We had a nice run-through of our program yesterday at Southbridge Church. What a nice place to play! It takes some getting used to, playing in such a nice acoustic when you're used to a rehearsal space. Here are a couple things we ran through while getting acclimated to the room and playing around with a Zoom5 audio recorder. I haven't managed to figure out a better way for you to hear them, so here are links to mp3s from our Drive. These are both on our March 18 program.
Ravel: Piece en forme de habanera - You can hear kids running around out front at the beginning of this one. They were quite curious about us.
Debussy: Nuits d'etoiles
They are both our "transcriptions" of songs.
I'll do better at the concert - at least I think/hope so. Hope to see you there.
DEF
Friday, March 17, 2017
Program Notes 3/18/17
Our next concert is around the corner (tomorrow actually, 6PM Southbridge Church 15500 73rd Ave Orland Park, IL 60462), and I would like to take the opportunity to post Program Notes. Happy Reading!
Along with Ravel, Claude Debussy is one of the most prominent composers of what is known as Impressionist music. Although he disliked the term for his compositions, impressionist music has a tendency to focus on the moods and emotions aroused by the subject, rather than a detailed “tone-picture.” Impressionist music focuses on “color” via texture and harmonic usage, of which Debussy frequently used chromaticism and non-traditional scales and tonalities. Nuit d’Etoiles (1880) and Les Cloches (1885) are originally composed for voice, while Reverie (1890) is originally a piano composition. All three pieces evoke emotions of dream, sorrow, and reflection of years gone by.
Joseph-Guy Ropartz (1864-1955) is an often forgotten and neglected French composer. Ropartz studied composition under Francoise Clement Theodore Dubois and Jules Massanet. Modern composers of the time, such as Debussy, can be heard in Ropartz's music, but perhaps the largest influence of his music is Cesar Franck, with whom he studied organ. Franck's use of cyclic forms and chromatic harmonies can be heard in much of Ropartz's music. He was also influenced by Sacred music, being a devout Catholic. He identified himself not as a Frenchman, but as a Celtic Breton, associating himself with the Breton cultural renaissance of time. Ropartz set many works of Breton writers to music. He often said he was the son of a country "where the goblins populate the moor and dance by the moony nights around the menhirs...where spirits of the unburied dead appear all white above the waters of the Bay of the Departed." Rene Dumesnil wrote in his literary work Le Monde," There is with Ropartz a science of folklore and its proper use, which one admires; but more often than the direct use of popular motifs it is an inspiration drawn from the same soil which nourishes the work, like sap in trees." During the course of his lifetime, Ropartz composed a numerous amount of works including 5 symphonies, 3 violin sonatas, 2 cello sonatas, a vast amount of chamber works such as string trios, a piano trio, and string quartets, as well as choral music and other instrumental works.
Ropartz's second cello sonata was written in 1918, when the composer was about 54 years old, during which he worked as director of the Nancy Conservatory, before taking up the position as conductor of the Strasbourg the next year. The first movement of the cello sonata opens with a very short Lent intro, then transitioning into a sweeping Ardent where the lyrical cello line is brought forth in a romantic style with sweeping piano underneath. Brief pauses in the momentum almost harken to the music of Debussy, but the original idea reappears, finally slowing down towards the end of the piece with the original theme presented as if in a memory. The second movement, Lent et Calme, begins with a introspective and reflective dialogue between the cello and piano. The movement gains complexity as the texture thickens and polyrhythm becomes a common technique. This movement ends in a bloom of C major sonoroties with the cellist sustaining the tonic, and the piano softly supporting with two struck chords at the end. Based on a folk dance from Brittany, the third movement of this work begins with a very short Tres Lent section having the piano arpeggiate up a B7 chord. It quickly turns to an ostinato bass pattern in the lively Assez anime, in which the cello chimes in the the main theme. Throughout this movement the cello and piano exchange the ostinato pattern and the main theme, until the work ends with a triumphant Tres Vif in the parallel key of A Major.
Contemporaries of Guy Ropartz, compositions by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), Gabriel Faure (1845-1924), and Claude Debussy (1862-1918) are also featured on this program. Both Ravel and Debussy are both regarded as impressionist composers, however both rejected that term. Ravel considered himself a classicist, using more traditional forms from earlier musical periods (such as Baroque). He pulled inspiration from many different nationalities of music. He drew on French composers such as Rameau and Couperin, to his contemporaries, Faure and Debussy. Piece en Forme de Habanera was written during a time when he was writing two other works with a Spanish influence, Rapsodie espagnole and the opera, L’Heure espagnole. Piece was written originally as a vocal study for low voice, however it has been transcribed for many instruments including flute, violin, and cello.
One of the biggest influences of this period of French music was Gabriel Faure. He is regarded as the bridge between Romanticism and the modernism of the late 20th century. Although he used traditional forms, Faure was known for his innovative harmonic progressions and melodies. Much like Guy Ropartz, Faure was a working composer, first a Professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1905 became the director of the Conservatoire, where he remained until ill health forced him to resign. Faure’s output of works is vast, spanning over 100 songs, plus scores of piano music, sonatas for both violin and cello, as well as many other works including his well-known Requiem. This program features two works originally composed for cello and piano: Elegie (1880) and Sicilienne (1893). Les Berceaux (1879) and Au Bord d’leau (c.1875) are both originally written as vocal works, both part of two bigger cycles of Art Song.
Along with Ravel, Claude Debussy is one of the most prominent composers of what is known as Impressionist music. Although he disliked the term for his compositions, impressionist music has a tendency to focus on the moods and emotions aroused by the subject, rather than a detailed “tone-picture.” Impressionist music focuses on “color” via texture and harmonic usage, of which Debussy frequently used chromaticism and non-traditional scales and tonalities. Nuit d’Etoiles (1880) and Les Cloches (1885) are originally composed for voice, while Reverie (1890) is originally a piano composition. All three pieces evoke emotions of dream, sorrow, and reflection of years gone by.
-MS
Friday, March 3, 2017
Concert in Orland
Our next concert is coming up quickly. We are changing up the kind of program we play, just a bit. We have been presenting two big works with a couple short works which we felt complimented the big works. This time there will be one major work with a fuller selection of short works following the intermission.
We have a lot of love for, and faith in, French composer Guy Ropartz's second cello sonata, so that is the big work. It is with this work that our duo began, and it has been a very beneficial work to study. We are getting more confident with it, and, in performances, have been learning how to put it across to the audience. Hopefully. (Knowing a work, being able to play it well, and being able to effectively convey it to an audience are different things. The playing and learning can be accomplished in the rehearsal studio, but you need performances for an audience to learn to put it across to people.)
The shorter works are also by French composers, and include a few songs where we simply substitute the cello for the singer. Generally, these would be called transcriptions. In fact other pieces in our program are transcriptions made by famous cellists of days gone by. Most of them are done as we did them, simply assigning the music of the voice to the cello, so we can probably call ours transcriptions, too. But sometimes the transcriber does a little touching up, attempting to make things, according taste, more suitable to the cello and piano combination. We would appreciate knowing how well you think we've done.
We will be playing works by Ravel, Faure, and Debussy, and in fact only two of the Faure works, the Elegie and the Siciliene, were originally composed for the cello. All the rest of the works, including our own transcriptions, were made to give cellists opportunities to sing beautiful melodies, in the hope of winning audiences to the cello. This is our purpose, too. We hope you'll consider attending. And it's free admission.
Saturday, March 18, 6:00 PM, at Southbridge Church in Orland Park.
We have a lot of love for, and faith in, French composer Guy Ropartz's second cello sonata, so that is the big work. It is with this work that our duo began, and it has been a very beneficial work to study. We are getting more confident with it, and, in performances, have been learning how to put it across to the audience. Hopefully. (Knowing a work, being able to play it well, and being able to effectively convey it to an audience are different things. The playing and learning can be accomplished in the rehearsal studio, but you need performances for an audience to learn to put it across to people.)
The shorter works are also by French composers, and include a few songs where we simply substitute the cello for the singer. Generally, these would be called transcriptions. In fact other pieces in our program are transcriptions made by famous cellists of days gone by. Most of them are done as we did them, simply assigning the music of the voice to the cello, so we can probably call ours transcriptions, too. But sometimes the transcriber does a little touching up, attempting to make things, according taste, more suitable to the cello and piano combination. We would appreciate knowing how well you think we've done.
We will be playing works by Ravel, Faure, and Debussy, and in fact only two of the Faure works, the Elegie and the Siciliene, were originally composed for the cello. All the rest of the works, including our own transcriptions, were made to give cellists opportunities to sing beautiful melodies, in the hope of winning audiences to the cello. This is our purpose, too. We hope you'll consider attending. And it's free admission.
Saturday, March 18, 6:00 PM, at Southbridge Church in Orland Park.
DEF
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