Program Notes: Fabulous France

PROGRAM JEAN PHILIPPE RAMEAU Selections from Les Indes galantes Ouverture Musette En Rondeau Deuxième Air pour les Bostangis Air des Incas pour la Devotion du Soleil Menuets Air pour les Esclaves Affricains Air pour les amants qui suivent Belloone, et pour les amantes qui tachent de les retenir Tambourins MAURICE RAVEL JOHANNES DEBUS

Piano Concerto in G Major Allegramente Adagio assai

Saturday, November 11 | 8PM Sunday, November 12 | 2PM

FABULOUS FRANCE A Jacobs Masterworks Concert conductor Johannes Debus piano Louis Lortie

Presto Louis Lortie, piano

INTERMISSION GABRIEL FAURÉ Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80 Prélude Entr'acte: Fileuse (The Spinner) Sicilienne La mort de Mélisande (The Death of Melisande) CLAUDE DEBUSSY Ibéria, No. 2 from Images

Performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall

Par les rues et par les chemins (In the Streets and Byways) Les parfums de la nuit (The Fragrances of the Night) Le matin d'un jour de fête (The Morning of a Festival Day)

The approximate running time for this program, including intermission, is one hour and forty minutes.

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PROGRAM NOTES | FABULOUS FRANCE – NOVEMBER 11 & 12

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

The highly-esteemed French Canadian pianist LOUIS LORTIE has extended his interpretative voice across a broad range of repertoire rather than choosing to specialize in one particular style. The London Times has identified the artist’s “combination of total spontaneity and meditated

JOHANNES DEBUS has been Music Director of the Canadian Opera Company (COC) since 2009, having been appointed immediately following his debut.

The 2017-18 season includes debuts with the Seattle, Oregon and Kansas City Symphonies, and the Bilbao Orkestra Sinfonikoa. Mr. Debus returns to the Metropolitan Opera conducting The Tales of Hoffmann, the Bregenz Festival conducting the Austrian premiere of Goldschmidt's Beatrice Cenci and the San Diego Symphony. As Music Director of the COC, he conducts Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Stravinsky's The Nightingale and Other Short Fables. Highlights of the 2016-17 season included debuts with the Metropolitan Opera conducting Salome, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and his Australian debut with the Tasmanian and West Australian Symphonies.

He conducts regularly at the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, Staatsoper unter den Linden Berlin and Frankfurt Opera, and he has appeared in new productions at English National Opera and Opéra National de Lyon. He made his debut at the BBC Proms with Britten's Sinfonia in 2014, and he conducted a new production of The Tales of Hoffmann at the 2015 Bregenz Festival.

As guest conductor, Mr. Debus has appeared at several international festivals such as the Biennale di Venezia, Bregenz and Schwetzingen Festivals, Festival d'Automne in Paris, Lincoln Center Festival, Ruhrtriennale, Suntory Summer Festival and Spoleto Festival. Mr. Debus enjoys an ongoing relationship with the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

In 2010 Johannes Debus was invited to replace James Levine in a performance of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was subsequently invited to replace Sir Colin Davis in works by Mozart and Haydn in four subscription concerts, marking his Symphony Hall debut. He made his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival in the summer of 2012 and with the Toronto Symphony and the Philharmonia in London in 2013.

Johannes Debus graduated from the Hamburg Conservatoire before being engaged as répétiteur and, subsequently, Kapellmeister by Frankfurt Opera where he acquired an extensive repertoire from Mozart to Thomas Adès. At home in both contemporary music and the core repertoire, he has conducted a wide range of world premieres and works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, notably Salvatore Sciarrino's Macbeth and Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto. He has collaborated with internationally-acclaimed ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien and Musikfabrik. n

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ripeness that only great pianists have”.

He is in demand internationally. In 2017-18, he is Artist in Residence of the Shanghai Symphony and performs four different programs with them throughout the season. He performs with the OSESP Sao Paulo and the complete Liszt “Annees de Pelerinage” in recital for them. In Australia, Mr. Lortie performs with WASO/Perth and with the Adelaide Symphony. He performs the Liszt “Annees” for the Chicago Symphony and for the annual Liszt Festival in Raiding, Hungary. There will be two Lortie recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall and an extensive recital tour in Italy. He performs and records with Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony, and he was selected by Jaap van Zweden to play Mozart K. 466 for one of van Zweden’s final Dallas Symphony concerts as Music Director. He returns to the National Symphony Taipei, the Philadelphia Orchestra with Nezet-Seguin, the Toronto Symphony, Budapest Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. His play/conduct engagements are with great orchestras world-wide.

Louis Lortie’s long-awaited LacMus International Festival (https:// vimeo.com/lacmusfestival) on Lake Como, Italy, made its debut July 9-16, 2017.

He has made more than 45 recordings for the Chandos label, covering repertoire from Mozart to Stravinsky, including a set of the complete Beethoven sonatas and the complete Liszt “Annees de Pelerinage,” which was named one of the ten best recordings of 2012

by The New Yorker magazine. His recording of the Lutosławski Piano Concerto with Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony received high praise, as did a recent Chopin recording (he is recording all of Chopin’s solo piano music for Chandos), which was named one of the best recordings of the year by The New York Times. Recently released recordings are Chopin Waltzes (“This is Chopin playing of sublime genius”- Fanfare magazine), Saint Saëns’ Africa, Wedding Cake and Carnival of the Animals with Neeme Jarvi and the Bergen Philharmonic and Rachmaninov’s complete works for two pianos with Helene Mercier. Future recordings are Poulenc works for piano and orchestra with the BBC Philharmonic, Fauré piano works and Scriabin piano works. For the Onyx label, he has recorded two acclaimed CDs with violinist Augustin Dumay.

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FABULOUS FRANCE – NOVEMBER 11 & 12 | PROGRAM NOTES Louis Lortie is the Master in Residence at The Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel of Brussels. He studied in Montreal with Yvonne Hubert (a pupil of the legendary Alfred Cortot), in Vienna with Beethoven specialist Dieter Weber and subsequently with Schnabel disciple Leon Fleisher. In 1984 he won First Prize in the Busoni Competition and was also prizewinner at the Leeds Competition. He has lived in Berlin since 1997 and also has homes in Canada and Italy. n

ABOUT THE MUSIC Selections from Les Indes galantes JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU Baptized September 25, 1683, Dijon Died September 12, 1764, Paris Jean-Philippe Rameau made his reputation as a harpsichordist and theorist, and then at age 50 he did something that sent his career (and life) in an entirely new direction: he wrote an opera. Hyppolyte et Aracia may have been a commercial failure, but at this point Rameau had been bitten by the bug. Over the rest of his life he wrote 20 more operas, in the process becoming France’s leading opera composer.

If Rameau’s first opera was a failure, his second was a striking success. Les Indes galantes, produced in Paris on August 23, 1735, was an opéra-ballet, a form that combined singing and dancing. That title has been variously translated as “The Amorous Indies” or “The Courtly Indies,” and in its final form Les Indes galantes consisted of a Prologue and four entrées (essentially, acts), each of which has an individual name, is set in an exotic foreign location and tells a different love story. In the Prologue, youthful warriors from France, Italy, Spain and Poland are called together by Hebe (Youth) and Cupid (Love), but they choose to forsake love and go off to seek military glory in exotic lands (the “Indies” of the opera’s title).

Forsaken, Cupid decides to visit those lands herself and thus provides the context for the following four love stories. The Generous Turk, set on an island in the Indian Ocean, tells of the slave girl Emile who escapes her pasha to be reunited with her lover Valère. In The Incas of Peru, set at the foot of a volcano in Peru, the princess Phani chooses the Spaniard Don Carlos over the Peruvian Huascar, whose treachery is rewarded by his being buried beneath lava from the volcano. The third entrée – titled The Flowers, Persian Festival – revolves around two young men, each of whom loves the other’s slave. The plot (too complicated to explain here or anywhere) eventually ends happily for all concerned. The Savages, set in North America, once again features an Indian princess, this time named Zima. Forced to choose between a Spanish and a French suitor, she rejects both and chooses her Indian lover, the noble Adario. Featuring Rameau’s powerful

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music, spectacular settings and lavish sets, Les Indes galantes proved a great success: it was given 64 times in Paris in the two years after its premiere.

The opera is rarely staged today, but many have felt that Rameau’s music is too good to lose. French composer Paul Dukas was the first (1925) to draw a suite of orchestral excerpts from Les Indes galantes, and since then conductors have felt free to assemble their suites of excerpts. At this concert Johannes Debus leads a selection of eight movements, arranged not as they occur in the opera but to provide a varied concert experience. Six of these movements come from the opera’s Prologue. The binary-form Ouverture is suitably firm at its beginning, then races ahead in the second section. The Musette en Rondeau, with its constant drone, is one of the dances at Hebe’s opening festival, as is the Deuxième air pour les Bostangis, which dances vigorously along its 6/8 meter. The Air des Incas pour la Devotion du Soleil is the only one of these selections from opera’s second act; marked Gravement, this solemn music accompanies the Incas’ ceremony to welcome the sun. The following three excerpts are all once again from the Prologue, beginning with a pair of attractive Menuets. Next comes the rough Air pour les Esclaves Affricains; the slaves’ music is powerful, and the marking here is Lourdement (“heavily”). The Air pour les amants qui suivent Belloone makes sharp contrast between two kinds of music: the fast beginning and a tender response. This suite of movements concludes with the one selection from The Generous Turk, a pair of Tambourins that dance cheerfully as they bring that act to its conclusion. n

Piano Concerto in G Major MAURICE RAVEL Born March 7, 1875, Pyrennes, Basses-Cibourre Died December 28, 1937, Paris Throughout his career Ravel had written no concertos, and then in the fall of 1929 – at the age of 54 – he set to work simultaneously on two piano concertos. One was the Concerto for the Left Hand for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, and the other – the Concerto in G Major – was intended for the composer’s own use. The Concerto for the Left Hand is dark and serious, but the Concerto in G Major is much lighter. Ravel described it as “a concerto in the truest sense of the term, written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. Indeed, I take the view that the music of a concerto can very well be cheerful and brilliant and does not have to lay claim to profundity or aim at dramatic effect…At the beginning I thought of naming the work a divertissement; but I reflected that this was not necessary, the title ‘Concerto’ explaining the character of the music sufficiently.”

The actual composition took longer than Ravel anticipated, and the concerto was not complete until the fall of 1931. By that time, failing health prevented the composer from performing this music himself.

Instead, he conducted the premiere in Paris on January 14, 1932.

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PROGRAM NOTES | FABULOUS FRANCE – NOVEMBER 11 & 12 The pianist was Marguerite Long, to whom Ravel dedicated the concerto. (Long had given the first performance of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin in 1919.)

Ravel may have taken Mozart and Saint-Saëns as his model, but no listener would make that association. What strikes audiences first are the concerto’s virtuoso writing for both piano and orchestra, the brilliance and transparency of the music and the influence of American jazz. It is possible to make too much of the jazz influence, but Ravel had heard jazz during his tour of America in 1928 and found much to admire. When asked about its influence on this concerto, he said: “It includes some elements borrowed from jazz, but only in moderation.” Ravel was quite proud of this music and is reported to have said that in this work “he had expressed himself most completely, and that he had poured his thoughts into the exact mold that he had dreamed.”

The first movement, marked Allegramente (“Brightly”), opens with a whipcrack, and immediately the piccolo plays the jaunty opening tune, picked up in turn by solo trumpet before the piano makes its sultry solo entrance. Some of the concerto’s most brilliant music occurs in this movement, which is possessed of a sort of madcap energy, with great splashes of instrumental color, strident fluttertonguing by the winds, string glissandos and a quasi-cadenza for the harp. The Adagio assai, one of Ravel’s most beautiful slow movements, opens with a three-minute solo for the pianist, who lays out the haunting main theme at length. The return of this theme later in the movement in the English horn over delicate piano accompaniment is particularly effective. Despite its seemingly easy flow of melody, this movement gave Ravel a great deal of trouble, and he later said that he wrote it “two bars at a time.” The concluding Presto explodes to life with a five-note riff that recurs throughout, functioning somewhat like the ritornello of the baroque concerto.

The jazz influence shows up here in the squealing clarinets, brass smears and racing piano passages. The movement comes to a sizzling conclusion on the five-note phrase with which it began. n

Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80 GABRIEL FAURÉ Born May 12, 1845, Pamiers Died November 4, 1924, Paris Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande was first produced in Paris on May 17, 1893, and it quickly took the world by storm. A grim medieval romance with Arthurian overtones, Pelléas et Mélisande tells the story of Mélisande, who is found wandering in the forest by Golaud, a prince out on a royal hunt. He takes her back to his castle and eventually marries her, but Golaud’s brother Pelléas is strongly attracted to Mélisande as well. Golaud becomes suspicious, and although Pelléas and Mélisande have decided to see each other no more, Golaud kills Pelléas, and Mélisande dies after giving birth to a child.

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It is difficult to convey how powerfully this tale – full of doomed love and an evocation of a misty and more romantic past – influenced the younger generation at the turn of the century, particularly the younger generation of composers. Debussy saw the play in 1893 and immediately began work on his opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which he finished in 1902. Schoenberg composed a symphonic poem with the same title in 1902-03, and Sibelius wrote a suite of incidental music for a production of the play in Helsinki in 1905. Fauré was ahead of all these distinguished contemporaries: he was asked to write incidental music for the London premiere of Maeterlinck’s play in 1898.

Working quickly (he re-used some music he had written earlier and enlisted his student Charles Koechlin to help with the orchestration), Fauré composed 17 short movements that were performed as part of the London premiere on June 21, 1898.

From his incidental music, Fauré drew an orchestral suite of four movements, this time orchestrating all the music himself. The suite is marked by unusual restraint. There are no dramatic outbursts, no explosions of orchestral sound, no precise depictions of action.

Instead, Fauré’s music projects a mood of somber and poised beauty, a subdued atmosphere equivalent to the emotional events of Maeterlinck’s play. The four movements of the suite roughly follow the action of the play. The opening movement – Prélude: Quasi adagio – accompanies the beginning of the play, and its quiet beauty perfectly sets the tone for the events that follow. Near the end a French horn sounds the hunting call associated with Golaud’s hunt in the forest. The second movement, titled Fileuse and originally the entr’acte to Act III, accompanies a scene in which Mélisande is seen spinning (fileuse is the French word for “spinner”). Flowing triplets in the violins mark the sound of her spinning, and above them the solo oboe sings its expressive theme. The third movement, Sicilienne, has become one of Fauré’s most popular works, especially in its arrangements for flute and for cello. A sicilienne is a dance in swaying rhythm, usually in a minor key; its name suggests the place of its origin. The final movement – The Death of Mélisande: Adagio molto – serves as an introduction to the final act of the play. Darkest of the four movements, it warns the audience of the events about to unfold. n

Ibéria, No. 2 from Images CLAUDE DEBUSSY Born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye Died March 25, 1918, Paris In 1905, shortly after completing La mer, Debussy set to work on a piece he called Images, which he thought would be for two pianos.

Each of its three sections was to be based on the music of a different country – England, Spain and France – and he told his publisher he expected to have them done quickly. But Images became instead an extended work for orchestra, and it took much longer than Debussy expected: the cycle was not complete until 1912. The second section – Ibéria, a musical evocation of Spain in three colorful movements P ERFO RM AN C ES MAG A Z I N E

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FABULOUS FRANCE – NOVEMBER 11 & 12 | PROGRAM NOTES – has become one of Debussy’s most popular orchestral works and is usually performed separately, as it is on this concert.

The apparently universal love for Spain among French composers has shown up clearly in their music: in Bizet’s Carmen, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, Chabrier’s España, Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole and Bolero, and countless other examples. Debussy shared this enthusiasm, though his direct experience of Spain consisted of one three-hour excursion across the border to visit San Sebastian, but that was apparently enough: Ibéria has been hailed as one of the greatest examples of a distinctly “Spanish” music. Manuel de Falla said that this music “seems to float in a lucid atmosphere with sparkling light; the intoxicating spell of Andalusian nights, the brightness of a feasting people dancing to the merry chords of the banda of guitars and bandurrias…everything whirling in the air, approaching and fading away…”

Debussy was especially proud of the transition from the second movement to the third, The Morning of a Festival Day, which he said “doesn’t sound as if it has been written down” – he wanted the effect of the music being improvised on the spot. His marking for this movement is unique: “In the rhythm of a distant march, alert and joyous.” The expectant feeling of early morning at the opening gradually gives way to sunlight and bright color. The main subject sounds as if it is being played by a giant guitar; Debussy emphasizes this visually by having the violinists and violists strum their instruments under their arms rather than placing them under their chins. This music is remarkable in Debussy’s output for its attempt to paint detailed scenes – “there are melon sellers and whistling urchins whom I see very clearly,” he said. At one point the march interrupts a street fiddler and thrusts him aside, and then with a sudden rush (“Fast and nervous”) the music blazes to a wild finish. n -Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Each of the three movements of Ibéria has a descriptive title. In the Streets and Byways is full of energy and hard-edged rhythms underlined by clicking castanets. This movement offers striking solos for clarinet, English horn, viola, a virtuoso entrance by the entire horn section and sultry trombone glissandos; after all the excitement, it flickers out on a few strokes of quiet percussion.

The Fragrances of the Night, a habanera, is the most exotic-sounding movement – Debussy marks it “Soft and dreamy.” Colors are muted in this movement, in the unusual key of F-sharp Major. This is music of the perfumed night, full of languorous melodies, subtle touches of instrumental timbre and fluid rhythms.

Performance History

by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist The music by Rameau for his Les Indes galantes is being given its first performance by this orchestra at these concerts. In contrast, Ravel's popular Piano Concerto was first played at these concerts by Nikita Magalof, when Earl Bernard Murray conducted it during the 1966-67 season. Since then, it has been played here 11 times, most recently by Jean-Yves Thibaudet when Jahja Ling led it during the season 2011-12.

Debussy's brilliant Ibéria was first programmed here by Earl

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Bernard Murray, a protégé of the great French conductor, Pierre Monteux, in the 1961-62 season. Surprisingly, I have been unable to find any listing of this incredibly brilliant piece in the orchestra's repertory since then. The lovely music by Fauré from his suite for Pelléas et Mélisande has been performed on two previous occasions by the San Diego Symphony. First, during the summer season of 1958 it was led

by Robert Shaw, and again, during the 1973-74 season it was conducted by Robert Zeller. n

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