Two Legends (1863) Franz List

Sunday
February 26, 2012, 8:00 pm
Warner Concert Hall
Concert No. 162 / Guest Recital
Janice Weber, piano

Two Legends (1863) Franz List

St. Francis of Assisi. The Sermon to the Birds (1811–1886)

St. Francis of Paola walking on the waters

Estampes (1903) Claude Debussy

Pagodes (1862–1918)

La soriée dans Grenade

Jardins sous la pluie

Prelude, Chorale and Fugue César Franck

(1822–1890)

Intermission

The Seasons (1947) John Cage

Prelude I (1912–1992)

Winter

Prelude II

Spring

Prelude III

Summer

Prelude IV

Fall

Finale

Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 Sergei Rachmaninoff

(1873–1943)

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 List

Cadenza by Rachmaninoff

Please silence all electronic devices and refrain from the use of video cameras

unless prior arrangements have been made with the performer.

The use of flash cameras is prohibited. Thank you.

Program Notes

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth and the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s. Their legacies changed the course of twentieth-century music, and I am honored to include them on tonight’s program.

Although Liszt’s late, enigmatic piano pieces paved the way for Debussy’s impressionism, the earlier Legends are wonderfully evocative as well. In the first legend, St. Francis of Assisi happens upon a flock of sparrows and preaches to the excited avian chorus: Birds, you are beholden to the Creator, who has given you liberty to fly about everywhere, beautiful feathers, clean air, rivers to drink, and trees for refuge. Be grateful. He blesses them and they fly off. The second legend describes St. Francis of Paola at the seashore, hoping to find passage across the Strait of Messina. Boatmen refuse to take such a beggar aboard, telling him to sail on his own tattered cape if indeed he is a saint. In response St. Francis blesses his cloak, tosses it on the water, and sails through a tempest, his gaze fixed heavenward. Safe on land, he chides and forgives the astonished boatmen before proceeding on his way.

Debussy was profoundly influenced by the visual arts, and Estampes indicates his wish to merge the visual with the aural. The title refers to images printed from engraved copper or wood plates.

Pagodes (Pagodas) was Debussy’s first piano piece to break away from traditional textures. It uses the pentatonic scale similar to the one he heard performed by the Javanese gamelan and Cambodian pin peat musicians at the Paris Exposition in 1889. Debussy spent many hours listening to these exotic orchestras, made up almost entirely of percussion instruments. The booming gongs and tinkling bells suggest a kind of stasis, a state of static balance, in a remote place.

Debussy’s knowledge of Spain was limited to a few hours at San Sebastian, yet no less an authority than Manuel de Falla found La Soirée dans Grenade (The Evening in Granada) reminiscent of ‘images in the moonlit water of the pools adjoining the Alhambra.’ A habanera rhythm pervades the work, which is full of the languor and ecstasy of a warm summer night.

Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the Rain) depicts a child looking out from a nursery window at rain drenching the garden. Tunes from two French children’s songs vie with the wind and rain before sunlight breaks through in all its glory.

~Debussy notes by Maurice Hinson, Alfred Music Publishing

César Franck disappointed his ambitious stage father by abandoning the concert hall for the joys of academe, the organ loft, and composition. He originally conceived of Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue as “just” a prelude and fugue, but soon felt the need for a transitional movement. The resulting Chorale expanded to become the focal point of a great masterwork. Its figurations and thematic transformations owe a huge debt to Liszt, of course, but the chromaticism is vintage Franck.

The Seasons, a ballet in one act, was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein and the New York Ballet Society in 1947. Merce Cunningham wrote the choreography; sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed the set. Lou Harrison and Virgil Thomson later orchestrated Cage’s original piano score.

The ballet is in nine cyclical movements, ending where it began, and reflects Cage’s then-fascination with Indian philosophy. Winter depicts quiescence, spring is creation, summer is preservation and fall, destruction. The Seasons is one of the few compositions where Cage attempted to "imitate nature in her manner of operation" and, typically, is far more complicated than it appears. The work's internal rhythmic structure is 2-2-1-3-2-4-1-3-1 (try counting that!) and the relative lengths of the movements follow this ratio.

I imagined a dancer trying to follow this elusive score. When several balletomanes informed me that Cunningham often rehearsed in silence, and his dancers heard the music for the first time at dress rehearsal, if not the actual performance, everything then made perfect Cagean sense.

The following is from a 2009 appreciation by New York Times music critic Allan Kozinn:

John Milton Cage, Jr. was a prolific and influential composer whose work influenced the Minimalist movement in art and music. Also a writer and philosopher, Cage had an impact far beyond the musical world. He was a central influence on the choreography of Merce Cunningham, whom he had known since they were students at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle. He was also an influence on the artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and several generations of performance artists.

Cage started a revolution by proposing that composers could jettison the musical language that had evolved over the last seven centuries, and in doing so he opened the door to Minimalism, performance art and virtually every other branch of the musical avant-garde. Composers as different in style from one another -- and from Cage -- as Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Frederic Rzewski have cited Mr. Cage as a beacon that helped light their own paths.

In a career that began in the 1930's, Mr. Cage composed hundreds of works, ranging from early pieces that were organized according to the conventional rules of harmony and thematic development, to late pieces that defied those rules and were composed using what he called "chance" processes. Not surprisingly, Cage’s theories of composition have always inspired debate. Traditionalists have dismissed him as a prankster, a charlatan or an anarchist, and although performances of his music take place uneventfully today, there were times in the 1960's when his works evoked angry responses. At a 1964 New York Philharmonic performance of Eclipticalis With Winter Music, for example, a third of the audience walked out and members of the orchestra hissed the composer. "I do what I feel it is necessary to do," he told an interviewer. "My necessity comes from my sense of invention, and I try not to repeat the things I already know about."

Mr. Cage was, in fact, the son of an inventor, and if there is a single thread running through his compositions and books, it is a sense of constant innovation, improvisation and exploration. Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied and whose rigorous 12-tone style inhabits an end of the contemporary music continuum opposite the place occupied by Mr. Cage, once described him as "not a composer but an inventor of genius," a quotation that Mr. Cage always said pleased him.

Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) did not actually compose the theme of Rachmaninoff’s eponymous set of variations; he most likely “borrowed” it from Les Folies d’Espagne by Marin Marais (1656-1728). Even Marais wasn’t entirely original: the bass line of his set of variations directly quotes one of the oldest harmonic progressions then extant. In any event, Rachmaninoff spins twenty variations from this stark air in D minor. Some are optional (although I have never heard anyone leave them out). Two variations in D-flat major form the heart of the piece, which ends not with a bang, but a somber coda. Rachmaninoff did not repeat that trajectory with his very next work, Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 – although the key of D-flat makes a ravishing appearance in that set as well. The piece is dedicated to violinist Fritz Kreisler, whose own faux-antique (but genuinely banal) La Folie variations may have inspired Rachmaninoff to redeem the genre.

Rachmaninoff’s sardonic cadenza adds a nice twist to Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, a work that needs no introduction. Liszt’s 200th birthday year has just passed, and it is worth noting that, one way or another, every piece on this program can trace its roots to the peerless master.

~Janice Weber