Simone Porter Plays Bruch

Simone porter plays Bruch

Please note that this concert will not be livestreamed.

This concert features violinist Simone Porter performing Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy with the Festival Orchestra under the baton of Peter Bay. 

ZHOU LONG
Poems from Tang
Rachel Yi, Claire Arias-Kim, violin • Julian Seney, viola • Amanda Chi, cello

ANDRÉ MESSAGER [ARR. TODD PALMER]
Suite from the ballet “Les Deux Pigeons”
Ellen Hayun Lee, flute • Natalie Feldpausch, oboe • Todd Palmer, clarinet • Katherine Cheng, Ashley Yoon, violin • Phillip Ying, viola • Emma Fisher, cello • Tracy Rowell, bass • June Han, harp

MAX BRUCH
Scottish Fantasy, Op. 46
Simone Porter, violin • Peter Bay, conductor • Festival Orchestra

Program Notes

ZHOU LONG 

Poems from Tang (1995)

Zhou has provided the following note to accompany Poems from Tang:

Poems From Tang was jointly commissioned by the Ciompi Quartet, Chester and Shanghai String Quartets, and composed in 1995. It was funded by the Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Leila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation. It had its world premiere in the 95/96 music season.

Poems From Tang consists of four movements inspired by the works of four poets of the Tang dynasty.  Unlike the preceding folk traditions in which thematic material relied heavily on magic and spiritualism, Tang dynasty arts were more cultivated and intellectual.  Tang poets created distinguished new literary forms within an ancient civilization.

In Poems From Tang, I am concerned primarily with a merging of Eastern and Western cultures through music.  The influence of Chinese culture can be heard in some of the earlier twentieth century music of Mahler and Bartok.  What I have tried to do here is more directly to combine ancient Chinese and Western musical traditions in a coherent and personal statement.  I have conceived of the string quartet as an expanded ch’in, an ancient seven string Chinese zither.  Throughout the piece there are musical traits directly reminiscent of ancient China:  sensitive melodies, expressive glissandi in various statements, and, in particular, a peculiarly Chinese undercurrent of tranquility and meditation.

The second movement is based on a poem titled Old Fisherman by Liu Zongyuan (773-819) who was government official and outstanding thinker and writer during the middle of the Tang dynasty.  He was removed from his post for advocating reform, but he never became despondent.  He travelled to many mountains and valleys in southwestern China and created many excellent works.  In the Old Fisherman, he wrote:

The old fisherman moors at night by western cliffs;

At dawn, water draws from the clear Xiang, lights a fire with southern bamboo. 

Mists melt in the morning sun, and the man is gone; 

Only the song reverberates in the green of the hills and waters. 

Look back, the horizon seems to fall into the stream;

And clouds float aimlessly over the cliffs.

The fourth movement is based on Du Fu’s Song of Eight Unruly Tipsy Poets.  In this long poem, Du Fu (712-770) provides individual humorous and affectionate descriptions of the drunken behavior of eight famous poets, all friends of his.  He described the images of his drunk fellow poets as:

Unrestrained, undisciplined, humour and eloquent;

Riding on the horse, faltering steps in enjoyment;

Drawing on the paper, spattering inks as dancing dragon;

Howling toward the sky, citing poems feeling indignant;

The movement is in the form of a scherzo.  I have written a rhythmic motive for the quartet and a dialogue between the quartet and the orchestra.  The movement begins ad libitum, but as the poets’ drink more and more, the tempo increases first to andantino and then to allegro, fast and wild at its climax, the point at which the poets are so uninhibited and “unruly.”  The movement ends with eight identical fortissimo chords for full orchestra–one chord in honor of each poet.  The chords are separated by eight measures of rest, during which we hear the faltering sounds of the quartet, representing these by now very drunken poets, trying harder and harder to continue reciting until eventually despite themselves they collapse into silence.

ANDRÉ MESSAGER [ARR. TODD PALMER]

Suite from the ballet “Les Deux Pigeons” (1886)

In the fable Les deux pigeons (The two pigeons), recorded in the seventeenth century by poet Jean de La Fontaine, two male birds live together in friendship. One grows tired of this platonic bliss, ventures out into the world, gets soaked in a storm and attacked by a mean boy with a slingshot, and promptly returns home to the safety of his companion. In the 1880s, the director of the Paris Opéra Auguste Vaucorbeil planned a ballet based on the tale. As was the case in many later interpretations of the fable, the libretto (by Henri de Régnier and the choreographer Louis Mérante) substituted the original pair of men for a heterosexual relationship. In it, a young fellow named Pépio is enticed by a wandering troupe of so-called “Gypsies” (presumably Romani travellers, though this label was often used as a proxy for any sort of cultural outsider). He follows them when they leave town, but he is humbled by his encounters with other women, gets robbed, and eventually goes back to his love, Gourouli. For the score, Vaucorbeil hired André Messager—a talented student of Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré who had worked variously as an organist, a choirmaster, and the composer for stage productions at the Folies-Bergère music hall in Paris. The ballet debuted in 1886, and it was a considerable financial success for the Opéra and for Messager.

Much of what we hear in this suite comprises entrances or dances of the virtuosic and alluring troupe. Many French composers of this period, perhaps most notably Georges Bizet in his 1875 opera Carmen, depicted Romani women with an assortment of exoticizing scales, orchestration strategies, and chromatic melodies and harmonies. Strikingly, Messager does not lean all that much on these tropes in Les deux pigeons. The music tends toward bombastic and militaristic characters, the cooing melodies and fluttering pitter-patter coloratura of light opera, and winding, harp-filled waltzes that bring to mind ballets of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In the second act, Gourouli disguises herself as one of the “Gypsy” dancers, and she actively orchestrates her partner’s disappointments. This twist on the fable, which gives her character considerably more agency, makes the soaring, final, forgiveness-filled Pas des deux feel like a much-deserved reunion.

MAX BRUCH 

Scottish Fantasy, Op. 46 (1880)

Max Bruch wrote most of his large catalogue of violin works for two great soloists of the second half of the nineteenth century. He finished his beloved Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor (1866–67) with the help of Joseph Joachim, the foremost German violinist of the era. A decade later, he produced another one for the eminent Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate, who premiered it in London in 1877. This event helped Bruch secure more concerts in England, and in 1880 he was appointed conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society. In late 1879, while he was living in Berlin and anticipating his move to Britain, he started another piece intended for Sarasate, a Fantasy for violin with orchestra and harp, “with free use of Scottish folk melodies.” Joachim again served as Bruch’s informant on violin-related matters, and he ended up debuting the Fantasy in Liverpool in 1881. Ultimately, Bruch was unhappy with Joachim’s interpretation and relieved when Sarasate took up the piece a couple of years later. Whereas Joachim was known for elastic, rounded performances of large-scale Romantic concertos, Sarasate’s precise, understated approach to executing technical passages, and his intuitions for presenting folk music with both meaning and flair, were more appropriate to the challenges of Bruch’s new creation.

Bruch’s interest in the music of Scotland had started back in the 1860s, when he arranged and published twelve Scottish songs. For the finale of his Scottish Fantasy, as the work came to be known, he conscripted one of these, the chipper, patriotic drinking song “Hey Tuttie Taiti.” The rest of the work draws on other folk tunes that he most likely encountered and earmarked when preparing these song transcriptions. The second movement of the piece is a rousing chorus of “The Dusty Miller,” and the third is a keening rendition of “I’m A’ Doun for Lack O’ Johnnie,” the outcry of a pining lover. Bruch makes his collection into a continuous fantasy by using freely flowing transitions and refrains. The opening movement introduces “Through the Wood Laddie,” a rich underscore for sweethearts walking through the forest. When the composer brings this song back at the conclusion of the second, it becomes a means of smoothly strolling from one stirring scene to another, and a last hearing near the end of the fourth provides satisfying closure.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett