Beethoven Pastoral Symphony • Gabriel Kahane
September 22, 7:30 pm
Great Hall, GBPAC
Henry Purcell • The Fairy Queen, Z. 629, selections
Gabriel Kahane • Crane Palimpsest (2012) with Gabriel Kahane, vocalist
Ludwig van Beethoven • Symphony no. 6 in F, Op. 68, ‘Pastoral’
Indie singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane joins the WCFSO for the Midwest premiere of his acclaimed Crane Palimpsest for baritone and chamber orchestra, a 2012 work in which this gifted composer/performer explores connections between the worlds of popular and classical music.
Linking these two worlds are The Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Purcell captures the earthy English Baroque imagination in his adaptation of Shakespeare’s outdoor fantasy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Beethoven conveys the everyday sounds of the 19th century through his evocative orchestral depiction of nature.
Sponsored by Iowa Public Radio and Friends of the WCFSO
Program notes
Henry Purcell • The Fairy Queen, Z. 629, selections
Like Mozart, Schubert and many others, Purcell is one of music history’s tragedies. There remains little doubt that he was the leading composer of his time (most insist that he was the greatest British-born composer from the Baroque to the time of Elgar and Vaughan Williams), but the cause of his untimely death remains unknown.
As he held concurrent positions as organist at both Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, his influence on English church music was paramount. Still, Purcell found sufficient time to also compose for the theater and his crowning musical achievement, Dido and Aeneas, is often acknowledged as the first genuine English opera. In less than an hour, Purcell succinctly and dramatically spins Virgil’s tragic tale of two lovers torn apart by the whim of the gods.
Purcell composed over 40 works for the theater, including complete incidental music as well as brief interludes. The Fairy Queen is actually a semi-opera or masque with a libretto adapted from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Surprisingly enough, the score was lost for nearly 300 years, and only recently has found its way back into the repertoire - due in large part to the Baroque revival movement of the late 20th century.
In addition to a large number of significant arias, the work is rife with instrumental music, demonstrating Purcell’s cogent understanding of the fineries of the mature Baroque style, including a mastery of English counterpoint and a well-developed context of the Italian opera. Many of the instrumental sections were used much like modern day theatrical overtures, with “act-tunes” or short sinfonias presented between acts as scenes were changed.
• Brian Hughes
Gabriel Kahane • Crane Palimpsest (2012)
Crane Palimpsest is a love letter to New York, in the form of a meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge, juxtaposing settings of stanzas from Hart Crane’s Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge with songs set to my own lyrics in response to Crane’s poem. I’ve literalized the idea of “the bridge” in the sense that two distinct musical vocabularies are in play and cross paths; the first being the more formal language heard in the introduction and first several stanzas of the Crane, the second being the vernacular or pop-based harmonic language in the songs with my own words. As the piece reaches a kind of peripeteia around the line “O Harp and Altar”, it is as if the two languages, crudely speaking, meet on the bridge and are exchanged: the final song with my own lyrics begins in a dense and dissonant setting before giving way to the final stanzas of the Crane poem which are set in an unapologetically open harmonic atmosphere.
• Gabriel Kahane
Ludwig van Beethoven • Symphony no. 6 in F, Op. 68, ‘Pastoral’
Beethoven, who is often bizarre and baroque, takes at times the majestic flight of an eagle, and then creeps in rocky pathways. He first fills the soul with sweet melancholy and then shatters it by a mass of barbarous chords. He seems to harbor together doves and crocodiles.
• Tablettes de Polymnie, Paris 1810
The contemporary view of Beethoven is that of a very driven man, angry at the world because of his all-consuming deafness. Yet, he was a man who loved to escape the haste of the city in search of tranquil solitude. Having walked in his footsteps in both the Czech spa Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary) and the Hungarian estate of the Brunswick family, this writer can well understand Beethoven’s sentiments: “How glad I am to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees, flowers, and rocks. Noone can love the country as I do; the woods, trees and rocks give back the echo that a man longs for.”
Much could be surmised about Beethoven’s leap forward to the Romantic program symphony, yet Charles Rosen, award-winning author of The Classical Style, insists that the composer was paying homage to the past: “The Pastorale is, for the most part, a true classical symphony strongly influenced by the then fashionable doctrine of art as the painting of feelings or sentiments, a philosophy better suited to the music of the 1760s (and before) than to the dramatic style that succeeded it.” Whether looking forward or back, the Sixth Symphony was, during his lifetime, Beethoven’s greatest popular success.
The first movement, subtitled “pleasant, cheerful feelings aroused by approaching the countryside,” is a picture of serenity and peace. With a texture that is string dominant, the themes are all motivically based; the development is a series of simple modulations on the thematic ideas. Frequent drones (reminiscent of the bagpipe, a folk instrument popular throughout all of Europe, not just Scotland) add to the rustic flavor.
The “Scene by the brook” is attractively designed with an undulating, “aquatic” accompaniment beneath a gentle melody resembling bird-song. Even at its loudest moments, the landscape never exceeds a dramatic apex. Solo winds offer moments of sublime expression, including the actual birdcalls (including nightingales and cuckoos) at the conclusion.
Beethoven’s scherzo is titled “Festive gathering of country folk,” and is a peasant dance, opening as if one viewed the hamlet from a distance. The oboe sings a song of glee, answered in succession by the clarinet and horn. The strings, in a kind of early nineteenth century barn dance replace the trio before returning to the original theme.
Many have noted the five-movement structure of the symphony, but—in fact—there are only three, as the final movements are connected. Beethoven also used this type of construction in the Fifth Symphony (coincidence?), and his ideas concerning symphonic architecture would influence the next generation of symphonists.
The symphony segues into “Storm,” in which the compulsive Beethoven finally rears his head. The orchestra erupts as if igniting all of its explosive energy. This movement alone leaps forward harmonically, rhythmically, and texturally. With cellos and basses playing in cross-rhythms (4 vs. 5) and lightning strokes flashing in the violins (as well as the addition of a screeching piccolo) this is not just any storm, but a cataclysm capable of frightening both man and beast.
The storm is not long-lived, however, and the scene moves immediately onward, this time to the “Shepherds’ song; happiness after the storm.” Peace returns to the valley as the clarinet and horn announce the pastoral theme, which is completed by the violins. Beethoven builds a set of rhythmic and timbral variations over the theme, apparently winding down to a quiet finish. Only in the final two chords is the scene broken - not emphatically - but rather embracing the beloved countryside one last time.
• Brian Hughes
