DMA Vocal Coaching and Accompanying Recital No. 4

RUSSIAN MOURNING

PROGRAM NOTES

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This recital is a representation of music that was born in times and places of conflict, as well as some of the textual references embodying that conflict. These pieces were chosen not only for their musical challenges, but also as a vehicle for dealing with conflict that still is occurring today.

 

Sergei Rachmaninoff is perhaps best known for his career as a concert pianist. Second to that is his life as a composer.  Because of his adept piano skills, many of his works are for piano in various forms: solo, chamber, or with orchestra. He is also known for his choral pieces and more than eighty works for voice and piano. The Vocalise comes from a set of fourteen songs published in 1915. It is most notable, because it is his only work for voice and piano that does not have a text setting. Long phrases and an extended range make this piece challenging for the singer while singing only on one vowel. It’s popularity has been noted in all instruments and combinations thereof. Three years after these fourteen songs were published, Rachmaninoff would leave Russia a year after the October Revolution in 1918 for America. He would live in America for the remainder of his life, while always longing to return to his homeland, and is buried in Valhalla, New York. 

 

Another Russian composer living in America post-revolution was Sergei Prokofiev. However, his time in America was not as successful as Rachmaninoff and ended up spending years in Paris. He would return to Moscow in 1936. The Flute Sonata in D Major, Op. 94 was written between 1942 and 1943 amidst the strains of the Second World War. He had evacuated Moscow to Alma-Ata. Originally, the completion date was to be 1 December 1942. However, with paper shortages, power outages, and other commitments on commissions and financial woes, this date quickly passed without completion.  It would finally premiere a year later on 7 December 1943 in Moscow. Unfortunately, this version initially was not full of enthusiasm by its audience and instrumentalists. Thus, a version for violin and piano was created in 1944. Being Prokofiev’s only work for flute, advocates of the flute sonata would bring attention to the neglected work bringing it into the canon of the flute repertoire. Prokofiev suffered a hypertensive crisis and died in 1953. His death was overshadowed by the death of Joseph Stalin who died the same day.  

 

Kyiv born composer, Reinhold Glière studied at the Moscow Conservatory and would later become a teacher to Prokofiev. For a brief time, he would become the director of the Kyiv Conservatory before moving positions to the Moscow Conservatory, where he periodically taught until 1941. The Op. 35 pieces were composed after his return from studying conducting in Berlin with German composer and conductor Oskar Fried. Political conflicts were still prevalent after the 1905 revolution. With a nod to neo-romanticism, these four selections have become standard pieces of the horn repertoire, although two of the pieces,Romance and Valse Triste, were originally composed for clarinet. The four as a whole are character pieces that focus on rich harmonies and expansive melodies. Glière would outlive his former pupil by another three years, passing away in 1956. 

 

Songs of Dances and Death is Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s third song cycle. In this set of four songs, Mussorgsky uses texts by Arseny Golenischev-Kutuzov, a friend of the composer, who also provided the text to Mussorgsky’s first cycle, Sunless in 1874. Beginning in 1875, Mussorgsky composed the first three pieces of the latter cycle: Lullaby, Serenade, and Trepak. Completing the cycle is the fourth piece, Field Marshal in 1877, just four years before his own death just a week after his 42nd birthday. Each of the pieces are a representation of encountering death: death of an infant, death of a small girl, death of a drunken man, and death on the battlefield. In each piece, the voice always begins as a narrator to set up the scenes that are to follow. In the first song, Lullaby, the mother is also a character that interjects as she is trying to fight for her child’s life. In Serenade, death comes to a window as a knight in shining armor to take a sick girl away to death. The third piece contains the dance movement of the Trepak. In it, death dances with a man that has gone past the limitations of drunkenness, and because of this will die. The final movement portrays death as a magnificent being riding on a horse with her “white bones glistening in the moonlight.” She has arrived at the moment when the battle has dispersed, but the remains of dead soldiers are still lying on the ground. She speaks that “Life put you at odds, but I am here to reconcile you” and “no one will remember you in death, but me.” These four songs seem to be a commentary on the quality of life people endured during the late-nineteenth century in Russia. In them, death often seems like pleasant option. Which begs the question: was life so terrible, that it was better to be dead?