At a Glance
THE MUSIC
WAGNER Good Friday Music from Parsifal
Wagner conveys the purity and transcendent beauty of nature in this beloved orchestral passage from Act III of his final opera.
ZIMMERMANN Canto di speranza
In this concerto-like work for cello and small orchestra—composed in 1952–1953 and revised in 1957—the soloist wanders through a stark and fractured sonic landscape of eloquent melodic gestures and strikingly beautiful textures.
SIBELIUS Luonnotar
To create this “tone poem for soprano and orchestra,” Sibelius used texts from the Kalevala, Finland’s epic folk tale—a work to which the composer turned repeatedly over the course of his career.
KAIJA SAARIAHO Mirage
This shimmering work by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho features a highly unusual pairing of soprano and cello performing in solo roles with orchestra.
SIBELIUS Symphony No. 5
Composed during the difficult years of World War I, Sibelius withdrew and revised his Fifth Symphony several times between 1915 and 1919; it has since become one of his most popular works.
THE ARTISTS
DAVID ROBERTSON
This season marks Mr. Robertson’s fourth as Music Director of the 129-year-old Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.
ANSI KARTUNNEN
One of the classical music world’s most renowned and versatile musicians, Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen enjoys a busy career as a soloist and chamber-music player, performing standard cello works as well as world premieres.
KARITA MATTILA
One of today’s most exciting lyric dramatic sopranos, Ms. Mattila has garnered numerous awards in a distinguished international career in which she has sung in the world’s major opera houses and festivals and performed with the world’s great conductors.
RICHARD WAGNER (1813–1883)
Good Friday Music from ParsifalParsifal, Richard Wagner’s last opera, reworks a medieval romance with strong religious overtones. That story concerns a brotherhood of knights devoted to preserving the Holy Grail, the chalice which, according to legend, Christ used to serve wine to His disciples at the Last Supper. The once strong band of Grail Knights has fallen victim to the dark magic of the sorcerer Klingsor. A young knight, Parsifal, arrives in their realm an innocent, ignorant of the world and even of his true name. This very quality permits him to defeat Klingsor and restore the strength and spirit of the Grail knights.
The opera’s final act begins with Parsifal returning on Good Friday morning to the castle of the Grail after years of wandering. There he experiences an epiphany in which the purity of nature is revealed to him. Glistening in the morning sunlight, the landscape seems reborn, purged of sin and sorrow. Wagner conveys the transcendent beauty of the scene in an orchestral passage known as the Good Friday Music.
BERND ALOIS ZIMMERMANN (1918–1970)
Canto di speranza, for Cello and Orchestra
At the time of his death, in 1970, Bernd Alois Zimmermann had gained widespread recognition as one of the most original voices in post-war European music. Eclectic and questing, his work chronicles the explorations of new sounds, formal ideas, and combinations of music with other media that were so much a part of the experimental ferment of advanced composition in the 1950s and ‘60s. At the same time, Zimmermann’s work remained highly individual. To a considerable extent, his art addressed his own very personal moral and philosophical questions. The composer was a devout Catholic who had received a cloistered parochial education and, having come of age in Hitler’s Germany, was painfully sensitive to the spiritual crises of his time. Several of his most important compositions—including the opera
Die Soldaten, his best-known work—were written as efforts to reconcile his faith with the cruelty and suffering that seemed to him such an integral part of life during the period in which he lived.
Zimmermann initially composed
Canto di speranza, a concerto-like work for cello and small orchestra, in 1952–1953, but he substantially revised the work in 1957. The composer was, during this period, exploring 12-tone serialism, and this piece shows what artful and expressive use he made of serial technique and the atonal sound world associated with it. Indeed, the eloquent melodic gestures and strikingly beautiful textures we find throughout this piece belie the conventional notion of serial music as dry, sterile, or overly cerebral.
Zimmerman declined to offer any explicit word on the significance of the title
Canto di speranza (“Song of Hope”), though the opening moments of the piece suggest a general scenario. Here the solo instrument—Zimmermann did confirm the fairly obvious notion that the cello is the singer in this work—seems to wander through a stark, fractured sonic landscape of disjointed percussion sounds, growling tones, tremolo figures, isolated notes, and, later, violent hammer blows from the orchestra. Initially, soloist and ensemble seem almost oblivious of each other, each pursuing a separate musical agenda, as befits Zimmermann’s description of the cello part as tending to “monologue and meditation.” Eventually, the two parties find some common ground, particularly when the orchestra supports the cello in exquisitely shimmering sonorities. The music builds to an extended cadenza. From there, it retraces its steps, finally making its way back to the kind of pointillist textures of the opening passage. Here, however, the tone seems neither tense nor uneasy, as in the work’s initial moments, but calm, almost serene.
JEAN SIBELIUS (1865–1957)
Luonnotar
Jean Sibelius’s standing as Finland’s great national composer rests not only on his distinction as the first Finnish musician to achieve international prominence. Even more significant is his success in giving musical expression to important aspects of his nation’s culture. In doing this, Sibelius turned repeatedly over the course of his career to the
Kalevala, Finland’s epic folk tale.
One of the fruits of Sibelius’s involvement with the
Kalevala is
Luonnotar, which the composer described as a tone poem for soprano and orchestra. Sibelius may have written it in 1910, when Finnish newspapers announced that he had completed such a work for the soprano Aino Ackté. However, the music was not performed until nearly three years later, when Sibelius used it to fulfill a commission from the Gloucester Music Festival, in England.
Luonnotar relates a creation myth set forth in the opening canto of the
Kalevala. Luonnotar
is the “Spirit of Nature,” the “Maiden of the Air,” who floated alone in the universe before the earth and heavens were made. Tired of her lonely maiden existence, she descended to the primordial ocean, where she swam for seven centuries. Longing to conceive, she called to the god Ukko. At last, a sea bird flew by, seeking a place to nest. Luonnotar raised her knee above the water, and upon it the bird laid her eggs. But at length the eggs emitted such great heat that Luonnotar flinched, spilling them into the water. The eggs shattered, and from their pieces were formed the earth, sky, sunlight, moon, and stars.
Luonnotar is not often heard, mostly because the soprano part, with its very wide range, is extremely challenging. The composition deserves more frequent performance. Writing to a friend, Sibelius declared that, whatever else might be said of it, “this piece is written in ‘my own’ style.” That assessment is entirely accurate. As much as any of his works,
Luoonontar embodies the distinctive “voice” of the composer’s maturity.
KAIJA SAARIAHO (b. 1952)
Mirage
Today, a century after Sibelius achieved international fame, Finnish composers once again occupy prominent places in the front ranks of creative musicians. Among them are such notable figures as Esa-Pekka Salonen (an accomplished composer as well as a conductor), Magnus Lindberg, and Kaija Saariaho.
Born in Helsinki, Saariaho settled in Paris a quarter-century ago. There she initially worked with electronic techniques for generating and altering sound. Although she lately has moved more towards purely acoustic instrumental and vocal music, her experience with electronic sound strongly influenced her composing, inclining her to, among other things, a predilection for richly layered sonic tapestries and striking aural colors.
Mirage, composed in 2007, sets to music part of a chant by the Mexican shaman Maria Sabina (1894–1985). A native of Huautla de Jimenez, in the State of Oaxaca, Maria Sabina was famously associated with the sacred mushroom ceremony called
velada. Although the text Saariaho chose for
Mirage sings of the psilocybin mushroom’s power, its imagery of a powerful female spirit who soars and swims is as much archetypal as hallucinatory. Indeed, its parallels to the verses of
Luonnontar are striking.
Saariaho’s setting is highly unusual in its pairing of soprano and cello in solo roles with orchestra. (The solo parts were conceived for tonight’s performers, Karita Mattila and Anssi Karttunen, each of whom has worked extensively with the composer.) And the relationship of the vocal and cello parts form the music’s principal focus and point of interest. The soprano sings of “the sacred eagle woman,” “the lady who swims ... in the immense,” “the shooting star woman beneath the water.” Meanwhile, the cello line soars and dives, tracing fantastical shapes through musical space, embroidering, supporting, even echoing the singer’s utterances, yet retaining a wild independence. It seems not too much to suggest that the solo instrument is the protean spirit of which the soprano sings. All this occurs against a background of shimmering, ever-changing orchestral sonority, surely the mirage of the composition’s title.
JEAN SIBELIUS
Symphony No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 82
Sibelius wrote his Fifth Symphony during the difficult years of World War I, and its creation also was difficult and protracted. An initial version of the piece, performed in December 1915, displeased the composer, who withdrew the score for revision. A second version, performed the following year, also failed to meet his standards. Not until 1919 did Sibelius complete the symphony in a way that pleased him.
During the course of his work on the composition, Sibelius combined what had originally been the first two movements into one. The symphony begins with an arching horn call, answered and extended by woodwind figures. Other ideas follow, and Sibelius leads his themes through some dramatic but seemingly organic metamorphoses. Suddenly, however, the music turns in a new direction, quickly accelerating into a delicately scored scherzo section, derived from what originally had been the symphony’s second movement.
The real second movement is based on a hymn-like theme plucked out by the strings and, in alternating phrases, sounded by the high woodwinds. Everything that follows is a development or variation of this single idea. Much of the music flows like a forest stream, at times cascading down slopes or over obstacles, occasionally slowing to form a quiet pool, and once in a while threatening to overflow its banks in an exuberant rush of orchestral sound.
The finale, long one of most popular movements in Sibelius’s symphonic output, has as its initial idea a swiftly moving melody given out by the strings. But the chief attraction is the second theme and its bold horn figures, which the English conductor and commentator Donald Francis Tovey likened to the Norse god Thor swinging his hammer. This subject returns in several guises during the course of the movement, most impressively in the symphony’s climactic final moments.
—Paul Schiavo
© 2009 Paul Schiavo
Paul Schiavo writes frequently on music and is the program annotator for the
Seattle Symphony and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.