By Christopher Wilkins
We are thrilled to extend our partnership with the New England Aquarium and its Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life tonight. I am grateful to President and CEO Vikki Spruill for her generous participation, and to the New England Aquarium team for enthusiastically embracing our collaborations. For over a decade, in four distinct concerts, the Landmarks Orchestra and I have found inspiration in the passion, adventure, dreams, and bold ideals of the New England Aquarium.
Our oceanic-musical adventures have included vocal performances by humpbacks, bearded seals, bottled nosed dolphins, pilot whales, sei whales, and bowheads (singing in duet). We have explored themes of human-generated noise in the oceans, plastics and pollutions, the survival of threatened and endangered species, and interspecies communication. Tonight we reveal exciting new drone footage of North Atlantic right whales, look at stunning imagery of glaciers and coral reefs in the context of climate change, and take an inspiring visit inside the Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Hospital.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the most prodigious child in musical history, Mozart and Mendelssohn notwithstanding. His ballet-pantomime Der Schneemann (The Snowman), composed at the age of 11, quickly became a sensation at the Vienna Court Opera. His Sinfonietta, written when he was 15, was performed to extraordinary acclaim throughout Europe and America. While still a teenager, he composed two operas, both of which premiered under the direction of Bruno Walter.
Korngold’s eventual triumph as a Hollywood composer followed his lifelong affinity for the theater. The success of his opera Die tote Stadt—an immediate sensation and still widely performed today—led to his involvement with director Max Rhinehardt. That association led him to Alfred Hitchcock and eventually to the Warner Brothers Studio. Historian Tony Thomas writes that Korngold had “the gift of melody, an innate sense of theater, and the skills to manipulate sentiment, emotion, humor, and excitement. In short, if Jack L. Warner had been praying for such a composer, then his prayers had been answered.”
The Sea Hawk was the last of six scores Korngold composed for the swashbuckling star Errol Flynn. Of the film’s more than two hours, Korngold scored all but twenty minutes. There are themes for all the film’s principal characters, for Elizabeth and the English court, for its battle scenes, and for the love between the English privateer Geoffrey Thorpe and the Spanish ambassador’s niece, Doña María. Korngold’s score is widely considered a high point in the history of music for Hollywood. To us at Landmarks, the music also echoes the passion for the sea, the exalted ideals, and the spirit of can-do we associate with the New England Aquarium.
Tonight we present a new video of North Atlantic right whales, incorporating recent close-up drone footage. The images move to the music of Maurice Ravel’s Une Barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean). This eight-minute work began life as the fourth of his five piano pieces, Miroirs (Mirrors). The orchestration is the composer’s own. Swirling arpeggios in strings and harp invoke wind and water, as woodwinds exchange bobbing motives to suggest the rocking of a boat.
For North Atlantic right whales, the potential for catastrophe looms. Saving them is an urgent priority for the Aquarium, the Anderson Cabot Center, and Women Working for Oceans. Despite some encouraging news over past couple seasons, North Atlantic right whales face a multitude of hazardous conditions caused by human activity, principally ship strikes and entanglement in fishing lines, but also toxic algae, noxious chemicals, pervasive noise pollution, unreliable supplies of their principal food (copepods), and the highest incidence of parasitic infections (giardia and cryptosporidium) ever recorded in a mammal. Their birthrate remains alarmingly low.
Paul Gay is a musical hero in New England. For many years the principal trombonist of the Boston Ballet Orchestra, Paul could also be seen performing frequently with elite ensembles in the Boston area including the Boston Pops and Boston Symphony. As a conductor, he has led various New England regional orchestras. A performance of Puccini’s La Bohème under his direction was listed by the Boston Globe as one of Boston’s “Top Ten Performances of the Year.”
Paul’s career in composition began while an undergraduate at the New England Conservatory of Music. Its Third Stream Big Band —and its way of incorporating improvisation—felt like a natural outgrowth of Paul’s early rural high school years in Jonesboro, Maine. Paul Gay’s works include song cycles, music for piano, chamber music, dramatic and symphonic works. His Bacchanalian Alarum opened the Boston Symphony’s 100th Anniversary celebration party. A recent highlight was the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra premiere of the Finale from the ballet Due Sorelle.
Of his North Atlantic Sea Songs, Paul Gay writes:
Sailing Under the Stars
This vocal-orchestral setting of Robert Frost’s “Stars” is one of three that I’ve made of the poem. “Stars” seem to have assumed dominance over all the other Frost poems I’ve set. All the others have only one setting. The language is so cool and ethereal at the same time.
Stars
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
How countlessly they congregate
O’er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
When wintry winds do blow!—
As if with keenness for our fate,
Our faltering few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest
Invisible at dawn,—
And yet with neither love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes
Without the gift of sight.
Flying Lesson: Profile of a Puffin
On a ski trip to Vermont, the first day was so cold that we stayed in bed all day. It happened that a fascinating program on puffins was on TV, and that I had some music manuscript in my suitcase. I was struck by the contrast between their getting around on land and in water. It was a hoot writing “Profile of a Puffin” that day.
Seabreeze
The upstairs bedroom windows in our old oceanside farmhouse in Roque Bluffs, Maine are open every morning, and the breeze from the ocean across the field keeps the air filled with its scent. One morning the breeze brought the opening line for Seabreeze with it as well. That morning the text and the music that edged itself in took turns with each other as to what comes next. The held hands from a warm memory = the conversation, the moon darting through the clouds, the mystery the inspiration.
Seabreeze
Paul Edward Gay
Softly as a goose down pillow
it seems to me this night,
this night so gentle the feel
of hands held firm, not tight.
Softly as a goose down pillow
it seems to me tonight.
What is this I dream?
Seabreeze floats by mystery,
now clouds recede,
Moonlight touches us.
Still your beating heartbeats
will lay to rest the dust.
Surely this will end, end;
must it ever tho’?
I could spend forever
gently so entwined,
forever dream with me.
In the mirror reflected
the sun appears to my op’ning eyes.
Still, your beating heartbeats
where are they now?
Surely this did end?
Now that I’m awake,
I will search forever, searching,
searching for my dreams—of you.
Lying softly… goose down pillow.
Now that I’m alone,
must it e’re be so?
So—Moonlight—Seabreeze—swiissh
Seabreeze
Squall
From the conductor’s perspective, Squall is the densest and most complex of the four movements. Regularly irregular rhythmic reverberations emerge right away from the large percussion battery, which includes a five-octave marimba and a wind machine. At least three different types of music constantly converge and disperse, creating the drafts and crosscurrents suggested by the title. As with Flying Lesson, the virtuosic writing for solo piano is deftly delivered by one of the region’s most celebrated orchestral pianists, Vytas Baksys.
Arthur Sullivan’s musical partnership with playwright W. S. Gilbert stands as one of the most successful in theatrical history. Together, they created fourteen operettas over a twenty-five period, beginning in 1871. The Pirates of Penzance premiered in New York rather than in London, because the team believed, incorrectly, that it would help them secure the US copyright. Gilbert develops the story using classic G&S conceits: unqualified and undeserving people in positions of authority, the absurd consequences of bad decision-making, and last-minute discoveries that get everybody out of a jam. The plot not only makes fun of British aristocracy and the English criminal justice system, but also of dramatic and operatic conventions. The elegance and eloquence of both music and play have kept Pirates in the standard repertory of theaters, opera companies, and community playhouses throughout the English-speaking world.
David Arnold, Trustee of the Boston Landmarks Orchestra and former Boston Globe Reporter, shares with us tonight a stunning video creation. Then and Now: Changes from Above and Below comes in two parts. The first deals with glaciers; the second with coral reefs. It is set to Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Never has that American masterwork been put to greater use, with an effect that is at once awe-inspiring and devastating.
In David’s words:
Then and Now places us squarely in unsettling evidence of how humans are changing the face of the planet—both above and below the waterline.
The late Bradford Washburn, Director of the Boston Museum of Science, was also an extraordinary early aerial photographer of glaciers. He provided 60-year-old flight logs with meticulously recorded shooting details of locations, flying altitudes, weather conditions, and seasonal light conditions. They were the roadmap that facilitated an accurate second look decades later.
If the path to documenting melting ice was an exercise in connecting dots, the challenge with corals was simply finding the dots. Only since the early 1970s has underwater photography become relatively common in source materials such as old dive magazines. Very rarely did a photographer contemplate returning to a coral structure. Reference might be made to the name of a reef. But coordinates? No way.
Another daunting challenge—if the photographer was still alive and could be found—was gaining permission to use her or his shot for a project illustrating not beauty but malignancy. The solution ultimately required finding dive shop guides who knew the “neighborhood” and recalled remnants of a specific formation, and were willing to share their concern for coral health at the risk of losing the business of the tourist dive community,
Thanks to the remarkable assistance of Gabriela Romanow, these photo comparisons have been featured in eleven museums nationwide, three other musical concerts, and twenty-nine schools and civic organizations. Since my most recent “now” picture, seasonal heat trapping carbon overhead has increased 6.75 percent. Water temperature in the Caribbean is up 6.25 percent. In an era when science, indeed reality, can so flippantly be questioned, this project has been and will continue to be a personal inspiration to act.
Music from the orchestral suite Caucasian Sketches by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, provides the musical backdrop to an uplifting and dramatic story told in images from the New England Aquarium.
For more than twenty-five years, the New England Aquarium has partnered with Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary to rescue, rehabilitate, and release endangered and threatened sea turtles on Cape Cod. As cold-blooded reptiles, sea turtles depend on the temperature of their surroundings to maintain their body temperature. When water temperatures decline, turtles can suffer from a form of hypothermia called cold-stunning. Each fall in Cape Cod Bay, some turtles get stuck in the cooling waters, become cold-stunned, and wash up on area beaches.
The team at the Sea Turtle Hospital in the Aquarium’s Quincy Animal Care Center, rehabilitates hundreds of injured turtles each year. Working in coordination with the Aquarium and NOAA, “Turtles Fly Too” transports medically stable sea turtles to other rehab facilities so they can be released in warmer waters. Up to 85% of the turtles that remain in the Sea Turtle Hospital are released back into the ocean.
The sea inspired Claude Debussy throughout his life. La Mer was also born of another of Debussy’s passions at the time, Emma Bardac. He dedicated his original score to her, making reference in his inscription to dark times they shared as a result of pursuing their intimate relationship while both were still married to others: “For my little one whose eyes laugh in the shade.”
Debussy’s turbulent state of mind must have had an effect on the music. Compared with the rest of his output, La Mer is unusual for its emotional power. When once asked to name his favorite poets, Debussy named only one: Baudelaire. He did not abide the term “Impressionism” to describe his own style, identifying more with the artists known as Symbolists. Debussy felt closer to Mallarmé than to Monet. He particularly admired J. M. W. Turner (“the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art,” Debussy said) and Edgar Allan Poe (he once began an opera based on The Fall of the House of Usher). In explaining his love of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, he revealed a Symbolist’s aesthetic: “There is no attempt at direct imitation, but rather at capturing the invisible sentiments of nature. Does one render the mystery of the forest by recording the height of the trees?”
Begun as “three symphonic sketches,” La Mer eventually assumed the shape of a thematically unified three-movement symphony. The first movement corresponds to a morning on the sea. It emerges from the indistinct colors of dawn in the low strings, timpani and harp into brightly colored arabesques in the winds. Noting that the music covers the morning hours, Eric Satie once wryly commented that he especially enjoyed a tranquil moment toward the end, which he estimated occurred at “about a quarter to eleven.”
The second movement contains the most evocative nature painting of the three, with vivid representations of rippling wind and water, blowing sea foam, lightning streaks, and crashing waves. The last movement invokes the Greek god Poseidon, riding the waves, blowing his conch. The finale contains the only extended melodic material of the entire work. Building from a majestic theme first heard at the close of the first movement—amidst rousing fanfares blown by a team of five trumpets—Debussy creates an enormous accumulation of sound as the work reaches its thrilling conclusion.
CHRISTOPHER WILKINS was appointed Music Director of the Boston Landmarks Orchestra in the spring of 2011. Since then, he has expanded the orchestra’s mission of making great music accessible to the whole community. He has also helped develop the orchestra’s Breaking Down Barriers initiative, making accessibility a priority in all aspects of the orchestra’s activities.
