Concert II, 2024-2025 Season
Invigorating Water Music
This family-friendly concert is designed to illustrate the way music and water are connected. It traces this relationship over time from whale-song (perhaps the original water music) in Hovhaness’s And God Created Great Whales to the effects of modern industrial manufacturing on rivers in Charles Ives’ The Housatonic at Stockbridge.
The first set (played without interruption) features the first movement from a suite (a set of pieces) by Handel that was designed to be played by musicians floating down the river Thames on barges. Even setting aside the possibility of bad weather, rough waters, and so on, the music had to communicate (no microphones or speakers) to people standing on the banks or in other boats. You can hear how clear and bright the sounds have to be to make this happen. The next two pieces relate to the idea of a river in different ways. Duke Ellington’s piece “The Spring” from his suite “The River” suggests how a little trickle can become something mightier. And Ives’ The Housatonic at Stockbridge suggests what may lie underneath the apparently placid surface of a river used for industry.
Before the next water-related set, we have a special guest appearance by Kyle Almquist, who won our “Conduct the Orchestra” silent auction prize. He leads us in a short section of Tchaikovsky’s famous Swan Lake ballet. This is the theme that is associated with Odette, the swan/human heroine of the ballet, who, as the music suggests, comes to a sad end.
The second set includes just one piece— Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, written when Mendelssohn was only 18, and inspired by two poems by the German poet Goethe. The first one (The Calm Sea) includes the lines “Deathly silence! In that huge expanse, the water does not even ripple.” The second (Prosperous Voyage) says “The sky is bright! … Hurry up … I already see land!”
Our third set is not-water-related. Joshua Zhang, winner of this year’s Judith Elser Concerto Competition, will play the first movement of Henri Tomasi’s elegant Trombone Concerto. Tomasi wrote concertos for all the wind instruments except flute, and also one for viola. This one’s use of orchestral color is distinctively French, and its emphasis on lovely melodies makes sense when we know that Tomasi’s primary interest was opera.
The third set, also played without interruption, consists of the famous Hornpipe from Handel’s water music. The Hornpipe is a British folk dance in a slowish triple meter (beats grouped into threes); the name may or may not derive from an ancient musical instrument, unsurprisingly built from an animal’s horn. After the Hornpipe, the whales enter. Actually, the whales (taped) don’t show up until after the orchestra suggests roiling water, something huge and majestic, and then a growing folk-like tune over bubbling accompaniment.
Our last set puts Duke Ellington’s quietly meandering river, set to a slow swing beat, and complete with piano and harp twinkles in the sun, next to Smetana’s famous portrayal of the noble and fast-flowing Moldau river (the German term for the Vltava River in Bohemia, or what is now the Czech Republic). Some listeners may hear the resemblance between the main tune of this piece and the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah. The resemblance is unmistakeable, but there was no direct borrowing involved; both tunes probably derive from a Romanian folksong known in the 1800s and probably earlier, as “Cart and Oxen.”
© Mary Hunter