The Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra William Schrickel, Music Director

Sunday, October 19, 2014—4:00 PM Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota

William Schrickel, conductor

Maria Jette, soprano Dominick Argento, composer

Program

Dominick Argento Ode to the West Wind for Soprano and Orchestra (1956) Maria Jette, soprano (World Premiere)

Intermission Sergei Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances, op. 45 I. Non allegro II. Andante con moto (Tempo di valse) III. Lento assai—Allegro vivace

Program Notes

Dominick Argento was born on October 27, 1927 in York, Pennsylvania. He earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory and subsequently was awarded his Ph.D from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Bernard Rogers. A Minneapolis resident, he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, where he taught from 1958 until 1997. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975 for his song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, and he won a Grammy® in 2004 for Casa Guidi, a song cycle that will be performed by mezzo soprano Clara Osowski with William Schrickel and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra on May 17, 2015 at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi. Argento was at Eastman and working with Bernard Rogers in 1956 when Rogers suggested to Argento the idea of setting British poet Percy Blysshe Shelley’s (1792-1822) five stanza Ode to the West Wind (written in 1819 in Florence, Italy) for voice and orchestra. Argento composed the work for his wife, soprano Carolyn Bailey, and writes that “every note had been tailored for her remarkable voice.” The work was played in a private performance at Eastman in 1957, but was not published until two months ago or performed in a public concert until this afternoon. Argento agreed that today’s performance may properly be termed the world premiere. Shelley wrote Ode to the West Wind in iambic pentameter and a complex rhyming scheme called terza rima, a form employed in the 14th century by Danté in his epic poem The Divine Comedy. The form of each of the five stanzas is: ABA, BCB, CDC, DED and a final rhyming couplet, EE. Though his musical setting effectively delineates each of the five verses, Argento made no attempt to musically reflect Shelley’s elaborate rhyme form. The Ode’s first three verses depict the effect of the wind on the earth, sky, and oceans. In the final two stanzas, the poet addresses

the wind directly, invoking its power and beseeching the wind to spread the poet’s ideas and thoughts across the face of the earth. Like Shelley’s poem, Argento’s setting of Ode to the West Wind reflects a spiritual and emotional journey from darkness, powerlessness and despair to hopeful, enthusiastic optimism. “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) created his final work, Symphonic Dances, op. 45, in an amazingly brief period of just under six weeks in the summer of 1940. Living with his wife at Orchard Park, a rented estate near Huntington, Long Island, he wrote (and practiced the piano for his upcoming fall recital tour) in his soundproof studio every day from nine in the morning until eleven at night. Rachmaninoff had a close musical association with the Philadelphia Orchestra dating back to 1909, and he offered the premiere of the Symphonic Dances to the Philadelphians and their relatively new young Music Director, Eugene Ormandy. Cast in three movements, the work is an extroverted orchestral tour de force and a psychologically autobiographical revelation. The opening movement begins as a march, by turns quietly mysterious and vehemently angry. Rachmaninoff curiously marked the music to be played Non allegro. An allegro indication usually suggests fast music, but the literal meaning of the Italian word is “high-spirited” or “good-humored”, and Rachmaninoff, who battled depression for much of his life (it initially devastated him following the crushing failure of his Symphony #1 at its premiere in 1897) likely intended his admonition to apply to the movement’s emotional tenor rather than its speed per se. A lyrical central section features the melancholy voice of the solo saxophone, but the threatening march music returns reasserting the earlier defiant mood. As the movement nears its conclusion, Rachmaninoff stunningly introduces a brand new theme in a major key, warm, singing and accompanied by soft bell-like tones in the flutes, glockenspiel, harp and piano. Audiences at the 1941 premiere had no way of knowing that this new theme is a reconfiguration of the dark, stormy first theme of the opening movement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony #1. This work met with such disdain at its first performance in 1897, that the composer, in deep despair, withdrew it from publication and attempted to destroy all copies of the score and parts. Rachmaninoff intended this musical reference to be purely a private one. It may have been an attempt to reconcile himself to the bitter disappointment he experienced all those years earlier. Astonishingly, after Rachmaninoff died, a transcription of the symphony for two pianos and a set of orchestral parts, without a score, turned up in Leningrad. The Symphony #1 was reconstructed and received a second premiere in 1945, and Rachmaninoff’s private autobiographical reference finally became public knowledge. The second movement of the Symphonic Dances is a sequence of waltzes. Separated by recurring fanfare-like declarations from the brass, they morph in mood from bittersweet to delirious to ghostly and from darkly sensual to passionate to otherworldly before evaporating into the ether. The finale shares the musical architecture of the opening movement—brief introduction, fast section, a slower, lyrical center, another fast segment and a final closing coda. Rachmaninoff alludes to, then directly quotes the Dies irae from the Gregorian Mass for the Dead, a theme he had explored in a number of his earlier works. Yet, it is telling that the final musical self-reference he makes in the Symphonic Dances is an emotionally and spiritually positive one. Near the end of the work, he writes “Alliluya” at the top of the score and proceeds to introduce music from the Doxology of his Vespers, op. 37, a religious a cappella choral work he wrote in 1915. The “Alliluya” music vanquishes the darker Dies irae, and the dramatic final stroke of the tam-tam that ends the Symphonic Dances would seem to indicate that in this last composition, Rachmaninoff, who struggled with depression, darkness and self-doubt throughout his life, musically affirms his belief in the ultimate victory of Faith over Death. At the end of the manuscript of the Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff wrote, in Russian, “I thank Thee, Lord.” ©William Schrickel 2014

Ode to the West Wind Percy Blysshe Shelley O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear! ------------------------------------- Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear! ---------------------------------------- Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear! -------------------------------------- If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. -------------------------------------- Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened Earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?