Haydn, Bizet & Copland

Saturday, March 16, 2013 • 7:30 p.m.
First Free Methodist Church

Orchestra Seattle
Seattle Chamber Singers
Clinton Smith, conductor
Catherine Haight, soprano
Melissa Plagemann, mezzo-soprano
Wesley Rogers, tenor
Charles Robert Stephens, baritone

Program

Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787)
“Dance of the Furies” from Orphée et Eurydice

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Missa in Angustiis (“Lord Nelson” Mass), Hob. XXII:11

—intermission—

Georges Bizet (1838–1875)
Carmen Suite No. 1

Aaron Copland (1900–1990)
Billy the Kid Suite

About the Concert

Haydn’s great “Lord Nelson” Mass (which the composer actually dubbed Missa in Angustiis, having composed it before news of Nelson’s victory over Napoleon reached him) takes center stage as we welcome another of the six candidates for OSSCS music director: Clinton Smith, currently music director of the St. Cloud Symphony and previously assistant conductor at Minnesota Opera. The concert opens with a fiery orchestral dance by Gluck, and after intermission we visit the opera and the ballet: a selection of Bizet’s beloved melodies from Carmen is followed by Aaron Copland’s famous “cowboy ballet” that interpolates songs from the Old West.

About the Conductor

Guest conductor Clinton Smith obtained his formal training at the Universities of Texas and Michigan before being engaged by Minnesota Opera as assistant/cover conductor and chorusmaster, where he worked for four seasons, preparing over 20 productions and conducting main stage performances. The 2012–13 season will see his debut as the newly appointed artistic director and principal conductor of the St. Cloud Symphony. Additionally, he will work as cover conductor for Juilliard Opera, cover conductor/coach for Santa Fe Opera, cover conductor/chorusmaster for Portland Opera, coach for Kentucky Opera, conduct Skylark Opera, and prepare the chorus for Minnesota Opera’s recent commission of Doubt by Douglas J. Cuomo. Recently, Mr. Smith worked for San Francisco Opera’s Merola program as assistant conductor/chorusmaster and as guest coach for the National University of Taiwan in Tainan City, conducted Madama Butterfly for Hamline University, and led a workshop of Minnesota Opera’s Pulitzer Prize–winning commission Silent Night by Kevin Puts, which premiered in 2011.

Past positions include: assistant conductor/coach for Glimmerglass Opera; conductor for the Canadian Operatic Arts Academy at Western Ontario University; conductor and coach with Opéra du Périgord in Périgueux, France, Austrian-American Mozart Opera Academy in Salzburg, Austria, and University of Michigan Opera Theatre; assistant conductor and coach at the International Institute of Vocal Arts in Chiari, Italy; music director of the University of Michigan Life Sciences Orchestra and University of Michigan Gilbert and Sullivan Society; assistant conductor of the University of Michigan Symphony, Philharmonia and Campus Orchestras; music director of the Starlight Symphony Orchestra; conductor of the University of Texas Undergraduate Opera; and assistant conductor of the University of Texas Butler Opera Theatre.

About the Soloists

Soprano Catherine Haight appears frequently with the region’s most prestigious musical organizations, regularly performing in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Carmina Burana and The Nutcracker. Reviewing PNB’s world premiere of Christopher Stowell’s Zaïs, The Seattle Times called her singing “flawless.’ She appears as soprano soloist on the OSSCS recording of Handel’s Messiah, the Seattle Choral Company recording of Carmina Burana, and on many movie and video game soundtracks, including Pirates of the Caribbean, Ghost Rider and World of Warcraft. This spring she will sing Strauss’ Four Last Songs with the orchestra of Seattle Pacific University, where she has served on the voice faculty since 1992.

Mezzo-soprano Melissa Plagemann has been praised by audiences and the press for her “clear, burnished voice” (Tacoma News Tribune) and “attractively expressive mezzo” (Crosscut Seattle). She performs frequently with the finest musical organizations throughout the Pacific Northwest, and is rapidly becoming known for the passion and musical intelligence she brings to performances on opera and concert stages alike. A first-prize winner in competitions of the Ladies’ Musical Club, the Seattle Musical Art Society and the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society, she holds degrees from the University of Victoria and Indiana University. Learn more: northwestartists.org

Tenor Wesley Rogers has been hailed by San Francisco Classical Voice as possessing the “kind of tenor that pours forth powerfully, effortlessly, seemingly for any length of time.” During the 2012–2013 season, he sings Belmonte in Die entführung aus dem Serail with L’Opéra National de Montpellier and Opéra de Liège, and—in a debut with Madison Opera—Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni. Recent performances include an important debut as Belmonte at Semperoper Dresden, the Berlioz Te Deum at UC Davis’ Mondavi Center, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with OSSCS, and a concert appearance as Belmonte at the Theatre des Champs-Elysées. Performances with Seattle Opera have included roles in Billy Budd, La Fanciulla del West, Salome and Daron Hagen’s Amelia.

Baritone Charles Robert Stephens has enjoyed a career spanning a wide variety of roles and styles in opera and concert music, with Opera News praising him for “committed characterization and a voice of considerable beauty.” At New York City Opera, he sang the role of Prof. Friedrich Bhaer in the New York premiere of Mark Adamo’s Little Women, and was hailed by The New York Times as a “baritone of smooth distinction.” He has sung on numerous occasions at Carnegie Hall in a variety of roles with Opera Orchestra of New York, the Oratorio Society of New York, the Masterworks Chorus and Musica Sacra, as well as with ensembles throughout the Pacific Northwest. Learn more: seidelartistsmgmt.com

Program Notes

Christoph Willibald Gluck
“Dance of the Furies” from Orphée et Eurydice

Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck was born in Erasbach, Bavaria, on July 2, 1714, and died in Vienna on November 15, 1787. He originally composed “Dance of the Furies” for his 1761 ballet Don Juan, later repurposing it for the 1774 French version of his 1762 opera Orfeo ed Euridice. The 1774 revision calls for pairs of oboes and horns, plus harpsichord and strings.

Modern listeners know Gluck primarily for his opera Orfeo ed Euridice, a revolutionary work that helped reshape the art form. Earlier generations revered his music, however: Berlioz and Wagner held him in the highest regard.

The son of a Bavarian forester, Gluck grew up speaking Czech, moving to Prague at age 18, and then to Vienna at age 22. The following year he traveled to Milan, where he worked as a chamber musician and studied composition with Giovanni Battista Sammartini. Milan afforded Gluck the opportunity to become familiar with Italian opera, and he premiered his own first contribution to that genre there during 1741. A few years later, he befriended Handel during a trip to London, and after visits to other European capitals returned to Vienna in 1752.

Gluck’s early operas showed no signs of bucking established tradition, but in 1760 he began collaborating with poet Ranieri Calzabigi and choreographer Gasparo Angiolini on a ballet-pantomime after Molière’s 1660 play Don Juan—a story Mozart would later utilize for his opera Don Giovanni. In Don Juan, Gluck and his artistic partners sought, according to Italian conductor Giovanni Antonini, “to tell a story exclusively by means of dance movements accompanied by music—it may be considered as marking the birth of modern ballet as an independent form of expression.”

In the ballet’s climactic finale, Don Juan descends into hell. Choreographer Angiolini described the action as follows: “The center of the Earth opens up, belching flames. From this volcano emerge many specters and furies that torment Don Juan. He is chained up by them, and in his dreadful despair is swallowed up along with all the monsters; and an earthquake covers the spot with a pile of rubble.” The dramatic stage action inspired Gluck to create a D-minor chaconne—a musical form in which melodic variations unfold over a repeating harmonic pattern. This “Dance of the Furies” achieved wide recognition outside of the ballet and served to inspire the Sturm und Drang style most often associated with Haydn symphonies dating from the late 1760s and early 1770s.

After moving to Paris, Gluck reworked some of his operatic successes from the previous decade, dulling the revolutionary edge of works such as Orfeo, but making them more palatable to Parisian tastes by translating the librettos into French and incorporating dance interludes. For the resulting Orphée et Eurydice, Gluck repurposed his “Dance of the Furies” from Don Juan, adjusting the orchestration in the process.

—Jeff Eldridge

Franz Joseph Haydn
Missa in Angustiis, Hob. XXII:11

Haydn was born in Rohrau-on-the-Leitha, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. He composed this mass between July 10 and August 31, 1798. The first performance likely took place on September 23 in Eisenstadt’s Stadtpfarr (parish) church. Haydn’s original orchestration calls for trumpets, timpani, organ and strings.

One of the most inventive and independent spirits in the history of music, Joseph Haydn employed the diligence and tenacity of his hard-working forebears, as well as his unusual musical gifts, to accomplish over the course of his lifetime a single-handed and tremendous conquest of all of musical Europe such as had never before occurred. The son of a farmer-wheelwright and a cook, “Papa Haydn,” as his friend Mozart called him, can be considered the “father” of Viennese musical classicism at the turn of the 19th century, particularly the symphony and the string quartet, both of which he nurtured from toddlerhood to maturity. Over the course of a career that spanned 54 astonishingly prolific years, he wrote, in a wide range of genres, music that displayed a playful sense of humor and a sparkling imagination, integrating elements of folk music and whimsical coloristic effects into “serious” works, and infusing his compositions with the irrepressible joyfulness of spirit that sustained him through his life’s most turbulent times.

Three years after Haydn’s return to Vienna in 1795 from brilliant musical successes in England, Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy required the composer to do little apart from the annual composition of a new mass for the September name day of the prince’s wife, Maria Josefa Hermenegild. From 1796 to 1802, Haydn spent his summers writing six “Hermenegild masses.” Haydn simply titled the third such work Missa at the top of the score, and in his own catalog of works dubbed it Missa in Angustiis (“Mass in [a Time of] Anxiety”). Whatever Haydn’s reasons for so naming the work, it later earned the nickname Nelsonmesse, perhaps because of a subsequent performance during Lord Nelson’s visit with the Esterházys at Eisenstadt during September 1800.

Haydn biographer H.C. Robbins Landon has called the Missa in Angustiis “arguably Haydn’s greatest single composition.” The composer beautifully balances a small orchestra (the Esterházys had dismissed the orchestra’s woodwind players some years earlier, and he therefore scored the work for the remaining musical forces) with chorus and a solo vocal quartet—the solo soprano and bass parts are especially challenging!

The opening of the mass (as well as the “Benedictus”) centers around the shadowy key of D minor. The tempestuous “Kyrie” with which the Missa in Angustiis begins is pervaded by a motive composed of agitated repeated notes—often treated imitatively—that accompanies the anguished cries for mercy in descending octave leaps that precede the brief “Christe eleison.” In contrast, the warmly reassuring D-major first section of the “Gloria” movement presents the chorus and soloists dancing together in an intricately wrought, exuberant expression of praise to the Lord who is merciful. The slow, subdued, triple-meter “Qui tollis” section features a contemplative bass solo (into which the chorus, sometimes encouraged by the solo soprano, inserts softly chanted petitions) and provides an independent solo voice for the organ. The energetic music of the movement’s opening returns in the third section, which concludes with a vivacious fugal “in gloria Dei Patris” to balance the A–B–A″ architecture.

The “Credo” (where omitted phrases of the liturgical text were probably added or improvised during performance) opens with an orchestral introduction followed by sopranos and tenors in canon with the altos and basses (reinforced by stately trumpets) affirming belief in one God. Haydn emphasizes Christ’s descent from heaven to become human through text repetition before, in the “Et incarnatus,” a gracefully gliding soprano solo introduces a triple-meter choral meditation—sometimes joined by the soloists and punctuated by trumpets and timpani—upon the mystery of God’s assuming human flesh and being crucified, dead and buried. In the largely homophonic “Et resurrexit,” strings run to the empty tomb in excited sixteenth notes, and a sparkling soprano solo ushers the chorus into the glorious life of the world to come.

The brief but rapturously radiant “Sanctus” leads to the fanfare-like opening of the “Pleni sunt coeli,” in which heaven and Earth are filled with the effervescent sixteenth notes of the strings that accompany the chorus’ exclamations. In the relatively lengthy “Benedictus” (during which the mass’ celebrant had a number of liturgical actions to perform!) contrasting choral, ensemble and solo sections contribute to an unsettled, nervously expectant mood; soon, triplet trumpet fanfares announce the arrival of the one coming in the Lord’s name, leading from the movement’s minor mode to a triumphant D major in which the choral “hosannas” of the “Sanctus” return.

In the reverently lyrical “Agnus Dei,” strings provide a delicately filigreed accompaniment for the four soloists’ prayers for mercy and forgiveness. The imitative choral “Dona Nobis Pacem” that provides “traveling music” for the clergy at the end of the mass bubbles over with sixteenth-note string excitement as performers, listeners and composer rejoice together in D major, with certainty that—as the texts of the mass teach—death and despair are swallowed up in life and hope in the promise of eternal peace.

—Lorelette Knowles

Georges Bizet
Suite No. 1 from Carmen

Bizet was born in Paris on October 25, 1838, and died in Bougival (near Paris) on June 3, 1875. He began composing Carmen around early 1873; the opera premiered in Paris on March 3, 1875. The first of two orchestral suites culled from the opera requires pairs of woodwinds (including piccolo and English horn), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion and strings.

The first staging of Georges Bizet’s Carmen—although far from a failure, as often depicted—met with critical reaction ranging from hostile to indifferent. As a result, Bizet (who died a mere three months after the premiere) did not live to see Carmen become the most celebrated of all French operas, its brilliant tunes familiar around the world even to listeners who have never set foot in an opera house or concert hall.

Adapted from a novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, Carmen tells the tale of a gypsy girl who works in a Seville cigarette factory. She seduces a soldier, Don José, who sacrifices his sweetheart and his military career to pursue her. When Carmen turns her affections to the toreador Escamillo, José murders her in a fit of jealousy. Although Bizet’s librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, toned down the novella’s racy subject matter, the scandalous plot and its fateful conclusion nevertheless shocked audiences at the Opèra-Comique. After Bizet’s untimely death, his friend Ernest Giraud composed recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue of the original staging—which helped the opera gain acceptance and, eventually, tremendous acclaim.

Giraud also assembled two orchestral suites from Bizet’s music for Carmen, the first of which consists largely of orchestral introductions to the opera’s four acts. The suite begins with an instrumental passage that opens Act I, prominently featuring the “fate” motive that foreshadows the opera’s tragic conclusion. This leads without pause to the orchestral prelude to Act IV, which anticipates the bullfighting action to follow with an “Aragonaise” based on the Spanish jota—a lively dance in 3/8 time.

Next comes the entr’acte that precedes Act III, with solo flute and harp introducing a tranquil melody that establishes a pastoral mood for the mountain setting where Carmen and José hide out with some smugglers. The “Seguedille”—another Spanish 3/8 dance, but in a more relaxed tempo—adapts Carmen’s aria from the end of Act I, with solo oboe standing in for Carmen as she seduces José.

In “Les dragons d’Alcala,” the entr’acte preceding Act II, bassoons sing the marching song of Don José’s regiment. The suite concludes with the march of the toreadors, which figures prominently in the bullfighting action of Act IV; this instrumental rendition, composed by Bizet to serve as the opera’s prelude, incorporates the toreador song (“Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre”), Escamillo’s famous aria from Act II.

With the exception of the “Seguedille,” the suite retains Bizet’s original orchestrations, admired by composers from Tchaikovsky to Richard Strauss, who advised: “If you want to learn how to orchestrate, don’t study Wagner’s scores, study Carmen.…It is sheer perfection. What wonderful economy, how every note is in its proper place.”

Aaron Copland
Billy the Kid Suite

Copland was born in Brooklyn on November 14, 1900, and died in North Tarrytown, New York, on December 2, 1990. Composed during the summer of 1938, the ballet Billy the Kid debuted in Chicago in October of that year. Copland subsequently prepared a concert suite, premiered by William Steinberg and the NBC Symphony Orchestra at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on November 9, 1940. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds (plus piccolo), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings.

Between 1936 and 1941, impresario Lincoln Kirstein commissioned a number of ballets on American themes from up-and-coming young composers for his Ballet Caravan (a precursor of the New York City Ballet), among them Pocahontas by Elliot Carter and Tom (based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin) by David Diamond. Kirstein initially sought out Aaron Copland to score a Civil War–era ballet to be entitled Memorial Day—that project never materialized, but in early 1938 he persuaded choreographer Eugene Loring to collaborate with Copland on a work about famed outlaw Billy the Kid.

Inspired by Walter Noble Burns’ 1926 fictionalized biography The Saga of Billy the Kid, Loring devised an even more historically inaccurate scenario that had a 12-year-old Billy avenging the death his mother, launching a life of crime that ends with Billy being tracked down by Sheriff Pat Garrett, his former friend. Copland initially hesitated at agreeing to write a “cowboy ballet,” until Kirstein told the composer that Billy, like Copland, had been born in New York City.

Kirstein supplied Copland with two books of cowboy songs, suggesting—but not insisting—that he incorporate some of them into his score, much as Copland had done with south-of-the-border tunes in his recent orchestral work El Salón México. “[I]n order to humor Mr. Kirstein, who said he didn’t really care whether I used cowboy material or not,” Copland wrote not long afterward, “I decided to take his two little collections with me when I left for Paris in the summer of 1938.…Perhaps there is something different about a cowboy song in Paris. But whatever the reason may have been, it wasn’t very long before I found myself hopelessly involved in expanding, contracting, rearranging and superimposing cowboy tunes on the rue de Rennes in Paris.” In all, Copland made use of six cowboy songs but balked at employing perhaps the most famous such tune, “Home on the Range,” remarking to his Parisian neighbor, David Diamond, “I decided to draw the line someplace.” While some of the actual melodies remained relatively intact, Copland added what he called “fresh and unconventional harmonies…without spoiling their naturalness.”

Upon returning to America, Copland completed the ballet at Peterborough, New Hampshire, and it premiered in Chicago on October 16, 1938, with Loring dancing the title role and keyboardists Walter Hendl and Arthur Gold playing a two-piano reduction of the score. The full orchestral version debuted in New York on May 24, 1939. Not long after, Copland set about creating an orchestral suite that retained approximately two-thirds of the ballet score. Serge Koussevitzky had expressed interest in performing the suite at a November 1939 concert with the Boston Symphony, but Copland was preoccupied in California working on the score for the film Of Mice and Men. (“Hollywood is an extraordinary place,” he wrote to Koussevitzky on October 18. “You must come here some time. It’s like nothing else in the world. Thank heavens!”) Copland indicated he could get the parts to Boston by November 6, but asked the conductor to postpone the premiere until February 1940, when he could be in attendance. That performance never transpired, and the orchestral suite instead made its debut the following November, on a radio broadcast by the NBC Symphony.

The suite begins, as does the ballet, with music for settlers traversing the open prairie. Loring had envisioned this sequence as a march, but Copland’s use of a 3/4 meter and a trudging, syncopated bass line signifies the arduous journey across the plains. The music begins quietly, with two high-register clarinets introducing a theme harmonized in open fifths, but the dynamic level steadily escalates to a triple-forte climax with declamatory brass chords evoking the awesome power of the landscape.

Solo piccolo (replacing a tin whistle from the original ballet score) presents the first of the cowboy tunes, “Great Grand-dad.” Dissonant fragments of “Git Along, Little Dogies” intrude as Copland paints a picture of “familiar figures ambl[ing] by” on the main street of a frontier town. Solo trombone introduces an off-kilter waltz superimposed over the prevailing duple-meter “Great Grand-dad” tune, with the waltz melody eventually dominating the proceedings. The music quiets briefly until a fortissimo outburst from full orchestra leads to a spirited variant of “The Old Chisolm Trail.” Two trombones impersonate drunken cowboys with a new theme in broad triplets, and the melodic material piles up as more and more people arrive on the scene.

The townsfolk stop to watch some Mexican women dance a jarabe, which Copland casts in 5/8 time (with occasional bars of 4/8). Two 7/8 measures transition to a 3/4 statement of “Old Paint” by violins and solo oboe. The music becomes ever more forceful, leading to a tragic climax in which young Billy tries to stop a fistfight, his mother ends up being shot, and Billy stabs the perpetrator.

A brief passage recalls the music of the open prairie, and the suite jumps ahead to later in the story. As an older Billy plays cards with Pat Garrett, Copland creates a 12/8 nocturne out of “The Dying Cowboy” (better known as “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie”). First violins and violas sing out the melody against a repeated bass line from cellos and amorphous textures from flute and clarinet. Solo trumpet eventually takes up the tune in a cadenza-like sequence.

The action jumps ahead once again to a ferocious gun battle, dominated by explosive percussion with interjections from rapid-fire trumpets and low brass and strings. When the gunfire subsides, townsfolk react to Billy’s capture with an increasingly wild celebration (which Loring originally envisioned as “a macabre polka”). This yields to a quietly mournful passage for the outlaw’s death and a reprise of the ballet’s opening prairie music.

—Jeff Eldridge