THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2017-2018 37
Program Notes
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
PRELUDE, FUGUE AND RIFFS
Duration: ca. 8 minutes
Jazz formed an integral part of Leonard Bernstein’s musical
personality. The snap and sizzle and feel of jazz echoes
through many of his instrumental works and theater pieces,
from the Broadway shows On the Town, Wonderful Town
and, especially, West Side Story, through the opera Trouble
in Tahiti and the controversial Mass, to the Divertimento for
Orchestra. Jazz was also the subject of two of Bernstein’s
incomparable television lectures during the 1950s: “What is
Jazz?” on October 16, 1955 and “Jazz in Serious Music” on
January 25, 1959. The earlier program featured the premiere
of Bernstein’s most overtly jazz-oriented instrumental piece,
the Prelude, Fugue and Riffs for Clarinet and Jazz Ensemble,
with Benny Goodman as soloist. The work begins with a
Prelude for the brass (five trumpets and four trombones
augmented by percussion and bass) in conventional threepart
form: a fast, driving section in mixed meters; a central
passage in “slow drag” tempo; and a return of the driving
opening music. The loosely built Fugue for the five saxes
(without percussion or bass) that follows is a musical
progeny of the jazz fugue in Milhaud’s La Création du monde
of 1923, which was the principal focus of Bernstein’s 1959
television lecture. (The lectures are available in print in The
Joy of Music 1955 and The Infinite Variety of Music 1959.)
The clarinet soloist is introduced in the concluding Riffs for
Everyone, which recalls themes from the two earlier sections
and intertwines them with “riffs” (short, repeated melodic
figures that are stock-in-trade for both jazz arrangements
and improvisations) to bring the work to a rousing close.
HEINZ KARL GRUBER
AERIAL, Duration: ca. 25 minutes
Overview
Mary Shelley’s cautionary novel about Dr. Victor Frankenstein
and the monster he created in his laboratory is perhaps even
more relevant in these days of DNA sequencing and genetic
engineering than it was when it was published in 1818,
and it is the title of the work that won for HK Gruber (his
preferred professional name) international recognition in
1978. Gruber, composer, conductor, chansonnier and double
bassist, was born in Vienna in 1943 and sang in the famed
Vienna Boys Choir as a child and later studied composition,
performance and dance at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik.
While he was playing double bass with the contemporary
music ensemble “die reihe” and the Vienna Tonkünstler
Orchestra in the 1960s, Gruber was also composing
actively, and his Concerto for Orchestra won a prize at the
Österreichische Jugendkulturwoche (“Austrian Youth Culture
Week”) in 1966. Gruber has also gained a reputation as a
cabaret-style performer during, and he created a sensation
as the “chansonnier” in the premiere of his Frankenstein!!
in Liverpool in November 1978; he has since appeared
around the world in the role. He has continued to conduct
(he was composer-conductor of the BBC Philharmonic
Orchestra in Manchester from 2009 to 2015), perform as
chansonnier and compose, earning special recognition
for his orchestral and concerted works and his operas
Gomorra, Gloria von Jaxtberg, Geschichten aus dem Wiener
Wald and Der Herr Nordwind.”
What To Listen For
Gruber wrote, “Aerial was composed in 1998-1999 on a
commission from the British Broadcasting Corporation for
the BBC Promenade Concerts; it was performed at Royal
Albert Hall on July 29, 1999 by Håkan Hardenberger and the
BBC Symphony under Neeme Järvi. The concerto stretches
the soloist’s skills not only in terms of virtuosity, stamina and
the use of multiple mutes, but also through the requirements
to play cow horn as well as trumpet and piccolo trumpet, the
ability to sing and play simultaneously, and the employment
of playing with slides removed. Each trumpet valve leads to a
small curved tube that can slide to allow subtle adjustments
in pitch.
“The concerto offers two aerial views, firstly an imaginary
landscape beneath the Northern Lights bearing an
inscription from Emily Dickinson’s poem Wild Nights: Done
with the compass — Done with the chart! In part, this refers to
the pure invention that can be conjured up through the skills
of a great trumpeter, heard here as a magician casting an
incantatory spell. The movement opens with the trumpeter
simultaneously playing and singing the work into being,
conjuring up the mythological image of the creation of music
as Pan blows into the reed into which the nymph Syrinx
has been transformed. As the orchestra enters, the soloist
explores the notes available with slide-less playing, providing