Alborada del gracioso
Maurice Ravel
Comparing orchestrations of piano works to their original piano versions is like comparing apples and oranges. Both have their merits, although the orchestra cannot match the intimacy of a solo piano work, and the piano does not have access to the vast array of colors available in the orchestral palette. It takes a master orchestrator like Maurice Ravel to reveal the solo piano work’s hidden symphonic character.
Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso is a quasi-ironic portrait of a bumbling court jester, originally one of five movements in Ravel’s piano suite Miroirs. In its orchestral version, however, Alborada del gracioso has become part of a ballet and a popular stand-alone symphonic work in its own right.
One of Ravel’s biographers, Alexis Roland-Manuel, who was also Ravel’s pupil and friend, described the Alborada as a work “in which the dry and biting virtuosity is contrasted, Spanish-wise, with the swooning flow of the lovelorn melodic line which interrupts the angry buzzing of guitars.” The overall structure, which Ravel insisted was “as strict as that of a Bach fugue,” features two dances framing a central love song. The orchestra’s percussion section, enhanced by castanets, effectively captures the “dry, biting virtuosity” of the Spanish-flavored rhythms. We hear this virtuosity first in the opening pizzicato strings and harp (imitating Spanish guitars), and the first orchestral entrance, which wallops the ear with joyful clamor. Ravel gives the “lovelorn melodic line” to the solo bassoon, which represents the hapless jester and can be heard as either plaintive or ironic, or perhaps both at once. The Spanish dance rhythms of the Alborada return, led by the percussion section, engulfing the poor jester at last.
A Through Line
Hanna Benn
Indianapolis native Hanna Benn is a composer, vocalist, and genre-spanning collaborator. Her multi-disciplinary approach has incorporated dance, opera, and theater, blurring genre and discovering new sonic landscapes in the process. Benn’s work as a composer has taken her across the globe, from most recently a new spiritual for GRAMMY Award-winning choir The Fisk Jubilee Singers and a premiere at The Perth (Australia) International Arts Festival to Antwerp (Belgium) performing with the B.O.X. Baroque Orchestra. Benn’s music has been performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Northwest Symphony, Saint Helen’s String Quartet, Seattle Chamber Players, and the Indianapolis Symphony, among other ensembles.
The ISO commissioned an oboe and bassoon concerto from Benn to coincide with the International Double Reed Society’s annual convention at Butler University, which takes place June 10-14. For Benn, a singer with many years of choral music experience, the commission offered her an opportunity to write a concerto, a genre she has not previously explored.
“I titled it A Through Line,” says Benn in a recent interview. “Because I’m a singer, my instrument is a voice, so lyricism and lyrical lines show up in all my work. That is the “through line” of this concerto. I’m really honing in on the emotional quality of the lyricism.”
Benn usually uses non-musical prompts—poetry or visual art, for example—as initial inspiration for her composing process, but A Through Line focuses on the inherent qualities of music itself, particularly vocal music. Lyrical melodies and flowing lines predominate. “I gravitate towards writing music I would want to sing on top of,” says Benn. “And then I’ll edit and try to think like a double-reed player.”
Concertos, by definition, showcase soloists and solo writing. Benn’s inclinations as a performer are towards collaboration rather than solo performance. “For me, writing a concerto is quite a challenge because I can imagine something as a soloist, but also I’m just so enamored with the collective,” she explains. “So even though this is a double concerto, the oboe and the bassoon are kind of one voice a lot of the time; not that they’re playing in unison, but that they’re in communication with each other.” Some of the soloists’ music is meant to convey the idea that the oboe and bassoon have merged into one imaginary instrument with the range and expression of both. “Sometimes it’s like they’re one organism in the piece,” says Benn. “and sometimes it’s just cut and dried, where one instrument introduces a melody and the other repeats it in a different register or key.”
The concerto has three movements, in keeping with standard concerto structure; each has a different emotional and musical feel. “The first movement is jazzy, lush,” says Benn. “In the second movement, there’s a pastoral folk-like melody. It’s very Ralph Vaughan Williams. The first thirty seconds is a long introduction with the string orchestra, and it invokes that feeling of pastoral England. The third movement is almost minimalist. It has a more contemporary feel, with a lot of repetition and then finally the instruments come together in unison.”
Like many composers, Benn does not want to be too specific about what the audience will hear or feel when listening to her music; she prefers to let each listener experience her music in a way that’s unique and personal to them. “I do like to be more on the ambiguous and mysterious side. And also, I feel like the ideas that I had at the time I was writing, and maybe even the emotions I felt were the vessels to the notes, and were fleeting in the moment.”
Symphonie fantastique
Hector Berlioz
Say what you want about Hector Berlioz: he was an arrogant, selfish, self-obsessed man, full of vitriol, and he drove poor Harriet Smithson, the inspiration for his Symphonie fantastique, to drink and despair. Yet none of Berlioz’ deficits as a human being take away from the fact that at age 27, he wrote, by general agreement, the most groundbreaking first symphony any composer has yet produced.
Berlioz completed the Symphonie fantastique just three years after the death of Beethoven. When heard in that context, it is possible to appreciate how original this music is. Berlioz was no doubt inspired by Beethoven’s own symphonic innovations, especially Beethoven’s use of a program in the Sixth (Pastoral) Symphony, but, typically, Berlioz pushed the programmatic elements further than any composer had before.
Berlioz’ inspiration for the Symphonie fantastique grew from his obsession with Smithson, an Irish actress he first saw in a production of Hamlet in 1827. Berlioz spoke almost no English, so his violent infatuation with Smithson was likely more carnal than courtly. (Berlioz and Smithson did not actually meet for another five years, after the premiere of the revised version of the Symphonie.)
What made Berlioz’ program so innovative and shocking to audiences was the story’s overtly autobiographical and literary quality. Along with Smithson, who was musically transformed into the idée fixe—recurring theme—of the symphony, Berlioz drew on plots from literature, most notably Faust, in his exploration of the gloriously ruinous nature of love. Berlioz was not interested in a literal depiction of events, but rather the transformation of his emotional response to those events into music.
Berlioz insisted his music could not be understood or appreciated without its accompanying program, which he provided to audiences at the first performances of the work. Its five movements, in roughest outline, proceed as follows: Part I: Dreams – Passions: Boy meets girl. Part II: A Ball: Boy obsesses about girl. Part III: A Scene In the Country: While strolling through the countryside listening to shepherds’ songs, boy convinces himself girl doesn’t return his love. Part IV: March to the Scaffold: In despair, boy takes a less-than-fatal dose of opium, which induces horrible visions and hallucinations, including a death march to the guillotine. Part V: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath: Still hallucinating, boy dreams his funeral is a witches’ Sabbath, and his beloved joins the diabolical festivities.
Or, as Leonard Bernstein so eloquently put it, in one of his Young Peoples’ Concerts, “Berlioz tells it like it is . . . You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.”
© Elizabeth Schwartz. All rights reserved.
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
