The theme for tonight's program,
Spiritual Voices of Eastern Europe, was
chosen in preparation for our upcoming concert tour to Hungary, Romania, and
Slovenia. We will be bringing some music from America, to be sure (two
spirituals from our first concert this season, and the new piece on
tonight's program), but as is our practice, we will also be bringing music
from the countries we are visiting.
As in past tours, it is through this music and the experience of singing it
with choirs from our host countries that we hope to gain the special insight
into unfamiliar cultures that only music can give. The various countries of
Eastern Europe have a rich variety of long-standing musical traditions that
are now experiencing a revival in the wake of the newly won independence of
most of these countries. The sacred music of this region reflects the close
proximity here of the two major original branches of Christianity, Western
Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Organ Works
Leo Janácek wrote his Glagolitic Mass in 1926, two years before his death.
The composer's nationalism is evident in the mass, as it was written looking
forward to the 10th Anniversary of the founding of the Czech Republic in
1918. Musically it displays the vitality and exuberance that characterized
much of Janácek's music, all the more remarkable coming from a composer in
his seventies. While many performances conclude the mass with the Intrada,
Janácek intended it to be performed at the beginning and the end, so this
evening's concert will begin with this short movement. The dramatic Organ
Solo from the mass, which begins the second half of this evening's concert,
is of considerable originality -- a perpetuo moto of wild energy.
Arvo Pärt was born in Estonia, and has quickly become one of the world's
better-known living composers of choral music. Pari Intervallo was composed
in 1976 on the occasion of the death of a friend and is dedicated to his
memory. The basic musical material consists of two parts which move exactly
parallel to each other, so that the interval between them is always the same
hence the title. Annum per Annum was commissioned by the Cathedral in
Speyer, Germany in 1980 to celebrate its 900th anniversary. The piece
is divided into 5 movements, preceded by an introduction and followed by a
Coda. The movements, played without pause, have the following titles: K, G,
C, S, A, and they represent the five ordinary (unchanging) texts from the
mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.
While Pärt's compositional style is not completely minimalist (repetitive
use of small amounts of musical material), the five movements are linked by
a common cantus firmus. The opening Introduction and concluding Coda are
the most minimalist parts of the piece, and mirror images of each other (the
Introduction beginning loudly followed by a decrescendo, and the Coda
beginning quietly followed by a crescendo). Pärt named this work Annum per
Annum in recognition of how the mass has been celebrated at the Speyer
Cathedral "year after year."
Mendelssohn's Six Sonatas for organ are staples of organ repertoire. The
composer held profound respect for the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and
his sonatas are teeming with fugues and chorales, in apparent homage to the
great master. Sonata No. 1 in f minor begins with a movement that pits
phrases of the German Chorale, Was mein Gott will, das g'scheh' allzeit
against louder, contrapuntal passages. The second movement is a lovely
dialogue between two contrasting sounds. Movement III again showcases
contrasting sounds, this time in a recitative form or with free rhythm.
This movement leads directly to the toccata-like fourth movement, full of
arpeggios and scales.
Born in the Bohemian village of Policka, Bohuslav Martinů was a very
prolific and varied composer. He entered the Prague Conservatoire as a
violin student in 1906 and by 1913 had joined the Czech Philharmonic
Orchestra. After World War I, he re-entered the conservatoire and a year
later he moved to Paris. The threat of the approaching German armies in
1940 forced him to flee to the United States, where he was encouraged by
commissions from Serge Koussevitzky. His Czech origin is generally
identifiable in his music, which nevertheless also reflects the influence of
France, while returning at times to earlier musical traditions. He wrote
orchestral works, operas, oratorios, choral works, keyboard works and a
bewildering number of chamber compositions. Martinů began to sketch his
lone organ piece, Vigilia, in April of 1959 and, due to declining health,
was not able to finish the work before his death in August of that year.
The last nineteen bars were finished by the commissioner of the work,
Bedích Janácek (no relation to Leo Janácek).
Choral Works
Along with his contemporary, the great Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly led a
renaissance of classical music in his native Hungary through an intensive
exploration of its folk music. The distinctive melodic and rhythmic
language of this rich oral tradition provided the basis for a national music
that was distinct from the Germanic styles that dominated the 19th Century.
Kodaly was also an important educator, developing a system of teaching music
through singing that is now used all over the world, including heavily in
the United States.
Esti Dal (Evening Song) is a kind of "national song" today in Hungary it
is the piece our host choir in Budapest suggested we learn from their
repertoire. It is a sacred folk song of sorts -- not a liturgical anthem per
se, but not a secular patriotic song either. When the choir traveled to
Estonia three years ago, we encountered several songs of this hybrid type of
sacred folk song as well.
This version of Kodaly's Missa Brevis was first performed in the basement of
the Budapest Opera House, where the composer and his wife took refuge during
the siege of Budapest in the winter of 1945. The choir was made up of
soloists from the opera company, accompanied by a harmonium (small organ)
and the sound of distant gunfire. The work is unified by expressive themes
such as those heard in the Kyrie and Qui tollis (in the Gloria) and then
again in the Agnus and Dona nobis pacem at the end.
Mendelssohn's setting of Psalm 42, Richte mich, Gott, is one of a number of
distinctive anthems for unaccompanied chorus he wrote for the Berlin
Cathedral Choir almost 100 years before Kodaly's Missa Brevis. It is
typical of his grand choral style unison declamations of the psalm text
followed by sonorous 8-part choral harmonies.
Victor Kalinnikov was one of the faculty at the famous Moscow Synodal
School from 1897-1923. Encouraged by Tchaikovsky, a group of young Russian
composers began to explore ancient Znammeny chant as a source of musical
identity much in the way Kodaly and Bartok later used folk music. The
result was a brief flowering of Russian choral settings of liturgical texts
in Church Slavonic, which remain among the most unique and inspired works in
the choral repertoire. Kalinnikov's close attention to the inflection of
the words in phrases that are sometimes fervently hushed and other times
ecstatically exclamatory.
Rudolf Tobias is considered one of the leading composers to develop a
distinctive Estonian style of concert and church music in the late 19th
Century. He studied in Russia just before the founding of the Moscow
Synodal School. This arrangement of Psalm 42 was part of a large stack of
music brought home from the last BCCS tour, to St. Petersburg and Estonia in
2004, so it seemed fitting to include it in this tour program.
Jubilant Intimations was written for this tour in an attempt to link the
Eastern and Western strains of sacred music through the medium of an
enigmatic Walt Whitman text brought to my attention by my teenage son,
Jeremy. The Western tradition is represented by Pange lingua, the great
hymn of St. Thomas Aquinas for the feast of Corpus Christi. The Eastern
voice is heard in the joyous Slavonic hymn of the All-Night Vigil liturgy
Slava vishnih Bogu (equivalent to the beginning of the Latin Gloria
text). By comparison, the Whitman text seems almost irreverent in its
childlike insouciance, and yet aptly symbolic of American optimism and
openness.
We hope some of the music you hear on tonight's program will take you to
regions of the ear, the heart, and the spirit which you may not have visited
before but which will enrich your soul in days to come which is what we
hope for from our tour in July! - TL
