Program

Gianandrea Noseda, conductor
J’Nai Bridges, mezzo-soprano

Edvard Grieg
(1843–1907)

Suite No. 1 from Peer Gynt, Op. 46 (15’)

• i. Morning Mood
• ii. Åse's Death
• iii. Anitra's Dance
• iv. In the Hall of the Mountain King

Luciano Berio
(1925–2003)

Folk Songs (23’)

• i. Black is the Color (USA)
• ii. I Wonder as I Wander (USA)
• iii. Loosin yelav (Armenia)
• iv. Rossignolet du bois (France)
• v. A la femminisca (Sicily)
• vi. La donna ideale (Italy)
• vii. Ballo (Italy)
• viii. Motettu de Tristura (Sardinia)
• ix. Malurous qu'o uno fenno (Auvergne, France)
• x. Lo fiolairé (Auvergne, France)
• xi. Azerbaijan Love Song (Azerbaijan)
• J’Nai Bridges, mezzo-soprano

Intermission

Carlos Simon
(b. 1986)

Songs of Separation (20’)

• (World Premiere, NSO Commission)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(1840–1893)

Romeo and Juliet – Fantasy Overture (19’)

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Meet the National Symphony Orchestra

Gianandrea Noseda, Music Director, The Roger Sant and Congresswoman Doris Matsui Chair

Steven Reineke, Principal Pops Conductor

Program Notes

© 2023 Thomas May

Edvard Grieg: Suite No. 1 from Peer Gynt, Op. 46

The success of the incidental music to Peer Gynt gave an enormous boost to the career Edvard Grieg. It didn’t hurt that his name became linked to that of Norway’s greatest playwright, Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). Ibsen came up with the idea of supplying his epic verse drama Peer Gynt (published in 1867) with music for its first stage production in 1876.

Ibsen is today primarily recognized as the pioneer of a probing realism that became the foundation of modern theater—above all in such “problem plays” exploring marital unhappiness as A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler. These generated widespread controversy, but before them came the colorful, outsize adventures of his anti-heroic Peer Gynt—an existential Everyman who is shown by turns to be a braggart, an outlaw, a greedy capitalist, and a frail old man. Ibsen realized how helpful music would be in bringing Peer Gynt’s fantasy-filled, far-ranging allegory to the stage. So he hand-picked his younger compatriot Grieg, who had already been collaborating on theater projects for a company in Oslo.

Grieg produced 20-some separate movements (totaling around 90 minutes) and scored his music for a combination of orchestra, soloists, and chorus. In 1888 he prepared an orchestral suite from the full score—the one we hear—and a second suite followed in 1891.

“Morning Mood” is a mini-tone poem that originally set the scene as the curtain raiser to Act 4, in which Peer begins his overseas adventures. Grieg’s pentatonic melody suggests a hint of the exotic. He referred to the first forte chord as the moment when the rising sun breaks over the horizon. “Åse’s Death” accompanies the poignant scene preceding “Morning Mood” (at the end of Act 3), when Peer has returned home after some wanderings just as his mother, Åse, lies dying. Grieg touchingly scores this music for the string orchestra alone, using mutes to effect a veiled sound.

In “Anitra’s Dance,” we have moved from the Norwegian landscape to a North African desert, where Peer continues to have adventures and play changing roles. Anitra is the daughter of a Bedouin leader whom Peer tries to seduce before she outwits him. The music is again scored for muted strings, but with the added touch of a triangle.

The best-known number, “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” which originally included a chorus representing the trolls, accompanies one of Ibsen’s allegorical scenes. Peer is shown having an hallucinogenic run-in with threatening trolls after he encounters their king. They chase Peer out of their mountain realm, and the mountain collapses just as he flees, to a din of crashing cymbals. Grieg uses the simple device of a steady crescendo and accelerating tempo to spine-tingling effect.

Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, strings

Luciano Berio: Folk Songs

When he was asked to define his concept of music, Luciano Berio replied that, for him, it incorporates “everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.” This focus on listening points to Berio’s view of musical experience as based on a malleable process rather than an object.

Berio was born on Italy’s northwest Ligurian coast into a family with strong musical traditions. Both his grandfather and father were composers as well as organists in the local church. Although he became associated with the hotbed of the postwar European avant-garde, Berio maintained a distance from its more dogmatic tendencies. He applied this philosophy of open ears to the whole of human culture, for which he had an endless appetite: “high” and “low,” elite and populist. He found inspiration across the board in literature, theatricality, circus performances, linguistics, anthropology, politics.

Among the best known of his works, Folk Songs, dates from Berio’s “American decade” in the 1960s, when he taught at the pioneering Mills College in Oakland, California and later at The Juilliard School. His compositions from this period in particular, such as Sinfonia, responded to the creative ferment of the era and left an enduring impression on audiences and fellow composers. While still a student at the Milan Conservatory, he had met the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian—a legendary figure who inspired a wide range of composers in the late 20th century—and they married in 1950. It was for Berberian’s endlessly malleable voice that he originally wrote Folk Songs in 1964 on a commission from Mills College. The original version was scored for a chamber ensemble of seven players; Berio created an orchestral version in 1973.

“I have always sensed a profound uneasiness while listening to popular songs performed with piano accompaniment,” Berio wrote, explaining his desire to devise his own arrangements of some well-known tunes as “a tribute to the artistry and the vocal intelligence of Cathy Berberian.” He made his selection for the cycle from “old records, printed anthologies, or [songs he] heard sung by folk musicians and friends.”

Yet two of the cycle’s eleven songs—La donna ideale and Ballo—use tunes Berio himself wrote during his student years in the 1940s, setting old folk texts. And the first two songs (Black is the Color and I Wonder as I Wander) are also modern melodies by the American folklorist John Jacob Niles. The other songs originate from the following regions: Loosin yelav (“The Moon Has Risen”), Armenia; Rossignolet du bois (“Little Nightingale”), France; A la femminisca (a song sung by fishermen’s wives), Sicily; Mottetu de Tristura (“Song of Sadness”), Sardinia; Malurous qu’o uno fenno (“Wretched is he who has a wife”) Lo fiolairé (“The Girl at the Shining Wheel”), both from the Auvergne region of France; and, for the closing love song, Azerbaijan.

Berio wrote that he “recomposed” the pre-existing songs by giving them “a new rhythmic and harmonic interpretation.” The instrumental part “is meant to underline and comment on the expressive and cultural roots of each song. Such roots signify not only the ethnic origins of the songs but also the history of the authentic uses that have been made of them.”

Instrumentation: Two flutes (second doubles piccolo), one oboe, two clarinets, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, harp, two snare drums, two chimes, two tambourines, two crotales, two springs, two tam tams, two wood blocks, strings

Carlos Simon: Songs of Separation

Even before Carlos Simon began his three-year tenure as Kennedy Center Composer-in-Residence in the fall of 2021, local audiences could get a sense of his versatility from performances here of his brief but powerful string quartet, An Elegy: Cry from the Grave, and his one-act chamber opera, Night Trip. Both works also underscore Simon’s commitment to addressing issues of social justice and racial inequity in America. The young composer, who was born in Washington, D.C., believes in music’s power to give voice to the marginalized and to shape aspirations for a better world.

Simon grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, in a family that encouraged his love of music as a way to participate in singing and playing for the services at the African-American Pentecostal church his father founded. He likes to compare his role as a composer to what his father, part of a multigenerational line of preachers, does from the pulpit. Simon has again become a D.C. resident: in 2019 he joined the performing arts faculty at Georgetown University, where his work on the Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Project inspired him to write Requiem for the Enslaved. A “rap opera” featuring spoken word and Hip Hop artist Marco Pavé, Requiem appears on Simon’s debut album for the Decca label (released last summer); it was nominated for the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category in this year’s Grammy Awards^®.

Songs of Separation for mezzo-soprano and orchestra was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in connection with Simon’s current residency. The ordeal of the COVID pandemic concentrated his attention on experiences of separation and loss. Searching for texts for this orchestral song cycle, which he wrote for J’Nai Bridges, he found himself drawn backward in time to the work of the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī.

“We all, as humans, experience separation in a variety of forms,” Simon writes in his note to the score. “Whether it be through the death of a loved one, a break-up, a divorce, or a permanent relocation from family and friends, a parting of ways is a part of life for us all.” He explains that the timeless eloquence of Rūmī appealed to him in particular because he realized it could serve as a vehicle to grapple with “negative things that we tend to shy away from.” Summing up the personal message he finds in these poems—“What hurts you, also blesses you”—Simon describes how the pain of loss can lead to gaining something as well, which he says is “the real inspiration and hope of the piece.”

Using the translations/interpretations of Rūmī’s texts by Coleman Barks, Simon selected four poems that “depict moments of grief and sorrow as well as hope and encouragement”: “The Garden,” “Burning Hell,” “Dance,” and “We Are All the Same.” He wrote the four songs specifically to highlight the unique beauty and power of Bridges’ wide range. Simon prefers not to pre-program audiences with guideposts about what to listen for but encourages them to bring their own background to the experience: “Everybody’s dealt with loss in a certain way. So everyone will bring something different.”

Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, bass drum, bell tree, drum set, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbal, tam tam, triangle, vibraphone, strings

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet – Fantasy Overture

The idea of distilling Shakespeare’s early tragedy from the mid-1590s into music seems almost predestined for the strengths of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, so it’s not surprising that Romeo and Juliet became a vehicle for the Russian’s first major breakthrough as an orchestral composer. Just a few years out of conservatory, the young, still-unknown Tchaikovsky took up a suggestion from his mentor, Mily Balakirev, to musically recount the story of Romeo and Juliet. Balakirev, a composer and mathematician, played guru to a whole generation of composers seeking to establish a uniquely Russian musical identity.

It was Balakirev’s idea to organize episodes from Shakespeare’s play of the star-crossed lovers into an independently coherent sequence of musical ideas. The piece depicts not only the young Romeo and Juliet discovering their love, but the compassionate Friar Laurence who understands their plight, as well as the ever-present background of violent enmity between the feuding Montagues and Capulets. Balakirev even recommended how Tchaikovsky could use the harmonic relationships between distant keys to enhance the story: the music associated with the young lovers, for example, is in a key (D-flat major) far removed from the tragic B minor that he uses to illustrate the clash between their respective families.

Tchaikovsky wrote the piece over six weeks near the end of 1869 but was characteristically unsatisfied and returned to revise it twice, completing the final version in 1880. In the process, he condensed the main elements of the play into a powerful emotional arc that makes sense on its own terms and anticipates the sweeping emotional intensity and directness of his later symphonies.

Following a somber, moody introduction—an Orthodox chant-tinged chorale intoned by lower woodwinds portraying Friar Laurence—the music quickens with martial themes that vividly foreground the violence of the feuding families. Like parting clouds, this gives way to an expressive theme (English horn and viola at first) representing the yearning of the lovers and their unbreakable bond. It grows more passionate in Tchaikovsky’s orchestration but cannot escape interruption from the feud music.

The funereal final section accompanies the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but a soaring final statement of their theme suggests that their love endures beyond this world—which, as the stabbing chords of the last bars remind us, is too riven by harshness and hate to allow such beauty to survive.

Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, strings

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