Chapel Hill PhilharmoniaHill Hall — University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

7:30 p.m. Sunday, May 5, 2013

Donald L. Oehler, Music Director

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)España

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33 Allegro non troppo - Allegro con moto - Tempo Primo

Jonah Krolik, cello2013 Young Artist Concerto Competition Winner

Intermission

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14 Rêveries, passions (Reveries – Passions) Un Bal (A Ball) Scène aux champs (Scene in the Fields) Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold) Songe d’une Nuit du Sabbat (Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath)

Refreshments

FANTASTIQUE FRENCHThe art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at

the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.

– Nadia Boulanger

George Gershwin’s An American in Paris captured the energy and cultural richness of the French capital in the “Roaring” 1920s. A raft of 20th century American composers – Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Roy Harris, Joyce Mekeel, Thea Musgrave, Walter Piston, Elie Siegmeister, Virgil Thomson, and scores more – absorbed this Gallic atmosphere first-hand, mainly at the hands of Nadia Boulanger. What made her studio a magnet for these artists? Perhaps it was Boulanger’s synthesis of the philosophies of two great pillars of French thought, René Descartes (1596-1650) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). She conjoined Cartesian logic with Rousseauian passion, the latter comprising an uplifting faith in natural good and human liberty (expressed in the opening words of The Social Contract, “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”) contradictorily mixed with anti-rationalism and egocentricism (leading a recent writer to dub Rousseau “a philosopher for the Facebook generation”).

A generation of 19th century American artists and professionals similarly made “The Greater Journey” to Paris, recounted in a recent book by David McCullough. While this history focuses on literature, the visual arts, and medicine, no doubt many of the young pilgrims also gained exposure to music, spending leisure hours in Parisian concert halls and opera houses. It seems more than coincidental that the timeframe of McCullough’s study coincides closely with the rising tide of Romanticism swept in by Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique in 1830, and washed away by Claude Debussy’s impressionistic Afternoon of a Faun (1894) and La Mer (The Sea, 1905, performed by the Chapel Hill Philharmonic this past February). Tonight’s CHP program constitutes a three-course gourmet meal from this French Romantic era.

Palais Garnier built from 1861 to 1875 for the Paris Opera

Chabrier: España

Emmanuel Chabrier came as a teenager from a small village to Paris in 1856. Although a promising pianist and composer, he followed family footsteps to enter law school, followed by 19 years as a civil servant in the Ministery of the Interior. However, he continued to study and compose music, and cultivated friendships with progressive artists such as the poet Paul Verlaine and the painter Edouard Manet. The controversial first Parisian performance of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser on March 13, 1861 marked a turning point for Chabrier, who joined the avant garde mania for Wagnerian Romanticism. Chabrier’s sentiment did not abate. In 1880 he went to Munich with other French composers to attend a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. As Vincent

d’Indy recalled, “The Prelude was about to begin, and silence and darkness reigned in the theatre when we heard quite near us what sounded like someone trying to stifle a hiccough...it was Chabrier sobbing...The person sitting next to him turned round to inquire whether he was feeling ill, and our good Chabrier replied… ‘I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it...I’ve been waiting for 10 years of my life for that A on the cellos...’” Soon after Chabrier resigned his government post to commit full time to music.

Chabrier devoted most of his compositional effort to operas in which Wagnerian influences can be discerned, but with a distinctive voice, more Cartesian precision, and a far greater sense of humor. He also was a virtuosic pianist, considered by his friend d’Indy to be in a league with Anton Rubinstein and the legendary Franz Liszt. His powerful playing was noted for a wide range of tonal color. This aptitude aligned well with Chabrier’s “vital role in expanding the tonal and orchestral palette of French music.” (Grove Encyclopedia of Music) Maurice Ravel, another fine orchestrator, paid homage to Chabrier, stating “all of contemporary French music stems from his work.”

Like Ravel in Bolero, and many other Romantics (e.g., Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Capriccio Espagnol, Max Bruch in Scottish Fantasy, Piotr Tchaikovsky in Souvenir de Florence), Chabrier drew inspiration from street music heard during foreign travel. On a holiday in Spain in 1882 the flamenco dancers aroused his enthusiasm: “If you could see them wiggle, unjoint their hips, contort, I believe you would not want to get away! At Malaga I was compelled to take my wife away…” Returning home to Paris, he captured the Spanish spirit in dances written for piano. Legend holds that one evening Chabrier played these pieces for the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and his overflowing energy led to breaking several strings and damaging the keyboard’s action. Escaping the confines of 88 strings, Chabrier converted the piano sketches to his best-known orchestral work, España. The main theme is a lively Spanish jota, followed by a mellower malagueña. Chabrier develops the basic dances with overlapping of two-beat and three-beat patterns, and surprising shifts in dynamics and instrumental timbres, ending with a wild coda. Charles Lamoureux, the work’s

Emmanuel Chabrier

dedicatee, conducted the premier performance in Paris on November 4, 1883, in his series of Société des Nouveaux Concerts. España proved an immediate and lasting hit. Popular crooners of the 1950s such as Perry Como and Pat Boone brought it back in a white-shoe version with the lyrics “Hot diggity, dog ziggity, boom: What you do to me: When you’re holding me tight.”

Saint-Saëns: Cello Concerto No. 1

Like the thinly disguised Bob Dylan in Joan Baez’s song “Diamonds and Rust,” Paris-born Camille Saint-Saëns “burst on the scene already a legend.” A prodigy justifiably considered “a French Mozart,” the 10-year-old Camille gave an astonishing first concert in 1845, including piano concertos by Wolfgang Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. For an encore, the lad offered to play any of Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas. The event was reported in newspapers around Europe and across the Atlantic in Boston. Perhaps better likened to Felix Mendelssohn, a musical prodigy and polymath, Saint-Saëns displayed talent in many intellectual spheres. He learned languages easily, excelled in advanced mathematics, and did original work in fields ranging from the sciences (botany, geology, astronomy) to poetry and philosophy. His book Problèmes et mystères (Problems and Mysteries) espoused a rational society in which the arts and sciences would be paramount.

Jonah Krolik

Our soloist in the Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto, native North Carolinian Jonah Krolik, age 16, is a junior at East Chapel Hill High School. He began playing the cello at age 6 with Leslie Alperin and for the past 5 years has studied with Bonnie Thron, Principal Cello of the NC Symphony Orchestra. This spring Jonah was a finalist in both the Win-ston-Salem Symphony Peter Perret Youth Talent Search and the Durham Symphony concerto competition. He has performed in cello master classes for Johannes Moser and Zuill Bailey. His orchestral career includes membership in the NC Symphony Youth Sinfonietta, the NC All-State Orchestras, and the Mallarme Youth Chamber Orchestra (MYCO). Jonah particularly enjoys playing chamber music. During the past two summers he participated in the Music at Port Milford chamber music camp in Canada. In the MYCO chamber music program Jonah collaborates with pianist Ethan Chu and violinist Yong-hun Kim in the Piedmont Piano Trio, which was coached by the late Professor Richard Luby of UNC-Chapel Hill. The Piedmont Trio has been invited to compete in the final rounds of the Fischoff National Chamber Music Com-petition, to be held at Notre Dame University later this spring. This summer Jonah will attend the Greenwood Chamber Music Camp in Massachusetts. Besides music, he enjoys basketball, golf, and playing with his dog Shosty.

Saint-Saëns entered the Paris Conservatory as a teenager and developed both as a keyboard performer and composer. For some 20 years he served as organist at the Church of the Madeleine, the most prestigious such post in Paris. He wrote many works for solo organ and also became famous for extraordinary improvisations. In addition he toured as a pianist, often performing one of his own five piano concertos.

Over his long career Saint-Saëns produced over 300 compositions, most before he reached the end of his sixth decade, although he lived to his mid-80s. The works included more than 30 concertos and smaller concertantes for solo instruments and orchestra. Initially considered a champion of the revolutionary new music espoused by Wagner and Liszt, he nevertheless remained steadfast to classical principles of predecessors such as Mozart and Beethoven. Over time he seemed increasingly a conservative throwback to an earlier era, and by the 20th century was superseded by more modern composers such as Debussy.

Many of Saint-Saëns’ works that remain well known today date from the 1870s and 1880s, before he reached the age of 50. Already in 1868 he was awarded the prestigious Légion d’Honneur and was considered one of the handful of great living composers. Saint-Saëns wrote his first of two cello concertos shortly after France was defeated by Prussia in the war of 1871. Nationalist spirit spurred demand for new pieces by French composers. Saint-Saëns composed the Cello Concerto

in A minor, Op. 33 in response to this need. He dedicated the work to Auguste Tolbecque, a Belgian cellist and educator who helped expand the role of the cello as a solo instrument, on par with the piano and violin. Tolbecque gave the first performance in January 1873, in Paris with the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.

The Cello Concerto is in a single movement, but readily divided into three segments that preserve the familiar fast – slow – fast pattern of the most common three-movement concerto structure. The work opens with a single introductory chord before the cello declaims the main motif, which recurs frequently in both the solo part and various sections of the accompaniment. A lyrical theme bridges to the middle section, a minuet stated by muted strings, with the solo cello accompanying in a high register. The third section returns to the opening motif, with the soloist playing an increasingly virtuosic role. A new, lyrical theme adds emotional depth before the concerto concludes with a thrilling coda.

Camille Saint-Saëns

Auguste Tolbccque as a student in 1849

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique

Had Hector Berlioz followed his physician father’s wishes, he might well have joined the young Americans medical students in Parisian hospitals, described in McCullough’s The Great Journey. Born in a small town near the French Alps during the Napoleonic era, Berlioz obtained his bachelor’s degree in Grenoble and acceded to the paternal demand to matriculate at the Ecole de Médecine in Paris. But young Hector had no desire to practice medicine and, despite obtaining a baccalaureate science degree in 1824, pursued different aspirations: “Become a doctor! Study anatomy! Dissect! Take part in horrible operations – instead of giving myself body and soul to mu-sic, sublime art whose grandeur I was beginning to perceive! Forsake the highest heaven for the wretchedest regions of earth, the immortal spirits of poetry and love and their divinely inspired strains for…the screams of patients, the groans and rattling breath of the dying! No, no! It seemed to me the reversal of the whole natural order of my existence.” Increasingly, Berlioz spent his time and limited financial resources on learning music. In 1826 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, taking classes in composition and in counterpoint and fugue. He sought the prestigious Prix de Rome, which would enable advanced study and travel to Italy, but lost out in several competi-tions as judges considered his work dangerously avant garde. (He finally won the award in 1830).Even so, Berlioz made great musical strides, already displaying an unusual flair for orchestration, and composing themes he would later recycle into his best-known works. He also was developing literary skills that eventually led him to devote more effort to music criticism, a seminal text on orchestration, and an extensive autobiography than to composition.

During his period of growth in Paris, Berlioz’s first contact with the works of two artists rocked his world. In 1827 he saw Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet presented by an English company, with the Anglo-Irish Harriet Smithson starring as Ophelia and Juliet. Despite not speaking English, Berlioz fell in love with both the texts and Ms. Smithson (who spoke no French). He courted the actress and by 1833 per-suaded her to marry. During the spring of 1828 Berlioz heard Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Symphonies played at the Con-servatoire. These works were by no means cultural icons to Berlioz’s teachers and contemporaries; most deemed them “monstrosities.“ To Berlioz, however, they showed that mu-sic could convey the deepest emotional expression. The dual exposure felt as when “one thunderclap follows another as swiftly as it does in those great storms in the physical world, where the clouds, charged with the electric fluid, seem liter-ally to sport with the thunder…I had scarcely recovered from the visions of Shakespeare…when I beheld Beethoven’s giant form looming above the horizon…and a new world of music was revealed to me by the musician, just as a new universe of poetry had been opened to me by the poet.”

Harriet Smithson as Ophelia, Odeon Theater, Paris 1827

Influenced by Beethoven, Johann Goethe’s Faust, and his obsession with Smithson, Berlioz created an autobiographical “Fantastic Symphony: An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts,” first played in 1830. Revisions and explanatory notes (quoted liberally below) continued until Berlioz published the work in 1845. It stands as the archetypal Romantic symphony.

Reveries - Passions: A young musician “sees a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person of his dreams and falls desperately in love with her.” He represents her in his mind with a melancholic musical theme, the “idée fixe” (object of fixation), which recurs throughout the work. The movement follows “the transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations.”

A Ball: “The Artist finds himself in the most diverse situa-tions in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful con-templation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.” Two harps lead the waltz at the ball and symbolize the artist’s love.

Scenes in the Fields: Haunting calls of a cor anglais (English horn) echoed by a distant oboe capture a childhood memory of cattle herdsmen communicating in the Alps with simple horn mel-odies. The “pastoral duet...the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind...kindle hope and restore a measure of calm to the artist...He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own...But what if she betrayed him!...At the end one of the shepherds resumes his call; the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder...solitude...silence...“

March to the Scaffold: “The Artist, certain that his love is not returned, poisons himself with opium...He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution...The procession advances to...a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn...At the end...the idée fixe reappears like a final thought of love. It is interrupted by the fatal blow, and the Artist’s head bounces down the steps.”

Dreams of a Witches’s Sabbath: The opium nightmare deepens. The Artist “sees himself...in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters...who have come together for his funeral...The idée fixe melody reappears, but transformed to a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque. His Beloved comes to the sabbath...to join the diabolical orgy...The funeral knell tolls...[Low brass play] a burlesque parody of the Dies irae [Day of Wrath, an ancient hymn from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead], the dance of the witches...combines with the Dies irae.”

―MarkE.Furth,PhD

Witches Sabbath Hans Baldung, woodcut, 1510