The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music's fall concert season opens with a program of works by three seminal 20th century French composers, Maurice Ravel, Edgar Varèse, and Pierre Boulez. The compositions will be performed by the Slee Sinfonietta, conducted by Case Scaglione and featuring mezzo soprano Julia Bentley. The concert will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 10 in the Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall on the University at Buffalo's North Campus in Amherst. Tickets are available at the Slee Hall box office, (716) 645-2921.
Program:
Pierre Boulez – Dérive 2, for 11
instruments (1988/2006)
Maurice Ravel, orchestrated by Boulez – Frontispice, for orchestra (1918)
Maurice Ravel – 2 Mélodies
hébraïques, for voice and orchestra (1914)
Edgar Varèse – Un Grand Sommeil
Noir, for voice and piano (1906)
Maurice Ravel – Un
Grand Sommeil Noir, for voice and
piano (1895)
Written for Elliott Carter's 80th birthday, Dérive 2 by Boulez is scored for eleven
instruments: two trios (woodwinds, strings), two duos (percussion, harp/piano),
and solo horn. The piece was the result of Boulez's research into periodicity. “When
I reflected on some of Ligeti’s compositions, I felt the desire to dedicate
myself to some almost theoretical research into periodicity in order to
systematically examine its overlays, its shifts and its exchange.” The
derivations are fragments of pieces by Carter and Ligeti. Boulez uses them
isorythmically, in the manner of a 14th Century composer, complete with hockets.
In 1918, at the end of World War I, Ravel was in a state of deep
creative despair after having witnessed the nightmare of combat firsthand. He wrote
only one new piece that year, Frontispice
for two pianos, five hands, a work which
lasts all of two minutes. Frontispice
first appeared in a magazine in 1919 as a musical frontispiece to Sonate pour un jet d’eau (Sonata for
Water Jet), a poem by Ricciotto Canudo. The piece has a numerological component
in its systematic use of threes and fives: three pianists, five hands, fifteen
(3x5) measures, five staves, and so on. As conductor John Kennedy remarked,
Boulez's 1987 orchestration of Frontispice
brings out the “novel-in-a-sigh” quality of each gesture in an almost Webernesque
way.
Ravel wrote two versions of Deux mélodies hébraïques (Two Hebrew Songs), one for voice and
piano, the other for voice and orchestra. The Slee Sinfonietta will play the
latter. Interestingly, the dates of the piano version and the orchestral
version coincide almost perfectly with the beginning and end of World War I:
1914 and 1919. The texts for both songs are from the Bible. Ravel wrote each in
two languages: The first, Kaddisch, a
hymn of praise to God, in Aramaic and French, and the second, L'Énigme éternelle (Eternal Mystery), in
Yiddish and French.
It's always interesting to hear two accomplished composers
set the same text to music. In 1895, after completing his studies at the Paris
Conservatoire, Ravel composed Un grand
sommeil noir (A Deep Black Sleep), a setting for voice and piano of a short
poem by Paul Verlaine. This piece marks the beginning of a gloomy and macabre note
in Ravel's music, born out in such later works as Le Gibet from Gaspard de la
nuit and La Valse. In 1906, while
still a student of organist and composer Charles-Marie Widor, Varèse wrote his Un grand sommeil noir, a setting of the
same Verlaine poem. Those who know Varèse as radical experimenter and
electroniste will be fascinated to hear the hauntingly lyrical melodies and
tonal harmonies he wrote in this song.
Bios
In September 2011, American conductor Case Scaglione began
his tenure as Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic. During the
2012/13 season, Mr. Scaglione worked with Sir Andrew Davis on the Lyric Opera
of Chicago's production of Strauss’ Elektra, and appeared as a guest conductor
with the St. Louis Symphony, Edmonton Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, and Palm
Beach Opera. He finished his season in China with the Guangzhou Symphony and
China Philharmonic, and at the Siena Music
Festival in Siena, Italy with a production of Britten’s Turn of the Screw.
Since completing apprenticeships with the Santa Fe Opera and
the Chicago Lyric Opera, mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley has appeared in leading
operatic roles (Carmen, Rosina, Dorbella, Despina, and both Rossini and
Massenet Cinderellas) from Anchorage to New York, and has been featured as a
soloist with orchestras led by George Manahan, Raymond Leppard, Oliver Knussen,
Robert Shaw and Pierre Boulez. She currently teaches voice at Concordia
University and the DePaul University School of Music, as well as the graduate
Art Song Seminar at North Park University.
The Slee Sinfonietta is the professional chamber orchestra
in residence at the University at Buffalo and the flagship ensemble of the
Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music. The Sinfonietta presents
a series of concerts each year that feature performances of challenging new
works by contemporary composers and lesser-known works from the chamber
orchestra repertoire.
Slee
Sinfonietta
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall
Case Scaglione, conductor
Julia Bentley, mezzo soprano
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