Program Notes for “Ferocious Beauty”
February 6, 2009
Partita, op. 20 (1939)
by Vítezlava Kaprálová (Brno [now Czech Republic], 1915 - Montpellier, France, 1940)
Visit the website of the Kaprálová Society and you will discover a nearly forgotten composer who created more than forty compositions before her death from tuberculosis at age 25; one of the world’s first professional women conductors who had studied with Charles Munch in Paris; student, collaborator and lover of Bohuslav Martinu on whom she had a major influence.
Vítezlava Kaprálová left Czechoslovakia for France on a scholarship in 1937. When her country was invaded by the Nazis in March 1939, she became an exile. Throughout this time, she composed feverishly, as if she had felt that her time was running out. The three-movement Partita for Piano and Strings was one of her central accomplishments during this difficult period; she worked on it for almost a whole year. During that time, Kaprálová was in daily contact with Martinu-her senior by 25 years-who was then working on his Three Ricercars for Two Pianos and Orchestra. The two compositions, written for similar performing forces, exhibit a definite stylistic kinship, reflecting the composer’s shared interest in reviving Baroque stylistic elements in a 20th-century context, and that “simple speech” that Martinu referred to in one of his articles as the supreme goal of the artist.
The motifs of Kaprálová’s Partita really “speak”: they are terse and pithy and their development eminently logical. The first movement retains its strong rhythmic energy as soloistic episodes alternate with tutti passages in true concerto-grosso fashion. The piano plays the role of the main soloist, but there is also a characteristic episode where two violins take center stage. A placid melody opens the second movement which also includes an excited and mysterious “B” section. The last movement begins as a scherzo with a traditional Czech folk-dance flavor, enriched by contemporary harmonies. The two “trio” sections, in slower tempo, are more impressionistic in tone. Kaprálová originally planned to include a fugue and a chorale in this last movement but ultimately changed her mind, keeping the “speech” “simple.” The conclusion, based on the “trio” material, is majestic and grandiose, ending the work with a major musical statement.
String Symphony (Symphony. No. 4, 1998)
by Libby Larsen (b. Wilmington, DE, 1950)
Libby Larsen seems to share Kaprálová’s concern with musical speech. “Italian, German, Russian and French music sounds distinctly Italian, German, Russian and French…So I begin to ask, what is the melody of American English? And can it be best expressed through orchestral strings?”-she muses in her notes on her String Symphony. In this work, she finds the orchestral sound of American English in the American Romanticism of Samuel Barber, which “speaks” through expressive melodic lines and insistent rhythmic figures without any direct references to the vernacular.
Larsen, a longtime resident of the Twin Cities, wrote this piece for her “hometown band,” the Minnesota Orchestra, which gave the first performance under Eiji Oue in December 1998. Known mainly for her operas and other vocal works, the composer reveals her love for “singing” melodies even when she writes for instruments. The opening movement of the String Symphony, entitled “Elegance,” lives up to its name by choice harmonies and a streamlined formal construction. “Beauty Alone” informs the second movement; that beauty is realized with the help of an intensely lyrical theme, occasionally enhanced by contrapuntal development. After two slow movements, the finale (“Ferocious Rhythm”) provides energy, excitement and textural variety. Larsen weaves the four-note motif of the “Dies irae,” so dear to Rachmaninoff, into the melodic material, shortly before the brilliant ending.
Malédiction (1833?)
by Franz Liszt (Doborján, Hungary [now Raiding, Austria], 1811 - Bayreuth, Germany, 1886)
The image of the Romantic artist, with his perpetual emotional turmoil, his extreme mood swings and his world-weariness may have become a cliché, yet it describes the young Franz Liszt to a ‘t.’ A fabulously gifted piano prodigy who, by the age of 20, had Vienna, Paris, and London lying at his feet, Liszt also had to deal with the the loss of his first great love and the tragedy of his father’s premature death. At 17, he fell into a deep depression, combined with a religious fervor bordering on mania, and disappeared from public view to the point that one newspaper even printed his obituary on October 23, 1828. Liszt was roused from his melancholy when the July Revolution broke out in Paris in 1830. “The guns cured him,” his mother later said. He sketched (but did not finish) a Revolutionary Symphony. He returned to the concert stage and composed feverishly throughout the 1830s while developing a reputation as a ladies’ man. He read voraciously, formed friendships with Berlioz and Chopin, and had a life-changing encounter with the virtuoso violin playing of Paganini. All of these experiences went into the first compositions that established him as a composer (for instance, the piano cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses)-but also into compositions that became known only much later, after many revisions, or remained in the drawer, not to be discovered until after the composer’s death.
Liszt had a particularly difficult time with the concerto genre. In the 1830s he started work on several works for piano and orchestra. Both the E-flat major and the A-major concertos were begun many years before they were completed in the 1850s. But in addition, there was a third piano concerto (also in E-flat) that was rediscovered only in the 1980s, the “instrumental psalm” De profundis that turned up around the same time-and Malédiction, which was discovered in 1915 but is still something of a rarity, known only to die-hard Liszt aficionados.