Contemporary Classics May 1, 2018 Celebration of the Sea

Oceana has been compared to his work La Pasión.  But unlike La Pasión, Oceana mingles its various idioms into an integrated aesthetic vision. What stands out is Golijov's fearless rejection of the orthodoxies of modernism, postmodernism, minimalism, and every other -ism that limits the definition of an acceptable aesthetic. Oceana is a large-scale cantata for which the unique sound of Brazilian singer Luciana Souza provided inspiration, and her voice is a unifying thread that runs through it. It's evocative of oceanic vastness without being imitative, and its moments of grand emotion are passionate, even spiritual; the fact that the ecstatic choral exclamations, "Oceana!" are easily mistaken for "Hosanna!" cannot have been coincidental. Souza's voice is absolutely astounding in its tonal coloring and expressive range. The text is from Pablo Neruda.     Robert Spano leads the Gwinnett Young Singers and the Atlanta Symphony & Chorus in a radiant performance.

Oceana: I. Call    II. First Wave and Rain Train Interlude  III. Second Wave   IV. Second Call   V. Third Wave   VI. Aria  VII. Coral del Arrecife (Chorale of the Reef)

Richard Faith:  Sea Pieces

Richard Faith 92 last month was born in Evansville IN, educated in Chicago but spent much of his life in Tucson AZ- all far from the sea.  Faith's music displays a freely modulating harmonic language within the boundaries of tonality that combines neo-romantic and impressionistic qualities, with Debussy, Ravel as major influences.   Two Sea Pieces for Clarinet and Piano 1966

Richard Faith:  Sea Pieces: No. 1. Nocturne              No. 2. Capriccio       

 Rued Langgaard :  Symphony No. 15, BVN 375, "Sostormen" (The Sea Storm)

Langgaard was in many ways deeply conservative, and spent his later years as a church organist in the provincial town of Ribe in Denmark. He was a colossally prolific composer, with 431 works to his name, including 16 symphonies, and in his youth was hailed as a prodigy and the natural successor to the great Danish symphonist Carl Nielsen.   But by the time he died in 1952 he’d been more or less forgotten, even in his native country.  He had been a standing joke in Danish music; a loner, a freak and an outcast. None of his works were commissioned and half were never performed in his lifetime. Langgaard did experience major success – once. Aged 19 he had his astoundingly assured First Symphony inaugurated by the Berlin Philharmonic under Max Fiedler. It proved, in the words of the composer’s biographer Bendt Viinholt Nielsen, ‘the climax of his whole career’. War then tore through mainland Europe and by the time it was over Denmark had its musical figurehead – man of the people Carl Nielsen.

Then a rare performance of a symphony in the 1970s caught the attention of conductor Thomas Dausgaard, who was then a high-school student.

Dausgaard  remembers “I was doing work experience, sitting in on the cello section of an orchestra, and one day they played a symphony by this man Langgaard. I had heard a few stories about him from my grandmother. She remembered seeing this eccentric, shabby figure in the streets of Ribe, with his wild hair, but I had never heard a note of the music. I was completely riveted, because the music in itself was familiar, but the way it was put together was really strange. It was a like a movie, jumping from one image to the next, and sometimes combining them in strange ways.”

The Symphony No. 15 "Sea-storm" (1937/1949) is scored for large orchestra, baritone solo and men's choir. The first three movements (I. Bevaeget (Moving, II. Scherzo and III. Adagio Funebre) are purely instrumental, with the opening a long, turbulent introduction and the following two movements shorter and more tranquil. The final movement (IV. Finale: Allegro Molto Agitato ) brings in the choir, who sings of a savage storm.

John Luther Adams:  Become Ocean

In the words of John Luther Adams: “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea.  Today as the polar ice melts and sea levels rises, we humans face the prospect that we may once again quite literally, become ocean.”

The Seattle Symphony Orchestra commissioned the work and premiered it at Benaroya Hall, Seattle, on 20 and 22 June 2013. The work won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.  The large orchestra is divided into three groups 1) strings and some percussion and a piano centrally spread across the stage, 2) woodwinds and more percussion stage right and 3) brass and more percussion stage left. Each group is given slowly moving sequences of sound, often in the form of arpeggios for the strings, and each block has its own rise and fall. Thus the groups overlap in an ever-changing pattern. Harmonies are fundamentally tonal; simple diatonic intervals form the basis of the wind instruments' staggered chords. The phrase lengths are constructed so that there are three moments when all the groups reach a climax together; the first is early on, and the second represents the greatest surge of sound. From that point, the music is played in reverse: the entire piece is a palindrome.

Jan Sibelius  Oceanides

The Oceanides (Finnish title: Aallottaret (OH-LOW TAHL’), translated to English as Nymphs of the Waves or Spirits of the Waves; original working title Rondeau der Wellen; in English, Rondo of the Waves), Op. 73, is a single-movement tone poem for orchestra written in 1913–14 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece, which refers to the nymphs in Greek mythology who inhabited the Mediterranean Sea, premiered on 4 June 1914 at the Norfolk Music Festival in Connecticut with Sibelius conducting. Praised upon its premiere as "the finest evocation of the sea ... ever ... produced in music", the tone poem, in D major, consists of two subjects, said to represent the playful activity of the nymphs and the majesty of the ocean, respectively. Sibelius gradually develops this material over three informal stages: first, a placid ocean; second, a gathering storm; and third, a thunderous wave-crash climax. As the tempest subsides, a final chord sounds, symbolizing the mighty power and limitless expanse of the sea.

Stylistically, many commentators have described The Oceanides as either an outright example of Impressionism or somehow derivative of that art movement. Others have countered that Sibelius's active development of the two subjects, his sparing use of scales favored by Impressionists, and his prioritization of action and structure over ephemeral, atmospheric background distinguish the piece from quintessential examples, such as Debussy's La mer.

As the story has it, he sent an original version ahead of his trip, but completed the final version on the trip over to the US.  Although the orchestra of the Norfolk Music Festival might not seem prestigious, that orchestra was comprised of musicians from the the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Oceanides            9:06            London Philharmonic Orchestra Sir Adrian Bolt Cond.            Sibelius: Tone Poems & Symphonies 5 - 7