by Bill Scanlan Murphy
BRIGHT SHENG
(1955-)
THREE GORGES OF THE LONG RIVER
Composed: 1995
Premiered: Seattle, Washington, 1995
Bright Sheng was born Sheng Zong-Liang in Shanghai in 1955 and came to the United States in 1982. His American composition teachers included Leonard Bernstein and Jack Beeson; he is now Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, and also enjoys parallel careers as conductor and pianist (an instrument he took up at the age of four).
Sheng’s declared musical mission has been to explain China to the West. Three Gorges of the Long River is the final movement of the suite China Dreams. In this work, Sheng remembers the China of his childhood—an exercise in very complex nostalgia, as he and his family as “westernized” musicians lived in dread of the Red Guards that attempted to purge China of “foreign” and “decadent” influences in the near-Holocaust of the Cultural Revolution. Many artists were hauled off to camps for “re-education,” never to return.
Three Gorges largely holds the composer’s worst memories at bay in a feat of musical pictorialism that has been compared to Respighi’s famous musical travelogues. The “long river” is the Chang Jiang, better known in the West as the Yangtse River, the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world. It is traditionally the dividing line between North and South China. The Three Gorges have become a major tourist attraction (and always were—Marco Polo saw them), though more recently under the shadow of the Three Gorges Dam project, which has literally engulfed huge areas of once inhabited land—the Three Gorges that the young Sheng knew. The darkness that unmistakably flits over the outwardly serene face of the music could be inspired by this, or by the terrible Yangtse floods that killed millions over the centuries (and made the Dam necessary)—or, of course, by the Cultural Revolution, which flooded Chinese life and left precious few artists of stature alive when it receded. Mercifully, one of those survivors was Bright Sheng.
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
(1872–1958)
THE LARK ASCENDING
Composed: 1914, revised 1920
Premiered: London, England, 1921
Inspired by a poem of the same name by George Meredith, The Lark Ascending was composed in just before the Great War and revised in 1920. The fact that the composer was literally in the trenches between these dates makes it all the more surprising that this piece is the epitome of the word “idyll,” evoking the untroubled English countryside as only Vaughan Williams (who was Welsh by descent!) could. After the initial long, slow ascent to the cantabile heavens, Vaughan Williams’ own Cotswold Hills stretch out on all sides, with perhaps the faintest hint of some village jollity taking place far below. This piece is English pastoralism, a mood perhaps best described by Meredith’s poem:
“For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instills,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.”
MODEST MUSSORGSKY
(1839–1881)
SONGS AND DANCES OF DEATH (orchestrated by Dmitri Shostakovich)
Composed: 1875–1877, orchestrated 1962
Premiered: Gorky, Russia, 1962
Mussorgsky was a lifelong alcoholic who died in terrifying delirium at the age of 42, and left many important works half-finished at his death. As a result, he is a composer whose most important works became famous only after being reworked by others. His operas, including his masterpiece Boris Godunov, became famous in orchestrations by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov; his most famous work of all, Pictures at an Exhibition, is a piano suite far more famous in its orchestration by Maurice Ravel. Songs and Dances of Death was intended to be for bass and orchestra, but, typically, only the piano version was completed (and survives in the composer’s eerily beautiful, clear manuscript). An early orchestration was made by Alexander Glazounov and Rimsky-Korsakov, but tonight we are hearing the version by Dmitri Shostakovich, who found his own resonances in the dark world of Mussorgsky’s settings of grim texts by his room-mate, Arseny Golinishchev-Kutuzov.
Here, Death is not merely personified, but turned into an inexorable, demonic force. In Lullaby, Death triumphs in a vicious dialogue with a mother nursing a sick child; in Serenade, Death is a young woman’s final suitor; in Trepak, a drunken peasant has Death for a dancing partner. Finally, in The Field Marshal, Death orders the dead to march from the battlefield into his domain.
However morbid the subject matter, Mussorgsky’s unique, angular, tortured music is all too clearly the product of experience—and, as the composer discovered all too soon—dread of the inevitable. Revealingly, the musical voice of Shostakovich is as easily heard in Mussorgsky’s own notes as in the orchestration; these two composers were made for each other.
CARLOS CHAVEZ
(1899–1978)
SINFONIA INDIA
Composed: 1935-1936
Premiered: New York, NY, 1936
Written in 1935–1936, Chavez’s very exotic one-movement second symphony is based largely on melodies gathered from the Yaqui, Seri, and Huichol Indians (the historical Aztecs), absorbed into a music that owes much to Stravinsky and shares much with Aaron Copland. Just as Bright Sheng grew up during the Cultural Revolution, Carlos Chavez was a child of the Mexican Revolution, and emerged a fervent Mexican nationalist, which he explained in his own description of the Sinfonia India:
“We have found ourselves by going back to the cultural traditions of the Indian racial stock that still accounts for four-fifths of the people of Mexico."
Ethno-musically impressive as it sounds, Sinfonia India was actually written and first performed in New York, and Chavez later admitted that his grasp of Aztec music was “imaginary.” Many of his college friends had been ethnomusicologists and song-gatherers, and it was from their work that Chavez took the material for his symphony. Ironically, much of the “exotic” melodic material in the piece is based on scales that Chavez quite wrongly thought the Indian tribes used in their music; it is the “western” melodies that are the real Indian tunes. Chavez not only came to be synonymous with Mexican music; he quite literally invented it, and unwittingly used largely traditional “Western” materials. Lurking not far below the surface is a very clear (if long) sonata allegro movement; the slow section is simply the usual sonata development. There is as much Beethoven as Quetzelcoatl here.
GEORGES BIZET
(1838–1875)
Music from CARMEN
Composed: 1874
Premiered: Paris, France 1875
It took a Frenchman to write the most famous Spanish music of all, though he had a little help from a real Spaniard: the Habanera is plagiarized wholesale from a song by Sebastian Yradier, now best known for La Paloma.
Bizet died (allegedly from a broken heart) barely three months after the disastrous first performance of Carmen, and never saw the work’s meteoric rise to popular acclaim over the following decades; the philosopher Nietzsche even described Carmen as worth more than all the works of Wagner combined. The musical ghost of Wagner can be seen in the “fate” motif that creeps through the opera (and is heard here in the Intermezzo), but it is the swaggering music of the Toreadors and Carmen’s seductive (if borrowed) Habanera that have earned this music the undying love of generations of listeners.
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