SEASON 3 EPISODE 6
ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
Good afternoon and thanks for tuning in to Little Rock Public Radio and Classical KLRE-FM, 90.5. I'm Eric Harrison, I write about arts and culture at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and I’ll be your host for the next two hours.
You're listening to ‘Major and Minor Masterpieces,’ where we focus each week on a broad range of classical music, from chamber music to choral works to full symphonies and maybe even a touch or two of opera.
This week we’ll take a look at musical legends, heroes and anti-heroes.
Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg accepted an invitation from fellow Norwegian Henrik Ibsen in January 1874 to compose incidental music for his verse drama “Peer Gynt.” But the playwright’s original vision for a few interstitial pieces ultimately grew to 26 numbers across five acts, which considerably strained Grieg’s creativity — it took him a difficult year and a half to complete. The task was made more difficult in the process of adapting Ibsen’s original vision, which was a four-hour quasi-epic poem involving a a repellent Faust-like protagonist hell-bent in pursuit of his own desires, into a suitable stage play. Grieg’s music also helps a lot in making Ibsen’s rather brutish character less reprehensible.
When “Peer Gynt” premiered in February 1876 in Christiania (now Oslo), critics praised both play and music, but Grieg wasn’t satisfied, particularly with the orchestrations; for subsequent productions in 1888 and 1892, he revised his score and also published a pair of concert suites, extracting eight pieces that have become, along with his piano concerto and “Suite from Holberg’s Time,” his most popular and most-often-played works.
The first suite contains the four best-known pieces, and the ones that most often show up in movies and even TV commercials: “Morning Mood,” which opens Act IV of the play; “Åse’s Death,” set at the deathbed of Peer’s mother at the end of Act III, detailed by somber strings and melancholic brass; “Anitra’s Dance,” the seduction of Peer by the daughter of a Bedouin chieftain; and “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Act II, in which Peer finds himself in a troll king’s hostile court. (Grieg, who notably hated this piece, though it is arguably is the one most identified with him, wrote a friend, “I have done something for the hall of the troll king in Dovre which literally I can’t bear to hear, it reeks so of cow-turds, ultra-Norwegianism and to-one’s-self-enoughness!”)
The second suite opens with “Ingrid’s Lament,” focusing on the daughter of a rich farmer whom Peer abducts to start the drama, followed by the “Arabian Dance,” from the middle of Act IV, set in the Bedouin camp just before “Anitra’s Dance.” “Peer Gynt’s Homecoming (Stormy Evening)," the Prelude to Act V, depicts Peer’s shipwreck on his return to Norway, and closes with “Solveig’s Song,” in which the woman he has loved and left at various points throughout the play comforts him with a lullaby.
(By the way, fans of science fiction movies will recognize “Morning Mood” and “Ase’s Death” that were used in the soundtrack for “Soylent Green.”)
Let’s hear both suites, performed by Herbert Blomstedt conducting the San Francisco Symphony.
(EDVARD GRIEG’S “PEER GYNT”)
ERIC: Herbert Blomstedt conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the two suites from Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” on Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
—PROGRAM BREAK—
[EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
SARAH BUFORD, PRODUCER:
Hey listeners, welcome back to Major and Minor Masterpieces. I’m your producer, Sarah Buford, and it's time for our show’s little educational session, in which we break down some of the terminology we use when describing classical music and its history.
Let’s continue our discussion from last week on loudness and softness in music. There’s probably a way, isn’t there, for composers to indicate transitions between one volume level and another?
ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
That’s absolutely right, Sarah. The terms, also called “dynamic markings," are “crescendo” and “decrescendo,” also known as “diminuendo.” As with most such terms, they are Italian — meaning, respectively. “growing, becoming louder” and “diminishing” or “growing/becoming less.” Composers mark a crescendo in the score with the designation “cresc.” or with a so-called “hairpin,” opening to the right (think an extended “greater than” symbol in mathematics); a decrescendo is represented by with the abbreviation decresc. or dim., or a hairpin that opens to the left.
Sometimes crescendos and diminuendos are rapid, occurring within the same measure; sometimes they are extended, as in “The Pines of Rome” that we played last week, in which the final movement is basically one long crescendo.
SARAH: Thanks, Eric! Let’s not make a crescendo out of the rest of this show but keep it just right. Alright, let’s keep the pace and volume and get back to more “Major and Minor Masterpieces”.
[END OF EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
ERIC: Franz Liszt pioneered “symphonic poem” (and coined the term) in the mid-19th century, writing 12 of them between 1848 and 1858 (and adding a 13th in 1882). We heard “The Battle of the Huns” earlier this season; the third, and most widely performed one, “Les Preludes,” had its premiere in 1854.
Liszt appended a program note, indicating that the piece is to be considered a musical depiction of a poem by Alphonse de Lamartine that begins: “What is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is tolled by death?” And concludes with, “For when the trumpet sounds, he hastens to danger’s post, that in the struggle he may once more regain full knowledge of himself and his strength.”
Eugene Ormandy conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in this classic 1943 recording.
(FRANZ LISZT’S “LES PRELUDES”)
ERIC: Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in a classic 1943 recording of Franz Liszt’s “Les Preludes."
Jean Sibelius was working on an opera he called "The Building of the Boat” that never came to fruition. But he recycled several of the musical ideas from that project into his four-movement “Lemminkainen Suite,” subtitled “Four Legends from the Kalevala,” the 19th-century compilation of Finnish epic poetry and mythology of which Lemminkäinen is one of the prominent heroes.
The four pieces are, in order, “Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island,” in which the handsome hero, fleeing from persecution at home, sails to an island where he wins the hearts of all, with one exception, the beautiful young women; “The Swan of Tuonela,” which we first played for you in Season 2, depicting the swan who glides upon the river that surrounds the land of Death; and “Lemminkäinen in Tuonela,” in which the hero, seeking to win the daughter of the ruler of the Northern Lands, is assigned a quest to hunt the swan but ends up dead, dismembered and the pieces of his body thrown into the river. (His mother collects and re-assembles his remains and returns him to life.) In the finale, “Lemminkäinen's Return,” the hero turns his worries and anxieties into fighting horses and makes an increasingly wild journey to the land of his childhood.
Sibelius wrote the four individual pieces in 1893-95 and revised them several times; the suite was published as a whole only in 1954.
Let’s hear the London Symphony Orchestra with Sir Colin Davis conducting. It’s part of a 7-disc box set that contains all 7 Sibelius symphonies and an assortment of his orchestral works.
(JEAN SIBELIUS’ “LEMMINKAINEN SUITE”)
ERIC: You’ve heard the London Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Sir Colin Davis, perform the “Lemminkainen Suite,” subtitled “Four Legends from the Kalevala,” by Jean Sibelius on today’s edition of “Major and Minor Masterpieces.”
And now for this week’s lagniappe. With a heroic theme, no less.
Frederic Chopin wrote 16 “Polonaises,” a dance form of Polish origin in 3/4 time and in a moderate tempo. Ten of them were published in his lifetime, six posthumously.
His Polonaise No. 6 in A-flat major, op.53, titled “Heroic,” composed in 1842, is probably his best known and one of the most frequently performed works in the romantic piano repertoire. Pianist Arthur Rubinstein once called it "the composition which is the closest to my heart.”
George Sand, the pen name of the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Franceuil, Chopin's longtime lover and companion, is responsible for the nickname. On hearing the piece, she wrote to Chopin, ”The inspiration! The force! The vigor! There is no doubt that such a spirit must be present in the French Revolution. From now on this polonaise should be a symbol, a heroic symbol.”
By the way, I have a personal connection to this piece: When I moved to Little Rock from Philadelphia back in the late Bronze Age, the exceptional jukebox at Pizza d’Action contained not only every single Beatles single then extant, but this piece, on two sides of a 45rpm disc. Took two dimes to play the entire work, which I did frequently.
Let’s hear Maurizio Pollini play it on a Deutsche Grammophone recording.
(FREDERIC CHOPIN’S “HEROIC”)
You’ve heard pianist Maurizio Pollini play Frederic Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise No. 6 in A-flat major, op.53, to wrap up this week’s Major and Minor Masterpieces on classical KLRE-FM, 90.5.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
Thanks for tuning in this week to Major and Minor Masterpieces. I've been your host, Eric Harrison, of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Our producer is Sarah Buford. And our transition and credit music is by our friend Wojciech Chiselinski.
Tune in again next week for Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and classical KLRE-FM, 90.5.