Masters Program Notes: Carmina Burana - April 4 & 5, 2009

Masters Program Notes: Carmina Burana - April 4 & 5, 2009

Carmina Burana
Saturday, April 4, 2009 - 8 pm
Sunday, April 5, 2009 - 2 pm

William Eddins, conductor
Allene Hackleman, French horn
Bonaventura Bottone, tenor
Ilana Davidson, soprano
Hugh Russell, baritone
Kokopelli & Òran (Scott Leithead, music director)
Cantilon Chamber Chorus (Heather Johnson, music director)
Ukrainian Male Chorus (Svitlana Lysogor, music director)

BORODIN
Prince Igor: Polovtsian Dances (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov) (13’)*

BRITTEN
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op.31 (23’)*
    I. Prologue
    II. Pastoral
    III. Nocturne
    IV. Elegy
    V. Dirge
    VI. Hymn
    VII. Sonnet
    VIII. Epilogue

INTERMISSION

ORFF
Carmina Burana (65’)*
    Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi
     1. O Fortuna
     2. Fortune plango vulnera
    I. Primo vere
     3. Veris leta facies
     4. Omnia sol temperat
     5. Ecce gratum
    Uf dem anger
     6. Tanz
     7. Floret silva nobilis
     8. Chramer, gip die varwe mir
     9. Reie
     10. Were diu werlt alle min
    II. In Taberna
     11. Estuans interius
     12. Olim lacus colueram
     13. Ego sum abbas
     14. In taberna quando sumus
    III. Cour d'amours
     15. Amor volat undique
     16. Dies, nox et omnia
     17. Stetit puella
     18. Circa mea pectora
     19. Si puer cum puellula
     20. Veni, veni, venias
     21. In truitina
     22. Tempus est iocundum
     23. Dulcissime
    Blanziflor et Helena
     24. Ave formosissima
    Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi
     25. O Fortuna

*indicates approximate performance duration

Program Notes

A tremendous sense of the poetic runs through the three works on tonight’s concert.  Whether it is feelings of love, desire, patriotism, or outright debauchery, there is always an undercurrent of loss, need, and the pursuit of the unattainable.  No matter the beauty or the cultural popularity of the music, in the end there is an impression of sweeping tragedy that is hard to shake.  Life is hard, and our journey through life makes us weep.

Prince Igor: Polovtsian Dances (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov)
Alexander Borodin
(b. St. Petersburg, 1833 / d. St. Petersburg, 1887)

First performance of the opera: November 4, 1890 in St. Petersburg
Last ESO performance of the Dances: January 2007

"In winter I can only compose when I am too unwell to give my lectures. So my friends, reversing 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 at home and wrote the Thanksgiving Chorus in the last act if Igor."
Alexander Borodin

The Polovtsian Dances of Alexander Borodin hold some of the most ubiquitous music of our time.  Paul Whiteman (commissioner of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue) used it as the basis of his tune My Fantasy.  The “Love Theme” is featured in the 1953 musical Kismet, and the music has even appeared in an episode of The Simpsons.  Yet the story itself is more dramatic.  The Dances form the core of Borodin’s unfinished opera Prince Igor, which tells the tale of the Prince’s epic battle against the invading Polovtsian tribes.  Borodin was the consummate procrastinator, and despite spending 18 years on the opera, it was still unfinished at the time of his death.

In 1879, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov helped Borodin orchestrate several movements from the severely fragmented opera in order for them to be performed in a concert setting.  From all accounts this was a very frustrating task (and one that Rimsky-Korsakov would also undertake for fellow Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky), but the results are this set of dances.  Although the thrust of the opera is one of Russian patriotism, the music for these dances revolves around the Polovtsian tribe.  There is little doubt that Borodin looked upon the Polovtsian’s with the usual 19th century hauteur – the subtitles for the movements emphasis such things as the “Gliding Maidens” and the “Dance of the Wild Men.”  This is the “civilized” world looking down from on high towards the unwashed heathen but it makes for great music nonetheless.


Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op.31
Benjamin Britten
(b. Lowestoft, 1913 / d. Aldeburgh, 1976)

First performance: October 15, 1943 in London
Last ESO performance: 1977

“It was the first large-scale work he had written specifically for Peter Pears, and it was also a response to the extraordinary artistry of the horn player Dennis Brain. The solo horn opens the work, adds perfectly imagined atmosphere to the songs, and then, in Pears's words, "winds the work into stillness."
Andrew Clements, The Guardian

The second work on the program takes us away from the extremes of patriotic empire and invading hosts towards the intimate beauty of love and despair, and the strange desolation which is the Night.  The Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings by Benjamin Britten was written in the midst of World War Two, and premiered in 1943 by the great horn player Dennis Brain and the tenor Peter Pears, Britten’s lifelong partner and collaborator. Britten and Pears had recently returned to England from living in the United States.  Always a man of strong convictions, Britten was a confirmed pacifist, and he managed to acquire the status of conscientious objector, something that was not easy to get at this period in the history of the British Isles. 

Britten had an obvious fascination with the voice. The Serenade was written during one of his most fertile periods of writing vocal music, which saw him create such disparate works as A Ceremony of Carols and the operas Paul Bunyan, Peter Grimes, and The Rape of Lucretia.  The Serenade is based on six poems of the English cannon, all of which have to do with night, and the horn is used as a musical foil to the beautiful poetry.  The solo horn Prelude and Postlude are some of the most haunting music written for horn, because of Britten’s use of the natural harmonics of the instrument.  This causes some of the notes played by the horn to seem sharp or flat to our “western” ears and it gives the music a surreal quality that sets the stage for the songs themselves. 


Carmina Burana
Carl Orff
(b. Munich, 1895 / d. Munich, 1982)

First performance: June 8, 1937 in Frankfurt
Last ESO performance: May 1998

“The subject matter covered in Carmina stays pretty basic: love, lust, the pleasures of drinking and the heightened moods evoked by springtime. These primitive and persistently relevant themes are nicely camouflaged by the Latin and old German texts, so the listener can actually feign ignorance while listening to virtually X-rated lyrics.”
Conductor Marin Alsop

If the Serenade is an intimate portrait of the night, then Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana can only be described as an early 20th version of Sex, Drugs, and Rock’n’Roll.  In 1803, the infamous Burana Codex was discovered in the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuern.  Even a cursory reading of these poems lends one to believe that the authors did not take their ecclesiastical duties very seriously.  Many of the poems are a direct send-up of the Church and the topics covered are as relevant today as they were then – love, drinking, springtime – all of which are centred around the turning of the Fortuna Wheel.  Hope turns to despair, love to loss, gambling to destitution, etc.

Orff excerpted 24 of the poems from the codex (originally in Ecclesiastical Latin, High Old German, and some Old French) and used them as the first part of his Trionfi trilogy (the sequels Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite are, unfortunately, rarely performed).  Carmina Burana is in five major sections, most of which are self explanatory:

•    Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi – “Fortuna, Empress of the World”
•    Primo Vere – “Spring”
•    In Taberna – “In the Tavern”
•    Cour d’amours – “Court of Love”
•    Blanziflor et Helena – Blanchefleur and Helen

The opening Fortuna chorus returns at the end of the work, clearly signifying the completion of the circle of Fortune which is itself the compositional framework for the piece.  Carmina is scored for a very large ensemble – the orchestra includes multiple percussion and keyboard instruments – as well as a vocal ensemble which includes children, a chamber choir, a large mixed choir, and four soloists. 

The history of Carmina Burana is almost as interesting as the music itself.  Following the extremely successful premiere in 1937 Orff wrote to his publisher:

"Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin." 

Despite the risqué nature of the piece, the Nazi government of Germany embraced the work, and there is much controversy as to Orff’s own relationship with the Nazi regime.  Yet after World War Two, the popularity of Carmina Burana continued to rise, and today it is one of the most recorded classical works of the 20th century.

Program Notes © 2009 William Eddins

Program notes © 2009 by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and its respective annotators. All Rights Reserved. Program notes may not be printed in their entirety without the written consent of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra; excerpts may be quoted if due acknowledgment is given to the author and to the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. For reprint permission, contact D.T. Baker, Music Resource, by email, dave.baker@winspearcentre.com.
 
These notes appear in galley files prepared for Signature magazine, official publication of the ESO, and may contain typographical or other errors, or may differ from the final print version. Programs and artists subject to change without notice.