The Metropolitan Opera’s Ronnita Miller takes the New World Center stage to perform delightful songs by classical music’s symphonic masters. Igor Stravinsky embraces his playful side with songs inspired by Russian folk tunes and sleepy tomcats. Gabriel Fauré enchants with his Second Piano Quartet and selections from La Bonne Chanson, a dreamy song cycle based on love poems. Brazilian sambas and tangos are at the heart of Darius Milhaud’s Dances of the Little Crocodile. Start the afternoon with gems by two composers overshadowed in history: Joseph Boulogne—Mozart’s contemporary and rival—and Germaine Tailleferre, the only female in the famed composer group Les Six.  

This concert is part of the Chamber Music Series. NWS Fellows and acclaimed guest artists collaborate at these intimate concerts, performing a wide range of repertoire for small ensembles. Subscriptions for this 6-concert series are $72. Click here to explore the full subscription! 

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Program

Joseph Boulogne

Sonata in E-flat major for Harp with Flute Obbligato (c. 1770)
Approximate duration: 9 minutes

Joseph Boulogne’s French father owned sugar plantations on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and the son that he raised was conceived with one of his African slaves. Throughout his life, Boulogne defied what should have been possible for a person of African descent under France’s Code Noir: He was a champion fencer before his 20th birthday, and also a renowned boxer, dancer and marksman, but his real love was music, and his prowess with the violin allowed him to become the leader of a powerhouse orchestra in Paris and a personal instructor to Queen Marie Antoinette.

The Sonata that Boulogne wrote for flute and harp sometime in the 1770s is typical of the luxurious music that filled Marie Antoinette’s lavish court. The Queen was an accomplished keyboardist and singer, and she could even play the harp. Boulogne might have written this Sonata for the Princess de Lamballe, a close confidante of the Queen, or any number of patrons during a boom time for flute and harp music in Paris. (Even Mozart picked up on the trend during his visit in 1778, writing a concerto for the pair of instruments.)

The flute part often stays in its untaxing low register, and it has ample rests in a Sonata that treats it as obbligato icing on the deliciously sweet cake that is the harp. This was exactly the kind of music that aristocratic amateurs adored to play—at least until the French Revolution, which saw the Princess de Lamballe stabbed to death by a mob in 1792 and Marie Antoinette executed by guillotine the next year.

Germaine Tailleferre

Image for Eight Instruments  (1918)
Approximate duration: 6 minutes

Germaine Tailleferre was a standout student at the Paris Conservatory during the earth-rattling years of World War I, sharing classes with several of the young men with whom she would soon be inextricably linked. For upstart French composers in those years, no hero loomed larger than Erik Satie, and he was so impressed by Tailleferre that in 1917 he declared her his “musical daughter.” A 1920 article gave those acolytes of Satie a collective name—Les Six—but their career progress was uneven in the years to come. Tailleferre’s old classmates Milhaud and Honegger surged into the international limelight, along with Poulenc; Tailleferre herself continued composing in relative obscurity until her death at the age of 91, maintaining her connection all the while to the impressionist and neoclassical styles of her youth.

Before Les Six coalesced, Tailleferre wrote a novel piece of chamber music in 1918 that put her at the forefront of the new French style. The original title of this little poetic gem was Pastorale, which implied naivete and innocence. Tailleferre didn’t manage to publish the original version of Image that makes such attractive use of flute, clarinet, piano, celesta and string quartet, but her arrangement for two pianos reached the public in 1921.

Darius Milhaud

Dances of the Little Crocodile for Violin and Piano, Op. 256 (1945)
Approximate duration: 6 minutes

Darius Milhaud was exempted from military service on medical grounds after he graduated from the Paris Conservatory in 1915, and so he joined the diplomatic corps instead, leaving soon for a two-year stint in Brazil. Milhaud had always had an ear attuned to folk music, dating back to his childhood listening to the work songs of the laborers at his family’s almond business in Provence, and he came back from his time in Brazil with a lasting affection for the intoxicating rhythms of samba and other popular dance styles.

Those Brazilian influences were still swirling in 1945, when Milhaud was teaching at Mills College in Oakland. (His Jewish ancestry made him a Nazi target, so he left France after it was occupied in 1940.) He wrote the Danses de Jacarémirim for a local violinist, taking his title from a Portuguese slang word meaning “little crocodile.” (Milhaud also used “Jacarémirim” as a pseudonym years earlier when writing newspaper articles.) He based the work’s three short movements on dance styles also given in their diminutive forms: Little Samba, Little Tango and Little Choro. Milhaud dashed off refreshing miniatures like these with ease and fluidity like few composers in history, eventually reaching an astonishing output of 443 published opuses.

Igor Stravinsky

Cat Lullabies for Voice and Three Clarinets (1915)
Approximate duration: 4 minutes

In the space of five years, Igor Stravinsky went from being a late-blooming music student unknown even in his native Russia to the world’s most notorious composer, whose ballet The Rite of Spring sparked a legendary riot at its 1913 premiere in Paris. His run of successes with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes ended with the outbreak of World War I, and Stravinsky began what turned out to be a permanent exile from his homeland, landing first in Switzerland. He also began to drift away from the orchestral bombast he inherited from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, and turned instead to lean ensembles and bone-dry textures, preparing the way for his neoclassical style that emerged in the 1920s.

Two small works for voice and chamber ensemble highlight the worlds that Stravinsky was straddling in the first phase of his exile. Berceuses du chat has a French title (meaning “Cat Lullabies”), but the songs were originally composed in Russian, borrowing source material from a folksong collection Stravinsky found during his last trip home to Russia and Ukraine. The scoring for low voice and three clarinets brought new austerity to the timeless folk material, and the jagged harmonies show Stravinsky reacting to the advances of his colleagues and rivals in Europe, especially Schoenberg.

Igor Stravinsky

Pribaoutki  (1914)
Approximate duration: 4 minutes

A year earlier, at the very start of his Swiss exile, Stravinsky set four Russian texts in the brief cycle Pribaoutki, accompanying the low voice with a tiny but fierce orchestra of four winds and four strings. Neither of these transitional works reached the public amid the disruption of war, and the first performance in 1918 in Paris substituted piano for the distinctive ensembles. Credit goes to composer Arnold Schoenberg for bringing them out in their intended form, with both works appearing in 1919 on a program performed by the contemporary music society he directed in Vienna.

Gabriel Fauré

La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61 (1892-94)
Approximate duration: 10 minutes

Thanks to an introduction from his former teacher, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré found a musical home in his late 20s in the Paris salon of the opera singer Pauline Viardot. That environment nurtured Fauré’s talents as a composer of beautiful and intimate songs, and in the years to come he built on those strengths to create some of the most memorable vocal music in the French repertoire.

Composed between 1892 and 1894 using texts by Paul Verlaine, La bonne chanson elevated the song cycle to new heights of musical sophistication, shocking Fauré’s old mentor Saint-Saëns and inspiring the up-and-coming Claude Debussy. Fauré dedicated these love songs to the married soprano Emma Bardac, with whom he had a torrid affair; there was even suspicion that he was the father of her daughter, Dolly, for whom Fauré wrote a suite of piano pieces. (A decade later, Bardac became Debussy’s second wife under equally scandalous circumstances.)

This performance features an arrangement of four songs by Michael Linville, the New World Symphony Dean of Chamber Music and Fellow Development.

Gabriel Fauré

Quartet No. 2 in G minor for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello, Op. 45 (1886)
Approximate duration: 34 minutes

Fauré owed much to his former piano teacher Camille Saint-Saëns, who was only a decade older but who had the star power to lift young French composers up with him. One major outlet was the National Society of Music that Saint-Saëns cofounded in 1871, creating a platform for new chamber music in an era when the genre had fallen out of favor in France. Fauré, Franck and Massenet all presented breakthrough works on Society concerts, sparking a renaissance in French chamber music that rippled through to Debussy, Ravel and the generations since.

Fauré presented the First Piano Quartet at the National Society of Music in 1880, and he returned in 1887 with the Second Piano Quartet in G minor. Certain aspects of texture and thematic development point to the influence of Brahms, whose own First Piano Quartet shares the same key. There are also cyclical elements that return to connect separate movements, a hallmark of Liszt’s music.

Looking back 20 years later, Fauré wrote to his wife that, “without really meaning to,” he based the central piano figure from the Quartet’s third movement on the peal of bells he used to hear as a child, on nights when a westerly breeze would carry the sound from a neighboring village. “Their sound gives rise to a vague reverie,” he explained, inspiring a melody for which violists owe their eternal gratitude.

-- © 2022 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.

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