Past Performances

Saturday March 12, 2005 at 8:00 PM

A Choral Bestiary

Featuring Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb and Manuel Oltra's El bestiari de Pere Quart; with additional music by Irving Fine, John Tavener, Ivan Tcherepnin, Peter Willsher, and Yehudi Wyner.

Notes on this Performance

Mary Beekman, Director

For a composer, writing music about animals must feel like being a kid in a candy store with money to spend. As you will hear in tonight's concert, animals allow a composer's imagination to really run wild! Using pitch, rhythm, dynamics, tempo and timbre, composers create music which calls forth those aspects of an animal which come foremost to their minds. The most obvious aspect to depict musically is the animal's sound, but composers do not stop there. Their music might convey the physical: how the animal moves, how it looks, or even how it tastes. The composer might also allow the music to express his own feelings about the animal. Whether the results are humorous or stirring, they are always entertaining.

Our opening piece, Shenandoah's Ark provides a catalog of animals, which, for a work about Noah's ark, makes perfect sense. The text, written by the 17th century Calvinist theologian Gustavus Revius, ends moralistically. Sowash creates a vivid tableau of chaotic activity; thickly overlapping melodic lines of leaping intervals and lopsided rhythms describe the animals as they enter the ark.

Peter Willsher composed Every one suddenly burst out singing in memory of his friend Pat Scanlon, who died from Hodgkin's disease. The arpeggiated opening lines, in which the soprano climbs two octaves, suggest the uprising of a flock of birds suddenly taking wing. The abrupt activity of the opening also evokes the narrator's startled state. Then, as the poet Siegried Sassoon compares his delight to that of birds taking off in freedom and disappearing into the distance, Willsher depicts it musically by slowing the note values, bringing the dynamic down from fortissimo to pianissimo, and placing all of the vocal parts into the lower region of their respective registers. At the end of the work, the music's static quality suggests a flock of geese flying so high in the air as to seem motionless.

Subtitled "Four Vivariations", Irving Fine's McCord's Menagerie, settings of humorous poems by David McCord, keep up the drollery. With the bumbling "loo's" accompanying the tenor melody, Fine's setting of Vultur Gryphus implies a harmless creature. Instead of the movie western's ominous bird associated with death, Fine's animal seems too lazy and stupid to get his own food. McCord mentions the condor found in the vicinity of gipfel und spitzen... donner and blizten, German words for summit and peak and thunder and lightning. The latter two, also the names of two of Santa's reindeer suggest that hungry condors nonchalantly hang around large animals just in case something happens.

Jerboa, classified as the genus jaculus jaculus, is as active and scary in Fine's world as Vultur Gryphus is laid back and friendly. Fine agrees with those to whom a darting (the translation of the Latin jaculus) small rodent is sinister and creepy, attributes he conveys through abrupt entrances and minor tonality.

In Mole McCord compares the over-soul of man, a Unitarian concept put forth by Ralph Waldo Emerson, with the limited capacities of the mole, which he ultimately identifies as an under-soul. Fine sets the statement Man has an over-soul as though the possession of it gives him super powers; the busyness of the music setting what the mole has isn't clear suggests his subterranean burrowing.

In Clam, Fine and McCord give in to their silliest selves. McCord observes how man the diner and clam the dinner (in chowder no less) both evolved from the same ancestor; man is saved from the clam's fate, according to McCord, by his own initiative and work ethic. Fine has a lot of fun with the sounds; once again the accompaniment, in this instance a repeated motif in the bass creating a passacaglia on the syllable bng, suggests insouciance, which explains why the clam never got ahead. Fine tells the singers that the accompaniments "Vv" and "Zh" represent fog horns, but this listener hears the inarticulate efforts of the bivalve to speak.

Britten used the poetry of the 18th century poet Christopher Smart for his cantata Rejoice in the Lamb; his music is at turns forceful and charming. The poetry was first published four years before Britten's composition of 1943. Smart wrote it while locked in an asylum for the insane. The inventory of Old Testament characters and the animals associated with them illustrates the introductory line: let man and beast appear before Him and magnify His name together. Britten's opening movement, with its vibrantly rhythmic music, bears witness to the strength and ferocity of both man and beast. The final movement also contains an inventory, but this one catalogues fantastic associations of rhymes with various instruments. These two vigorous movements for chorus enclose three of the most charming arias ever to appear in choral literature. In the third one, a tenor sings a hymn to flowers that is ravishingly beautiful and affecting. The first two arias, however, pay tribute to the cat and the mouse. Cat lovers easily identify with Smart's praise of his cat Jeffrey. Britten's repetitive motif in the organ evokes both the cat's weaving his body seven times round with elegant quickness, and a characteristic mentioned in part of the poem Britten did not use but surely knew: for he can spraggle upon waggle. Those familiar with cats may also be reminded of the ball cats curl up into and their contortions in bathing themselves.

Britten and Smart admire the cat as a beloved pet, but they portray the mouse as an heroic figure. Britten's organ part accompanies the alto soloist with dotted rhythmic figures reminiscent of trumpets' call to arms for battle. Britten uses a speech like rhythm known as parlando to set the words of the mouse to the cat. He also interrupts the musical flow of the aria with a low parlando to create the narrator's melodramatic aside: for this is a true case.

In 1987 Ivan Tcherepnin created both the text and the music for this piece, Butterfly Dream / Dartington Stone, to my knowledge his only work for chorus, to celebrate a music festival in Dartington, England. The opening motif, which recurs near the end of the work, creates a dreamlike effect and also a sense of hesitance through elongated note values, fragmentation of the text among the voices, and erratic and serendipitous movement of the vocal parts in relation to each other. The music fits the opening text, in which a Chinese emperor does not know whether he is man dreaming of butterfly, or butterfly dreaming of man. Tcherepnin deepens the riddle, however, by using this same uncertain music to set his line "thank the earth for certainty." He also has fun with the word Dartington, turning it into "darting tone" and then illustrating that with fast moving lines which then allude to the "solid stone" of Dartington. In Tcherepnin's world, things are not what they seem; they might even be the opposite of what they are.

The innocence of the lamb inspires the mood for The Lamb, a simple yet beautiful work of John Tavener. The entire work emanates from the opening musical line setting William Blake's eponymous poem Little lamb, who made thee? Tavener takes this line and accompanies it with a strict inversion; where the original line moves up a major third, the inverted line moves down a major third in mirror image. After extending the opening line by three notes, he has the sopranos sing it in reverse, in music known as retrograde. He takes this longer line and its retrograde and again inverts it for the altos to accompany the sopranos. He follows this with the original shorter line accompanied by all voices moving together in more traditionally tonal ways to end the piece.

These three settings of Yehudi Wyner of poems by Marianne Moore reveal his sense of humor and amazement. In Oh to be a dragon, the opening alto line becomes more and more rhythmically detailed to reflect the narrator's glee as she contemplates the delights of being a dragon. Wyner has great fun with the musical description of the dragon's mercurial ability to be immense or at times invisible. The melodic lines describing the dragon's great size are expansive in length, note value, and vocal range. In contrast, the singers intone at times invisible with extremely short note values, representing "invisible" by a minimal presence. Wyner uses these quick repeated notes again to describe the fluctuations of the jellyfish from visible to invisible. Manuel Oltra uses them in Bacil as well; the tiny vote values sung quickly portray the tiny microbe.

In Jellyfish Wyner's fast tempo and irregular vocal entrances convey not only the elusive quality of the jellyfish visually and physically, but also the narrator's attempts to catch it. At the end of the movement, alternating notes a whole step apart setting the word fluctuating create a musical fluctuation; in fact, the accompaniment throughout teems with vacillating tones. Musical word painting continues in Chameleon, as vocal parts interweave to describe the chameleon's twining itself around grapevine stems. Wyner uses dark tonal shapes to suggest that the chameleon's ability to change color, or snap the spectrum up for food, has a sinister quality.

Like Pere Quart, the poet whose works he sets, Manuel Oltra has a lot of fun describing beasts in his Bestiari de Pere Quart. In Pregadeu, the imitative fugue, the predominant characteristic of the compositional style of sacred Renaissance music, aptly describes religiosa. In one of the few instances of its kind in this concert, one can hear the actual song of the cricket in this same work. The bee's bumbling flight and characteristic buzz are represented by the tenors' trill, in which five 16th notes make up a quarter note instead of the usual four, so that the sound is ungainly and lopsided.

In Xanguet, the sopranos' initial line is ultimately passed among all the parts from the bass, up through the tenor and alto, to the soprano. The rising fifth that opens the interval and the rising tessitura of the line passing among the singers, allude both to the waves the fish swims in and the arc of the fish's flight. In Gripau Oltra depicts the hopping of the toad by the opening theme of two notes passed among the voices. For Musclo, he mourns the death of the mussel with a dirge, even though its demise results from being cooked in cream and buried under rice and fish.

The short length and few words of Bacil inspire Oltra to break up the monosyllabic words with rests and gradually build the periodicity of entrances; as a result you can hear the microbes multiplying. In Rata-Pinada the minor key and ferocious entrances play to all of our fears about the bat. For Rossinyol Caduc Oltra creates a musical subtext by having the lower parts intone the "sadder but wiser" interpretation of the nightingale's sweet song of love, as sung by the soprano solo. And, finally, in Elephant Oltra captures the heavy tread, nasal trumpeting, and circus appeal, while setting Quart's highly cynical interpretation of the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

Further Notes on the Text

Elana M. Messer, Soprano

Joan Oliver i Sallarès (1899-1986) is the Ogden Nash of Catalonia: his agile, whimsical, slightly subversive poems are mined with puns. A law student, playwright, author, journalist, prolific translator and recipient of numerous belles-lettres awards, Oliver is one of the most prominent Catalonian poets of the twentieth century. In 1937, under the pseudonym "Pere Quart," he published Bestiari, a collection of epigrammatic poetry written in a self-confessed "spirit of shameful frivolity," and dedicated to his beloved dog Camus.

Manuel Oltra Ferrer (b. 1922), a successful pianist, conductor and composer, has been a major force in the development of Spanish choral music. Oltra's compositions include symphonic works, chamber music, folk songs and works for "cobla" as well as choral compositions; "El Bestiari de Pere Quart" was published in 1964. In 1994 Oltra was awarded both the National Music Prize and the National Popular and Traditional Culture Prize by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

The first piece in the set is about a sanctimonious Praying Mantis, or pregadéu pels rostolls, who prays fervently for the forgiveness of others' sins. In the next piece, Oliver imagines the Ladybug (hear the wings whirring?) as a drop of blood in a shimmering metallic shell, or as a ruby gemstone clasped in a platinum ring setting. In Goby, flying fish soar peacefully through crystal clouds, but the music grows increasingly frantic until the terrible truth is revealed: the crystal clouds are salt, and the moons overhead are drops of oil in a pan.

The Toad is dreaming that he can fly; Oltra thoughtfully sets this one as a pianissimo lullaby so we won't wake him up. Mussel is another one with mischievous wordplay and a surprise ending. It begins as a funeral requiem, but the music is more sinister than somber; sure enough, the title character is laid to rest on a dinner plate. Beure can mean either "drink" or "absorb," and while the expression a doble queix means "immoderately," the phrase doble queix ("double jaw,") refers to a bivalve. Listen for the sizzle of the paella. Bacillus sounds like bubbles in a test tube or microscopic creepy-crawlies in a petri dish.

The Bat vanishes into the darkness like a snuffed-out spark at a witches' Sabbath. Obsolete Nightingale is a dialogue between a hyper-romantic nightingale and a cynical second voice (perhaps a neighbor leaning out a window?) The title suggests that Oliver doesn't side with the bird. Finally, in Elephant, Oliver offers a scathing critique of a certain institution (and gets in a swipe at lawyers along the way.) Oltra's treatment of this text is gleeful, filled with burlesque flourishes and mocking fanfares. In an old parable, several blind men try to identify a mysterious object. One feels its legs and insists that they are palace columns, another feels its ear and declares it to be a flag, and so on. These men are blind to the world around them, don't communicate with each other and have no sense of the whole, yet they shamelessly preach "the truth." Wonder what institution is being skewered? The clue is in the last two lines of the poem...

"El Bestiari de Pere Quart" offers evidence that Manuel Oltra and Joan Oliver—two great artists of the twentieth century —are kindred spirits; and we are delighted to share the intersection of their work.

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