Hartford Symphony Orchestra
2015-2016 Masterworks Series
Battle of the Batons
January 21-24, 2016
Notes on the Program by DR. RICHARD E. RODDA
World Premiere: Undocumented, First publication in 1925.
Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO’s premiere performance of this work.
Instrumentation: Strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and double bass
Duration: 12'
Double Bass Concerto No. 2 in B minor (1845)
Giovanni Bottesini
(Born December 24, 1821 in Crema, Italy;
died July 7, 1889 in Parma)
Giovanni Bottesini, composer, conductor and the pre-eminent double bass virtuoso
of the mid-19th century, was born on December 24, 1821 in the small town of Crema, in
the northern Italian province of Lombardy. His father, Pietro, a clarinetist and
composer, early taught his son the rudiments of music, and before he was eleven,
young Giovanni had sung in several choirs, played timpani in the local theater
orchestra, and studied violin with one of the town’s leading performers. Bottesini’s
father took his precocious son to Milan in 1835 with hope of enrolling him in the
Conservatory, but they learned upon their arrival that scholarships remained only for
players of bassoon and double bass. Giovanni applied himself with such vigor to the
latter instrument that he was accepted into the school only a few weeks later, and he
began his formal studies there on November 1, 1835. He left the Conservatory four
years later, having obtained a graduation prize for his solo playing. With his winnings,
Bottesini purchased a fine instrument made by the old Milanese master Giuseppe
Testore that, legend has it, the young musician found beneath a pile of rubbish in a
puppet theater. (Bottesini’s instrument had only three strings, tuned a tone higher than
usual so that he could more easily adapt much of the cello repertory for his use.)
During the decade after 1839, while he was perfecting his technique, Bottesini lived
as a free-lance musician, a period that included a residence in Havana in 1846 as
principal bassist of the orchestra of the Teatro Tacon, the production there of his first
opera (based, appropriately, on the subject of Cristoforo Colombo), and a sensational tour
of the United States. (One enterprising jeweler got rich peddling pins in the likeness of
the visiting virtuoso.) Bottesini returned to Europe, and he was so successful in his
concert debut in Crema in 1849 that he was soon in demand as a soloist across the
Continent and in England. In that same year, he was appointed principal bassist of the
Teatro San Benedetto in Venice, where he befriended Giuseppe Verdi. Bottesini’s
playing, with its extraordinary agility, purity of tone, precision of intonation and
exquisite phrasing, continued to astound audiences for more than four decades — he
was universally known as the “Paganini of the Double Bass.” In addition to his
performing engagements, Bottesini also held several important conducting
assignments, gaining special notice for his interpretations of Italian opera in Paris,
London, Barcelona, St. Petersburg, Madrid and New Orleans (he visited the United
States three times, and was named an honorary member of the Philharmonic Society of
New York in 1850). The high point of his podium career came when he conducted the
premiere of Verdi’s Aida on Christmas Eve 1871 in Cairo to celebrate the opening of the
Suez Canal. The last months before his death, on July 7, 1889, were spent as director of
the Parma Conservatory.
Bottesini’s compositions encompass a dozen Italian operas, a Requiem, an Englishlanguage oratorio (The Garden of Olivet) for the Norwich Festival, several short
orchestral pieces, eleven string quartets and numerous other chamber works, and a
large quantity of music for the double bass, including two solo concertos, the Grand Duo
Concertante for violin and bass, virtuoso fantasies on operatic themes, and miscellaneous
scores with the accompaniment of piano or orchestra. His works, like those of Verdi, are
characterized by their emphasis on lyricism, plangent harmonies and straight-forward
emotional appeal built with solid craftsmanship. The Double Bass Concerto No. 2 in B
minor is testament both to Bottesini’s considerable craft as a composer and to his
breathtaking performance technique, which emphasized not only his agility on the
orchestra’s most recalcitrant instrument but also the high, baritonal register that was his
specialty. The Concerto opens with a fantasia-like movement built from the doleful
arching melody given by the bass at the outset, with formal balance provided not by
conventional thematic contrast but by elaborate passages of figuration for the soloist.
The Andante is a sweetly sentimental, basso profundo aria without words, a concert-hall
analog to a scene from one of Bottesini’s operas. The finale is a brilliant showpiece for
double bass whose Gypsy-inflected thematic material and vibrant, dancing spirit recall
the fiery Hungarian Csárdás.
World Premiere: 2002
Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO’s premiere performance of this work.
Instrumentation: Strings: violin I, violin II, violin III, violin IV, viola I, viola II, cello I, cello II,
double bass I and double bass II
Duration: 7'
Concerto for Vibraphone and String Orchestra (1999)
Emmanuel Séjourné
(Born July 16, 1961 in Limoges, France)
Emmanuel Séjourné is one of France’s leading percussion performers and
composers. Séjourné, born in Limoges in 1961, studied at the Conservatoire de
Strasbourg, where he began composing while majoring in percussion with a specialty in
mallet instruments; he won the school’s Gold Medal in percussion in 1980 and the
European Audio-Visual Grand Prix the following year for his CD Saxophone et
Percussion. Since 1984, Séjourné has taught mallet percussion at the Strasbourg
Conservatory, where he is currently head of the percussion department; he is also on
the faculty of the Academy of Music of Strasbourg University of the Arts. In addition,
he has authored a six-volume method for mallet percussion, served as an advisor to the
French Ministry of Culture, been a member of the juries of many international
competitions, and given frequent master classes. Séjourné has appeared widely in
Europe, Asia and North America as recitalist, chamber musician and soloist with
orchestra, and recorded on the Universal, Fingerprint, Auvidis, Montaigne, Accord,
Una Corda, Musifrance Erato, Biber and MFP Berlin Jazz labels. As a composer, his
eclectic output includes works for orchestra, chamber ensembles and soloists, as well as
incidental music, stage musicals, and film and dance scores; he composed the ballet The
Invaders on a commission observing the 2,000th anniversary of the city of Strasbourg.
Séjourné composed his Concerto for Vibraphone and String Orchestra for the 1999
Vibraphone International Competition in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The first of its two
movements, a showcase for the solo instrument’s remarkable range of sonorities and
lyrical qualities, opens with floating string chords that are haloed by ethereal, bowed
notes from the vibraphone. The pace quickens with the gentle but insistent string
figures that accompany the vibraphone’s expressive main theme. This melody returns
twice, the first followed by increasingly elaborate decorations with an improvised
feeling that mirrors Séjourné’s experience as a jazz artist, the second to lead to a coda
recalling the ethereal bowed notes of the opening. The second movement is a highenergy affair, with a vehement string introduction providing the gateway to a virtuosic
display by the soloist. Twice the music is interrupted by slow, meditative episodes: a
brief one with sustained string harmonies and fragmented phrases from the
vibraphone; and a longer passage using eerie “melting” orchestra chords and bent
bowed notes from the soloist.
World Premiere: April 4, 1867
Most Recent HSO Performance: May 23, 2010
Instrumentation: Strings: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets,
timpani, bells, and strings; violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and double bass
Duration: 9'
Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 28 (1863)
Camille Saint-Saëns
(Born October 9, 1835 in Paris;
died December 16, 1921 in Algiers)
Camille Saint-Saëns was the Renaissance man among the great composers. His
interests extended well beyond music to include the sciences (especially astronomy),
theater, drawing and caricature, archeology, poetry, mathematics and literature. Philip
Hale, the noted critic, left a memorable sketch of him: “He was of less than average
height, thin, nervous, sick-faced, with a great and exposed forehead, hair habitually
short, beard frosted. His eyes were almost level with his face. His eagle-beak would
have excited the admiration of Sir Charles Napier, who once exclaimed: ‘Give me a man
with plenty of nose.’ Irritable, whimsical, ironical, paradoxical, indulging in sudden
changes of opinion, he was faithful to his friends, appreciative of certain rivals, kindly
disposed toward young composers, zealous in practical assistance as well as verbal
encouragement. [He was] a man that knew the world and sparkled in conversation;
fond of society; at ease and on equal terms with leaders in art, literature, fashion.”
Camille Saint-Saëns, himself a brilliant pianist, wrote ten concertos — five for his
own instrument, three for violin and two for cello. In addition, there are numerous
smaller concerted pieces scattered throughout his large body of work, including the
Havanaise and the popular Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for violin. The latter was
composed in 1863 for the great Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate, for whom SaintSaëns also wrote the Third Violin Concerto in 1880. The Introduction and Rondo
Capriccioso is prefaced by a doleful opening section (marked “malinconico” —
“melancholy” — in the score), after which the spirited main rondo theme is presented by
the soloist. This section of the work is based on the stirring rhythms of the Spanish
dance from Aragon, the jota, perhaps in tribute to Sarasate’s native land. The work is a
sterling display of the violin’s technical possibilities balanced by Saint-Saëns’ unerring
sense of musical form and good taste.
World Premiere: September 30, 1791
Most Recent HSO Performance: June 1, 2007
Instrumentation: Strings: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3
trombones, timpani, and strings; violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and double bass
Duration: 6'
Overture to Die Zauberflöte (“The Magic Flute”), K. 620 (1791)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(Born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg;
died December 5, 1791 in Vienna)
Early in 1791 Mozart was deeply in debt, troubled by the disinclination of the
Viennese public to embrace his recent music and concert appearances, and suffering
seriously from the kidney failure that would take his life before the year was out, so
when Emanuel Schickaneder, a slightly shady actor and theater entrepreneur,
suggested in May that they collaborate on a new opera that was sure to be a hit, the
composer jumped at the chance. Mozart had first met Schickaneder a decade earlier in
Salzburg, when the latter’s touring company performed a season of plays, musicals and
ballets to which Wolfgang’s family was given free admission. (In appreciation Mozart
wrote for him the incidental music to Thamos, King of Egypt and a Singspiel titled Zaïde.)
After arriving in Vienna in 1789, Schickaneder took over the management of the
Theater-auf-der-Wieden, a well-equipped 800-seat house just outside the city walls that
specialized in presenting popular, German-language musical entertainment. The
Viennese public was especially fond at that time of comic pieces with Oriental or
fantastic settings, and Schickaneder had achieved a fine success soon after he arrived
with the “magic opera” Oberon by composer Paul Wranitzky and librettist Carl Ludwig
Giesecke. For a sequel he proposed to write the libretto for a Singspiel called Die
Zauberflöte — The Magic Flute — a comic musical with spoken dialogue based on
Liebeskind’s story Lulu from Wieland’s 1786 collection of Oriental fairy-tales called
Dschinnistan, for which Mozart would provide the music. Schickaneder could offer no
money immediately, but promised Mozart he would get all the rental fees for
subsequent productions after the premiere. (Schickaneder reneged, however, and
Mozart’s widow fought creditors for years while The Magic Flute made money all over
Europe.)
Mozart threw himself into composing the music for The Magic Flute in May and
June. Early in June he sent his wife, Constanze, to the suburban spa town of Baden to
ease the last months of her current pregnancy, and he visited her whenever he could.
(On one of those trips he wrote the sublime motet Ave verum corpus for Anton Stoll, the
choirmaster of the church at Baden.) Schickaneder, however, was eager to finish the
new production, and he encouraged Mozart to stay in Vienna and finish the score by
providing him with a little hut on the grounds of the Theater-auf-der-Wieden in which
to work, and then plied him with oysters and wine and arranged encouraging visits
from members of the troupe. (This “Magic Flute House” was moved to Salzburg in the
mid-19th century, and may be seen today in the garden of the Mozarteum.) Most of the
composition was completed by July, when Mozart received two more commissions —
one for an opera seria on Metastasio’s old text La Clemenza di Tito, to commemorate the
coronation in Prague of the new Emperor, Leopold II, as King of Bohemia; the other, a
mysterious order for a Requiem Mass, the work that was to cast such an ominous pall
over Mozart’s last months. As Tito was needed for performance on September 6th, he
had to begin the music immediately, and was still composing the score when he and
Constanze left for Prague in mid August, only three weeks after she had given birth to
Franz Xaver. When they returned to Vienna a month later, Mozart began the final
preparations for the premiere of The Magic Flute, which included composing the
Overture, always the last part of his operas to be written. The full score was finished on
September 28th.
The Magic Flute was premiered at Schickaneder’s Theater-auf-der-Wieden on
September 30, 1791; Mozart conducted. The audience responded without much
enthusiasm to that opening night, though the production was elaborate (there were at
least thirteen scene changes) and the performance was good. The listeners were
probably bewildered by the seeming inconsistencies in the plot (which continues to
incite much musicological debate) and by the awesome variety of Mozart’s music —
from folk-like ditties to austere chorale preludes, from slapstick comedy to soaring
profundity. However, word of this new musical curiosity quickly spread throughout
the city, and the crowds came to see it for themselves — and kept coming. The Magic
Flute was a hit. Schickaneder announced his 100th performance of the opera in
November 1792, and mounted the work again in 1794, 1798 and, in his new Theater-ander-Wien, in 1802. It was heard in at least 59 towns before 1800, and reached New York
in 1833. Mozart, however, enjoyed little of this success. He attended the performances
almost nightly during October 1791, and was much pleased with the response of the
audiences, especially with the praise he received from Court Composer Antonio Salieri.
(“There was not a single number that did not call forth from him a bravo,” Mozart
boasted.) By November, however, his health had given way to such an alarming degree
that he was forced to take to his bed. The Magic Flute, though, was constantly in his
thoughts, and he would sit, watch in hand, each evening imagining the progress of the
performance — “Now the first act is ending.... Now comes the Queen of the Night,” he
would mutter. Just nine weeks after he had unveiled The Magic Flute to an astonished
world, Mozart was dead.
The Overture to The Magic Flute is one of the supreme orchestral works of the 18th
century. Rich in sonority, concise in construction, profligate in melodic invention and
masterful in harmonic surety, it balances the seemingly polar opposites of the opera —
profundity and comedy — with surpassing ease and conviction. The slow introduction
opens with the triple chords associated with the solemn ceremonies of the priests, the
Overture’s only thematic borrowing from the opera. The Allegro is built on a tune of
opera buffa jocularity treated, most remarkably, as a fugue. The complementary theme,
initiated by the flute, is characterized by its sensuous ascending chromatic scales. The
balance of the Overture follows traditional sonata form, with the triple chords of the
priests reiterated to mark the beginning of the development section.
World Premiere: December 22, 1894
Most Recent HSO Performance: February 13, 2011
Instrumentation: Strings: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns,
crotales, and strings; violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and double bass
Duration: 10'
Prélude à “L’Après-midi d’un faune” (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”)
(1892-1894)
Claude Debussy
(Born August 22, 1862 in St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris;
died March 25, 1918 in Paris)
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was one of those artists in fin-de-siècle
Paris who perceived strong relationships among music, literature and the other
arts. A number of his poems, including L’Après-midi d’un faune, were not only
inspired, he said, by music, but even aspired to its elevated, abstract state. The
young composer Claude Debussy had similar feelings about the interaction of
poetry and music, and he and Mallarmé became close friends, despite the
twenty years difference in their ages. When Mallarmé completed his L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune in 1876 after several years of writing and revising, he
envisioned that it would be used as the basis for a theatrical production.
Debussy was intrigued at this suggestion, and he set about planning to provide
music to a choreographic version that would be devised in consultation with
Mallarmé. The projected work was described as Prélude, Interludes et
Paraphrase finale to L’Après-midi d’un faune. Debussy completed only the
scenario’s first portion, perhaps realizing, as had others, that Mallarmé’s misty
symbolism and equivocal language were not innately suited to the theater. The
premiere, given at an orchestral concert of the Société Nationale in Paris on
December 22, 1894, a few months after the score was finished, was
meticulously prepared by the conductor Gustave Doret, with Debussy at his
elbow giving instruction and inspiration, polishing details, retouching the
scoring. So successful was the initial performance that the audience demanded
the work’s immediate encore. L’Après-midi d’un faune was first staged by
Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe at the Théâtre du Châtelet on May 29, 1912; Nijinsky
created the controversial choreography and appeared in the title role.
Mallarmé’s poem is deliberately ambiguous in its sensuous, symbolist
language; its purpose is as much to suggest a halcyon, dream-like mood as to
tell a story. Robert Lawrence described its slight plot, as realized by Debussy,
in his Victor Books of Ballets: “Exotically spotted, a satyr is taking his rest on
the top of a hillock. As he fondles a bunch of grapes, he sees a group of
nymphs passing on the plain below. He wants to join them, but when he
approaches, they flee. Only one of them, attracted by the faun, returns timidly.
But the nymph changes her mind and runs away. For a moment he gazes after
her. Then, snatching a scarf she has dropped in her flight, the faun climbs his
hillock and resumes his drowsy position, astride the scarf.” As the inherent
eroticism of the plot suggests, the Debussy/Mallarmé faun is no Bambi-like
creature, but rather a mythological half-man, half-beast with cloven hooves,
horns, tail and furry coat, a being which walks upright and whose chief
characteristic is its highly developed libido. Mallarmé’s poem is filled with the
ambiguities symbolized by the faun: is this a man or a beast? is his love
physical or fantasy? reality or dream? The delicate subtlety of the poem finds a
perfect tonal equivalent in Debussy’s music.
World Premiere: November 4, 1890
Most Recent HSO Performance: November 1, 1997
Instrumentation: Strings: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes with 1 doubling English horn, 2 clarinets, 2
bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, triangle,
tambourine, glockenspiel, suspended cymbal, timpani, harp, and strings; violin I, violin II, viola,
cello, and double bass
Duration: 8'
“Polovtsian Dances” from Prince Igor (1874-1875)
Alexander Borodin
(Born November 12, 1833 in St. Petersburg;
died there on February 27, 1887)
Among Borodin’s correspondence is one of the most unusual sentiments ever
expressed by a composer: “In winter, I can only compose when I am too unwell to give
lectures. So my friends, revising the usual custom, never say to me, ‘I hope you are
well,’ but ‘I do hope you are ill.’ At Christmas I had influenza, so I stayed home and
wrote the Chorus of Thanks in the last act of Prince Igor.” Borodin was a sometime
composer whose principal occupation was as a researcher and teacher in chemistry and
medicine. He gained international fame as the author of The Solidification of Aldehydes
and other learned treatises, and when the Soviet government erected a monument to
him, it was for his contributions to science rather than to music. He composed as much
as time allowed, in sickness or in health, but, despite over seventeen years of trying, he
was not able to complete his magnum opus, the opera Prince Igor.
Vladimir Stassov, the influential critic and philosophical mentor of the Russian
nationalist composers, first brought the idea for Prince Igor to Borodin in 1869. Stassov
sketched out a scenario based on The Epic of Igor’s Army, a poem, later shown to be an
18th-century fraud, that Stassov thought to be a 12th-century description of the conflict
between the Russians and the Tartars. Borodin was enthusiastic about the topic as the
basis of an opera, and he set to work devising his own libretto. He devoted significant
time to the project in 1869-1870, but then was unable to return to it for several years,
though he did use many of the sketches in the Second Symphony of 1871-1874. When
Borodin resumed work on Prince Igor in 1874, the Polovtsian Dances were among the first
numbers written. He orchestrated this excerpt, and it was first heard at a concert
conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1879 with great success. He pecked away at the
opera for the remaining eight years of his life, but the score was left incomplete when he
died suddenly at a party from a burst aneurysm. Rimsky-Korsakov and his student
Alexander Glazunov finished Prince Igor from Borodin’s sketches, reconstructed from
memory the overture that the composer had played many times on the piano but never
transcribed, orchestrated the whole, and prepared the opera for its premiere, in 1890 in
St. Petersburg.
In the opera, Igor is captured while trying to rid Russia of the Polovtsi, an invading
Tartar race from Central Asia. The leader of the Polovtsi, Khan Kontchak, treats Igor as
a guest rather than a prisoner, and entertains him lavishly. Khan offers him his freedom
if he will promise to leave the Polovtsi in peace, but Igor refuses. Igor nevertheless
effects his escape and returns triumphantly to his people. Borodin wrote that Prince Igor
is “essentially a national opera, interesting only to us Russians, who love to steep our
patriotism in the sources of our history, and to see the origins of our nationality again
on the stage.” To make his opera as authentic as possible, he studied the music, history
and lore of Central Asia, where the opera is set, and sought out travelers with first-hand
knowledge of the region. His colorful, “Oriental” writing for the Polovtsi was
influenced not only by authentic Caucasian melodies, but also by music from the
Middle East and North Africa.
The Polovtsian Dances are the centerpiece of the Khan’s entertainment for Igor in Act
II. A brief introduction opens the scene in the Polovtsian camp with an arch-shaped
theme played quietly by flute and clarinet. The first dance, whose beguiling melody
was transformed into the song Stranger in Paradise in the 1953 Broadway musical Kismet,
accompanies the procession of captives. The women of the chorus sing its text, a tender
song extolling the high mountains and blue skies of their Polovtsian homeland. Next
comes the entry of the Polovtsian warriors to solid, rough music led by the Oriental
wailings of the woodwinds and a sturdy version of the arched theme from the
introduction. A timpani solo introduces a ferocious general dance in which the chorus,
accompanied by full orchestra, sings the praises of the mighty Khan. The next dance,
with its galloping rhythm, its persistent descending four-note motive and its continuing
adulation of the Polovtsian ruler, accompanies the war games of the savage young men.
The swaying melody of the first dance returns in a richer setting and is soon combined
with the energetic theme of the savage warriors. The rough music and Oriental wailings
that introduced the warriors return with a ferocious vehemence to bring the brilliant
Polovtsian Dances to a rousing close.
©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda