Masters Program Notes: September 18 & 19, 2009 - The Red Violin

The Red Violin
Friday, September 18, 2009 - 7:30 pm
Saturday, September 19, 2009 - 8:00 pm
Enmax Hall, Winspear Centre

William Eddins, conductor
Martin Riseley, violin
Sara Davis Buechner, piano

Program

Lavallée: O Canada (arr. Gilliland) (1')*

Shore: Fanfare for Organ, Brass & Percussion (8)*
 Jeremy Spurgeon, organ

Tan Dun: Crouching Tiger Concerto (32)*
 George Gao, erhu

Intermission

Corigliano: Red Violin Chaconne (17)*
 Martin Riseley, violin

Gershwin: Second Rhapsody for Piano & Orchestra (15)*
 Sara Davis Buechner, piano

*Indicates approximate performance duration

Program Notes

Fanfare for Organ, Brass and Percussion
Howard Shore
(b. Toronto, 1946)

First performance: September 27, 2008 on the Wanamaker Organ at Macy’s Department Store, Philadelphia
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

The new Fanfare by Shore came out of protracted, intense study of the organ's possibilities: Though Shore is said to have intended an hour's visit to Macy's to hear what he was writing for, he stayed for at least four. The 10-minute piece seemed out to explore as many possibilities as possible, with brass writing encompassing suggestions of Wagner's Die Meistersinger as well as John Williams' Star Wars.
David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 2008

Program Note by Ray Biswanger, Executive Director of the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, Inc.
In 2008, Macy’s commissioned this fanfare in honour of its 150th anniversary, at a performance featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra and organist Peter Richard Conte in the historic John Wanamaker Philadelphia store. Macy's was cognizant of the rich musical heritage of the Wanamaker Organ, the world's largest pipe organ, and of the legacy of the Wanamaker Grand Court as a setting for important new music. Howard Shore is perhaps best known for his acclaimed scores for the The Lord of the Rings movie cycle and other feature films, including several for the films of fellow Canadian David Cronenberg. In this tone poem, an unruly opening theme from the organ is offset by fanfares from the brass choir. Soon, organ and brass join forces and dance in an ever-widening gyre.


Crouching Tiger Concerto for Erhu and Orchestra
Tan Dun
(b. Si Mao, Hunan Province, 1957)

First performance: September 30, 2000 in London
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

The six-movement Crouching Tiger Concerto is an inviting amalgam of Chinese and Western timbres and gestures … The cello music is often dramatic and hard-driven as well…Chinese percussion instruments augment the Western orchestra, and among the work's most intriguing moments were cadenzas for percussion, and bawu and dizi flutes.
Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

Program Note by Peggy Monastra
The individual bodies of work of Tan Dun and Ang Lee have focused on the meeting of the cultures of East and West, and the fascinating hybrid that results — something no longer wholly eastern or western. Like Tan Dun's Orchestral Theater series, many of Ang Lee’s earlier films focus on that which is born of the cross-fertilization of cultures, traditions and generations. In developing the musical scores to accompany his films, Lee has sought out innovative composers who are adept at creating a contemporary sound in the blending of eastern and western musical traditions. It thus seems a natural progression that Tan Dun's and Ang Lee's work should come together, and not only in the format of music accompanying images — but also a work in which images accompany music.

The Crouching Tiger Concerto, written originally for cello and chamber orchestra but later adapted for the erhu as solo instrument, is a concert work based on Tan's Oscar-winning score for Lee's Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — a film which joins the quintessential Asian genre of martial arts cinema with the drama of a western romance with a deep metaphorical message.

The concerto is in six movements with cadenzas connecting the orchestral movements. The work is highly reflective of Tan Dun's current interest in the historical cultures of the Silk Road. Woven into the film score and concerto are instruments, their performing techniques and articulations, and melodies native to the cultures which intermingled along the Silk Road in China's Xinjiang province. Of particular interest is the erhu melody in the third cadenza, which is a folk song from this region. Instruments heard in the concerto which are indigenous to these Silk Road cultures are the tar (a North African frame drum) and the bawu (a bamboo, copper-reed flute which came into China from Southeast Asia). The rawap (a high-pitched, plucked string instrument native to the Uygar culture of the Taklimakan area) is prominent in the film score and represented in the concerto in melodies and articulations transcribed to the cello and the orchestra. Additional instruments from Silk Road cultures can be heard throughout in the gestures and timbres that Tan crafted into the scoring of this Western orchestra.

The Crouching Tiger Concerto was written for and inspired by Yo-Yo Ma. The work received its world premiere at London's Barbican Centre Festival: Fire Cross Water, of which Tan Dun was artistic director.


The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra
John Corigliano
(b. New York, 1938)

First performance: November 26, 1997 in San Francisco
Last ESO performance: Enbridge Symphony Under the Sky 2000

John Corigliano is film scoring's answer to Terrence Malick and the late Stanley Kubrick, the kind of genius who comes along every 20 years or so to amaze us with brilliance. Corigliano's bravura score is nothing short of a masterpiece, a concert work in sound-track form. No instrument can resonate emotion like the violin, and Corigliano uses this one for all of its tragic potential.
Daniel Schweiger, Venice Magazine

Program Note by the composer
The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra draws upon music I composed for the film of the same name. The film spans three centuries in the life of a magnificent but haunted violin in its travels through space and time. A story this episodic needed to be tied together with a single musical idea. For this purpose I used the Baroque device of a chaconne: a repeated pattern of chords upon which the music is built. Against the chaconne chords I juxtaposed Anna's theme, a lyrical yet intense melody representing the violin builder's doomed wife. From these elements I wove a series of virtuosic etudes for the solo violin, which followed the instrument from country to country, century to century.

I composed these elements before the actual filming, because the actors needed to imitate actual performance of the music. Then, while the film itself was shot, I made - from Anna's theme, the chaconne, and the etudes - this concert work. While I scored the film just for the soloist and string orchestra (to emphasize the "stringness" of the picture), I composed this seventeen-minute concert work for violin and full orchestra.

As The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra begins, diaphanous ascending string lines unveil the chaconne chords, voiced in incantatory dotted rhythms, in low winds and brass. Then solo violin and orchestra utter, and expand on, Anna's theme. Virtuosic etudes quicken the pace, lead to a rushing climax; these yield to a stratospherically high, gravely slow melody, which remembers, against slowly shifting string sonorities, Anna's romantic theme. The string chords grow louder and stronger, with winds and brass: then the soloist reclaims, in determined accents this time, the diaphanous string line that opened the score. The orchestra halts to launch the soloist's cadenza, impetuous and songful by turns: then the chaconne, in strings chords rendered brittle by sharp attacks with the wood of the bow, gradually climax in a grand tutti restatement of the incantatory opening and a whirlwind coda for all.


Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra
George Gershwin
(b. Brooklyn, NY, 1898 / d. Hollywood, 1937)

First performance: January 29, 1932 in New York
This is the ESO premiere of the piece

Program Note by Sara Davis Buechner
George Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra originated as musical material for the 1931 Hollywood film Delicious, starring Janet Gaynor as a young Scottish immigrant in Manhattan. In the movie sequence, her arrival at Gotham’s door is accompanied by a pastiche of the sounds of the city, including construction workers building in directions both low (subway) and high (skyscraper). Indeed, Gershwin’s first impulse was to call his newest piano concerto Rhapsody in Rivets, and the opening gesture of the work calls for the pianist to pile-drive repeated notes into the bass octaves. “I wrote it mainly because I wanted to write a serious composition and found the opportunity in California to do it,” wrote Gershwin. “Nearly everybody comes back from California with a Western tan and a pocketful of moving picture money. I decided to come back with both those things, and a serious composition -- if the climate would let me.”

The piece remains one of the lesser-known in the Gershwin oeuvre although it is widely admired by musicians. Less flashy and tuneful than its rhapsodic predecessor, the work nevertheless displays a dazzling command of orchestration and motivic development, and demonstrates clearly the advanced compositional skills that Gershwin was rapidly acquiring en route to his final masterpiece, the opera Porgy and Bess.

There is evidence that Gershwin intended to create a solo piano version of his Second Rhapsody (as he had with the Rhapsody in Blue), but this project did not come to fruition. I have always had a great fondness for the piece and wanted to perform it more often, so I created and recorded my own solo version of it in 1988 along Gershwin’s lines. In any guise it’s a work deserving of much more performance, so it’s a special treat to play it at these concerts with the Edmonton Symphony.

Program Notes © by the respective authors noted above

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.