Finland’s finest return to NWS for classical music’s best dances. Debussy incorporates children’s folk tunes to usher in a shimmering spring in this pastoral tone poem. In one of the finest designs for cello, Henri Dutilleux’s sonorous and enigmatic World demands expert precision and grace throughout its five movements—each based on a poem by Baudelaire. Shortly after fleeing a war-ravaged Europe for America, Rachmaninoff composed his expansive Symphonic Dances. Sprinkling in influences from his new home, he included a nostalgic solo for saxophone and a lurching waltz before its ominous finale. This tour de force would be Rachmaninoff’s final composition, himself claiming “it must have been my last spark.” 

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**The Saturday, April 9 performance will be presented as a WALLCAST™ concert, presented by Citi®, in SoundScape Park. WALLCAST™ concerts are free and do not require a ticket.**

 

Program

Claude Debussy

Round Dances of Spring (1905-09)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes

Debussy drew inspiration from outside of typical musical channels, with interests ranging from Indonesian gamelan music to Symbolist poetry. He was especially interested in visual arts and it is easy to find parallels between his musical language and the paintings of his French contemporaries, the Impressionists (e.g., Monet and Renoir) and Post-Impressionists (e.g., Cézanne and Gauguin). 

Debussy demonstrated an artist’s eye for observation in a series of works composed between 1905 and 1912, all titled Images, comprising two books for solo piano and an orchestral triptych. The first two portions of the orchestral suite, Gigues and Ibéria, evoked the foreign lands of Great Britain (the home of the jig dance, or gigue in French parlance) and Spain, respectively. The final portion, Rondes de printemps (Round Dances of Spring), used quotations of French children’s songs to place the setting in Debussy’s homeland. At the beginning, unstable harmonies and chromatic motives bring out the unsettled and wild elements of springtime. 

The music becomes more bouncy and cheerful, and several times it arrives at a joyous modal theme, but this tone poem is as changeable as spring itself, never lingering for long in any one atmosphere. 

 

Additional Resources 

PDF score from the IMSLP Petrucci Music Library 

Lyrics and melody of a French children’s song quoted by Debussy 

Photo of Debussy and his second wife, Emma, to whom he dedicated Images

 

Henri Dutilleux

A Whole Distant World... for Cello and Orchestra (1967-70)
Approximate duration: 27 minutes

In true French style, Henri Dutilleux was a sensuous and intuitive composer, even in an era when technical theories and complex rationales dominated contemporary music. He studied at the Paris Conservatory, and in 1938 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome, although his Italian sabbatical was cut short by the outbreak of World War II. When Dutilleux first encountered Schoenberg’s 12-tone method after the war, his interest in the technique was nothing like that of his younger compatriot Pierre Boulez, who led the next generation of French composers in exploring those serial principles while Dutilleux charted an independent path. 

Dutilleux considered his Piano Sonata from 1948 to be his first mature composition and his Symphony No. 1 from 1951 launched his orchestral career. Working to exacting standards and at a glacial pace, Dutilleux issued only a dozen works for orchestra during a career that stretched into his nineties. Still, those scores were enough to establish his legacy as an heir to Debussy and Ravel in the French art of sparkling, sumptuous orchestral writing. 

Written for and dedicated to the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the cello concerto Tout un monde lointain… (A Whole Distant World...) occupied Dutilleux from 1967 to 1970. The title as well as epigraphs that accompany the five movements came from the landmark collection Les Fleurs du mal by the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). For the first movement, labeled Enigma, the Baudelaire quote picks up midsentence—“... And in this strange and symbolic nature”—and likewise the music begins with no formal declaration, entering instead with just a sizzle of cymbal and snare drum to introduce the cello and its mysterious first theme. 

The movement later becomes more rhythmic and agitated, beginning with a plucked figure from the cellist. 

For the second movement, Gaze, the “extremely calm” music reflects an excerpt from Baudelaire’s Poison: “... the poison that flows / from your eyes, from your green eyes, / lakes in which my soul trembles and sees itself upside down.” 

The third movement, Surges, occupies the center of the work’s continuous, five-part arch structure. This passionate section evokes the sea as a metaphor for a lover’s dark wavy locks, as found in Baudelaire’s poem The Hair: “... You contain, sea of ebony, a dazzling dream / of sails, of rowers, of flames and of masts...” 

The fourth movement, Mirrors, offers “slow and ecstatic” music that plays up the dualities embedded in Baudelaire’s lines from The Death of Lovers: “... Our two hearts / will be two large torches / that will reflect their double lights / in our two spirits, those twin mirrors...” This emphasis on mirrored reflection reinforces the larger shape of the concerto with its many large-scale and small-scale musical symmetries. 

In the final movement, Hymn, the accompanying quote from Baudelaire states: “Keep your dreams: / wise men do not have as beautiful ones as fools!” Inverting the shape of the first movement, this closing section begins at full intensity. 

Just as Dutilleux’s original title Tout un monde lointain… ends with the three dots of an ellipsis, the concerto closes with music that seems equivalent to an ellipsis, as the voices die away on unresolved trills. 

 

Additional Resources 

Dutilleux Obituary from The New York Times 

Full text and translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal 

Video interview with Dutilleux (in French with subtitles)

 

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 (1940)
Approximate duration: 35 minutes

The outbreak of World War II prevented Rachmaninoff from returning to his beloved villa on Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne, so he spent the summer of 1940 at an estate on Long Island. He had sworn off composing four years earlier after finishing the Third Symphony and his preparations for the upcoming concert season kept him plenty busy, but still he was compelled to compose what turned out to be his final score, the Symphonic Dances. He was inspired in part by the recent staging of a ballet set to his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, choreographed by the fellow Russian expatriate Michel Fokine (the creator of The Firebird and Pétrouchka, among his signature works for the Ballets Russes). Rachmaninoff hoped Fokine would choreograph his new dance movements, and the collaboration seemed on track after a read-through of the piano score, but nothing came of it before the choreographer’s death in 1942. Instead the work debuted on the concert stage in a performance in 1941 by Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra, to whom Rachmaninoff dedicated the score. 

There is no overt program behind the Symphonic Dances, although there are hints of a backstory in Rachmaninoff’s working title of “Fantastic Dances” and an abandoned plan to label the movements Noon, Twilight and Midnight. Symphonic Dances is a fitting title in the end, with the three broad movements forming an arc of symphonic dimensions. The kinetic, dancing nature of the music conjures Tchaikovsky, one of Rachmaninoff’s formative influences from 50 years earlier. There are also nostalgic references to significant musical themes from earlier in the Rachmaninoff’s own life, including a quotation in the first movement from the ill-fated Symphony No. 1 (which was received so poorly in 1897 that it nearly ended his career) and a robust reference in the finale to the Dies irae plainchant that appears in so many Rachmaninoff scores. 

The Symphonic Dances often spotlight solo voices within the orchestra, most distinctively an alto saxophone—making its only appearance in all of Rachmaninoff’s music—which delivers a haunting melody in the opening movement. 

The emphasis stays on woodwinds throughout the first movement, while a solo violin emerges for an extended melody in the waltzing second movement. Midway through the finale, a languid episode provides further opportunities for intimate solos. 

The outer sections of the finale, by contrast, employ full orchestral forces for sizzling rhythms and modal harmonies redolent of Spanish flamenco music. 

 

Additional Resources 

Excerpt from a San Francisco Ballet production choreographed to the Symphonic Dances 

Article in The New York Times about Russian efforts to exhume and relocate Rachmaninoff’s remains 

Photo gallery on a Rachmaninoff fan site 

-- Copyright © 2016 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.

Audio clips provided by Naxos of America, Inc.