“Prodigy” (dictionary): “1. A person, esp. a child or young person, having extraordinary talent or ability: a musical prodigy. 2. Something that excites wonder or excitement.“
Maestro Julien Benichou has designated “The Wonder of Prodigies” as the theme for today’s concert. The composers on the program all were or are young musical prodigies to one degree or another.
One locale for contemporary prospective prodigies is on Mt. Vernon Square in Baltimore. It is the Peabody Institute, a musical conservatory founded in 1857 but which began operating in 1866, after the Civil War. Peabody has become one of America’s world-leading conservatories, up there with The Juilliard School of Music in New York City, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Affiliated since 1977 with Johns Hopkins University as a Division of the university, a Peabody Conservatory degree is simultaneously a Johns Hopkins degree. Peabody students can avail themselves of all of JHU’s considerable research and other resources. The degree-granting Peabody Conservatory has some 640 undergraduate and graduate students.
Connected with the Conservatory is Peabody Preparatory, founded in 1894. Peabody Prep is “Baltimore’s premiere community school for the programming arts.” It serves some 2,000 students from 6 to 18 years of age. Peabody’s Children’s Chorus was founded in 1989 as part of the Preparatory School. It has ca. 300 young people in three levels, the Training Choir (age 6-10), Choristers (10-14) and Chamber Singers (12-18). Another part of the Prep is the Peabody Violin Choir, some 12 to 16 young people aged 10-16. Today’s concert features two sets of young people from Peabody Preparatory. We will have some 45 singers and several violinists on the stage together in concert with the Mid-Atlantic symphony.
Included on the program is the World Premiere of a work by a remarkable young composer, 13-year-old Thomas Reeves of New York City. Thomas Reeves is already an accomplished composer with some 40 opus-numbered works to his credit. The author of these notes had the opportunity to hear some of Thomas’ music on private recordings and on the Internet. It is truly noteworthy. One example is Thomas’ String Quartet No.1, Op. 13, the second movement of which was performed by a group of young musicians on National Public Radio’s “From The Top” broadcast on April 10, 2005. This movement can be described as a romantic Bach fugue. It combines presentation in fully developed fugal form à la Bach of a flowing melodism such as would cause Bach’s much later successors, Romantic-era composers like Brahms, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, to smile. An audio clip is available
http://www.fromthetop.org/Programs/Performers.cfm?pid=2020 .
Another piece that caught the writer’s ear was Thomas Reeves’ Piano Concerto #1, Op. #35, composed in 2006 at the age of 11. Even on the low-quality telephone-sounding recording on which I heard it, this piece is imaginative and very exciting. It is a full-throated concerto of piano versus orchestra. The first movement combines what can be characterized as rousing Lone Rangerish “giddyap!” western passages with full-flowered Brahmsian or Tchaikovskian flowing themes.
You can read more about Thomas Reeves elsewhere in this program book. His composition premiering with the MSO for the first time in live performance is Hexapodia. This work is an imaginative tour-de-force in its own right. It is further described below.
TODAY’S PROGRAM
Jean Sibelius (Finnish, 1865-1957)
Canzonetta, Op. 62a
Romantic-nationalist composer Jean Sibelius is best know for his evocative tone-poem Finlandia, revered in that country as its unofficial national anthem. In addition to patriotism, an intense emotionalism toward Finland’s landscape and nature pervades Sibelius’ music, much of which is evocative of broad northern vistas and windblown open spaces. Canzonetta is a quiet, lush song by strings. It has a nostalgic, pining quality. The piece is brief, only about four minutes long.
Johann Sebastian Bach (German, 1685-1750)
Concerto for Two Violins, Strings and Continuo
in D minor, BWV 1043 (First Movement)
The words prodigy and prodigious come together in describing Bach and his tremendous output of Baroque-era music of both orchestral and vocal genres and religious and secular motivations. By age 15 Bach was already an accomplished organist and organ composer and skilled violinist. It is amazing to realize that much of Bach’s output lay ignored and forgotten after his death as outdated. It was considered to be obsolete artifacts of the “old” Baroque music era that was being replaced by the then-new Classical style. Rediscovered, Bach nowadays is of course everywhere.
Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins is perhaps the most celebrated two-violin concerto ever written. It has the traditional three movements of a concerto, fast-slow-fast. In the first movement, first and second melodic subjects are introduced and then chase each other around fugally, anchored by a steady vigorous basso continuo beat.
Claude Debussy (French, 1862-1918)
Danses Sacree & Profane
The son of parents who ran a china-shop, Claude Debussy was another prodigy, entering the Paris Conservatory at age 10 or 11. In the 1890’s he lived in the picturesque Montmartre section of Paris, “then the center of artistic ‘bohemian’ life [,] surrounded by the artists. writers, fellow musicians, laundresses and prostitutes who constituted the district’s lively residents [where he] embarked on a period of penniless squalor but artistic creativity.” During this period Debussy developed his characteristic style of gossamer, ethereal delicacy that came to make him the father of musical Impressionism. He aspired to write music freed from both classicist restrictions and romantic emotional excess - much as Impressionist painters freed painting from strict representation of images. Among Debussy’s famous works are Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and “The Sea” (La Mer), a sonic interpretation of the interplay between light and water.
Today’s selections are two short pieces featuring strings and harp. The “Sacred Dance” is impressionistic and slow. The “Profane Dance” is impressionistic and waltz-like. As you listen to the latter think of what the contemporary composer Cesar Franck said of Debussy’s work: “It’s music on the points of needles.”
Camile Saint-Saens (French, 1835-1921)
Carnival of the Animals, Le Cigne (“The Swan”)
Camille Saint-Saens began piano at the age of two, composing at three, and was playing Mozart and Beethoven concerti at age 10. He had several other interests as an avid follower of archeology, geology, astronomy, philosophy and literature; he wrote essays, poetry and plays. He was organist at the Madeleine Church in Paris 1858-77 and was called by Liszt the “greatest organist in the world.”
Among Saint-Saens’ best-known works are the mighty Organ Symphony #3 of 1886, and his vastly different Carnival of the Animals, written the same year, it is said, as a private joke for performance for his friends. Saint-Saens never allowed it to be published or performed publicly during his lifetime. Subtitled a “Grand Zoological Fantasy,” Carnival paints humorous ironic sound pictures of numerous animals. The Walt Disney Company’s re-production of the film “Fantasia” in 2000 again set great music to animated images in the style of the original “Fantasia” of 1940. “Fantasia 2000” portrays Carnival’s puckish finale music by hilarious images of flamingos with yo-yo’s. Today’s selection from Carnival is the penultimate movement, La Cigne, ‘The Swan.” It suspends the fun and jocularity with a beautiful, flowing refrain featuring a solo cello evoking the gracefulness of the swan.
Johann Sebastian Bach (German, 1685-1750)
Duet from Cantata #9
The word “Cantata” literally means “sung.” In Bach’s time, cantatas were a shorter version of oratorio to be performed during church services. Both were like religious operas but without costumes, staging and acting. Bach’s Cantata # 9 was written in Leipzig between 1732 and 1735 for the sixth Sunday after Trinity on the liturgical calendar. It is in seven movements, of which this duet is one. The duet is scored for soprano and alto voices accompanied by instrumental lines performed by flute, oboe d’amore and basso continuo. The effect is of celestial song embellished by rhythmic, jewel-like floating instrumentation.
Gabriel Fauré (French, 1845-1924)
Cantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11
Gabriel Fauré was Saint-Saens’ favorite pupil and like him was a gifted pianist and organist. American composer Aaron Copland described Fauré’s music as “delicate, reserved and aristocratic” manifesting restraint, good taste, and elegance. Fauré’s specialty was smaller-genre works such as songs, piano and chamber music. His noted Requiem, scored for larger orchestra and chorus, still retains a sense of delicacy and intimacy. The Cantique de Jean Racine is a religious hymn that won 19-year-old Fauré first prize in 1865 at the prestigious Niedermeyer School of Church Music (which still exists in Paris). The Cantique is a setting of a devotional poem by a great French play dramatist, Jean Racine (1639-99). Set to gorgeous stately music are the words “Divine Saviour, look down upon us and bestow thy grace; receive the prayers that we offer to your immortal glory, so that we may go forth endowed with your everlasting gifts…”
Gustav Mahler (Austrian, 1860-1911)
“Adagietto” from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony
Gustav Mahler showed musical promise as a child and lived a full though rather short life, dying at the age of 50. In 1888 he became musical director of the Budapest opera and for ten years from 1897 to 1907 was conductor and music director of the Vienna State Opera. He became conductor of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in 1908. Mahler is best known for his turn of the century massive, late-romantic symphonic works, inflected with folk and melody idioms. He wrote ten symphonies. His Symphony # 9 premiered only after his death and he never completed his Tenth, but a British music scholar named Deryk Cooke did so in the 1960’s. Four of Mahler’s symphonies, Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 8, have substantial vocal and choral parts. His Eighth Symphony “for a thousand” envisaged that many performers comprised of orchestra and a massive chorus.
Today’s selection Adagietto, is the fourth movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Written in 1901-1902, the Fifth is perhaps Mahler’s best known symphony. A huge piece in five movements, it runs some 70 minutes. The fourth movement, the “Little Adagio” for harp and strings, was an expression of Mahler’s love for Alma Schindler whom he married later in 1902. It is a lyrical pause in the otherwise challenging symphony. It is a lush song, achingly and yearningly romantic. The Adagietto became more popularly known from its use in the 1971 Luchino Visconti film Death in Venice.
Thomas Reeves (English/Japanese, 1994 - )
Hexapodia (composed 2007, World Premiere by the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, March 2008)
Thomas Reeves combines old and new ways in composing music. He likes to notate initial musical ideas by hand with pencil and paper. He uses a computer program to publish his music, but Thomas adamantly feels that the computer is not “it.” Even at its best it produces relatively dry, soulless music, in his view. His music does not “live” until it emerges played by live, emoting performers who put their own hearts and skills into it. Only then, to Thomas, does his music truly breathe.
The word “hexapodia” derives from the Greek term for the insect world, ”Hexapoda.” Insects have six legs, Hexapodia has six movements and each movement represents a six legged creature. Movements 1-4 and 6 combine instruments with choral voices, Movement 5 is solely instrumental, using two violin trios.
Thomas attended and participated in the MS0 rehearsals of his piece, and will be in the audience together with his father Martin, mother Akemi and younger brother Morris. Below are notes (slightly edited) on Hexapodia provided by Thomas’ father, Martin Reeves. Morris Reeves wrote the words for the vocal parts in movements 1-4 and 6.
Thomas was commissioned to write this piece by the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra to be performed by the MSO, the Peabody Choir and the Peabody Violin Choir, and composed it over the summer of 2007 while staying with his grandparents in Japan. He wanted to write a piece which capitalized on the various possibilities of this unusual combination, was accessible to young performers and listeners but also musically interesting for all levels and ages. The piece has 6 movements. Each movement is based upon a poem and a drawing of a six legged animal by Thomas’s 9-year-old brother, Morris Reeves. Each movement uses different combinations of instruments, ranging from two violin trios up to the full ensemble.
Hexapodia is scored for instrumentation and voices as follows:
1 Flute, 1 Oboe, 1 Bb Clarinet, 1 Bassoon, 1 Horn in F, Harp
2 Percussion Players - Cymbal, Glockenspiel, and Snare Drum
8 Solo Violins - Violin I, Violin II
Violas, Violoncello, Double Bass
Children's Chorus - Sopranos and Altos
1. Ant
The first movement (“The Ant”) begins with complex interweaving pizzicato parts of the eight solo violins representing the movements of individual ants. Later, the choir and the orchestra celebrate the diligence and power of the ant colony with a triumphant climax, centered on the words “They Work.”
2. Butterfly
The second movement (“The Butterfly”) represents the repeated cycle of metamorphosis of the butterfly. It begins with the sliding movements of the caterpillar represented by chromatic passages in tritones. Next, the stillness of the pupa is represented by string tremolos and the impending metamorphosis is signaled by the snare drum. The beauty of the butterfly in flight is next represented by a graceful orchestral melody. The cycle of themes repeats after the words “Soon the cycle starts again.”
3. Beetle
The third movement (“The Beetle”) begins in march style representing the robustness of the beetle, depicted in the lyrics as “the tank of the forest.” The second section features a softer melody played by the harp and solo violins, representing the sun shining on the smooth back of the beetle. The melody develops into a chorale which ends the movement.
4. Honeybee
The fourth movement (“The Honeybee”) is the shortest. It features fast chromatic passages in the solo violins, harp runs, and string tremolos to represent the buzzing of the honeybee.
5. Cricket vs. Praying Mantis
The fifth movement (“Cricket vs. Praying Mantis -Violin Trios”) is written for two violin trios without choir or orchestra. The first trio to enter portrays the cricket, using tremolos and short disjointed rhythmic phrases. The second trio evokes the ferocity of the praying mantis, using a march style and strong dotted rhythms. The cricket enters a second time, but is interrupted by the praying mantis and is eventually eaten. The final section of this movement is labeled “The Cricket’s Ghost: Molto Tranquillo” and features very quiet muted harmonics.
6. Dragonfly
The last movement (“The Dragonfly”) is in rondo form with a lively theme resembling a happy children’s song in 6/8 rhythm, as the choir sings about the flight of the dragonfly. A second section represents the fluttering of the dragonfly’s wings. After a dramatic orchestral climax, the first theme appears again quietly, first in the woodwinds and then in the solo violins. A third chorale-like theme accompanies the words “Are you ever not thirsty, tired or playful?” After a long transition, the first theme appears for a last time, accompanied by full orchestra. A triumphant coda ends the work on the phrase “If only we were small.”
