Chamber Series 1 Program Notes

Chamber I

FRENCH RENDEZVOUS

Sunday, October 23, 3pm, DeBartolo

Guest Artist:   Jennet Ingle, oboe

Faure’s Pelleas et Melisande, Qigang Chen’s Extase and Saint Saen’s Symphony No. 2

Gabriel Fauré
Suite: Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80

Gabriel Fauré was born in Pamiers, France in 1845 and died in Paris in 1924. He composed his incidental music for Pelléas et Mélisande in 1898 on a commission from actress Beatrice Campbell; it was orchestrated by Charles Koechlin for an English production of the play the same year. Fauré later scored three of the movements for a larger orchestra for concert performance and added the Sicilienne. The first performance of this final version took place in Paris in 1912 with André Messager conducting. The score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, harp, and strings.

Several composers have written music on Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1893 symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande; among them, the dreamy impressionism of Debussy’s opera stands in the greatest possible contrast to Schoenberg’s densely chromatic tone poem. As you might expect, Fauré’s incidental music is worlds apart from either.
The play is a dark-hued tale of forbidden love set in the medieval fantasy world of Allemonde. Mélisande is married to Golaud, but falls in love with his brother Pelléas. When he learns of the infidelity, Golaud warns Pelléas to stay away from Mélisande, but the two lovers continue their trysts. When Golaud overhears the pair declare their love for one another, he kills Pelléas and mortally wounds Mélisande. Struggling for life, Mélisande gives birth to a baby girl, then dies.

The Prelude of Fauré’s suite sets a melancholy mood for the play as Mélisande, lost in the woods, hears the horn call of Golaud. The second movement (Fileuse) depicts Mélisande at her spinning wheel. The Sicilienne is Fauré’s portrait of Mélisande, and Mort de Mélisande accompanies her funeral cortège.

Fauré’s life and music spanned both the turn of the century and that uneasy transition from the romantic era to the modern. Essentially a romantic composer, he differed from other romantics who were ferociously passionate and inclined to scream. Fauré was at his best composing songs and the sort of exquisite orchestral miniatures we find in Pelléas et Mélisande, where his romanticism speaks with restraint, delicacy, and grace.

Qigang Chen
Extase for Oboe & Orchestra

Qigang Chen was born in Shanghai, China in 1951. He composed this work in 1995 on a commission from the Deutscher Kammerphilharmonie and the French Ministry. It was first performed in 1995 in Bremen, Germany by oboist Rodrigo Blumenstock and the Deutscher Kammerphilharmonie under the direction of Thomas Hengelbrock. The work is scored for solo oboe, 2 flutes, oboe, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, percussion, and strings.

Qigang Chen was born to a family of artists that was brutally affected by China’s Cultural Revolution. His father, an artist and calligrapher, was declared “bourgeois and antirevolutionary” and sent to a labor camp, while Qigang Chen was shipped off to a “re-education” camp for three years. In time, Chen applied for and won a position at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where he studied with Luo Zhonghong and earned his bachelor’s and master’s Degrees. A state grant allowed him to study abroad; he went to France to study composition with Olivier Messiaen, later working with Ivo Malec, Betsy Jolas, Claude Ballif, and Claude Castérède. He went on to earn the Diplome supérieur de Composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique and the Diplome de Musicologie at the University of Paris. He became a French citizen in 1992.

Chen’s ever-evolving music is a unique mixture of Eastern and Western influences, something that makes his Extase (Ecstasy) highly original. The work uses the Chinese folk song San shi li pu as a tribute to another Chinese composer, Mo Wuping, who died in Paris at the age of 32. It also uses the solo oboe as a stand-in for the so-na, a traditional Chinese instrument; in imitation, the oboist is required to perform pitch-bends, glissandi, multiple-tonguing, and circular breathing—a technique that allows the player to play continuously without stopping for air.

Extase is a single movement work that begins with the oboe alone in a harrowing solo that is eventually joined by percussion and orchestral interjections. The piece evolves through a series of fresh textures and wondrous harmonies; eventually the temperature rises with an increase in tempo and flurries of notes from the soloist. As the texture alternately thins and thickens, the tension builds inexorably until a plaintive melody from the soloist brings us to a refuge of calm. From here, remembrances of the beginning return to close this stunning work.

Charles Camille Saint-Saëns
Symphony No. 2 in A minor, Op. 55

Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835 died in Algiers, Algeria in 1921. He composed his Symphony No. 2 in 1859 and it was first performed in Paris in 1862 under the direction of François Seghers. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy of the Mozartean class. He was picking out tunes at the keyboard at age two-and-a-half, composing at three, studying Don Giovanni in full score at five. He had a photographic memory and absolute pitch. He astonished the audience at his debut piano recital, given at age ten, by offering to play any of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas from memory.

In an era of increasing specialization, Saint-Saëns became a general practitioner: he was a composer, conductor, pianist, organist (“the best in the world,” said Liszt), musicologist, and critic. While French tastes demanded opera, opera, and more opera, he led a revival of instrumental music. To that end he founded the Société de Musique, lending support (and performances) to such composers as Charbrier, Chausson, Dukas, d’Indy, Franck, and Ravel.
Of his own music, he said, “I ran after the chimera of purity of style and perfection of form.” But that put him behind the times in the eyes of other musicians and the public, and his works never reached the popularity achieved by those he had helped. Saint-Saëns was guilty of the one crime composers are never allowed to commit: he was old-fashioned.

Yet clarity, restraint, and elegance aren’t ever old-fashioned, and Saint-Saëns’ Second Symphony has these in abundance. It was actually the fourth symphony he composed: he suppressed the first and third, while the second became his Symphony No. 1. He composed the Symphony No. 2 in 1859 at age 23; it carries an abnormally high opus number because it wasn’t published until 1878.

The symphony’s first movement lays its agenda before us right in its opening bars: the descending-then-rising theme of the introduction will fuel all that follows. Instead of a strict sonata form, Saint-Saëns prefers to subject his theme to continuous development, a highly crafted technique that sounds delightfully spontaneous.

The short Adagio brings a halting but tender melody. If you know Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto you’ll see that he liked this tune so well he used in that work, too.

The Scherzo gives us a rambunctious, syncopated tune to start, then a more genteel (yet still syncopated) section led by the winds. Saint-Saëns avoids the usual formal repeats, so we hear each of these but once.
The Finale is a whirling tarantella that comes to an abrupt stop in the middle to give the dancers a chance to catch their breath, then dances its way to the end; along the way we hear a few allusions the previous movements for good measure.

Much of Saint-Saëns’ music was dismissed as out-of-date before the ink was dry on his scores: he was a classicist in an age of unbridled romanticism. Only a rare few of his works have remained in the repertory, and that’s a shame—works such as this prove that his music is timeless.

—Mark Rohr