By Warren Cohen

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Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

 

The Vaughan Williams Fantasia is one of the composer’s earliest works to enter the standard repertoire, though he was already 37 when he wrote it. Vaughan Williams took a long time to develop his personal style, and with the Fantasia we have an iconic example of that distinctive voice. It is strongly influenced by the modal harmonies of Medieval and Renaissance music, the harmonic language of Ravel and Debussy (Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel, despite Ravel being the younger of the two men), and it owes almost nothing to the language of the Romantic age that preceded it or the evolving contemporary work of Schoenberg or Stravinsky. The organ was another strong influence, and one of the most striking aspects of the piece is the juxtaposition of two groups of strings to create echo effects and a vast arc of sound that fills the hall much as an organ would.

 

The Fantasia is based on Tallis's Psalter, written for the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1567. Vaughan Williams came across this work while editing the 1906 edition of the English hymnal, and chose the tune to Psalm 2, ‘Why fumeth in sight: The Gentils spite, In fury raging stout?’ as the basis for his piece. An extremely simple tune intoned at the beginning is subject to a very free treatment, including harmonic elements that were already archaic when Tallis wrote the original hymn! From this fragment, Vaughan Williams creates an extraordinary tapestry unique in the history of music.

 

The Fantasia created a huge sensation at its premiere. It was a curtain raiser for a performance of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius at the Three Choirs Festival. Nobody expected much from it, but the audience knew they had experienced something new and special. The notices the next day were fulsome in their praise. A new musical voice had been discovered.

 

Yagling: Suite for Cello and Strings

 

Victoria Yagling was best known as a cellist during her lifetime, but she wrote a considerable amount of music, mostly for cello, voice or piano. Her three cello concertos are her most substantial works. Her music was praised by Shostakovich. Like many Soviet composers, she was strongly influenced by his music, although her harmonic language goes in a different direction. Yagling navigated the political intrigue of the Soviet regime with considerable difficulty, being at various points in and out of favor. She finally moved to Finland in 1990, shortly before the fall of Communism. She lived in Finland and identified as a “Finnish artist” during the last 21 years of her life. Her music is now archived at the Finnish Music Information Center and published by a Finnish publishing firm.

 

The title “suite” suggests a somewhat lighter composition than a concerto, but this is a serious work. Although the composer was a professional cellist, the work treats the soloist and orchestras as equals, with the melodic material veering back and forth between the cello and the orchestra. This is especially true in the fast first movement, “Toccata,” where the viola section is as busy as the soloist! The second movement, “Aria,” is a beautiful tune that has taken on a mini life of its own in recent years. A number of cellists have performed it as a separate piece, often in a version with piano accompaniment. We  hear the Shostakovich influence most clearly in the scherzo-like third movement, and the finale is a chorale with distinctive and unusual harmonies.

 

Esmail: Zeher for Cello and Strings (premiere performance)

 

Reena Esmail is among the most exciting and unique composers of her generation. Now in her 40s, she has carved a path for herself as a composer weaving elements of Indian music into the fabric of Western music. She has worked with Indian and Western musicians to create a unique blend of these two traditions.

 

Zeher was composed while the composer was sick with a persistent infection that at times made it hard for her to breathe. The Hindu word “zeher” means “poison,” and this feeling of constriction and tension is central to the piece, especially at the beginning. The long melismas from the solo cello --  in a style that suggests several Indian traditions -- are interrupted by outbursts from the orchestra that suggest conflict and resolve. Eventually the orchestra becomes a kind of whirling bed of sound that the cello dances over, and the work ends on a long passage with a delicate repeated rhythm and gorgeous fragments of melodic material suggesting peace and resolution.

The version for cello and strings on this program is a premiere; Esmail arranged it from the original version for string quartet. The larger ensemble and showcasing of the cello gives the piece a different and somewhat bolder perspective. We are honored to be doing it!

 

Price: Andante Moderato for String Orchestra

 

Another work that began life as a work for string quartet, the Andante Moderato comes from the slow movement of Florence Price's first string quartet. Although in recent years Price's symphonies and concertos have been played with some regularity, it was in chamber music that she composed her finest music. The first quartet might be her best composition.

 

The story of Florence Price's music is fascinating. Despite the double disadvantage of being a woman and being black, she was able to attract attention as a composer in the 1930s and ’40s, but then she faded from view. In 2012 a large cache of her music was discovered, leading to a great revival of interest in her music. In the past few years all her major works have been performed. Just as importantly, they have been printed in modern clean typeset editions, which make it easy for performers to find and play the music. So many fine composers have been hampered by the inability of performers to find playable copies of their music. In the past year alone, I have been stymied in my attempts to play the music of Julia Perry, Avril Coleridge-Taylor and Peggy Glanville-Hicks simply because the music was not available in performable form.

 

The Andante Moderato is a fine example of Price's style, a distinctive style of music that I describe as black classical music of the mid-20th century. Price shared this style with William Dawson, James P. Johnson and William Grant Still. Their music had similar roots in the music of Dvorak, in field calls and ragtime, but they made little use of jazz (even Johnson, who was himself a famous jazz pianist!). It is an American version of the English pastoral school of Vaughan Williams and his successors; we can regard it as “conservative” because it doesn’t follow dominant European musical trends, but the music itself could not have been composed at any time but the 20th century. It was not pastiche, it was not imitative. It was innovative and equally “modern.”

 

Cohen: Concerto Grosso no. 1 for String Quartet and String Orchestra.

 

I wrote this work in the spring of 1991, at the beginning of my life as a conductor. The previous fall I had been contracted to conduct a musical theatre show with a full pit orchestra, something I had never done, and after that run I immediately started getting calls to conduct elsewhere. My only experience as a conductor then were a few recordings of short works I composed for theatre and film projects, and I had exactly one undergraduate class in conducting. I thought one way to help develop my skills as a conductor would be to write a piece exploiting numerous conducting problems and then program it. The result was this Concerto Grosso.

 

The work was inspired musically by the concerti grossi of Corelli, the Introduction and Allegro for the same combination of instruments by Elgar, musical theater, and the then popular minimalist movement in music. The structure of the work, in two movements instead of three, was inspired by the Fourth Piano Concerto of Camille Saint-Saens, and the Fifth Symphony of Carl Nielsen.  My vision of the work was a symmetrical structure, two halves sharply contrasted. After the premiere, I revised the second movement by re-introducing material from the first movement, which ties the work together in a more satisfying way.

More than 30 years after writing it, I still like the piece because it it exploits the sound world of the string orchestra in a different way -- much like all the other works on this program!

 

 

 

MusicaNova Orchestra

Violin I

Julian Nguyen, concertmaster

   John and Elizabeth McKinnon Chair

Linda Quintero

Rebecca Rosmanitz

Pat Synder

Esther Witherell

Danny Yang

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Violin II

Spencer Ekenes, principal

   Robert Dixon Chair

Lisa Eisenberg

Dasom Jeon

Jingting Liu

Jamilyn Richardson

Bella Ward

 

Viola

Allyson Wuenschel, principal

   Dominque van de Stadt and Octavio Pajaro chair

Vanessa Bisaha

Graham Cohen

Mason Haskett

Jill Osborne

   David and Dory Mawyer chair

 

Cello

   Ed & Cynthia DuBrow section

Maria Simiz, principal

Gina Choe

Jennifer Cox

Cindy Leger

 

Bass

Sila Kuvanci, principal

Siqing Zhang