Artistic & General Director Rob Ainsley is back with this month’s edition of his blog! Listen to his playlist here, and scroll down to read the full blog.
Grand occasions have been on my mind, as we wind down from a stunning Gala in NYC – see here for photos of the occasion – celebrate the extraordinary life of Pope Francis, remember President Carter’s funeral earlier this year, and of course get ready to celebrate a grand occasion of our own this summer in the Festival’s 50th Anniversary. Music is a crucial part of such occasions — often one of the most memorable and emotional factors in making these moments special — and it got me thinking about how ‘ceremonial’ music will play a role across our season.
soundtracking celebration
Recently, the kind congregation and Rector of Christ Church, Cooperstown, again let me loose at the organ console for their Easter Sunday service. (Christ Church is a beautiful venue you can experience during the Festival when our free Midday Music concert takes place there on July 10.) Whether you celebrate Easter or Pesach or neither, there is no reason not to enjoy all the wonderful music written for such special occasions.
An important occasion like Easter is traditionally marked with grand, celebratory music: I chose the usual Widor Toccata as a postlude, threw in a few fanfares of my own devising during the service and the hymns, and then set myself the challenge of working up Bach’s sublime “St Anne” Prelude and Fugue to perform before the service as a birthday week treat to myself. This miraculous creation is a 15-minute Leviathan from the third part of Bach’s Clavier-Übung (“Keyboard exercise”) that I haven’t touched in some twenty years; it has lost none of its majesty for me — or its teeth! — over that time.
Here’s a far better organist than I, Jonathan Scott, giving a great rendition:
The whole is an expression of the majesty and mystery of the Trinity: it is written in the somewhat unusual key of Eb major, with its three flats (a grand overture would more normally be in D major); its prelude is a combination of the grand dotted rhythms of French Overture and the counterpoint of the Italian style; the astonishing triple fugue is in three parts thought to represent the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, all sharing the same subject based on the “St. Anne” hymn tune, which you may know as “O God, our help in ages past.” The great composer Arnold Schönberg (also a longtime nemesis of Igor Stravinsky, at least until he’d completed The Rake’s Progress) was just as fascinated by this beloved work from the old master. While there’s nothing like playing the original, I’m also a big fan of Schoenberg’s wonderfully romantic orchestration. Here are Esa-Pekka Salonen and LA Phil with a fine performance of the fugue.
Much ceremonial music like this is similarly full of reference and allusion, and few operas are as littered with both as The Rake’s Progress. Almost every bar doffs a chapeau to Stravinsky’s operatic predecessors. The opera itself opens with a grand fanfare (click here to listen!)
Its distinctive rhythm is almost certainly a reference to the opening of the very first great opera still performed regularly today, Monteverdi’s Orfeo.
the rake’s progress
We’ll be opening our season with plenty of fanfare. More details about why you should buy a ticket to opening night coming soon, but experiencing this amazing Dukas fanfare with our full brass section from the balcony outside the theater is reason enough! We’ll only perform this on opening night, but it’s a celebration you won’t want to miss!
Towards the end of The Rake’s Progress, when the devilish Nick Shadow loses the bet in the graveyard and dramatically descends back to the depths he came from, it’s impossible not to think of Don Giovanni’s fate. Yet rather than choosing to recall Mozart’s streaming flames of damnation, Stravinsky opts for the same solemn dotted rhythm of the “St. Anne Prelude” for “I burn! I freeze!” Goodness, I can’t WAIT to hear Aleksey Bogdanov in that role!
There is more ceremonial music to come as we move to Bedlam. Tom’s heartbreaking final duet with Anne, “In a foolish dream” is a mash-up of two more Bach references: it shares the same key and string figurations as the opening of the “St. John Passion” and also references the solo oboe of Cantata 82, “Ich habe genug,” here sung by one of the greatest Wotans of all time, Hans Hotter.
tosca
Tosca also makes use of the awesome power of ceremonial and religious music. A Te Deum is a hymn of praise used on ceremonial occasions of celebration – such as a victory in battle, a royal birth, or the signing of a peace treaty (wouldn’t one of those be nice these days!) One of the most well-known, performed here by a truly merry band at Versailles, is Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s version.
And of course, my British roots will always return to Handel when it comes to ceremonial music, and his great Dettingen Te Deum (written to celebrate the victory of the Battle of Dettingen) is hard to beat.
At the end of Act I of Tosca, what should be a public expression of praise and faith is appropriated into a hymn to lust and power by the wicked Baron Scarpia, who finally proclaims “Tosca, mi fai dimenticare Iddio!” (“Tosca, you make me forget God!”) This moment also notably features the organ alongside church bells and a vast chorus to add to the sense of ceremony. You’ll have the chance to hear the great Greer Grimsley this summer, so instead I offer another of my favorite voices of all time, George London.
There is more ceremonial music to come later in the piece, all with the same repetitious, march-like feel and dotted rhythms we heard in the “St. Anne Prelude,” such as Tosca’s ritual of placing three candles around Scarpia’s body.
And of course, there is the solemn “march to the scaffold” that precedes Cavaradossi’s “fake” execution at the end of the opera, which seamlessly moves us from a sense of Tosca’s false hope to the dread and anticipation of the coming denouement.
We have other musical celebrations to come – you’ll have an opportunity a couple of times during the season (including the opening night dinner) to hear our Resident Artists perform a beautiful choral piece by Richard Rodney Bennett (composer of The Mines of Sulphur) commissioned expressly for the Resident Artists Program (then the Glimmerglass Young American Artists Program) and Stewart Robertson.
All in all, you can expect plenty of fanfares, celebrations, ceremonies, and spectacle this season to mark the occasion. Grab those tickets to opening night now! Happy Easter, Happy Pesach, or Happy Spring – whatever you are celebrating as the world warms up!