Pristine Classical Recorded Music

Stravinsky - Le Chant du Rossignol

notes from Wikipedia

 

Stravinsky’s Le Chant du Rossignol, commonly referred to as The Song of the Nightingale, is a symphonic poem written in 1917. The song is an adaptation from his earlier work, Le Rossignol (The Nightingale), an opera from 1914. The opera, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Nightingale, is set in three acts, told from the point of view of a Chinese fisherman. In the orchestral version, Stravinsky mostly uses music from acts two and three.

The opera, the first act written in 1908 and the later two in 1913—14, was the first ever to be written by Stravinsky. The delay between writing the first and the latter acts was because of his commission to write The Firebird and The Rite of Spring for impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909. After this lapse of time in which Stravinsky established himself as a ballet composer, he was unsure of returning to Le Rossignol, and although he did finish it, he chose to also create a purely symphonic version, Le Chant du Rossignol.

Says Stravinsky in his autobiography, “I reached the conclusion—very regretfully, since I was the author of many works for the theatre—that a perfect rendering can be achieved only in the concert hall, because the stage presents a combination of several elements upon which the music has often to depend, so that it cannot rely upon the exclusive consideration which it receives at a concert. I was confirmed in this view when two months later, under the direction of…Ansermet, Le Chant du Rossignol was given as a ballet by Diaghilev at the Paris Opera.”

Le Chant du Rossignol’s symphonic debut, conducted by Ernest Ansermet at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, was met with criticism, much like that of The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s untraditional use of dissonance and instruments was unwelcome in later performances of the piece as well. It is possibly due to this public reaction that he then let Diaghilev turn it into a ballet.

The piece’s ballet debut occurred in February 1920 at the Theatre National de l’Opera in Paris. This also was met with some skepticism. Stravinsky himself was not entirely pleased. “I had destined Le Chant du Rossignol for the concert platform, and a choreographic rendering seemed to me to be quite unnecessary,” he says later in his autobiography.

Stravinsky agreed to do a revival of the ballet in 1925. Well-known artist, Henri Matisse, was assigned to the artistic design of the performance. Originally, the choreography was to be done by Massine, but when that fell through, Diaghilev chose one of his newest students, George Balanchine, to choreograph the ballet. This is when Stravinsky first met Balanchine, who later became his most important creative partner.

The ballet follows the main plot line of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol, based on Andersen’s The Nightingale. The first scene shows the Nightingale singing (or in this case, dancing) for the Emperor of China, who is pleased. In the music, the song of the nightingale is chromatic and swooping, it sounds free and natural, like the song of a bird. The second scene introduces the gift of the mechanical nightingale from the Emperor of Japan. All are mesmerized by its song and ignore the real Nightingale, who she flies away. The music here is short and clear, without the smooth runs of the “real” Nightingale and more sounds of a mechanical automaton. In the third scene, the Emperor meets Death, due to illness and suffering from having lost the nightingale. Then the Nightingale appears outside the Emperor’s window and convinces Death to let the Emperor go. The final scene shows the courtiers discovering that the Emperor is now well, although his Nightingale leaves once again, returning to nature.

Motifs of the story include the natural versus the artificial, with the real Nightingale juxtaposed with its mechanical replacement. It is interesting to note that this was not the first (or last) piece by Stravinsky centered on the character of a bird, nor was it his first fascination with a seemingly perfect machine, as records tell us Stravinsky often preferred the sound of a mechanical pianollo, to the human (and inevitably imperfect) performance on a real piano.

Stravinsky was always specific about the use of movement with music. He once said, “I do not see how one can be a choreographer unless, like Balanchine, one is a musician first,” in praise of the famous choreographer who began working with Stravinsky for the revival of Le Chant du Rossignol. Balanchine was in fact a musician himself, and already a fan of Stravinsky’s work. He was immediately willing to take the challenge. “I learned the music well, and so…when Diaghilev asked me to stage Stravinsky’s ballet Le Chant du Rossignol, I was able to do it quickly,” Balanchine is quoted to have said.

Le Chant du Rossignol, though not a necessarily critically acclaimed piece, marked the beginning of an important relationship between Stravinsky and Balanchine, composer and choreographer. The Diaghilev and Stravinsky relationship weakened during Le Chant du Rossignol, as each liked to be the director in charge. As Balanchine was allowed more of a role, however, it was clear that the Balanchine-Stravinsky relationship was a lasting one. They had similar taste in art, music, and movement and lived to create. Stravinsky and Balanchine continued as a team for several years, creating a number of famous ballets.

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_chant_du_rossignol

 

 

Beethoven - Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67

notes from Wikipedia

 

Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 was written in 1804–08. This symphony is one of the most popular and well-known compositions in all of European classical music, and one of the most often-played symphonies.[1] It comprises four movements: an opening sonata allegro, an andante, and a fast scherzo which leads attaca to the finale. First performed in Vienna's Theater an der Wien in 1808, the work achieved its prodigious reputation soon afterwards. E.T.A. Hoffmann described the symphony as "one of the most important works of the time".

It begins by stating a distinctive four-note "short-short-short-long" motif twice:

The symphony, and the four-note opening motif in particular, are well known worldwide, with the motif appearing frequently in popular culture, from disco to rock and roll, to appearances in film and television. During World War II, the BBC used the four-note motif to introduce its radio news broadcasts because it evoked the Morse code letter "V" (· · · —, "victory").

 

History

Composition

The Fifth Symphony is notable for the amount of time it spent in gestation. The first sketches date from 1804, following the completion of the Third Symphony. However, Beethoven repeatedly interrupted his work on the Fifth to prepare other compositions, including the first version of Fidelio, the Appassionata piano sonata, the three Razumovsky string quartets, the Violin Concerto, the Fourth Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony. The final preparation of the Fifth Symphony, which took place in 1807–1808, was carried out in parallel with the Sixth Symphony, which premiered at the same concert.

Beethoven was in his mid-thirties during this time; his personal life was troubled by increasing deafness. In the world at large, the period was marked by the Napoleonic Wars, political turmoil in Austria, and the occupation of Vienna by Napoleon's troops in 1805.

 

Première

The Fifth Symphony was premièred on December 22, 1808 at a mammoth concert at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna consisting entirely of Beethoven premières, and directed by Beethoven himself. The performance took more than four hours. The two symphonies appeared on the program named in the reverse of the order by which we know them today: the Fifth was numbered No. 6, and the Sixth appeared as No. 5. The program was as follows:

• the Sixth Symphony
• Aria: "Ah, perfido", Op. 65
• The Gloria movement of the Mass in C Major
• the Fourth Piano Concerto (played by Beethoven himself)
• (intermission)
• the Fifth Symphony
• the Sanctus and Benedictus movements of the C Major Mass
• a solo piano improvisation played by Beethoven
• the Choral Fantasy

Beethoven dedicated the symphony to two of his patrons, Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz and Count Rasumovsky. The dedication appeared in the first printed edition of April 1809.

 

Reception and influence

There was little critical response to the premiere performance, which took place under adverse conditions. The orchestra did not play well—with only one rehearsal before the concert—and at one point, following a mistake by one of the performers in the Choral Fantasy, Beethoven had to stop the music and start again. The auditorium was extremely cold and the audience was exhausted by the length of the program. However, a year and a half later, another performance resulted in a rapturous review by E.T.A. Hoffmann in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. He described the music with dramatic imagery:

Radiant beams shoot through the deep night of this region, and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy all within us except the pain of endless longing—a longing in which every pleasure that rose up amid jubilant tones sinks and succumbs. Only through this pain, which, while consuming but not destroying love, hope, and joy, tries to burst our breasts with a full-voiced general cry from all the passions, do we live on and are captivated beholders of the spirits.

The symphony soon acquired its status as a central item in the repertoire. As an emblem of classical music, as it were, the Fifth was played in the inaugural concerts of the New York Philharmonic on December 7, 1842, and the National Symphony Orchestra on November 2, 1931. Groundbreaking both in terms of its technical and emotional impact, the Fifth has had a large influence on composers and music critics, and inspired work by such composers as Brahms, Tchaikovsky (his 4th Symphony in particular), Bruckner, Mahler, and Hector Berlioz. The Fifth stands with the Third Symphony and Ninth Symphony as the most revolutionary of Beethoven's compositions.

 

Instrumentation

The symphony is scored for piccolo (fourth movement only), 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in B flat and C, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon (fourth movement only), 2 horns in E flat and C, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones (alto, tenor, and bass, fourth movement only), timpani (in G-C) and strings.

 

Form

The work is in four movements:

First movement: Allegro con brio

The first movement opens with the four-note motif discussed below, one of the most famous in western music. There is considerable debate among conductors as to the manner of playing the four opening bars. Some conductors take it in strict allegro tempo; others take the liberty of a weighty treatment, playing the motif in a much slower and more stately tempo; yet others take the motif molto ritardando (a pronounced slowing through each four-note phrase), arguing that the fermata over the fourth note justifies this.

The first movement is in the traditional sonata form that Beethoven inherited from his classical predecessors, Haydn and Mozart (in which the main ideas that are introduced in the first few pages undergo elaborate development through many keys, with a dramatic return to the opening section—the recapitulation—about three-quarters of the way through). It starts out with two dramatic fortissimo phrases, the famous motif, commanding the listener's attention. Following the first four bars, Beethoven uses imitations and sequences to expand the theme, these pithy imitations tumbling over each other with such rhythmic regularity that they appear to form a single, flowing melody. Shortly after, a very short fortissimo bridge, played by the horns, takes place before a second theme is introduced. This second theme is in E flat major, the relative major, and it is more lyrical, written piano and featuring the four-note motif in the string accompaniment. The codetta is again based on the four-note motif. The development section follows, using modulation, sequences and imitation, and including the bridge. During the recapitulation, there is a brief solo passage for oboe in quasi-improvisatory style, and the movement ends with a massive coda.

 

Second movement: Andante con moto

The second movement, in A flat major, is a lyrical work in double variation form, which means that two themes are presented and varied in alternation. Following the variations there is a long coda.

The movement opens with an announcement of its theme, a melody in unison by violas and cellos, with accompaniment by the double basses. A second theme soon follows, with a harmony provided by clarinets, bassoons, violins, with a triplet arpeggio in the violas and bass. A variation of the first theme reasserts itself. This is followed up by a third theme, thirty-second notes in the violas and cellos with a counterphrase running in the flute, oboe and bassoon. Following an interlude, the whole orchestra participates in a fortissimo, leading to a series of crescendos, and a coda to close the movement.

 

Third movement: Scherzo. Allegro

The third movement is in ternary form, consisting of a scherzo and trio. It follows the traditional mold of Classical-era symphonic third movements, containing in sequence the main scherzo, a contrasting trio section, a return of the scherzo, and a coda. (For further discussion of this form, see "Textual questions", below.)

The movement returns to the opening key of C minor and begins with the following theme, played by the cellos and double basses:

The 19th century musicologist Gustav Nottebohm first pointed out that this theme has the same sequence of pitches (though in a different key and range) as the opening theme of the final movement of Mozart's famous Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550. Here is Mozart's theme:

(The derivation emerges more clearly if one listens first to Mozart's theme, then Mozart's theme transposed to Beethoven's key and range, then Beethoven's theme.

While such resemblances sometimes occur by accident, this is unlikely to be so in the present case. Nottebohm discovered the resemblance when he examined a sketchbook used by Beethoven in composing the Fifth Symphony: here, 29 measures of Mozart's finale appear, copied out by Beethoven.

The opening theme is answered by a contrasting theme played by the winds, and this sequence is repeated. Then the horns loudly announce the main theme of the movement, and the music proceeds from there.

The trio section is in C major and is written in a contrapuntal texture. When the scherzo returns for the final time, it is performed by the strings pizzicato and very quietly.

"The scherzo offers contrasts that are somewhat similar to those of the slow movement in that they derive from extreme difference in character between scherzo and trio ... The Scherzo then contrasts this figure with the famous 'motto' (3 + 1) from the first movement, which gradually takes command of the whole movement."

 

Fourth movement: Allegro

The triumphant and exhilarating finale begins without interruption after the scherzo. It is written in an unusual variant of sonata form: at the end of the development section, the music halts on a dominant cadence, played fortissimo, and the music continues after a pause with a quiet reprise of the "horn theme" of the scherzo movement. The recapitulation is then introduced by a crescendo coming out of the last bars of the interpolated scherzo section, just as the same music was introduced at the opening of the movement. The interruption of the finale with material from the scherzo was pioneered by Haydn, who had done the same in his Symphony No. 46 in B, from 1772. It is not known whether Beethoven was familiar with this work.

The Fifth Symphony finale includes a very long coda, in which the main themes of the movement are played in temporally compressed form. Towards the end the tempo is increased to presto. The symphony ends with 29 bars of C major chords, played fortissimo. Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style suggests that this ending reflects Beethoven's sense of Classical proportions: the "unbelievably long" pure C major cadence is needed "to ground the extreme tension of [this] immense work."

 

Notes from Wikipedia continue here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beethoven_symphony_5