A Parisian-born child prodigy, Lili Boulanger’s talent was apparent at the age of two, when Gabriel Fauré, a friend of the family and later one of Boulanger’s teachers, discovered she had perfect pitch. Her parents, both of whom were musicians, encouraged their daughter’s musical education. Her father was 77 years old when Lili was born and she became very attached to him. Her mother, Raissa Myshetskaya (Mischetzky), was a Russian princess who married her Paris Conservatoire teacher, Ernest Boulanger.

In 1918 D’un Matin de printemps (“Of a Spring Morning”) was composed, along with its companion piece D’un Soir triste (“Of a Sad Evening”), during the last months of the composer’s short life. By this time, Boulanger had already made a name for herself as the first woman ever to win the prestigious Prix de Rome and was lauded for her unique compositional voice among her fellow Impressionists. At only 24 years old she lay stricken with terminal illness, her sister Nadia by her side and the German bombardment advancing on nearby Paris. Her final works convey the intimate and mature compositional voice that, even under such circumstances, continued to explore color and harmony. In particular, the vigor of D’un Matin de printemps, completed two months before her death, belies her fragile condition.

Matin’s brisk opening is underpinned by light eighth notes in the strings, providing momentum as the solo flute enters with the main theme. Like much of French music of the time, winds feature prominently, imparting vibrancy with their bright timbre; occasional melodious string passages add a lush texture. This spring morning is not without shadows of its own, however. After brass and percussion join in for a brief resounding of the ensemble, the energy of the opening sinks into a murkier state. Boulanger masterfully employs color and texture to continue this seamless ebb and flow between two realms. One is bright and alert, with each restatement of the main theme in solo winds acting as a call to attention and restoring the faster tempo. The other is dreamlike, marked mystérieux, with ghostly violin and celesta heightening the effect. Eventually the initial energy returns in full in a series of flourishes, a final glissando on harp marking a brilliant close.

By Erica Miller

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer who was strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song. His output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.

Born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook, he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens throughout his life, and believed in making music as available as possible to everybody. He wrote many works for amateur and student performance.

He was musically a late developer, not finding his true voice until his late thirties; his studies in 1907–1908 with the French composer Maurice Ravel helped him clarify the textures of his music.

The Lark Ascending is a short, single-movement work by Vaughan Williams, inspired by the 1881 poem of the same name by the English writer George Meredith. The solo violin flutters and soars, evoking the lark of Meredith’s poem, the first lines of which read;

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

Vaughan Williams composed The Lark Ascending in 1914, in the early days of World War I, when a pastoral scene of a singing bird seemed far removed from reality. The war so occupied public attention that the premiere of The Lark Ascending was delayed seven years until the violinist Marie Hall, for whom the piece had been written, gave the first performance of the orchestral version.

By Erica Miller

Said Healey Willan of himself, “I am Irish by extraction, English by birth, Canadian by adoption, and Scotch by absorption”! That witty aphorism gives a big clue to the character of Healey Willan who arrived on these shores in 1913 and immediately found himself the centre of musical attention in Toronto – where he stayed for the rest of his life. The tweed suits and ever present malodorous pipe might have suggested a certain stuffiness (and, agreed, his music was ultra-conservative even in his younger days) – but clearly, from the above summation of himself, this Doctor (he was granted a rarely dispensed Lambeth doctorate for his services to Church music in 1956) had a really wicked twinkle in his eye which belied the outward appearance.

Together with Sir Ernest Macmillan, Healey Willan helped drag Toronto (some say kicking and screaming) to enjoy a wide range of music. Both men operated at the amateur and professional levels (between them, they ran the Toronto Conservatory of Music and the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto) and so could exert a major influence on the tastes of Torontonians.

But Willan was also trained as an organist and choirmaster in his English homeland. His ecclesiastical tastes tended to the Anglo-Catholic tradition of his upbringing rather than the low Church traditions of St. Paul’s, where he was appointed Organist and Choirmaster shortly after his arrival in Toronto, so in 1921 he moved to St. Mary Magdalene’s and stayed there until his death in 1968. In the process he produced a body of liturgical music that won him the aforementioned Lambeth doctorate. Central to this was his preference for the word rhythms of plain chant. So, somewhat paradoxically, Willan’s muse oscillated from that of the Tudors to the late-Romaticism of Elgar and Richard Strauss (which influenced Willan’s Symphony No. 2 and Piano Concerto), though he steers closer to Reger in full magnificence when it comes to his solo organ works, such as his powerful Introduction, Passacaglia & Fugue of 1916. In his youthful English years, however, he had also conducted a group of singers noted for their performances of Gilbert & Sullivan. So, perhaps it is not too surprising that the music for this Overture to an Unwritten Comedy of 1951 should have a certain Sullivanesque quality about it. ‘The Unwritten Comedy’ should have been written by Napier Moore as he and Willan had agreed to collaborate on a comic opera but Moore died before the project got anywhere – but not before Willan had written the overture. It is an ebullient little piece (all of four minutes) in sonata form, with a theme that even Elgar would have drooled over!

Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Opus 33a Britten

Peter Grimes was a milestone for English opera. It was written in response to the promptings and, equally important, the financial backing of Serge Koussevitsky during Britten's sojourn in America between 1939 and 1942. A possible subject for his first opera was already at the back of Britten's mind, however. He had become fascinated by the poetry of an eighteenth-century English clergyman, George Crabbe, who, like Britten, was a native of Suffolk. Crabbe's poetry is notable for its tart honesty, biting humour and keen observation. In his narrative poem The Borough he charts the harshness and futility of life in the small fishing village of Aldeburgh on the English east coast, matching the people to their bleak unfriendly surroundings: one character of note is the fisherman, Peter Grimes.

Britten began work on the opera after he had made the hazardous wartime transatlantic crossing back to England in 1942. The première was given by the Sadler's Wells Opera Company in London one month after the armistice with Germany in 1945. It was instantly recognized as a gripping piece of theatre and marked Britten as an opera composer of note.

The prologue and three acts are skilfully linked together by six brilliantly conceived orchestral interludes, each capturing a different mood of the sea and serving as impressionistic, even expressionistic, introductions to the succeeding scenes (which also serve to allow the stagehands time to effect the necessary scene changes).

The four Sea Interludes show both the extraordinary lucidity of Britten's aural awareness and the virtuosity of his orchestration as he creates music from the sounds of the sea. In the first interlude, Dawn, (which joins the Prologue to Act I) listen for the gulls calling as they wheel with the moaning wind; the advance and retreat of the waves on the shingle beach; the latent, menacing power of the sea's swell. Sunday Morning, which introduces Act II, depicts the sunlight of a warm Sunday morning glistening and dancing on the sea. Especially memorable is the way the horns evoke the characteristic harmonic jangle of church bells by announcing each new chord before the preceding one has died away. Moonlight, which introduces Act III, uses slowly pulsing bleak harmonic chords to create the cold despairing melancholy of a moonlit night – the occasional glint on the sea provided by the flutes, harp and xylophone. Finally, we hear the Storm, though in the opera this interlude comes between Scenes 1 & 2 of Act I. The music becomes menacing; there is the jarring juxtaposition of unrelated harmonic keys grinding against each other, the now aggressive swell, the smash of waves and the howl of the wind. In concert form these interludes form a series of short tone poems about the sea, at various times beautiful, friendly, cold and menacing. In the opera they set the scenes for one of the great masterpieces of our time.

Job, A Masque for Dancing Vaughan Williams

The Book of Job, at first blush, doesn’t seem a likely source to inspire a theatrical work – and certainly not a ballet. After all, it is a highly philosophical book on that most fundamental of questions: “Why does God allow the righteous to suffer?” – or in more modern parlance: “How/Why do good and evil co-exist?” Isn’t this inherently too static a concept for a dramatic stage work? Not according to that most visionary of composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams. He was captured by the notion when it was suggested to him by his second cousin, the artist Gwendoline Raverat [a grand-daughter of Charles Darwin], and Geoffrey Keynes (who was married to Madame Raverat’s sister, and was brother to Maynard Keynes, the eminent economist and husband of the great Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova). He was not only a surgeon of note but also an eminent Blake scholar, and, like his brother, a balletomane. 1927 was the one-hundredth anniversary of William Blake’s death. Blake, that great English mystic and artist, had created 21 dramatic engraved plates for Illustrations to the Book of Job in 1825. 1927 was also a pivotal point in Vaughan Williams’s career. In the past were masterpieces such as the deeply spiritual Tallis Fantasia and the emotive Lark Ascending; in the future was the brusqueness, even at times the brutality, of Symphonies Nos. 4 & 6. The score of Job is a pivotal point between these landmark scores in Vaughan Williams’s œuvre, for we have the spiritual comfort of Job and his family praising God versus the violence of Satan who tries to ensure he wins his bet with God – that a blameless Job bereft of wealth and family would finally curse God. [One might also note that the basic raison d’être for The Book of Job, probably the oldest text in the Bible, hasn’t changed one iota in the intervening millennia.]

Vaughan Williams was adamant that his ballet would not embrace dancing sur les pointes, hence his insistence that Job be called a Masque for Dancing, though technically a Jacobean Masque also included spoken and sung text. With the help of Keynes and Raverat, Vaughan Williams designed a nine-scene ballet around Blake’s etchings. The intent was to create a series of tableaux rather than a continuous narrative. Although Vaughan Williams was not an orthodox Christian (he professed to be an agnostic), he was deeply aware of our inherently spiritual nature and wrote his score accordingly. But there is no mistaking the arrival of Satan at strategic moments throughout this work. Initially it is the bassoons, cellos and basses who hip-hop first a major 7th, then a minor 9th followed by a minor 10th. Your ears instantly tell you that this is bad news. They are probably the most memorable three bars that Vaughan Williams ever wrote – and are absolutely indelible once heard. Equally, when Satan holds the stage, so does that harmonic interval so abhorred in medieval times – the augmented fourth/tritone (the diabolus in musica). Because it is so totally dissonant and harmonically unstable, the tritone demands to be resolved one way or another as soon as possible. Failure to do so creates a level of harmonic tension that perfectly represents the nature of Satan. With these armaments in his musical quiver, Vaughan Williams then makes full use of a large orchestra (including organ) to create an aural splendour appropriate for so exalted a moment as the revealing of God’s throne – even if it is Satan who dares to sit on it – a bit of theatrical licence there! Given the orchestral forces required he cannot have really expected his creation to make it to the stage. Yet it did (in 1931) once Constant Lambert had reduced the orchestration to numbers that would fit in the average theatre orchestra pit. Ninette de Valois created the choreography for the Camargo Society (a precursor to the Royal Ballet Company at Covent Garden, London) and Anton Dolin danced the brilliant part of Satan. However, it has since had rather greater success on the concert platform, especially as the great English conductor Sir Adrian Boult, to whom the work is dedicated, espoused it throughout his long career.

So, essentially what we hear in Job is Vaughan Williams in visionary mode, inviting his listeners to let the music inspire scenes in the imagination for this morality play based on Blake’s engravings. And while there is no mistaking Job as a twentieth century score, Vaughan Williams deliberately uses ancient dances to conjure up his version of this eternal question/debate about good and evil. Thus we see/hear the Saraband, the Pavane, and the Galliard. Even Stravinsky (who is harmonically poles apart from Vaughan Williams) in his Oedipus Rex uses similar ancient devices to create an epic, timeless quality to his creation. So ancient – so modern! Or as the distinguished musicologist Michael Kennedy has noted: “Musically, [Job] is a perfect reconciliation of the various elements in [Vaughan Williams’s] style: the lyrical (‘pastoral’) side, the folk-dance rhythms, the aggressive twentieth-century harmonies, the Purcellian diatonic splendour of a great tune”.

Scene I. Introduction – Pastoral Dance – Satan’s Appeal to God – Saraband of the Sons of God. Vaughan Williams’s music ranges from the serene to the aggressive as first we contemplate Job’s contentment in his family (e.g., the descending motif [with its characteristic momentary triplet rhythm] of Job’s blessing first announced by the massed violins), and then as Satan and God argue about the nature of Job’s sincerity with the memorable motif that Vaughan Williams created for Satan). God said: “All that he hath is in thy power.” [quotations are from the synopsis published in the full score.]

Scene II. Satan’s Dance of Triumph. “And Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord.” The jagged harmonic leaps, wild rhythms and the diabolus chord are central to this episode as Satan claims the empty throne of God (now that God has allowed Satan to sport with Job).

Scene III. Minuet of the Sons of Job and their Wives. An archaic minuet seductively harmonized indicates that the sons and their wives are as much voluptuous as graceful. “Then came a great wind and smote the four corners of the house and it fell upon the young men and they are dead.” They are all cursed (with a distortion of Job’s theme of blessing from Scene I) and destroyed by Satan.

Scene IV. Job’s Dream – Dance of the Plague, Pestilence, Famine and Battle. “In thoughts from the visions of the night … fear came upon me and trembling.” Raucous syncopations and plenty of augmented fourths invade Job’s dream (which begins with a fugato!) as the worst is paraded before his sleeping eyes.

Scene V. Dance of the Three Messengers. Lamenting woodwind led by the oboe create a funeral cortege as Job is informed of the loss of his wealth and his sons and daughters-in-law. “Job still blesses God.”

Scene VI. Dance of Job’s Comforters – Job’s Curse – A Vision of Satan. “Happy is the man whom God correcteth.” Here is a moment of orchestral genius as Vaughan Williams represents Job’s Comforters and their insincerity by the wheedling, seedy tones of a saxophone. Finally “Job curses God” fortissimo (to a variant of the blessing/curse theme) and musically the Heaven’s open again (at the entry of the organ) to reveal Satan seated in triumph on God’s throne – accompanied by a warped version of the initial holy Saraband. [At least this is how the action is described in the score. However, in the biblical text, Job does no such thing. At the most he curses the day he was born back at the beginning of Chapter 3. But for Job to curse God would mean that Satan had won his bet and could claim the right to God’s empty throne. Dramatically in the Masque this is the climactic point; theologically it doesn’t happen – but ironic artistic licence wins again!]

Scene VII. Elihu’s Dance of Youth and Beauty – Pavane of the Sons of the Morning. At last, some genuine comfort for Job appears as a solo violin wafts aloft (like The Lark Ascending) representing the innocence and genuineness of the youthful Elihu. The scene ends with a hymn-like Pavane offering Job some new hope.

Scene VIII. Galliard of the Sons of the Morning – Altar Dance and Heavenly Pavane. Satan (and his theme) bounds in to claim victory, but God turns the curse on Satan. The Sons of the Morning, to a rustic dance (one of Vaughan Williams’s great tunes originally for military band), drive Satan from Heaven. Job can now rejoice with the Pavane from the previous scene which Vaughan Williams richly harmonizes and orchestrates.

Scene IX. Epilogue. “So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.” Thus we come full circle. Job older and humbled, is back in the embrace of his new family – and the return of the music from Scene 1.

And we are left to ponder …..

© David Gardner

Modest Mussorgsky was inspired. He had just walked into the retrospective exhibition of paintings and architectural drawings by Victor Hartmann arranged by Vladimir Stassov. Hartmann had died in 1873 and left his close friends, Mussorgsky and Stassov, bereft. And now, a cathartic release. Mussorgsky suddenly knew how he could commemorate his friend. It would be a suite: aural images inspired by Hartmann’s visual genius linked by a ‘promenade’ theme as he, Mussorgsky, wandered from one painting to the next. The final suite for piano consisted of ten ‘paintings’ and four linking ‘promenades’. Yet, although a magnificent virtuosic tour de force for a pianist, it was clear at its publication in 1886 (five years after the composer’s death) that this suite really cried out for the tonal splendour and colour of a full orchestra. Koussevitzky certainly realized that and commissioned Ravel, in 1922, to make his dazzling orchestration.

Ravel summons us to the gallery for the first Promenade (in modo russico!) with resplendent brass who are later joined by the full string choir and the woodwinds. The first picture is Gnomus, Hartmann’s design for a child’s toy in the guise of a nutcracker – a gnome with deformed legs. Mussorgsky’s conception of this gnome seems more related to the sinister creatures found in the Grimms’ fairytales than to any toy nutcracker. There is a brooding potential for ‘things that go bump in the night’ as Ravel paints with wild changes of register and orchestral colour. The subsequent Promenade is a complete contrast: a horn alternating with solo woodwinds walk us to the next picture. Il vecchio castello, a medieval Italian castle in front of which stands a troubadour. Here Ravel was inspired to give the troubadour’s song to that rare visitor to the orchestra – the saxophone, over string ostinatos; it is a haunting movement. Then comes another Promenade, this time initially in the company of trumpet supported by cellos and double basses, who lead us to Tuileries – an alley in the Tuileries gardens in Paris where children play and quarrel. Ravel chooses an appropriately delicate orchestration to depict this – oboe, flute and clarinet share the solos over pulsating woodwinds. But then to Bydlo (a Polish wagon on enormous wheels drawn by oxen; very ungainly). The sounds lumber appropriately, courtesy of gruff lower strings and tuba, followed by the full orchestra with a special assist from the snare drum. Then it is time to Promenade again – led by solo woodwinds over lower strings. This erupts into the Ballet of the unhatched chicks (referring to a ballet for which Hartmann designed the sets and costumes) – a picturesque display with Ravel at his most imaginative. Trilling flutes, oboes and clarinets, high muted strings, celeste and harp are some of the ingredients that Ravel uses to colour Mussorgsky’s canvas. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle are two Polish Jews: one rich, one poor (two paintings borrowed from Mussorgsky’s own collection for this exhibition). Heavy lower strings and woodwinds (the opulent Sam), solo muted trumpet (the whining Schmuyle), and finally the full orchestra, are all used to depict the squabbling confrontation between these old men. Limoges, the Market Place is next. Ravel uses horns and strings, with interjections from the woodwinds, bells and triangle to depict a good old gossip and dispute among the market women at Limoges. Then comes another great contrast: Catacombs & Cum mortuis in lingua mortua. Here Ravel unleashes the brass in full Wagnerian cry, ending the movement appropriately (in Cum mortuis) with woodwinds and harp over quiet tremolo strings. Next, a Russian legend – the hideous witch Baba Yaga, who lived in a hut on hen’s legs. She went hunting in a red-hot mortar which she drove through the air with a pestle (altogether quite the lady!). Mussorgsky’s original is made even more exciting by the unleashing of Ravel’s full panoply of orchestral tricks. We have horns flying high, strings scampering, low flute tremolos against bassoon reinforced with pizzicato lower strings, then tuba and harp, and interjections from the percussion. It all makes quite a stir. Finally, we arrive at the Great Gate of Kiev. This was Hartmann’s design for a triumphal gateway for the City of Kiev in the old Russian style with a cupola in the form of a Slavonic helmet. Mussorgsky’s pianoforte version is massively sonorous but in orchestral dress it becomes the very soul of old Russia. The promenade theme from the full brass mixes with the resplendent peals of bells (strings, woodwinds and harps) and Russian Orthodox chants (clarinets and bassoons). Stabs of instrumental colour come from tubular bells, percussion and harps, but, of course, eventually it is the full brass with lots of help from the cymbals and tam-tam, that sweep everything away as the suite reaches its stirring triumphant final chords.

And so we leave, impressed by Hartmann's imagination, Mussorgsky’s genius and Ravel’s ingenuity. Although it is not as ‘Russian’ sounding as more recent orchestrations by Stokowski or Ashkenazy, Mussorgsky and Ravel make our tour of Hartmann’s exhibition vivid and exciting.

© David Gardner