EVANSTON FANFARE

             Mark Gresham b. 1956

Mark Gresham is an Atlanta based composer who has written in a variety of forms and for many differing ensembles. His Magnificat was performed to great acclaim by the Evanston Symphony and the North Shore Choral Society in the December 2011 Christmas Concert.

The following year Music Director Lawrence Eckerling was looking for a short brass fanfare to perform a as companion to Dukas’ Fanfare to La Peri, but was having little success until Gresham offered to compose a new fanfare. He titled it Evanston Fanfare, and it is having its official world concert premiere at this concert.

OVERTURE TO ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD

            Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880)

Jacques Offenbach is thought of as a French composer, having moved to Paris from his native Cologne, Germany at age 14. He did more than any other composer to establish and popularize the operetta in France, at about the same time as Johan Strauss was doing the same in Vienna.

Orpheus in the Underworld, premiered in 1858, was his first two act work and a major success. It is best known for the “can-can” music which concludes the overture, and is also sung by an ensemble of gods and goddesses in the operetta. The standard overture, which is being played today, was actually “composed” by a Viennese musician named Carl Binder for its 1860 premiere in that city.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS

            Camille Saint-Saens (1835–1921)

Camille Saëns’ compositions numbered close to 200 and included five symphonies, 10 concerti and 13 operas. Yet The Carnival of the Animals, composed as a private joke in 1886, is his most popular work, a fact which “would have caused him the bitterest annoyance” per the Grove Dictionary of Musicians. In fact, he forbade any performances of the work during his lifetime, with the exception of The Swan, its most famous single section.

The Carnival was composed in only a few days, and is scored for two pianos, two violins, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, xylophone and glass harmonica. Standard performance practice, followed in this performance, is to use a full complement of strings and to substitute a glockenspiel for the glass harmonica.

The titles of the 14 sections are shown on the preceding page, and the verses written by Ogden Nash in 1949 will introduce each movement of this 25-minute piece. Here are some highlights:

The Tortoises are depicted by a very slow version of Offenbach’s “Can-can” music on the strings. In a similar musical joke, the Elephant is portrayed by a heavy double bass solo (plus piano) which parodies the airy “Dance of the Sylphes” from The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz. The Personages With Long Ears movement features the two violin sections imitating a donkey’s “hee-haw,” which is probably a reference to music critics. The Pianists section is meant to satirize the scales and exercises which test beginning piano students. The xylophone depicts the clattering of the bones of the Fossils; this section refers to Saint-Saëns’ own Danse Macabre. The Ogden Nash verse for the Swan ends with the name Pavlova, a reference to the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, whose signature solo was The Dying Swan, set to Saint-Saëns’ music for solo cello and the two pianos.

BOLERO

             Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

Ravel was a musical craftsman of the highest order, resulting in an oeuvre in which almost every work is in the standard repertoire. Ironically, his most popular and best known piece, Bolero, is one which he said consisted of “orchestral tissue without music”.

Bolero was commissioned by the Russian ballerina Ida Rubenstein for a scenario involving a woman dancing on a long table in a Spanish tavern. The 15 minute piece is a long crescendo in the key of C Major, with a single two part theme and a constant rhythm on the snare drum. Ravel highlights the solo woodwinds and brass as the orchestration and the volume of sound build. The key changes briefly from C Major to E Major at the work’s climax.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

            Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881)

Modest Mussorgsky, one of the most brilliantly original of all composers, wrote Pictures at an Exhibition for solo piano in 1874 as a remembrance for his friend the painter Victor Hartmann, who had died the year before aged 39. This piano cycle has been orchestrated many times, with that of Ravel (from 1922) being performed most frequently, as it is at this concert.

The score numbers ten separate “pictures,” beginning with “Gnomus” and ending with the “Great Gate of Kiev”; they are preceded by an introductory “Promenade” (solo trumpet and then brass), which recurs in various instrumental colors in the score, as if the listener is moving from picture to picture in a gallery.

“Gnomus” represents a small gnome lurching about irregularly. A wind/horn version of the promenade leads to “The Old Castle,” which features a major solo on the alto saxophone. After a short reprise of the promenade, “Tuileries” depicts children dashing about in that Paris garden. “Bydlo” is a Polish oxen-drawn card. Ravel chooses a solo tuba to portray the cart, which approaches and then recedes. Another promenade precedes the “Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells,” which is in the standard form of a scherzo. The next number, based on two Hartmann pictures, contrasts wealthy “Samuel Goldenberg” (powerful strings and winds) with the poor “Schmuyle” (muted high solo trumpet). “Limoges” (a French city) is another scherzo movement, and leads directly into the Roman “Catacombs”on the brass. A second part of this picture (with the dead in a dead language) brings the promenade theme into a picture itself. Baba Yaga is a witch in Russian folklore who lives in a “Hut on Fowl’s Legs,” which allows the hut to rotate about to always be facing a threat. This powerful picture, marked “féroce” leads into the even more powerful “Great Gate of Kiev,” one of music’s most stunning finales, in which the promenade theme makes a final appearance.