Santa Rosa Symphony

Mozart's Swan Song
2024-01-18 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
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Unmasking the Stars
2024-01-18 00:00
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Concert Conversations with Francesco Lecce-Chong

Concert Conversations are general seating and free to Classical Series concert ticket holders. Approximately 30 minutes in Weill Hall.

Saturday, October 5, 2019 at 6:30 PM

Sunday, October 6, 2019 at 2:00 PM

Monday, October 7, 2019 at 6:30 PM

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Music selections handpicked by Francesco!

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Sponsored by Jim LambConductor Francesco Lecce-Chong underwritten by Norma Person, In memory of Evert Person Guest Artist Garrick Ohlsson underwritten by Marcia Wagner, In memory of Hap WagnerDiscovery Rehearsal Series sponsored by The Stare Foundation and David Stare of Dry Creek VineyardPre -Concert Talks Sponsored by Jamei Haswell and Richard GrundyVideo underwritten by Chuck & Ellen Wear

October 2019 Program Notes by Steven Ledbetter

Anna Clyne
Masquerade for OrchestraAnna Clyne was born in London on March 9, 1980, and currently resides in the United States. The first performance of Masquerade, commissioned by the BBC for the Last Night of the Proms in 2013, took place at the Royal Albert Hall on September 7, 2013; Marin Alsop conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani (plus tambourine), three percussionists playing bass drum, two suspended and two sizzle cymbals, castanets, three kazoos, side drum, two cowbells, crash cymbals, motor horn, whip, tom-tom, suspended cymbals (with brushes), ratchet, vibraslap, triangle and harp (with two guitar picks or plastic cards) and strings. Duration is about 6 minutes.

Anna Clyne began composing before entering her teens. She studied music at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with honors, then continued with a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. She has attracted the attention of conductors, including Ricardo Muti at the Chicago Symphony, who chose her, along with Mason Bates, to be co-composers in residence in Chicago from 2010 to 2014.

After that, Marin Alsop invited her to be composer-in-residence at the Baltimore Symphony.

Her work is highly picturesque, filled with color and energy, as Masquerade is from the first gesture, a rushing whirlwind of sound, suggesting a wildly diverse group of colorful people, possibly in disguise, so that they can behave with joyous disregard for polite behavior. For a few seconds the hullabaloo relaxes to bright, sweet charms, before the joyous madhouse begins again.

The composer provided the following commentary for the first performance:

Masquerade draws inspiration from the original mid-18th century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens. As is true today, these concerts were a place where people from all walks of life mingled to enjoy a wide array of music. Other forms of entertainment ranged from the sedate to the salacious with acrobatics, exotic street entertainers, dancers, fireworks and masquerades. I am fascinated by the historic and sociological courtship between music and dance. Combined with costumes, masked guises and elaborate settings, masquerades created an exciting, yet controlled, sense of occasion and celebration. It is this that I wish to evoke in Masquerade.

The work derives its material from two melodies. For the main theme, I imagined a chorus welcoming the audience and inviting them into their imaginary world. The second theme, Juice of Barley, is an old English country dance melody and drinking song, which first appeared in John Playford’s 1695 edition of The English Dancing Master. –Anna Clyne

Ludwig Van Beethoven
Concerto No. 4 in G major for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 58Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. The Fourth Piano Concerto was composed in 1805 and early 1806 (it was probably completed by spring, for the composer’s brother offered it to a publisher on March 27). The first performance was a private one, in March 1807, in the home of Prince Lobkowitz, and the public premiere took place in Vienna on December 22, 1808, with the composer as soloist. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for one flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns and strings; two trumpets and timpani are added in the final movement.Duration is about 34 minutes.

During the years immediately following the composition and private first performance of the Eroica Symphony, ideas for new compositions crowded the composer’s sketchbooks, and he completed one important work after another in rapid succession—an opera, three piano sonatas, three concertos, three string quartets, the Fourth symphony and preliminary work on the Fifth. Truly a heady outpouring of extraordinary music—and among these, the Piano Concerto No. 4 is among the most original.

The very beginning is one of the most memorable of any concerto. Beethoven establishes the presence of the soloist at once—not with brilliant self-assertion (he was to do that in the Emperor concerto), but with gentle insinuation, a quiet phrase demanding an orchestral response. But the orchestra is both quiet and startling, seeming to come in an entirely unexpected key (though it quickly works back to the expected home base).

That remarkable opening is only the first of many fresh, surprising and treasurable ideas that Beethoven offers in the concerto. At the end of the first movement exposition, for example, the soloist works up to an extended trill, which from long conditioning, we expect will lead to a fortissimo orchestral close to the section. That close eventually comes, but not before the pianist coyly inserts a sweetly expressive version of a theme that is otherwise grand and overpowering. And immediately after that, an unexpected pitch (reiterating the ubiquitous rhythmic pattern which this concerto shares with the Fifth Symphony) marks the beginning of the development.

In some ways the middle movement is the biggest surprise of all. Winds are silent; piano and strings are strictly segregated. It seems to demand an explanation. In 1859 a critic, Adolph Bernhard Marx, proposed that Beethoven created this movement as the most thoroughgoing program music he ever wrote, to express the “power of song” by depicting the great singer Orpheus pleading with the Furies to allow him to pass to the netherworld to recover his wife Eurydice. Certainly the orchestral strings, with their perpetual unison and sharp staccatos throughout avoid any feeling of softness or even humanity, while the piano (as Orpheus) pleads with increasing urgency, finally overcoming the opposition of the strings sufficiently to end their hard unison, persuading them to melt into harmony.

The first movement opened with a harmonic surprise at the orchestra’s entrance; the last movement plays similar games, first by seeming to start in the “wrong” key, by way of a link from the closing chord of the second movement. Beethoven uses this unexpected harmony to play many tricks during the course of the finale. Many of the thematic ideas grow from four tiny melodic and rhythmic figures contained in the rondo theme itself. Most of the movement rushes along at a great pace, but Beethoven also pauses sometimes for moments of delicate and even romantic coloring, then returns to the fundamental high spirits that close the concerto with some last prankish echoes.

Matt Browne
How the Solar System Was Won for Symphony OrchestraMatt Browne was born in 1988 and lives in New York. He composed How the Solar System Was Won in 2012. It was first performed by the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Rodrigo Ruiz, on February 10, 2013. The score calls for three each of flutes (including piccolo), oboe (including English horn), clarinet (including E-flat clarinet), and bassoon (including contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones (including bass trombone), harp, piano, timpani and three percussionists, and strings. During is about seven and a half minutes.

Matt Browne earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado and his doctorate in composition at the University of Michigan, studying with Michael Daugherty, Kristin Kuster, Carter Pann, and Daniel Kellogg. On his website he quotes, favorably, the command from impresario Serge Diaghilev to Jean Cocteau: “Astonish me!” It suggests a goal that is surely met in his colorful and dramatic single-movement score that is, in part, a reaction to his favorite film, with a philosophical echo. How the Solar System Was Won offers a frequently-changing series of musical outbursts that suggest excitement, color and drama. In the note that he has written for the piece, he describes the various elements that went into his planning for it:

Commentary by Matt Browne:

“How the Solar System Was Won” was the working title of the Kubrick classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, my favorite film. Using the title as an impetus, this piece is about three very different but related things: one astronomical, one musical, and one deeply personal.

The astronomical narrative is about how the solar system became what it is today through the chaotic mess of celestial mechanics and cosmic collisions. Over billions of years, various gasses, rocks, and other debris have interacted with each other in these ways to create this tentative orbital balance we have around us, still slowly (but consistently) changing. It is interesting that some of the most recognized astronomical objects (Saturn’s rings, the asteroid belt, the moon) came as a direct result of a collision of some sort that has momentarily thrown off the balance that gravitational forces have been working so hard to create.

The second narrative deals with my use of musical grooves. I repeatedly set them up one by one for only a few bars at a time – just before the audience can be lulled into a comfortable, restful languor (much like an orbit) – and then quickly subvert them in chaotic and surprising ways to make something new and exciting –a musical version of Saturn’s rings.

The final narrative is about how the most chaotic and devastating moments in our normally groove-filled lives are what contribute most to shaping our personalities, and help give us our own personal rings of Saturn.

Richard Strauss
Also sprach Zarathustra [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] (tone poem) for Orchestra [after Nietsche], Opus 30Richard Strauss was born in Munich on June 11, 1864, and died in Garmischâ€‘Partenkirchen, Bavaria, on September 8, 1949. He began the composition of Also sprach Zarathustra in Munich on February 4, 1896, and completed it on August 24. Strauss himself conducted the Municipal Orchestra of Frankfurt-am-Main in the first performance on November 27, 1896. The score calls for a large orchestra consisting of piccolo, three flutes (third doubling as second piccolo), three oboes, English horn, two clarinets plus Eâ€‘flat clarinet and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two bass tubas, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, orchestral bells, a deep bell, two harps, organ and strings. Duration is about 33 minutes.

Surely no major philosopher has ever had a closer relationship to music and musicians than Friedrich Nietzsche, and no work of philosophy has inspired more musical compositions than his Also sprach Zarathustra. Nietzsche was an excellent pianist and an amateur composer as well, having turned out a fair number of choral works both sacred and secular, songs, and piano pieces by his thirtieth year.

But in addition to being drawn to some of the musical questions of the day, Nietzsche was also a source for music in others. His bestâ€‘known essay, Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885), served as the basis for songs by Schoenberg, Delius, Medtner, and Taneyev, as well as larger works by Mahler (Third Symphony), Delius (A Mass of Life), and Strauss.

The essay has an unusually poetic text for a work of philosophy, loosely narrative in character, recording the (invented) sayings of Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks) covering all sorts of diverse topics; each section ends with the formula “Also sprach Zarathustra” (“Thus spoke Zarathustra”).Strauss became acquainted with Nietzsche’s work while reading in preparation for his first opera, Guntram. What interested him most of all was the philosopher’s criticism of the established church and ultimately of all conventional religion. Strauss was the last composer who could be called an intellectual, but he made the courageous decision to attempt to deal with Nietzsche’s philosophical ruminations as a symphonic poem. He chose to emphasize one particular theme of the work; he said he wanted “to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific.

Strauss conceived one enormous movement that has little in common with the traditional musical forms used in his earlier tone poems. He selected a limited number of section titles from Nietzsche’s work and arranged them in a way that made possible musical variety. The most important of the unifying musical ideas—it comes up again and again—is the use of two keys, C and B, whose tonic notes are as close together as they can be melodically, though harmonically they are very far apart, to represent the natural world on the one hand and the inquiring spirit of man on the other. Time and again these two tonalities will be heard in close succession—or, indeed, even simultaneously.

The opening of the tone poem is a magnificent evocation of the primeval sunrise, with an important threeâ€‘note rising figure in the trumpets representing Nature and the most glorious possible cadence in C (alternating major and minor at first before closing solidly in the major). That trumpet theme is the single most important melodic motive of the work.

Immediately there is a drastic change of mood to the section entitled Von den Hinterweltlern (“On the Afterworldly”), the most primitive state of man. Gloomy, insubstantial phrases soon introduce an important new theme (heard here in B minor) leaping up, pizzicato, in cellos and basses; this theme is used throughout to depict man’s inquiring mind. Strauss satirizes those inquiries that lead to religion by quoting the opening phrase of the plainsong Credo in the horns and moves into a lush passage of conventional sweetness for the strings divided into sixteen parts.

This leads into Von der groÃŸen Sehnsucht (“On the Great Longing”), to depict man’s yearning to move beyond ignorance and superstition. The section combines the B minor “inquiring mind” motive with the C major “nature” motive. A vigorous new figure rushes up from the depths of the orchestra, gradually overpowering everything else. With a harp glissando it sweeps into Von den Freuden und Leidenschaften (“Of Pleasures and Passions”).

This section, in C minor, links man’s sensual life with Nature (through the key relationship). A passionate new theme followed by an important motive blared out by trombones and heard frequently thereafter, sometimes identified as the theme of “satiety.” Das Grablied (“The Tomb Song”), follows immediately in B minor and related keys.

It dies away into the depths as cellos and basses begin a passage in strict imitation labeled Von der Wissenschaft (“On Science”). What could be more scientific than a fugue? And this one begins with the notes of the Nature theme, in C, followed immediately by the three notes of the Bâ€‘minor triad, then continuing to all the remaining pitches of the chromatic scale. The imitations work the tonality around to B minor again, and a new developmental section gets underway, climaxing in Der Genesende (“The Convalescent”) in which the themes lead up to a powerful C major tripleâ€‘forte for full orchestra, breaking off into pregnant silence. The next chord? B minor, bringing in an extended new development of several of the major ideas, treated with extraordinary orchestral virtuosity.

This comes to an end in an utterly unexpected way—by turning into a Viennese waltz, and a waltz in C major at that! For this section Strauss borrows Nietzsche’s title Das Tanzlied (“The Dancing Song”). Here, for the very first time in Strauss’s life, he seems ready to take on his older namesakes, the other Strausses who were renowned as the waltz kings. And here, already, we can get more than a tiny glimpse of Der Rosenkavalier, still some sixteen years in the future. This waltz begins as an amiable and graceful dance with a theme based on the Nature motive, but it soon builds in energy and vehemence, as many of the earlier themes make their appearance, only to be destroyed in turn by the “satiety” motive, which takes over fiercely at the climax of the score (corresponding to a similar climax in the book), as a great bell tolls twelve times.

Strauss marks this passage in the score Nachtwandlerlied (“Night Wanderer’s Song”). The bell rings every four measures, ever more softly, as the music settles onto a chord of C major, only to slip, with magical effect, into a gentle, bright B major for the coda, in which the violins present a sweet theme representing “spiritual freedom.”

This luminous B is softly but insistently undercut by cellos and basses, pizzicato, with the rising threeâ€‘note “Nature” motive, as if to say: Earth—the natural world—abides in spite of all. Four more times the upper instruments reiterate their chord of B, only to find that the bottom strings repeat the C with quiet obstinacy, finally bringing the work to an end.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)

Master of the Modern Banjo
2024-01-18 00:00
On Stage Comments at Nov. 2-4 Concerts After Wildfires & Outages

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“…winning Grammy Awards for country and jazz in the same year and also winning in pop, world music, classical crossover and, yes, folk. That’s a lot of territory for five strings.” – The New York Times

Concert Conversations with Francesco Lecce-Chong

Concert Conversations are general seating and free to Classical Series concert ticket holders. Approximately 30 minutes in Weill Hall.

Saturday, November 2, 2019 at 6:30 PM

Sunday, November 3, 2019 at 2:00 PM

Monday, November 4, 2019 at 6:30 PM

Listen to this concert’s music on Spotify

Music selections handpicked by Francesco!

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Learn more about the Discovery Rehearsal Series

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Before the Concert

At the Concert

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We gratefully acknowledge the generous contributions from the following:

Sponsored by Joseph A. and Judith M. Gappa Conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong underwritten by David and Corinne ByrdGuest Artist BÃ©la Fleck underwritten by The Stare Foundation and David Stare of Dry Creek VineyardDiscovery Rehearsal Series sponsored by The Stare Foundation and David Stare of Dry Creek VineyardPre -Concert Talks Sponsored by Jamei Haswell and Richard GrundyVideo underwritten by Chuck & Ellen Wear

November 2019 Program Notes By Steven Ledbetter

Aaron Copland
Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo for OrchestraAaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900, and died in New York City on December 2, 1990. He wrote the ballet Rodeo on a commission from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, composing it in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, between May and September 1942. The work was premiered at the (old) Metropolitan Opera House on October 16 that year, with Franz Allers conducting. Agnes de Mille choreographed and danced the lead role. The concert piece “Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo” comprises all but about five minutes of the full ballet. The score calls for three flutes (second and third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, xylophone, glockenspiel, cymbals, wood block, snare drum, slapstick, bass drum, triangle, celesta, piano, harp and strings. Duration is about 18 minutes. Rodeo is the second of the three popular Copland ballets on American subjects, but it is one that Copland did not, at first, look forward to composing. Billy the Kid, composed for Eugene Loring and the Ballet Caravan, had achieved a great success in 1938. Four years later, as the composer recalls in Copland: 1900 through 1942, conductor Franz Allers took him to meet Agnes de Mille, who had an idea for a ballet.

When de Mille explained that she wanted to create a cowboy ballet, Copland said he had already written one of those and didn’t want to repeat himself. But “Agnes was after something lighter and more bouncy,” he recalled, after she demonstrated some of the steps she was planning to use. So, he agreed. He began composing in May 1942 and had much of the score in his head already before leaving to spend the summer at Tanglewood.

It was the war that gave Agnes de Mille the opportunity to create the ballet. The management of the Ballet Russe decided that an American subject and an American choreographer might be a good patriotic idea. The Russian-trained dancers required extra rehearsals, because their Russian classical training had not prepared them for cowboy lopes and folkâ€‘dance groupings. In addition, they needed to have the humor of the piece explained to them. But they got it, and the ballet was a huge success. The company gave seventyâ€‘nine performances in the first year alone.

Rodeo tells a simple story with warmth and humor. The tomboyish heroine on a western ranch is pining for the handsome head wrangler, but, despite her skill with horse and rope, he pays no attention to her. When the cowgirl is thrown by a bucking bronco, the city girls who have come to the ranch for the evening’s party tease her, while the head wrangler goes off with the rancher’s daughter. At the Saturday night dance, still in her ranch clothes, she is unnoticed until she turns in her chaps and cowboy boots for a pretty dress and a bow in her hair. When she returns, looking just as pretty as any of the other girls, she turns all heads—especially that of the head wrangler. But when he invites her to dance, she turns him down in favor of another cowhand who had been friendly before her transformation. (In an interview late in her life, de Mille said, “You can’t imagine some of the letters people have had the idiocy to write me—one said that Women’s Lib should take action against this ballet! Well, in 1895 or 1900 a woman had to have a man or she was considered an outcast and became the family drudge.”)

As with Billy the Kid, Copland chose real cowboy songs as part of the basic material of his ballet, though here, too, he does more than simply quote them literally. Rodeo gives him the opportunity to treat the tunes with welcome humor, emphasizing certain details to make them stand out. Early in the first movement, “Buckaroo Holiday,” Copland treats part of the tune “Sis Joe” to irregular drum punctuation to emphasize its energetic and clipped character. Later on, the solo trombone plays “If he’d be a buckaroo by his trade” with humorous portamentos and witty exaggerated pauses. (Copland found both these tunes in Our Singing Country by John and Alan Lomax.) The second movement, “Corral Nocturne” has no borrowed tunes. “Saturday Night Waltz” begins with the sound of country fiddlers tuning up, then offers a danceable near-quotation of “Goodbye, old Paint.” The final “Hoe Down” is based on the traditional fiddle tune “Bonyparte” (along with a brief citation of “McLeod’s Reel”); Copland found the tunes in Ira Ford’s Traditional Music of America.

In Rodeo, as in Billy the Kid, Copland uses the old tunes to give a melodic “feel,” a way of evoking the specific time and place. But his score is far more than a simple orchestration of a couple of old songs; he takes over the tunes fully, developing and elaborating them with wit, rhythmic verve, and varied orchestral color, transmuting them fully into the characteristic and instantly recognizable musical personality that we know as Aaron Copland.

Béla Fleck
Juno Concerto for Banjo and OrchestraBéla Anton LeoÅ¡ Fleck was born in New York City on July 10, 1958, his three given names paying homage to three 20thcentury composers, BartÃ³k, Webern and JanÃ¡Ä_x008d_ek. He composed the Juno Concerto for the Canton Symphony, Gerhardt Zimmermann, conductor, and played the solo part in the first performance on March 19, 2016. In addition to the solo banjo, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, two tenor trombones and bass trombone, timpani, three percussionists (vibraphone, maraca, shaker, tambourine, bass drum, gong, tenor drum, side drum, suspended cymbals, claves, crash cymbals, triangle, chimes) and strings. Duration is about 30 minutes.

The banjo has traditionally been regarded as an instrument created for folk music, originating in Africa and being further developed once it was brought by enslaved Africans to the New World. Over the centuries, the banjo has been a frequent part of ensembles performing traditional dance and country music, gradually spreading into different categories. Fleck developed an interest in the banjo, first of all from hearing the theme of the television show Beverly Hillbillies, which featured Earl Scruggs. After getting a banjo as a present on his fifteenth birthday, he studied—largely through books by Pete Seeger and others. After graduating from New York’s High School of Music and Art, he began what has been a busy and varied career playing the banjo in all kinds of ensembles, becoming a highly regarded soloist on the instrument and increasingly recognized as a composer, including partnerships with various classical composers, with whom he joins his banjo.

The Juno Concerto is his second concerto for banjo and orchestra, named after his son, Juno. It is cast in the traditional three movements. The first opens with fanfares and open harmonies that recall, in a way, the music of Aaron Copland, especially his cowboy ballet Billy the Kid. The banjo solo is playful, anticipating and echoing the orchestral themes. It becomes increasingly virtuosic in the second half of the opening movement.The middle movement begins with a kind of hesitating vamp in the banjo, to which sustained low tones in the orchestral strings add depth. Soon the banjo begins suggesting a gentle dancelike figure that is developed into a cadenza-like middle passage for the soloist. The last half of the movement offers poignant themes, especially with the winds in dialogue with the banjo.The orchestra sets up a fast opening for the finale, building quickly to a climax on which the banjo enters with racing figures that bring the various sections of the orchestra in an energetic debate that continues to a dynamic climax.

Modest Mussorgsky (maurice Ravel, Arranger)
Pictures at an Exhibition for OrchestraModest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born at Karevo, district of Pskov, on March 21, 1839, and died in St. Petersburg on March 28, 1881. He composed Pictures at an Exhibition as a suite of piano pieces in June 1874. Maurice Ravel made his orchestral transcription in the summer of 1922, for Serge Koussevitzky, who introduced it at one of his own concerts in Paris on October 22, 1922. Ravel’s orchestration calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, bells, triangle, tam-tam, rattle, whip, cymbals, side drum, bass drum, xylophone, celesta, two harps and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes.

Mussorgsky’s music is the triumph of genius over technique. Though he had possibly the least formal training of any of the Russian “Five” (nationalist composers—including also Cui, Balakirev, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov—who sought to create a purely Russian musical style) and was regarded as little more than a dilettante by composers of far greater polish, Mussorgsky had a burning originality that at times was able to conquer both his lack of technique and a sad addiction to the bottle that led to an unstable life and an early demise. His genius expressed itself most directly in opera, for he had the ability to translate verbal and physical gestures into extraordinarily imaginative, lifelike music.

His best-known, non-operatic composition is the suite Pictures at an Exhibition for piano solo, one of the great achievements of Russian nationalism. Even here Mussorgsky was inspired by a kind of dramatic event. The exhibition in question was a real one, a memorial showing of works by an architect named Victor Hartman, who had died at the age of forty in July 1873. Mussorgsky was a close friend of the artist.

The news of Hartman’s death shocked Vladimir Stasov, critic and spokesman for a whole generation of Russian artists and friend to both Mussorgsky and Hartman. At Stasov’s initiative, a special exhibition of Hartman’s work was put together in St. Petersburg, where it opened in early 1874. The exhibition had a powerful effect on Mussorgsky. Within a week of seeing it, he wrote to Stasov with good news: “Hartman is boiling as Boris boiled.” This was his way to say that he was deeply involved in composition and that it was going well. He continued: “Sounds and ideas have been hanging in the air; I am devouring them and stuffing myself—I barely have time to scribble them on paper…My profile can be seen in the interludes…How well it is working out.”Composing at a terrific pace, Mussorgsky finished the work by June 22. The suite was immediately hailed by his friends, particularly Stasov, to whom he dedicated it. Yet few people played the suite; it is fiendishly difficult. Pictures only became famous and popular in the brilliant orchestral guise created by Maurice Ravel in 1922 at the suggestion of conductor Serge Koussevitzky. The various “pictures” are linked here and there by references to the opening Promenade, which, as Mussorgsky reported, was his own self-portrait, “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.” Most of the pictures are lost, but we haveStasov’s description of the exhibition to tell us about them.

The Gnome was a grotesque drawing for a child’s toy, “something in the style of the fabled Nutcracker, the nuts being inserted into the gnome’s mouth.” [Promenade] The Old Castle depicted an Italian landscape with a troubadour singing his lay. Ravel makes this an extended saxophone solo, one of the most famous passages for that instrument in the orchestral repertory. [Promenade] Tuileries, a Parisian scene, showed children quarreling at play in the famous gardens, an image perfectly captured in the taunting musical figure (the universal children’s cry of “Nyah, nyah!”). Bydlo is the Polish word for “cattle”; Hartman’s picture showed a heavy oxâ€‘cart lumbering along. [Promenade] The unlikely sounding Ballet of unhatched chicks consisted of designs for an 1871 ballet with choreography by Petipa, who always included a scene with child dancers. In this case the children were dressed as canaries “enclosed in eggs as in suits of armor, with canary heads put on like helmets.”

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle: Mussorgsky himself owned Hartman’s drawings (two separate images, not one) of “A rich Jew wearing a fur hat” and “A poor Jew.” He transmuted these into a single movement, contrasting the arrogance of wealth to the cringing obsequiousness of poverty.[Promenade] Hartman’s lively drawing of The Market at Limoges becomes a brilliant scherzo, for which he even imagined some of the conversation of the shopping housewives, for he entered bits of their dialogue in the margin of the score. The scherzo ends with dramatic suddenness in the powerful contrasting scene of the Catacombs (A Roman Sepulchre) in Paris. Mussorgsky noted in the margin: “The creative spirit of the dead Hartman leads me toward skulls, apostrophizes them—the skulls are illuminated gently from within.” The mood is continued in the passage headed Con mortuis in lingua morta (“With the dead in a dead language”), in which Musorgsky himself becomes our guide through the city of the dead with a ghostly version of his Promenade. The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga) evokes the fearsome witch of Russian fairy tales; Mussorgsky’s music suggests rather the witch’s wild flight in a mortar in chase of her victims. Her ride brings us to the powerful finale of the suite, The Bogatyr Gate (at Kiev, the Ancient Capital), described by Stasov as “unusually original,” a design for a series of arched stone gates to replace the wooden city gates to commemorate Tsar Alexander II’s from an attempted assassination. Mussorgsky filled his musical image with the perpetual ringing of bells large and small, recreating the sounds heard around a Russian public monument, and Ravel has seconded him in this, capping off the score with sonorous fireworks.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
