CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Met Chamber Ensemble

Weill Recital Hall
Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 5:00 PM

The MET Chamber Ensemble
James Levine, Artistic Director and Conductor
Jo Ellen Miller, Soprano

PIERRE BOULEZ Mémoriale (…explosante-fixe…Originel)
PIERRE BOULEZ Dérive 1
PIERRE BOULEZ Improvisation sur Mallarmé I
PIERRE BOULEZ Improvisation sur Mallarmé II
MOZART Divertimento in B-flat Major, K. 287

Program Notes:

The Program

PIERRE BOULEZ (b. 1925)
Mémoriale (… explosante-fixe … Originel)

Mémoriale (… explosante-fixe … Originel) was composed in remembrance of Lawrence Beauregard, a flutist in Boulez’s Paris-based Ensemble InterContemporain and a close personal friend of the composer. Based on musical material from the larger work … explosante-fixe …—which was itself composed in memory of Stravinsky and exists in several versions dating from 1972 to 1993—Mémoriale revolves around four short thematic units that recur in various guises, transformations, and fragmentary forms. The piece is strongly focused on the solo flute; the ensemble accompaniment, which was not written until the solo part was completed in full, is used to enhance and extend the sound of the soloist—a technique that has become known as "unplugged electronics" due to its use of electronic composition techniques with acoustic instruments. Characterized by soft dynamics, continual flutter-tonguing in the solo part, and an ethereal ambience created by the ensemble, Mémoriale is characterized by some of the composer’s most tranquil music.

Performance Time:
approximately 6 minutes


PIERRE BOULEZ
Dérive I

Dérive I was composed in 1984 to honor Sir William Glock, an advocate of new music who retired that year as director of the Bath Festival. The musical substance is mostly derived (hence the title) from material Boulez originally wrote for his electro-acoustic chamber piece Répons, but its framework is based on a rotating sequence of six chords formed from the same note pattern that Boulez had already used in another work, Messagesquisse (composed in 1976 to honor Paul Sacher, another legendary new-music patron). Brief and chaotic, Dérive I energetically explores a knotty sound world of acerbic timbres and spasmodic motion before consuming all its fuel and softly guttering out.

Performance Time:
approximately 7 minutes


PIERRE BOULEZ
Improvisation I sur Mallarmé
Improvisation II sur Mallarmé

These Improvisations sur Mallarmé (1957) are the first two of three relatively short vocal pieces that represent Boulez’s first attempts to incorporate improvisation into his compositions. Based on verse by the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, each successive piece allows additional degrees of improvisation: The first, acting as a kind of control variable, allows none at all; the second permits the performers marginal freedom, mostly in regard to tempo and rhythm; and the third presents choices between melodic lines and optional vocal parts. While none of these techniques results in true improvisation, the desired illusion of spontaneity is largely achieved, and the acrobatic soprano lines sound convincingly free above the diverse and unusual harp-and-percussion ensemble. Boulez’s nebulous atmosphere, however, does nothing but compound the natural ambiguity of Mallarmé’s oblique verse—a result that surely would have delighted the Delphic poet, who believed that "everything that is sacred and wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery."

Performance Time:
For Improvisation I sur Mallarmé, approximately 5 minutes; for Improvisation II sur Mallarmé, 12 minutes



TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS

Improvisation I sur Mallarmé
Text: Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!

Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.

Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l’espace infligée à l’oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l’horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.

Fantôme qu’à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s’immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l’exil inutile le Cygne.


The virginal, lively, and beautiful day,
Will it tear for us with a stroke of its drunken wing
This hard, forgotten lake that haunts beneath the frost
The transparent glacier of flights unflown!

A swan of yesterday remembers that it is he,
Magnificent but without hope of freeing himself,
For not having sun of the land in which he lives
When sterile winter’s tedium shone forth.

His whole neck will shake off this white agony
Inflicted by space on the bird that denies it,
But not the horror of the earth where his feathers are caught.

Phantom that to this place is assigned by his pure light,
He stills himself in the cold dream of contempt
That clothes the Swan in his useless exile.


Improvisation II sur Mallarmé
Text: Stéphane Mallarmé

Une dentelle s’abolit
Dans le doute du Jeu supreme
À n’entr’ouvrir comme un blaspheme
Qu’absence éternelle de lit.

Cet unanime blanc conflit
D’une guirlande avec la même,
Enfui contre la vitre blame
Flotte plus qu’il n’ensevelit.

Mais, chez qui du rêve se dore
Tristement dort une mandore
Au creux néant musician

Telle que vers quelque fenêtre
Selon nul ventre que le sien
Filial on aurait pu naître.


A lace does away with itself
In the doubt of the supreme Game
To half-open like a blasphemy
Only an eternal absence of bed.

This unanimous white conflict
Of a garland with the same,
Fled against the pale pane
Floats more than it buries.

But, in one who gilds himself with dreams
Sadly sleeps a mandorla
With music’s void in its emptiness

Such that toward some window
Depending on no womb but its own,
Filial one could have been born.


WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)
Divertimento No. 15 in B-flat Major, K. 287

About the Composer

Biographically speaking, the summer of 1777 stands as a bridge between two frustrating and unhappy periods of Mozart’s life. In August, after four unfulfilling years as a musician in the court of Salzburg’s Archbishop Colloredo, the 21-year-old composer resigned his position and set out in search of more lucrative employment, more appreciative audiences, and a more cosmopolitan environment elsewhere in Europe. A year later—after failing to secure a position in either Augsburg, Mannheim, Munich, or Paris—Mozart’s journey ended in family tragedy with the death of his mother Anna Maria, who had been traveling with him. In January 1779, with no income, no prospects, and nowhere else to go, he reluctantly returned to Salzburg and another position in the Archbishop’s court. Despite the many struggles in his personal life, however, this period was extremely fertile for Mozart musically, and through works such as the Piano Concerto in E-flat Major, K. 271; the Flute Concerto in G Major, K. 313; and the "Paris" Symphony in D Major, K. 297, it heralded the emergence of the composer’s mature genius.


About the Work

The Divertimento in B-flat Major, K. 287, was completed in February 1777 and is one of Mozart’s greatest contributions to the genre, as well as a masterpiece of chamber music in general. Like the Divertimento in F Major, K. 247, from the previous year, this piece was written to commemorate the name day of Countess Antonia Lodron, a close friend and neighbor of the Mozart family, as well as a kind of first lady of the Archbishop’s court. As it was written for a celebratory occasion, the B-flat Divertimento reveals little of Mozart’s unhappiness, for the most part fulfilling the expectations of gaiety and amusement. The final movement is even based on a musical joke; after an exaggerated, anguished violin cadenza modeled after a recitative one might find leading up to a tragic aria, the movement bursts into a silly, rollicking folk tune that was popular at the time, D’Bäuerin hat d’Katz verlorn ("The farmer’s wife has lost her cat"). Despite its sunny outlook and comic wit, however, this music is anything but vapid; it pulses with invention in melody, form, and texture.

The piece comprises six movements and was originally scored for string quartet and two horns. (The instrumentation is frequently expanded to include additional strings, as it will be in tonight’s performance.) The texture is less typical of a string quartet, however, and more typical of a concerto, with the first violin clearly holding pride of place above a predominantly homophonic accompaniment. The obbligato horns, used mainly for emphasis and sustained notes, lend the music a sense of solidity and a wider tonal palette (except in the Adagio, throughout which they are silent), but their parts are much less independent than is usual in Mozart’s wind writing. The first violin part, on the other hand, includes multiple cadenzas, virtuosic runs, detailed ornamentation, and some passages that travel extremely high, all of which make this something of a showpiece for the ensemble’s leader. Mozart himself, a more accomplished violinist than he ever was willing to admit, won some acclaim as a soloist while performing the divertimento on tour.


A Closer Listen

With its two minuets and alternation of slow and fast movements, this work is strongly reminiscent of a dance suite in overall form—a feeling that is only magnified by the predominance of clear, incisive rhythms throughout. Listen, for example, to the elegant movement between two-and four-note groupings at the opening of the Andante grazioso, or the exuberant, accented triple-meter Allegro molto in the final movement. One can almost see the gracefully whirling dancers in the concert hall even without the help of a choreographer. It should be no surprise, then, that the legendary George Balanchine chose to use this music for a new ballet in 1956, titled simply Divertimento No. 15, which is still popular and frequently performed today.

As badly as Mozart wanted to get away from Salzburg, the conservative Austrian city could still be heard in his music—and not just in its evocation of courtly dance. Since 1762, Michael Haydn, younger brother of Joseph, had held the position of Kapellmeister in Salzburg, and many scholars have pointed out the strong influence of his music on some of Mozart’s earlier compositions, including the B-flat Divertimento. These similarities can be seen in the general character of the music, as well as in matters of formal detail, such as the first violin’s recitative-like cadenzas and the inclusion of the opening theme in the coda of the first movement despite its absence in the recapitulation. But just as Mozart was already thinking far beyond Salzburg, so was his music already far beyond his colleague’s, not to mention most other living composers, in skill and originality. As Hermann Abert wrote in his exhaustive biography, "There is no longer any trace of the schoolboy awkwardly imitating his mentor’s model. Once Haydn’s ideas have passed through the fire of Mozart’s imagination, they seem no more than a shadowy image alongside all that is new … The artistic result is entirely independent and towers as far above its model as genius towers above mere talent, however powerful it may be."

—Jay Goodwin