Symphony Soundbites

Welcome to the opening concert of the ESO’s 68th season, with its theme of Celebrate Evanston! Please see “Behind the Scenes” by Maestro Eckerling, which details how he arrived at the program for our “Evanston 150” opening concert, and explains the origin of the Evanston Fanfare by Mark Gresham.

The provenance of the second work on the program, the Overture to Orpheus in the Underworld by Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880), is a good deal murkier than that of the Evanston Fanfare. <!--break-->In fact, the standard version of the overture is not by Offenbach at all, but by a Viennese composer named Carl Binder, who stitched together three sections of the score using Offenbach’s melodies for the 1860 Vienna premiere of this popular operetta. Offenbach was a master of catchy tunes; in addition to the “can-can” music which closes this overture, he also composed the melody which is now the official hymn of the U. S. Marine Corps.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921), as Maestro Eckerling points out on the next page, used Offenbach’s “can-can” in a slowed down version to represent the tortoises in his Carnival of the Animals. Saint-Saëns also slowed down the “Dance of the Sylphs” from The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz to depict the elephant. The Carnival of the Animals was originally scored for two pianos plus a small chamber ensemble; our performance will follow the standard practice of using a full complement of strings in the orchestra plus the other instruments as originally scored.

Maurice Ravel’s (1875–1937) Bolero, his best known composition, is actually a ballet score, which was commissioned by a Russian ballerina named Ida Rubenstein in 1928. Their original plan was for Ravel to orchestrate six sections of Iberia, piano music of the Spanish composer Isaac Albeniz. When copyright issues prevented the orchestration, Ravel composed an entire score, consisting of one theme (in two parts) over a constant rhythm on a snare drum (a second snare drum is added toward the end) and a bass motif played by pizzicato strings at the start with other instruments joining in as the work progresses. The popularity of Bolero as a film score and as ice skating music (Torvill and Dean) has obscured the artistry of Ravel’s structure.

A Ravel orchestration of earlier piano music, Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881), will close our concert. Mussorgsky, in the 1874 piano original, ­honored his close friend Viktor Hartmann (an artist who had died suddenly) with musical depictions of ten of ­Hartmann’s pictures. Between 1891 and 2012 there have been at least 15 orchestrations of the Pictures, with Ravel’s 1922 ­version by far the most frequently performed. Ravel was a master of orchestration, and both Pictures and Bolero provide many solos for the individual players in the ­orchestra, ­concluding with enormous climaxes for the full orchestra.      

—David Ellis