Hailed as “one of the world’s most remarkable singers,” American lyric tenor Nicholas Phan joins NWS Fellows for intimate chamber music by French masters. Using stirring pastoral themes, Camille Saint-Saëns and Franz Schubert pair voice one-on-one with violin and horn for sublime storytelling. Francis Poulenc channels the absurd in his Cocardes, before Jake Heggie’s Friendly Persuasions honors four transformative friendships in Poulenc’s life. When just a teenager, boy genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart whipped up this delightful String Quartet while living in Milan. Maurice Ravel packs his signature color painting in this dreamy miniature harp concerto.

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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 Sacred and Profane Dances for harp and string orchestra as a showpiece for the instrument. The next year, Érard responded by asking 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, allowing the performer to change the pitches of the strings. (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 that June, “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 glissandos, and he also took advantage of the ethereal sonority of 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.

Camille Saint-Saëns

Violins in the evening (1907)
Approximate duration: 7 minutes

Composers began pairing singers with instrumental soloists more than 300 years ago, applying the Italian label of obbligato to those secondary but indispensable parts. The tradition has flourished ever since, crossing all generations, national borders and stylistic boundaries, including this example composed in 1907 by Camille Saint-Saëns, the elder statesman of French music. He took his cue for incorporating a prominent violin part from the poem by Anna de Noailles. In a nocturnal scene stirred by “a flourish of violins,” the poem describes the player’s bow as “a voluptuous dagger that pierces the heart / With exhausting euphoria.”

Francis Poulenc

Cocardes, FP 16b (1919-20; revised 1939)
Approximate duration: 7 minutes

The music that Francis Poulenc was writing at the age of 20 already demonstrated his lifelong penchant for whimsy and irreverence, inspired by such avant-garde trailblazers as Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. Using nonsensical texts by Cocteau and an ensemble of violin, trumpet, trombone and percussion that imitated a ragged street band (recalling Stravinsky’s similar approach in The Soldier’s Tale), Poulenc wrote Cocardes, a set of three charming songs that helped put him on the map the next year when Cocteau arranged for the debut performance. Poulenc shared that program with Milhaud, and soon those two upstart composers and four other young comrades were being hailed as “Les Six,” placing them at the forefront of French music.

Jake Heggie

Friendly Persuasions: Homage to Poulenc (2008)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

Jake Heggie is one of the world’s premier composers of vocal music, known for his songs (nearly 300 of them) and 14 works for the stage, beginning with his operatic treatment of Dead Man Walking that has been produced 70 times since its debut in 2000. His collaborator on many of the operas, Gene Scheer, wrote the texts for Friendly Persuasions, “based on four transformative friendships and meetings in Francis Poulenc’s life,” as a note on Heggie’s website explains. Expanding the original scoring for tenor and piano, this version adds flute, clarinet and cello.

Heggie tailored his musical language to reflect the clear surfaces and sharp edges of Poulenc’s style, and he allowed the subject of each song to influence the proceedings too, as heard in the Baroque-style figurations in the first song, a tribute to the great harpsichordist Wanda Landowska for whom Poulenc wrote a concerto. The second song references the baritone Pierre Bernac, who for decades was Poulenc’s primary touring partner, putting on recitals that included the 90-odd songs Poulenc wrote for them. The third song remembers Poulenc’s childhood friend Raymonde Linossier, whose death in 1930 had a devastating impact on the composer. Inspiring the final portion of the cycle, the poet Paul Eluard was one of Poulenc’s go-to sources for song texts.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Quartet No. 4 in C major for Strings, K. 157 (1772-73)
Approximate duration: 32 minutes

Mozart composed this String Quartet in C major around the time of his 17th birthday, while he was writing an opera in Milan. That third extended visit to Italy proved to be the last of many gigs arranged by his enterprising father, at a point when Mozart was aging out of being a child prodigy and starting to find his own footing as an independent young man. The string quartet was a burgeoning genre in Austria at the time, with Joseph Haydn leading the charge, but the examples Mozart wrote in Italy were more closely aligned with another quartet innovator, Milan’s own Giovanni Battista Sammartini, who had taken the young Mozart under his wing. The most striking music of this Quartet comes in its central Andante, set in the key of C minor, with strategic silences in different voices (such as the delayed entrance of the cello) creating an unusually rich spectrum of colors and emotions. 

Franz Schubert

On the River, D. 943 (1828)
Approximate duration: 10 minutes

In 1828, when the 31-year-old Schubert finally presented his first public concert consisting entirely of his own music, the one new piece he wrote for the occasion was Auf dem Strom (On the River), a song for voice and piano with an obbligato solo horn. The concert took place exactly a year after Beethoven’s death, and the new song was a clear homage to the man who had overshadowed Schubert’s entire working life in Vienna—a life that was fated to end just eight months later, when Schubert succumbed to syphilis.

With lyrics drawn from a poem by Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860), On the River comes from the perspective of a man borne away on a river and out to the sea, where “songs from the shore can no longer reach me.” Just in case anyone missed the metaphor, Schubert quoted from the famous Funeral March from Beethoven’s Third Symphony; the quotation first appears in the song’s second stanza, which begins, “And so the waves bear me forward with unsympathetic speed.” The horn heightens the sense of separation throughout, playing on the instrument’s long association with woodland hunts, mail dispatches and other functions that exploited the instrument’s ability to project its sound across great distances.

-- © 2020 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.