Bulletin E-Edition:
A change of pace
C.O. Symphony plays Stravinsky ballet at fall concerts
By Eleanor Pierce / The Bulletin
Published: October 23. 2009 4:00AM PST
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As art forms, music and dance are inextricably linked. It can be hard to imagine one without the other.
The Central Oregon Symphony's fall concerts, performed Saturday through Monday in Bend (see “If you go”), will be a good place to think about the relationship between music and dance. While there are no dancers performing with the symphony, the concerts will showcase two distinctly different treatments of dance music.
The first, “Pétrouchka,” by Igor Stravinsky, is taken from a Russian ballet that premiered in 1911.
“Stravinsky's claim to fame is the revitalization of rhythm,” Central Oregon Symphony maestro Michael Gesme said. The tradition of rhythm in Western music, from classical music all the way to modern pop, is “exceptionally unadventuresome,” he said. This is why the majority of Western music is fairly easy to count rhythm to, or easy to tap your toe to. Music with a predictable rhythm is also easier to dance to.
But Stravinsky's composition “is challenging in terms of its rhythmic complexity,” Gesme said. Different parts of the orchestra will play different counts — five beats to a bar, or two, or three — simultaneously. Gesme said the effect on the listener can be disorienting. “You're getting pulled all over, and what you're hearing is this hodgepodge (of rhythhm),” though “at the end of the day it all works out mathematically beautifully.”
It's unusual, Gesme said, but not painful: “It's not going to be just getting thumped over the head with clash. There are wonderful melodies.”
Stravinsky also used the action of the ballet to build drama into the music.
For instance, the ballet starts with a crowd scene, and the music is hectic and frenetic as various people move about. Suddenly, Stravinsky might zoom into one corner of the scene where a lone dancer performs, Gesme said.
“The whole orchestra will be playing, and then the floor will drop out and there will be three instruments playing,” he said.
The complicated rhythms the composer employed in “Pétrouchka” didn't make it easy for choreographers or dancers.
“Stravinsky really fought a lot with his dancers,” Gesme said, because they were accustomed to music with straightforward rhythm in which all the dancers could land on the same note.
Instead, Stravinsky “was writing music that created an environment on which choreography was laid,” Gesme said. The choreography couldn't be written with the primary focus of lining up dancers to move to precise beats. The dance had to, in a more general sense, “line up with sound,” Gesme said.
After the symphony performs the music from “Pétrouchka,” it will play dances from “Le Roi Malgré Lui” by Emmanel Chabrier.
The Polish dances are “fabulous examples of late 19th-century dance music,” Gesme said, that would have been played in a ball scene in an opera. In contrast to “Pétrouchka,” Gesme said, the dances are “as traditional as the day is long.”
Chabrier described “Le Roi Malgré Lui,” which translates as “the king in spite of himself,” as “a comic opera with elaborate undies.” The symphony will present two dances from the opera: the Slavonic dance that Gesme's program notes describe as lively, and the “fete Polonaise,” which opens with an extended fanfare but settles into a Polonaise proper. Gesme said the latter dance “resembles the musical character of the waltz.”
In addition to the dance pieces, the concert will open with Leonard Bernstein's overture to “Candide.” Gesme called the piece a “four-minute, curtain-raising, barn-burner.” An overture is the music that's played at the beginning of a theatrical piece that indicates to the audience that the show is starting.
The 1956 operetta “Candide,” a political satire that criticized McCarthyism, “didn't work out well as musical theater,” Gesme said, but Bernstein's music is still regularly played in concerts. The overture in particular, Gesme said, is raucous and fun, “a tour de force for the orchestra.”
The Central Oregon Symphony will also play Mozart's Concerto in A Major for Clarinet, with featured soloist Benjamin Lulich (see sidebar). It's a classical piece with fewer players, a contrast to the near extravagance of the bigger, 20th-century Stravinsky and Bernstein pieces, which the entire 75-member symphony will play.
Gesme said he feels lucky to have the talent in Central Oregon to put together such a musically challenging program.
“I'm just thrilled to be able to do it, the group of people we have here is amazing.”
Featured soloist
Benjamin Lulich, principal clarinet of the Pacific Symphony in Orange County, Calif., will be the featured soloist on a Mozart clarinet concerto with the Central Oregon Symphony for the fall concert series.
Lulich, 27, grew up largely in Bend; in fact, it was in Central Oregon that he first began playing the clarinet, at age 11.
“My parents still live there,” he said in a phone interview, “It's like home.”
“He's clearly a top-notch player,” Central Oregon Symphony maestro Michael Gesme said. “It's so cool this person grew up in Central Oregon and is now coming back to play with the hometown band.”
The concerto that Lulich will join the orchestra for — Concerto in A Major for Clarinet — is one of the last pieces Mozart wrote before he died. “It's really the apex of his soloistic writing,” Lulich said. “It's about as perfect of a clarinet concerto as you can get.”
Gesme described how the clarinet as an instrument didn't exist when Mozart was born. “This piece is the fist masterwork written for the clarinet,” Gesme said. “Many people believe it has never been improved upon. The bar was set pretty darn high from the get-go.”
Compared with the other non-stringed instruments available when Mozart was writing, the clarinet has a vast range. “It has this slow, silky smooth register, then a middle, then it can get high and shrill,” Gesme said. Lulich said many people consider the clarinet the most “voice-like” of instruments.
The Mozart piece utilizes the full range of the instrument, not just in the range of musical notes but also in the skill of the performer by having slower and faster parts.
“It definitely goes through different moods,” Lulich said. One part of the piece was featured in the 1985 film “Out of Africa.”
“The slow movement is the most beautiful. It's just gorgeous and slow. Very simple, but very touching.”
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