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Overture to THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO, K.384
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
In early 1782 Mozart left his position, which he considered “slavery,” with the dictatorial Archbishop of Salzburg and moved to Vienna with high hopes of making a reputation as a freelance musician. One of his first public triumphs was the comic opera The Abduction from the Seraglio.
Vienna was the perfect venue for the opera. On the eastern edge of Europe, the city had been the principal stronghold against the advances of the Ottoman Turks since the 16th century. (Recently we have witnessed the tragic results of Turkish expansionism in the ethnic conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Bosnia.) In Mozart’s time, however, Europe was fascinated by the music of the Janissaries, the elite unit of the Ottoman military forces, often made up of troops who had been abducted as children from the Balkans. Their music, with its bass drums, cymbals and triangles with jangling rings attached, became all the fashion and led to the enlargement of the percussion section of European orchestras. Many composers in the 18th centuries incorporated their ideas of Janissary music into their composition, the most famous of which is Symphony No.100, the “Military,” by Franz Joseph Haydn. Among other spin-offs of the European orientalist fad are tulips, now associated exclusively with Holland.
The Abduction from the Seraglio tells the story of a Spanish nobleman’s attempt to rescue his fiancée from Turkish captivity. The short overture alternates loud “Turkish” music 
with softer, more European music, and a quiet middle section that includes the theme of the opening aria of the opera’s hero.
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CONCERTO FOR FLUTE AND ORCHESTRA, Op.39
Lowell Liebermann
A native of New York City, composer, conductor and pianist Lowell Liebermann earned his doctorate from Juilliard, where he studied with David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti. He has had a long-term position as composer in residence with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, for whom he composed his Symphony No.2 in 2000 to commemorate the Orchestra’s centennial.
Liebermann is often attacked by critics as being backward-looking, employing a musical language that recalls the neo-Romanticism of Samuel Barber, David Diamond and Howard Hanson. Audiences and conductors, however, like him and he has rapidly become one of the most prolific, frequently performed and recorded of contemporary composers, writing in every musical field, including opera (The Picture of Dorian Gray).
Liebermann wrote his Sonata for Flute and Piano, Op.23 in 1988. It caught the attention of flutist James Galway, who asked the composer to orchestrate it. But Liebermann preferred to write a new work rather than rework the old one, the result being the Flute Concerto, Op.39, which Galway premiered in 1992 with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.
The Concerto is an unabashedly Romantic work that has rapidly gained in popularity. It opens moderato in a lyric theme with a pianissimo two note march-like accompaniment. 
The central part of the movement is a chaconne that begins in an almost inaudible pizzicato in the basses, while the flute weaves arabesques over it. Shortly afterwards, the ground is repeated more clearly in the string sections with angry marcato bowing. The flute variations become increasingly virtuosic with the orchestration recalling Shostakovich, before the calm of the opening returns.
The second movement, molto adagio, is a serenely whispered chant that floats over a pulsating syncopated ostinato. In the middle section the flute enters into a canon with solo viola, before its solo voice returns to float over the orchestra. The finale, presto, is a rondo-like virtuoso workout for the soloist, ending in a spectacular prestissimo coda to conclude the work with a flourish.
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DANSE
Claude Debussy
Despite the fact that today some of Debussy’s most beloved works are for the piano, it took him some time to warm up to the instrument. When he was at the Paris Conservatoire, one of his teachers remarked, “Debussy isn’t very fond of the piano, but he loves music.” Apparently, the piano was too percussive to allow for the subtle gradations in dynamics and timbre that so characterize all of his music. Although most of his early works are songs, he gradually mastered the piano’s shortcomings until it became his primary means of expression. In fact, some of his earliest piano compositions from the late 1880s, such as Deux arabesques and Suite bergamasque, are among his most popular.
Danse also belongs to that period. Published originally in 1891 as Tarantelle styrienne, Debussy republished it as Danse in 1903. Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1922 at the same time he was working on the orchestration of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
The original title is enigmatic. While the tarantella is a dance associated with southern Italy, Styria is a district of southeastern Austria, near the border of Slovenia. Danse is a rondo, using a refrain that occurs between episodes of new music. The folkdance itself is characterized by an underlying ostinato of rapid triplets in either 6/8 or 12/8 time. Surprisingly, Debussy employs passages of cross rhythms against the beat that create subtle syncopations. The rondo refrain itself illustrates the point. 
Debussy also avoids the monotony of the triplets by occasionally setting melody in slower note values over the pianissimo ostinato.
Ravel's orchestration includes passages with the characteristic tambourine in the background, as well as solos for horn, clarinet and oboe in the episodes in between the repetitions of the refrain.
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MA MÉRE L’OYE (Mother Goose) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Maurice Ravel loved children although he never had children of his own. While visiting friends, he frequently ended up in the nursery playing with the little ones. Two of his favorites were Jean and Marie, the children of his long-time friends Cyprian and Ida Godebski. Both children played piano well, and in 1908 Ravel surprised them with a gift of a composition, the five-piece suite for piano four hands, Ma mère l’oye. Ravel wrote: “My intention of awakening the poetry of childhood in these pieces naturally led me to simplify my style and thin out my writing.” The inspiration for the work came from the seventeenth-century collection of European fairy tales by Charles Perrault entitled Contes de ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose Stories). These, incidentally, do not correspond with the collection of nursery rhymes by British writer John Newbery, whose collection of mostly traditional rhymes, published in 1765, usurped the title but not the stories. Rather, some of Perrault’s tales turn up in the nineteenth-century collection of the brothers Grimm. Ravel’s Suite was premiered in Paris in 1910 by the two children, then six and seven years old.
When in 1911 Ravel was asked to compose a ballet for performance in the Théâtre des Arts, he orchestrated the Suite and added some numbers, always retaining the light touch. But it is the original five-movement Suite that is most frequently performed:
- Pavane de la belle au bois dormant (Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty): In this slow, slow and dreamy dance, Ravel uses the flute and harp to portray Sleeping Beauty in the forest.
- Petit poucet (Tom Thumb): The oboe and English horn depict Tom Thumb’s disappointment when the birds (piccolo, clarinet and recorded birdsong) eat the crumbs that were meant to guide his family home.
- Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodas (Ugly Little Empress of the Pagodas): Ravel employs the Chinese pentatonic scale, which uses the black keys on the keyboard. The Empress is taking a bath while little dolls entertain her by singing and playing on tiny instruments.
- Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête (The Conversation between Beauty and the Beast): In this slow waltz, Beauty is represented by the clarinet; grotesque bass notes in the contrabassoon imitate the grunting of the ugly beast until a glissando on harp, celesta and piano transforms him back into a handsome prince.
- Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden): Here, the Prince awakens Sleeping Beauty. A gentle quiet melody develops into the only forte section of the whole work, a series of bell-like glissandi.
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Sergey Prokofiev |
SYMPHONY No.1 IN D MAJOR, Op.25, “THE CLASSICAL”
Sergey Prokofiev
Prokofiev was a composer caught between two cultures. Born into an affluent and musical family, he left the Soviet Union in the summer of 1918, shortly after the 1917 revolution. For the next twenty years he toured the United States and lived in Paris, then in the mid-1930s returning to his native country, never to leave again.
The year 1917 was a traumatic one for Russia. The February revolution deposed the Tsar, and the October revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. Throughout this time, Russia was also losing disastrously its piece of World War I against Germany and Austria. In the spring and summer of that year Prokofiev retired to a village not far from Petrograd and, as if oblivious to the earth-shattering turmoil around him, composed at a furious pace. Among the creations of that period was his sunny Symphony No.1, which he subtitled “The Classical.”
The Symphony was an experiment. An accomplished pianist, Prokofiev composed routinely at the piano. He noticed, however, that “…thematic material composed without the piano was often better in quality…I was intrigued with the idea of writing an entire symphonic piece without the piano…So this was how the project of writing a symphony in the style of Haydn came about…it seemed it would be easier to dive into the deep waters of writing without the piano if I worked in a familiar setting.” This delicate work was premiered in April 1918 in Petrograd amidst the civil war and social upheaval, with the composer conducting.
The overall classical style of the Symphony makes it easy to forget that it is a 20th century creation. The opening movement, Allegro, is an imitation of the typical Classical first movements of Haydn minus the usual slow introduction with some 20th century harmonic surprises. 
The second theme is a caricature of the 18th century Rococo style, played on the tips of the violin bows con eleganza like a mincing dance master – but with a less than elegant surpise sforzando at the cadence. The graceful second movement Larghetto, introduced first by the violins and then joined by a flute, shows what a little musical creativity can do with a simple descending scale. A middle section introduced by the solo bassoon and pizzicato strings emphasizes the constant sixteenth-note pulse that pervades the entire movement before the full orchestra joins in, then slowly fades to return to the opening theme.
The short Gavotte third movement is a clumsy galumphing dance. The trio is accompanied by a bagpipe-like drone. Prokofiev loved this movement and used the theme – greatly expanded – some 20 years later for the departure of the guests at the Capulet's ball in Act I of his ballet Romeo and Juliet.
The Molto vivace finale is in sonata form, rather than the usual rondo, but has the same persistent dynamic drive as the finales of so many Haydn symphonies. Like the opening of the Symphony, the first theme is certainly accessible but lacks the "singability" of Prokofiev's classical models. The brief second theme, which serves also as a closing theme, provides the sole "tune" in the movement. In composing it, Prokofiev played a game with himself, trying to eliminate all minor chords, a restriction that makes it extremely difficult to do much with a development section. So he didn't.
Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2007