Bartók wasn’t the first to write a Concerto for Orchestra. The Italian composer Alfredo Casella, for example, was commissioned to write one for the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1937. But most of the examples I’ve selected for this blog were written in the decades following Bartók’s beacon.

Leonard Bernstein
© HNH International

And Thou shalt number seven Sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years… shall be unto thee forty times nine years… And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim Liberty throughout the land.

Orchestral players underscore the significance of the number seven (sheva in Hebrew) by whispering or shouting the number seven times. Later, an exclamation of hamishim (fifty) is followed by fanfare signals from the brass, imitating the motifs prescribed to the shofar, the traditional ram’s horn used to mark the fiftieth year as a holy year. Several of these fanfares are heard on pre-recorded tapes. Here is that first movement.

Free-Style Events (8.559100)

The 1980s was a good decade for concertos for orchestras. My first choice is Ukrainian composer Ivan Karabits’ Concerto for Orchestra No. 3, ‘Holosinnya’ (‘Lamentations’) which was commissioned by Virko Baley, the Ukrainian-American composer, conductor and pianist, who gave the premiere of the work with the Las Vegas Symphony Orchestra on 29 October 1989.

For Karabits (1945-2002), with few opportunities for his music to be performed in the West, a world premiere in the United States was a highly significant event, and he used the opportunity to make a powerful, humanitarian statement arising from two terrible twentieth-century tragedies that enveloped Ukraine: first the Holodomor (or terror famine), a man-made famine perpetuated by Stalin’s policies towards Ukraine in 1932-33 when the collectivisation of agriculture was imposed, with the result that some seven million people starved to death; and secondly the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant disaster of April 1986.

In two linked movements, the concerto’s opening pages are marvellously evocative: they feature a special percussion instrument that Karabits (with help from his then thirteen-year-old son Kirill) made with little bells woven into tresses of hair, “whose delicate chimes”, wrote Karabits, “symbolise the voices that we hear from the past…”. These delicate chimes accompany a solo horn playing a sorrowful Ukrainian folk-melody, before brass blow into their instruments without any pitch, conjuring a sensation of rustling and whispering, and continuously repeated woodwind figuration evoke a mood of anguish, against which passionate, keening lyrical lines are heard on violins and cellos, leading finally to a mournful clarinet solo. During this Largo three climaxes exploiting the battery of percussion occur, each one rising in intensity, concluding with the appearance of spine-chilling flexatones (an image here of evil authoritarianism if there ever was one). Here is that opening movement.

Largo rubato (8.572633)

Rodion Shchedrin
Tatarstan.ru / CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

“I spent my childhood in the small Russian town of Aleksin, situated on the river Oka, 300 kilometres south of Moscow. My grandfather was an Orthodox priest there. When I was growing up, purely entertaining, commercial music was not yet as ubiquitous as it is now on television, radio, in stations, sea-ports and shops… It was still possible to hear choral songs, the sound of the accordion, the strumming of the balalaika, funeral laments, the cries of shepherds at dawn, coming from beyond a river, enveloped in fog. All that distant and now extinct musical atmosphere of a Russian province is strongly etched in my childhood memories. I think, in [the Concerto for Orchestra No. 5], it has found its own nostalgic echo.”

Here’s the concluding section of the work.

Four Russian Songs (8.572405)

Tan Dun
Photo: Nana Watanabe

An orchestra in a composer’s hands no longer remains a standard orchestra — it becomes the orchestra of that specific composer. The same instrumentation in the hands of Bartók or Stravinsky or Debussy becomes a completely different orchestra. I have always asked myself: what is my orchestra? What is the orchestra of the future? This piece, Concerto for Orchestra, is my answer.

It evolved from a concerto of mine commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic and was written with my opera Marco Polo in mind. Marco Polo took three different journeys: a geographical, musical and spiritual journey. In the first movement Light of Timespace, Marco Polo is making his spiritual journey through time and space. The brass and strings slide back and forth, much like the fading in and out of light or the dripping of ink on calligraphy paper. The sound stops, but the meaning of the notes still continues.

The second movement, Scent of Bazaar, opens to the aroma of Eastern markets with the trumpets and brass representing the spicy flavours and powerful perfumes.

With the third movement, The Raga of Desert, we hear Indian raga where every note is alive and has an infinite number of expressions. Here, I specifically focused on the blowing and bowing instruments and how they could sound like plucking instruments such as the sitar.

For the final movement, Marco Polo makes his arrival in The Forbidden City and I was trying to imagine what kind of light, colour and sound he saw and heard there.

Here’s the second movement.

Scent of Bazaar (8.570608)

Witold Lutosławski

 
Capriccio notturno ed arioso (8.553779)

Christopher Rouse
Photo: Jeffrey Herman via New York Classic Review

 
Concerto for Orchestra (8.559852)

Béla Bartók
© HNH International

 
 
Finale: Presto (8.572486)

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Catalogue No.: 8.559852

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The circle is no longer used in modern staff notation, but the notion of circles in music, how they can be represented in the laying out of a composition, continues to engage composers. Rondo form, for example, in which the music digresses but constantly comes back to where it started, continues to attract. This week’s blog homes in on a selection of works that use, shall we say, ‘circular’ musical ideas.

Anthony Girard (b. 1959) wrote a set of 24 preludes for piano which explore an inner journey, and which he titled Le cercle de la vie (The Circle of Life) (8.572993). The 2 sets of 12 preludes each depict an inner journey passing through different and opposing states of mind. If the sets were laid out on a circle, the North and South poles in the first set would be Joy (Prelude 1) and Sorrow (Prelude 7), with east and west representing Anxiety (Prelude 4) and Tranquillity (Prelude 10). Here you can listen to the corresponding stages in the second set:

Light (Prelude 13)
Darkness (Prelude 19)
Dream (Prelude 16)
Reality (Prelude 22)

Margaret Brouwer (b. 1940) wrote her 3-movement concerto Aurolucent Circles (8.559250) for the distinguished percussionist, Evelyn Glennie. She manufactured the word aurolucent by blending the idea of the lucent percussion sounds she uses in the work with the way sounds arc around the physical performance space, reminiscent of the aurora borealis. You can hear this arcing effect in sections of the central movement. Here’s an excerpt.

Round Time (8.572981) by Luis Tinoco (b. 1969) stands on points around the circle, looking inwards towards the centre point. The composer’s process of connecting the work’s starkly contrasting atmospheres is explained as follows:

Each of these seems to evolve in its own way and is linked to the others in the same way as the different shots in a TV control room are connected: several cameras film the same programme but from different angles, and the producer moves from shot to shot to bring a particular rhythm to the continuous flow of images. Here the composer chooses from a number of different layers of sound, producing a kaleidoscopic effect of ambiances that seem to come and go in a circular manner.

Christopher Rouse’s (b. 1949) intriguingly titled Wolf Rounds (8.572439) presents ‘circular’, or repetitive ideas that repeat over and over until metamorphosing to a new idea, which is then similarly repeated until becoming yet another. The episodes are of different lengths, so their repeated overlaps produce a constantly changing sonic landscape. But what about the Wolf in the title? The composer explains:

“My first impulse was to entitle the work Loops as it seemed to me that this was an accurate description of the processes involved in composing the piece. However, this title seemed a bit prosaic. The word ‘loops’, though, led me to think of the Latin word lupus, which means ‘wolf’. I was put in mind of the way in which wolves circle their prey, and these predatory rounds of course reminded me of the circular nature of my musical presentation. Thus the final title: Wolf Rounds.”

The opening section sets the scene.

It’s a short hop from a circle to a circus, so we’ll end with a couple of contrasting pieces that were written with the circular entertainment zone in mind.

The first is John Corigliano’s (b. 1938) Symphony No. 3 (8.559601), subtitled Circus Maximus, ancient Rome’s notorious setting for entertaining masses in the round with displays that were by turn spectacular and brutal. What goes around comes around. The composer explains the ancient and modern relationship in his symphony:

“The parallels between the high decadence of Rome and our present time are obvious. Entertainment dominates our culture, and ever-more-extreme ‘reality’ shows dominate our entertainment. Many of us have become as bemused by the violence and humiliation that flood the 500-plus channels of our television screens as those mobs of imperial Rome who considered the devouring of human beings by starving lions just another Sunday show. The shape of Circus Maximus was built both to embody and comment on this massive and glamorous barbarity.”

Here’s the opening of the sixth section, itself headed Circus Maximus.

To bow out today, we turn to Stravinsky and to the last piece he wrote for piano. It was commissioned, improbably, by the Barnum and Bailey circus troupe, as music to accompany a ballet of young elephants: his Circus Polka (8.570377). The legendary choreographer George Balanchine approached Stravinsky with the commission. Apparently, the conversation went something like this:

“I wondered if you’d like to do a little ballet with me, a polka perhaps?”
“For Whom?”
“For some elephants.”
“…How old?”
“Very young.”
“…”
“…?”
“All right… If they are very young elephants, I will do it.”.

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Catalogue No.: 8.559799

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