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Programme note

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Apollon musagète (1927-8)

One of Stravinsky’s earliest so-called ‘neoclassical’ works written in the aftermath of the First World War was the ballet Pulcinella, commissioned by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, the company that had first brought Stravinsky to international fame with Firebird. Pulcinella was Stravinsky’s discovery of the past, as he later described it, "the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course – the first of many love affairs in that direction – but it was a look in the mirror, too." Despite its dependence on the music of the past, Pulcinella represents an important turning point in Stravinsky’s artistic development. It revealed to him the possibilities of an engagement with all kinds of earlier music in order to renew his own musical language. Crucial, though, for his neoclassical music was not the material he borrowed (which could come from anywhere) but his attitude to it. Everything he touched he made his own.

If Pulcinella was the epiphany, then Apollon musagète must surely be the apogee of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. Commissioned by the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge in 1927, Stravinsky chose, as he explains in his autobiography, "to compose a ballet founded on moments or episodes in Greek mythology plastically interpreted by dancing of the so-called classical school". He wanted to create what he termed a 'ballet blanc’, a score of great purity and unity, in which violent contrasts were avoided and all elements were pared down to their simplest. Hence it is scored for strings alone and makes almost exclusive use of diatonic harmony (the equivalent of the ‘white notes’ on the piano keyboard). For George Balanchine, choreographer of the 1928 European premiere, the work was a revelation: "In its discipline and restraint, in its sustained oneness of tone and feeling… [Apollon] seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate". The result was the perfect union of music and dance in the expression of pure, classical beauty.

In order to achieve this sense of order as symbolized by the Greek god Apollo, Stravinsky turned to poetry. Each dance explores a basic iambic (short–long) pattern, while the ‘Variation of Calliope’ (the muse of poetry) is headed by two lines from Boileau and takes the twelve-syllable lines of the alexandrine as its rhythmic model. Another means of order was achieved by alluding to the stateliness of French Baroque dances, such as the ouverture style of the opening ‘Birth of Apollo’ or the pavane-like second ‘Variation of Apollo’. The closing ‘Apotheosis’, in which Apollo leads the three Muses towards Parnassus, brings together the various rhythmic elements of the work in music that is not just serenely beautiful but also seems to speak of something deeper and darker, something beyond reason and order. Stravinsky looks back to ancient Greece but is ultimately, perhaps, only able to see the reflection of his own tragic age.

© Jonathan Cross

Programme note

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Seven Songs arranged for voice and orchestra by Colin Matthews (b 1946)

first performance

Fleur jetée Op.39 No.2 (1884)

Nocturne Op.43 No.2 (1886)

Mandoline Op.58 No.1 (1891)

Clair de lune (Menuet) Op.46 No.2 (1887)

Notre amour Op.23 No.2 (1879)

Green Op.58 No.3 (1891)

Les berceaux Op.23 No.1 (1879) –

Postlude

Colin Matthews’s extraordinay accomplishment as a composer derives in no small way from the active interest he has always taken in the music of others – from his early collaboration with Deryck Cooke in completing a performing version of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony and his work as assistant to Benjamin Britten to his recent masterly orchestration of Debussy’s 24 piano Preludes. Even so, in spite of the experience he has in this area, including a version for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra of Debussy’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, creating orchestral arrangements of Fauré songs cannot have been easy. The peculiarly intimate relationship between voice and piano characteristic of most of the best of Fauré’s mélodies is a quality that, as far as we know, the composer himself never attempted to translate into another medium.

Fleur jetée, the opening item in the selection made by Colin Matthews and Robin Ticciati, is peculiar among Fauré’s hundred or so songs for the violence of its expression, the insistently repeated semiquavers and the surging bass calling Schubert’s Erlkönig to mind. The trumpet crescendo and the rumbling of bassoons and lower strings at the beginning of the first and third stanzas of the Matthews version and the occasional doubling of the vocal line by solo woodwind reflect the intensity of the poet’s bitterness without exaggerating it. Nocturne is a more characteristic inspiration, a dialogue between the voice and the right hand of the piano, the latter sensitively represented here by, in turn, solo oboe, horn, flute and piccolo in each of the three stanzas.

As Matthews himself has observed, the plucked strings of the third song, Mandoline, are implicit in Verlaine’s text, just as it is immediately clear, he says “that wooodwind should carry all the melody” in the setting of the same poet’s Clair de lune. It is worth noting, however, the delicacy of the woodwind reactions to the decorative element in the vocal line of Mandoline and the part played by the harp in echoing the sound of the lute carried by the masquers and bergamaskers in Clair de lune.

The triplet rhythms that sustain the momentum of Notre amour are confined in the original to the central register of the piano. In this version they are entrusted to the two clarinets until, at the climax of the song, they are transferred with a decisive change of colour to the harp. The eloquent left-hand counterpoint to the voice is carried by the cellos with occasional support from the bassoons, while the tiny interlude between the fourth and fifth stanzas is presented by unison flutes and oboes over bassoon arpeggios. Fascinated by Fauré’s paradoxical remarks on Green – which should be “slow moving” and yet “lively, passionate, almost out of breath” – Matthews prescribes Fauré’s Allegretto con moto tempo direction but steadies it by taking a three-note figure scarcely noticeable in the piano part of the original and presenting it on its several appearances as a tender exchange between clarinet and horn.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the original version of Les berceaux is its economical, basically two-line accompaniment shared between left hand and right, each with its own rhythmic pattern. Feeling perhaps that literally translated it would seem thin in orchestral terms, Matthews has enriched the texture in several ways: he consigns Fauré’s accompaniment mainly to clarinet and bass clarinet but varies its colouring and at the same time discreetly adds new material, like that of the flute line anticipating in the opening bars a phrase to come later in the work. He also doubles the voice in every line except the last, where it is left poignantly to itself. A berceuse and at the same time a barcarolle, Les berceaux is linked directly in the present version to a Postlude in F major based on Fauré’s late piano Barcarolle in E flat.

Gerald Larner © 2011