Scheherazade

Described as a “composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods” in a New York Times profile and as “fearless” by NPR, Grammy-nominated composer Anna Clyne is one of the most acclaimed and in-demand composers of her generation, often embarking on collaborations with innovative choreographers, visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians. Clyne’s versatile style focuses on acoustic and electro-acoustic music, combining resonant soundscapes with propelling textures that weave, morph, and collide in dramatic explosions. Clyne’s music also reflects her eclectic influences from other art forms, including poetry, dance, visual arts, and film.

“Masquerade draws inspiration from the original mid-18th-century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens,” writes Clyne. “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.

“It is an honor to compose music for the Last Night of the Proms and I dedicate Masquerade to the Prommers.”

© Elizabeth Schwartz

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26
Sergei Prokofiev

American journalist: “What is a classical composer?”

Sergei Prokofiev: “He is a mad creature who composes work incomprehensible to people of his own generation. He has discovered a certain logic, as yet unknown to others, so that they cannot follow him. Only later do the roads that he has pointed out, if they are good ones, become understandable to those around him. To write simply according to the rules established by previous classics signifies that one is not a master, but a pupil. Such a composer is easily acceptable by his contemporaries, but has no hope of surviving his own generation.”

In his memoirs, Sergei Prokofiev said he “wished to poke a little fun at the Americans,” when asked the question quoted above in a 1927 interview he gave in New York. Prokofiev’s tongue-in-cheek response was more accurate than he intended, however, particularly with regard to his own music and how it was received by American audiences.

Prokofiev was a composing prodigy, writing his first work at age five. He was admitted to the St. Petersburg Conservatory at 13, and left the Conservatory after he won the Rubenstein prize, a prestigious award for pianists, for playing his own Piano Concerto No. 1. As a student, Prokofiev was something of an enfant terrible. Disrespectful to his professors, among them Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev eventually learned to discipline his rebellious, willful nature, becoming an outstanding pianist in the process.

During the Russian Revolution, Prokofiev faced a hard choice: stay in Russia and write music that would pass muster with Soviet cultural authorities, or live in exile and keep his creative freedom.

Prokofiev, who had little affinity for the political ideals of the Revolution, fled Russia for America in 1918. Over the next several years he spent time in New York, Paris, Brittany, and Chicago. In the mid-1930s, Prokofiev returned to Moscow permanently, where his later music was both admired and disparaged. Thereafter, Prokofiev’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union dominated the rest of his artistic life. As a final ironic summary of that relationship, it is worth noting that he died on the same day as Joseph Stalin.

Prokofiev composed in a patchwork style, jotting down fragments of themes in a notebook as they came to him. He kept these musical diaries for years, and often referred to them when he composed. Several of Prokofiev’s musical ideas for the Third Piano Concerto had been gestating since 1913, including the delicate melody that forms the basis for the Andantino theme and variations. Like a quilt design fashioned from many unrelated patches, Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto is an artful arrangement of musical ideas that evolve into a unified sound collage.

The Andante-Allegro contrasts the languid opening clarinet melody with the piano’s ebullient energy. The final theme, a rapidly ascending stampede of thirds in the piano, was one of the first fragments Prokofiev had jotted down. The theme of the Tema con variazioni (Theme with variations) is a lilting, rhythmic melody first heard in the winds; the five variations that follow are, by turns, wistfully elegant, agitated, stormy, mysterious, and frenzied. Prokofiev characterized the Allegro ma non troppo as an “argument” between piano and orchestra, full of “caustic humor . . . with frequent differences of opinion as regards key.” After much musical bickering, the concerto ends with a blazing coda.

The exuberant, brash Piano Concerto No. 3 drew thunderous applause from American audiences but rather tepid reviews. After the premiere, one Chicago paper described it as “a plum pudding without the plums.” Later concerts in New York produced similar reactions; Prokofiev’s observation about the “certain logic” of contemporary composers proved prescient. Three years after the end of WWI, which disrupted all societal and cultural conventions, the audiences were receptive to Prokofiev’s post-war explorations of new sonorities, but critics, often more conservative than their readers, were not. Discouraged by the lackluster American reviews of his music, Prokofiev departed for Europe. In 1932, he made his first recording, playing the Third Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra. This recording helped Third Piano Concerto become one of Prokofiev’s most popular works.

© Elizabeth Schwartz

Scheherazade, Op. 35

Nikolai Rimsky-Korasakov

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, inspired by alluring images from the Tales from the Arabian Nights, is characterized by the composer as “an Oriental narrative of . . .varied fairy tale wonders.” The solo violin, as Scheherazade, stitches the exotic stories together.

The literary inspiration for Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral masterpiece is a collection of folk tales from Egypt, India, and Persia that includes stories dating back over 1,000 years. In 1704, French translator Antoine Galland began publishing the Tales of the Arabian Nights in a series of installments, beginning with Sinbad the Sailor. For most Europeans who would never experience the East firsthand, these tales provided a colorful, exotic lens through which the wonders of “the Orient” were viewed. The otherness of all things Eastern captured the imaginations of Westerners; in their minds it became a quasi-magical realm tinged with mystery, the scent of foreign perfumes and spices, beguiling music, and other sensual delights. Galland’s translations created a frenzy among Europeans for all things Eastern and also contributed to the rise of turquerie, an interest in the culture, art, and style of the Ottoman Empire.

Rimsky-Korsakov capitalized on listeners’ instant association of Scheherazade with the East when he immortalized the legendary storyteller and her fantastic tales in music. According to legend, Scheherazade’s stories were invented to prevent her execution at the hands of her brutal husband, Sultan Shakriar, who believed all women were naturally deceptive and had each of his wives killed after one night. Scheherazade escaped this fate by telling stories that spun themselves out over 1,001 nights. Her stories were an ingenious amalgam of poems, folk songs, and fairy tales. Infected by the universal desire to find out “what happened next,” the sultan deferred her execution each morning and eventually commuted her death sentence.

In his memoir My Musical Life, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, “I meant these hints to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy on the path which my own fancy had traveled. All I desired was that the hearer, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders, and not merely four pieces played one after the other and composed on the basis of themes common to all four movements.” More specifically, Rimsky-Korsakov indicates the solo violin, which opens the first two movements, the intermezzo of the third movement and the conclusion of the fourth, all correspond to Scheherazade herself. (The forbidding theme in the brasses that opens the whole work and is sometimes associated with the Sultan is perhaps better perceived as a metaphor for Scheherazade’s death sentence. Postponed as long as she continues to beguile the Sultan with her inventive stories, it is always present as a threatening, if unspoken, reminder).

Rimsky-Korsakov’s student, composer Anatoly Lyadov, suggested the names by which each of Scheherazade’s four sections are known to most audiences. Although Rimsky-Korsakov approved them initially, he had them removed from subsequent editions of the score, in keeping with his conception that Scheherazade was not a linear narrative. Instead, Rimsky-Korsakov described it as a “musical kaleidoscope” of images: the ocean carrying Sinbad’s ship from one near-escape to the next; the roguish exploits of a Kalendar Prince (the Tales includes several stories of princes who, disguised as beggars, enjoyed daring adventures. Rimsky-Korsakov does not specify which tale, instead creating a lighthearted episode of mischief-making); an enchanting love story of a young prince and princess, possibly Aladdin and the princess Badur; a vastly different ocean, now storm-tossed and deadly, which finally wrecks Sinbad’s ship against the rocks.

© Elizabeth Schwartz

NOTE:  These program notes are published by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for its patrons and other interested readers. Any other use is forbidden without specific permission from the author, who may be contacted at http://classicalmusicprogramnotes.com

Elizabeth Schwartz is a musician, writer, and music historian based in Portland, OR. She has been a program annotator for more than 25 years, and writes for ensembles and festivals across the United States and around the world. Ms. Schwartz has also contributed to NPR’s “Performance Today,” (now heard on American Public Media). http://classicalmusicprogramnotes.com