Like an art gallery, but with music

Anna Clyne (b. 1980)
Color Field (2020)

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: First Oregon Symphony Performance 

Instrumentation: two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets (second doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons (second doubling contrabassoon), two horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 15 minutes

A sensory blending known as synesthesia applies to approximately 4% of the population. Among musicians, synesthesia typically manifests as an association of pitches and/or key centers with specific colors. Synesthetic musicians share several characteristics; no two have precisely the same set of color associations, and those colors link to only a subset of tones and key centers, not to all. (Russian composer Alexander Scriabin may have claimed across-the-board color bindings, but he selected his color-tone associations deliberately and systematically. Innate synesthesia doesn’t work that way.) 

Personal note: I am myself naturally synesthetic. My color associations are specific to me, and apply to certain tones and keys only. For example, I hear F Major as bright green, but I have no association for nearby G Major. My colors have a tactile quality, they signify mood as well as pitch, and they have been with me for as long as I can remember. 

Synesthesia is common amongst visual artists. “I am just experiencing life through a heightened sense of iridescent form. It contributes to my artistry, as it does for all artists with synesthesia,” reports synesthetic artist Jack Coulter. Whether or not the eminent American abstract painter Mark Rothko was synesthetic – concrete proof is lacking – the floating luminescent color blocks of his ‘color field’ canvases invite emotional, physical, and even musical reactions from viewers. 

Anna Clyne’s 2020 Color Field is dedicated to businesswoman and philanthropist Melanie Sabelhaus, who is of Serbian descent. Her particular fondness for the color Hermès Orange led Clyne – who was influenced by the concept of synesthesia – to Rothko’s 1961 Orange, Red, Yellow, with its heated chromatic saturation and turbulent transitions between adjacent color fields. 

Clyne writes that “each movement of Color Field weaves in elements of Melanie's life, where music was always present. ‘Yellow’ evokes a hazy warmth and incorporates a traditional Serbian melody, first heard as a very slow bass line, and then revealed in the middle of the movement in the strings and winds. In ‘Red,’ the fires blaze with bold percussive patterns and lilting lines. In ‘Orange,’ the music becomes still and breathes, and then escalates once more, incorporating elements of ‘Yellow’ and ‘Red’ to create ‘Orange.’” 

Max Bruch (1838–1920) 
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 (1868) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: David Danzmayr led violinist Simone Lamsma and the Oregon Symphony on April 19-22, 2024, at Smith Auditorium at Willamette University and the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: solo violin with two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 24 minutes 

Our musical world would be a much poorer place without the magisterial 19th-century violinist Joseph Joachim. A violinist’s violinist and a musician’s musician, there was something Jovian about him, even at the age of 12 when he first performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto and began the process of rehabilitating a work that most critics dismissed as an estimable failure. But Joachim never had any difficulty telling his hawks from his handsaws. It was his advocacy that ensured repertory status for the violin concertos of Mendelssohn and Brahms, not to mention Bach’s solo violin partitas and the late Beethoven string quartets. (He is also the patron saint of modern violin playing, but that’s a topic for some other program note.) 

Joachim contributed mightily to the success of the beloved G minor Violin Concerto by the German Romantic Max Bruch, celebrated in his day as a leading choral composer but nowadays close to being forgotten save this one work. Joachim helped Bruch massage the piece into its final form, played the premiere, and always spoke fondly of the concerto’s lovable richness.

The Bruch G minor Concerto has become such a familiar part of the musical landscape that we run the risk of overlooking how adroitly Bruch navigated the terrain that lies between a formally constructed concerto and a freer fantasy-like affair. The first movement, a Vorspiel or prelude, hints at a traditional concerto structure – contrasting themes, one sturdy, the other lyrical – but reveals its introductory nature by tailing off into the sublime Adagio, one of the most beguiling lyrical effusions in the repertory. A short preparation leads directly into the joyous finale, physically robust to be sure, but frequently soaring into the flights of ecstatic melody that have ensured this wonderful concerto’s lasting popularity. 

Nota bene: for those who might wonder if the theme of Bruch’s finale was influenced by the Brahms Violin Concerto – they are very close cousins indeed – be advised that the Bruch is the earlier of the two works, and in all likelihood the similarities are coincidental. 

Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881)
Pictures at an Exhibition (1874, orch. Maurice Ravel 1922) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Carlos Kalmar led the Oregon Symphony on February 7-10, 2020, at Smith Auditorium at Willamette University and the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: three flutes (second and third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celeste, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 35 minutes

The familiar claim that great art cannot be created by committee is sorely challenged by Pictures at an Exhibition, an undisputed masterpiece that may have been written by a single composer but involved the significant contributions of an artist (Viktor Hartmann), an editor (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), and a field of orchestrators (including Sir Henry Wood, Maurice Ravel, and Leopold Stokowski.) 

Pictures is the work of an untrained, diamond-in-the-rough composer who wore his musical rusticity as a badge of honor and shunned the very idea of acquiring technical polish. In this, he was typical of his immediate circle, a loose confederation of young Russian musicians who had adopted an aggressively nationalistic and anti-conservatory stance, at least in part as a defensive posture in the face of public indifference to native composers. Nevertheless, certain of his colleagues initially ridiculed him as “a perfect idiot.” Even musicologist Gerald Abraham, an authority on Mussorgsky’s life and work, acknowledged that in terms of basic compositional technique “he was hopelessly limited, with remarkably little ability to construct pure music or even a purely musical texture.”

We may safely conclude that Mussorgsky’s posthumous elevation to the highest ranks of Russian composers is due to neither his taut symphonic arguments nor his mastery of classical form. His immense gifts were much more elemental in nature and just might have been diminished by the necessary restrictions of traditional conservatory training. Above all, he possessed an uncanny ability to translate words and pictures into music, and it is that compelling vividness that has given his work such remarkable staying power, while the products of his better-trained colleagues have mostly faded into obscurity.

Mussorgsky and the artist Viktor Hartmann met sometime around 1870. Their mutual devotion to nurturing a native Russian art encouraged the blossoming of a solid friendship, cut tragically short when Hartmann died in 1873 at the age of 39. A year later the influential critic Viktor Stasov helped to organize a showing of Hartmann’s works at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. That exhibition inspired Mussorgsky to plunge into the composition of Pictures at an Exhibition, originally titled Hartmann. Six weeks later the work was finished, although it was never to be performed publicly during Mussorgsky’s lifetime.

Music lovers are sometimes unaware that Mussorgsky wrote Pictures for solo piano; its history of orchestral transcription runs deep. In fact, the first known public performance of the work, in November 1891, was an abridged orchestration by Rimsky-Korsakov’s student Mikhail Tushmalov. Mussorgsky may or may not have intended to orchestrate the work, but as a piano piece Pictures is distinctly effective, albeit rather stark. (One occasionally hears claims that Vladimir Horowitz’s legendary 1951 performance makes a truly compelling case for the solo piano version – but Horowitz was actually playing his own gussied-up arrangement, and not Mussorgsky’s original.)

Approximately thirty orchestral transcriptions have been made of Pictures over the years, of which Maurice Ravel’s masterful 1922 orchestration has become the de facto standard. Despite his fastidious disdain for Mussorgsky’s crudity, Ravel was a bona fide Russophile who could not help but respond to Pictures’ kaleidoscopic imagery. The celebrated result seamlessly blends two contrasting cultures in a milestone of orchestral writing.

Pictures at an Exhibition charts the course of visitors strolling through a gallery of Hartmann’s various paintings, sketches, and architectural fantasies. (We may assume that among the visitors is the composer himself, presumably a fictionalized, alert Mussorgsky instead of the shambling and disoriented alcoholic of reality.) A Promenade theme acts as a musical museum guide, accompanying us from picture to picture as we make our way along. In the course of our tour we take in a panoply of subjects: a grotesque Christmas tree ornament (Gnomus), a ruined medieval castle (Il vecchio castello), children playing with their nurse in the Parisian Tuileries, a lumbering Polish oxcart (Bydlo), a ballet scene (Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks), two Jewish men, one rich, the other poor (Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle), old women quarreling in The Market at Limoges, eerily glowing skulls in the Paris Catacombs, and a fantastical clock in the shape of the witch Baba Yaga’s Hut on Fowl’s Legs. The tour concludes with Hartmann’s architectural design for The Great Gate of Kiev, created for a competition to design a magnificent city gate in commemoration of Tsar Alexander II’s narrow escape from assassination. The gate itself was never built, but Hartmann’s design lives on in Mussorgsky’s powerful portrait.