Conductor
Bruno Ferrandis

featuring
Jacalyn Kreitzer, mezzo-soprano

The Women of the Sonoma County Bach Choir

MESSIAEN: Un Sourire for Orchestra

MAHLER: Songs of a Wayfarer

HOLST: The Planets

October 13, 14, 15, 2007
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50

Our first full season under the musical direction of Bruno Ferrandis features a unique multi-media performance: Gustav Holst’s The Planets with simultaneous video projection. Also on the program are two other composers who reach beyond the borders of the usual imagination. Olivier Messiaen, in his tribute to Mozart called “A Smile,” touches on the mysticism of nature and his faith in God. Gustav Mahler’s song cycle, performed by the exquisite mezzo-soprano Jacalyn Kreitzer, expresses the passion of German folk poetry in symphonic form. An opening concert both exciting and profound!

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES: The Planets for Orchestra
SRS performs Holst’s 50-minute piece with live-sequenced video projection of images sourced from NASA and enhanced with computer graphics. The audience may have the uncanny illusion of piloting a space ship while listening as the orchestra plays movements descriptive of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Computer stations in the lobby will allow audience members to “explore” the solar system on their own using interactive 3D controls.

Bruno Ferrandis underwritten by Margaret and Harry Wetzel.

PRESENTED BY THE LAW OFFICES OF

Olivier Messiaen: Un Sourire

Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon, France, on December 10, 1908 and died April 27, 1992. He composed Un Sourire (A Smile) in 1989 on commission from Marek Janowski, who wanted a piece that would honor the bicentenary of Mozart’s death. Janowski conducted the world premiere in Paris on December 5, 1991. The score calls for three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, one trumpet, xylophone, xylorhymba, tubular bells, suspended cymbal, and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes.

Olivier Messiaen’s musical education began in early childhood. He was already composing by the age of seven and entered the Paris Conservatoire at eleven. In 1926 he won the first prize in fugue, following that in 1928 with the prize in piano accompaniment. His teachers included Marcel Dupré for organ, Messiaen’s principal instrument, and Paul Dukas in composition.

Almost immediately after finishing his studies, Messiaen took up the position of organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris, remaining in the post from 1930 until the early ‘70s. He began teaching in Paris in the Ecole Normale de Musique and the Schola Cantorum, and of course, he continued composing. The ’30s saw the completion of many organ compositions, as well as piano works including the elegant and expressive song cycle Poèmes pour Mi for voice and piano (later orchestrated), and a number of works for orchestra, mostly on religious themes.

Messiaen was imprisoned in a Silesian military camp in 1940; there he composed one of his most powerful and moving compositions, the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) for violin, clarinet, cello and piano. After his release from the camp in 1941, Messiaen became professor of harmony at the Conservatoire. Not long after, he began the series of lessons in the home of a friend that attracted the attention of the brightest young composers at the institution.

During the 1950s, Messiaen’s fame spread both through performances of his own works and his acknowledged influence on such students as Pierre Boulez. He traveled widely and found inspiration in many cultures, not to mention in the bird songs of many lands. He was named Professor of Composition at the Paris Conservatoire in 1966.

Messiaen wrote Un Sourire as a tribute to Mozart in preparation for the two-hundredth anniversary of his death on December 5, 1991, when the work was premiered in Paris. The title and character of this short work are best explained in the composer’s own brief note:

Messiaen’s music has taken its character from his unique and pervading interest in rhythm, his harmonic language combining elements of old and new musical styles–tonal, modal, atonal, and serial–in a personal fusion, in melodic structures that are now lyrically direct, now wildly elaborate (and often based on bird songs). Here he combines these elements to produce a highly personal view of the Salzburg master.

Gustav Mahler: Songs of a Wayfarer

Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt (Kalište) near the Moravian border of Bohemia on July 7, 1860, and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. He began writing the poems that became the basis of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) in December 1883 and completed the music, for voice and piano, by January 1885. No performance of this version is known, though there was surely at least a private reading. Mahler apparently never orchestrated the cycle until there were prospects of an orchestral performance. Then he worked out at least two complete versions, in the early 1890s, before he allowed the work to be performed. The premiere took place in Berlin, under the composer’s direction, on March 16, 1896; the singer was Anton Sistermans. The orchestral accompaniment is scored for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, glockenspiel, bells, harp, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.

In 1883 the twenty‑three‑year‑old Mahler was an impatient, occasionally insubordinate second conductor at the opera house in Kassel. Not for the last time in his distinguished career as opera conductor, he became infatuated with one of the sopranos on the company roster. To what degree his love was returned is not entirely clear; certainly Mahler spent many anguished hours of doubt, passing his fears along in letters to one of his best friends, Friedrich Löhr. He was always supremely discreet about his amours, however, and never once mentioned the lady’s name in writing. We only know who she was because Löhr, to whom Mahler had unburdened his heart when they were spending holidays together, used it in writing back to him. She was one Johanna Richter, a new member of the company, about two years younger than the composer.

Johanna Emma Richter never had a career of more than mediocre success. She was offered a contract with the Kassel Opera after appearing as a guest artist there in spring 1883. She left after four years and, throughout her singing career, rarely stayed longer than that in any one place. She finally retired from the stage about 1906 and earned her living thereafter giving singing lessons and recitals. She lived at least until 1943 (when she was in Danzig, or, as it is called today, Gdansk), but there is no indication that she ever married, nor do we have any way of knowing whether she herself was aware of her role in inspiring Mahler’s earliest masterpiece.

In August 1884, soon after returning from his vacation with Löhr, Mahler wrote to his friend, “I have seen her again, and she is as enigmatic as ever! All I can say is: God help me!” By the beginning of 1885 things were no clearer as far as Mahler was concerned. He spent New Year’s Eve with her, “almost without saying a word.” Whatever emotional relationship existed between them, Mahler found it opaque and impossible to understand. He wrote again to Löhr:

Probably the “song” Mahler sent his friend was the text alone. He spent much of the next year composing four of the six poems for voice with piano accompaniment, though he evidently  thought of that as merely a draft, not a completed composition.

Mahler did not, it seems, begin orchestrating the cycle until after he had finished the First Symphony, and probably the Second and a good part of the Third as well. He was thus no orchestral neophyte when he finally undertook the “Wayfarer” songs. The First Symphony contains a number of passages that quote material from the song cycle, but it now appears as if the symphony was the place where they were first treated in any kind of orchestral guise.

Early in the 1890s he completed a version of the songs in full score, but he held onto it in order to polish and refine the orchestral colors—and that was exactly what he did, probably during 1894 and 1895.
I have referred to the Songs of a Wayfarer as Mahler’s earliest masterpiece. But from the extended chronology of its composition and elaboration, it is clear that the final, masterful version we know today is not an “early” work at all, but rather more a “middle” work. Why the delay? There is no easy answer to this question. Donald Mitchell suggests—purely as a working hypothesis—that Mahler consciously put off finishing the “Wayfarer” songs, even in a sense “suppressed” them, because of the fact that he was using the same material in his First Symphony, for fear that he would be reproached as a “song-symphonist”—a charge that was, indeed, leveled at him in any case. Be that as it may, we can now hear the symphony as a symphony and the song cycle as a song cycle, appreciating the qualities of each and the changes Mahler wrought in the material that they share.

Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen is a deeply affecting contribution to that very German tradition—going back in music to Schubert’s Winterreise and in literature still farther—that the young man who is unlucky in love must wander the wide world, finding in all the brightest and freshest of natural beauties reminders of his lost sweetheart and of his misery, which periodically bursts beyond the bounds of control, finally to achieve some kind of consolation in rest or oblivion or death.

                           Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht

Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld

                        Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer

                                 Die zwei blauen Augen

GUSTAV HOLST: The Planets, Suite for Large Orchestra, Opus 32

Gustav Holst was born—Gustavus Theodore von Holst—in Cheltenham, Gloucesterchire, England, on September 21, 1874, and died in London on May 25, 1934. He wrote The Planets between 1914 and 1916, beginning with Mars (but before the outbreak of war in August), continuing with Venus and Jupiter that fall, writing Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in 1915, and finishing with Mercury in 1916. The first performance of the complete suite took place in London on November 15, 1920. Albert Coates conducted. The score of the complete work calls for four flutes, two piccolos, bass flute, three oboes, bass oboe, and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tenor and bass tubas, six timpani, triangle, side drum, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, gong, bells, glockenspiel, celesta, xylophone, two harps, organ, strings, and (in Neptune), women’s chorus.

Gustav Holst, an Englishman of Russian and Scandinavian stock, was one of the most original composers of the great flowering of English music in the early part of the 20th century. He was a delicate and sickly child, overstrung, and so near-sighted as to be unable to recognize members of his own family, even when wearing thick glasses. During much of his life he suffered from a severe neuritis in his right arm which often forced him to dictate his compositions to an assistant, since he was unable to write them down himself. (Some portions of The Planets were written as dictation in this way.)

While still a student, Holst became familiar with Hindu literature and philosophy. He wanted to set some Hindu texts to music, but found the translations so bad that he learned Sanskrit himself in order to undertake his own versions of the poetic texts. The choral hymns form the Rig Veda and his moving opera Savitri were among the consequences of this study. Perhaps it was through his work in Hindu philosophy that he became interested in astrology. In any case, sometime early in the century he occasionally cast horoscopes for his friends (calling this his “pet vice”), and this interest inspired his best-known composition. Just before the outbreak of the Great War, from which he was exempted because of his long-standing ill health and poor vision, he began the composition of an orchestral suite that would depict in music the character of the seven astrological planets (Earth is not counted in this reckoning, and Pluto had not yet been discovered).

Holst commented once that “the character of each planet suggested lots to me.” He did not consider the work to have a program, but simply to reflect in the broadest sense the character of the planet as treated by astrology. The movements had nothing to do with the classical deities after whom the planets were named. Portions of the work received first performances in 1918 and 1919; from the date of the first performance of the entire score, November 15, 1920, The Planets has been Holst’s most popular orchestral score, a fact that amazed him, for he never considered it to be his best piece. Still, it has retained its popularity, even though snippets have been used in background music and other composers have not failed to imitate many of its pages.

Mars, the Bringer of War. The character of Mars has been associated with war as far back as we have any historical record. Holst’s first audiences assumed that he wrote this movement to depict the war that had just ended, but in fact, he created this music in early 1914, before the war broke out. The fierce allegro, with five pounding beats to the bar, has become a veritable symbol of battle, and the mood and color of this movement have offered the precise character needed by later composers—such as John Williams in his “Imperial March” for Star Wars score—to depict opposing forces in pitched battle.

Venus, the Bringer of Peace. A quiet horn solo answered gently by high woodwinds leads us into the strongly contrasting picture of peace, exemplified by Venus, who, in this zodiacal cosmology, is not a figure of passion and sexual torment but a symbol of serenity.

Mercury, the Winged Messenger. Holst wrote this movement last; indeed, he told a friend that he had the rough plan of all the movements except Mercury worked out in 1914. Obviously music for the “messenger” should be fast, and Holst makes this the opportunity for a brilliant piece of orchestral writing that is also harmonically daring—a fact that we may overlook in its speedy whirlwind of activity.

Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. From one form of the Latin name for Jupiter we get the adjective “jovial.” Of his character, Holst noted, “Jupiter brings jollity in the ordinary sense, and also in the more ceremonial type of rejoicing associated with religions or national festivities.” Indeed, Holst himself later took the big tune in the center of the movement and converted it into a patriotic unison song, “I vow to thee, my country.” This Jupiter is a thoroughly domesticated and cheery Englishman.

Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. This was Holst’s favorite movement. Saturn was the most distant planet known to the ancients; the god was associated with Chronos (time) and portrayed as an old man. It is a serene adagio, filled with flutes and harps and the sustained, static sound of bells.

Uranus, the Magician. Discovered by Sir William Herschel through his telescope in 1781, Uranus symbolizes invention, innovation and discovery. These are hailed at the outset with a threefold summons in the brass instruments before turning into a hearty, heavy dance that disappears into silence.

Neptune, the Mystic. Discovered in 1846, Neptune was the outermost planet known at the time Holst wrote his suite. The other planets could be seen with the naked eye (if one knew where to look!), but Neptune was too distant for that. Holst makes it symbolize mystery, questions that one asks perpetually, but that have no answers. It is slow in tempo, irregular in meter, full of shimmering sounds and subtly dissonant harmonies, finally dying away with the unexpected sounds of women’s voices.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

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Bruno Ferrandis [full bio]

Jacalyn Kreitzer [full bio]

This Performance Sonoma production is supported by grants from both The James Irvine Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation given through Community Foundation of Sonoma County. Learn more...