The Carnival of the Animals verses by

Ogden Nash

Wild Asses

Have ever you harked to the jackass wild, Which scientists call the onager? It sounds like the laugh of an idiot child, Or a hepcat on a harmoniger. But do not sneer at the jackass wild, There is a method in his heehaw. For with maidenly blush and accent mild The jenny-ass answers shee-haw.

Kangaroos

The kangaroo can jump incredible, He has to jump because he is edible. I could not eat a kangaroo, But many fine Australians do. Those with cookbooks as well as boomerangs, Prefer him in tasty kangaroomeringues.

Royal March of the Lion

The lion is the king of beasts, And husband of the lioness. Gazelles and things on which he feasts Address him as your highoness. There are those that admire that roar of his, In the African jungles and velds, But, I think that wherever the lion is, I’d rather be somewhere else.

Tortoises

Come crown my brow with leaves of myrtle, I know the tortoise is a turtle, Come carve my name in stone immortal, I know the turtoise is a tortle. I know to my profound despair, I bet on one to beat a hare. I also know I’m now a pauper, Because of its tortley, turtley, torper.

Aquarium

Some fish are minnows, Some are whales. People like dimples, Fish like scales, Some fish are slim, And some are round, They don’t get cold, They don’t get drowned. But every fishwife Fears for her fish. What we call mermaids They call merfish.

Hens and Roosters

The rooster is a roistering hoodlum, His battle cry is “cock-a-doodleum”. Hands in pockets, cap over eye, He whistles at pullets, passing by.

The Elephant

Elephants are useful friends, Equipped with handles at both ends. They have a wrinkled moth-proof hide. Their teeth are upside down, outside. If you think the elephant preposterous, You’ve probably never seen a rhinosterous.

People With Long Ears

In the world of mules

There are no rules.

The Cuckoo in the Middle of the Wood

Cuckoos lead bohemian lives, They fail as husbands and as wives, Therefore, they cynically dispariage Everybody else’s marriage.

Aviary

Puccini was Latin, and Wagner Teutonic, And birds are incurably philharmonic, Suburban yards and rural vistas Are filled with avian Andrew Sisters. The skylark sings a roundelay, The crow sings “The Road to Mandalay,” The nightingale sings a lullaby, And the sea gull sings a gullaby. That’s what shepherds listened to in Arcadia Before somebody invented the radia.

Fossils

At midnight in the museum hall, The fossils gathered for a ball. There were no drums or saxophones, But just the clatter of their bones, A rolling, rattling carefree circus, Of mammoth polkas and mazurkas. Pterodactyls and brontosauruses Sang ghostly prehistoric choruses. Amid the mastodonic wassail I caught the eye of one small fossil, “Cheer up sad world,” he said and winked, “It’s kind of fun to be extinct.”

Finale

Now we’ve reached the grand finale, Animale carnivale. Noises new to sea and land, Issue from the skillful band. All the strings contort their features, Imitating crawly creatures. All the brasses look like mumps

From blowing umpah, umpah, umps. In outdoing Barnum and Bailey, and Ringling, Saint-Saëns has done a miraculous thingling.

Pianists

Some claim that pianists are human, And quote the case of Mr Truman. Saint Saëns, upon the other hand, Considered them a scurvy band. A blight they are, he said, and simian, Instead of normal men and womian.

The Swan

The swan can swim while sitting down, For pure conceit he takes the crown, He looks in the mirror over and over, And claims to have never heard of Pavlova.

sunday 25 june 3pm

Vortex

PRELUDE TALK by Owen Cantor at 2pm

ALFRED SCHNITTKE

Itamar Zorman, violin

Diana Cohen, violin

Moz-Art (after the fragment K. 416d)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Orion Weiss, solo piano

Itamar Zorman, violin

James Thompson, violin

Samuel Rosenthal, viola

Nicholas Canellakis, cello

Nathan Farrington, bass

Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major, K. 414

Allegro

Andante

Rondeau. Allegretto

-intermission-

MICHAEL STEPHEN BROWN

Nicholas Canellakis, solo cello

Diana Cohen, violin

Itamar Zorman, violin

James Thompson, violin

Samuel Rosenthal, viola

Maiya Papach, viola

Zlatomir Fung, cello

Nathan Farrington, bass

FRANCIS POULENC

Denis Savelyev, flute

Cynthia Koledo DeAlmeida, oboe

Franklin Cohen, clarinet

William Caballero, horn

Andrew Brady, bassoon

Roman Rabinovich, piano

Vortex for Cello and Strings

Sextet for Piano and Winds, FP 100

Allegro vivace

Divertissement: Andantino

Finale: Prestissimo

This ChamberFest program draws its title not from a novel but from a work receiving one of its earliest performances. It shares the stage with two views of Mozart — first by a Russian composer and then by The Man himself — and the season’s most insouciant piece, Francis Poulenc’s Sextet for Piano and Winds. Contrasts are rampant at this concert. Prepare to be propelled into a whirlpool — a vortex — of styles and moods.

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was a master of stylistic variety, the ability to meld numerous influences into something new, fresh, subversive, and meaningful. Initially indebted to his fellow Russian, Dmitri Shostakovich, Schnittke eventually carved out his own artistic niche through the polystylism that would inform many of his works. He wrote that “the goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so.” No necks are broken during Moz-Art, his five-minute violin duo, though more than a few rules are. Schnittke borrows themes from Mozart, including a fragment from an unpublished 1783 pantomime (K. 416d) and the famous opening from the Symphony No. 40, as he places the violins in consonant and dissonant conversation (competition?). Notes clash and caress, tempos change suddenly, one violinist whistles, plucked notes rub shoulders with bowed ones. It’s all very Classical, except when it isn’t. As Roman Rabinovich puts it, “They try to play Mozart but constantly get interrupted with the wrong things.” In 1977, a year after he wrote the piece, Schnittke expanded the score for two violins and two small string orchestras under the title Moz-Art à la Haydn

Which brings us to real Mozart in the form of the Piano Concerto No. 12 in A major, K. 414. What, a piano concerto on a chamber-music concert? Why not? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote all of these concertos for himself as soloist with a small group of colleagues. A conductor isn’t required in most of these pieces. The pianist can set tempos and collaborate closely with the other musicians on details as if they are playing chamber music — which they are. It was common, in fact, for ensembles to adapt instrumentation for intimate circumstances. So, the two oboes and two horns in the concerto’s original score give way to the more streamlined string version offered at this concert, with no injury to the music.

And what happy and affectionate music it is. Mozart wrote the piece in 1782 in Vienna during a productive period that included the composition of The Abduction from the Seraglio, Serenade No. 12 in C minor for Winds, and the “Haffner” Symphony. The score’s genial nature is established in the first movement with the strings shaping the first theme and then handing it over to the soloist. The piano engages in playful and lyrical interplay with the strings, suggesting how agile a player Mozart was, and also how inventive a composer. Further evidence can be heard in the cadenza, written out in the score, which heads in many directions as Mozart improvises on what he has already shared. He pays tribute to Johann Christian Bach in the Andante, quoting from his late mentor’s overture to La calamità de’ cuori with warm lyricism and offering an eloquent cadenza. Mozart returns to the brightness of A major in the playful finale, an Allegretto full of tender and nimble activity.

Like Mozart, Michael Stephen Brown (born 1987) is an admired pianist who also has won acclaim as a composer. He was the recipient of the 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant and appears often with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His Vortex for Cello and Strings is the newest piece at ChamberFest this season, having received its premiere in April under the auspices of Chamber Music Sedona. In a program note provided to ChamberFest, Brown writes:

“Vortex for Cello and Strings is inspired by both Ezra Pound’s quote, ‘the vortex is the point of maximum energy,’ and the mythical energy believed to exist in the natural landscape of Sedona. Sedona’s beauty and powerful energy has moved me since I first visited when I was eight years old. Vortex is also a culmination of fifteen years of artistic collaboration with cellist Nicholas Canellakis. We play in a cello/piano duo, and I’ve written several works for him. After showing Nick a draft of Vortex, he was disappointed there weren’t enough beautiful cello melodies. After a great deal of arguing, I realized he was right. I reworked the piece with that in mind, and the final version intermingles soaring cello melodies with kinetic, pulsating energy. The strings swirl vibrantly all around the central voice of the cello, as if pushing and pulling against the currents of life. You might think of the work as a hero’s journey during uncertain times, resolved at the end by all the players uniting in a feeling of celebration.”

The urge to celebrate is on copious display in Francis Poulenc’s Sextet for Piano and Winds, a staple of the wind repertoire. The French composer (18991963) was a member of the group known as Les Six, founded in the 1920s, of young French and Swiss composers who revolted against Romanticism and Impressionism and produced music that balanced the serious with the irreverent. Poulenc was a master in this regard, capable of writing works as penetrating as the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1956), songs, and choral pieces or whipping up pieces as zany and sentimental as the Sextet for Piano and Winds (1931-32). He wrote the last during the same period he composed the whimsical chamber cantata Le bal masqué, which shares some material with the Sextet, and the motoric, Mozart-like Concerto for Two Pianos.

The first movement of the Sextet is marked “Very fast and carried away,” which tells volumes about the music’s character. The piano and friends race up scales, the horn whoops into the stratosphere, and the ensemble proceeds with loony abandon. Poulenc seems to be thumbing his nose at the world as he flings flutter-tongued passages, pointed grace notes, and curlicue phrases at our ears. Then the motion stops as the bassoon plays a sad solo and a tune resembling “My Melancholy Baby” makes its way around the group. But the jazzy events of the early part of the movement return to conclude the romp.

The oboe introduces a sugar-coated tune in the second-movement “Divertissement,” but the serenity is interrupted by a middle section abounding in musical hijinks before settling back into lyrical mode. Rude remarks begin the last movement, a scene of heightened frivolity set in a music hall or cabaret. Then everything stops and the music settles back into the nostalgic world of “My Melancholy Baby,” suggesting that life is destined to balance the light with the dark.

© Donald Rosenberg