Cutting Room Floor: Seasonal Edition

For those of you coming to our final Inside the Classics concerts of the season this week, here's the usual trove of links, tidbits, and general info that we won't have time to get into on stage. To begin with, we're playing a wider assortment of music on our first half than we ever have before on this series, so here's a playlist of everything heard during the show:

VIVALDI Summer, from The Four Seasons
PIAZZOLLA Otono Porteno from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (arr. by Leonid Desyatnikov)
RASKATOV January, February, March, and April from The Seasons' Digest
VIVALDI Spring, from The Four Seasons
MESSIAEN Oiseaux Exotiques
RODRIGUEZ La Cumparsita (arr. by Sarah Hicks)
PIAZZOLLA Oblivion
HAYDN Introduction to Der Winter, from The Seasons
TCHAIKOVSKY January from The Seasons
LAM In Search of Seasons
"February" by Dar Williams

-- For a concert based mainly around Vivaldi's Four Seasons, we're actually spending very little time talking about the composer known as the Red Priest. But he was a fascinating man, born into poverty in Venice, trained in the priesthood, and celebrated for bringing a distinctly Italian sensibility to concert music. (His use of stringed instruments in particular revolutionized orchestral music.) There's an excellent condensed biography of Vivaldi at BaroqueMusic.org, as well as the story of how his music, lost to historians for centuries, came to be rediscovered and popularized in the mid-20th century.

-- Both Vivaldi and Raskatov included poems in their scores to describe the feelings intended to be imparted by each movement. Vivaldi's sonnets, which he wrote himself, evoke each season directly, while Raskatov's poems, which he takes from various Russian authors including Tolstoy and Pushkin, focus on specific characters or events for each month of the year. There's no online translation available of Raskatov's poems, but here's a translation of the Pushkin poem he uses for January, At The Fireside:

The night is shrouded in a twilit glow,
Silence reigns in the corner,
The fire is low in the grate,
The candle burns out.

To this, Raskatov adds, "It's terribly cold outside. An old clock strikes midnight." (Presumably, the hollow plunking sounds coming from the prepared piano in this movement of the piece represent the clanging of the clock.)

-- The March movement of the Raskatov contains a number of decidedly theatrical performance notes, including an indication that members of the violin section should "airbow," or pretend to play the notes on the page for several bars. This is the composer's way of bringing the idea of death and loss into the music. The poem he selected for this movement is about a lark, and Raskatov's notes call the setting "a sad thawing. An old lark, by some miracle still alive, welcomes the death of nature." As if to commemorate this passing, each violinist is asked to whisper the words "Requiem aeternam" (grant them rest) three times while holding the final note of the movement. So if you heard some whispering going on during the performance, that was it.

-- I first became aware of Raskatov's work when the violinist Gidon Kremer and his excellent ensemble, Kremerata Baltica, recorded The Seasons' Digest for a CD called The Russian Seasons, which is well worth a listen.

--Speaking of Gidon Kremer, he's an astoundingly great performer, and his version of Astor Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, which was arranged specially for him (more on this below,) is truly awesome. Remarkably, the complete audio is available on YouTube, so here it is, season by season...









--The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires was originally written by Piazzolla for his quintet - bandoneon, piano, violin, electric guitar and electric bass. In 1991, Brazilian arranger/composer/conductor Jaques Morelenbaum arranged the work for woodwind quintet, three celli and double bass for an album. Neither the original nor this initial transcription contain any overt references to Vivaldi's Seasons, although the title pays homage to the idea. It was in 1999 that Russian composer/arranger Leonid Desyatnikov, working with Gidon Kremer, reworked Piazzolla's originals into the set (featuring solo violin) from which we've extracted "Autumn". Desyatnikov creates virtuoso character pieces out of Piazzolla's originals, adding cadenzas for the violin and occasionally inserting an overt reference to Vivaldi; in "Autumn", for instance, towards the end of the of the cadenza there is a brief quote from Vivaldi's "Spring" - a clever play on the fact that when it's spring in Italy, it's autumn in Argentina!

-- Finally, Angel Lam, the young alum of the Minnesota Orchestra's Composer Institute whose In Search of Seasons we're featuring towards the end of our first half, has a fantastic website of her own, stuffed with audio clips, biographical info, and other assorted goodies. She's definitely an artist on the rise, and I'm guessing this week won't be the last time our orchestra puts her music on a program. Here's an interview she did while she was with us last fall...