Conductor: Emmanuel Villaume
PROGRAMME:
Maurice Ravel
La Valse
Camille Saint-Saëns
Piano Concerto No 2 in G Minor, Op. 22
Richard Wagner
Introduction and Isolde’s Death from the opera Tristan und Isolde
Claude Debussy
La Mer
La Valse (1920) is a poème chorégraphique of which there are versions for orchestra and for one or two pianos. “I conceived this Valse as an apotheosis to the Viennese waltz which in my mind’s eye blends together the sensation of a fantastical and deadly whirlwind,” Ravel wrote. The score is prefaced by the following programme note: “In the clearings among the clouds hastened on by the whirlwind, one can see glimpses of couples waltzing. The clouds are gradually dispelled: one is faced with a huge hall filled with dancers. The stage is lit more and more powerfully. The dazzle of the chandeliers fills the hall...” From the mysterious first bars that seem to feel for the waltz rhythm, through the Strauss-like ravishing chain of waltzes and on to the vertiginous “dancing on top of a volcano” (an expression of one of the composer’s contemporaries) – that is the implacable subject logic of Ravel’s poem. La Valse is a grandiose tableau of “death among dazzle.”
Iosif Raiskin
The revival of interest in the genre of the instrumental concerto in 19th century French music is linked with the name of Camille Saint-Saëns. The composer wrote five piano concerti, three for violin, two for cello and an entire series of other works featuring various solo instruments. As a talented pianist and musician of broad vision, Saint-Saëns had a thorough knowledge of and frequently performed music by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Chopin and was a great admirer of the talents of Liszt who, in turn, praised the music of Saint-Saëns and was one of the first to commend the Second Concerto. The noticeable links with the creations of past masters gave critics ammunition to accuse him of eclecticism, although the style of the French maestro is absolutely original.
Thanks to the combination of clarity and refinement with virtuoso piano technique, the Second Concerto has come to be one of the composer’s most popular works.
The dramaturgy of Saint-Saëns’ concerto is by no means traditional. As a general rule, classical concerti open with a fast movement which embodies the idea of the soloist competing with the orchestra. Saint-Saëns begins the concerto with a slow piano solo, improvised in character, reminding listeners of the style of Bach’s fantasias for organ. Throughout the entire movement the piano dominates, while the orchestra performs a largely subordinate role.
The second movement is a Mendelssohn-like scherzo and, at the same time, it is undoubtedly French (in the secondary theme Saint-Saëns uses a motif that closely resembles melodies from popular French vaudevilles). The witty solo of the kettledrums sets the rhythm for the entire movement and gives it a dance-like quality.
This dance-like quality appears again in the third movement. Its genre prototype is an impetuous tarantella – again reminiscent of Mendelssohn and the finale of his Italian Symphony.
© Mariinsky Theatre, 2015/Vladimir Khavrov
The idea of Wagner’s most magnificent musical drama was connected with
the wish to give love a definition, to present an all encompassing
analysis of the phenomenon. “Although in life I have not tasted true
loving happiness, I wish to raise a monument to this most glorious of
reveries,” the German maestro wrote. The source of Wagner’s “drama of
emotions” was a mediaeval legend about a knight and a beautiful lady,
destined by fate to be the wife of another. The composer transformed
the story, based on a classic love triangle, into a “truly metaphysical
opus”. The refined, tense and ecstatic music matches to absolute
perfection the world of languishing and unquenched passions that
comprise the work’s emotional atmosphere. The finest episodes of Tristan
are the orchestral introduction and the final scene of Isolde’s death.
Each of these large sections forms an arch that frames the work and
which augment one another in terms of music – this is why they are
often performed together, without interruption, as one concert piece.
The combination of the themes of love, concentrated in the
introduction, and of Isolde’s death in the final scene express the
fundamental idea running throughout Tristan: love and death as two indivisible sides of one and the same phenomenon.
Nadezhda Kulygina
Following in the footsteps of Liszt, Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov who had set examples for the poetic depiction of scenes of nature in music, Claude Debussy won a reputation as a maestro of musical “painting”. That last word conveys most clearly the essence of the incredibly subtle sounds that call forth instinctive associations with the canvasses of the French impressionists.
According to the memoirs of Marguerite Long, there was a particularly mysterious note in Debussy’s attitude to the sea. “Can you hear the sea?” he would say, “The sea is the most musical thing that there is...” Debussy was drawn by the endlessly changing colours of the sea and the ocean, the reflections of the sky, thundery clouds, the dazzling sun and the moonlight... Calm and mirror-like, majestic billows, lazily approaching the shore from the horizon, seething waves and the quietly splashing sea... Debussy gave spirit to the sea, imbuing his tableaux of it with some meaning known only to him. Does it really come as any surprise that he “repeated” the words of Musorgsky whom he so admired (which he could not actually have known!) – “...The idea of a troubled sea is incomparably more threatening and imposing than a storm”?
The three symphonic sketches La Mer are woven together as a symphony – specifically a “French” symphony, which generally has three movements. The music flows from the slow and fundamentally contemplative first section De l’Aube à midi sur la mer (From Dawn to Noon on the Sea) to Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves) , a kind of symphonic scherzo, with its tumultuous “spills” of sound and vividly dance-like rhythms, and, ultimately, to the final Allegro which is called Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea) . The triumphant coda of the finale is structured around the extravagant final use of “the theme of the sea” that creates an arch between the start of the symphony and its conclusion.
La Mer was first performed on 15 October 1905 in Paris under the baton of Camille Chevillard. But Debussy’s score would only meet with true success three years later when it was conducted by the composer himself.
In 1913 Debussy conducted La Mer in St Petersburg and Moscow.
Iosif Raiskin
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