Saturday, January 14, at Powell Hall, guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru takes the podium as
the St.
Louis Symphony Orchestra plays a program featuring the local
premiere of a piece by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) that's over
110 years old, the wild and woolly Symphony No. 1 by Dmitri
Shostakovich (1906-1975), and a popular piano concerto that was
the result of a failed attempt at self-improvement by Maurice
Ravel (1835-1937).
[Preview the music with my commercial-free
Spotify playlist.]
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Maurice
Ravel birthday party, New York City, March 8, 1928
L-R: Oscar Fried, conductor; Eva Gauthier, singer;
Ravel at piano; Manoah Leide-Tedesco, composer-conductor;
and composer George GershwinOn |
The Ravel work in question is the Concerto in G, written mostly
between 1929 and 1932. It's one of only two piano concertos in his
catalog (the other is the Concerto in D for the left hand, written
at around the same time) and it represented an attempt by Ravel to
improve his own less than stellar skill as a pianist.
Ravel, as Washington University's Hugh Macdonald has written, was not a virtuoso at the
keyboard. “In his public appearances as a concert pianist,” notes
Mr. Macdonald, “he had preferred to play easier pieces like the Sonatine
and was all too conscious that his technique was not up to his
most demanding works, such as Gaspard de la nuit. But
rather than write a piece within his own capacity, he decided to
write a concerto of proper difficulty and simply acquire the
technique to play it.” Thus was born the Concerto in G.
The composition process was apparently long and difficult,
having begun as early as 1911 with a holiday trip to the Basque
region of France, where Ravel was born. There he started sketching
a piano concerto based on Basque themes. The project was
abandoned, only to resurface later as the Concerto in G. By then
jazz was in the air and so, as MacDonard writes, the more
energetic material in the first and third movements "emerge from
Ravel's preoccupation with the brilliant percussive qualities of
the piano itself" while "the languorous melodies betray his gift
for giving a peculiarly sophisticated edge to the language of
jazz."
In fact, Ravel got a taste of the real thing during a 1928 tour
of the USA, so much is understandably made about the jazzy
influences in the concerto; possible Basque influences, not so
much. Regardless of the source of the concerto's inspiration,
though, the result is characteristically Ravel: inventive, witty,
and brilliantly orchestrated.
Ravel's attempts to bring his keyboard skills up to the level
required by the concerto came to naught, unfortunately. He was
already in his mid fifties—a time in life when learning new skills
becomes more difficult—and his health was declining, resulting in
memory problems and difficulty concentrating. So when it came time
for the French premiere of the concerto, the solo role went to
Marguerite Long, who taught piano at the Paris Conservatoire
between 1906 and 1940. And even she found it a challenge.
“It is a difficult work,” she observed in the posthumously published Au Piano avec Maurice Ravel, “especially in respect of the
second movement where one has no respite."
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Saint-Saëns
in 1900
By Petit, Pierre (1831-1909)
Photographer Restored by Adam Cuerden |
At the keyboard this Saturday will be the multi-talented Alice Sara Ott, whose latest project
is a multi-media concert titled "Echoes of Life" that was created
in collaboration with architect Hakan Demirel. It's
described as a "personal musical reflection on life, built around
Chopin’s Preludes op.28 and interspersed with seven works by the
likes of György Ligeti, Nino Rota, Chilly Gonzales, Tōru
Takemitsu, Arvo Pärt, Francesco Tristano, and Ott herself." Her
ten albums for Deutsche Gramophon include music by Grieg, Chopin,
and Liszt, among others.
Before we get to the concerto, though, we'll have the St. Louis
premiere of the last of the three “Tableaux symphoniques d'après”
La foi," Op. 130, by Camille Saint-Saëns. Written in 1909, the
three tableaux were compiled from the incidental music Saint-Saëns
had composed for the drama "La foi" (literally "The Faith," but
usually translated as "False Gods") by playwright/polemicist
Eugène Brieux (1858-1932) Brieux was best known for writing controversial "realist" plays
dealing with what would now be called "social justice" issues in a
forthright manner that was guaranteed to cause massive pearl
clutching among what Peter Weiss (in "Marat/Sade")
called the "blinkered guardians of morality."
"La foi" seems to have triggered less outrage than earlier plays
such as "L'Engrenage" (1894), which attacked political corruption,
or "Les Avariés" (1901, banned because of its depiction of the
ravages of syphilis), probably because its attack on organized
religion and its corruption by the State is set in ancient Egypt.
Brieux says as much in his preface, in which he acknowledges that
the inspiration for the work was "the excited, suffering, and
praying crowds of people” at Lourdes. “It was while on a trip to
Egypt," he relates, "that I saw the possibility for discussing
such questions in the theatre without giving offence to various
consciences.”
It is, in any case, highly melodramatic stuff. And when the
disillusioned priestess Mieris brings down the final curtain declaring "I do not
believe in gods in whose name men kill," it's hard not to
see the relevance to contemporary events, both in 1909 and 2023.
The dramatic music we'll hear Saturday was written to underscore
Act IV, in which the High Priest opens the temple of Isis so the
people can witness the "miracle" of the god's stone image nodding
its head, thereby promising that the annual flood, on which
Egyptian agriculture was heavily dependent, will take place as
usual and that, as the character of Zaya relates in Act I, "in the
crowd there will be blind who shall see, and deaf who shall hear,
and dumb who shall speak." It is, of course, a fake, activated by
a hidden lever, but the combination of the crowd's hysterical
pleas and the self-serving pontification of the High Priest, the
Pharoah, and their minions probably delivered a serious theatrical
wallop, especially with Saint-Saëns's score in the background.
Like his "Egyptian" piano concerto (last heard here in 2016),
the music for "La foi" was influenced by the composer's visits to
Egypt and Algeria in 1896. Unlike the earlier work, the
Orientalism of "La foi" is relatively subdued. There's an obvious
exotic (to Western ears) sound to the opening Allegro moderato e
maestoso, for example, but for the most part this could easily be
music from a Hollywood Biblical epic from the 1930s. It's so
cinematic, in fact, that you could do worse than read along with
the English translation of Act IV at Project
Gutenberg as you listen to the recording by Michel Plasson
and the Orchestre Du Capitol de Toulouse in my Spotify playlist.
If your French is up to it, the original version is
available out there as well, complete with production photos and
illustrations
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| Dmitri
Shostakovich in 1935 |
In the introduction to his chapter on Shostakovich in the 1967
Penguin Books edition of The Symphony, British musicologist Robert
Layton described the Russian symphonist somewhat dismissively as a
"documentary composer, far more bound up with this time
than...Prokofiev, or any other of his Soviet contemporaries."
These days that would probably be a minority view. Yes,
Shostakovich was heavily influenced by the economic and political
turmoil that characterized 20th century Russian history. How could
he be otherwise? But even in the early Symphony No. 1, you can
hear how he transmuted those external experiences into a sound
that was uniquely his own.
Written as a Leningrad Conservatory graduation piece and first
performed in 1926 (when the composer was only 19), Shostakovich's
First Symphony is a remarkable study in contrasts, with chamber
music–style solo passages cheek by jowl with the full-tilt bombast
of the composer's more popular works. Perky melodies reminiscent
of the stuff Shostakovich probably heard during his work as a
cinema pianist pop up in the first and second movements, standing
in stark juxtaposition to the brooding and sporadically anguished
gloom of the third. There's a piano part that calls to mind
Stravinsky's "Petrushka." And the final Allegro molto wraps
everything up in a classic flourish of brass and percussion,
reflecting the young composer's brash confidence while still
retaining the sense of sarcasm that is always just below the
surface.
It is, in short, a collage of external influences unified by
Shostakovich's particular sensibility. It's not a documentary;
it's art, even if it's a bit rough around the edges.
The Essentials: Pianist Alice Sara Ott makes her SLSO
debut with Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. Cristian Măcelaru is the
guest conductor in a program that also includes the third of
Saint-Saëns’s three “Tableaux symphoniques” from his incidental
music for the play “La foi” and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1.
Performances take place at 10:30 am 8 pm on Saturday,
January 14. The evening concert will be simulcast on St.
Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.
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