Bucket List Recitals and Flowers Bestowed In Vita...Program Notes Given Thereunto (2 March 2018)...

Faculty Recital Program Notes, 2 March 2018

Aulis Sallinen can be justly regarded as the natural successor to the greatest Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. After early experimentation with serialism, Sallinen adopted a clear, diatonic syle that often evokes the cold expanse of Finnish landscapes. With a strong sense of national identity, Finnish traditional melodies often appear in Sallinen’s works, and the subject matter of several of his six operas draw upon native history and folklore, such as The Red Line (set against the backdrop of the first Finnish national election), or Kullervo (based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.  In the same manner of “diatonic expanse” as Sibelius, Sallinen’s Metamorfora reflects a similar expressive disposition as Sibelius’s work for cello and piano, Malinconia, Opus 20 (which is cast in the key of d minor, a whole tone lower than this evening’s opening work, which is in the key of e minor). It was awarded First Prize in the Turku Musical Arts Society Composition Contest in 1974.

Suzanne U. Polak provides an interesting account of the origin of the Three Songs for Cello and Piano: “When I began composition lessons during my undergraduate years at Duquesne University, I simply wrote down whatever themes crossed my mind at any given time.  I also adored the sound of the cello (who doesn’t??), so I fully developed two of the themes and wrote out the piano part as well as the sketches. But I never finished them and they languished away in my notebook. Moving ahead eight years (“in fast forward”), I had three amazingly gifted young cellists in one class at the Pittsburgh High School For The Creative and Performing Arts who are the respective dedicatees of each song—Richard Dannenberg, Michael DePasquale and Peter Levine.  I accompanied them in various competitions and recitals, and they knew that I was a composer and encouraged me to write something for the cello.  I remembered my poor themes from eight years back, and they gradually became this set of songs.  The main themes in Songs I & II have a youthful quality to them, but Song III is more pensive--reflective of my own developing artistic maturity. However, I still find them to be simply what I wanted from the moment I wrote them in their original sketch form: vocal-esque pieces that show the beautiful resonance of the cello that continually calls out to all composers.” Suzanne U. Polak is an alumna of Duquesne University (PA), and also taught at Point Park University. She is a doctoral student in piano accompanying and chamber music at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The Fantasy, Elegy and Caprice of Adolphus Hailstork is both an “old and new” work: the Elegy is the creative nexus from which the entire triptych germinates. The Elegy is a brief musical gem written in 1980 for the African American cellist James Herbison (1947-2008), the assistant principal cellist of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and a member of the NOVA Trio. He also taught, conducted and coached chamber music at The College of William and Mary, Christopher Newport University, Norfolk State University and the York River Symphony Orchestra. As a work of memorial disposition, its understated bluesy nobility touched me profoundly. I’ve performed it on recital programs as a companion piece to the well-known Elegie of Gabriel Faure (1845-1924).  Over the years I’d occasionally suggest to Adolphus that the Elegy would be wonderful as an inner movement to a projected suite for cello and piano. Years later (and two ‘solo cello works in between!!), this past July I received the following email message with a substantial attachment as a most pleasant surprise:

Dear Tim, It is my understanding that you have recently tied the matrimonial knot.  That means you are making someone happy. As a composer someone whose happiness you have benefited, allow me to congratulate you.  One way to say thanks for the encouragement is to send this piece.  The Elegy is the one you already had, I think. Now there are supporting movements to go with it.  I thank you for your support through the years, and wish you well in your marriage. Sincerely, Adolphus

The opening Fantasy uses three chords to introduce the cello as the solitary figure, whose reflective brooding character of melody and expression might recall the dramatic character of Troy Maxson, the central figure of August Wilson’s play, Fences. The same chords also usher the listener from the Fantasy into the Elegy, but the chords are distilled into three single pitches that gradually grow in interval range to reveal an unfolding series of major-key tonalities mixed with the blues influence. The melody clearly recalls the “farewell motive” used in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E flat, Opus 81a (“Les adieux”), but the similarity of quotation is quickly transformed from classical music to the blues through those uniquely placed single pitches. While the Elegy bears markings of blues encounter, the closing Caprice bears the markings of neoclassical parody and American folksong. A brief note in the score reveals this movement to have the nickname: “Doorbell”, on account of the consistently descending minor 3rds in its opening melody. This evening’s performance is a premiere.

When Langston Hughes arrived in Harlem in 1921, his poem “The Negro Speaks Of Rivers” had recently garnered the national recognition via Crisis Magazine’s poetry competition sponsored by the NAACP. In the span of a seventy years, three African American composers--Howard Swanson (1907-1978), Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) and Richard Thompson, respectively, have made landmark, benchmark and hallmark settings of this poem—each achieving some of the finest combinations of words and musical text painting in the current whole of African American artistic tradition. One point of both interest and aesthetic exception is the apparent audible speech-rhythm in the Hughes poetry and the familiarity of its rhythmic flow and dramatic contour. The reclaimed aesthetic spirit of the New Negro Movement and its dedication to racial uplift and protest against race violence inspired William Grant Still to use the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar in epigraphic fashion alongside of each movement of the Afro-American Symphony.  The Hughes poetry serves a parallel expressive function in this performance. While such treatment assumes a highly abstract quality (as does most instrumental music), the listener will have the musical setting—and the poetry unsung—to “serve as both guide and escort.”

Regarding the final work of this program, it is necessary to pose a rhetorical question first: in the creative process leading to a product, is growth presumptuously germinative and then emotional?? Or vice versa?? The answer to questions of presumed growth, inherent emotion and the understanding of that growth stands at the center of the Sonata for Violoncello and Piano of Frank Bridge. It is a fascinating work of consummate artistry and craftsmanship, marked by organic unity, symmetrical structure and expressive potency. The unusual challenge of hearing this work in performance is strangely mired in the intensity reflected in its terse organic development. The unfolding of the sonata formal process in its opening movement will leave the listener most intrigued as to how intricately the melody and its development can be so organically related and flowing one to the other so effectively.

The second movement flows as an unusual continuation of the first, and the contrast of mood will give the listener immediate pause as to what this movement is attempting to express in terms of mood and larger structural intent. The most helpful insight in regard to the melodic and structural oddity of this work can be found in a reminiscence of the British cellist Antonia Butler, who gave the French premiere of the Sonata in 1928: During the period 1915 until the completion of the Sonata, Bridge was “in utter despair over the futility of World War One and the state of the world, and would walk round Kensington in the early hours of the morning unable to get any rest or sleep”. This movement unfolds and mirrors the reality of that reminiscence: Bridge’s emotional despair, the international turmoil, carnage and stagnation of the ‘Great War, and the gradual denouement of it all. The Great War would end the year after this work was completed, but the “war to end all wars”--did not do so. The political map of the world changed, empires disappeared, nations changed names, governments rose and fell, the results of which our generation now recognizes presently--and continues to witness even further change.  Yet that tormented human spirit within still endures and even dares to rise and soar. The closing music of the Coda gives a unique personal, national and human voice to this tenacious commitment. TWH

The Negro Speaks Of Rivers (1921)

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
      flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln  
     went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.            --James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Langston Hughes

Aulis Sallinen

Suzanne Polak

Adolphus Hailstork

Richard Thompson

Frank Bridge (with an extra large viola…or perhaps a violoncello, “small bass”)

Richard Thompson, Darryl Taylor, "The Negro Speaks Of Rivers"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cchA13YBPFU