Fanfare from La Péri
Paul Dukas
(b. 1865, Paris, France; d. 1935, Paris)
Paul Dukas would undoubtedly be chagrined to know that he is largely remembered today for that classic of children’s concerts The Sorcerer's Apprentice, delightful as that little tone poem is. For this very serious musician was one of France’s most influential figures in the first decades of the 20th century, especially as a renowned teacher of composition and orchestration at the Paris Conservatoire, training such stellar pupils as Manuel de Falla, Joaquín Rodrigo, and Olivier Messaien.
A masterful writer of prose as well as music, Dukas became a music critic of the highest discrimination and ideals. Unfortunately, such refined critical faculties did not help his work as a composer. Despite the pleas of friends, he destroyed more of his pieces than he published, leaving at his death a very slender musical legacy of beautifully crafted music.
Besides The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Dukas’ two other works that remain in the international repertoire are his opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue and his ballet La Péri. Premiered in Paris in 1912, La Péri was created for the Russian ballerina Natalia Trouhanova. A lovely work in impressionist style, it sadly became the last work that Dukas permitted to be published, and it was only saved by the intervention of his friends. At the last minute before its premiere production, Dukas added the brilliant fanfare prelude for brass instruments that we’ll hear tonight. And in our own times, this two-minute prelude is far more often heard than the ballet score as a whole.
In Persian mythology, a péri is a fairy creature descended from fallen angels who cannot re-enter paradise until he or she has done penance. Many 19th-century Romantic composers were fascinated by these legends, and Robert Schumann wrote a large-scaled oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri. In Dukas’ scenario, the youth Iskender encounters a péri while searching for the lotus flower that will grant immortality. After many journeys, he discovers the flower in the hand of a female péri sleeping in a bejeweled bower. She is very beautiful, and Iskender falls in love with her. He seizes the lotus from the sleeping fairy, but when she awakens, she wins the flower back in exchange for a kiss. She then melts into the golden light of sunset, and Iskender realizes that he has lost her forever and given up his own life in the bargain.
Urban Legends
Michael Abels
(b. 1962, Phoenix, Arizona; now living in Los Angeles, California)
Growing up on a farm in South Dakota, Michael Abels as a young child showed so much interest in music and the family piano that his music-loving grandparents persuaded a teacher to give him lessons when he was four. By eight, he began composing and at thirteen, had his first orchestral work performed. Moving to California, Abels studied piano and composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. Then, since he was of mixed race, he decided to explore his African-American roots and moved on to the California Institute of the Arts to study West African drumming techniques.
Abels’ early composing career was focused on classical concert music, both orchestral and chamber. Now a fervent Angelo, he also wanted to write film music, but for years was unable to break into a field not yet really open to African-Americans. And surprisingly that break came about from the concert work Urban Legends that we’ll meet tonight: a concerto for string quartet and orchestra commissioned by the Sphinx Organization, a nonprofit that supports the careers of young Black and Latino classical musicians. The Harlem String Quartet premiered Legends with the Sphinx Orchestra in February 2012.
A few year later, director Jordan Peele was looking for a Black composer to score his latest film, Get Out (2017). Searching through You Tube, he watched the video of Legend’s first performance and immediately contacted Abels. The partnership was a stunning success, and Abels’ score won many film industry prizes. Suddenly studios and directors were hammering on his door, and to date, he has written 14 more film scores, including two more for Peele, Us and Nope (Nope actually contains some music from Legends). Abels’ fame grew bigger when he was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music for the opera Omar, which he co-wrote with the multi-talented Rhiannon Giddens.
Urban Legends marries the most classical of chamber ensembles, the string quartet, with a colorful orchestra propelled by a fully stocked percussion section prominently featuring West African drums. Indeed, the quartet becomes a percussion section itself during the music’s opening moments. When the drums enter, they establish a propulsive click track. This thrilling music thus builds into an irresistible mixture of jazz, rock, hip-hop, and classical string virtuosity.
Duet Concertino
Richard Strauss
(b. 1864, Munich, Bavaria; d. 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany)
As World War II ended, Richard Strauss was forced to leave his broken and defeated land. In the chaos of a destroyed Germany, he could no longer access the royalties from his compositions; furthermore, he faced a de-nazification tribunal before he could take up any work as a conductor again. For a few years, he sought refuge in Switzerland while questions about his ill-advised brief tenure as president of the Reichsmusikkammer were being cleared up. Though Strauss could happily compose music under virtually any conditions, he constantly was forced to move from hotel to hotel after his demanding wife, Pauline, had made herself persona non grata with each management.
Nevertheless, a few exquisite last works flowed from his pen. His last purely instrumental work, the Duet-Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon written swiftly in 1947, epitomized his late style: reduced orchestra and highly refined writing paying tribute to his life-long passion for the 18th century and especially for Mozart. This is music that shares almost nothing in common with the spectacular, large-orchestra tone poems of his youth.
Duet-Concertino, nevertheless, was inspired by a little story line, although Strauss didn’t choose to follow it slavishly as he did in his earlier tone poems. The unusual choice of wind soloists was inspired by Strauss’ admiration for Hugo Burghauser, once principal bassoonist for the Vienna Philharmonic and an old friend, who had recently moved to New York City to play in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The composer wrote to Burghauser telling him about his intentions: “I am even busy with an idea for a double concerto for clarinet and bassoon thinking especially of your beautiful tone.” He further added that he was thinking about a “Beauty and the Beast” scenario for the work: a beautiful princess (the clarinet) is frightened by the grotesque cavorting of a bear (the bassoon) in imitation of her. Finally, the bear wins her over, and she dances with it, upon which it turns into a prince. “So, in the end, you too will turn into a prince, and all live happily ever after,” Strauss told Burghauser.
Burghauser, however, did not play the premiere of Duet-Concertino, which was given by the Italian-Swiss Radio Orchestra and its soloists in Lugano, Switzerland on April 4, 1948. The work is scored for a chamber orchestra of strings and harp, with a quintet of string soloists juxtaposed against the full ensemble. Its three movements — the last as long as the first two combined — flow together without pause. All the movements share much of the same thematic material.
The first movement begins like chamber music with the string quintet playing elegantly lyrical music that recalls the prelude to Strauss’ last opera, Capriccio (1941). The little twirling figure that launches the music is the motive from which the work is built. From this, the clarinet emerges, singing a beautiful, expansive melody that undulates gracefully over a large range. Stumbling up the scale, the clumsy bassoon tries to join in, but the clarinet shrieks and takes flight. The bassoon persists with his own song, and eventually, the two soloists join in a rhythmically conflicting duet.
The music flows directly into an Andante slow movement. Under shimmering strings, the bassoon takes on a more princely character and sings a noble romantic aria. The clarinet responds rapturously, and an ardent love duet ensues. A brief, cadenza-like dialogue between the two forms the link to the finale.
In this effervescent Rondo, the twirling motive heard at the beginning of the work generates a limpid, dancing rondo theme. Finally reconciled to each other, clarinet and bassoon are compatible and equal partners. Even the bassoon’s stumbling upward scale is now smooth and assured and happily adopted by the clarinet. The work closes in a joyous fantasia on the twirling motive.
Symphonic Dances
Sergei Rachmaninoff
(b. 1873, Semyonovo, Russia; d. 1943, Beverly Hills, California)
By 1940, Sergei Rachmaninoff, then 67 and in failing health, believed his composing career was over. Since fleeing Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917 for refuge in Western Europe and America, he had managed to create only five substantial works, including his popular keyboard masterpiece Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
Many factors contributed to Rachmaninoff’s creative drought. Exile from Russia had turned his life upside down: he had forfeited a considerable fortune there, and in America was forced to turn to arduous annual tours as a concert pianist to support his family. One of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, he soon rebuilt his fortune, but a life on Pullman cars shuttling from one concert hall to the next exacted a heavy price on his composing. Pondering his predicament, he wrote: “Perhaps the incessant practice and eternal rush inseparable from life as a concert artist takes too much toll of my strength; perhaps I feel that the kind of music I care to write is not acceptable today. And perhaps my true reason for adopting the life of an interpreter rather than that of a creator … is none of these. For when I left Russia, I left behind the desire to compose: losing my country I lost myself also. To the exile whose musical roots, traditions and background have been annihilated, there remains no desire for self-expression.”
But the desire for self-expression still smoldered. In the summer of 1940 as Rachmaninoff recuperated from minor surgery at a rented estate near Huntington, Long Island, it blazed up again for the last time. On August 21, he surprised his friend Eugene Ormandy, conductor of his favorite Philadelphia Orchestra, with news of a new composition. Ormandy happily accepted the new work, and Rachmaninoff rushed to orchestrate it, completing it just in time for its premiere by the Philadelphians on January 3, 1941.
His swan song, Symphonic Dances is a retrospective work that sums up Rachmaninoff’s musical and personal philosophy. Yet it is also an astonishingly youthful creation that shows the composer at the peak of his powers. With its incisive dance rhythms, it was intended for the ballet, to be choreographed by Rachmaninoff's friend, the great Russian choreographer Michel Fokine, but Fokine’s sudden death in 1942 sadly ended that possibility. Here Rachmaninoff created a wondrous kaleidoscope of instrumental colors, from the mellow crooning of an alto saxophone to the dry-bones clatter of a xylophone. Prone to sentimental excess in his younger days, he maintained a careful balance between emotion and detachment as he surveyed the world with the wisdom of a man approaching life’s end.
First Movement: Softly, the violins establish the incessant chugging rhythm of the first dance. Woodwinds trace a three-note descending idea that soon grows into the nervously driven main theme. Then the tempo slows for a peaceful oasis. Here Rachmaninoff gives us the last of his romantically beautiful tunes, introduced by the mellow alto saxophone, a visitor from Big Band jazz. Violins soon sweep up this gorgeous melody, steeped in the flavor of Russian folk song. In the closing coda, the strings sing a lovely Russian chant-like melody: a theme from the composer’s First Symphony, a bitter failure in his youth but now recalled with tranquility in a radiant mist of bells, harp, and piano.
Movement two’s dance is a phantasmic waltz, like something heard in a dream. It is introduced by ominous brass chords that will return to disturb its flow. With difficulty the orchestra tries to launch the waltz; finally, the English horn succeeds in establishing the swaying melody. Occasionally, the waltz blossoms lushly in the divided strings, but biting harmonies constantly undercut any sentimentality.
The finale opens with the weary sighs of old age. Here Rachmaninoff's old nemesis, the “Dies Irae” (“Day of Judgment”), a Gregorian funeral chant he used so often in his music, returns as the composer contemplates death. The music seems to describe a person’s final struggle for life and then its end, as woodwinds vanish upward over a harp glissando. Music of mourning issues from the depths of the orchestra. But the tempo soon accelerates to a dance of triumph. “Dies Irae" sounds again in the brass, but is vanquished by a rhythmically vivacious Orthodox chant melody rising from low strings and woodwinds. This is the song “Blagosloven Yesi, Gospodi” from Rachmaninoff’s 1915 choral masterpiece All-Night Vigil, telling of Christ’s resurrection. Here the composer seems to be joyfully proclaiming his own faith in resurrected life. At the end of the score, he wrote the words: “I thank Thee, Lord!”
Notes by Janet E. Bedell copyright 2025
