Program Notes: Opening Night Concert — Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue

Most of the music of Brazil’s Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), arguably the most important Latin American composer, is an original synthesis of the folk idioms of his country and the traditions of Western classical music — a theme that binds together the music on this Opening Night program. Villa-Lobos is best known abroad for his nine Bachianas Brasileiras; composed for several combinations of instruments, they blend the structure of Bach with elements of traditional Brazilian music. Bachianas brasileiras No. 8, scored for orchestra (1944), is in four movements; the third, Catira batida, is cast as a Baroque toccata that conjures the catira of the title — a Brazilian folk dance with accents from the dancers’ feet and hands. 

The fast-paced Catira is highlighted by mallet percussion, woodwinds, brass and strings, all of which scurry around in small groups, with strong basslines guiding the action. A contrasting section for chirping flute over low reeds follows (listen to the English horn and clarinets), with a rousing theme for full ensemble in turn serving as a climactic point. Villa-Lobos then brings us back to the commotion of the opening, underpinned by rapid-fire woodblocks.  

For El Salón México, a colorful symphonic evocation of 1930s-era Mexico City, Aaron Copland (1900–1990) borrowed popular folk themes from the country. Most notably, he used “El Mosco,” “El Palo Verde” and “Jesusita,” among other tunes he had become familiar with through songbooks and compilations he acquired during several trips to Mexico. The first visit, in 1932, made a strong impression on him; he was particularly taken with the Harlem-type dance hall El Salón México, open from 1920 to 1960 in Mexico City’s historic downtown. Several popular dance styles of the time were played at El Salón México, even music for barefoot dancing. “Please don’t throw lighted cigarette butts on the floor,” read a sign on the wall. 

Instead of devising a high-minded depiction of Mexico, with its rich culture and history of ancient civilizations, and its 20th-century revolutionary spirit, Copland took a humbler approach: His Salón México is a musical postcard of the city and that dance hall as he remembered it, as a tourist. “It wasn’t the music I heard, but the spirit that I felt there, which attracted me,” he wrote in the notes for his 1975 recording with the New Philharmonia Orchestra. “Something of that spirit is what I hope to have put into my music.” 

The orchestration, which includes solos for trumpet, bassoon and clarinet along with delightfully playful passages for strings, was completed in 1936. The great Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, who had first invited Copland to visit the country, conducted the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México at the 1937 premiere in Mexico City.   

Angélica Negrón’s Fractal Isles was composed on commission from the Louisville Orchestra’s Festival of Latin American Music, where it had its world premiere in 2022 under Teddy Abrams. It combines full orchestra with live electronics and samples from field recordings made in Negron’s native Puerto Rico, specifically in the tropical rainforest El Yunque. 

Negrón (b. 1981) aspired to create new orchestral sonorities with Fractal Isles. The programmatic design of the piece is to depict outsiders, whose idealized notion of a Caribbean destination like Puerto Rico is that of the exotic and the idyllic. Such a paradisiac location may be only what they want it to be — rendering the relationship between destination and visitor a performance of sorts — while neglecting its native inhabitants. The piece represents “the tourist gaze,” according to Negrón’s notes, conjuring the “natural landscapes, culture and people in an artificial way that feels detached from the everyday experience of the people that live there.” 

Though his music has fallen into obscurity, the Spanish composer Eduard Toldrà (1895–1962) played a significant role in Barcelona’s cultural landscape in the early 20th century. Toldrà is perhaps best known for founding the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, in Cataluña, for which he served as music director from 1944 to 1962; Ludovic Morlot, the Seattle Symphony’s Judith Fong Conductor Emeritus — and this program’s conductor — became the principal conductor of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra in 2022. 
 
The sprightly Empúries takes its title from the ancient city on the coast of Cataluña, dating to 575 B.C. The piece is an orchestral version of a classic sardana — a circle dance from Cataluña in which men and women hold hands while moving toward and away from the center of the circle with choreographed footwork. The oboe and bassoon set the sardana in motion, with the main theme later undergoing a set of variations and a sturdy horn announcing the second theme. Throughout, Toldrà employs clear tonalities and hummable tunes, organized into a tight structure that brings back the material, connecting the ending to the opening theme. 

The superbly orchestrated Alborada del gracioso (usually translated as “Morning Song of the Jester”) by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) has become a symphonic staple, a showpiece for orchestra with the flavor of a Spanish dance and a dose of wry humor. It started as one of the movements of the piano suite Miroirs (1905); later, at the request of the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, Ravel orchestrated Alborada for the ballet Les jardins d'Aranjuez, produced in London in 1919. (The orchestral Alborada was first performed in Paris, though, the same year.)  

The pizzicato strings and harp that set the piece in motion suggest a guitar strumming to the triple beat of an Iberian dance before giving way to the main theme, on oboe, which is immediately repeated by English horn and echoed by bassoon. A superb outburst for full ensemble ensues, displaying Ravel’s technicolor palette and wondrous blending of instrumental forces. A solo bassoon introduces the slower, moodier middle section, representing the jester’s serenade, which the writer Fran Hoepfner perfectly described as a “sad clown putting on a tragic little play.” The Alborada is a delectable little feat in musical fancy and orchestration, and an excellent gateway into the magic of Ravel. 

Rhapsody in Blue is one of those pieces that you know even if you’ve never really listened to it. Blending ragtime, jazz and blues with the more “highbrow” concert hall music, the celebrated tunesmith George Gershwin (1898–1937) effectively created an ode to the Jazz Age that has continued to be ubiquitous and immediately recognizable. Looking back at Rhapsody 100 years after its premiere — on February 12, 1924, in Manhattan, by Paul Whiteman’s jazz band — it is easy to understand why the piece still casts a spell on audiences all over the world: the genre-bending, freeform composition for piano and jazz band (later for orchestra) captures the melting pot of early 20th-century New York and the cultural explosion of the Roaring Twenties. Rhapsody in Blue is a truly American piece, composed during a time of European dominance in orchestral music. It sizzles with unforgettable passages that evoke a nostalgia that simultaneously transcends all times and places.  

The story of how it came to be is fascinating. While shooting pool, Ira Gershwin, the composer’s brother, brought to his attention a New York Tribune article announcing a jazz concerto by George Gershwin to be premiered in a concert of modern American music at Aeolian Hall, presented by bandleader Paul Whiteman. Except that Gershwin didn’t know about it, and the concert was only about six weeks out. After some back and forth with Whiteman, Gershwin set to work, sketching the piece on a train to Boston and completing it in only 10 days. He produced a score for two pianos, which would be arranged for jazz band by Whiteman’s right-hand man, Ferde Grofé. It included a virtuosic, quasi-improvisatory part for solo piano that Gershwin himself performed at the premiere. Other versions by Grofé followed, including the now-famous 1942 arrangement for full orchestra. 

Rhapsody opens with a sultry, yowling clarinet glissando (courtesy of Ross Gorman, from Whiteman’s band) that was later indelibly married to film when Woody Allen used it for the opening montage of Manhattan (1979); it also received a memorable animated tribute two decades later in Disney's Fantasia 2000. A muted trumpet repeats the theme, with cool, breezy interpolations from the piano. Brassy statements — some would say cartoony — for full ensemble later erupt with glee. Gershwin’s catchy tunes — earworms, anyone? — switch back and forth, sometimes without transition. Indeed, some critics have taken Gershwin to task, even if the audiences have always loved the piece, for purportedly assembling a pastiche of tunes linked only by the thinnest connecting tissue. Say what you will, but by the time Rhapsody introduces that treacly nighttime theme for strings and horn in the second half, you can’t help but feel nostalgic for a yesteryear you never had, no matter where, or when, you are.  

Esteban Meneses © 2024   

Esteban Meneses is a fellow of the 2022 Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, a freelance arts and music journalist, and a bilingual public relations consultant. Read his articles here.