Four Centuries of Great Music April 23, 2023 Recently Released Classical Music

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music  are continuing our series of recent classical music releases

We begin with a new recording of Alexander Scriabin’s Symphony #2.  Written in 1901, the second symphony is the most structurally conventional of all Scriabin's symphonies.  Scriabin’s own deeply personal orchestral sound world is very much to the fore in the Symphony No. 2 despite some echoes of Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Strauss, but his structural plan owes an obvious debt to César Franck, who had taken the idea of cyclical composition to new levels of artistic sophistication. However, it features extensive thematic transformation establishing a cyclic link between its movements. For instance, the sombre initial theme of the first movement played serioso on the clarinet, is developed to a triumphant hymn full orchestral pomp. functioning as the main subject of the finale.
The symphony consists of five movements:
I. Andante
II. Allegro 9:13
III. Andante 10:47
IV. Tempestoso – 5:55
V. Maestoso

Although the first two and the final two are played attacca connected to each other without a break.

The Symphony No. 2 has always tended to attract fewer ardent champions than Scriabin’s other mature orchestral works. This is rather surprising given that over the course of all five movements, the symphony is awash with sweeping climaxes, passages of great majestic intensity, and swirls of rich orchestral tone colours, enough to beguile any listener.




Joseph Vella: Rebbieħa, Op. 45a

Joseph Vella was one of Malta’s major musical figures, a leading composer, conductor and musicologist. Vella’s musical language is ingrained in a personal idiom influenced mainly by the 20th Century neoclassical movement, with a lyrical brand of atonality which tends to precipitate to a fundamental note. Nonetheless, there is an adventurous eclecticism to his oeuvre, evident in the diversity of styles he employed.

Rebbieħa is a symphonic poem originally written for wind band, first performed in its orchestral guise in 1986. The title, “Victorious,” refers to Malta’s checkered history, and the country’s ability to overcome the challenges it has faced over the centuries, not least the Great Siege of 1565 and the bombings and deprivations of World War II. This idea is expressed in a one-movement work based on a tripartite structure. The opening “Allegro Moderato” is characterised by blaring brass fanfares and outbursts of percussion. The music settles down into a dirge-like section, “Tempo di Marcia Funebre,” which builds up to a heart-wrenching climax. In contrast, the closing “Allegro” is dance-like and celebratory. Towards the end, snatches of the Maltese National Anthem reveal the work’s patriotic intent.

Here is a performance of Joseph Vella’s Rebbieħa, Op. 45a by the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra | Sergey Smbatyan conductor from the album BORODIN SYMPHONY NO. 2    Navona


Igor Stravinsky:  Rite of Spring

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is both evolutionary and revolutionary.  In The Firebird, Stravinsky had begun to experiment with bitonality (the use of two different keys simultaneously). He took this technique further in Petrushka, but reserved its full effect for The Rite where, as the analyst E.W. White explains, he "pushed [it] to its logical conclusion”.  White also observes the music's complex metrical character, with combinations of duple and triple time in which a strong irregular beat is emphasised by powerful percussion.  The music critic Alex Ross has described the irregular process whereby Stravinsky adapted and absorbed traditional Russian folk material into the score. He "proceeded to pulverize them into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages and montages”.

The score calls for a large orchestra but much of the piece is written chamber-fashion, with individual instruments and small groups having distinct roles.

Part I: The Adoration of the Earth

The opening melody is played by a solo bassoon in a very high register, which renders the instrument almost unidentifiable;  gradually other woodwind instruments are sounded and are eventually joined by strings. The sound builds up before stopping suddenly, Hill says, "just as it is bursting ecstatically into bloom". There is then a reiteration of the opening bassoon solo, now played a semitone lower.

The first dance, "Augurs of Spring", is characterised by a repetitive stamping chord in the horns and strings, based on E♭ dominant 7 superimposed on a triad of E, G♯ and B.  It has been suggested that this bitonal combination, which Stravinsky considered the focal point of the entire work, was devised on the piano, since the constituent chords are comfortable fits for the hands on a keyboard.  The rhythm of the stamping is disturbed by Stravinsky's constant shifting of the accent, on and off the beat, before the dance ends in a collapse, as if from exhaustion. 

At first sight there seems no pattern in the distribution of accents to the stamping chords.  But within these there are increasing intervals between beats overlapped by decreasing intervals.  Whether Stravinsky worked them out like this we shall probably never know. But the way two different rhythmic 'orders' interfere with each other to produced apparent chaos is... a typically Stravinskyan notion.”

The "Ritual of Abduction" which follows is described by Hill as "the most terrifying of musical hunts”.  It concludes in a series of flute trills that usher in the "Spring Rounds", in which a slow and laborious theme gradually rises to a dissonant fortissimo, a "ghastly caricature" of the episode's main tune.

Brass and percussion predominate as the "Ritual of the Rival Tribes" begins. A tune emerges on tenor and bass tubas, leading after much repetition to the entry of the Sage's procession. The music then comes to a virtual halt, "bleached free of colour", as the Sage blesses the earth. The "Dance of the Earth" then begins, bringing Part I to a close in a series of phrases of the utmost vigour which are abruptly terminated in what Hill describes as a "blunt, brutal amputation".

Part II: The Sacrifice

Part II has a greater cohesion than part I. Hill describes the music as following an arc stretching from the beginning of the Introduction to the conclusion of the final dance.  Woodwind and muted trumpets are prominent throughout the Introduction, which ends with a number of rising cadences on strings and flutes. The transition into the "Mystic Circles" is almost imperceptible; the main theme of the section has been prefigured in the Introduction. A loud repeated chord, which Berger likens to a call to order, announces the moment for choosing the sacrificial victim. The "Glorification of the Chosen One" is brief and violent; in the "Evocation of the Ancestors" that follows, short phrases are interspersed with drum rolls. The "Ritual Action of the Ancestors" begins quietly, but slowly builds to a series of climaxes before subsiding suddenly into the quiet phrases that began the episode.

The final transition introduces the "Sacrificial Dance". This is written as a more disciplined ritual than the extravagant dance that ended Part I, though it contains some wild moments, with the large percussion section of the orchestra given full voice. Stravinsky had difficulties with this section, especially with the final bars that conclude the work. The abrupt ending displeased several critics, one of whom wrote that the music "suddenly falls over on its side". Stravinsky himself referred to the final chord disparagingly as "a noise", but in his various attempts to amend or rewrite the section, was unable to produce a more acceptable solution.



Margaret Bonds:  Spiritual Suite

Margaret Bonds was a child prodigy who studied at the Coleridge-Taylor Music School and began writing her first compositions at thirteen. Bonds attended Northwestern University and The Juilliard School and became a close friend, pupil, and creative collaborator of Florence Price.  Bonds suffered from the racism of the 20th century.  In 1932, she won first place in the song category of Wanamaker Foundation Awards. She wrote over 200 works of which only about 75 survive and only 47 were published during her lifetime.  Bonds is best known for her popular arrangements of spirituals and her collaborations and text settings with poet Langston Hughes, with whom she created several works that explored African American history and culture.  However she was an accomplished pianist and composed many works for piano.

Spiritual Suite Composed as a show-stopping closer for her solo recitals and performed as an inspirational statement of racial and cultural pride, Margaret Bonds’s dazzling Spiritual Suite was inspired by the concert encores of legendary Black vocalists Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. Based on settings of traditional Negro spirituals (“Dry Bones,” “Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells,” and “Wade in the Water”) and infused with the idioms of gospel, jazz, and blues, this three-movement suite was drafted throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Although it became one of Bonds’s most celebrated and studied works, the rousing finale, “Troubled Water,” was the only movement to be published during her lifetime. It was not until 2020, when Dr. Louise Toppin, a significant force in archiving the repertoire of Black composers, edited all three movements of the suite and had them printed as part of the Videmus African American Art Song Series, that “Valley of the Bones” and “The Bells” became available for future generations of pianists to rediscover and bring to life—a fitting revival to one of the most significant classical artists of the twentieth century.



Thank you for listening to today’s Four Centuries of Great Music and listen again next Sunday for more recent releases of classical music.