by Christopher Wilkins
Tonight we partner with the Esplanade Association in a concert marking the 25th anniversary of both organizations. Together with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, they steward this remarkable stretch of public parkland. Since the beginning, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra has presented nature-inspired programs that our founder, Charles Ansbacher, called Green Concerts. Beautiful places and great music enrich one another, and Boston is blessed with both.
In August of 1829, Felix Mendelssohn made a superb pen-and-ink drawing titled “A View of the Hebrides.” He sketched it looking out at Dunollie Castle from the west coast of Scotland, with the Isle of Mull in the distance. The next day, he and a companion made their way by steamship to the Isle of Staffa and Fingal’s Cave. His friend marveled, “A greener roar of waves never rushed into a stranger cavern—its many pillars making it look like the inside of an immense pipe organ, black and resounding, absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide grey sea within and without.”
In a letter home from the fishing village of Tobermory, Mendelssohn wrote: “In order to make you realize how extraordinarily the Hebrides have affected me, the following came into my mind…” Below, he wrote the opening twenty-one bars of what became The Hebrides overture, with dynamics and orchestration, already in nearly its final form.
The gentle rocking motion of the overture’s principal theme first emerges “below the surface” in the violas, cellos, and bassoon. As the violins take it up, the lower strings flow into an undulating counterline. Musical shapes are in constant flux, transforming into waves both short and long. As the turbulence subsides, it is the cellos again who unveil the second subject. Donald Tovey called it “quite the greatest tune Mendelssohn ever wrote.” It seems to express both bliss in the present moment and nostalgia for an idealized past. A climbing bass line signals mounting agitation as the first theme returns, now dramatically intensified in every respect—harmony, rhythm, and orchestration.
The development section, at the center of the work, reveals Mendelssohn the nature painter at his finest. We hear rolling waves, the cries of gulls, echoes returning from the interior of the cave, and the bustle of human adventure. When the opening music returns, motivic reverberations from the development linger. As the music settles again, the second subject passes to the solo clarinet—with the second clarinet soon joining—bringing a new mood of poignant rumination. The coda surges quickly to the overture’s most propulsive moment before subsiding into brief reminiscences of the first subject in the clarinet and the second subject in the flute’s final ascending line, as if suggesting an ending without end.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Excerpt from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, published in Dream Work (1986)
British-American composer Anna Clyne’s gift for creating imaginative large-scale works has led to residencies with several of the world’s leading orchestras. Her music spans an astonishing range, from electroacoustic works and multimedia collaborations to compositions incorporating her own paintings. Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” inspired Clyne to explore musical counterparts to its imagery of flight, birdsong, wildness, urgency, and belonging. The work unfolds in three interconnected sections: an opening of distant calls and expansive horizons; a restless central span of mounting tension and turbulence; and a luminous conclusion suggesting both arrival and open sky.
The marvels of Ottorino Respighi’s Fountains of Rome are many. The first of his Roman trilogy—followed later by Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals—it stands not far removed from grand Italian opera, with its broad melodies, grand climaxes, and theatrical sweep. Like Puccini’s Tosca, it is a musical love letter to Rome, each movement rooted in a precise location and time of day. As Respighi explained, he sought to portray each fountain “at the hour in which its beauty appears most in harmony with the surrounding landscape.”
As compelling as the imagery is, it is Respighi’s sumptuous orchestration that most thoroughly seduces the ear. At the age of twenty-one, he left his native Bologna to play viola in the orchestra of the St. Petersburg Opera, where he took what he described as “a few, but for me very important” lessons with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the age’s unrivaled master of orchestration. Respighi’s extraordinary ability to capture a scene in vivid orchestral color has made him one of musical history’s greatest landscape painters.
I. The Fountain of Valle Giulia at Dawn Early light plays upon an ever-brightening landscape as rivulets of water murmur in the background. Piping shepherds and “droves of cattle pass and disappear in the fresh, damp mists of a Roman dawn,” Respighi writes in the score’s preface. II. The Triton Fountain in the Morning Four blasts on Triton’s horn and upward-shooting sprays announce our arrival at Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s great fountain. A “joyous call” summons “troops of naiads and tritons,” in Respighi’s description, “who come running up… mingling in a frenzied dance between the jets of water.” III. The Trevi Fountain at Noon At midday we reach the grandest of Rome’s monumental fountains, celebrated in the 1954 film Three Coins in the Fountain. Neptune rides his chariot, “drawn by sea horses and followed by a train of sirens and tritons,” according to the composer. “The procession then vanishes while faint trumpet blasts resound in the distance.” IV. The Villa Medici Fountain at Sunset A glowing romantic atmosphere descends. Swirling harps, shimmering flutes, and soft viola chords accompany mournful themes that pass from winds to solo violin. “The air is full of the sound of tolling bells, birds twittering, leaves rustling,” Respighi writes. “Then all dies peacefully into the silence of the night.”
Leonore Overture No. 3 is the best-known of Beethoven’s several attempts at writing an overture for his only opera. Conceived as a “rescue symphony,” it traces the opera’s emotional journey from imprisonment to liberation, compressing its psychological and dramatic arc into a single movement. The overture’s overwhelming power is widely thought to explain why Beethoven ultimately set it aside: it tells too much of the story before the curtain rises. Yet the breadth of its conception and the force of its musical argument make it one of the supreme expressions of Beethoven’s heroic style.
I cannot hear the overture’s opening without imagining Leonore descending, step by step, into the dungeon where her husband, Florestan, has been unjustly imprisoned. Held chords in the strings and bassoon follow her searching gaze into the darkness. An unexpected brightening gives way to clarinets and bassoons, who introduce the opening phrase of Florestan’s Act II aria: “In the springtime of my life, happiness has deserted me.” An exchange of short motives suggests the passage of time, building to a series of momentous chords that reveal the magnitude of what is at stake. At their quietest, cellos and basses climb stepwise toward the beginning of the Allegro.
The principal theme of the exposition unfolds in rising arches. Horns, with a skeletal fragment from Florestan’s aria, announce a second theme of sunny cast but uncertain destination. Long, suspenseful passages made from this material are interrupted by abrupt full-orchestra interjections. A sudden upward surge leads to an offstage trumpet call announcing the arrival of a government minister. A second call—by tradition now closer—offers hope for Florestan’s release. The principal theme returns in the solo flute, whose exuberant arabesques seem to anticipate new-won freedom. The coda opens with rapid ascending scales that accumulate in successive layers through the strings, building toward an immense crescendo and exploding into a compressed, heroic statement of the principal theme—one of the most exhilarating conclusions in all of Beethoven.
“I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again,” Camille Saint-Saëns said of his Symphony No. 3. A virtuoso pianist and organist, he was also an accomplished conductor and one of the most learned musicians of his generation. He published influential writings on French musical history, on Mozart and Gluck, and on subjects ranging from astronomy and archaeology to acoustics, philosophy, and literature. With a gift for expressive melody and an extraordinary ear for orchestration, Saint-Saëns produced a lifetime of works distinguished by grace, clarity, and eloquence. Among them are Samson et Dalila, Carnival of the Animals, five piano concertos that remain cornerstones of the French Romantic repertory, and the monumental Third Symphony.
The London premiere on May 19, 1886, was a triumph. “The Symphony enjoyed a colossal success,” Saint-Saëns reported, “spiced up by just enough opposition to make the success more intense.” Most of the dissent focused on his decision to augment the orchestra with both organ and piano four-hands. But audiences have always loved the symphony. More than a few tears have been shed over the slow movement, while the finale’s grande mélodie has achieved near-immortality, surviving even a rendition by singing mice and the unexpected heroism of a pig in the 1995 film Babe.
The symphony’s Introduction lasts little more than a minute, yet it accomplishes an extraordinary amount. It establishes an atmosphere of mystery and premonition, enriches the harmonic palette by beginning not in the home key but in a neighboring one, and introduces a four-note motive—first heard in the oboe—that becomes the germ of most of the symphony’s melodic material.
Violins and violas launch the Allegro moderato with an agitated theme whose rhythm seems displaced, entering a sixteenth note before the expected beat and projecting an air of restlessness and instability. Keep this melody in your ear: you will recognize it as the source of the “tune of tunes” that concludes the entire work. The second subject is gentler, yet the nervous rhythmic figures of the opening continue beneath the surface, preventing the music from finding complete repose. The movement’s form follows Classical outlines, but its musical ideas undergo the kind of thematic transformation associated with Liszt. Saint-Saëns acknowledged that debt by dedicating the symphony to Liszt shortly before his death.
The atmosphere and motives of the introduction return. As pizzicati basses recall the lead-in to the opening Allegro, the first great coup de théâtre arrives with a single note: a low A-flat in the organ, which has remained silent until now. The music, Poco adagio, shifts to the luminous tonality of D-flat major, the key hinted at in the symphony’s opening bar. The mood turns blissfully serene as Saint-Saëns unfolds one of his most lyrically expansive melodies, recalling the ecstatic love duet from Act II of Samson et Dalila in the same key.
The only pause in the work separates the first section from the second, marking what many listeners perceive as the beginning of a third movement, Allegro moderato. A bold, athletic theme, derived from the four-note motto and answered forcefully by the timpani, brings new assertiveness. A central trio-like episode turns playful—even giddy—as Saint-Saëns introduces for the first time a solo piano. Its mercurial brilliance recalls the sparkling keyboard style of Carnival of the Animals, composed at nearly the same time. There, Saint-Saëns affectionately lampooned his own profession by including Pianistes—endlessly practicing their scales—among the exhibits in his zoological gallery.
After revisiting the scherzo, Saint-Saëns adds new fugal lines to the trio out of which he spins a lyrical transition leading to the finale. Solo oboe and pizzicato basses echo the symphony’s opening. Then, without warning, the organ erupts in a blazing organa plena C-major chord. This is the grand portal—marked Maestoso—that opens onto the final movement. Handelian counterpoint built from the fugal theme propels the music toward the first appearance of the grande mélodie, which the strings unveil above a glittering carillon in the piano, now played by two pianists. Organ and orchestra now pull out all the stops: a Baroque-style fugue, jubilant brass fanfares, repeated accelerations, a succession of mounting climaxes, and a final descending scale on the organ’s pedals—from C to shining C—carrying the symphony to a close in a blaze of grand rhetoric and sonic splendor.
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.
