WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Debussy (1862–1918)

Children’s Corner (1908)

Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum

Jimbo's Lullaby

Serenade for the Doll

The Snow Is Dancing

The Little Shepherd

Cake-walk

Mozart (1756-1791)

Flute Concerto No 2 in D Major, K 314 (1778)

Allegro aperto

Adagio ma non troppo

Rondeau: Allegro

Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Danses concertantes (1942)

Marche-introduction

Pas d'action. Con moto

Thème varié. Lento

Pas de deux. Risoluto - Andante sostenuto

Marche-conclusion

Mozart (1756-1791)

Idomeneo, Overture and Ballet Music

Nos 1 & 2, K 366, 367 (1780–81)

Overture

No 1: Chaconne

No 2: Pas seul

From an anglophile Parisian to an Austrian job-hunting in (what’s now) Germany, and even a Russian expat living it large in LA, there’s nothing if not variety in tonight’s century-leaping, country-hopping concert. What brings all of today’s music together, however, is a sense of conciseness, focus and vivid picture painting – as well as, after the interval at least, a passion for dance.

Musical picture painting is precisely what Claude Debussy had in mind in his Children’s Corner, a set of six pieces originally for solo piano that he wrote between 1906 and 1908. Despite what his voluptuous, sensual music might suggest, Debussy was notorious for being bad-tempered and irascible in personal encounters. But for his daughter ClaudeEmma – affectionately nicknamed Chouchou – he expressed nothing but tenderness and affection. So much so, in fact, that when she was barely three years old, he embarked on a collection of pieces portraying her favourite toys and activities.

Unlike, for example, Ravel’s equally childfocused Ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose), Debussy wasn’t out to create music for Chouchou or other children to play themselves (though he toned down some of his more extravagant pianistic demands in what became Children’s Corner, making it suitable for fairly experienced younger fingers). Instead, he imagined a world seen through the eyes of a child, painting musical pictures of a certain naive innocence, though the pieces undeniably suggest a wistful nostalgia for the simplicity and wonder of childhood that could only an adult could experience.

Children’s Corner, by the way, is the work’s correct original title, though Debussy’s publisher Durand helpfully added its French translation Coin des enfants in brackets on the score’s contents page. Debussy was an ardent admirer of all things English, and he and his wife Emma Bardac had engaged an English nanny to help with looking after Chouchou. As a result, all of the little girl’s toys (and therefore also the titles of Debussy’s individual movements) had English names. English-born pianist Harold Bauer gave Children’s Corner its first performance, in Paris on 18 December 1908. It was just three years later that the orchestral version you hear tonight – whose orchestration Debussy had entrusted to his close friend and fellow composer André Caplet – received its first performance.

Debussy begins with one of the grandest, most mysterious and most entrancing toys a young child can encounter: a piano. In the opening ‘Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum’, he imagines a youngster running through finger-strengthening exercises (the piece’s title is a sly nod to classic volumes of piano pedagogy called Gradus ad Parnassum, or ‘Steps to Parnassus’, home to the Muses of Greek mythology), whose ceaseless patterning Caplet entrusts to bubbling woodwind. The infant’s mind wanders to increasingly expressive, fantastical improvisations, only to be brought back, perhaps by a passing parent, to what they were supposed to be practising.

‘Jimbo’s Lullaby’ is a portrait of Chouchou’s cuddly elephant, named after the illustrious pachyderm Jumbo who spent a brief time housed in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes before ending up in PT Barnum’s travelling circus. The piece begins, appropriately enough, with a low-pitched, plodding melody in the double basses, and there’s surely a sense of gentle sadness in the music at the magnificent beast’s captivity. Debussy’s mis-spelling of his subject, it’s been suggested, had less to do with ignorance and more to do with poking fun at the nasal Parisian accent that might make ‘Jumbo’ sound more like ‘Jimbo’.

‘Serenade for the Doll’ is an elegant, refined evocation of Chouchou’s porcelain doll, in music whose spinning figurations make great use of oriental-sounding modes. The young girl gazes from the warmth of her room at wintry precipitation in ‘The Snow is Dancing’, which mixes magic and a certain chilly menace in its icy repetitions on strings and oboe. The dream-like ‘The Little Shepherd’ begins with unaccompanied piping from the solitary boy, lost in the landscape, and unfolds across three carefree, al fresco episodes.

More than a century after Children’s Corner’s composition, we might find the original title of the suite’s closing movement, ‘Cake-walk’, somewhat problematic, as we also might its depiction of a blackface doll doing a strutting, music hall-style dance all the rage in Paris in the first years of the 20th century. More interesting, however, is Debussy’s appropriation of dance-hall ragtime rhythms – especially when butted up against the luscious quotations from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde that he sarcastically inserts about halfway through. At the piece’s 1908 premiere, Debussy reportedly paced the corridors, frightened that Wagner lovers might be up in arms at his cheek. Thankfully, they saw the funny side.

From Paris just before the Great War, we jump to Mannheim in what’s now southern Germany in 1777 for tonight’s next piece. The 21-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had quit his job in his birth city of Salzburg with its over-demanding, underappreciative ruler, Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, and had set off to tour the musical centres of Europe with his mother in search of work. Mannheim was the Mozarts’ second stop (after Augsburg), and it was home at the time to one of Europe’s most accomplished, most professional and most pioneering court orchestras. Under the guidance of music director Johann Stamitz, the Mannheim musicians were out to wring musical performance for every last drop of intense expression they could manage, with surging crescendos, dramatic pauses, even stormy basslines and chirruping birdsong to thrill and delight their listeners.

No wonder, then, that Mozart spent a joyful and fulfilling five months in the city (even if he was unsuccessful in his search for a permanent job). His happiness was helped, no doubt, by a lengthy flirtation with young Aloysia Weber, who he’d met there (she later spurned his affections, and he ended up marrying her younger sister, Constanze). Mozart also got to know the Mannheim musicians well, and struck up a particularly close friendship with the court orchestra’s flautist, Johann Baptist Wendling, who was determined to get a flute concerto out of the young composer. Wendling enlisted the help of wealthy amateur flautist Ferdinand de Jean, who commissioned no fewer than three flute concertos and three flute quartets from Mozart.

In the end, however, the composer only managed two of each, and only received a portion of the commissioning fee as a result. For many years, only one of those two flute concertos was thought to have survived, until a set of parts turned up in Salzburg in 1920 that proved to be the ‘missing’ piece, tonight’s Concerto in D major, K 314. Those parts bore an uncanny resemblance, too, to an earlier Oboe Concerto that Mozart had written for Salzburg player Giuseppe Ferlendis, and which Mannheim oboist Friedrich Ramm loved so much that he played it no fewer than five times during Mozart’s stay. How the concertos’ commissioner, Ferdinand de Jean, remained unaware that one of the pieces written for him wasn’t even original is a mystery – though Mozart ensured sufficient changes to the music for it to feel and sound idiomatic on the new instrument.

It was in justifying his inability to complete de Jean’s commission that Mozart made a puzzling reference in a letter home to his father Leopold, writing: ‘You know that I become quite powerless whenever I am obliged to write for an instrument which I cannot bear.’ It’s left flautists and Mozart scholars scratching their heads ever since. Did he really mean he hated the flute? It seems unlikely, given the elaborate, eloquent flute writing across his music, and the efforts he made to showcase the instrument in this buoyant, sensitively crafted Concerto. More probable was that Mozart’s apparent hostility was simply an excuse for not doing the work he’d promised.

Indeed, the flute makes quite a flourish at its first entry in the Concerto’s light and airy opening movement, and there’s no lack of athletic virtuosity in its opening theme. Mozart cunningly contrasts the instrument’s brilliant higher register with more plangent, richer passages lower in its range in his elegant, gently flowing slow movement. His finale is quick and bouncy, with a playful, somewhat mischievous theme that returns several times across the movement, rather furtively on the solo flute, then far more confidently from the full orchestra.

It was dance that secured the worldwide reputation of Russian-born Igor Stravinsky, specifically the trio of succulent scores he produced for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris – The Firebird , Petrushka and The Rite of Spring – around the same time that Debussy was writing his Children’s Corner . Around three decades later, Danses concertantes was the first major work that Stravinsky composed in his new home of West Hollywood, where he settled in 1941 after fleeing war-ravaged

Europe. The official commission came from Los Angeles movie composer and conductor Werner Janssen, for his own Symphony Orchestra. But legendary choreographer George Balanchine –who unveiled a dance interpretation in New York in 1944 – later claimed that Stravinsky had actually written the piece for him, and that he’d visited the composer on the West Coast several times to discuss the project.

Stravinsky himself always maintained that he’d written it as a concert work, not specifically for the stage. And, perhaps unconcerned about biting the hand the fed him, the composer also confided to a San Francisco Chronicle critic that he’d kept Danses concertantes brief because ‘the attention span of today’s audience is limited, and the problem of the presentday composer is one of condensation’.

Judge for yourself whether he was successful with that.

With its crisp rhythms, acerbic harmonies and switchback mood shifts, Danses concertantes is indeed a brisk and brusque creation, and it and his 'Dumbarton Oaks' Concerto of 1938 have even been termed ‘Stravinsky’s Brandenburgs’ in reference to JS Bach’s iconic concertos from two centuries earlier. Following a bracing opening march, the suite of five pieces moves from a gentle ‘Pas d’action’ to an elegant theme and variations (listen out for a swaggering, cowboy-style dance), then a tender ‘Pas de deux’, before the march returns to bring things to a rousing conclusion.

We stay with dance in tonight’s closing piece, the Overture and ballet music that Mozart wrote for his opera Idomeneo. But hang on: aren’t ballet and opera meant to be two entirely separate things? Not for French audiences, who loved a ballet segment as part of an opera to offer a bit of light relief from following convoluted plots. And they’d be furious if they didn’t get it. Richard Wagner specifically wrote a ballet section for the Parisian premiere of his opera Tannhäuser in 1861, but he inserted it far too early in the opera’s storyline. As a result, latecomers missed the very bit of the evening they’d come to see. Tannhäuser in Paris survived just three performances.

Idomeneo was commissioned from Mozart by Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, who nonetheless hoped to emulate the spectacle and variety of French opera in the work, which was first performed at his Residenz in Munich on 29 January 1781. By that time, Mozart had returned, unsuccessful in his jobhunting, from his Europe-hopping trip, during which he’d lost his mother to an unknown illness in Paris. Back in Salzburg, he’d reluctantly returned to work for Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. One get-out clause in his new contract, however, allowed Mozart a leave of absence if he was composing an opera elsewhere – which was precisely the case with his Idomeneo commission in Munich.

Set on the island of Crete immediately after the Trojan War, Idomeneo tells a Romeo and Juliet-like story of Ilia, daugher of King Priam of Troy, and her love for Idamante, son of the Cretan King Idomeneo. When Idomeneo is rescued from drowning by the sea god Neptune, the King promises to make a sacrifice of the first living thing he sees – which happens, tragically, to be his own son, Idamante.

Mozart establishes the opera’s grand, classical tone right from the majestic opening of his Overture, which soon breaks into music that’s far more overtly festive. The threat of tragedy is never far away, however, as the sadder melody of the Overture’s second main theme suggests. The piece ends in an unusually quiet, tentative manner: on the stage, it would lead directly into the first scene, but tonight, its hushed ending provides a transition into the opera’s ballet music. A strutting, confident ‘Chaconne’, full of pomp and ceremony, leads straight into a quieter ‘Annonce’, a contrasting, far stormier ‘Chaconne’, and then a ‘Pas seul’ that has an almost Handelian grandeur to its slower opening section.

© David Kettle