Evocative Elegance

Lili Boulanger (1889-1918): D’un matin de printemps (1918) (arr. Camille Pépin)

This is the second occasion that the Kamloops Symphony Orchestra has had the pleasure of presenting the music of Lili Boulanger. Yes, that’s right, Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), not Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), Lili’s much better-known older sister. She was a composer too, but also a composition teacher, through whose influential hands many of the Twentieth Century’s most renowned and productive composers passed. Lili, however, spent most of her life in ill health and lived and composed in the expectation of an early death. That death, at age 24, left much of her potential unfulfilled, yet in her short life she achieved much. Most notably, at the age of nineteen she won the Prix de Rome, which is France’s long standing and most prestigious award for composition. That puts her in a company which includes Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and Debussy to name only a few. And, most significantly, she was the first woman to win.

D’un matin de printemps (On a morning in spring) is a brief, busily energetic and joyful evocation of nature’s renewal of life. The sprightly opening theme is carried by flutes accompanied by a quietly rhythmic figure in the upper strings. Other instruments take up the melody and vary it in a lively and richly orchestrated section. Then gradually, the strings develop a slower but an increasingly more emotional take on Spring’s arrival which is then curtailed by a return to the opening material, though not yet in its original form and key. That more emphatic restatement Boulanger keeps until the climax of her piece, just before its assertive ending.

Lili completed D’un matin de printemps in the last months of her life, along with a companion piece, D’un soir triste (On a sad evening). It is not clear which came first, but it is hard to avoid speculating about the relationship between the two in the context of her imminent death. If D’un soir triste is her final musical statement is it her sad but realistic revision of the vitality and energy we experience as we listen to D’un matin de printemps? If D’un matin de printemps is her final work we are then free to take it as a courageously heroic affirmation of life in the face of impending death. It is likely we will never know. What we do know is that we have encountered and then lost a wonderfully expressive and absolutely distinctive musical voice.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1892-94)

Debussy was born at St. Germain-en-Laye near Paris in 1862 and died, aged 55, in Paris in 1918. His early years were unsettled so he got little formal education until he was accepted into the Paris Conservatoire in 1872. In his piano lessons there he showed promise of a career as a virtuoso; however, starting in 1880, he showed more interest in composition, and in 1884 he won the coveted Prix de Rome. His career as a composer still took time to develop as he experimented with different forms (e.g. opera) and with the influence of competing styles (e.g. Wagner). Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (or Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), was Debussy’s first major venture in writing for orchestra. In many ways, it is the clearest early sign of those distinctive features of Debussy’s influential style that helped transform music in the early Twentieth Century through his use of sound- colour (or timbre) to shape his music rather than through traditional developmental structures like sonata form. It was this aspect of his style that gave rise to the term “impressionism” in music, as an analogy to the similarly named movement in painting that used light in a similar fashion.

Debussy’s Prélude is his musical reaction to the poem “Afternoon of a Faun” by poet Stephane Mallarmé, who was a friend of his. As the word “prelude” implies, Debussy’s original intention was to compose other movements, namely an Interlude and a Finale, but he decided to focus all his musical ideas into just the one movement. The original work is scored for three flutes, two oboes, english horn, two clarinets (A and B-flat), two bassoons, four horns, two harps, two crotales (tuned brass cymbals that are struck), and strings. However, as you will see from the number of musicians on stage, the KSO will be performing a reduced orchestration arrangement by Yoon Jae Lee which allows us to hear this beautiful work without the necessity of, for example: two harps. Debussy’s own description of the work is instructive: “The music of this prelude is a very free illustration of Mallarmé's beautiful poem. By no means does it claim to be a synthesis of it. Rather there is a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of nymphs and naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep, in which he can finally realize his dreams of possession in universal Nature.” The palette of orchestration and instrumental voicings Debussy uses is varied and sophisticated as we follow the prelude’s main melody from instrument to instrument, from solo to duo, from unison to solo, every combination expressing a different atmosphere from the same melodic element.

What did Mallarmé think of Debussy’s intention to the use of his poem for a musical composition? According to another poet, Paul Valéry— not much! Mallarmé believed the verbal music of his poem was more than adequate on its own. However, as a friend and fellow artist, he did attend the premiere when Debussy invited him, and expressed nothing but enthusiasm for Debussy’s composition saying: “it presents no dissonance with my text, but goes much further, into nostalgia and into light. . .”

Ina Boyle (1889-1967): Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1932-33)

The Irish composer Ina Boyle (1889-1967) was born near Enniskerry in County Wicklow and lived her entire life in her family home. She is one of those talented women composers who struggled, most often unsuccessfully, to have her works performed or published, and who, as a result, have for decades been ignored by music history. Although a few of her works, including The Magic Harp (1919), and her Symphony No.1, Glencree (1924-27) did receive acknowledgement and first performances during her lifetime, the majority of her compositions remain unpublished. It is only in recent years that the true breadth of her talents has been rediscovered. This includes choral and chamber compositions and opera, ballet and vocal music, as well as orchestral works such as the beautiful Violin Concerto on tonight’s programme.

Her earliest music lessons were with her governess and with her father, a clergyman whose hobby was making violins. When her interests turned to composition she took lessons in counterpoint and harmony at first with noted English musicians temporarily resident at Trinity College in Dublin. After the success of her early orchestral rhapsody, The Magic Harp, the new impetus to her career required she find a new teacher. She contacted Ralph Vaughan Williams, and, starting in 1923, Boyle took the steamship across the Irish sea whenever her family duties allowed and took lessons with him, focusing on whatever works she was composing at the time. Although the outbreak of World War Two put an end to this travelling, Vaughan Williams remained an admirer and strong supporter of her work.

Boyle’s Concerto for violin and orchestra (1932-33) is brief and deeply moving. The concerto is dedicated to the memory of her mother, who died in 1932. The emotion it evokes, the wistful and nostalgic feelings punctuated by more openly passionate passages from the violin, is likely a reflection of these strong personal associations. There are three movements each of which is quite short—in fact when she took the work to one of her lessons with Vaughan Williams he suggested that she dispense with the breaks between movements, which she did. The result is a continuous work more along the lines of her teacher’s The Lark Ascending. The first movement, Lento ma non troppo, begins with a sombre orchestral melody, responded to passionately by the violin. The same tune is heard later accompanied by the violin, the music growing to a climax, then with the solo violin leading into the second movement. The Adagio continues the contemplative and heart-felt exchange between violin and orchestra. The third movement, Allegro ma non troppo, presents a more energetic conclusion to the concerto. Boyle draws on her own earlier setting of a Christmas carol, ”All Souls’ Flower,” she had written for mother in 1928. She uses the form of a rondo—a lively tune that is repeated with musical episodes in between each repetition. These episodes are based on the carol tune and feature the violin both solo and with different orchestral combinations, with a joyful sound like bells that fades to a gentle conclusion.

Philip Glass (b. 1937): Concerto Grosso (1992)

Philip Glass was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with French composer Darius Milhaud. Then, dissatisfied with much of what was considered as modern music in North America, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger (older sister of composer Lili Boulanger on tonight’s programme) who also taught American composers Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones. Glass also worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

From the perspective of the 21st Century it is clear that Glass (who is now 85) is one of the most successful serious American composers of our time, commanding an international audience that includes admirers of pop and jazz as well as classical music. Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists that include Twyla Tharp, Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. In addition to his operas— “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” among many others – which continue to play throughout the world’s leading theatres, Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as “The Hours.”

For most music lovers Philip Glass’s name is forever linked with the term “minimalism,” a new style of music that emerged in the late 20th Century. The essence of minimalist style is a series of repeating patterns that undergo changes by the addition or subtraction of different instrumental colours, sometimes with distinctly contrasting dynamics, shifts in speed and changes in harmonic pattern. The effect can be atmospherically mesmerising, anticipatory and climactic. Glass himself does not like the term but prefers simply to describe himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” The Concerto Grosso we hear tonight exhibits many of the characteristics of minimalist style.

A solo concerto, such as those by Boyle and Moussa on the programme tonight, explores the musical interaction between a single instrument like a violin and a larger instrumental group like an orchestra. A concerto grosso, in distinction, takes a small group of instruments (which in themselves already display musical potential) and develops their musical relationship with the larger orchestra. The concerto grosso form was widely used by composers in the 17th and 18th Centuries, before the solo concerto with its focus on the virtuoso performer became more popular. In this case, the use of the term Concerto Grosso by Glass is quite enigmatic, since over the three movements, each distinctive group of instruments – the woodwinds, brass and strings, even though playing their “solo” part, are all consistently playing at the same time, in this way, giving the responsibility to the performers, and to listeners also, to actually decide for each different section, which group is the featured one and which one is the accompaniment.

Samy Moussa (1984): Violin Concerto “Adrano” (1910)

Samy Moussa is a Canadian composer and conductor. Born in Montreal in 1984, he has lived in Germany for over a decade and has conducted many of Europe’s finest orchestras in a repertoire that extends from classical to contemporary works. However, he remains very active in North America, with strong links to the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, and is at present Artist-in-Residence with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. As a composer he has had works commissioned by a range of American and European orchestras as well as by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Montreal Symphony. His composition activities will not lessen any time soon as he has commissions from the Vienna Philharmonic and other orchestras, and his composing plans include an oratorio, “Antigone,” for contralto and chorus, a trombone concerto, and a flute concerto. Meanwhile, the conducting schedule continues to remain full.

Moussa has won a number of prizes for his compositions over the years. This violin concerto won him the Juno for best classical composition in 2021. The sub-title he has given to it, “Adrano,” is a reference to the ancient fire god that the early occupants of Sicily believed lived beneath the volcano Mt. Etna and from which the composer drew inspiration when he visited it. There are four movements to the work of which the first and third are the more substantial ones. These two are separated by the second, a cadenza, and the work ends with an epilogue. The slow introduction with which the work begins features low flutes out of which the solo violin climbs in a serene ascending scale to which is added a more ominous tone from the double basses. The violin’s climax leads to a further slow section in turn leading to another, more intense, climax. The second movement is an accompanied cadenza, marked senza misura (meaning in free time) that features ethereal harmonics from the soloist, leading without pause into the third movement that is, by contrast, forward moving, fast and urgent. For an epilogue we hear a slightly different version of the concerto’s slow introduction that fades gradually to a quiet end. Our soloist tonight, Andrew Wan, was the soloist for the premiere of the concerto in 2019, with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal conducted by Kent Nagano.