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Overture to Il Guarany The only Brazilian opera composer of the nineteenth century to have his works successfully performed abroad, Antônio Carlos Gomes was already well known in his native country when he traveled to Italy to study in Milan. There he wrote his opera Il Guarany, which was premiered at La Scala in 1870, drawing high praise from Giuseppe Verdi and librettist and composer Arrigo Boito. The opera, based on a popular novel by José Martiniano de Alencar, is the Brazilian version on the popular theme of the Noble Savage. Taking place in 1560 in Rio de Janeiro, the complicated plot touches on the Portuguese mine owner Don Antonio’s exploitation of indigenous resources (in this case, silver). Like so many late-nineteenth-century operas Il Guarany contains a cross-cultural love story between Cecilia, Don Antonio’s daughter, and Pery, the chieftain of the Indian tribe of the Guaraní, who are captured by the cannibalistic Aimoré tribe but are rescued at the last moment. Alencar’s novel is ethnically evenhanded, including both good and bad Europeans and Indians. The music of the Sinfonia (overture) clearly reflects Gomes’s studies in Italy and the strong influence of Verdi. Unfortunately, it does not attempt any musical exoticism that would give a sense of what people were singing or dancing to in Brazil at the time. The Sinfonia conforms to the typical Italian opera overture of the period, rolling out four principal themes: A slow introduction;  a Verdi-like melody that sounds like it might refer to an aria within the opera but doesn’t; an Allegro agitato that will show up again in Act IV as the battle between the cannibalistic Aimoré and the Guarany; and closes with another orphan cantabile tune. | ||||||||||
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The Chairman Dances John Adams is generally associated with minimalism, a style of composition pioneered by Terry Riley, Phillip Glass and Steve Reich in which short musical motives are repeated, although undergoing gradual transformations in melody, harmony or rhythm one note at a time. While repetition in the works of Riley, Glass and Reich can seem interminable, Adams adds more drama and musical direction, as well as a more accessible tonal and melodic language to his scores. Born in Worcester, MA, Adams studied at Harvard University before settling in California. From 1979 to 1985, during his tenure as composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Symphony, he established a fine reputation in the musical establishment with such works as Harmonium, settings of three poems by Emily Dickenson. In September of 2003 Adams succeeded Pierre Boulez as Composer in Residence at Carnegie Hall. In 1987, Adams’s collaboration with stage director Peter Sellars catapulted him into international fame with the Grammy-winning opera Nixon in China, based on Richard Nixon’s breakthrough trip in 1972. In 1991, Adams composed The Death of Klinghoffer, also based on an historical event, the terrorist murder of a handicapped passenger aboard a cruise ship. Not only did both works become the most performed contemporary operas in recent history, but they were also televised by PBS. Klinghoffer was filmed in 2003 on location in the Mediterranean aboard a cruise liner, the most authentic venue for the presentation of opera on film. The Chairman Dances, composed in 1985, had been intended for Nixon in China but was dropped in the final version. According to Adams, The Chairman Dances began as a foxtrot for Chairman Mao and his wife, Chiang Ch’ing, the fabled "Madame Mao," a former Shanghai movie actress, revolutionary, executioner and architect of China’s calamitous Cultural Revolution. Adams composed The Chairman Dances according to the following scenario. It is set in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People where Nixon is hosting a huge banquet for his Chinese counterpart: “Chiang Ch’ing, a.k.a. Madame Mao, has gatecrashed the Presidential Banquet. She is first seen standing where she is most in the way of the waiters. After a few minutes, she brings out a box of paper lanterns and hangs them around the hall, then strips down to a cheongsam, skin-tight from neck to ankle and slit up to the hip. She signals the orchestra to play and begins dancing by herself. Mao is becoming excited. He steps down from his portrait on the wall and they begin to foxtrot together. They are back in Yenan, dancing to the gramophone…”The Chairman Dances contains within it both a microstructure and a macrostructure. The microstructure consists of the myriad of tiny alterations in the perpetual motion of the piece that give the minimalism its name, as here in the opening moments. This example sets up the static underlying rhythm and static harmony with the interjection of a two-note motive in an upper solo woodwinds (flute or oboe), as well as small changes in the percussion instrumentation. An example of microstructure change occurs when this pattern has been going for over a minute and new melodic motives come in with the brasses that signal a major change in harmony. The macrostructure consists of the major musical events that occur within the piece. There are several macro events in this 12-minute piece. The first occurs about four minutes into the work when the driving pulse gives way to the foxtrot, heralded by a melody in the horn. There are several dance sections in The Chairman Dances, all sounding distinctly Western, in fact, much like '40s movie music – in reference to Chiang Ch’ing's former profession – while still maintaining the minimalist microstructure. | ||||||||||
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The Planets Composer, educator and conductor Gustav Holst is known outside his native England essentially as a one-work composer. The Planets, composed between 1914 and 1916, gained him international fame, but he detested its popularity. As if to validate the composer’s feelings, snippets of its opulent music with its broad orchestral palette have also been favorite fodder for television commercials. Holst came from a musical family and was taught the piano by his father. He was a precocious, but not a particularly healthy, child who started composing while in grammar school. As a teenager he developed neuritis in his right arm, forcing him to give up the piano, but he picked up the trombone as a cure for his asthma. At the Royal College of Music, which he entered in 1893, he continued with the trombone in addition to composition, and from 1897 to 1903 performed as a freelance trombonist, mostly with opera companies. The experience inspired him to write numerous works for brass band, including two Suites for Military Band and Hammersmith, the latter written for the BBC Military Band. Holst was influenced by mysticism and developed his own individual blend of Indian music and English folksong. His early works were inspired by the Vedas, Sanskrit holy verses that he modified and adapted for his own compositions. In 1908 he wrote a chamber opera, Savitri, based on a story from the great Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. A quiet introverted person, for most of his life Holst devoted his musical efforts to teaching. From 1905 until his death he taught music at St. Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, where many of his compositions were written for the school's orchestra and chorus. In 1906, on his doctor's advice, he went on vacation to Algeria and bicycled in the desert. The experience was the inspiration for the orchestral work Beni Mora. When it was first performed in England, one critic complained, "We do not ask for Biskra dancing girls in Langham Place." Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams once noted that had the piece been premiered in Paris instead of England, it would have made Holst a household name some ten years earlier than his success with The Planets. In 1932 Holst was visiting lecturer in composition at Harvard; among his students was composer Elliott Carter. The inspiration for The Planets was not astronomy, but astrology, to which Holst was introduced in 1913, when he began studying the writing of the aptly named astrologer, Alan Leo. He attempted to depict in music the traditional astrological "personalities" and influences of the seven planets (Pluto was not discovered until 1930 and has now been demoted anyway.) His musical language was influenced by the new – albeit divergent – developments in music at the time, especially by Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky and Edward Elgar. Holst arranged the seven movements according to musical, not astronomical, criteria. Thus their arrangement does not correspond to their orbital distance from the sun: Mars, The Bringer of War: This martial movement with its brutally percussive machine rhythms, was actually written a few months before the outbreak of World War I. | ||||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2014 | ||||||||||
