Ibéria, No. 2 from Images
Claude Debussy
b. St. Germaine-en-Laye, France / August 22, 1862
d. Paris, France / March 25, 1918
Debussy composed the three orchestral Images between 1905 and 1912. In the second piece in the collection, Ibéria, he crystallized a celebratory vision of Spain. He paid a single visit there, even then only to spend part of one day attending a bullfight. That encounter, plus books, paintings, travel tales told by friends, and his vivid imagination – the last as always his preferred and most potent inspiration – sparked him to create several Spanish-flavored works. The outer panels of Ibéria bask in the diamond-bright glow of Spanish sunshine. In the Streets and Byways blazes with bright, sharply chiselled colors and pulses with vivacious rhythms. The Fragrances of the Night is a still, shimmering nocturne. As the warmth of the night gradually dissolves with the approach of daybreak, this panel overlaps ingeniously with the exuberant, freewheeling final portion, The Morning of a Festival Day.
Interchange, for Guitar Quartet and Orchestra
Sérgio Assad
b. Mococa, Sao Paulo, Brazil / December 26, 1952
Sergio Assad began creating music for the guitar not long after he began playing the instrument. By age 14, he was arranging and writing original compositions for the guitar duo he had formed with his brother, Odair. He went on to study conducting and composition at the Escola Nacional de Música in Rio de Janeiro.
Over the last 20 years, he has concentrated most of his efforts on building a repertoire for the guitar duo. He has extended the possibilities of the two-guitar combination through his arrangements of Latin American music by composers such as Piazzolla, Villa-Lobos and Ginastera, as well as baroque to modern music by Scarlatti, Rameau, Soler, Bach, Mompou, Ravel, Debussy, and Gershwin among others.
As a composer, he has completed more than 50 works for guitar, many of which have become standards in the repertoire. From September 2008, Mr. Assad is a faculty member in guitar at the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
The composer has provided the following introduction to his new composition, Interchange.
It was an old dream of mine to write a substantial piece for the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet (LAGQ) with orchestra. A few years ago, Bill Kanengiser, a member of the LAGQ, encouraged me to sketch a piece that was later commissioned by Matthew Dune, Director of the Southwest Guitar Festival, to be premiered by the San Antonio Symphony during the 2009 season.
Interchange grew out of my view of the quartet’s great ability to blend different music styles into a unique and novel interpretation. I used their individual taste in music as starting points for the first four movements and I end the piece with the coalescence of these four different pieces forming an Interchange.
Since I have known Bill Kanengiser, Scott Tennant, and John Deerman for over two decades as great musicians and friends, I had many good memories to choose from for inspiration. Matthew Greff is their new partner, having recently joined the quartet. Each of the first four movements highlights one member of the quartet with a specific blend of music styles and a short solo cadenza. A larger cadenza involving the four guitars announces the final movement.
To honor Bill in the first movement, I crossed some Renaissance-type of dances with the Jewish scale following the idea that Bill has a vast interest in different types of music while remaining the most classical of all four members. To portray Scott, a big fan and excellent performer of flamenco style, I offered a mix of Spanish buleria with another area of his interest that is Balkan music. For Matt, who added to the group his great skills in jazz improvisation, I wrote a slow movement reminiscent of a jazz ballad with an open section for his inventive melody lines. For John, who lately became passionate about Brazilian music, I mixed baião and blues. Baião is a rhythm from the northeast of Brazil and I had lots of fun submitting some blues phrasing to the peculiar syncopation of the Baião. The fifth and last movement crosses all four themes and that is how I brought up the name Interchange. The word Interchange represents my intentions in using traditional music styles of the world blended as a whole organic unit. At the same time Interchange also suggests a casual meeting of different people on the L.A. turnpike.
Selections from Carmen
Georges Bizet
b. Paris, France / October 25, 1838
d. Bougival, France / June 3, 1875
The path to Carmen, Bizet’s masterpiece, involved numerous other operas, through which he developed the profound understanding of musical theater which Carmen so clearly displays. It premiered in Paris on March 3, 1875. The savagely negative reviews ensured that it gradually dropped from sight. Its ascent to worldwide popularity began in the autumn of that year, with the triumphant success of the first production in Vienna. Alas for Bizet, since by then he had died, just 37.
Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy based their libretto on the story by Prosper Merimée. The action takes place in and around Seville, Spain, during the 1820s. Carmen is a heartless gypsy who seduces and abandons Don José, a weak-willed soldier. In a fit of jealous rage, he kills her. The brilliantly scored orchestral selections you will hear at this concert vividly evoke the opera’s sultry setting, dramatic events, and vibrant characters, who include gypsies, toreadors, soldiers and street urchins.
Suite from Romeo and Juliet
Sergei Prokofiev
b. Sontsovka, Ukraine / April 27, 1891
d. Moscow, Russia / March 5, 1953
In 1934, the Leningrad Opera and Ballet Company (later the Kirov Ballet) commissioned Prokofiev to compose a ballet based on Shakespeare’s immortal love drama, Romeo and Juliet. He and the company’s director, Sergei Radlov, spent months working on the scenario. Meanwhile a newly installed company management decided to withdraw from the project. Undaunted, Prokofiev struck a deal to have it staged by Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. He then proceeded to complete his score, which he did in five months’ worth of concentrated, inspired effort. Alas, history repeated itself and the Bolshoi decided to pass on it, too. In order to have the music heard, Prokofiev drew upon it for a set of 10 piano transcriptions and two concert suites. Romeo and Juliet finally saw the stage in December 1938 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. That production was successful enough. More than a year passed before the appearance of the first staging to do the score justice, once the Kirov agreed to mount the premiere production within the Soviet Union. It scored an unqualified triumph on January 11, 1940.
Romeo and Juliet may well be Prokofiev’s masterpiece. None of his other scores display with equal consistency the same degree of passion, or a comparable variety of color and mood. The selections that Maestro Seaman has chosen include the menacing dance performed at a grand ball by the members of the lovers’ rival families (Montagues and Capulets), the mischievous and wistful portrait of the young Juliet, and the terrifying scene in which Romeo avenges the death of his friend Mercutio by killing Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt.
© 2008 Don Anderson. All rights reserved.
