Malcolm Arnold
Tam O'Shanter Overture, Op. 51
No, this piece is not an advertisement for a brand of whiskey, but next time you’re stocking up on “spirits,” take a cautionary hint from Tam O'Shanter.
One of the most prolific English composers of the twentieth century, Malcolm Arnold had a roller-coaster career. He entered the Royal College of Music at 16, studying the trumpet. Due to the wartime shortage of professional players, he regularly appeared in the ranks of major orchestras even before graduating and was acknowledged as an outstanding trumpeter. His unhappy two years of military service ended when he deliberately shot himself in the foot. A fellowship in 1946 gave him the confidence to pursue a full-time composing career, but his frenzied pace of work was repeatedly interrupted by bouts of depression and alcoholism, including long stretches of hospitalization.
Arnold’s style was conservative and popular, his shorter works especially sought after by youth and amateur orchestras both for their playability and ready accessibility. But because of his conservative style he was long shunned by the establishment who now was embracing atonality and serialsm. At the core of his output are nine symphonies, twenty concertos and two operas. He also composed 132 film scores, the most famous being Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he received an Oscar in 1958. The score took him all of ten days to write (the famous whistling tune was not original to him.)
Composed in 1955, the Tam O'Shanter Overture was inspired by Robert Burns’s 1790 poem by that name, considered one of Burns’ finest. It is the grimly humorous legend of Tam O’Shanter,  hard drinker who ignores his wife’s warning that he will one day be “catch’d wi’ warlocks” for his misdeeds. Late one fateful night, in a roaring tempest, he sets out recklessly from the inn toward home on his mare, Meg. When they reach a haunted kirk, they witness a wild orgy of witches and warlocks, with many ghastly adornments that Burns catalogues in detail:
Wi’ mair o’ horrible and awfu’
Which ev’n to name wad be unlawfu’
One dancer, wearing a garment “in longitude tho’ sorely scanty” (called a cutty-sark by the natives), pleases Tam so well that he cries out “Weel done, cutty-sark!” In an instant everything turns pitch black, and the hellish legion pursues him. If he reaches the bridge he is safe, since the fiends cannot cross running water. Although he makes a narrow escape, his gallant mare loses her tail, which had been grasped by a witch. The moral is embodied embodied in the last lines of the poem:
Now wha this tale o’truth shall read,
Ilk man and mother’s son tak heed
Whene’er to drink you are inclin’d,
Or cutty-sarks run in your mind,
Think ye may buy the joys o’er dear, Remember Tam O’ Shanter’s mare.
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Maurice Ravel
Piano Concerto in G major
In the annals of classical composers, Maurice Ravel was in a lucky minority. Born into a cultured middle-class family, he is one of the few composers – along with Mozart and Mendelssohn – whose parents encouraged his professional musical ambitions from the start. From the time Maurice turned seven, Ravel’s father provided him with the best private musical instruction; at twelve, he went on to the preparatory school for the Paris Conservatoire, graduating into the regular course of study at fourteen. In a surprisingly single-minded manner, the youthful Ravel marched to his own drummer in terms of his musical language. He could not – or would not – conform to the rigorous, and by then dated, strictures of the Conservatoire and was repeatedly beaten out for the composition prizes awarded to young composers who have now pretty much lapsed into oblivion.
Ravel was a good pianist; much of his large output for the piano was written for his own use. With a predilection for both the very old and the very new, he frequently patterned the framework of his music after courtly dance forms from the Renaissance or the Baroque, in such works as the Menuet antique and Le tombeau de Couperin. At the same time, he was one of the earliest classical composers to incorporate the jazz idiom in his compositions, especially in his Violin Sonata and his two piano concertos.
In 1929, Ravel began work on the Piano Concerto in G the same time as the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in World War I. At the time of the conception of the G Major Concerto, Ravel had originally intended it for his own use. But by the time he completed it in 1931, his health was not up to the physical rigors of practicing. The premiere was given by French pianist Marguerite Long with the composer conducting. The two recorded it soon after the premiere in January 1932, a performance now reissued on CD.
Because of the light-hearted and witty mood of the Concerto, especially when compared to the seriousness of its left-handed companion, Ravel originally wanted to call the concerto a “Divertissement.” It opens with a crack of the whip, or slapstick, followed by a perky tune on the piccolo which is in turn taken over by a trumpet solo, all the time accompanied by gossamer arpeggios on the piano. In an exaggeration of the convention of a contrasting second theme, Ravel switches into a languid blues style making use of a short jazz refrain first for the clarinet, which he appends as a cadence figure throughout the movement as solos for the various wind and brass instruments. While the piano, with its jazzy, syncopated rhythm, is clearly the dominant instrument, Ravel provides abundant solo opportunities for the orchestral instruments.
The graceful slow movement adagio was modeled, according to Ravel, on the Larghetto in Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. It opens with a long piano solo, an “unending melody” that is resolved only many bars into the orchestral part. A. Ironically, the seemingly easy and natural spinning out of the melody, with its inherent tension born of delayed resolution, belies the difficulties the composer had with it: Ravel admitted he had had to piece it together bar by bar.
The dazzling Presto finale is a virtuoso piece for the soloist, the drumming of repeated notes suggestive of a Baroque toccata. But this is no Baroque imitation, punctuated as it is by jazz riffs for solo winds and “blue notes.” The final cadence returns to the snappy opening bars of the movement.
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Camille Saint-Saëns
Symphony No. 3 in c Minor, Op. 78
Composer, organist and pianist Camille Saint-Saëns was a man of wide culture, well versed in literature, the arts and scientific developments. He was phenomenally precocious and gifted in everything he undertook. As a child prodigy he wrote his first piano compositions at age three and at age ten made his formal debut at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, playing Mozart and Beethoven piano concertos. In his youth he was considered an innovator, but by the time he reached maturity he had become a conservative pillar of the establishment, trying to maintain the classical musical tradition in France and expressing open disdain for the new trends in music, including the “malaise” of Wagnerism. His visceral dislike of Debussy made endless headlines in the tabloid press. As a performer – he premiered his five piano concertos – his technique was elegant, effortless and graceful. But neither his compositions nor his pianism were ever pinnacles of passion or emotion. Berlioz noted that Saint-Saëns “...knows everything but lacks inexperience.”
Saint-Saëns was a consummate craftsman and a compulsive worker. “I produce music the way an apple tree produces apples,” he commented. He was a proponent of “art for art's sake” but his views on expression and passion in art conflicted with the prevailing literary and emotive Romantic ideas. He wrote in his memoirs: “Music is something besides a source of sensuous pleasure and keen emotion, and this resource, precious as it is, is only a chance corner in the wide realm of musical art. He who does not get absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music.” And also: “Beware of all exaggeration.”
Saint-Saëns’ output is large and diverse, including chamber works for most orchestral instruments. Although his music was often perceived as passé, he was the first composer to write an original film score in 1908 for L’assassinat du Duc de Guise (The assassination of the Duke of Guise).
Saint-Saëns professed to uphold the classical virtues of clarity, restraint and elegance, but none of these virtues appear in the c minor Symphony, a highly romantic work with colorful and grandiose orchestration throughout. There is thematic interconnection between the movements and the traditional four movements are fused into two: “[the Symphony] embraces in principle the four traditional movements, but the first, halted in its development, serves as introduction to the Adagio, while the Scherzo is abandoned by the same process to lead to the Finale,” explained the composer. The organ part is integrated into the orchestra and does not emerge as a solo counterforce, as in a concerto. Appropriately, it was dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt, whose virtuosic organ music served as a model for Saint-Saëns. The symphony was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society and premiered by that orchestra in May 1886 with the composer conducting.
Despite the composer's insistence on the Symphony as a two-movement work, it is easier to think of the it as having four movements since there are four distinctly discernible sections each with its own mood and musical structure. After a brief slow introduction, the stuttering first theme of the Symphony creates a kind of anxious tension. This theme will recur in each of the following movements as an integral part of the fabric of the Symphony, not merely as a kind of musical tokenism for thematic unity. It is followed by a classically contrasting and more relaxed second theme. Without pause the movement blends into the Poco Adagio, where the organ first appears as an accompaniment of long notes. The main theme of the first movement also returns, the first instance of the thematic integration of the entire Symphony. The two themes then combine with the first movement theme in the pizzicato basses and cellos.
The stuttering rhythm returns in the third movement with a new theme, but immediately accompanied by the first movement theme and a return to the ominous mood of the opening. The Trio, yet another iteration of the first movement theme, makes a surprising introduction of the piano into the orchestral mix. The movement ends on a serene note, with the first movement theme now in the major mode, anticipating the final movement.
After a grand entrance on the organ, the strings, accompanied by the piano, transform the first movement theme into a majestic chorale. Saint-Saëns even creates a fugue for it in its new guise. In a sense, the Symphony No. 3 can be understood as a musical drama, in which a protagonist (the first movement theme) eventually triumphs over adversity. Over the top? Perhaps, but then, Saint-Saëns dedicated his Symphony to one of the nineteenth century's more melodramatic composers.
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Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2008
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