GUEST ARTIST
Winner of the Grand Prize at the 2016 Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal Manulife Competition, Blake Pouliot is a Soloist-inResidence at the Orchestre Métropolitain with whom he performed Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, as part of their digital series last year. 2021/22 culminated with his Philadelphia Orchestra debut, joining forces again with Nézet-Séguin in John Corigliano’s The Red Violin (Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra) in a special concert at the Kimmel Centre.
2022/23 symphonic highlights include a return to Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, sharing a stage with Angela Hewitt in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. Other guest appearances across the US include performances of the Korngold, Paganini, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns concerti as well as Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy with Madison, Milwaukee, Arkansas, Bangor, Elgin, North Carolina, Oregon, Tacoma, and Westmoreland Symphony orchestras. Engagements from recent seasons include his aforementioned Philadelphia Orchestra debut and engagements with Boise Philharmonic, Omaha Symphony, Plano Symphony, Sarasota Orchestra and Winnipeg Symphony.
As a chamber musician, Pouliot brings his artistic flair to the Koerner Hall in Toronto, as well as other recital halls in Temecula, Paris, and Boston. At the latter, his programme features the world premiere of Derrick Skye’s God of the Gaps for violin and electronics. Pouliot rounds out this season with his debut at the Seattle Chamber Music Society and a return to La Jolla Summerfest. He also returns to the National Youth
Orchestra of Canada to embark on his second year as Artist-in Residence, following last season’s inaugural residency in which the NYOC welcomed him to cultivate a curated program for students and faculty.
Pouliot released his debut album of 20th century French music on Analekta Records in 2019. Featuring Ravel’s Tzigane and Violin Sonata in G, Debussy’s Violin Sonata in G minor and Beau Soir, the recording received critical acclaim including a five-star rating from BBC Music Magazine and a 2019 Juno Award nomination for Best Classical Album.
Since his orchestral debut at age 11, Pouliot has performed with the orchestras of Aspen, Atlanta, Detroit, Dallas, Madison, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, and Seattle, among many. Internationally, he has performed as soloist with the Sofia Philharmonic in Bulgaria, Orchestras of the Americas on its South American tour, and was the featured soloist for the first ever joint tour of the European Union Youth Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra of Canada. He has collaborated with many musical luminaries including conductors Sir Neville Marriner, David Afkham, Pablo Heras-Casado, David Danzmayr, JoAnn Falletta, Marcelo Lehninger, Nicholas McGegan, Alexander Prior, Vasily Petrenko and Thomas Søndergård. Pouliot has been featured twice on Rob Kapilow’s What Makes it Great? series and has been NPR’s Performance Today Artist-in-Residence in Minnesota (2017/18), Hawaii (2018/19), and across Europe (2021/22). Prior to that, he was named First Laureate of both the 2018 and 2015 Canada Council for the Arts Musical Instrument Bank.
Pouliot performs on the 1729 Guarneri del Gesù on generous loan from an anonymous donor.
Fate Now Conquers
Carlos Simon (b. 1986)
Born in Washington, D.C., composer Carlos Simon was raised in Atlanta. Descending from a long line of clergymen, he was strongly influenced by gospel music, but has developed an eclectic style that has included it occasionally while extending to many other influences as well, from Beethoven to jazz, hip-hop, and the techniques of contemporary classical composers. He holds degrees from Georgia State university and Morehouse College as well as a doctorate from the University of Michigan, where his teachers included the prominent American composer, Michael Daugherty.
Currently Composer-in-Residence at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Simon has written for the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, both based at the Kennedy Center. He has also received commissions and performances from many other major organizations including the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the London Symphony.
Fate Now Conquers is based on the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, well-known as one of the most profoundly moving and soul-searching moments in all of Beethoven. In working on the piece, Simon has said that he wanted to explore Beethoven on a personal level and so turned to studying the composer’s journals. In doing so, he came across the following quote from the Iliad, recorded in 1815: “But Fate now conquers; I am hers; and yet not she shall share / In my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit / And that some great deed shall beget that all lives inherit.”
Simon has described his approach as follows: “Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh symphony, I have
PROGRAM NOTES
composed musical gestures that are representative of the unpredictable ways of fate. Jolting stabs, coupled with an agitated groove with every persona. Frenzied arpeggios in the strings that morph into an ambiguous cloud of freeflowing running passages depict the uncertainty of life that hovers over us.”
Although the Beethoven work is so well disguised that even listeners well acquainted with it will be hard put to recognize it, Fate Now Conquers is a brief but effective work in contemporary music language that provides a look into Beethoven’s soul. His sufferings, both physical and emotional, are well known, but as Carlos Simon has put it, “Whatever the specific reason for including this particularly profound passage from the Iliad, in the end, it seems that Beethoven relinquished himself to fate. Fate now conquers.”
Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor, op. 61 Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Although Camille Saint-Saëns certainly occupies a place in the pantheon of great musicians, it might be said that the full extent of his achievement has often been underestimated. To begin with, he was a child prodigy of the highest order, picking out tunes at the age of two and proving himself an accomplished pianist and well- rounded musician by the age of six, achievements which rival those of Wunderkinder such as Mozart and Mendelssohn. Fast company indeed.
As an all-around musician, his facility and versatility were such that even a Leonard Bernstein, André Previn, or Daniel Barenboim in our own era might envy. Prominent musicians of his time marveled at his phenomenal musical memory, acuteness of ear, and sight-reading and score reading ability, confirming his status as one of music’s greatest natural musical minds.
Nor did his interests stop with music. He was the very definition of the Renaissance man, being also a writer, linguist, world traveler and passionate amateur scientist who
once arranged a concert tour so that he could see Mt. Aetna in eruption.
His musical career covered the entire extent of the art. As composer, his large output reached to virtually every genre, including, incidentally, a film score (in 1908) which made him the first established composer to write for the new medium. As performer, he was a conductor and pianist but also part of the great tradition of titular master organists in the great churches of Paris, serving as organist at the church of the Madeleine for nearly two decades. Franz Liszt pronounced his organ playing “not merely in the front rank, but incomparable…No orchestra is capable of producing such an impression.” His literary and scholarly abilities made him an important music journalist and musicologist, who edited much eighteenth-century music at a time when it was not a well-known part of the repertoire.
As composer, one of Saint-Saëns’ greatest achievements was his important role in reviving interest in serious instrumental music in France. The Second Empire, which came crashing down at the time of the FrancoPrussian War of 1870-71, had been known for a certain superficiality and frivolity. The popularity of opera and the new operetta form left little time for instrumental music. Under the rubric of Ars Gallica (“French art”), Saint-Saëns led a movement that would challenge German supremacy in music. Among other things, this would mean writing in German-dominated genres such as symphonies, concertos, and sonatas.
The Third Violin Concerto was written in 1880 and dedicated to the great Spanish violinist, Pablo de Sarasate, who premiered it. The elegance and formal beauty of the work illustrate the composer’s classical bent, even though he was writing at the very height of the Romantic period. As might be expected, the concerto is in the traditional fastslow-fast three- movement form, yet, classicist or no, the composer takes some liberties with the traditions of the genre. At the very beginning, for example, instead of an extended orchestral introduction, the soloist leaps in
suddenly over a string tremolo with the fiery and dramatic minor key principal theme. Eventually we hear a suavely lyrical theme in major key which perfectly contrasts with the opening material. In another departure from tradition, the end of the movement leaves no time for the usual solo cadenza.
Saint-Saëns’ lyrical gift is at its best in the second movement, with its exquisite, soaring major key melody in the gently rocking motion of the barcarolle, a Venetian gondolier’s boat song. The movement ends with a wonderfully delicate passage in which the soloist plays ethereal high harmonics doubled by a clarinet playing octaves lower.
The finale again breaks rules by beginning with a brief, introductory, recitative-like cadenza by the soloist before launching into the first theme, a jittery, fiery melody in B minor which has the flavor of so-called Gypsy music. (Sarasate, who had recently written a famous solo piece based on such music, surely appreciated the gesture.) Two other themes eventually present themselves: the first, a broadly lyrical theme in D major, and then, as the mood suddenly changes, a new, touchingly gentle, chorale-like theme. The recap of the opening is again announced by the solo cadenza which leads again into both the Gypsy theme and the following D major theme. But then comes a surprise. The chorale-like theme reappears, this time stated not in gentle fashion but triumphantly by the full brass section. A fast coda drives the movement to a frenetic conclusion.
Writers of program notes must earn their pay and probably do, as has occasionally been alleged, spend too much time delving into the private lives of composers. Biography, particularly of the more scandalous sort, is more interesting to the general public than technical analysis and
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, op. 36
Piotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93)
provides many temptations for making unwarranted connections between a composer’s private life and work. Valid as such criticism may sometimes be, however, there clearly are occasions when such connections between art and life do exist, and to ignore them would be ridiculous. One of the most striking such cases is Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Although the bizarre circumstances surrounding the composition of the work may read like pulp fiction, they do give insight not only into the heart-rending difficulties of the composer’s private life but into his work as well.
Tchaikovsky began work on the symphony during the winter of 1876-77 in Moscow and completed it in January of 1878 in Sanremo, Italy. In the intervening period he experienced several of the most momentous events of his life. First, he began his famous relationship, conducted entirely by correspondence, with his patron Mme.
Nadezhda von Meck. The relationship would last some thirteen years and produce over a thousand letters, constituting one of the most interesting testaments ever left by a major artist. Then, despite his homosexuality and against the advice of his closest friends, Tchaikovsky foolishly succumbed to social pressure and entered into a disastrous marriage with a former pupil whom he barely knew. The marriage lasted barely three months, driving Tchaikovsky to a complete nervous collapse. He was sent to convalesce in Western Europe, where he stayed for a time in a pension in Switzerland and then traveled to various places including Paris and Venice. As his condition improved, he was finally able to return to work on the symphony, finishing it in Italy. The new work was dedicated to Mme. von Meck and received its first performance in Moscow in February of 1878, less than two months after its completion. The composer was not present.
In letters to Mme. von Meck Tchaikovsky poured out his feelings about his life as well as his thoughts about his new work, which, incidentally, he described to her as “our symphony.” From these confessions it is quite clear that he intended the work as a kind of “psychogram”, as one critic
has called it, expressing some of the turbulent feelings of this period of his life. The quotations which follow are all taken directly from Tchaikovsky’s own correspondence.
The symphony opens with a fanfare figure in the brass which Tchaikovsky called the “chief thought of the whole symphony” and a representation of “Fate, the fatal power which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness.” Tchaikovsky was quite explicit in saying that he had in mind Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, supposedly the original “Fate” symphony, which begins in a dark minor key but ends in triumphant major.
After the introductory Fate motif dies away, Tchaikovsky begins the largest symphonic movement that he had yet written. The movement is in 9/8 time, an unusual meter for a symphonic movement and one which gives the impression of a melancholy waltz. David Brown, the distinguished Tchaikovsky scholar, has done some brilliant detective work about the theme, deducing that it is pieced together from two themes from Bizet’s opera Carmen, which Tchaikovsky had seen in Paris in 1876 and which overwhelmed him by its own concept of Fate.
We expect a movement in sonata form to have a contrasting second theme and Tchaikovsky actually gives two. The psychological import of these themes is again explained by the composer. If the first theme expressed the idea that Fate is invincible and can’t be overcome, these new themes provide escape. “Is it not better to turn away from reality and submerge yourself in daydreams?” The first of the themes begins with a clarinet solo in mincing rhythm with comments from other woodwinds. The other is a gentle theme in rocking rhythm played by the violins, signifying the possibility of happiness. “Everything gloomy, joyless is forgotten.” Very simply put, the remainder of this vast movement explores the possibilities of these contrasting themes and their psychological implications. The menacing Fate motif is clearly heard in the brass several times.
The slow second movement with its expressive oboe solo evokes a gentler melancholy about which the
composer writes: “This is that melancholy which comes in the evening when, weary from labour, you are sitting alone. You take a book- but it falls from your hand. There comes a whole host of memories…There were happy moments when young blood boiled, and life was satisfying. There were also painful moments, irreparable losses. It is both sad, yet somehow sweet, to immerse yourself in the past.”
The famous third movement scherzo marks a turning point in the symphony, introducing a new feeling of lightness. Tchaikovsky orchestrates in masterly fashion, omitting percussion but dividing the orchestra into the remaining three families. The opening string section with its novel pizzicato effect presumably is an imitation of the balalaika. The woodwind family then follows with its sprightly tune, followed by the brass. The composer’s comments state that we are hearing disjointed images including the sounds of drunken peasants, a street song, and a military procession.
The jubilant finale begins with an explosion in F major, symbolizing, like the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that joy has finally triumphed over Fate. Tchaikovsky’s commentary states that joy is to be found “among the people”, a notion that he may have borrowed from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which had been recently published. For his second theme Tchaikovsky uses a well- known Russian folk song called There Stood a Little Birch, which recurs several times. Finally, the menacing Fate theme casts its melancholy shadow one more time near the end of the movement but is vanquished by another outburst of joy. “Rejoice in others’ rejoicing”, the composer tells us. “To live is still possible!”
DONOR HONOR ROLL
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