Leighton :Dance Suite No. 2, Op. 59

Dance Suite No. 2, Op. 59

Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988)

Kenneth Leighton’s early musical training took place as a choirboy at Wakefield Cathedral, followed by studies at Oxford University. He attracted early notice from a number of important composers, including Vaughan Williams, Britten and Gerald Finzi. Composer of symphonies, concertos and chamber music, Leighton is perhaps best-known for his choral works. A prolific composer, his style, with its clarity, lyrical expressiveness and classic form, places him among the more conservative British composers of his time, although elements of the 12-tone technique were to have an influence upon his work as well.

One of a set of three Dance Suites commissioned in the early 1970s to be played by school orchestras, the Second Suite is a vivid example of Leighton’s style, in which technical mastery goes along with a flair for exhibiting an appealing “popular” tone.

The suite opens with a brightly-colored “Intrada,” a march-like introductory movement steps forth with energy and a confident swagger. A secondary, more lyrical theme follows, with the opening material returning to conclude the movement with brilliant flourishes.

The Ragtime Jig is quite removed from the edgy stride of Scott Joplin’s classical ragtime style, here rather stressing the “jig” element, giving a decidedly English cast to the music. Beginning quietly, the music builds to a climax, and then fades away softly in a low flute solo.

The closing “Introduction and March,” is the most imposing part of the suite, opening with

a broad, sustained melody in the strings, soon joined by the winds, moving ahead with a majestic stride and rising to a powerful fullness of sonority. Quite abruptly the music shifts to a springy, almost hectic quick march tempo, with a principal theme filled with rhythmic touches which gives the music a distinct contemporary flavour. A more sustained contrasting melody appears which, upon the return of the opening material soars overhead in the winds, the two thematic elements combined to bring the work to an exultant conclusion.

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Wieniawski :Concerto for Violin No. 2 in D Minor: First Movement, Allegro Moderato

Concerto for Violin No. 2 in D Minor: First Movement, Allegro Moderato

Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880)

The Polish violinist Henryk Wieniawski was born into a family of musicians, and showing a great musical talent at an early age, entered the Paris Conservatoire, studying the violin, and soon gaining notice as one of the most brilliant performers of his generation. Much of his career was spent as a travelling virtuoso throughout Europe, as well as spending two years giving concerts in North America. For twelve years Wieniawski taught at the conservatory in Saint Petersburg (in that period Poland was a province of the Russian Empire), where he had a close association with the great pianist, Anton Rubinstein, and became a close friend of Tchaikovsky. Always in frail health, the composer became dangerously ill in 1880, and was taken to live in the palational home of Madame von Meck, Tchaikovksy’s patroness, where he died a few months later. Tchaikovsky wrote of his death, “in him we shall lose an incomparable violinist and gifted composer…the D Minor Concerto shows a true creative gift.”

Composer of many concert works for violin, the Second Concerto is his outstanding creation, a work of fire, lyrical power and great color.

The concerto opens with an introduction featuring a gentle theme in the violins, shared with the winds, and setting the stage for the entry of the solo violin, who is first heard taking up the initial melodic element, now adding some virtuoso touches. A richly lyrical secondary theme follows, which leads to an episode of increasingly brilliant technical display, all the resources of the violin given full rein.

Copland : “Hoe Down” from RODEO

“Hoe Down” from RODEO

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

By the 1940s Aaron Copland had already become known as America’s best-known composer, and with the celebration last year of his centenary his position as his country’s best-loved composer is more secure than ever. Although active as a composer for films, with a couple of operas to his credit, the most natural medium for Copland’s dramatic instincts (very much like Stravinsky) was in the field of the dance. Indeed, it was with the appearance in 1938 of BILLY THE KID that Copland began to win a wide popular following. With the composition of RODEO (1942) and APPALACHIAN SPRING (1944) Copland’s reputation was firmly established as the composer who distilled the very essence of the American spirit into his music.

Following the sensational appearance of BILLY THE KID, Copland was invited to join in a second dance project by Agnes DeMille, who herself was about to win a great career success with her choreography for OKLAHAMA in 1943. Another ballet about cowboys at first had little attraction for Copland, but the ever-persuasive DeMille won out, and at the premiere of RODEO at the old Metropolitan Opera House Copland shared in one of the great triumphs of American dance. Four episodes from the ballet were published as a concert suite shortly afterward. The brilliant concluding Hoe Down is a glorious evocation of the time-honored American barndance, complete with fancy fiddling and stomping rhythms. There is a contrasting element midway, with a perky, prancing little ditty heard in the winds, then taken up by the strings. But in the end the fast and furious energy of the main tune carries the day, bringing the dance to an exhilarating finish.

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Berlioz :Hungarian March from The Damnation of Faust

Hungarian March from The Damnation of Faust

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

For more than a century after its appearance in the 1820s Goethe’s FAUST was to be a powerful preoccupation of a remarkable stream of composers, including Schumann, Liszt, Gounod, Wagner, Busoni, and many others. One of the earliest of these was Hector Berlioz, who as early as 1828 composed a set of “Eight Scenes from Goethe’s Faust” – which he promptly sent off to Weimar, seeking the approval of the great German poet. (Goethe gave the manuscript to a musical advisor, who dismissed it as incoherent rubbish!) In 1845 Berlioz returned to his Faust project, which now developed into a massive work for voices, chorus and orchestra, labeled a “Dramatic Legend” – a work not for the stage, but for the concert hall, with the usual visual and dramatic elements intended to take place in the minds of the listeners through the medium of the music.

Although in the main faithful to Goethe’s work, there is one startling liberty on the part of the composer: in order to inset into the action a stirring march composed after a visit to Hungary, Berlioz arbitrarily shifted the locale of the opening of the drama to that country. The march, sometimes known by its tradition Hungarian title, “Rákóczy March,” is one of several popular orchestral excerpts from the DAMNATION OF FAUST, notable for its brilliant coloration and dashing energy. The march begins softly, which caused Berlioz some nervousness when he conducted it in Budapest, lest the audience might take offense at such an understated opening. His fears were groundless; the swelling power and swagger of this infectious piece swept the Hungarians into a storm of applause, and the march has been one of the composer’s most popular compositions ever since.

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Humperdinck : Evening Prayer from Hansel and Gretel

Evening Prayer from Hansel and Gretel

Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921)

Engelbert Humperdinck today is remembered for a single composition, his opera HANSEL AND GRETEL. Introduced in 1893 under the baton of none other than Richard Strauss, HANSEL AND GRETEL was perhaps the most sensationally successful first opera in history, going on to join Handel’s MESSIAH and Tchaikovsky’s NUTCRACKER BALLET as a mandatory musical fare in the Christmas season. Growing out of a quite modest family entertainment, with a libretto by the composer’s sister, the work soon was expanded into a full-scale opera. Ironically, this unpretentious fairy-tale piece might well be described as the only successful opera to carry on the legacy of of Richard Wagner, with whom Humperdinck worked as a young man.

The Evening Prayer is a tiny little duet sung by Hansel and Gretel, who have become lost in the woods, and now prepare to sleep, singing the familiar words, “Now I lay me down to sleep….” No more gentle and tender music has ever been written.

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Mozart :Overture to The Magic Flute

Overture to The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

In the last year of his life, contrary to popular myth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was beginning to see a turnabout in his professional fortunes. True, he had been in ill health, burdened by debt and a falling-off of his popularity with fickle Viennese audiences. But by the spring of 1791 he was busy at work on two operatic projects at the same time: The Magic Flute, a German-language SINGSPIEL (an opera with spoken dialogue), and LA CLEMENZA DI TITO, a rather old-fashioned “serious” opera in Italian. While TITO was intended for a gala performance in Prague as part of the celebrations of the coronation of a new emperor, DIE ZAUBERFLOTE (“Magic Flute”) was written for more modest circumstances: performances in a small theatre in the suburbs of Viennese, before middle-class “family audiences.” While the Italian opera turned out to be a disappointment, the singspiel was an instant, long-running popular success---perhaps a sign of what might have been had Mozart lived.

Commissioned by a roustabout theatre-manager, one Emmanuel Schikaneder, who himself wrote the libretto (and even created the popular role of Papageno, the Bird-Catcher in the first performances), “The Magic Flute” was a confusing scramble of pseudo-Egyptian mythology (complete with references to Osiris and Isis), a boy-meets-girl story, plus a fascinating admixture of Masonic symbolism as well. (After years of prohibition by the Church, under the tolerant Emperor Joseph II the masons were permitted to exist, many of the most prominent artist and intellectuals of Vienna becoming members, including both Haydn and Mozart.)

The Magic Flute is Mozart’s most majestic overture: opening with a slow introduction featuring heavy, portentous chords (suggesting the Masonic element), leading to a full-scale ALLEGRO, filled with bustling fugal writing. Midway the music pauses, and three massive intonations in the brass and winds are heard, yet again a Masonic symbol. The whirling energy resumes, and the overture concludes in triumph.

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