurt Loft, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America who has written about the arts in the Tampa Bay area for more than 40 years.