Camille Pépin

Born: November 17, 1990, Amiens, France.

Les eaux célestes

• Composed: 2022.
• Premiere: March 10, 2023 in Frankfurt Germany, by the HR Symphony Orchestra, Alain Altinioglu conducting.
• Duration: 11:00.

This colorful, impressionistic piece tells an ancient Chinese legend of lovers separated but eventually reunited. 

Background

At age 34, Camille Pépin is among the leading French composers of her generation. After initial studies at Amiens Conservatory, where she won several first prizes (the equivalent of passing a subject with great distinction) and studied composition with Thierry Escaich, Guillaume Connesson, and Marc-André Dalbavie. Her compositions have been played widely by French orchestras and orchestras from around Europe and are just beginning to be played by American orchestras. 

What You’ll Hear

Pépin’s Le eaux célestes (The Celestial Waters) was composed in 2023. This is a work with an extensive program, as laid out by the composer:

This work is based upon an ancient Chinese legend and is divided into four parts. Princess Orihime weaves clouds to create clothes for the gods. The star herdsman Mikoboshi herds milk cows to feed the celestial kingdom. Falling madly in love with one another, they abandon their respective tasks. The cows go astray. The gods wait in vain for their clothes.

I. Tisser les nuages (Weaving the Clouds). Beginning with impalpable and blurred sounds (phasing of strings and clouds of shifting string harmonics, and bowed percussion), this episode becomes more mechanical (running lines in woodwinds and keyboards) as the princess weaves.

II. La séparation (The Separation). With matters now in disarray, the sky god decided to separate the lovers by placing a great celestial river, the Milky Way, between them. Clouds of woodwinds and brass swell into the first climax, symbolizing the lovers’ heartbreak

III. Les larmes perlées (The Pearly Tears). They are finally permitted to meet once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month. Not knowing how to cross the celestial waters, the princess is distraught. Her tears of light (harp and celesta) gently bead on the fragile and vaporous texture of the clouds (string harmonics).

IV. Le pont des ailes (The Bridge of Wings). But a flock of birds decides to help the couple. With their wings, they form a bridge over the river, which allows them to meet again. The out-of-phase keyboards (vibraphone, marimba, and celesta) lead into the final climax, celebrating the lovers’ reunion.

Two melodic motifs are used: the first, reminiscent of Debussy’s Nuages, represents the cloud weaver; the second, a pentatonic idea, represents the cowherd. To illustrate this legend orchestrally, vibraphone, crotales [a set of small tuned cymbals], and cowbells are played with a bow to create a hazy, cloudy texture. The strings move through this space like an impalpable mist. Tubular bells, cowbells with sticks, and marimba, with more concrete sounds, are associated with a Hikobashi. Gongs, Chinese cymbals, and celesta in the lower register bring an Asian tinge. The woodwinds are aquatic and virtuosic with their spun lines.

This brief symphonic poem brilliantly uses extended playing techniques to create Pépin’s delicate, transparent textures: bowed percussion, high string harmonics, and “phasing” (moving gradually between two sonorities, creating a kind of audible “smear”).

Michael Daugherty

Born: April 28, 1954, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Tales of Hemingway

• Composed: 2015.
• Premiere: April 17, 2015, in Nashville, Tennessee, by cellist Zuill Bailey and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, with Giancarlo Guerrero conducting.
• Duration: 25:00.

This cello concerto, written in 2015 for Zuill Bailey, was inspired by the writing of Ernest Hemingway.

Background

Iowa-born Michael Daugherty started his musical career as a pianist for a local television station and later played in a funk band with his brothers. He studied jazz piano at North Texas State University before turning to studies in composition at the Manhattan School of Music, IRCAM, and Yale University, and with György Ligeti in Hamburg. Daugherty currently teaches composition at the University of Michigan. His credits are impressive, including awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. One of the most frequently commissioned American composers working today, his works have been commissioned and performed by groups such as the Kronos Quartet, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Summit Brass, and dozens of the world’s great orchestras. Daugherty’s eclectic music is rooted in American popular culture, and he has drawn inspiration from such widely diverse sources as Las Vegas lounge music (Le Tombeau de Liberace), American cultural icons (Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover, Paul Robeson Told Me, Fifteen: Symphonic Fantasy on the Art of Andy Warhol, and several works inspired by Elvis Presley), and even Superman™ comic books (the Metropolis Symphony). According to Daugherty, his cello concerto Tales of Hemingway:

evokes the turbulent life, adventures, and literature of American author and journalist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). His terse, direct, accessible writing style, combined with a mastery of dialogue and brilliant use of omission and repetition, made him one of the most influential and original writers of the 20th century. Hemingway’s distinctive body of work was also informed by his larger-than-life experiences.

In his youth in Oak Park, Chicago, Hemingway was surrounded by music, where his mother was a prominent music teacher, and he played the cello in school orchestras. Hemingway’s family owned a remote summer home on Walloon Lake near Petoskey, Michigan, where hunting, fishing, and camping were a family ritual. As an adult, Hemingway’s passion and expertise for deep-sea fishing in the Florida Keys and Cuba, big game hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, and boxing were legendary. Hemingway experienced the horrors and ironies of war as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I (1918) and as a journalist on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War (1937) and World War II (1944-45). In the 1920s, Hemingway was part of Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation” in Paris and haunted the bars and cafés with F. Scott Fitzgerald. During his lifetime, many of his works were made into Hollywood films, and his journalism and literature was syndicated in magazines and newspapers around the world, making Hemingway an international celebrity and a household name.

What You’ll Hear

Daugherty’s Tales of Hemingway is divided into four movements, each inspired by one of Hemingway’s short stories or novels. He provides the following description:

I. Big Two-Hearted River (1925, Seney, Michigan). In this story, Nick Adams is an emotionally scarred and disillusioned soldier from World War I who treks to Northern Michigan for a camping-fishing trip to try to regain control of his life. I have composed serene and passionate music that evokes a leitmotif in Hemingway’s writing: his belief that one can be healed by the power of nature through exploring isolated outdoor terrains.

II. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940, Spanish Civil War). Hemingway tells the tale of the last three days in the life of Robert Jordan, an American teacher turned demolition expert who has joined the anti-fascist Loyalist guerillas in Spain. Jordan accepts a suicide mission to blow up a bridge only to fall in love with Maria, a young Spanish woman from the Loyalist guerilla camp. The cello strums and plucks, leading the martyr’s march to battle the Fascists and to Jordan’s eventual death. As the chimes explode at the conclusion of the movement, the epitaph of the novel rings forth: ‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

III. The Old Man and the Sea (1952, Cuba). In Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning novella, Santiago is a poor, old fisherman whose luck changes when he takes his small boat deep into the Gulf Stream. After an epic struggle, he catches a gigantic marlin, the largest fish of his career. As he makes the long journey home, sharks relentlessly attack his boat and devour the marlin. As a musical response, I have composed an elegy to the struggle of life and death between man and nature. The cello represents the old fisherman’s journey as he searches for the truths of man’s existence with dignity and grace.

IV. The Sun Also Rises (1926, Pamplona, Spain). The main character in this ground-breaking novel is Jake Barnes, bitter and wounded by war, living in Paris as an unhappy expatriate journalist. Aimless in life, he makes a journey to the Festival in Pamplona, Spain. Along the way, he is joined by other adrift souls of the “Lost Generation,” such as Lady Brett, a promiscuous divorcée with whom Barnes was involved before the war. For the final movement of the concerto, I have created an exciting and dramatic sound world where I imagine Jake Barnes, his entourage (and Hemingway) in Pamplona at the Fiesta, watching the running of the bulls and reveling in the spectacle of the bullfights. We also hear musical illuminations of the novel’s enigmatic epigraph, ‘the sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.’

Edward Elgar

Born: June 2, 1857, Broadheath, United Kingdom.
Died: February 23, 1934, Worcester, United Kingdom.

In the South (Alassio), Op. 50

• Composed: 1903-04, while in Italy, Elgar completed it shortly after he returned to England on February 21, 1904.
• Premiere: March 16, 1904, in London, by the Hallé Orchestra, the composer conducting.
• Duration: 20:00.

This fine concert overture was largely composed by Elgar in the Italian resort city of Alassio. Its storyline includes a boisterous opening section, a pastoral portrait of a shepherd and his flock, a vision of an ancient Roman army, and a lush, songlike interlude.

Background

At the turn of the 20th century, century Elgar was the most prominent composer in England: his Enigma Variations of 1899 was widely regarded as a masterpiece, and he had just completed an oratorio, The Apostles, whose performance in October 1903 was one of the great successes of his career. Plans were made for a three-day festival of his music at Covent Garden in London in March 1904—an almost unheard-of honor for any English composer. Amidst all this success, Elgar was downcast—still depressed over the death of his mother and suffering from the dreary English weather. He and his wife decided shortly after the premiere of The Apostles to take a holiday in Italy, both to recuperate and to produce a new work for the festival. (His backers were clearly hoping for a symphony but would have to wait four more years for Elgar’s Symphony No.1.) The Elgars went first to the popular resort town of Bordighera but found it too full of English tourists to be a proper getaway. They moved on to Alassio, on the Italian Riviera, south of Genoa. Though Elgar complained to friends back home about the unexpectedly cold and wet weather, he clearly enjoyed the food and wine. He made no progress on the hoped-for symphony, but Elgar did find sudden inspiration for a programmatic overture while walking in Alassio—as he recalled:

I was by the side of an old Roman way. A peasant stood by an old ruin, and in a flash, it all came to me—the conflict of armies in that very spot long ago, where now I stood—the contrast of the ruin and the shepherd—and then all of a sudden, I came back to reality. In that time, I had ‘composed’ the overture—the rest was merely writing it down.

What You’ll Hear

Elgar half-jokingly titled the opening section “Love of Life (wine and macaroni).” The blustery opening theme—sounding very much like music by his friend Richard Strauss—was not from not-so-sunny Italy, but a melody he had written a few years earlier inspired by his friend George Robertson Sinclair’s bulldog Dan. (Dan also made a cameo appearance in Elgar’s Enigma Variations.) This stormy opening eventually subsides into more wistful and pastoral music for clarinets and strings—according to Elgar, representing “a shepherd with his flock straying about the ruins of the old church—he piping softly and reedily and occasionally singing.” The mood suddenly shifts to warlike and dramatic—to “paint the relentless and domineering force of the ancient day, and to give a sound picture of the strife and wars, the ‘drums and tramplings’ of a later time.” This character shifts once more, and a solo viola introduces an Italian-style song—though written by Elgar and later published separately under the title In the Moonlight—a gentle interlude before a grand finale that brings together all of the earlier themes. Though this overture was partly inspired by the landscape and music Elgar experienced in Italy, he also includes a few literary quotations in his score—two from Tennyson’s poem The Daisy:

“What hours were thine and mine
In lands of palm and southern pine
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom
Of olive, aloe, and maise and vine.”

and

“What Roman strength Turbia show’d.
In ruin, by the mountain road.”

Another is drawn from Byron’s epic Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

“…a land
Which was the mightiest in its old command
And is the loveliest…
Wherein were cast …. the men of Rome!
Thou art the garden of the world.”

Ottorino Respighi

Born: July 9, 1879, Bologna, Italy.
Died: April 18, 1936, Rome, Italy. 

The Pines of Rome

• Composed: 1923-44.
• Premiere: December 14, 1924, in Rome, by the Augusteo Orchestra, under Bernardino Molinari.
• Duration: 21:00.

This work, the second of Respighi’s “Roman Trilogy,” includes four vividly drawn programmatic scenes: of children at play, a funeral procession in the catacombs, delicate night music, and the song of a nightingale, and finally, of a Roman army on the march.

Background

The “Roman trilogy” of Respighi includes three large symphonic poems that are easily his most famous works: The Fountains of Rome (1916), The Pines of Rome (1924), and Roman Festivals (1928). In these works, the composer creates a sonic portrait of his native Rome. From Fountains celebrating the great Bernini monuments to the wild revelry of Festivals, Respighi paints a colorful, programmatic picture of the Eternal City. For the central work, The Pines of Rome, Respighi uses images of the ancient trees that line Rome’s parks and promenades to inspire four programmatic episodes. The four sections are played without pauses.

What You’ll Hear

In the score, Respighi describes the first section, Pines of the Villa Borghese, as follows: “Children are at play in the pine grove of the Villa Borghese, dancing ‘Ring around the Rosy;’ they mimic marching soldiers and battles; they chirp with excitement like swallows at evening, and they swarm away.” The music is appropriately light and high-spirited, with quick woodwind and horn lines beneath trumpet fanfares.

For Pines near a Catacomb, he turns to a much darker, “quasi-Medieval” texture. Respighi was fond of using Gregorian chant or chantlike themes in his orchestral works, and the Lento second movement begins with a quiet chant that builds gradually towards a tremendous orchestral statement near the end of the movement. Here are “the shadows of the pines that crown the entrance to a catacomb. From the depths rises a dolorous chant which spreads solemnly, like a hymn, and then mysteriously dies away.”

In his description of Pines of the Janiculum, the composer notes:

There is a tremor in the air. The pines of the Janiculum hill are profiled in the full moon. A nightingale sings.

This is profoundly calm and quiet night-music, carried by the softer voices of the orchestra throughout. At the very conclusion, a recording of a nightingale’s singing is added to the orchestral texture—one of the earliest instances of a composer using prerecorded sounds in a concert piece.

The final section is titled Pines of the Appian Way. Respighi gives the following colorful description of an ancient Roman army on the march:

Misty Dawn on the Appian Way. Solitary pines stand guard over the tragic countryside. The faint, unceasing rhythm of numberless steps. A vision of ancient glories appears to the poet; trumpets blare, and a consular army erupts in the brilliance of the newly risen sun—towards the Sacred Way, mounting to a triumph on the Capitoline Hill.

The movement opens quietly, with a slow and inexorable march, but builds gradually towards an enormous brassy peak. To create this picture of Roman military might, Respighi’s score calls for six buccinae—Roman war trumpets. (He also provides the helpful suggestion that modern instruments may be used if buccinae are not available!)

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Program notes ©2024 by J. Michael Allsen