Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

Carlos Kalmar, conductor
Jean-Philippe Collard, piano

THOMAS ADÈS
Overture, Waltz and Finale from Powder Her Face

Vital Stats

Composer: Born Mar. 1, 1971, in London

Work composed: 1995, on a comission from the Almeida Opera, part of London’s Almeida Theatre

World premiere: Brad Cohen conducted the opera’s premiere on July 1, 1995, at the Cheltenham Music Festival in England, with Jill Gómez in the leading role. Adès led the London Symphony Orchestra in the first concert performance at the Barbican in London on June 8, 2006.

Oregon Symphony premiere: At these concerts

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, 3 clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, brake drums, roto toms, snare drum, vibraslap, ashboard, bass drum, bongos, glockenspiel, guiro, cymbals, hi-hat, tam tam, tambourine, temple blocks, triangle, xylophone, piano, harp and strings

Estimated duration:  10 minutes

Thomas Adès, considered one of the most exciting, original and important young composers of his time, is at the forefront of a contemporary British music renaissance. Critics have likened him to Beethoven, Mozart, Purcell and Britten, and his work has been performed and recorded by ensembles around the world. In addition to his award-winning music, Adès is also a noted pianist and conductor who divides his time between composing and a demanding concert schedule.

Powder Her Face, Adès’ first opera, takes as its subject the flamboyantly larger-than-life Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, whose motto might well have been “Go to bed early and often.” Her sexual proclivities and adventures scandalized British society during her well-publicized divorce in 1963. After her divorce, the duchess continued to command public attention with her lavish parties and eye-popping lifestyle, but in 1990 she was evicted from her penthouse suite at the Dorchester Hotel for failure to pay over £30,000 in back rent; she died three years later in a nursing home.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the scandal surrounding her, the duchess attained an almost mythical identity, as noted in James Frere’s book, Now … The Duchesses (1964): “Margaret Whigham became famous for her beauty, charm and intelligence as soon as she made her debut; she will retain her claim to these things through the centuries and may very well enter the fables of another age, like Helen [of Troy].”

Adès and his librettist Philip Hensher wanted to portray, in the words of Andrew Porter, “an arresting, beautiful, inwardly inadequate and finally tragic woman, whom they imagined as ‘all cladding – powder, scent, painting, furs – nothing inside,’ whose life finally crumbles about her.” Adès’ music, originally written for a chamber ensemble of 15, explores an array of colors and timbres, particularly in the brasses. The trumpets use a wide variety of mutes, the horns often sound at the highest and lowest ends of their range, and the percussion battery includes fishing reels, a popgun and brake drums. The orchestral interludes featured in tonight’s performance capture the duchess’ decadent lifestyle through a series of louche glissandi in the winds, while the brasses snarl society’s condemnation. We also catch glimpses of the duchess’ inner life, as imagined by Adès, in short moments of disconcerting silence and sparseness.

MAURICE RAVEL
Concerto in D major for the Left Hand

Vital Stats

Composer: Born Mar. 7, 1875, Ciboure, France; died Dec. 28, 1937, Paris

Work composed: 1929-30, commissioned by and dedicated to Paul Wittgenstein, brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the early days of World War I.

World premiere: Robert Heger conducted the Vienna Symphony in the Grosser Musikverreinssaal with Wittgenstein at the piano on Jan. 5, 1932.

Oregon Symphony premiere: Mar. 16, 1980, with James DePreist conducting; John Browning, pianist

Most recent Oregon Symphony performances: Apr. 6-8, 2002, with Sergiu Comissiona conducting; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, pianist

Instrumentation: Solo piano, piccolo, 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tam tam, harp and strings

Estimated duration:  19 minutes

“I wasn’t overwhelmed by the composition,” recalled Paul Wittgenstein some years after he commissioned Maurice Ravel to write a piano concerto for the left hand. “It always takes me awhile to grow into a difficult work. I suppose Ravel was disappointed and I was sorry, but I had never learned to pretend. ... Only much later, after I’d studied the concerto for months, did I become fascinated by it and realize what a great work it was.”

Wittgenstein had similar reactions to the music of several composers whose works he commissioned. He succeeded in offending many of them, including Ravel, by demanding major changes to their music, and some, including Benjamin Britten, viewed him as little more than a cranky meal ticket. (“I have been commissioned by a man called Wittgenstein,” Britten wrote to his sister. “The man really is an old sour puss, [but] he pays gold so I’ll do it.”) Wittgenstein and Ravel had a famous argument in which Wittgenstein, in demanding Ravel alter his music, exclaimed, “Performers must not be slaves!” Ravel responded, matter-of-factly, “Performers are slaves.”

Ravel said of the Concerto for the Left Hand, “In a work of this kind, it is essential to give the impression of a texture no thinner than that of a part written for both hands. For the same reason, I resorted to a style that is much nearer to that of the more solemn kind of traditional concerto.”
The concerto opens with one of the darkest passages Ravel ever composed. A music reviewer noted, “From the opening measures we are plunged into a world into which Ravel has but rarely led us,” and pianist Marguerite Long, a good friend of Ravel’s, described this passage as “evoking a Goya-like phantasmagoria.” The basses, bass clarinet and contrabassoon, along with low brasses, create an atmosphere of foreboding which suggests the anguish of war. Eventually the orchestra rises in both pitch and intensity, bringing us out of the phantasmagoric darkness into a brighter, almost triumphant realm in which the soloist announces the first theme with strength and power.

Ravel wrote "Musae mixatiae" (Mixed muses) on the cover of the completed score, a reference to the combination of jazz and classical elements that inspired him. Ravel’s biographer Arbie Orenstein describes this concerto as “Ravel's most dramatic work, combining expansive lyricism, tormented jazz effects, a playful scherzo, and driving march rhythms, all of which are scaffolded into one movement of modest dimensions.”

GUSTAV HOLST
Egdon Heath (Homage to Hardy)

Vital Stats

Composer: Born Sept. 21, 1874, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire; died May 25, 1934, London.

Work composed: 1927, on a commission from the New York Symphony Orchestra, as an homage to Thomas Hardy
 
World premiere: Walter Damrosch led the New York Symphony Orchestra at Mecca Auditorium on Feb. 12, 1928

Oregon Symphony premiere: At these concerts

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabasoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba and strings

Estimated duration:  15 minutes

A place perfectly accordant with man’s nature — neither ghastly, hateful nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning nor tame; but like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony.” Gustav Holst included this quote from Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel The Return of the Native in the score for Egdon Heath, which Holst wrote and dedicated to Hardy (Hardy died the following year.) Holst’s daughter Imogen, in her biography of her father, wrote: “This was Holst’s idea of beauty. Its uncompromising denial of ease and charm was perfectly in accordance with his own nature: he was by rights a native of that sparsely populated country of the mind.”

Hardy named the bleak and forbidding countryside east of Dorchester, where he lived, “Egdon Heath.” Holst, who knew Hardy well, visited him in the Egdon Heath country while he was composing the music, and the physical surroundings permeated his work along with Hardy’s literary description.

The pianissimo of the single movement is rarely interrupted throughout. It is a contemplative, introspective work, touched with mystery, which draws the listener in to a vast world of untamed nature, where humanity dwindles into insignificance.

Holst thought Egdon Heath his greatest work, and it was received well at its premiere. However, a London audience at a performance a few weeks later was, in the words of Imogen Holst: “profoundly uncomfortable. The opening for muted double basses was so soft that many people in the audience were unaware that the work had begun. And when the music at length became audible they were even less at their ease. It was all so very unsettling.” Perhaps as a response to the London audience’s reaction, Holst insisted that the Hardy quote be included in the program notes whenever it was performed.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Symphony No. 34 in C major, K. 338

Vital Stats

Composer: Born Jan. 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria; died Dec. 5, 1791, Vienna

Work composed: 1780, completed Aug. 29 of that year

World premiere: Sept. 2, 3 or 4, 1780, at the court of Mozart’s employer, the archbishop of Salzburg.

Oregon Symphony premiere: Nov. 17, 1958, with Theodore Bloomfield conducting

Most recent Oregon Symphony performances: Jan. 14-16, 1990, with James DePreist conducting

Instrumentation: 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.

Estimated duration
33 minutes

This symphony was the last Mozart composed in Salzburg. He had recently returned from a trip to Paris, and his longing to leave his hometown and the stuffy court of his employer, Hieronymus von Colloredo, the archbishop of Salzburg, had only increased during his travels. In addition, Mozart also likely wanted to remove himself, as any young man would, from his father’s influence. Mozart composed this symphony as a farewell to Salzburg and left a few weeks later for Munich to premiere his opera Idomeneo.

Mozart’s dislike for the archbishop is well known, and those feelings extended to the archbishop’s court musicians, about whom Mozart had nothing good to say. He described them as “coarse, slovenly and dissolute.” He thought little more of Salzburg’s citizens, claiming “one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people.” The Symphony No. 34 captures a sense of lightness and freedom, as if Mozart were celebrating his independence, shaking off the aesthetic and societal shackles that had constrained him.

In a nod to the prevailing conservative tastes of the archbishop and Salzburgers generally, Mozart limited this symphony to three movements, even though symphonies were beginning to feature four movements. The first movement is majestic, suggesting royalty with its trumpet fanfares. The original second movement was a minuet, an unusual choice (minuets were usually the third movement, accompanied by a trio). In addition, minuets were a rather new addition to the symphonic structure in 1780. As with all innovations, some disapproved of their inclusion, claiming they were “inimical to the symphony’s unity” or that the inclusion of a dance movement trivialized the seriousness of a symphony.

Only the first 14 measures of the minuet, which were written on the back of the first movement, survive; Mozart ripped the rest of the pages out of his manuscript. The Andante that replaced it is marked “di molto più tosto allegretto,” (very andante but more quickly allegretto), which suggests Mozart wanted it performed faster than a typical andante. The final movement is a breathless tarantella, an Italian folk dance that sparkles and flashes as it races by.

            In addition to its performances in Salzburg, we know that Mozart also performed this symphony in Vienna, and it may be the one Mozart was referring to in a letter to his father in 1781, when he wrote, “The Symphony went magnifique and had all possible succés [sic].”

© Elizabeth Schwartz 2010

Program Notes by Elizabeth Schwartz

Elizabeth Schwartz is a Portland-based free-lance writer, researcher and musician. In addition annotating programs for the Oregon Symphony and other ensembles, she has also contributed to NPR’s Performance Today (now heard on American Public Media). Schwartz also co-hosts The Portland Yiddish Hour, heard at 10 a.m. Sundays on KBOO 90.7 FM. Email: schwartzelizabeth@yahoo.com.

Recommended Recordings by Michael Parsons

Adès: Overture, Waltz and Finale from Powder Her Face
Thomas Ades-Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Kultur 10002  (DVD)

Ravel: Concerto in D major for Piano Left Hand
Jean-Philippe Collard-Piano
Lorin Maazel-French National Orchestra
EMI Classics 74749

Holst: Egdon Heath
Andre Previn-London Symphony Orchestra
EMI Classics 62616 
OR
Richard Hickox-London Symphony Orchestra
Chandos 9420

Mozart: Symphony No. 34
Sir Charles Mackerras-Prague Chamber Orchestra
Telarc 80190 
OR
Peter Maag-Orchestra di Padova E Del Veneto
Arts 47398

These selected recordings are available at Classical Millennium, located at 3144 E. Burnside in Portland.