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January 28/29
CATHEDRALS OF SOUND
By Dr. Richard E. Rodda
30 SECOND NOTES: The symphonies of Anton Bruckner have often been called “cathedrals in
sound” for their grand scale and visionary content, qualities that are abundantly
demonstrated by the “Romantic” Symphony that closes this Des Moines Symphony concert.
They strive for the infinite, for the transcendent spiritual experience; and that takes time –
about 65 minutes! Two very different musical types precede Bruckner’s magnificent work on
this program — Johannes Brahms’s rousing compendium of German university drinking
songs in his Academic Festival Overture, and William Bolcom’s Concerto Grosso for
Saxophone Quartet & Orchestra, whose influences range from Robert Schumann and the
waltzing Strauss family to the Beatles.
JOHANNES
BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833 in
Hamburg;
died April 3, 1897 in
Vienna.
ACADEMIC FESTIVAL OVERTURE, OP. 80 (1881)
• First performed on January 4, 1881 in Breslau,
conducted by the composer.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony
on May 6, 1956 with Frank Noyes conducting.
Subsequently performed five more times, most
recently on April 13 & 14, 2013 with Joseph
Giunta conducting.
(Duration: ca. 10 minutes)
Artis musicae severioris in Germania nunc
princeps — “Now the leader in Germany of
music of the more severe order” — read the
lofty inscription of the honorary degree, honoris
causa, conferred upon Johannes Brahms by the
University of Breslau on March 11, 1879.
Brahms, not fond of pomp and public adulation,
accepted the degree (he had declined one from
Cambridge University three years earlier — he
refused to journey across salt water) but
acknowledged it with only a simple postcard to
Bernhard Scholz, whom he asked to convey his
thanks to the faculty. After receiving this skimpy
missive, Scholz, conductor of the local orchestra
and nominator of Brahms for the degree, wrote
back that protocol required the recipient to
provide something more substantial, a “DoktorSymphonie,” perhaps, or “at least a solemn
song.” Brahms promised to compose an
appropriate piece and bring it to Breslau the
following year, when he would join the
academicians in “doctoral beer and skittles.”
In 1880, Brahms repaired to Bad Ischl in
the Salzkammergut, east of Salzburg, for the
first of many summers in that lovely region.
There he worked on the piece for Breslau: “a
very jolly potpourri of students’ songs,” he called
the new Academic Festival Overture. (The
somber Tragic Overture was composed at the
same time, Brahms stated, to serve as an
emotional balance to the exuberant Academic
Festival.) When Scholz discovered that Brahms
was preparing to serve up a medley of student
drinking songs to the learned faculty at an
august university ceremony, he asked the
composer if this could be true. Never one to deny
his innate curmudgeonly nature, Brahms shot
back, “Yes, indeed!” On January 4, 1881, almost
two years after the awarding of his degree,
Doctor (!) Brahms displayed for the first time his
sparkling Academic Festival Overture to the
Rector, Senate and members of the Philosophical
Faculty of Breslau University.
Brahms, who was not a university man,
first became acquainted with the traditional
student songs when he visited his friend the
violinist Joseph Joachim in Göttingen in 1853.
The four melodies that he chose for the
Academic Festival were known to all German
students; Gaudeamus Igitur (“Let us rejoice while
we’re young” ), basis of the Overture’s majestic
coda, is the most famous. Even with the use of
these unsophisticated campus ditties, however,
the work is still solidly structured and
emotionally rich, a fine example of Brahms’s
masterful techniques of orchestration,
counterpoint and thematic manipulation.
The score calls for piccolo, two flutes,
two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons,
contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets,
three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle,
cymbals, bass drum and the usual strings
consisting of first violins, second violins,
violas, violoncellos and double basses.
WILLIAM
BOLCOM
Born May 26, 1938 in
Seattle, Washington.
CONCERTO GROSSO FOR SAXOPHONE
QUARTET & ORCHESTRA (2000)
• First performed on October 20, 2000 in
Detroit, conducted by Jahja Ling with the PRISM
Quartet as soloists.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony
on October 13 & 14, 2001, conducted by Joseph
Giunta with the PRISM Quartet as soloists.
(Duration: ca. 21 minutes)
William Bolcom, in many ways, exemplifies the
American composer at the start of the new
millennium. Bolcom has taken his proper share
of native and European training with
distinguished (mostly French) teachers, including
Milhaud, Messiaen and Boulez. His work has
been recognized with commissions from the
NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller
Foundations, and many noted performers and
ensembles, as well as by a Pulitzer Prize in 1988
for his Twelve New Etudes for Piano, recognition
as the 2007 “Composer of the Year” by Musical
America, multiple Grammy Awards for his
settings of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and
Experience, National Medal of Arts, Letter of
Distinction from the American Music Center, and
induction into the American Classical Music Hall
of Fame. He has taught at leading conservatories
(he was on the faculty of the University of
Michigan from 1973 until his retirement in spring
2008, the last fifteen years as Ross Lee Finney
Distinguished University Professor of
Composition), and has served as a critic,
composer-in-residence and adjudicator. He is
known as an excellent pianist. It is his
background outside these factual entries,
however, that makes him such an intriguing
representative of the modern American
composer.
Bolcom’s earliest memorable musical
experience came not from his grandfather, a
lumber tycoon who raised money for the Seattle
Philharmonic so that he could annually conduct a
program of marches — though he could not
read a note of music. Nor did it come from his
mother, who continuously played classical
selections on the phonograph while she was
pregnant with William in the hope that he would
become musical by pre-natal osmosis. Rather,
Bolcom admits that his first musical memory
came when he was eight, during a visit to a
music shop where he heard a recording of The
Rite of Spring. So intrigued was he by the music
that he pleaded to take the album home. It was
duly purchased, and he spent hours in front of
the phonograph imbibing Stravinsky’s epochal
masterpiece. It is significant, and typical of many
of today’s composers, that it was a recording
— that dynamic marriage of music and
technology — that opened the world of music to
William Bolcom.
After Stravinsky, Bolcom added the
pioneering American iconoclast Charles Ives to
his musical pantheon. Other items were soon
deposited in his increasingly eclectic musical
grab-bag — Berg, Weill, serialism, microtones,
as well as a thorough grounding in the great
European classics. To all of these, Bolcom, like
Ives, added a wide range of American popular
music: jazz, folk, blues, rock, pop, ragtime. He
gathered what he wished from this torrent of
musical streams, and hammered it with a real
flamboyance into his own characteristic style. In
1965, for example, he received second prize in
composition at the Paris Conservatory for his
String Quartet No. 8 — he was denied first prize
because the theme of the finale was in the style
of rock-’n’-roll. His Session IV (1967) contains
quotations from Beethoven and Schubert
cheek-by-jowl with some snippets from Scott
Joplin’s rags. His first two operas (Dynamite
Tonite and Greatshot) are rooted in the popular
idioms of the satiric cabaret; McTeague,
premiered by Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992, is
set in 19th-century San Francisco; A View from
the Bridge, commissioned by Lyric Opera of
Chicago for its 1999 season, is based on Arthur
Miller’s novel; his most recent commission for
Lyric Opera, premiered in December 2004, took
Robert Altman’s movie A Wedding as its subject.
Bolcom’s most recent work is the Trombone
Concerto, premiered on June 10, 2016 by the
New York Philharmonic and that ensemble’s
Principal Trombonist, Joseph Alessi, under the
direction of Alan Gilbert.
The composer wrote, “The Concerto
Grosso, composed for the PRISM Quartet (which
includes two of my former students), is intended
purely as a piece to be enjoyed by performers
and listeners. In 1993, PRISM expressed an
interest in having me compose a concerto
grosso for their group. (To remind readers, a
concerto grosso is a Baroque-era form involving
a ‘concerto,’ i.e., a soloist or small group of
players, in this case our quartet, in dialogue with
the ‘ripieno,’ the large orchestra.) Although each
member of PRISM is an excellent soloist, I took
their request to mean that I should emphasize
their group identity, their ‘four-ness.’ This
immediately called up two precedents in my
mind: the Schumann Concerto for Horn Quartet
and (of all things) the early Beatles in their mode
of dress and style of movement.
“The first movement, Lively, in simple
sonata form, evokes blues harmonies in both of
its themes. Song Without Words, which follows,
is a lyrical larghetto. The third movement, Valse,
begins with a long solo stretch for the saxophone
quartet; the development of this theme
alternates with a pianissimo scherzetto section.
The final Badinerie, a title borrowed from Bach,
evokes bebop and rhythm-and-blues.”
The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two
oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four
horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba,
timpani, glockenspiel, suspended cymbals,
wood block, China cymbal, triangle,
slapstick, crotales, tambourine, chimes,
snare drum, tom-toms, hi-hat, ride cymbal,
bass drum, tam-tam, drum set (consisting
of: snare drum, bass drum, crash cymbals,
hi-hat, ride cymbal) and the usual strings.
ANTON
BRUCKNER
Born September 4, 1824
in Ansfelden, Upper
Austria; died October 11,
1896 in Vienna.
SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN E-FLAT MAJOR,
“ROMANTIC” (1874; Revised in 1878-1880)
Edited by Leopold Nowak
• First performed on February 20, 1881 in
Vienna, conducted by Hans Richter.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony
on March 21 & 22, 1992 with Joseph Giunta
conducting.
(Duration: ca. 65 minutes)
The music of Bruckner is unique in the history of
the art. He has been called the “Wagner of the
Symphony,” after the mortal whom he revered
above all others, but this appellation implies that
his work is more derivative than can be
substantiated by the musical scores or by his
life. Bruckner, scion of generations of Catholic
peasants, passed most of his life in a sort of
ceaseless religious ecstasy and fervent humility
that held him aloof from the exigencies of
everyday life. Even Wagner, as mean and
self-serving as any musician who ever lived,
could not resist the guileless simplicity and utter
sincerity of this extraordinary man. Bruckner’s
early works were mostly service music, plainly
intended to praise God. When he turned to
orchestral music later in life — his First
Symphony did not appear until he was 42 — the
intent and philosophy of his sacred compositions
were transferred into his newly adopted genre.
The music created by such a visionary as
Bruckner needs special care from the listener.
His symphonies have been called “cathedrals in
sound,” and the phrase is appropriate both for
the mood that they convey and for their
implication of grandeur. Such works by their very
nature must be large in sonority and temporal
duration if their vision is to be realized — a
twenty-minute Bruckner symphony would be as
ludicrous as the massive baldachino of St.
Peter’s dropped onto the altar of the
neighborhood parish church. It is this very
striving toward the infinite, toward the
transcendent, that raises Bruckner’s best works
to a plane achieved by few others in the history
of music. Those willing to meet Bruckner on his
own terms, to partake of the special hour that he
grants the listener in each of his symphonies,
find an experience as fulfilling and deeply
satisfying as any that the art has to offer. Wrote
Lawrence Gilman, “He was and is a seer and
prophet. Sometimes, rapt and transfigured, he
saw visions and dreamed dreams as colossal, as
grandiose, as aweful in lonely splendor, as those
of William Blake.”
The Fourth Symphony, one of Bruckner’s
finest achievements of spirit and craftsmanship,
could be (and has been) the subject of extensive
analysis. (Robert Simpson’s consideration runs
to 22 pages.) Suffice it to say for the technically
minded that the first movement is in leisurely
sonata form, the Andante is built from three
themes which recur in sequence, the galvanic
Scherzo is provided with a sharply contrasting
trio reminiscent of an Austrian Ländler, and the
Finale draws together themes from all the
preceding movements for a cyclical summation
of the entire Symphony. The most fruitful
approach for those who prefer to listen without
labels, however, is to be swept along by the
glorious tide of sound, at some times small and
intimate and reverential, at others, mighty and
heaven-storming. It is from the building of long,
controlled climaxes to move from the tiny to the
great that the Symphony derives much of its
power, as though these rising lines of musical
tension were the machines slowly, inexorably
opening the cathedral vault to the visionary sky
above. Deryck Cooke wrote, “The essence of
Bruckner’s symphonies is that they express the
most fundamental human impulses, unalloyed by
civilized conditioning, with extraordinary purity
and grandeur of expression; and that they are on
a monumental scale which, despite many
internal subtleties and complexities, has a
shattering simplicity of outline.” Perhaps
Bruckner was right — perhaps his talent did,
indeed, come directly from God.
The score calls for three flutes, two oboes,
two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns,
three trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, cymbals and the usual strings.