Michael Colgrass
Born in Chicago on April 22, 1932
Currently lives in Toronto
As Quiet As...
Having passed his 75th birthday last April, Michael Colgrass now ranks as one of Canada’s senior composers. He also holds a unique distinction among prominent classical composers in North America in that he is the only one whose music is well known equally on both sides of the Canadian-American border. His life has divided neatly into two nearly equal halves, first in the United States, then in Canada, where he has lived since 1974.
Colgrass’s musical education was undertaken with such prominent figures as Darius Milhaud, Lucas Foss, Ben Weber and Wallingford Riegger. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1956, he went to New York City where he free-lanced as a percussion player in a wide range of “gigs” ranging from the New York Philharmonic to Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz band to the original West Side Story orchestra on Broadway. Over the years, Colgrass turned more to composing, and now enjoys a career based solely on commissions, which have come from the Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Toronto Symphony and many others. His list of prizes includes a Pulitzer (for Déja vu, 1978), two Guggenheims, a Rockefeller Grant, and the 1988 Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music. Recent works include Raag Mala for wind ensemble (2006) and Side by Side, a work for harpsichord, altered piano and orchestra premiered in 2007.
As Quiet As is one of Colgrass’s oldest orchestral compositions, dating back to 1966. It is also one of his most imaginative in conception. Most of us are impressed with towering waves of sound and huge climaxes. As Quiet As goes to the other extreme. Here’s how the composer explains it: “As Quiet As was inspired by the answers of fourth-grade children asked by their teacher to complete the sentence beginning “Let’s be as quiet as …” From the 21 answers compiled by Constance Fauci and printed in The New York Times in December, 1961, I chose seven that seemed to make a nature study as might be perceived by a child. My purpose was to depict the very nature of each metaphor, as if I were demonstrating to a blind person the essence of a leaf as it changes color, of a creek abandoned even by birds, and of an ant – or many ants – skittering about.
“‘Children Sleeping’ and ‘Time Passing’ are like dream sequence. Following light breathing and heartbeats, a sonatina written by Beethoven as a child appears through a montage of ‘sleeping sounds,’ and then reappears fragmentarily in musical styles from 1800 to the present – Haydn, Sibelius, Ravel, Stravinsky, Count Basie – as if one were taking a fleeting glance at music history moving through time. the jazz is interrupted by a distant sound (1945!), which ends the dream, and the last setting (Webern) is in post-war style.
“‘A Soft Rainfall’ and ‘The First Star Coming Out’ are the spring and summer counterparts of the autumnal leaf and creek, and are related musically as well. The creek is not a rainfall, and the leaf a soft blanket of night across which stars flicker like a million raindrops turned to crystal.” he Berkshire Music Center Orchestra under Gunther Schuller gave the first performance of As Quiet As on August 18, 1966 at Tanglewood (the summer home of the Boston Symphony). The work is dedicated “to children, with love and with hope.”
Edvard Grieg
Born in Bergen, June 15, 1843
Died in Bergen, September 4, 1907
Piano Concerto in A Major, Op. 16
It is hardly surprising that Grieg’s only large-scale orchestral work is a piano concerto for, like Chopin, the piano was the instrument central to his compositional output. (Hans von Bülow even called him “The Chopin of the North.”) Grieg’s first works were for the piano, written as a teenager, and he wrote all his life for the instrument, including ten volumes of Lyric Pieces, which Michael Kimmelman has called “a mountain of neglected gems,” and about 150 songs with piano accompaniment. The melodic inspiration, wonderful freshness and harmonic piquancy that distinguish these pieces are found as well in the Piano Concerto. Grieg was the first composer from Norway to achieve international recognition in a big way, and it was his Piano Concerto, written at the age of 25, that brought him his first major success. It was written mostly during the summer months of 1868 while Grieg was spending an idyllic vacation in the town of Søllerød in the Danish countryside. The first performance was given by Edmund Neupert, Norway's leading pianist of the day, on April 3, 1869 at Copenhagen’s Royal Theater. The concerto was also dedicated to Neupert.
Musical connoisseurs have long made an exercise of comparing two of the world’s most popular piano Concertos written in the mid-nineteenth century, Schumann’s (1841/1845) and Grieg’s. Like Schumann, Grieg chose A minor for the key of his concerto. Both concertos open with an orchestral “bang” followed by a cascade of octaves from the soloist, and have for their first themes a plaintive melody played by a woodwind instrument. In fact, Grieg modeled his entire first movement on Schumann’s.
But Grieg was no mere imitator. The music is deeply imbued with a quality all his own. Building on the stylistic inheritance of the German romantic tradition, Grieg integrated elements of Norwegian folk music as well as individual touches of his own musical personality (fondness for certain intervals, melodic turns of phrase, etc.). The Norwegian elements are most pronounced in the final movement. Here, the principal theme announced by the piano conforms to the rhythmic pattern of the halling (a national dance), combined with the sound effects of the Hardanger fiddle (bare fifths, drones, slides to a dissonant pitch). Towards the end of the movement, this halling pattern becomes a springdans when the theme is played in triple rather than duple meter.
From the reams of praise that have been written about this concerto, these words by Tchaikovsky can be quoted as representative: “There prevails that fascinating melancholy which seems to reflect in itself all the beauty of Norwegian scenery, now grandiose and sublime in its vast expanse, now grey and dull, but always full of charm. … What warmth and passion in his melodic phrases, what teeming vitality in his harmony, what originality and beauty in the turn of his piquant and ingenious modulations and rhythms. ... perfect simplicity, far from affectation and pretense. It is not surprising that everyone should delight in Grieg.”
Antonín Dvorák
Born in Mühlhausen, Bohemia (today Nelahozeves, Czech Republic), September 8, 1841
Died in Prague, May 1, 1904
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 (From the New World)
Dvorák’s Symphony No. 9, the “New World Symphony” to most listeners, received its world premiere in New York's Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893. Although the “New World” Symphony was written in the New World, it is not specifically about the New World. True, there are themes that could be construed as being “authentic” songs of the American Indians or African-Americans, but in fact, as in Dvorák’s Slavonic works, he did not actually quote directly from folksong but rather composed his own based on study of the source material.
One “New World” aspect of this symphony is the role played by Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, which Dvorák had read in Czech translation some thirty years earlier. He re-read the poem in America and claimed that the scene of Minnehaha’s funeral in the forest inspired the Largo movement of his symphony, while the Indians’ Dance was responsible for the Scherzo. Dvorák actually visited Hiawatha’s land (Iowa and southern Minnesota), but the symphony was essentially complete by this time, so whatever influence Hiawatha had on him was purely literary, not geographical.
From the New World alone of Dvorák’s nine symphonies opens with a slow introduction. Within the space of just 23 measures, the composer incorporates moods of melancholic dreaming and tense foreboding, startling eruptions and a surging melodic line. The main Allegro section is launched by horns in an arpeggiated fanfare motif in E minor, a motif that will reappear in all remaining movements as well. Several additional themes follow.
The Largo contains one of the most famous themes in all classical music. Many listeners know it as the song “Goin’ home,” but Dvorák did not borrow the theme from a spiritual; it is his own, and the words were superimposed after the symphony was written by one of his students, William Arms Fisher. Although Dvorák himself claimed the movement was inspired by a passage from Longfellow’s poem, Otakar Šourek (himself a Czech), believes the listener is equally entitled to imagine instead Dvorák longing for his homeland: “the melancholy, wide expanses of the South Bohemian countryside, of his garden at Vysoka, of the deep solemn sighing of the pine forests, and the broad, fragrant fields.”
The Scherzo is one of the most energetic and exhilarating movements Dvorák ever wrote, and borders on the virtuosic as well for the dazzling orchestral display it entails. The contrasting Trio section is a charming rustic dance introduced by the woodwind choir and set to the lilting long-short-long rhythm of which Schubert was so fond.
The finale too contains its share of melodic fecundity and inventiveness. The development section develops not only material from this movement but from the three previous ones as well, especially the main theme of the Largo, which is fragmented and tossed about with almost reckless abandon. The grand climax of the long coda brings back the chordal sequence that opened the Largo, but now painted in broad, majestic strokes in the full brass and woodwind sections. The final chord is a surprise - not a predictably stentorian chord played fortissimo by the full orchestra, but a lovely, warm sonority of winds alone, a sound that lingers gently on the ears of New World audiences.
Robert Markow |
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