A Glorious Orchestra and Choir Concert
Why You Shouldn't Miss It
Youth Orchestra members join us for Bela Keler’s Lustspiel Overture. More musical stories are told by the Symphonic Choir with a series of popular opera choruses, including the Anvil Chorus from Verdi's Il Trovatore.
We’ll finish the program with Rimsky-Korsakov’s brilliant orchestral showpiece Sheherezade. Audiences love the enchanting music inspired by a great storyteller and the exotic tales she weaves.
BY GRANT HARVILLE
PROGRAM NOTES
Lustspiel Overture
1872
Béla Kéler | 1820 – 1882
6 MINUTES
One of my first self-imposed tasks upon arriving in Great Falls in 2017 was to catalog every piece the Symphony had ever performed. I went through all the old programs I could find (almost all of them, fortunately), and compiled a list of every piece from every concert, including soloists, venues, and so on. It took a couple months, but it was a great way to learn the history of the organization
I had just been charged to lead. (Do you know how many times the GFSA has performed Pictures at an Exhibition? You do now: Four–in 1971, 1979, 1991, and 2014.)
One only mildly surprising discovery was that, while the current instance of the Great Falls Symphony counts its origin from 1959, several earlier organizations of the same name had existed previously, the earliest of which was incorporated by a certain R.A. Keyes on October 1, 1924. In other words, while we describe this year as our 66th, it is in fact the 100th anniversary of the initial formation of a
“Great Falls Symphony.” And the first piece that that initial iteration of the Great Falls Symphony performed was Béla Kéler’s Lustspiel Overture.
Béla Kéler was a Hungarian composer and bandleader whose success took him to various posts and tours throughout Europe. (Unlike his more famous countryman and first-name sharer Béla Bartók, you can still find Kéler’s name listed in the traditional Hungarian order of family name first – that is, Kéler Béla – relatively often: Bartók’s fame seems to have brought about, in his case, the near-universal adoption of the personal-name-first arrangement, at least outside of Hungary itself.) Kéler’s music doesn’t receive much play today, but his light-hearted Romantic style will be familiar to anyone who knows the works of Johann Strauss, Jr. or Franz von Suppe. We’re delighted to have members of the Great Falls Youth Orchestra sitting side by side with us for this piece.
In fact, this program is designed to highlight all three of the largest programs in the GFSA umbrella, all of which I’ve had the pleasure to conduct for portions of my tenure.
After the Youth Orchestra joins us for the Kéler, the Symphonic Choir will come on for four famous opera choruses. (This too is a callback to 1924: Keyes’s Great Falls Symphony frequently performed opera excerpts – considered pops repertoire at the time – for its audience.)
Anvil Chorus
from Il Trovatore
1853
Giuseppe Verdi | 1813 – 1901
3 MINUTES
Amidst a lifetime’s worth of hummable favorites, the so-called “Anvil Chorus” from Il trovatore (The Troubadour) stands alongside “La donna è mobile” and “Va pensiero” as one of Giuseppe Verdi’s most famous tunes. Officially titled the Chorus of Gypsies, the Anvil Chorus establishes the second-act setting of the gypsy camp, with the men at their anvils (mimicked in the percussion), and men and women alike greeting the morning sun and extolling the virtues of hard work.
Moon Chorus
from Merry Wives of Windsor
1846
Otto Nicolai | 1810 – 1849
3 MINUTES
Otto Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, details the slapsticky shenanigans of the pompous Sir John Falstaff and the wealthy women whose fortunes Falstaff is scheming to acquire. The lovely Moon Chorus (“O sweet moon”) ushers in the opera’s final scene, a masked ball in a forest. The entire text can be quoted here: “O sweet moon, o lovely night: When peace reigns, only love watches.”
Peasant's Chorus
from Eugene Onegin
1879
Peter Tchaikovsky | 1840 – 1893
3 MINUTES
If the Moon Chorus is a serene moment in a comic opera, the Peasants’ Chorus in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is the opposite: a boisterous choral showpiece surrounded by a melancholy (if often gorgeous) tale of unrequited love, remorse, and death. (The plot, based on Alexander Pushkin’s novel, primarily consists of a man choosing not to be with a woman and later regretting that decision. Not a lot of action, though someone does get shot.) In contrast to the brooding noble principal characters, the peasants “sing and dance with pleasure” as they enjoy the harvest.
Gloria all'Egitto
from Aïda
1871
Giuseppe Verdi | 1813 – 1901
8 MINUTES
Finally, Verdi’s Gloria all’Egitto (often called
The Grand March) from Aïda rivals the Anvil Chorus as one of Verdi’s most popular opera excerpts. Aïda’s Romeo and Juliet-ish plot places its star-crossed lovers not in two households, both alike in dignity, but rather in the royal houses of the warring Egypt and Ethiopia. Gloria all’Egitto, flush with trumpet fanfares, celebrates Egypt’s Prince Ramades’s return from victory over the Ethiopians.
Sheherezade
1888
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
1844 – 1908
48 MINUTES
Along with the Youth Orchestra and Symphonic Choir, the third large ensemble in the GFSA is, of course, the symphony itself. There is no composer whose works more proudly celebrate the orchestral ensemble than the Romantic Russian Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Like many in his peer group, Rimsky was not groomed for a musical career, instead joining the Russian Navy, as was typical for second sons in the Russian nobility. (His naval duties may have made him the first major European composer to visit the United States: During a three-year voyage from 1862–65, his ship the Almaz is known to have docked in New York before continuing down the South American coast. Rimsky wrote his first symphony on this trip.) But a decade later, he was teaching composition at the fledgling Saint Petersburg Conservatory and gaining notoriety as an expert in orchestration, completing his still-used textbook Principles of Orchestration in 1874.
Rimsky’s most famous work Sheherezade premiered in Saint Petersburg in 1888. The tales of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, on which the composition is based, had made their way to Europe by the early 1700s, having been compiled from various sources throughout the Middle East and South Asia a few centuries earlier. Such Eastern cultural items were popular throughout the Western world but especially resonant in Russia, which had always had something of a split personality regarding Europe and Asia.
In the Arabian Nights, Sheherezade is married to the vengeful King Shahryar, who marries and executes a new woman every day as a defense against infidelity. Sheherezade’s tactic against such a fate is to tell the king a story so fascinating (and incomplete) that he refrains from killing her in order to hear how the tale ends. Once she finishes one, she immediately launches herself into the next, thus continuing the cycle. In Rimsky’s four-movement suite, both the king and Sheherezade appear throughout in various guises. The king opens the work in an oppressive, drawn-out E minor; by movement four his melody has become agitated and impatient. Sheherezade meanwhile takes the form of the plaintive solo violin, accompanied by the strumming harp, the classic instrument of the storyteller.
The four tales of Rimsky’s suite are evoked more than told: The opener The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship presents the wide expanse and rolling waves of the ocean – an image Rimsky would have known well. The eclectic second movement portrays the Kalendar Prince, who loses his wealth (and an eye) and is left wandering the world facing variegated sorrows and dangers. The Young Prince and Young Princess takes its inspiration from the many love stories in Arabian Nights. While no specific tale is intended, Sheherezade’s violin melody threads itself into the fabric of the movement, acting as a kind of self-insert rather than a framing device as it does in the other movements. This may presage the softening of the king’s wrath and the ultimate reconciliation of Sheherezade and the king. The finale too eschews specific tales and instead illustrates commonly-encountered high-energy tropes: a bustling market and a shipwreck. Sheherezade herself of course gets the last word.
CONCERT SPONSOR
Deborah Holbrook
GRANT HARVILLE
