THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2016-2017 51 Program Notes Concierto with an evocative, typically Spanish rhythmic pattern of ambiguous meter that courses throughout the movement. The orchestra, in colorful fiesta garb, soon enters while the guitar’s brilliant, virtuoso display continues. The haunting Adagio, among the most beautiful and beloved pieces ever written for guitar, is based on a theme of Middle Eastern ancestry, given in the plangent tones of the English horn, around which the soloist weaves delicate arabesques of sound as the music unfolds. The finale’s lilting simplicity (one commentator noted its similarity to a Spanish children’s song) serves as a foil to the imposing technical demands for the soloist, who is required to negotiate almost the entire range of the instrument’s possibilities. MANUEL DE FALLA The Three-Cornered Hat, Ballet in Two Parts DURATION: ca. 40 minutes Overview The Three-Cornered Hat concerns a village miller and his pretty wife. The Corregidor (mayor) is attracted to the miller’s wife, and makes his advances. She tells her husband to watch as she spurns the old man’s attempts at love. The Corregidor chases her, but becomes aware of the teasing intrigue between husband and wife, and departs. That evening the village festivities are interrupted by the local constabulary, who have come to arrest the miller on a charge trumped up by the Corregidor to get him out of the way. The Corregidor appears as the miller is led away, but falls into the millstream as he is pursuing the girl. She runs off in search of her husband while the Corregidor removes his sodden clothes, including his three-cornered hat — symbol of his office — hangs them on a chair outside the mill, and jumps into the absent girl’s bed to ward off a chill. Meanwhile, the miller has escaped and returned home. He sees the Corregidor’s discarded clothes and believes himself betrayed by his wife. Vowing to get even, he exchanges his garments for those of the official, scribbles on the wall “The wife of the Corregidor is also very pretty,” and runs off in search of his conquest. The Corregidor emerges to find only the miller’s clothes. He puts them on just in time for the police, hunting their escaped prisoner, to arrest him by mistake. The miller’s wife returns, followed by the miller, and the two are happily reconciled. MAURICE RAVEL La valse, Poème Chorégraphique DURATION: ca. 12 minutes Overview Ravel first considered composing a musical homage to Johann Strauss as early as 1906. The idea forced itself upon him again a decade later, but during the years of World War I, he could not bring himself to work on a score he had tentatively titled “Wien” (“Vienna”), and it was not until January 1919 that he was immersed in the composition of his tribute to Vienna — “waltzing frantically,” as he wrote to a friend. He saw La Valse both as “a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz” and as a “fantastic and fatefully inescapable whirlpool.” The “inescapable whirlpool” was the First World War toward which Vienna marched in three-quarter time, salving its social and political conscience with the luscious strains of Johann Strauss. Ravel completed La Valse in piano score by the end of 1919, and then made a piano duet version and undertook the orchestration, which he finished in the spring of the following year. What To Listen For A surrealistic haze shrouds the opening of La Valse, a vague introduction from which fragments of themes gradually emerge. In the manner typical of the Viennese waltz, several continuous sections follow, each based on a different melody. At the half-way point of the score, however, the murmurs of the introduction return, and the melodies heard previously in clear and complete versions are now fragmented, played against each other, and are unable to regain the rhythmic flow of their initial appearances. The musical panacea of 1855 cannot smother the reality of 1915, however, and the music becomes consumed by the harsh thrust of the roaring triple meter transformed from a seductive dance into a demonic juggernaut. At the almost unbearable peak of tension, the dance is torn apart by a violent five-note figure, a gesture so alien to the triple meter that it destroys the waltz and brings this brilliant, forceful and disturbing work to a shattering close. © 2017 Dr. Richard E. Rodda Please visit www.FloridaOrchestra.org for our full program notes.
19572FO
To see the actual publication please follow the link above