Ruth Dorothy Louisa (“Wid”) Gipps MBE (20 February 1921 – 23 February 1999) was an English composer, oboist, pianist, conductor and educator. She composed music in a wide range of genres, including five symphonies, seven concertos and many chamber and choral works. This performance of the Oboe Concerto is the NYC premiere.
Here is a performance from the Richmond Symphony with Valentina Peleggi & Katherine Needleman, oboe.
Just fifteen years ago, piles of sheet music and writings were discovered in an abandoned house slated for demolition. Inside were dozens of unpublished scores, including a symphony and two violin concertos. The house had been the summer residence of Florence Price, a child prodigy who was valedictorian at 14 and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. She was a pianist, organist, teacher, and composer who had written over 300 pieces of music: four symphonies, four concertos, choral works, vocal work, chamber music, and solo pieces, as well as popular songs. She achieved a degree of success, but during her lifetime she faced challenges in achieving recognition and performance opportunities due to racial and gender bias. Despite that, her “Symphony in E minor” was performed by the Chicago Symphony orchestra in 1933, making her the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra.
The Second Violin Concerto, completed a year before her death (and later found in the abandoned house), was written in a single movement in the form of a rhapsody. It is framed in the western classical structure, combining lyrical romanticism, impressionist harmonies, and elements of West African and African American spiritual and dance traditions. It is a compact single movement work, richly orchestrated, with contrasting motivic sections and bravura solo violin passages.
As Antonin Dvorak had incorporated folk and national elements into his music, Price, along with other composers of the time, sought to further expand the classical canon with a fusion of traditional and vernacular. Alex Ross, in the New Yorker, wrote, “This terse, beguiling piece has an autumnal quality reminiscent of the final works of Richard Strauss. It deserves to be widely heard.”
Satie was a musical iconoclast who sought to lead French music from Impressionism to a more minimalist, experimental approach. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc, and he is seen as an influence on a number of modern artists, including John Cage, Philip Glass, and Brian Eno.
His formal musical training began in 1879, when at age 12 he was enrolled in the preparatory piano class at the Paris Conservatoire. However, he strongly disliked it, and a few years later was expelled for unsatisfactory performance. Rejecting his restrictive, traditional upbringing, he embraced an eccentric, bohemian lifestyle and earned a living as a cabaret pianist, adapting more than a hundred compositions of popular music for piano, or piano and voice.
He became involved in avant-garde music and art circles in the early 20th century, becoming a friend and collaborator of many famous artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and James Joyce. He composed music for Cocteau’s play “Parade,” which featured set and costume designs by Picasso. His close friend, Claude Debussy, was a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition. Both were bohemians, enjoying the same café society and struggling to survive financially. Satie composed most of his works for solo piano, including two “Gymnopédies” in 1888 (plus another in 1895), and “Gnossiennes” in 1889.
In 1897 Debussy arranged two of the Gymnopédies for orchestra (the ones we are performing today). “Gymnopédie” may refer to a classical Greek annual festival where young men danced naked – or perhaps simply unarmed. The source of the title has been a subject of debate. The Gymnopédies are characterized by slow tempos, simple melodic lines, at once melancholic and atmospheric. The Gymnopédies are among the most publicly recognizable of Satie’s works. They have been featured in many artists’ arrangements, movies, and television shows.
— D. Rosen and M.F. Tietz
Mabel Wheeler Daniels (1877-1971) was an American composer, conductor, and teacher. Based in Boston, Daniels studied at Radcliffe College, The Royal Conservatory in Munich, and with composer George Chadwick.
Daniels was inspired to write “Deep Forest” after many summers at the MacDowell Colony, a storied retreat in New Hampshire for American poets, artists, and composers. Enveloped in nature, Daniels composed an atmospheric tone poem to reflect her tranquil surroundings.
Originally scored for small orchestra and performed in 1931, “Deep Forest” in its full orchestral form was first performed by the New York Symphony Orchestra under Nicolai Sokoloff in 1934. It was later played by orchestras in Washington DC, Rochester, Harrisburg, London, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.
“Deep Forest” was Daniels’ first purely orchestral work and shows her background in vocal writing. Listen for lyrical lines in the winds, the horns’ atmosphere and drama, and lush string chords. Tritones and diminished chords abound, adding to the sense of mystery.
What do you hear as you venture into the Deep Forest?
This lovely work, which Debussy composed in 1904, had its genesis in a rivalry between two harp makers. Sebastian Erard had perfected the pedal harp early in the 19th century. Pedal harps use foot pedals to raise or lower the pitch of a harp’s strings, and have become the standard instrument played by harpists. However, seeking to improve upon this design, in 1894 Gustave Lyon of the Pleyel firm invented a “chromatic” harp, an instrument with strings for every half step (similar to the white and black keys on a piano).
To publicize his new instrument, the Pleyel company commissioned Debussy to write a piece showcasing the abilities of the chromatic harp. This turned out to be his 2-movement Danses Sacrée et Profane for harp and strings, which he dedicated to Gustave Lyon. While the chromatic harp is now mostly relegated to museums, fortunately this work can also be played on pedal harp, and it has become a beloved mainstay of the harp repertoire.
The first, “sacred,” dance begins in a slow and stately mood set by unison strings, joined by the harp in an uplifting reverie, with numerous ascending and descending chromatic passages. The “secular” dance, which follows without a break, is in the form of a lilting waltz, with various statements of the main theme traded back and forth between the harp and strings. Towards the end of the piece, a short introspective reverie makes its appearance. The waltz then resumes at a joyous pace, followed by a majestic and sonorous ending.
Between 1930 and 1945, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos composed a series of nine pieces titled “Bachianas Brasileiras.” Scored for different combinations of instruments and voices, they feature a mix of Brazilian harmonic and rhythmic elements while also reflecting contrapuntal and other baroque, Bachian elements. This Aria is arguably Villa-Lobos best-known work. The lyrics are by Ruth Correa:
In the evening, a dreamy, pretty cloud, slow and transparent, covers outer space with pink. In the infinite the moon rises sweetly, beautifying the evening, like a friendly girl who prepares herself and dreamily makes the evening beautiful. A soul anxious to be pretty shouts to the sky, the land, all of Nature. The birds silence themselves to her complaints, and the sea reflects all of Her [the moon’s] wealth. The gentle light of the moon now awakens the cruel saudade [nostalgic or melancholic longing] that laughs and cries. In the evening, a dreamy, pretty cloud, slow and transparent, covers outer space with pink.
We are performing this moving piece as a memorial to Kurt Behnke, who passed away from Covid-19 early in the pandemic (March 2020). Kurt was an outstanding ‘cellist, member of our orchestra, and good friend to many of us. It is our way of honoring him and all the victims of the pandemic.
Can you hear a sunrise and sunset? Besides his well-known six symphonies, Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote many short orchestral works, including the “Helios Overture.”
In 1902, Nielsen signed a contract with the publisher Wilhelm Hansen, which allowed him to go to Athens, Greece to join his wife Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, a sculptor who was making copies of the bas-reliefs and statues in the Acropolis Museum. From his practice room in Athens, he watched the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea, and was inspired to write an overture after the Greek god of the sun.
While the Helios Overture was inspired by triumphant Greek myths, it’s easy to hear the influence of his Danish roots— listen for the opening horn tones echoing through frozen fjords!
On the score, Nielsen wrote,
“Silence and darkness,
The sun rises with a joyous song of praise,
It wanders its golden way
and sinks quietly into the sea.”
Shostakovich wrote the work for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich, who committed it to memory in four days and gave the premiere on October 4, 1959, with Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in the Large Hall of the Leningrad Conservatory. — Wikipedia
Although titled a “Rhapsody”, this work is actually a set of variations for solo piano and orchestra. It is based on a theme composed by Niccolò Paganini, the great 19th-century Italian violin virtuoso, in his 24th Caprice for solo violin. The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini consists of 24 separate, highly diverse variations, each based on Paganini’s original theme, with close collaboration between the soloist and orchestra. For the solo pianist, the Rhapsody is an extraordinary tour-de-force, with technical demands intermixed with delicate passagework, cadenzas and ultimate Romantic lyricism.
The work can be divided into several broad sections: an opening fast section (Introduction and Variations I-V); a more free-form “rhapsodic” section (Variations VI-XI); a minuet and scherzando section (Variations XII-XV); a slow section, including the emotional heart of the work (Variations XVI-XVIII); and a rousing finale (Variations XIX-XXIV).
Unconventionally, it does not open with the theme itself, but with a bare harmonic skeleton; the theme itself appears in Variation II, appropriately introduced by the violins. In Variation VII, Rachmaninoff introduces a notable counter-theme based on the Dies Irae, a medieval Latin hymn referring to Judgment Day, and a tune with which Rachmaninoff had a life-long fascination. Probably the best known part of the Rhapsody is Variation XVIII, with its lush romantic theme played first by the solo pianist, and taken up in turn by the orchestra. The last section of the Rhapsody is a driving accelerando and ends, after a forceful reprise of the Dies Irae, with a witty pianistic flourish.
Prokofiev composed the original version of the Overture on Hebrew Themes during his sojourn in New York in 1920. He composed it for a chamber group that specialized in Klezmer and other Jewish music; the original orchestration was for clarinet, string quartet and piano. The piece became so popular that he was later asked to arrange it for full orchestra. It consists of two main melodies ostensibly taken from Jewish folk tunes – the first very much in the Klezmer tradition, prominently featuring the clarinet and hairpin dynamics; the second a melody played at Jewish weddings and featuring the ‘cellos and horn.