Fanfara
SMETANA Overture to The Bartered Bride
RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 3, D Minor, Op. 30
Allegro ma non tanto
Intermezzo: Adagio
Finale: Alla breve
REVUELTAS La Noche de los Mayas
Noche de los Mayas
Noche de Jaranas
Noche de Yucatán
Noche de encantamiento
Program notes by Rebecca Jemian
Fanfara’s program celebrates return. Tonight the Louisville Orchestra renews its relationship with its music director and audience. At the same time, the pieces on this program were written at points of return for the composers. Smetana wrote his opera The Bartered Bride upon returning to Prague after working in Sweden for several years. Rachmaninoff returned to composing piano concertos with this piece—his third of four piano concertos—written for a trip to the U.S. Mexican composer Revueltas had traveled back and forth to the U.S. and to Spain; returning home, he immersed himself more deeply in his country’s ancient culture by scoring the music for the film La Noche de los Mayas. Welcome back!
Bedrich SMETANA
Born March 2, 1824, in Litomyšl, Bohemia
Died May 12, 1884, in Prague
Overture to The Bartered Bride
The Bartered Bride, Smetana’s second opera, served an important role as the first national comic opera for the Czech people. Smetana began composing it in 1863 and revised it several times before pronouncing it finished in 1870. Although he felt it was not his best opera, The Bartered Bride became his most popular and most often performed work. The story concerns a marriage broker in a village who has arranged for a girl, Marenka, to marry the son of a wealthy man, despite her being in love with a farmhand. Through numerous plot twists, true love achieves its goal. The overture’s music is drawn from the end of the second act when the marriage transaction is completed. The music features two lively themes: one, a scampering scalar idea played by the orchestra, and the other, a robust sturdy theme that easily conjures an image of peasants.
The middle of the 19th century was a time of rising nationalism in Bohemia, and those elements can be seen in this opera and in the life of Smetana. Bohemia was part of the Hapsburg empire in the early 19th century, dominated by all things German. Smetana’s father, a native Czech, was an acclaimed brewmaster who worked for the German part of society, and his children did not learn Czech at home. However, the 1848 revolution against the Hapsburgs that swept across eastern Europe stimulated wide interest in native culture, and Bedrich, then 24, decided to learn to speak and write Czech.
The political and social situation after the revolution made for tight job opportunities, and Smetana took a position in Sweden in 1856. The adage about absence and fonder hearts proved true in his case, and his love for Bohemia intensified during this period. Nevertheless, Sweden proved to be a land of opportunity for him where his music was well-received. Smetana worked in Sweden during the concert season and returned to Bohemia in summers. The political situation in Prague gradually improved, the job prospects became more promising, and Smetana moved home when he heard the announcement in February 1861 of a Czech national opera competition. Over the course of his life, Smetana wrote eight operas and many symphonic poems on nationalistic themes.
This 6 ½ minute work is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.
This is the first performance of the Overture to The Bartered Bride on a Louisville Orchestra Classics concert.
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Born April 1, 1873, in Semyonovo, Russia
Died March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills
Piano Concerto No. 3, D Minor, Op. 30
I. Allegro ma non tanto (Fast, but not too much); II. Intermezzo: Adagio (Intermezzo: Very slow); III. Finale: Alla breve (Finale: Rapid tempo)
In Rachmaninoff’s time it became nearly impossible to go home because of profound political changes. Born in the generation between that of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and that of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff saw the end of the Russian tsars and the beginning of Soviet life. Rachmaninoff’s answer to the political upheaval of the Russian revolutions was to find a new home in the United States in 1918. Born a decade before Igor Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff’s style remained conservatively rooted in the traditions of Tchaikovsky while his younger colleague startled the musical world with constant innovation.
Rachmaninoff was born in the town where the Russian nesting dolls are made. His early family life was somewhat disorganized as his father lost their money, his sister died of diphtheria, and his parents separated. All this took its toll on Sergei’s study habits; he failed exams at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and was sent to the Moscow Conservatory where he boarded with his piano teacher who enforced strict discipline. The regimen turned Rachmaninoff around. He added composition to his studies and graduated a year early in both the programs, taking first prize for piano in 1891 and composition in 1892; in between the two degrees, he finished his first piano concerto.
Pianist, composer, and conductor, Rachmaninoff maintained all three skills throughout his life. Unlike Smetana, for whom opera composition was the pinnacle of writing, Rachmaninoff began writing operas as soon as he finished school. With Tchaikovsky’s assistance, Rachmaninoff signed with a publisher and the future looked bright. Yet, Rachmaninoff was sometimes thrown off course. One composing moratorium was relieved only by several sessions with a hypnotist, after which he wrote his Second Piano Concerto in 1900–1901.
Rachmaninoff pursued all three parts of his career with balanced vigor in the first decade of the new century. The political situation in Russia was increasingly unstable, and in 1906 the family began making a second home in Dresden. Although Rachmaninoff did not enjoy touring, he agreed to come to the U.S. in 1909 to play concerts. He composed his Third Piano Concerto as a new piece to play on tour.
Although Rachmaninoff wrote the concerto for himself to play, he dedicated it to Joseph Hofmann (1876–1957), who had been a Polish child prodigy equally talented in music, math, and science. (Hofmann was director of the Curtis Institute from 1926 until 1938.) Rachmaninoff knew Hofmann through the Russian pianist, Anton Rubinstein.
The grand Third Concerto features an amiable interaction of piano and orchestra. The first movement offers a theme that is initially restrained in the piano but flowers into a powerful cadenza. Unlike many intermezzos that are lighter in character, the second movement begins slowly and pensively. It becomes giddy with a scherzo-like coda that tips into the finale with a cymbal crash. The Alla breve (“at the half note”) marking of the Finale signals a certain motion to the rhythmic values. The piano races in at the beginning, but soon the pace becomes more deliberate before dashing to the end.
In addition to the solo piano, the score for Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, military drum, cymbals, bass drum, and strings.
The Louisville Orchestra most recently performed this concerto on September 24 and 25, 1998, with pianist Lilya Zilberstein and conductor Uriel Segal. The piece lasts approximately 40 minutes.
SILVESTRE REVUELTAS
Born December 31, 1899, in Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango, Mexico
Died October 5, 1940, in Mexico City
La Noche de los Mayas (Night of the Mayas)
I. Noche de los Mayas (The Night of the Mayas); II. Noche de Jaranas (Night of the Jaranas); III. Noche de Yucatán (Night of the Yucatan); IV. Noche de encantamiento (Night of Enchantment)
Silvestre Revueltas was one of Mexico’s two leading composers of the early 20th century, the other being Carlos Chávez. Born in a town on the slope of the Sierra Madres, Revueltas showed his musical talent first through his violin playing. He and his brother Fermín, an artist, studied in the U.S., first in Austin, Texas, and then in Chicago. Silvestre moved back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. in the 1920s, playing violin and conducting. Chávez brought Revueltas to Mexico City in 1929 with the offer of a steady job as assistant conductor of the Mexico Symphony Orchestra and violin professor at the conservatory. Revueltas began to compose in this period. The two composers quarreled in 1935, and Revueltas was left to find his own work.
The arts in Mexico were flourishing in the 1930s, led by a strong group of painters (including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, David Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco), but also including sculptors, photographers (Manuel Álvarez Bravo), writers (Mariano Azuela, Octavio Paz), and an emerging group of filmmakers. These artists sought to realize their creative vision through the lens of current events, a lens that saw beyond the country’s borders. As the general secretary of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, Revueltas went to Spain in 1937 on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Revueltas gave concerts on behalf of those fighting against the Rebellion (which ultimately won and set the stage for the dictatorship of Francisco Franco), and Revueltas also reported back to Mexico on the war. When he left at the end of 1937—two years before the war ended—it was with profound despair at the state of affairs. Revueltas returned to Mexico to teach and compose in his last three years. His alcoholism worsened during this time and precipitated his tragically early death.
Revueltas’s music captures Latin American themes, and he combined a natural talent with a knowledge of European music in a style that drew easily on European and Mexican traditions.
La noche de los mayas is a 1939 film by Chano Urueta about a white man traveling in the interior of the Yucatán peninsula who finds a village living in the same style as its Mayan precursors. In 1960, composer José Ives Limantour extracted a concert suite of four movements from Revueltas’s score. Limantour’s version is symphonic in scope and design.
The first movement offers episodic music that begins and ends with a strong, stern chorale. Night of Jaranas sparkles with lively, bouncing orchestration and richly varied percussion, from shaking güiros to the Yucatán’s characteristic marimbas and the intoning caracol (a conch shell, which can be substituted for by a tuba). The bright rhythms of the asymmetrical meter capture the essence of Jaranas, a word applied to a dance, musical style and festival of the Yucatán states. The hushed beauty and gradually unfolding melodies painted in orchestral colors reflect Mexico’s peninsula in Night of the Yucatán. Revueltas quotes a Mayan song, set for the flute. The last movement, a theme and set of variations, emerges smoothly with an enchantment that sounds more like jungle sorcerers than fairy dust or a lover’s seduction. Several writers have compared it to the ending of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, an apt comparison as this movement relies on ostinatos, repeated patterns of different lengths that are layered on top of each other by different instruments. Over this background, Revueltas brings in solos, mostly on percussion instruments, and the movement’s unrelenting drive builds steadily to the end.
Revueltas expressed his thoughts about composition once, writing, “Within me there is a particular interpretation of nature. Everything is rhythm. The language of the poet is the common language. Everybody understands or feels it. That of the painters is color, form, plasticity. Only the musician needs to refine his own language. For me music is all of that. My rhythms are dynamic, sensual, visual; I think in images that agree in melodic line and move dynamically.”
La Noche de los Mayas is orchestrated for 2 flutes doubling 2 piccolos, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 E-flat clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, bongos, deep congo, tom-tom, guiro, rattle, tumkul (a Mayan percussion instrument that can be simulated by two low woodblocks), caracol, bass drum, Indian drum, snare drum, tam-tam, xylophone, piano, and strings.
This marks the first performance by the Louisville Orchestra of this 30 minute work.
