A Salute to Ballet Idaho
Darius Milhaud- La Creation du Monde Jacques Ibert- Divertissement Walter Piston- Divertimento Maurice Ravel- Daphnis & Chloe, Suites 1 & 2 Artistic Partner- Ballet Idaho Ibert: Divertissement Service as a naval officer during WW I interrupted Jacques Ibert’s musical pursuits, but as soon as the war ended he made his big play, competing for the Prix de Rome at the Paris Conservatoire which he won. The previously obscure composer now basked in a number of quick successes, ultimately securing a plum administrative post at the Villa Medici in Florence where he was a cultural ambassador for France. He was forced into exile by the Vichy government during the WW II, but afterwards returned to Tuscany and kept his post until 1966. Ibert’s suite Divertissement was composed as incidental music to The Italian Straw Hat, originally an 1851 stage farce by Eugène Labiche. Ibert’s musical treatment originated when the play was made into a silent film by René Clair in 1928. The genre of the story is vaudeville-esque imbroglio, in which someone is searching for something that they do not find until just before the curtain drops. In this case the item is a straw hat, needed to replace one that has been eaten by a horse on the day of the big wedding. Ibert’s score for small orchestra is lighthearted, bright and cunningly wrought. It also contains a hilarious musical send-up of Mendelssohn’s wedding march in Cortége, numerous pompous stereotypes in Parade, and madcap pandemonium in the final movement. Milhaud: La Creation du Monde For medical reasons Milhaud was not shipped off with the military when the Great War broke out, and decided after aiding Belgian refugees and working at the department of propaganda that he would accept a post in Rio to help from there. The music and rainforest of Brazil made a lifelong impact on the young composer, but when he returned to Paris after the war it was jazz in particular which became the object of his most intense fascination. When Milhaud heard an authentic American combo performing in Paris, he arranged a trip to the U.S. to study it in the clubs and streets of Harlem. Many composers vied to be first to incorporate this new language into the “legit” tradition well before Gershwin supposedly “made a lady” out if it with his Rhapsody. One of the first essays in this direction is Milhaud’s Crèation du Monde. Based on an African creation myth, the work hit on another hot trend of the day, the works of the Fauvists, which frequently featured African masks and sculptures. The work is divided into a series of six tableaux, but played without pause. Along the way Milhaud offers a blues song for solo oboe, a cakewalk for a pair of violins with bassoon and in the first movement, a masterly jazz fugue, Piston: Divertimento Walter Piston was an artist, engineer, author and composer. As a high school student destined to be an engineer, he instead enrolled in the Massachusetts Normal Art School at the age of eighteen. World War I interrupted his studies, but he insisted on joining the Navy Band as a self-taught saxophonist. At age twenty-five, Piston began formal studies in music and had already learned the piano, violin, and several wind instruments. The following year he entered the four-year undergraduate program at Harvard, where he soon found himself conducting the campus orchestra. As a composer, Piston was a late-bloomer who composed his first work after his thirtieth birthday. In 1924 he traveled to Paris to study with Paul Dukas (composer of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), George Enescu (famous for his Romanian Rhapsodies), and Nadia Boulanger, the legendary professor known for uncovering the personal voices of hundreds of composers from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass. She did the same for Walter Piston, whose style combines the Romantic conservatism of Dukas with the neoclassical modernism of Boulanger’s friend, Igor Stravinsky. The result is lean and sinewy music that possesses a lyrical richness that is uncommon in composers of Piston’s time. Although he was often criticized his music felt more European than American. “Is the Dust Bowl more American than, say, a corner in the Boston Athenaeum? Would not a Vermont village furnish as American a background for composition as the Great Plains? The self- conscious striving for nationalism gets in the way of the establishment of a strong school of composition and even of significant individual expression.” ~Walter Piston Piston joined the faculty of Harvard in 1926 as a professor of composition. During his tenure he wrote textbooks on harmonic analysis, orchestration, harmony, and counterpoint – all of which are still used in many colleges around the world. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his third and seventh symphonies. Piston’s Divertimento dates from 1946, in the middle of his career. By definition, a divertimento is a piece for light entertainment, usually played at informal gatherings as background music for conversation. Although Piston’s work is hardly light, it certainly lacks the feelings of tension and anxiety (except for a brief passage in the center of the second movement) that are present in nearly all of his other music. The scoring for combined woodwind quartet, string quartet, and bass is also in non-traditional compared to Mozart and his contemporaries over a century and a half before Piston’s work was written. The first movement, Allegro, is a mixed-meter romp, passing from 7/8 to 3/4, but with many other meters appearing within. Its jagged rhythms provide a fresh, almost Stravinskian, atmosphere that is interrupted only by the comparatively lyrical second theme. Piston’s second movement, Tranquillo, is a bit of a misnomer. An opening oboe solo, accompanied by strings, is perhaps the loveliest theme in the work, but the music becomes tenser as the texture thickens with added instruments. At its climax, there is a moment of great anxiety that is anything but tranquillo. The opening material returns to end the movement in a whisper of beauty. The finale, Vivo, is sprightly and buoyant. Throughout the movement, Piston alternates tutti statements by the full ensemble with sections that feature solo passages. This contrast of loud and soft, along with the lively rhythms and playful melodies, provides an effervescent conclusion to this brilliant work. Ravel: Daphnis & Chloé, Suites 1 & 2 The ballet Daphis et Chlöe was commissioned by the Ballets Russes at the same time they contracted an unknown 27 year-old Russian named Stravinsky, whose Firebird caused a sensation in 1910 and was followed by the equally enduring Petrouchka in 1911. Ravel’s ballet had to wait three long years for its premiere. The piece is often cited as one of Ravel’s most significant masterworks for its extraordinarily original sound-world, manipulation of orchestral colors, and brilliant solo writing. Ravel and the ballet company settled on a 19yh -century French adaptation of the pastoral romance Daphnis et Chloé by third-century (A.D.) Greek poet Longus, resident of the play’s setting, the Isle of Lesbos. Collaboration between Ravel and the master choreographer Fokine was slow from the start. Ravel wrote to a friend, “What complicates things is that Fokine doesn’t know a word of French, and I only know how to swear in Russian. In spite of the interpreters, you can imagine the savor of these meetings.” The story centers on the romance between shepherd Daphnis and shepherdess Chloé. At the beginning of the ballet, the pair are mingling with others in a meadow at the edge of a sacred wood, where they bow before the altar of the nymphs. One of the other shepherds flirts with Chloé, and the crowd insists on a dance contest to win her kiss. When Daphnis is victorious, the youths erupt, he gets his kiss, the group scatters leaving Daphnis alone in a daze. That night, Chloé and her maidens are abducted by pirates but Daphnis arrives to rescue her (Suite I: Nocturne). He falls to the ground in despair, and the nymphs materialize to revive him with a hypnotic dance. They summon Pan himself to assist in their cause. After a mysterious Interlude (Suite I) the scene shifts to the brigand’s beach camp, where a war dance commences (Suite III: Danse guerrière). But when Pan appears, Chloé’s captors flee in terror, and a glowing crown is placed on Chloé’s head. Daphnis awakens by the altar (Suite II: Lever du jour), wondering whether it has all been a dream. Chloé returns to the meadow the lovers are reunited and, after a scene in which they enact the story of Pan and Syrinx (Suite II: Pantomime), they declare their love for one another amid general rejoicing (Suite II: Danse générale). |
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