Program Notes

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     The decade which began in 1910 should have been the best of times.  The world embraced modernity. Advances in science, technology and medicine made life easier, healthier, longer.  The arts thrived, with masterpieces created in a dizzying variety of styles, from the final blossoming of Romanticism to Impressionism in its many forms, Primitivism, Expressionism and every sort of Modernism.  The same was true in music.  It is difficult to believe that the first three miniatures featured in this album were composed within a year or two of each other. 

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     Sergei Prokofiev (1891 – 1953) was only 19 in 1910, and still a student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.  In only a few years, he will develop his reputation as a rebel for the dissonance and percussiveness of his compositions.  But his Prelude Opus 12 #7 (“The Harp”) is filled with good humor and the optimism of the age. It is only in light of the events that followed, both in the world and in his own life, that the optimism seems somewhat premature…

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     Claude Debussy (1862-1918), on the other hand, was a composer at the height of his creative powers when he wrote his magnificent Preludes. “Les collines d’Anacapri” was inspired by the beautiful island of Anacapri, its church bells tolling at a distance, its sunlight reflected in the sea, its easy grace, the songs of its taverns.  “With the freedom of a popular song” is one of the score’s directions. Everything in this music evokes beauty, ease, voluptuousness even – and yet, and yet…  there is just a whiff of decadence, something a little tired, a little jaded….

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     The Preludes Opus 32 of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) represent something of a distillation of his Romanticism.  The language is condensed and purified of all self-indulgence of the composer’s youth.  The G Major Prelude No. 5 is an oasis of calm and reflection in this passionate and stormy collection.  But underneath the transcendent beauty and peace of this masterpiece, there is an undercurrent of world-weariness, an autumnal quality, a pessimism well-justified by events.

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     For the clouds were gathering on the horizon.  In 1911, Italy declared was on the Ottoman Empire, and peace in the Balkans was shattered.  In far-away China and Mexico, conflicts boil over into revolution. In 1912, the Titanic, the greatest technological creation of man, succumbs to the impersonal forces of cruel nature. Age-old conflicts in Europe exploded when a teenage anarchist murdered Archduke Ferdinand of Austria.  All wars are hell, but World War I was an order of magnitude more horrible.  Poison gas, trench warfare, attacks on civilians became normal.  And young men died.  Millions of them. In the words of A. E. Housman

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
    To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
    But young men think it is, and we were young.

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     Artists and musicians responded by fulfilling their patriotic duty.  They died too.  Franz Marc, the painter represented on this CD, Umberto Boccioni who created the most celebrated portrait of Ferruccio Busoni, Egon Shiele, and so many more. Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), the French patriot, joined the war effort, despite his age.  He drove a truck evacuating the injured at the Verdun front.  It did not take long for him to become passionately anti-war.  One of the greatest masterpieces he completed during the war was Le Tombeau de Couperin, each movement dedicated to a fallen friend. Like many artists, Ravel responded to the horror of war by withdrawing in his mind to a glorious, and largely imaginary, past.  The music evokes the harpsichord dance suites of Francois Couperin which added even more brilliance to the glorious halls of Versailles during the reign of France’s Sun King, Louis XiV. This suite has many of the standard Baroque forms, a Prelude and a Fugue, three dances, a Forlane, Menuet and Rigaudon, and a brilliant Toccata.  But it is not Baroque music, not in its rich textures and exquisite harmonies, and not in the complexities of its emotional states.  Rather it is reminiscent of the paintings of Watteau or Fragonard, where the Baroque style is seen through a veil of dreams.

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     Other artists faced the horrors of war head-on, allowing their experiences to change and reshape their language.  The American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) is best known for his lush and lovely Impressionist works.  In his Piano Sonata he finds a new language.  Some of his earlier impressionism still remains, but it is now combined with an almost Expressionist bitterness and a post-Romantic passion, all within a classical Sonata form.