Christmas with the OSO

Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has become profoundly embedded in modern culture. Its strains are part of the sounds of modern life, heard on the radio and in department stores and elevators. There are perhaps 200 different recordings that can be purchased at the moment (reissues, anthologies, and excerpts make an exact count difficult), and it accounts for about half the 174 appearances Vivaldi’s music has made in movies and television, according to Internet Movie Database.

Yet in 1725, when Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter were published as the first four concertos of his Op. 8 (the title “Four Seasons” was not used), they were viewed as crazy modern music, or facile curiosities, or tasteless gimmickry, or the way of the future, and pretty much everything in between. Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was as controversial and polarizing a figure in his time as Beethoven and Wagner in theirs.

The feature of the Four Seasons that drew the most positive and negative attention when they were new was the one aspect that was largely ignored when, after two centuries of obscurity, they started to get played again in the 1950s and 1960s: their pictorial literalness. Vivaldi included a sonnet for each concerto explaining what was going on, supplying not just descriptions, but performance instructions. The sonnet verses are printed not only as prefaces to each concerto, but also in all the instrumental parts, in the midst of tempo and dynamic markings. This is something that can pass unnoticed by the modern audience, which consists of listeners who aren’t looking at the music on the page. But in Vivaldi’s day the audience for his publications consisted mostly of accomplished amateur players, who could play the Four Seasons with as many players as could gather around the part-books, or as few as six, as the highlight of a social gathering. They would have been keenly aware that the sounds they were making represented specific scenes.

Winter begins with shivering (in another remarkable chain of dissonances), chattering teeth and “running and stamping your feet every moment” to keep warm in snow and biting wind. The slow movement is a cozy fireside scene, “while the rain drenches everyone outside,” the raindrops in pizzicato under the solo violin’s melody. The finale begins by painting a picture of trying, not always successfully, to walk on ice without slipping, and concludes with the onslaught of “Sirocco, Boreas, and the other winds at war.”

Notes adapted from the LA Phil

Sonnets

Allegro non molto
"Aggiacciato tremar trà neri algenti
Al Severo Spirar d' orrido Vento,
Correr battendo i piedi ogni momento;
E pel Soverchio gel batter i denti;"

Largo
"Passar al foco i di quieti e contenti
Mentre la pioggia fuor bagna ben cento"

Allegro
"Caminar Sopra 'l giaccio, e à passo lento
Per timor di cader gersene intenti;
Gir forte Sdruzziolar, cader à terra
Di nuove ir Sopra 'l giaccio e correr forte
Sin ch' il giaccio si rompe, e si disserra;
Sentir uscir dalle ferrate porte
Sirocco Borea, e tutti i Venti in guerra
Quest' é 'l verno, mà tal, che gioja apporte."

Winter – Concerto in f-minor

Allegro non molto
Shivering, frozen mid the frosty snow in biting, stinging winds;
running to and fro to stamp one's icy feet, teeth chattering in the bitter chill.

Largo
To rest contentedly beside the hearth, while those outside are drenched by pouring rain.

Allegro
We tread the icy path slowly and cautiously, for fear of tripping and falling.
Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground and, rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.
We feel the chill north winds coarse through the home despite the locked and bolted doors…
this is winter, which nonetheless brings its own delights.

No holiday concert feels complete without Tchaikovsky. While The Nutcracker remains a timeless classic, we offer an alternative this evening: December from The Seasons. Originally composed as a cycle of piano pieces, the work is heard here in an orchestral arrangement.

In 1876, Tchaikovsky was commissioned to write a short piece for each month of the year, to be published in the St. Petersburg magazine Nouvellist.

The Seasons consists of twelve pieces, one for each month of the year. Strictly speaking, the collection might more accurately be titled The Months, but the name under which it was published has endured, and so we accept it as such.

Each month reveals a distinct character. Some are intimate and lyrical, such as June’s Barcarolle and March’s Song of the Lark, while others, including November’s Troika and August’s Harvest, are more expansive and technically demanding. Yet across their varied moods and textures, all twelve unmistakably bear the musical voice of Tchaikovsky.

TCHAIKOVSKY arr. Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn, adaptation: Jeff Tyzik

Movements

1. Overture

2. Toot Toot Tootie Toot (Dance of the Reed Pipes)

3. Danse of the Floreadores (Waltz of the Flowers)

4. Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy)

5. Peanut Brittle Brigade (March)

The Christmas Eve setting of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker has helped it to become one of America’s most beloved Christmas traditions (we can thank the San Francisco Ballet of the 1940s), even though the composer had nothing of the sort in mind. By 1960, the potential appeal of updating Tchaikovsky’s score was obvious enough to a savvy musician like Duke Ellington.

Although separated by a century, the demands of the Romantic-era Russian ballet and the elaborate stage shows of New York City’s Cotton Club in the late 1920s presented similar challenges to Tchaikovsky and Ellington. The need for variety was paramount, meaning constant shifts in musical mood and style, but at the same time continuity was necessary. Exoticism was an audience favorite in both settings, and each composer had to take into account the choreography, making sure rhythms and tempos would allow the dancers to show their skills to the best effect.

The overtures in each case set the tone and show the range of timbre, volume, and articulation possible in each of their respective orchestras. Both are also elegant and balanced, whether in terms of the classicism that Tchaikovsky gleaned from Mozart and Haydn or the carefully calibrated swing of Ellington’s band. What typically follows in any concert performance of Tchaikovsky’s music is a selection from among the “characteristic dances,” which contrast style, tempo, and orchestration in order to conjure the various members of the court of the Sugar-Plum Fairy. As most conductors do, Ellington selected some, but not all, of these dances in order to show off the members of his band.

Ellington’s “Toot, Toot, Tootie, Toot” is the closest to its source material, although the innovations set the tone for what is to come. Where Tchaikovsky had piping flutes and bassoons over a quiet string ostinato, Ellington has the reed section divided into clarinets and saxes in close alternation, over a relaxed groove in the rhythm section, with more forceful interjections from the brass. The melancholy, resonant English horn solo becomes a series of broad smears with cup mutes in the trombones. Where the middle portion of Tchaikovsky’s dance is an exoticized whirling dervish, with trumpets over an ostinato in the low strings and brass, Ellington instead lets the band break out into an improvisatory section with the clarinet in the lead.

   The two marches also make for an interesting comparison—similar in spirit but executed on their own terms. Tchaikovsky’s quick marche militaire is all about precision of articulation and brilliance in figuration and orchestration. Although the brightness of trumpet also figures in Ellington’s “Peanut Brittle Brigade,” the virtuosity shines through most clearly in a series of up-tempo, boppish solo choruses for trumpet, clarinet, tenor sax, and piano.

   Tchaikovsky’s indifference to his own score for The Nutcracker is famous, but the “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” allowed him to showcase a new instrument that fascinated him—the celesta—making it perhaps the only part of the score he was pleased with. The twinkling, ethereal sound of the instrument, accompanied only by delicate pizzicatos, does make for a magical atmosphere—and it is here that Ellington and Strayhorn part ways with Tchaikovsky in all but the melody they borrowed. Over a slow vamp from the drummer, using the evocative toms, the tenor saxophone struts through “Sugar Rum Cherry,” encouraged by occasional smears and growls in the brass.

   The blistering trepak of Tchaikovsky’s Russian Dance becomes the energetic bounce of the “Volga Vouty.” In another reversal, Tchaikovsky’s graceful, but somewhat melancholy and restrained “Waltz of the Flowers” becomes an opportunity for almost every member of the band to have a virtuosic turn in the rousing series of swing choruses that make up “Dance of the Floreadores.” —Katherine Baber, Ph.D., Professor of Music and Director of the Salzburg Program, University of Redlands