Carnegie Hall’s NYO2 makes its anticipated return to New World Center alongside Grammy Award-winning pianist Gabriela Montero and NWS Fellows and alumni for an exclusive one-night-only event—the orchestra’s only public performance before its finale at Carnegie Hall on July 30. 

Under the baton of conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, the ensemble zips from Spanish music to Russian ballet music, performing selections from Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat and Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Pianist Gabriela Montero joins the ensemble as special guest to perform her own Piano Concerto No. 1, “Latin.” 

NYO2’s 2018 season and six-day residency in Miami marked the start of a new partnership between New World Symphony and Carnegie Hall, which has current and former NWS Fellows mentoring and performing side-by-side with participating NYO2 students from across the country, including many from South Florida.   

Comprising a "remarkable array of talent" (The New York Times), NYO2 is an orchestral training program for talented young players ages 14–17 with a focus on recruiting musicians from communities underrepresented in classical music. 

Click here for more information on NYO2.

NYO2 is a program of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute.

Program

Manuel de Falla

The Three-Cornered Hat (1916-19; abridged)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes

A Unique World of Color and Passion

There are few musical traditions more seductive and immediately identifiable than that of southern Spain, and Manuel de Falla’s ballet The Three-Cornered Hat is a supreme example. From the first fanfares to the final, frenzied jota, the listener is pulled into a world of color and passion that is uniquely Andalusian.

The Three-Cornered Hat is one of several pieces that paved the way for contemporary works that link Spanish and Latin American folklore with classical music. Commissioned by legendary ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev for his Ballet Russes, Falla’s breakthrough work brought the ancient flamenco tradition into the world of 20th-century modernism. Diaghilev specialized in ballets that combined vernacular music from different cultures with daring new harmonies and rhythms, including Stravinsky’s Russian ballets, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Debussy’s Jeux.

Diaghilev originally wanted to adapt Falla’s languidly atmospheric piano concerto Nights in the Gardens of Spain, but the composer convinced him to choose his ballet pantomime The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife instead. World War I prevented the ballet from being staged until 1919, when it opened in London with a new title, a much larger orchestra and impeccable modernist credentials: Pablo Picasso as set and costume designer, Léonide Massine (who danced the role of the Miller) as choreographer and Ernest Ansermet (whose early stereo LP remains a classic) as conductor.

Absurdism Andalusian Style

The deliberately absurd story on which The Three-Cornered Hat is based—a folktale depicted by novelist-poet Pedro Antonio de Alarcón in his novel The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife—involves the bumbling attempts by a corrupt Magistrate to seduce a Miller’s Wife, who turns out to be far more clever and resourceful than he is. In Act I, she dances a provocative fandango, offers him grapes and then darts away as he follows her, before he is jumped by the Miller. In Act II, the humiliated Magistrate tries again, arresting the Miller on false charges to get him out of the way, and again fails miserably, ending up in the miller’s bed without the Miller’s Wife. This time it is the Miller’s turn to dance a powerful farruca. At the end, the Miller’s guests join in a jota, hurling the magistrate up and down in a blanket.

As with many ballet scores, conductors of The Three-Cornered Hat in concert usually choose between suites that leave out large chunks of the score or play the entire ballet, which often has action-specific sequences that don’t work well as concert music. We hear an abridged version of the complete ballet on this evening’s program.

A Closer Listen

The work opens with an exuberant fanfare for trumpets and timpani. An Andalusian afternoon is evoked with harp, swirling strings, piquant woodwind solos and a fragment of the jota that closes the work. The Miller’s Wife dances a steamy fandango, ending with slashing repeated chords.

Act II begins with a nocturnal seguidilla for strings and timpani—one of the most evocative sections of the score—and concludes with chamber-like sonorities. The Miller dances a dignified farruca that gradually builds toward repeating four-note motifs and an abrupt cut-off (a coda resembling that of Falla’s frequently performed “Ritual Fire Dance”). A churning dissonance launches the jota finale—the most frenzied dance in the ballet—full of sizzling rubato, massive tutti and a release of pent-up eros and energy, with syncopated modal chords and a brief, serene interlude that leads to an explosive coda.

 

Gabriela Montero

Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra, "Latin" (2016)
Approximate duration: 30 minutes

In the Composer’s Own Words

My story is a modern one, in many ways.

I was born and raised in Venezuela until the age of eight, at which point my family moved with me to the United States for a decade. I landed at the Royal Academy of Music in London in my early 20s. I am a globalized, Latin American woman raised on a diet of European classical music with multiple, circumstantial side dishes of Pan-American folklore.

I also consider myself to be a musician whose primary role is to tell stories that reflect the wide gamut of human experience across both time and geography. Every era and continent has its story to tell—however joyful or troubling—from Renaissance Europe to the contemporary Americas, and composers are well positioned not only to tell it, but to provide a unique form of social commentary.

The piano is my chosen instrument as a performer, but not my only narrative tool as a composer and communicator. It should be no surprise, then, that my first Concerto should be written for the piano as solo instrument and that it should employ traditional, European musical structures to tell my contemporary story as a well-traveled Latin American woman.

In a process of musical osmosis—a natural consequence of the globalized, interconnected world in which we now live—my Piano Concerto No. 1, “Latin,” honors the musical traditions that have shaped me, while inviting the cultural idioms of my native continent to the concert halls of Europe and the wider world. European formalism and the informality of Latin America’s rich, rhythmical identity merge in a complimentary dance of both the joyful and macabre.

Writing my Concerto, I set out to describe the complex and often contradictory character of Latin America, from the rhythmically exuberant to the forebodingly demonic. Unlike my previous work for piano and orchestra—the specifically Venezuelan polemic Ex Patria (2011), a musical portrait of a country in collapse—the “Latin” Concerto draws upon the spirit of the broader South American continent. For every suggestion of surface celebration, in the first-movement Mambo, for instance, there are undercurrents of disruption. The third-movement Allegro Venezolano, which cites the well-known Venezuelan pajarillo, is interrupted at times by the dark arts of black magic, a symbolic reminder of the malevolent forces that too often hold our continent hostage to tyranny in its multiple guises.

It is a great honor to play my Concerto in Miami and New York with my dear friend Carlos Miguel Prieto and NYO2. Both cities beat to the rhythm of South American influence, while also celebrating a European heritage that forms the spine of the work. I can think of few better cities in which to tell my Latin American, musical story.

                — Gabriela Montero

 

Igor Stravinsky

Petrushka (1910-11; revised 1947)
Approximate duration: 35 minutes

Sardonic Success

Stravinsky’s Petrushka is often regarded as a transition piece that bridges the late Romanticism of The Firebird and the explosive modernism of The Rite of Spring. Petrushka, however, stands on its own as a unique and vivid work. In fact, the remarkable thing about all the ballets from Stravinsky’s so-called “Russian Period” is how different, how supremely separate, each is from the others. It is difficult to think of any composer besides Stravinsky, especially a young one, who crammed so much change and innovation into so few years.

Despite its biting, sardonic sensibility, Petrushka was an immediate success with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes when it received its premiere in 1911, occasioning none of the outrage that erupted two years later at the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Nevertheless, Diaghilev worried about the ballet’s reception. “Diaghilev fought to have me change the last four pizzicato notes,” Stravinsky later wrote, “in favor of ‘a tonal ending,’ as he so quaintly put it, though two months later, when Petrushka was one of the ballet’s greatest successes, he denied he had ever been guilty of his original criticism.” The novel ending remained Stravinsky’s favorite moment in the score.

From Piano Concerto to Ballet

Stravinsky originally conceived Petrushka as a short piano concerto depicting a “puppet suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios.” Immediately sensing the dramatic potential in the Russian version of Punch and Judy—and flush with the popular reception of The Firebird—Diaghilev talked Stravinsky into working the piece into a ballet. The elaborate, rambunctious piano part remained a prominent aspect of the score; as Diaghilev predicted, the folk-oriented carnival scenes proved ideal for ballet treatment. In 1947 Stravinsky revised his score, reducing its extravagant orchestration (as he did with The Firebird), bringing it back toward its original conception as a concert piece.

The Clown in the Concert Hall

As with Stravinsky’s other Russian ballets, Petrushka is programmed most frequently as concert music. The churning ostinato rhythms and vivid orchestral colors of the carnival sections, as well as the more harmonically “advanced” music in the second tableau, are exhilarating on their own without the ballet format. The famous bitonal “Petrushka chord” is at once a burlesque gesture and the first of numerous serious harmonic experiments that to this day retain their bite.

It is the mocking, nose-thumbing sense of mischief in Petrushka (subtitled “Burlesque in Four Scenes”) that remains its most endearing characteristic. Stravinsky said he wanted the dialogue for trumpets in two keys at the end to show that Petrushka’s “ghost is still insulting the public.” The public, obviously, still loves it.

                — Jack Sullivan
                 © 2019 The Carnegie Hall Corporation