The PSO’s Coming Season and Opening Concert
The Season
A few weeks ago, I wrote to you about the varied and rich programming of the Ravinia Festival and how our diverse American culture creates arts patrons that can appreciate the profound as well as the popular. You will notice that an underlying theme throughout this PSO season is the relationship between popular culture and art culture. Composers often turn to popular culture for inspiration and even musical material to incorporate into larger works of art. It is easy to see this in the music of a composer like Gershwin, for example, but the fact is that composers have been doing this for centuries. Whether it is a well-known story, character, song, or dance – popular culture throughout history has often been the starting point for some of our greatest musical artworks.
This PSO season, you will hear works by many great composers – Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Bernstein, Copland, and others. Throughout the season, you will not only enjoy these masterpieces, but also find out about the secrets of what inspired many of them. Whether it is the popular legend of the ghost ship Flying Dutchman in Wagner’s famous overture, Ukrainian folk melodies in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #2, or Jazz styles used in Bernstein’s On The Town Dances – these composers find inspiration in the events, stories and entertainment of their, and our, everyday lives. One need only consider a new opera premiered in 2011 at the Royal Opera House in London. It was entitled “Anna Nicole”.
The 2013-14 season is replete with great soloists, the great musicians of the PSO, and wonderful programs for adults, children, and the entire family. With two World Artists (Olga Kern and Béla Fleck), two PSO soloists (Nicole Luchs and Katherine Lewis), some rising stars (violinist Charles Yang, singers Nathaniel Olson, Ryan Lanning, and Linden Christ), and some exceptional solo artists/teachers (violinist Paul Kantor, hornist Jeff Nelsen, and singer Nina Yoshida-Nelsen), it will be an exciting year. And let’s not forget our January Matinee at the Movies with hosts Greg and Dan or the third year of our annual Valentine’s Day Concert.
The PSO’s outreach this season builds on the successes of previous years and we are proud to announce that Béla Fleck will perform on both our subscription series AND our two student concerts. As usual, our artists and PSO musicians will be in the schools, hospitals, colleges, and throughout the community – keeping to our motto: our community is our concert hall.
September 28 Concert – Passion and Power
Passion and Power – certainly two primal notions that we all have some intuitive notion of. But we have in this concert, refined renderings of these two highly charged concepts from four of the greatest composer-orchestrators of all time. Wagner, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, and Richard Strauss.
The concert opens with a popular legend – in the distance you sea the ghostly ship the Flying Dutchman and its damned captain and crew looking for one great love to lift his curse. Wagner captures the scene perfectly in this opera overture based on the old myth. Our obsession with ghost ships continues even to today with the Dutchman being mentioned in songs by Jethro Tull, Tori Amos, Jimmy Buffett, and Rufus Wainwright – and of course there are the Pirates of the Caribbean.
After our trip to sea, we welcome Van Cliburn Competition Gold Medal Winner Olga Kern to the stage for Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Olga is not only a passionate and powerful artist, she is also able to bring out the intimate and tender side of Rachmaninoff – as demonstrated in her Alice Tully Hall recital I attended last Spring in New York. Olga’s family has ties all the way back to Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky and perhaps this is one reason she possesses such great affinity for this special Russian repertoire.
Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is known as a theme and variations, which means that the entire piece is a series of perspectives on a single melody. It is based on the melody of Paganini’s famous 24th Caprice. But it also incorporates another musical obsession of composers: the ancient chant Dies Irae from the Mass of the Dead. Many composers have been obsessed and fascinated with both of these popular melodies and written works using them – such as Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique. Rachmaninoff, however, combines them both as he turns them upside down, inside out, and then fits them together at the same time.
From Russia, we move to France and the music of Claude Debussy. His Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is actually based on a poem by Stéphane Malarmé. After its premiere in 1894, Nijinsky choreographed a ballet for it. The poem, the ballet, and the music are all about a faun playing his pan-pipes alone in the woods who becomes aroused by passing nymphs and naiads, pursues them unsuccessfully, then wearily abandoning himself to a dream filled sleep. Though this music sounds beautiful to our modern ears – so well trained by cinema, this work was considered the dawn of the modern era in music. In fact, the great progressive composer/conductor Pierre Boulez said that: “the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music.” Now, what is interesting about this notion is something Debussy himself said about Wagner. Wagner was thought to be the future of music. But, Debussy said, Wagner was “a beautiful sunset mistaken for a dawn.”
The concert ends with one of the most transformative works of music in western culture. Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration. Strauss is an icon of the post romantic period in German art music and was so adept at depicting image, emotion, and dramatic content through music that he once bragged that he could represent a knife and fork in music. (Well … ok Richard).
His more lofty depictions, such as his tone poem Death and Transfiguration, are quite effective. The music depicts the death of an artist. As the man lies dying, thoughts of his life pass through his head: his childhood innocence, love, the struggles of his manhood, the attainment of his worldly goals; and at the end, he receives the longed-for transfiguration. The ending is so transformative and beautiful that one does get the feeling at its climax that all of life’s burdens have been suddenly drawn out as peace sets in. Strauss actually said to his daughter-in-law as he was dying: It’s a funny thing Alice, dying is just the way I composed it…”
I hope you will join us at the PSO for this very special opening concert, and all season, as we celebrate music in all of its forms and genres. And, that you find a little bit of yourself in every work we perform.
Warmly,
George Stelluto, Music Director of the Peoria Symphony Orchestra
