CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Song Continues... Duo Recital

Weill Recital Hall
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 5:30 PM

Amanda Majeski, Soprano
Danielle Orlando, Piano
Dimitri Pittas, Tenor
Carrie-Ann Matheson, Piano

MARX "Waldseligkeit"
MARX "Selige Nacht"
MARX "Und gestern hat er mir Rosen gebracht"
MARX "Nachtgebet"
MARX "Nocturne"
RESPIGHI "Pioggia"
RESPIGHI "Nevicata"
RESPIGHI "Nebbie"
POULENC "Air champêtre" from Airs chantes
POULENC "C" from 2 Poemes de Louis Aragon
POULENC "Violon" from Fiançailles pour rire, No. 5
POULENC "Fleurs" from Fiançailles pour rire, No. 6
SCOTT WHEELER Heaven and Earth
·· Night
·· The Little Vagabond
·· Holy Thursday
·· O for a Voice Like Thunder

Programs of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall are generously supported by the City of New York: Office of the Mayor, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council; and by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Program Notes:

By Susan Halpern

JOSEPH MARX “Waldseligkeit,” “Nocturne,” ”Nachtgebet,” and “Und gestern hat er mir Rosen gebracht”
Born May 11, 1882 in Graz, Austria; died there on September 3, 1964.

Although the conservative Austrian composer Joseph Marx first began studying music with his half-Italian mother, his parents forbade him to pursue a musical career, desiring him to study law. He made a complete break with his family as a result and began composing; it is from those early years that his songs date. Between 1908 and 1920, he composed around 120 songs. Although he also composed orchestral music, it is mainly for his songs that he is remembered today. By World War II, Marx was the most frequently performed composer in Austria.

Marx’s songs are the successors to those of his countryman, Hugo Wolf. A lyric romanticist, Marx aimed to give the text its due. His songs can best be described as a combination of the lyrical and the impressionistic. Spontaneous and brief, they have Slavic and Italian elements, the latter from the influence of his mother, critics attest.

The vigorous “Waldseligkeit” (“Woodland Happiness”) of 1911, a setting of a poem by the popular Paul Dehmel (1863–1920) also set by Richard Strauss and Alma Mahler, has a thick textured accompaniment and is brief but intense. This song symbolizes new departures for Marx with its free verse and the sensuousness of the fin de siècle alternation between the dream-like and the real.

“Nocturne,” to a poem with an ecstatic mood by Hartleben, is in three-part (ABA) form and is virtuosic in style for both piano and voice. It is characterized by its complex rhythms and harmonies.

E. H. Hesse’s “Nachtgebet” (“Night Prayer”) makes up the text of a song of yearning and love. The speaker admits to being deeply in love with one who is not aware of the intensity of the emotion felt toward him.

Paul Heyse’s “Und gestern hat er mir Rosen gebracht,” (“And Yesterday He Brought Me Roses”), composed in 1908 and published in 1910, is one of the finest and better known poems that Marx set. Through-composed, it is a melodic dithyrambic hymn of love with a magnificent soaring line at the conclusion that includes a vocal tour-de-force. The accompaniment sometimes offers a countermelody; toward the end, it, too, becomes exalted.

OTTORINO RESPIGHI “Pioggia,” “Nevicata,” and “Nebbie”
Born July 9, 1879, in Bologna; died April 18, 1936, in Rome.

Little of Respighi’s music is left in the active concert repertoire except his symphonic poems about the pines, the fountains, and the festivals of Rome. During his lifetime, however, Respighi won lasting success with his songs. The charm and expressive variety as well as the imaginative textures make many of his songs still attractive.

A teenage student of his, 15 years his junior, Elsa Olivieri-Sangiacomo, a singer/ composer, was attracted to Respighi and to his songs, and he composed many songs for her, developing a unique style in which he employed the emotional connection he felt with the text’s meaning and atmosphere. Respighi and Olivieri-Sangiacomo married and went on international tours, giving over 300 recitals, in which he accompanied her performances of his songs. She promoted his work until her death in 1996 at 102. Many of his songs’ strong melodies have transparent, refined piano parts, structured in a harmonic pattern of modulations following the poetry’s mood changes.
 
“Nevicata” (“Snowfall”) is a three-part song whose atmosphere of gently falling snow is set by the piano accompaniment. It is permeated by a feeling of peace, silence and calm.
  
“Pioggia” (“Rain”), written in 1906, is one of Respighi’s best known songs. In the evocative “Pioggia,” Respighi paints a charming visual image of the falling rain. Voice and accompaniment join as partners: the singer is the observer and the accompaniment depicts the rainfall, a summer rain that relieves the heat, refreshing and feeding the plants. At the end, rain seems to brush through the hair of the singer.
 
“Nebbie” (“Mists”), another popular song also written in 1906, is dramatic and powerful and contains echoes of Puccini and verismo style. It creates an ominous mood introduced by slow minor chords and uses a foreboding, mysterious text, including the famous cry of a lonely and freezing woman in the cold, as its base. Most of the lines start quietly, and then grow in volume and intensity.

FRANCIS POULENC “Violon,” “Fleurs,” “C,” and “Air champêtre”
Born January 7, 1899, in Paris; died there January 30, l963.

Poulenc, a member of the famous French “Groupe des Six” that also included Honegger, Milhaud, Auric, Durey, and Germaine Taileferre, was once viewed as a highly skilled composer of songs and piano pieces in a light, witty vein. In later years, however, he revealed his more serious side with some deeply moving sacred choral music and a striking one-character opera.

In “Violon” (“Violin”), a song in café style writing, the singer evokes the scene she sees of a couple in love; she is then entranced not only by a violin’s playing but by the violinist, too. She comments on the vulnerability of love and weaves a sensuous melody.

In “Fleurs” (“Flowers”), Poulenc returns to serious emotion, rendering a feeling of wistfulness as a lady burns the souvenirs of her former love. This song ends with a minor cadence; mirroring the emotions of the whole cycle, it mourns and bids farewell to a time past. Poulenc’s harmonic language here is highly chromatic. The wide-ranging vocal line fades away like the evanescent time it memorializes.

“C,” one of Poulenc’s most celebrated songs, is also one of his most serious; a wartime song, it was composed in 1943 to a poem by Louis Aragon. It reflects his thoughts as he accompanied the defeated French army that retreated after its vain attempt to defend the village of “C” in the Loire Valley during the German invasion of 1940.

“Air champêtre,” a country tune, was composed around 1928, to a text by Jean Moréas (1856–1910).

SCOTT WHEELER Heaven and Earth
Born February 24, 1952, in Washington, DC.

The Marilyn Horne Foundation gratefully acknowledges the ASCAP Foundation / Charles Kingsford Fund for its generous support of its commissioned work, Heaven and Earth, by Scott Wheeler.

The Marilyn Horne Foundation and the ASCAP Foundation / Charles Kingsford Fund commissioned Wheeler to write this set of songs on texts of William Blake. Wheeler studied at Amherst College and New England Conservatory; he received his PhD from Brandeis University. His principal teachers included Arthur Berger, Lewis Spratlan, and Malcolm Peyton. He pursued further studies at the Tanglewood Music Center with Olivier Messiaen, the Dartington School with Peter Maxwell Davies, and privately with Virgil Thomson. In 1975, he co-founded Dinosaur Annex, a chamber ensemble devoted to the performance of contemporary music; he became the group’s artistic director in 1982. In 1989, Wheeler joined the music department at Emerson College, Boston, where he is a music director in the theater department. His honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1988–89), a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994), and the Stoeger Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (1999).

Anthony Tommasini, in the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, commented on Wheeler’s vocal writing as “distinguished by clear, natural text settings, refined expressivity and wit.”

Wheeler has provided the following note for his new work:

This selection of poems by William Blake focuses on the contrasts between the tenderness of heaven and the violence of earth. “Night” sets an earthly scene and ends with a vision of heaven. “The Little Vagabond” finds a lesson in the alehouse here on earth. “Holy Thursday” depicts the annual tradition at St. Paul’s of bringing the poor children of London into the Cathedral; Blake notes the pious condescension of this sort of charity. In “Oh for a Voice Like Thunder,” Blake’s moral fervor takes on the tones of an Old Testament prophet.

In “Night” and “Holy Thursday,” I inserted sacred refrains of Alleluia and Kyrie eleison, both of which connect the angels of Blake’s texts to the traditional praises and supplications of sacred music. The la-la-la refrain I added to “The Little Vagabond” has the opposite function, bringing what might be a drinking song into the Parson’s cold and unwelcoming church. In the final song, where Blake’s iambic pentameter recalls various Shakespearean kings, I created a fragmentary recitative and arioso, as if Blake here is creating a member of the operatic royalty.

Throughout the composition of these songs, I was inspired by the prospect that they would be premiered by the ringing voice and communicative presence of Dimitri Pittas.

Heaven and Earth was commissioned by the Marilyn Horne Foundation and the ASCAP Foundation / Charles Kingsford Fund.