Conductor's Corner

Those of you who have attended our concerts when we’ve played Mozart, have probably heard me remark that almost every soloist who comes to play with OCO, initially suggests that we play a Mozart Concerto. His 27 for piano, 5 for violin, 4 for french horn and assorted concertos for woodwinds, including some missing ones for bassoon and horn, are testament to his particular interest and excellence in the concerto genre. On all woodwind instruments and horn, his concertos are the absolutely required concerto for professional auditions; they are considered a basic and essential part of advanced training on those instruments.

It’s been said that all composers can loosely be categorized as either motivic or melodic, that is, some of them think of organizing music on smaller building blocks (motives), or longer melodies. Mozart is certainly a melodic composer and this goes a long way to describing his excellence as a composer of operas and concertos. It’s interesting to look at Beethoven’s music in terms of the influence that Haydn and Mozart had on him. Beethoven was the quintessential motivic composer, just think about the first movement of his Symphony #5. His Symphonies and String Quartets are clearly influenced by Haydn, who also thought motivically. But his opera and concertos are influenced by Mozart beyond any doubt; in fact Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #1 is highly influenced by Mozart’s #25 which we perform tonight.

It’s a joy to welcome (again) to our concerts my former piano teacher from the University of Toronto, Professor Emeritus William Aide. Having had a long and esteemed career as a soloist, including performances at Carnegie Hall and with the Boston Symphony, he has been one of Canada’s most important pedagogues, influencing countless pianists, some of whom have gone on to be distinguished artists in their own right. He has also created multimedia works of poetry on musical topics with accompanying CDs of him playing Chopin and Schumann; his family of six and his encyclopedic knowledge of visual art make him a cultural Renaissance man. I’m proud and pleased to count him as a friend



The second half of our concert is one of my favourite Strauss works, his incidental music to Molière’s play The Bourgeois Gentleman. It show’s a totally different side of Strauss than his neurotic, huge-orchestra operas Salome and Elektra; and also a different expression than his large-scale early tone poems such as Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben. It’s part of a style that began in the 1920’s known as Neo-Classicism, which makes conscious reference to Classical and Baroque music. Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite that we played last year is also Neo-Classical, as is Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, to name a few. The Gentilhomme suite is full of beautiful melodies, funny and quirky moments, quotations from his earlier works, and extensive reference to Baroque music, including an entire movement quoted from Jean-Baptiste Lully. It’s been a challenge for us to put together, what with its many difficult passages and instrumentation much larger than we normally present, but I hope you agree with me that our effort has been worth it, in the presentation of this wonderful piece.

What can one say about Handel? He was the consummate artist in every respect... the excellence of his music is beyond doubt. He made most of his money as a composer of catchy and entertaining arias, but could also write in fugues and other complex counterpoint with the best of them. He brought the oratorio to England, as a way of keeping himself and other musicians busy during Lent, when the church forbade theatrical productions. He was certainly one of the most successful and respected composers of his age, and embraced by the English to such an extent that he was accorded the nation’s highest honour, burial in Westminster Abbey.



At this concert we present his most beloved instrumental music, the Music for the Royal Fireworks and Water Music Suite #2. While your toes will certainly tap to these wonderful tunes, we hope you also enjoy his less well-known g minor Concerto Grosso. It’s a delightful commentary on the concerto grosso form, and features a wide variety of elements, such as fugue, theme and variations, and dance forms.



While Handel does have an intellectual side he’s usually careful to conceal it, and his music certainly never comes across as pedantic. One is only carried away by the wonderful melodies and sprightly dance rhythms. It’s our pleasure to present one of classical music’s greatest!

There’s a certain joy to absolute music that I think is sometimes under-appreciated these days. By “absolute music” I mean music that makes no reference to anything outside itself. Clearly this must be music without words; and also music without a program, unlike ballet music, or tone poems such as Strauss’ Don Juan or Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet. All the music on this concert is only about itself; about the melodies, the harmonies, the relationships between the different keys explored in the course of the music, and the formal structure that holds it all together. Hardcore? Perhaps. But to me this is the purest sort of music. Mozart & Haydn’s music in particular is complex in its form (how the different sections relate to each other and are unified into a coherent whole). The first movements of all three works on this concert begin with a basic formal idea: we hear a theme, and a contrasting theme in a different key. We then hear these themes explored and developed. Finally the first and second themes are repeated, but this time both in the home key. The end of the Development is known as the Recapitulation, when the first theme returns; it’s a moment of great drama and satisfaction.



Having pointed this out, I must also observe that these composers all believed firmly in Art that disguises itself. Almost all of Haydn’s symphonies have “country” (folk-style) music in them. Mozart explicitly considered great melody to be the most important element in music, and had as his goal that everyone, whether professional musician or audience member of any and every musical background should enjoy his music. So please, do enjoy it, and analyze it as much or as little as you like! Your experience will be wonderful in any case.

The Baroque era was described by the Historian Oswald Spengler as the height of Western Civilization. He felt that the fugues of J.S. Bach, combined with the pipe organs they were written for and the spectacular churches that they were (are) played in, is a combination of artistic achievement unequalled before or since. Although his statement would be debated by some, almost no one will argue with the idea that string instruments were perfected at that time by Antonio Stradivari and his several colleagues, Guarneri & Amati among them. In fact it’s still a mystery exactly why the quality of Stradivari’s instruments cannot be duplicated, even by the finest iPhone-producing 21st century technological society.



There’s no doubt that Baroque music (by convention, European music from approximately 1600-1750) is the core of the chamber orchestra repertoire; it was a time when strings, keyboard and perhaps a few winds playing together was the state of the sonic art. Possibly the single feature that makes Baroque music still popular today is it’s persistent and steady rhythm, the steady flow of notes in regular pulse that communicates over the centuries. The other two most notable aspects of the style are basso continuo, and counterpoint. Basso continuo is the walking string bass with cello, possibly bassoon, and another instrument capable of playing chords, filling in. At our concerts it’s harpsichord, but it could also be organ, clavichord, lute, or another ancient guitar-like instrument, theorbo. These instruments together define the rhythm and harmony of the piece and fulfill the identical function as the rhythm section of a jazz band; on rare occasions we can also have drums, such as the Tambourin movement of Rameau’s Castor and Pollux that we play tonight. Counterpoint, the science of writing linear melodies that sound well with other independent melodies, is the perfect art that conceals itself. The lines that work so smoothly together in Baroque music, that sound so simple and effortless, actually take many years of study to properly compose.



The second half is a delightful take-off on Baroque music. Vancouver composer Michael Conway Baker’s Baroque Diversions is full of counterpoint, and although its harmony was never dreamed of by Pachelbel or Corelli, it wonderfully puts new wine in old bottles. The same must be said for Pulcinella, which is an arrangement of works of five different Baroque composers. In its harmony departs little from that of the originals, but somehow, especially in its rhythmic treatment, it manages to be pure Stravinsky. Let the dancing begin!

What is it about Vivaldi's Four Seasons that has made it the most recorded piece of music ever, and one of the most instantly recognized works worldwide? Well... the great tunes I suppose is the simple answer. Vivaldi very frequently wrote wonderful melodies, but in The Four Seasons his melodic invention was perfectly married to the sonnets and programmatic ideas he was trying to convey. When the Spring Concerto begins we are instantly transported to flowers blooming and birds happily singing, even when the piece is performed in the bleak midwinter. The ferocity of the storm music in Summer is unmistakable. Vivaldi's music doesn't have the same intellectual gravity and contrapuntal complexity that Bach's does. But at his best, Vivaldi's music transports us like no other.



The foil to Vivaldi's extremely famous music is the unjustly unknown Virtuous Wife suite of Purcell. Written in 1679, the same year that the composer became choirmaster and composer at Westminster Abbey, Thomas D'Urfey's play is a silly farce that by today is exclusively of academic interest. But Purcell's music is as light and elegant as we have come to expect from this composer's more famous works.

Sir Ernest Macmillan's Sketches are by turns sombre and enthusiastic arrangements of Quebec folksongs, written in the 1920's by the Toronto composer commonly referred to as the "Dean of Canadian Composers". His contibutions to the growth of Toronto's cultural life are enourmous, not only by his compositions but also his many years as Toronto Symphony Conductor and Royal Conservatory Principal. It's a joy for us to play this Canadian classic.

I have very often enjoyed programs in which the similarities between the works are obscure or not apparent. This program is certainly one of those; not only is the instrumentation completely different, but the ethos of the works is apparently very different also. Under the influence and precedent of Mozart’s Wind Serenades, Beethoven’s Octet has a more of a backward-looking feel to it, than any other of his well-known late works. It seems to have not much in common with Tchaikovsky’s brooding, passionate Souvenir de Florence. However, I have often programmed the two composers together, as they share a common energy, one could almost say aggressivity. Though cloaked in the Enlightenment form of the Wind Serenade, Beethoven’s work is unmistakably his, with its repeated and obsessive accents, virtuoso horn flourishes, and lightning-quick third movement.

Souvenir de Florence may have been inspired by the composer’s Tuscan sojourn but sorry to tell you, I hear nothing particularly Italian about it. It’s as Russian as any other Tchaikovsky work, serious, intense, and emotionally intense. It begins with a minor 9th chord spread throughout the strings, but all 4 notes of the chord played at once by the first violins. A minor 9th chord was a shrieking dissonance in Tchaikovsky’s day, and although our 21st-century ears know it as a normal jazz chord, it still strikes as an extraordinarily rich way to begin a piece. The contour of the first three notes of this theme, repeated very frequently throughout the movement, is the same as the contour of the second theme which is first introduced 2 minutes later. Listen carefully; the only difference between the two themes are the intervals between the notes, which make it sound minor (intense and tortured) the first time, and major (joyous and carefree) the second time. Towards the end of the movement as a transition from the major to minor versions, Tchaikovsky changes the intervals gradually and makes this connection very clear to the listener. This is a sophisticated expression of compositional unity, and I find it to be an impressive demonstration of his skills as a composer, which are all too often underrated.



OR



I hope you enjoy this program of intense and expressive nineteenth-century music!

The turn of the twentieth century is a fascinating period in European History. It was a time when progress of all kinds raced forward at an unprecedented speed. The automobile, telegraph, telephone, submarine and airplane were all invented in this period. An anonymous patent clerk named Albert Einstein quietly published an academic paper that would change our view of the universe and make nuclear weapons possible. It was also a time when European political hegemony, through its colonies, was at its apex. The sun (literally) never set on the British Empire, and Germany and Italy were politically unified for the first time in centuries. The intellectual and cultural life of the continent was in a frenzy of creativity.



At the same time, lurking beneath the surface of a sophisticated and highly mannered society was the sense that all was not well. Charles Darwin had dealt a major blow to Christianity by challenging the literal truth of the Bible. Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead. Into this instability stepped Sigmund Freud, who proposed that rather than being noble and civilized creatures, our actions are motivated by our basest desires, and even the most elevated of us has a subconscious that ferments disturbed and unstable thoughts. In the early nineteenth century Goethe’s great novel Werther had a protagonist who committed suicide, and this prompted a wave of suicides among young people, including the heir to the Austrian throne. Frankenstein and Dracula were also hugely popular creations of this era. The tension inherent in the zeitgeist, and the inarguable rational logic of the military establishments of the great powers, swept Europe into World War I, a massively bloody conflict...fought for no really good reason.



The arts both reflected and influenced these trends. Different artists responded in different ways. Debussy’s evocative and non-traditional use of harmonies created a completely new sensibility; he somehow translated the mood of Impressionist painting into music, and created a radical new approach and way of thinking and feeling about sound and harmony. Gustav Mahler continued in the path of his Germanic predecessors into ever-increasing harmonic complexity, and wore his heart on his sleeve with a sincerity hardly seen before or since. Not long before the First World War, Arnold Schoenberg took a step into the abyss and abandoned tonal harmony altogether, which in retrospect began a process that changed the public’s relationship to concert music in ways he could never have forseen.



It’s my great joy to present to you this concert on Nov. 28 and 29, our first of the new season, which explores some of the masterpieces of this era, music filled with emotion, and some of the most significant ever written. In the coming weeks I’ll have comments on the individual pieces that we’ll be playing. I hope you’ll join us in our journey into this music, with its sensibility so different from our own, yet which still has the power to move us.