Program Notes: Concert 2
About our soloist
Jayne West, soprano, has performed with many of the country’s leading orchestras and chamber groups, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Orchestra of St. Luke, Handel & Haydn Society and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under notable conductors Seiji Ozawa, Bernard Haitink, Trevor Pinnock, Neeme Jaervi, Roberto Abbado, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, Christopher Hogwood, Jane Glover, Grant Llewellyn and Keith Lockhart. She has sung at the Edinburgh Festival, Tanglewood Music Festival, Grant Park Series, Saito Kinen Festival, and with the Brussels National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, The New Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv and Boston Lyric Opera.
In addition, Ms. West has had a long-standing association with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including appearances with the orchestra at Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center and Tanglewood. She has also performed in a solo recital at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall. Ms. West performed Bach’s B Minor Mass at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan with Maestro Ozawa. She also sang with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Kaija Saariaho’s Chateau de l’Ame and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players in Copland’s As It Fell Upon a Day. Ms. West is a long-standing member of Emmanuel Music, which performs Bach Cantatas with full orchestra and chorus each week as part of the Sunday Service. In addition to having sung most of the Bach Cantatas, Ms. West has sung several times on Emmanuel’s 7-year Schubert Series, 7-year Schumann Series and in their performances of Schubert’s Mass in E-Flat, Bach’s B Minor Mass and Handel’s Hercules, Saul, Jephtha, Brockes Passion, The Magic Flute and Ariodante.
Ms. West has sung at The U.S. Embassies in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia; at NATO in Brussels; at the American Embassy in Paris; and in Boston Musical Theatre’s Red, White and Blues, a cabaret concert. She has frequently sung with the Mark Morris Dance Group, having premiered L’Allegro at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels; Four Saints in Three Acts at Berkeley; Dido and Aeneas in Brussels; and Stephen Foster Songs in Boston.
Ms. West recorded Ruth Loman’s Songs of Remembrance, released on CRI label. She has also recorded Cantatas for the 1st and 2nd Sundays after Trinity and the St. John Passion (Koch), both with Emmanuel Music, As It Fell Upon a Day (Koch) with Fenwick Smith and Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride (Telarc) with Boston Baroque. Ms. West’s performance of the Contessa in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro in Peter Sellars’ production, which aired on Great Performances, is now on DVD on London Records. Ms. West has also recorded for Hyperion, Decca/Argo, MusicMasters and Newport Classics.
Ms. West is currently on the faculty of Longy School of Music and Boston Arts Academy.
PROGRAM NOTES
Ballet Music for The Embattled Garden
Carlos Surinach (1915–1997)
Born in Barcelona in 1915, Carlos Surinach died in New Haven, Connecticut in 1997, having become an American citizen in 1959. In Spain, Surinach (his Catalan name pronounced as if ending in -AK) held conducting positions with the Barcelona Philharmonic and the Gran Teatre del Liceu Opera before traveling to Berlin to study composition with Max Trapp and Richard Strauss. After arriving in the United States in 1951, he became interested in writing for the dance. He composed three ballet scores for renowned choreographer Martha Graham: Embattled Garden (1958), Acrobats of God (1960) and The Owl and the Pussycat (1978).
The Embattled Garden is Martha Graham’s very original treatment of the Garden of Eden story. There are four characters: Adam, Eve, Lilith (Adam’s first wife, according to legend) and The Stranger, a slithery fellow who symbolizes The Serpent and who has already disrupted the marriage of Lilith and Adam. Lilith, hostile to Adam, and The Stranger, desirous of Eve, are twin forces pitted against Adam and Eve’s union. Meanwhile, Adam and Eve are locked in a struggle with each other over dominance and submission in their own relationship. (Adam and Lilith had experienced similar problems.) The ballet ends with Adam lying in the arms of a seated Eve in a pose reminiscent of Michelangelo’s famous “Pieta” statue. Eve has apparently achieved an attitude of maternal forgiveness toward Adam.
Surinach’s flamenco-flavored score adds fuel to the drama in a Garden of Eden “embattled” on more levels than one.
Chants d’Auvergne
Joseph Canteloube (1879–1957)
Auvergne is a mountainous region in the center of France, much of it covered by the volcanic Massif Central mountain range. Taking its name from the Gallic tribe known as the Averni, it is the site of the heroic resistance of Vercingetorix to the Roman invasion led by Julius Caesar. Today it is the part of France that supplies the world with Volvic mineral water, Michelin tires and the renowned cheese known as bleu d’Auvergne. Auvergne’s official language is French, but its historical language is Auvergnat, a dialect of Occitan (also called Provencal), and the language of the troubadours, spoken throughout the southern half of France during the Middle Ages.
Joseph Canteloube was born in southern Auvergne and grew up on the family property known as Malaret (hence his full name of Canteloube de Malaret). During his formative years he developed a passionate interest in the folk songs of the area. At age 21 he went to Paris, enrolling at the Schola Cantorum to study counterpoint with Cesar Franck’s pupil Vincent d’Indy. D’Indy, who was interested in regional musical traditions himself, encouraged Canteloube to study the folk music of his native province. Canteloube did write music of his own — vocal settings of Symbolist poems, chamber music, orchestral works and even an opera honoring Auvergne’s most famous hero (Vercingetorix, 1933) — but his output was modest and not of outstanding quality. Collecting Auvergnat folk songs and arranging them for soloist and orchestra was his true life’s work. In all, he published five collections of songs: four in the 1920’s, the fifth in 1955. It was Canteloube’s conviction that “the songs of the peasants very often rise to the purest artistic level, in feeling and expression if not in form.”
Sinfonietta (1947)
Francis Poulenc (1899–1963)
Francis Poulenc was born in Paris in 1899 and died there in 1963. Under the tutelage of his mother, a talented amateur pianist, he became an outstanding young pianist himself. He began composing in his teens, at first writing mainly for piano but ultimately producing a wide range of works including chamber music for various instruments, art songs, opera, oratorio, orchestral music and ballet music. He was a member of Les Six during the 1920’s and a close friend of Surrealist poets Jean Cocteau and Guillaume Apollinaire.
Even a knowledgeable listener can easily confuse Haydn with Mozart and Debussy with Ravel, but it is next to impossible to mistake Poulenc for anyone else. The flamboyant nonconformity that marked his personal life found rich expression in his art. Like Surrealist poetry, which delights in sequencing images and ideas that are not sequential at all, Poulenc’s music often careens from pillar to post with wonderful unpredictability. But there is another, more sober side to Poulenc’s art — a hauntingly poetic quality that surfaces especially in his slow movements. (When the Sonata for Flute and Piano premiered in 1957, featuring Poulenc himself and flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, the audience was so taken with the poignant, Assez lent middle movement that they encored the performers into repeating it before allowing them to play the Presto finale.) Music critic Claude Rostand, writing in 1950, described Poulenc as “half ruffian, half monk” (half “voyou” and half “moine”). Admirers find in the paradox of Poulenc’s split musical personality blatant buffoonery on the one hand, quasi-religious lyricism on the other — the very essence of his genius.
- Allegro con fuoco. Two startling percussive notes, an octave apart, start the Sinfonietta on its way. An infectious five-note figure (four quick notes followed by one long one) darts around the orchestra and immediately develops into the main motif. Before long we are swept up in a grandiose episode replete with timpani rolls and sweeping harp glissandos, all of this conjuring something similar to the showy glitter of a Miss America pageant. An eerie, slower segment follows in which a plaintive oboe and a melancholy trumpet seem to usher us into a mysterious underwater world. The five-note motif returns, building in intensity and leading to a resolute, march-like section that tramps its way to a return of the impertinent two-note crash that started everything off. The movement ends, not at all “con fuoco,” but on a note of lovely tranquility.
- Molto vivace. The Molto vivace is a peppy scherzo driven along by sprightly triplets. Bits of material from the first movement (the five-note motif again!) sneak in here and there. The brassy conclusion is amusingly self-important.
- Andante cantabile — Andante — Subito piu mosso. A short introductory passage resonant with lush woodwinds paints a dreamy moonlit setting. The lyrical principal theme follows, songfully intoned by a solo clarinet with accompanying French horn, both voices floating over lovely pizzicato strings. Additional thematic material is explored before a return to the song of the clarinet gently concludes the movement.
- Prestissimo et tres gai — Maestoso. After a nervous, Stravinsky-like, stop-and-start introduction has cleared the way, the violins jump into a jolly tune, sounding for all the world like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. A second theme strolls merrily along over pulsing pizzicato lower strings. A third theme, prompted by perky bassoons, transforms the stroll into a tipsy can-can dance. A more contemplative passage follows, after which the opening Gilbert and Sullivan tune makes one last return before a grandiose coda (Maestoso) brings down the curtain on a musical romp that has indeed proven to be “tres gai.”
These notes are written for Symphony by the Sea. They may be reproduced, provided that authorship acknowledgement is given to William R. Clark, © W. R. Clark