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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky Excerpts from The Oprichnik and Swan Lake Ballet began to gain status as an art form at the beginning of the nineteenth century. While dance had been an integral part of opera performance since the 1600s (and continued to hold that position for many audiences), the years around 1800 saw a rise in theatrical presentations with dancers and music but no singers. The dancers were primarily Italian or French, but they worked for theaters and courts across Europe. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the aspects still thought of as defining ballet performance had become standard practice. Musical scores were composed for dance, which provided structural support for narrative performances. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia had emerged as a primary center for ballet. Tchaikovsky wrote his opera The Oprichnik in 1874 and completed the score for the ballet Swan Lake in 1876. The Oprichnik tells the story of a young man who joins the Czar’s private army (the oprichniki) to exact revenge against a prince. The dance music in this opera holds to a long-standing tradition of turning to folk elements as respite from the melodrama of the opera libretto. Swan Lake also has its share of folk elements, taken as it is from the German fairytales. The ballet’s staying power, however, is due to the classic beauty of the dancers representing the graceful water birds as we see in tonight’s pas de deux. Tchaikovsky’s music holds a very special place in the ballet repertoire, striking just the right balance between evocation and sensuousness. Sergei Rachmaninoff Capriccio Bohémien The Capriccio Bohémien is the first piece this season by Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose music will be explored through many KSO concerts this year. Rachmaninoff’s family was part of the minor aristocracy at the end of Czarist Russia. Their lands came through his eighteenth-century ancestor Gerasimovich Rachmaninoff, an officer in the St. Petersburg Guard who had won the favor of Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth. Musical talent was added to the ancestral mix through his great-grandfather, Alexander, a soldier and violinist whose wife was from a musical family. As we know from Russian literature, the wealth and power granted to the aristocracy was not always a healthy thing. Although he had managed to marry well and increase the family’s lands, Rachmaninoff’s father fell into a life of disreputable habits. Eventually, he lost much of his personal wealth. Sergei’s mother, Lyubof Butakova, managed to arrange private music lessons for her son, and his obvious gifts in this area won the support of sympathetic family members. His career path was set. Rachmaninoff began to study at the conservatory in St. Petersburg in 1882. After his parents separated he transferred to the Moscow Conservatory to continue piano study. Composing captured his interest around 1887. He graduated from the conservatory with the highest possible marks and the Great Gold Medal, a rarely conferred honor. Graduation in 1892 allowed Sergei Rachmaninoff to call himself a “Free Artist.” The majority of Rachmaninoff’s early compositions were for piano, and the music that would become Capriccio Bohémien began as a piano duet. The duet was written during the summer of 1892, a very productive period for the composer that also included his early tone-poem The Rock, which was his first orchestral publication. The Capriccio Bohémien purposefully is meant to follow the models of similar pieces by Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. But instead of turning to the folk melodies of the sunny Mediterranean as his predecessors had, Rachmaninoff chose Gypsy melodies. As his graduation assignment in the spring of 1892, he had been given the task of composing a one-act opera on a libretto derived from Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies, so it is not surprising that Gypsy themes would inspire an additional piece of music, particularly as he was also acquainted with several Gypsy singers at this time. Rachmaninoff dedicated Capriccio Bohémien to Peter Lodïzhensky, whose wife was a Gypsy. The orchestral score is titled Kaprichio na tziganskiye (Capriccio on Gypsy Themes) in Russian. Although it is not meant to evoke the “bohemian” lifestyle (as in Puccini’s La Bohème) or reference the folk music of central Europe (old “Bohemia,” as heard in music by Smetana and Dvořák), there is some kinship with the latter in the alternating play of light and dark. Capriccio Bohémien is dramatic, with militaristic-sounding moments toward the beginning, followed by a beautiful episode featuring a flute solo. The music becomes more lighthearted toward the end of the piece. Forward momentum builds through several dramatic climaxes toward the end of the work. Rachmaninoff completed the orchestral score for Capriccio Bohémien in the fall of 1894. He had the opportunity to conduct the premiere of the work in Moscow at the end of November, 1895, during a tour with an Italian violinist. George Gershwin “The Man I Love" In 1970, the Russian ex-patriot George Balanchine (1904-1983) created the ballet “Who Cares?” with the help of American composer Hershy Kay (1919-1981). Balanchine emerged from Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to begin the New York City Ballet. Balanchine believed that dance should be an embodiment for music and that this goal was best achieved through classic technique. Although Hershy Kay was a talented composer of original pieces, he is probably best known today for orchestrating and reconstructing the work of others, including Louis Moreau Gottschalk. “Who Cares?” is comprised of sixteen Gershwin songs arranged for sensual rather than narrative effect. Gershwin originally wrote “The Man I Love” with his brother Ira for the 1924 musical Lady, Be Good. A ballad of longing for a romantic ideal colored by a jazzy melancholy, “The Man I Love” is a wonderful vehicle for ballet. Maurice Ravel Daphnis et Chloé Maurice Ravel wrote four scores to be used for dance performance. The last two — La valse and Boléro — became mainstays of the orchestral repertoire. The other two are generally heard these days as orchestral suites or, in the case of Mother Goose, as a piano duet. Ravel introduced some of the music he wrote for his second ballet, Daphnis et Chloé, to audiences in an initial suite before the ballet premiered. Like so much of our favorite music from the beginning of the twentieth century, Daphnis et Chloé owes its existence to the ballet impresario, Sergey Diaghilev. Diaghilev commissioned the score from Ravel in 1909 for his Ballets Russes. The scenario for Daphnis et Chloé was created by Diaghilev’s choreographer Mikhail Fokine (the original libretto was from 1904). While Fokine and Ravel apparently spent quite a bit of time in rancorous debate about the final conception of the ballet, they managed to work things out and Daphnis et Chloé premiered in Paris in 1912. The ballet received little publicity on its initial release. The Ballets Russes had just presented their version of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun as choreographed by Fokine’s rival, Nijinsky. Reports and criticism of the scandalous production kept the Parisian art world buzzing for weeks and disrupted the company’s rehearsals. The story of a young shepherd and his maiden comes from the Greek pastoral literature of the second to fourth centuries. Daphnis et Chloé was attributed to Longus, and translated in the sixteenth century by Jacques Amyot. The affection between the young people is challenged by their peers, including a rival male suitor, and then by outside forces in the form of pirates. Although Daphnis is capable of besting his rival through his own talents, he must call on supernatural forces to rescue Chlo é from the pirates. Daphnis petitions local water nymphs for help, but ultimately the demi-god Pan steps in to restore the couple’s happiness. Much of the score for Daphnis et Chloé is rather cool and reserved. The strong emphasis on woodwinds follows the tradition of pastoral music. Ravel’s precision in orchestration shines in several spots, most notably the sunrise music that accompanies the couple’s reunion. He also unleashes the orchestra for the destruction of the pirates and the ballet’s finale. © 2008 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth
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