Robert Spano—newly announced Music Director of the Fort Worth Symphony—returns to Miami Beach for a vibrant concert of chamber orchestra gems. Igor Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale is a theatrical tour de force. Horn Fellow Scott Leger will perform the world premiere of Eleanor Alberga’s new arrangement of Shining Gate of Morpheus—a stirring work for solo horn and chamber orchestra.

Program

Maurice Ravel

Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet (1905)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

Two masterpieces of the harp repertoire, one by Ravel and the other by Debussy, owe their existence to a rivalry between manufacturers. The Pleyel Company unveiled a new chromatic harp in 1897, and in 1904 they commissioned Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane for harp and string orchestra as a showpiece for the instrument. The next year, Érard responded by asking Debussy’s young rival Ravel to write a feature vehicle for their competing double-action pedal harp, which is still the gold standard design with its seven pedals spread on both sides of the harp’s base. (Each pedal has positions for flat, natural or sharp notes, and adjusting the pedal changes all the octaves of that note simultaneously, so that the harpist can play any chromatic pitch without needing extra strings.)

Ravel dashed off the Introduction and Allegro quickly before leaving for a cruise, confessing in a letter, “a week of frantic work and three sleepless nights enabled me to finish it, for better or worse.” He made sure to show off the harp’s characteristic arpeggios and sweeping glissando, and he also took advantage of the ethereal sonority of harp harmonics. He even entrusted the harp with broad, singing melodies, freeing it from its traditional role of accompanist. There is some of Debussy’s impressionistic dreaminess in the hazy introduction, but the bubbling rhythms, Spanish-inflected harmonies and repeating ostinato patterns in the Allegro are pure Ravel.

Eleanor Alberga

Shining Gate of Morpheus for Horn and Strings (2012; world premiere of NWS-commissioned arrangement )
Approximate duration: 15 minutes

Eleanor Alberga began playing piano as a five-year-old in her native Jamaica, and by 10 she was writing her own piano pieces. She went on to earn a scholarship that allowed her to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and she has been based in England ever since. For much of her career she balanced composing with extensive work as a concert pianist, but with a spate of high-profile commissions (including a 2015 concert opener for the BBC Proms), Alberga has shifted her focus entirely to composing more of the vocal, orchestral and chamber music that has made her one of the most respected composers in the United Kingdom and beyond. She wrote the following note about Shining Gate of Morpheus, originally commissioned by England’s Arcadia Festival in 2012 and scored horn and string quartet, and newly arranged for horn and string orchestra at the invitation of the New World Symphony.

I have always been drawn to Greek mythology and the world of fantasy that it embodies. This work came from the idea of Morpheus, the God best known to govern sleep and dreams. It is said that false dreams enter through gates of ivory and true dreams through gates of shining horn.  In Greek, the word for ‘ivory’ is like the word for ‘deceive’ and the word for horn is similar to that for ‘fulfil;’ thus, the use of the horn as a musical instrument is significant.

Homer describes this through Penelope’s words in The Odyssey: “Two gates there are for unsubstantiated dreams, one made of horn and one of ivory. The dreams that pass through the carved ivory delude and bring us tales that turn to naught; those that come forth through the polished horn accomplish real things, whenever seen.” 

The piece is in one movement. A short introduction to the peaceful world of sleep is followed by a fanfare as we enter dreams which take us through several musical tableaux describing prophetic dreams. Strange things happen in dreams and somehow, along with doors opening into scenes such as ‘Ancestors speak,’ ‘The Beloved’ and ‘Three descend,’ there is a visit from Puck, an unrelated character who gets into the mix and stirs things up with his antics. 

                – Eleanor Alberga

Edgard Varèse

Octandre (1923)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes

Edgard Varèse was an innovative composer whose small body of music—only 12 complete works—shaped the future of music on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. He studied in his native Paris until 1907, and then he relocated to Berlin for six years, where he came into contact with Strauss and Schoenberg. After a brief return to Paris, he moved on to New York in 1915 and based himself there for his remaining 50 years.

Octandre, for a chamber ensemble of eight players, is one of Varèse’s early compositions, composed long before the advent of electronic music that brought him widespread fame for how he incorporated recordings of everyday sound. His title came from the botanical term for a flower with eight separate stamens, and his musical approach likewise emphasized the individuality of the ensemble members by including many featured solo parts within the spare textures, like the unsettled oboe line that begins the work, the tapping flute solo that starts the second movement, and the exchange of phrases between the contrabass and bassoon at the opening of the third movement. In such a bare sound world, the use of all eight players together transmits surprising power, especially when led by the piercing muted trumpet.

Anton Webern

Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24 (1934)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes

As the very first student of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern became a pillar of the so-called “Second Viennese School,” that cohort of composers who led the charge toward atonality and serial (i.e. “12-tone”) techniques. In the middle decades of the 20th century, it truly seemed that the innovations of Schoenberg and company might shape the future just as much as the efforts of the “First Viennese School”—namely Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven—especially in Europe and among American academics. And as the ideas outlived their founders, it became clear that the real hero to younger composers was not Schoenberg, but rather his loyal lieutenant, Webern, the most radical and transparent of the bunch.

After Schoenberg articulated his new 12-tone system in the early 1920s, Webern approached that rigorous technique with his own innate sense of focus and concision, producing a string of miniature masterpieces. When he was mistakenly shot and killed by an American soldier in the aftermath of World War II, Webern left behind a catalog of just 31 works with opus numbers, a remarkable life’s work that adds up to about three hours of ultra-concentrated music.

Webern composed this Concerto for Nine Instruments between 1931 and 1934, and he dedicated to Schoenberg on his 60th birthday. The crux of the work is the 12-tone row, meaning a sequence that uses all 12 chromatic pitches once before repeating any. This particular tone row is filled with internal symmetries, such that it really consists of four three-note chunks that are each transformations of each other. What the ear perceives, even without any knowledge of the underlying logic, is a sense of cohesion in the leaps and melodic contours. These inner relationships come through especially clearly in the middle movement, supported by the stability of unchanging quarter-note rhythms. For all the experimentation with how to relate notes to each other, this piece is in other respects quite traditional, with its fast-slow-fast movement pattern and collective concerto instrumentation recalling Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and other Baroque precedents.

Igor Stravinsky

Suite from The Soldier’s Tale (1920)
Approximate duration: 15 minutes

Stravinsky spent the years of World War I exiled in Switzerland. By 1917 the ongoing ravages of war had squelched public music-making (and the associated earnings for musicians), while the Bolshevik Revolution had cut off the composer’s Russian income streams. In need of a profitable venture, Stravinsky and his novelist friend C. F. Ramuz created L'Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale), a production designed for a lean cast of three actors and a dancer, accompanied by a seven-piece chamber ensemble. The production nearly collapsed, and only reached the public in 1918 thanks to a cash infusion from Werner Reinhart, a Swiss patron of the arts and amateur clarinetist. Stravinsky dedicated the score to Reinhart, and paid tribute to him again the next year with a transcription of excerpts from the piece featuring Reinhart’s instrument, the clarinet.

The story of The Soldier’s Tale begins with the solider Joseph marching home on leave, the jubilant mood captured in the dry, sparkling music of The Soldier’s March. The section entitled The Soldier’s Violin comes from the first scene, in which Joseph trades his cheap fiddle to the devil in exchange for a book that promises limitless wealth by revealing all future events. The violin’s double-stops suggest the rustic fiddling of a peasant-soldier.

Joseph eventually seems to have vanquished his foe with The Devil’s Dance, in which the fiddler compels his adversary to dance himself to exhaustion, but his greediness ultimately costs him the princess, leading to The Triumphal March of the Devil that ends this parable with stark percussion.

-- © 2021 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.