About the Music
May 20, 2014
Michael Gandolfi
Night Train to Perugia
Michael Gandolfi was born in Melrose, Massachusetts in
1956. He composed this work in 2012 on a commission
from the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of
the 75th anniversary of the Tanglewood Music Festival,
and it was premiered by the BSO under the direction of
Lorin Maazel the same year. The score calls for 3 flutes,
piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet,
3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3
trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and
strings.
Concert music was a constant in Michael
Gandolfi’s home as a youngster, but his own path
led him (as a self-taught guitarist) through jazz,
blues, and rock music; his improvisational skills
naturally led him to composition, which he was
studying formally by his early teens. Since his
time at the New England Conservatory of Music he
has pursued, both as a musician and an educator,
collaborative projects among many artistic
disciplines, including animation, film, video, and
the theater. He has composed incidental music
for the Shakespeare & Company’s production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and has organized
interdisciplinary projects at the Tanglewood Music
Center and its Festival of Contemporary Music. He
has had commissions from the Atlanta Symphony
Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, Boston Musica
Viva, Speculum Musicae, the Koussevitzky
Foundation, and many others. He has also
taught at Harvard, Phillips Andover Academy, the
Tanglewood Music Center, and is currently the
chairman of the composition department at the
New England Conservatory.
Mr. Gandolfi writes the following about this
work: “Night Train to Perugia is a monothematic work
that takes flight through musings on neutrinos
(sub-atomic particles), trains, and surrealism. The
work plays with time and perception as the theme
makes its way through myriad guises. In the end
we find ourselves poised at the beginning, as if
the ‘train’ has never left the station; a condition
that is an odd reality for life on the quantum level.
Along the way, the piece depicts train whistles (old
and new), train-track rhythms, Doppler effects,
neutrino showers, time dilation references, and a
host of contrapuntal thematic treatments. After
a grand arrival at ‘the station,’ we magically find
ourselves at the start of our journey, in kinship
with a neutrino’s perspective.
“Several
serendipitous
circumstances
conspired to make their way into the piece. One
day while I was composing a passage evocative
of steam train whistles, a freight train passed
nearby. I transcribed its pitches and gave them to
the French horns (a good match for the timbre of
that train’s horn), at the precise point in the piece
at which I was working. On another day I found
myself musing on surrealist references, which mix
well with the nonsensical quantum world. While
taking a break from writing on a recent trip, I
visited the Art Institute of Chicago and came upon
one of my favorite surrealist paintings, Magritte’s
classic, ‘La Durée Poignardée’—literally, ‘ongoing
time stabbed by a dagger’ but popularly known as
‘Time Transfixed’—which depicts a train emerging
from a dining room fireplace. A clock sits on the
fireplace mantle in front of a mirror that only
partially reflects what rests on the mantle. This
painting best exemplifies the main conceptual
sources of my piece.
“Night Train to Perugia derives its title from
an underground track, which begins at the Cern
particle accelerator in Switzerland and terminates
at a research facility under Italy’s Gran Sasso
Mountain. Neutrinos are sent along this track
to test various quantum effects. Perugia is the
penultimate city under which the neutrinos
travel.”
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Capriccio espagnol, op. 34
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov was born in Tikhvin, Russia
in 1844 and died in Lyubensk in 1908. He composed
this work in 1887 and led the first performance in St.
Petersburg with the Orchestra of the Imperial Opera
House the same year. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo,
2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2
trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp,
and strings.
Though he was renowned as a great
orchestrator, Rimsky-Korsakov saw it differently:
he was merely a proper composer, he said, who
wrote every note with its orchestral color already
in mind. Many composers worked that way, and
many didn’t. Mahler, who was no slouch as an
orchestrator, typically composed in four-stave
piano score with copious indications of the
scoring he wanted. Still other composers treated
each task separately: first the composing, then the
orchestrating. Brilliantly orchestrated scores have
been produced every which way.
Yet the vivid scoring of Rimsky’s Capriccio
espagnol makes his argument for him, for it is a
feast of orchestral color without peer. Rimsky
first thought to employ the Spanish tunes kicking
around in his head in a work for violin and
orchestra, perhaps as a sequel to his Fantasy on
Russian Themes, op. 33 for the same forces. But he
soon abandoned that plan in favor of a bravura
showpiece for orchestra alone.
Capriccio espagnol comprises five sections
played without pause. The first is an Alborada, a
kind of morning serenade traditionally played by
pipes and tambor. Rimsky’s version isn’t much
of a serenade, as we hear the full orchestra in a
lively (and noisy) tune featuring the clarinet and
the concertmaster’s violin. Next we come to a set
of five variations based on a richly warm melody
in the horns; each variation presents a change of
color as the melody moves around the orchestra.
At a trill of the flute the Alborada returns with even
more excitement. A Scene and Gypsy Song begins
with a tune in the brasses, followed by a succession
of cadenzas for violin, flute, clarinet, and harp. At
last the song itself takes over, building intensity
all the way, and leads us directly into the Fandango
of the Asturias, a breathless dance from northern
Spain. A brief return of the Alborada caps the work
in a blaze of color.
Richard Strauss
Don Quixote, TrV 184, op. 35
Richard Strauss was born in Munich in 1864 and died
in Garmisch, Germany in 1948. He completed this work
in 1897 and it was first performed the following year
by the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne, Franz Wüllner
conducting. The score calls for solo viola, solo cello, 3
flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass
clarinet, E-flat clarinet, 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6
horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tenor tuba, bass tuba,
timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
“At a village of La Mancha there lived one of
those gentlemen who are wont to keep a lance in the
rack, an old buckler, a lean horse, and a swift greyhound.
Our gentleman gave himself up with so much delight
and gusto to reading books of chivalry that he almost
entirely neglected the management of his domestic
affairs. In short, he so immersed himself in those
romances that he spent whole days and nights over his
books: and thus with little sleeping and much reading,
his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use
of his reason. His imagination became filled with a host
of fancies he had read in his books—enchantments,
quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, courtships, loves,
tortures, and many other absurdities. At last, having
lost his wits completely, he stumbled upon the oddest
fancy that ever entered a madman’s brain: he believed
it was necessary that he should become a knight-errant,
roaming through the world with his horse and armor in
quest of adventures.”
Don Quixote, based on the novel by
Cervantes (1547-1616), is the sixth of Strauss’ big
programmatic tone-poems. (In the next, A Hero’s
Life, he finally came to himself.) Many consider it
his best. He himself called it “very original, utterly
new in its coloring and a really jolly snook cocked
at the muttonheads who didn’t recognize as much
and even laughed at it.”
To portray the varied adventures of two
unchanging characters, Strauss had the brilliant
idea to make his music a theme-and-variations:
as we follow the narrative we can always tell who’s
who. He also gives the two main characters their
own solo instrument—the addled Don Quixote is
portrayed by a cello while his saner squire Sancho
Panza is represented by a viola.
The piece begins with an introduction that
finds Don Quixote in his study, surrounded by
his books, daydreaming. He imagines himself a
gallant knight with courtly manners, and in three
themes we hear his earnestness, his whimsy,
and perhaps his naïveté as well. In the oboe
solo Quixote fantasizes about his ideal woman,
Dulcinea, but before we can meet her there is a
miniature battle in the music as muted trumpets
vanquish the tubas and basses. Now Dulcinea’s
theme and Quixote’s music intertwine in a love
duet. But Quixote is becoming more and more
unhinged and the music gradually goes off the
rails; eventually he wakes with a start and decides
to turn his fantasies into reality.
Now Strauss gives us the themes that are
the subject of the coming variations. Quixote’s
theme comes from the solo cello, who will speak
in his voice as the piece unfolds. Then we are
introduced to his squire, Sancho Panza, first in the
tuba and bass clarinet, then in his instrument, the
solo viola.
As the variations follow, each is its own
adventure. Variation I is The Adventure with the
Windmills. With the sound of Dulcinea in his ears,
Quixote imagines the windmills to be giants and
he attacks. He rides his lance into the turning sails,
which lift him off his horse and dump him on the
ground. Dazed, he is helped back onto his horse by
Sancho Panza.
In Variation II Quixote comes upon a flock of
sheep—ingeniously portrayed in the music—and,
imagining them to be an enemy horde, does battle
with them. But the shepherds are not amused, and
they “salute his ears with rocks as big as one’s fist.”
Cervantes’ novel is filled with “pleasant”
and “sensible” conversations between Quixote and
Panza. Variation III is one of these, though Quixote
finds it hard to get a word in edge-wise.
As the pair charge off in Variation IV they
see a procession of penitents carrying a statue
of the Virgin Mary. But Quixote sees them as
ruffians abducting a lady; he confronts them and
is unhorsed yet again.
As Sancho sleeps in Variation V, Quixote
keeps a vigil and imagines finding and rescuing
his Dulcinea.
Sancho persuades Quixote that Dulcinea
has been enchanted to appear as a saucy peasant
girl in Variation VI. As they encounter her on the
road, Strauss’ music lets us know she isn’t quite
the real thing.
In Variation VII Don Quixote and Sancho
are blindfolded, set upon a wooden horse, and told
they will fly it through the air. The whirling music
(and the wind machine in the orchestra) takes
them for a wild ride, but there is a persistent low
note in the basses: have they never really left the
ground?
Variation VIII is the Adventure with the
Enchanted Boat.The pair embark on the undulating
water, capsize, and plod to shore. Listen for them
beating their clothing dry and offering up a prayer.
The two bassoons of Variation IX are two
monks on the road; Don Quixote thinks they are
two magicians and he sends them packing.
Horns and trumpet calls begin the final
variation, where Don Quixote meets his defeat
at the hands of the Knight of the White Moon—
actually, a neighbor concerned for the Don’s safety.
The Finale, The Death of Don Quixote,
opens with a beautiful but bittersweet solo cello.
As Quixote’s strength wanes his sanity gradually
returns, and as the cello glisses downward we
know that he “had the fortune in his age / to live a
fool and die a sage.”
In program music one needs to be able to
follow the story, or at least experience the feelings
that the story engenders. Yet at the same time
the music needs to work as music, to follow its
own rules, to achieve its own musical coherence.
Many listeners prefer to ignore the program and
appreciate the music on its own terms; others like
to “follow along” lest they miss the skill and wit of
the composer’s portrayals. In Don Quixote Strauss
gives each preference its due: his tightly controlled
yet beautifully expressive music tells the story so
handily that one needs little more than the title to
understand all. No matter which kind of listener
you are, the result is sheer entertainment.
—Mark Rohr is the bass trombonist for the PSO.
Questions or comments?
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