Susan Graham
Mezzo-soprano
Susan Graham, one of the world’s top opera stars, is a celebrated expert in French music, and a French "Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur."
After singing at Senator Edward Kennedy’s funeral, Ms. Graham opened the season with the San Francisco Symphony. Her season operatic engagements include Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera; Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust in Chicago; and Handel’s Xerxes in Houston. She closes the season with the New York Philharmonic.
A popular guest on The Martha Stewart Show, Ms. Graham co-hosted the Fifth annual Opera News Awards and has appeared often with The Met: Live in HD. She has performed leading roles from the seventeenth to the twentieth century in the world’s great opera houses, including La Scala Milan, London’s Covent Garden, Opéra National de Paris, and Vienna State Opera, and she has sung with the foremost conductors and orchestras. Dubbed “America’s favourite mezzo” by Gramophone magazine, the tall and graceful Grammy Award-winner possesses an expressive voice and engaging acting ability.
A leader in the revival of Christoph Gluck’s operas, Graham has sung his Iphigénie en Tauride in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and London. “Graham put her own stamp on the part, bringing both nobility and vibrant vocal beauty to her affecting performance,” wrote The Chicago Tribune.
Susan Graham created the part of Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking for San Francisco Opera, and roles in two Metropolitan Opera world premieres Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy and John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby.
Her extensive discography includes Un frisson français, a survey of a century of French song. Earlier solo CDs include Poèmes de l’amour, with Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer. Her complete opera recordings range from a DVD of Berlioz’s Troyens, Handel’s Alcina and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride to Barber’s Vanessa and Heggie’s Dead Man Walking.
Born in New Mexico and raised in Texas, Susan Graham studied at Texas Tech University and the Manhattan School of Music. Awards and prizes include the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and San Francisco Opera’s Schwabacher Award, and a Career Grant from the Richard Tucker Music Foundation. She was Musical America’s 2004 Vocalist of the Year and, in 2006 her hometown of Midland, Texas, declared September 5 “Susan Graham Day” in perpetuity.
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 9
Born in Kalischt, Bohemia (now Czech Republic), July 7 1860; died in Vienna, May 18 1911.
First performance in Vienna, on June 26 1912; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, with Bruno Walter conducting.
In the end, Mahler dared to defy fate, to ward off the superstition concerning the Ninth symphonies: “It seems that the Ninth is the limit.” Mahler, aware of the “curse of the Ninth”, was thinking of Beethoven and Bruckner. Trying to trick fate, he composes the next work, Das Lied von der Erde – The Song of the Earth (1911), which acts effectively as his ninth symphony. The next one, in Mahler’s mind, was the Tenth: “Now the danger is past.” But, as any mortal knows, to play with fate is always at a loss.
Mahler was convinced that a symphony could create a whole world. In his Third, he originally provided titles for each movement, such as: “What Love tells me”, or "What the Angels tell me". Following the same idea, one could guess the title of his last completed symphony: “What Death tells me”. Nevertheless, at this stage, the music had no need of words anymore.
This powerful work features two conflicting worlds, between life and death. Irony, violence and bitterness mark two shorter, quick pieces, framed with two large slow movements, mournful and exalted, a kind of spiritual pilgrimage, where the music illuminates the road to the last farewell.
1. Andante comodo
In a letter to his wife (1912), in a few words, Alban Berg points out the meaning of this music:
Once again I have played through the score…The first movement is the expression
of an exceptional love for this earth, the longing to live in peace on it, to enjoy
nature to its depths- before death comes. As inevitably it does. The whole movement
is permeated by the premonition of death.
The construction of this movement is in a loose sonata form, using interweaving short motifs; fragmented elements are linked without development, apparently lacking any logic. Nevertheless, the unity of the whole is created by the variation and the insistent return of a three-notes motif, in changing timbres, with the characteristic descending second. It is closely related to the opening motif of Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 81a, Les Adieux; Mahler’s sketches bear the mark “Leb’wohl” (Farewell), quoting the title the Master gave to his work. The Finale of the monumental The Song of the Earth features the same motif bearing the last words : Ewig, Ewig.
2. Im Tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers . Etwas täppisch und sehr derb
(In the tempo of a leisurely Ländler. Somewhat clumsy and very crude)
Often mentioned as the “dance of death”, this movement is a limping, caricatured Ländler, Austrian folk dance. It is a kind of scherzo, with symmetrical tripartite structure, in three different tempi: two Ländler framing a Waltz. Following the ethereal sounds at the end of the first movement, it brings us back to earth, mixing folk-like motifs, grotesque parody and polyphonic technique. The orchestral setting emphasizes the clumsiness and sarcasm, through a series of rapid games in bassoons and brass instruments, followed by a Ländler phrase played by the piccolo and contrabassoon. Syncopated rhythms and distorted sounds of the muted brasses are far from the invitation to dance. There reigns the futile agitation of a crumbling world.
3. Rondo-Burleske. Allegro assai. Sehr trotzig (Very defiant)
Alluding to the learned critics of his music at the time, Mahler offered in the autograph score an ironic dedication of this Rondo-Burleske “To my brothers in Apollo”. Fluctuating between virtuosity and vulgarity, and despite its title, the movement contains more violence than humour, dark passages reaching demonic eruptions.
In a form of a rondo, it opens with a dissonant theme treated in a double fugue, followed by three episodes of grotesque counterpoint. As a contrasting central interlude, Mahler transforms the same dissonant motifs into serene, flowing melodies, played high on violins and flutes. This passage announces the final Adagio with a gruppetto figure, suddenly interrupted by blazing dissonance in brass instruments. Again, polyphonic episodes and folk-like refrains alternate in breathtaking race running nowhere, and finally disintegrate in a furious fortissimo.
4. Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend
(Very slowly and held back)
“I wander to find my homeland, my home” (Ich wandle nach der Heimat, meiner Stätte), could be a leitmotiv of this movement. It is a quote of the last chant of The Song of the Earth, among other allusions to Mahler’s own earlier works incorporated in this score. The short gruppetto motif, still heard in the Burleske, is transformed here in the fugal theme, as a thread going all over the movement. The intensity grows with a hymn-like melody, less in dynamic forces, than as interior expression. Both musical ideas are developed through variations, gradually fragmented, slowing down, until only strings are left playing. Beyond the last sound, in poignant silence, the pilgrim has found the fulfilment of his spiritual journey.
Dujka Smoje
Alban Berg
Born in Vienna, February 9, 1885;
died in Vienna, December 24, 1935
Seven Early Songs
Composition: 1905-1908
Premiere: The first performance of all seven songs was given by Lisa Frank with the composer at the piano on a broadcast recital from Radio Berlin on February 27, 1929 (three of the songs had been performed in Vienna in 1907). In their orchestral garb, all seven songs were first performed in Vienna on November 6, 1928 by Claire Born with Robert Heger conducting (five of them had already been heard the previous March).
Between 1900 and 1908, when he was in his teens and early twenties, Alban Berg wrote more than eighty songs for voice and piano. In fact, he composed virtually nothing else during this period. Nevertheless, when Berg decided to publish his Opus 1, he submitted his Piano Sonata, not a group of songs. Only many years later, in 1928 when he had fully adopted Schoenberg’s twelve-tone procedures, did Berg look back at these songs. Berg’s biographer Mosco Carner suggests that the composer’s reason for doing so lay in his desire to show “from whence he really came,” namely, the romantic era of Richard Strauss, Wolf, Mahler and early Schoenberg. Berg chose seven songs, revised them, and had them published under the title Seven Early Songs. The texts are all to poets of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
The songs do not constitute a cycle, nor does their order of publication conform to their order of composition. Rather, Berg organized them with a view towards musical balance and emotional contrast. If one theme can be said to thread its way through all seven poems, it is the imagery of evening and night.
The wistful Nacht (Night) is deeply imbued with both melodic and harmonic aspects of the whole-tone scale. Schilflied (Song amongst the reeds) owes its harmonic language to Wagnerian chromaticism. Die Nachtigall (The Nightingale), written in a Brahmsian vein, is the most tonal (D major in the outer sections, F-sharp minor in the middle) and conservative of the seven songs. It is written in simple ternary (ABA) form, with both text and music repeated identically. Traumgekrönt (A Crown of dreams) boasts the most intricate accompaniment of the seven songs. This one is richly melodic, yet at the same time perhaps the most forward-looking in terms of its harmony and its advanced counterpoint, clearly a result of Berg’s study with Schoenberg. The brief Im Zimmer (Indoors) radiates a coy charm of the sort that would not be out of place in the world of Strauss’s Rosenkavalier. In the passionate Liebesode (Lovers’ ode), voice and orchestra remain completely independent, with the latter’s rippling figure at the beginning of nearly every bar creating an almost hypnotic effect. Sommertage (Summer days) closes the Seven Early Songs in a mood of profound yearning and surging romanticism.
Robert Markow
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