Download Polovtsian Dances (no. 17) Alexander Borodin (1833

Polovtsian Dances (no. 17)
Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)
Alexander Borodin was born in St. Petersburg on November 12,
1833 and died there on February 27,1887. Although best known as
a composer, his profession was that of a medical doctor and
professor of chemistry and he distinguished himself in each of his
careers. The Polovtsian Dances are derived from his most famous
opera, Prince Igor (1890). The work is scored for chorus and large
orchestra.
Alexander Borodin, one of the most important Russian
composers of the second half of the nineteenth century, certainly
led an unusual life. He was an internationally recognized scientist
whose chaotic personal living habits resembled the stereotype of
the mad scientist and absent-minded professor. Countless numbers
of extended family (including pets) and friends populated the
Borodin household constantly. A rather handsome fellow, he
attracted several young women admirers, even after his marriage.
One is left to wonder how Borodin ever found time for music.
Indeed, his enduring fame rests on a very small repertory of
music—most notably his Symphony no. 2, his Second String
Quartet, and excerpts from his opera, Prince Igor. Our recognition
of his career as a chemist should not be passed over lightly. He
studied and worked in Russia, Italy, and Germany, and his
publications were widely published and read. His scientific
credentials also included botany, zoology, anatomy, and
crystallography. Music always formed an important part of his life,
even though his profession lay elsewhere. Understandably,
however, composition had to take a back seat to his “real” career.
He was not the only Russian composer of his generation about
whom this could be said. Modest Musorgsky, arguably the most
important of the “Mighty Handful” (to which Borodin belonged,
along with Musorgsky, Mili Balakirev, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov,
and César Cui), worked as a civil servant. Part-time composer that
he was, Borodin never abandoned his interest in musical
composition. His talents, which were abundantly evident even at
an early age (his earliest composition, a polka for piano, was
written when he was nine years old), gradually attracted attention.
His first admirers were Balakirev and Cui, later to extend to Franz
Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov. Liszt’s advocacy in particular helped
spread Borodin’s fame to Western Europe.
Audiences cherish Borodin’s music for its exotic, oriental
lyricism, and brilliant orchestrations. All of this is on ample
display in his Polovtsian Dances from Act II of Prince Igor. The
opera itself is episodic in nature and offers the listener a vast
panorama of picturesque scenes. The Polovtsian Dances, especially
no. 17, have taken on a particular popularity in the concert hall, a
notoriety that was only enhanced by their adaptation in the
Broadway musical, Kismet (1953), in which one of its most lyrical
tunes became known as “Stranger in Paradise.” Jazz musicians
Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw also made adaptations of
Borodin’s music in the 1930s.
The translation of the choral part of Polovtsian Dance no. 17
translates as follows:
Fly away on wings of wind
To native lands, our native song,
To there, where we sang you freely,
Where we were so carefree with you.
There, under the hot sky,
With bliss the air is full,
There, to the murmur of the sea, mountains doze in the clouds.
There, the sun shines so brightly,
Bathing [our] native mountains in light.
In the meadows, roses bloom luxuriously,
And nightingales sing in the green forests;
And sweet grape grows.
There is more carefree for you, song…
And so fly away there!
Program Note by David B. Levy © 2012
Doctor Atomic Symphony
John Adams
John (Coolidge) Adams was born in Worcester, MA on
February 15, 1947. The son of a musician, Adams is often
categorized as a “minimalist” composer. He has emerged as one
of the most important composers of his generation, writing in a
wide variety of genres, ranging from opera to solo works, chamber
music, orchestral compositions. His operas Nixon in China
(1987), Death of Klinghoffer (1992), and Doctor Atomic (2005)
have become three of the most successful and controversial works
in the genre composed in recent history. Doctor Atomic Symphony
is a three-movement distillation from the most recent of his operas
(libretto by Peter Sellars) and was first performed in London’s
Royal Albert Hall on August 21, 2007 by the BBC Symphony under
the composer’s direction. The work is scored for 2 flutes (piccolo),
3 oboes (English horn), 3 clarinets (E-flat and bass clarinet), 3
bassoons (contrabassoon), 4 horns, 4 trumpets (piccolo trumpet), 3
trombones, tuba, timpani, large percussion section (including
crotales, chimes, snare drum, thunder sheet, glockenspiel, bass
drum, 2 tam-tams, 2 suspended cymbals, and tuned gongs), celesta,
harp, and strings.
We live in perilous times. Indeed, one might say that since
the development of nuclear warfare in 1945, the word “perilous”
has taken on even greater, and more dread, meaning. We nowadays
tend to dwell on a more recent possible man-made path toward our
collective self –destruction, such as global climate change. But
whereas the effects of climate change tend to be slow developing
and, thus, harder to pinpoint, the impact of nuclear annihilation is
palpable and immediate. The nuclear age, while full of promise,
has been fraught with anxiety and the source of profound ethical
dilemma. Composer John Adams and librettist/stage director, Peter
Sellars, addressed these issues head on in their sensational 2005
opera, Dr. Atomic. The reference of the title is the man who was
the chief scientist of the Los Alamos nuclear program that
produced the atomic bomb in the 1940s, the physicist J. Robert
Oppenheimer (1904-1967).
Adams created the orchestral Doctor Atomic Symphony in
2007, as a way of bringing the stage drama into the concert hall.
The work is in three movements, entitled respectively “The
Laboratory,” “Panic,” and “Trinity.” The movements are played
continuously without pause. The composer has provided the
following program note for his Doctor Atomic Symphony
(reprinted here with kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes)
The symphony is cast in a sustained, 25-minute singlemovement arch, not unlike the Sibelius Seventh Symphony, a work
that has had an immense effect on Adams's compositional
thinking. The opening, with its pounding timpani and Varèse-like
jagged brass fanfares, conjures a devastated post-nuclear
landscape. The frenzied "panic music" that follows comes from
one of Act Two's feverish tableaux that evoke the fierce electrical
storm that lashed the test site in the hours before the bomb's
detonation. The ensuing music is taken from moments that
describe the intense activity leading up to the test. One hears the
US Army General Leslie Groves, here impersonated in the boorish
trombone music, berating both the scientists and his military
subordinates, music that gives way to the ritual "corn dance" of the
local Tewa Indians. The symphony concludes with an instrumental
treatment of the opera's most memorable moment, a setting
(originally for baritone voice, here played by solo trumpet) of John
Donne's holy sonnet, "Batter my heart, three person'd God." This is
the poem that the physicist hero of the opera, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, loved and that inspired him to name the desert test
site "Trinity."
Program Note by David B. Levy/John Adams, © 2012
The Hour Has Come
Srul Irving Glick
Canadian composer Srul Irving Glick was born in Toronto on
September 8, 1934 and died there on April 17, 2002. His father, an
émigré from Russia, was a famous synagogue cantor whose
musical activities were a life-long inspiration. After study at the
University of Toronto and in Paris with Darius Milhaud and
others, Glick became a music producer for the CBC. In 1969 he
became the choir director, later appointed composer-in-residence
(1978) at Beth Tikvah Synagogue (Toronto). His nearly 200 pieces
of liturgical music and earned him several awards for his
contributions to Jewish music. Glick’s The Hour Has Come is the
finale of a six-movement Choral Symphony composed in 1985 for
the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. It is scored for chorus, 2 flutes, 2
oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones,
timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
The Hour Has Come, a setting of a poem by Carole H.
Leckner, is the last movement of six that set to music the words of
this Canadian poet. Together they form what Glick called “A
Choral Symphony.” The text and music speak eloquently of the
need for humanity to make peace with one another:
The hour has come for mankind to embrace,
for the sun blazes upon the conscience of the earth
and time is growing short and what is visible must be seen,
for the fire is intense in the consciousness of the planet
and healing is the yearning of her heart.
Our cells are life’s tissue,
our bones and marrow her rivers and narrows,
our heart pumps the cry of her heart
and our soul breathes the spirit of her song.
Where art thou, o family of man, brothers and sisters?
O family of man the time is growing short
and what is visible must be seen
for the hour has come to love.
Program Note by David B. Levy © 2012