CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS

The theme of “lightness” that ChamberFest is exploring this season reaches a peak in this program featuring works from three centuries, including the second concert paying tribute to creatures who delight (and nourish) human beings. Lightness, it should be stressed, doesn’t imply lightweight: It suggests frames of mind and atmosphere, rather than anything relating to matters of gravity or importance. Grace, color, vivacity, and whimsy appear in the program’s varied styles of works by composers from Hungary, New Zealand, the United States, and France.

György Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for woodwind quintet dates from 1953, before the Hungarian-Austrian composer (1923-2006) ventured into more experimental territory following his 1956 departure from Budapest for the more welcoming artistic milieu of Vienna and Cologne. He would become one of the most original composers of the 20th century, though, ironically, perhaps best known for the music that provides so much of the otherworldly aura in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, alongside pieces by Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, and others.

Ligeti’s quintet is much more intimate, to say the least, but no less bewitching. The word “bagatelle,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a short unpretentious instrumental composition,” can be traced to François Couperin and a harpsichord work he wrote and played in 1717. The six bagatelles in Ligeti’s collection reflect the Oxford definition, as well as the influence of Ligeti’s compatriot Béla Bartók, who is memorialized in the fifth piece. Throughout the bagatelles, Ligeti defies convention, surprising the ear as the wind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon) embraces spiky rhythms, extremes of dynamics and range, and mysterious expressive realms. The third bagatelle combines waltz-like lines with darting, seven-note figures, the fourth dances in exuberant patterns of seven. After the mournful and aching lament to Bartók, Ligeti sends the quintet on an exuberant and folksy ride alternating meters of two and three before literally dying away.

Another composer who conjures magical sound worlds is Salina Fisher (born 1993 in New Zealand), whose Kintsugi for Piano Trio is a study in shimmering sonorities shared by piano, violin, and cello. As Fisher has written about her 2020 work: “Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. All the pieces of a broken bowl or pot are carefully joined back together with gold-dusted urushi (lacquer). Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates all the cracks or ‘scars’ for the unique history that they represent. The object is more beautiful for having been broken. I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the ‘cracks’.” Violin flutters and crystalline piano figures are melded with high cello trills and slides. The rhapsodic interplay evolves organically through hushed details, sharp edges, and ruminative gestures. the score with narrator, which ChamberFest is honoring, began in the late 1940s, when Ogden Nash wrote a set of witty topical verses to accompany the music.

Of distinctly more extroverted personality is Lukas Foss’s Capriccio for Cello and Piano, written in 1946 while the German-born American composer was serving as pianist of the Boston Symphony. The piece received its premiere in 1946 at Tanglewood by cellist Gregor Piatogorsky and Foss, who dedicated it to Natalie Koussevitzky, the late first wife of Boston Symphony music director Serge Koussevitzky. Foss (1922-2009) was born in Berlin and moved to the United States with his family in 1937. He absorbed a wealth of musical traditions at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he met Leonard Bernstein, and at Tanglewood. The “American” nature of the Capriccio for Cello and Piano stems in part from Foss’s familiarity with the music of Aaron Copland, including the ballet Billy the Kid. The cello opens with a robust theme that is answered to equally proud effect by the piano. Foss packs an enormous amount of rambunctious and affectionate activity into this six-minute score, which finds the instruments reveling in one another’s company and exploiting the range of their expressive and technical possibilities.

The animal kingdom appears in all its diverse splendor in Camille SaintSaëns’s The Carnival of the Animals for two pianos and chamber ensemble. The French composer wrote the 14-movement collection in 1886 but refused to publish it or allow public performances during his lifetime, fearing that the music world would no longer consider him a serious composer. (He did, however, allow publication of the ethereal 13th movement, “The Swan,” in a version for cello and one piano.) The entire work received a number of semiprivate performances shortly after its creation, sometimes with Saint-Saëns as one of the pianists and the musicians “wearing masks of the heads of the various animals they represented,” according to British writer Edward Blakeman. The full score wasn’t published until 1922, the year after the composer’s death, and quickly became one of his most beloved works. The tradition of performing

Saint-Saëns employs his estimable descriptive powers to portray the fourlegged, airborne, and aquatic protagonists in The Carnival of the Animals Along the way, he briefly quotes Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Offenbach, Rameau, and even himself. The music is as colorful and light as anything Saint-Saëns wrote, full of good humor and tenderness. The two pianos face notable challenges, as in the scampering octaves of No. 3 (“Hermonies,” or wild asses) and the satirical drudgery of scale practicing in No. 11 (“Pianistes,” depicted as a species all their own). Saint-Saëns makes fun of himself in No. 11 (“Fossiles”), borrowing from his own Danse macabre to portray dancing skeletons (partly via xylophone, mais oui) even as he folds popular tunes and a bit of Rosina’s aria “Una voce poco fa” from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville into the mischievous narrative. And Saint-Saëns outdoes anything in Disney under the sea in No. 7 (“Aquarium”).

The “lightness of being” that informs so much of ChamberFest’s programming is placed on momentary hold when the cello unfolds the forlorn melody in “The Swan” amid placid piano lines. (The piece shot to international fame in 1905, when Mikhail Fokine choreographed a solo for Anna Pavlova titled The Dying Swan.) But poignancy gives way to rollicking spirits in the finale, with the pianos again trilling and scurrying, the carnival bursting with music-hall exuberance, and many of our animal friends returning to the scene, including the hee-hawing donkeys that tip their tails to Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Introduction

Camille Saint-Saëns

Was wracked with pains, When people addressed him, As Saint Sanes. He held the human race to blame, Because it could not pronounce his name. So, he turned with metronome and fife, To glorify other kinds of life. Be quiet please - for here begins His salute to feathers, fur, and fins.