Sounds of America I: Marsalis & Rachmaninoff
What to listen for
Violin Concerto: Marsalis’ creative, nontraditional approach evokes both drama and historical/cultural experiences of Black America, such as the Rhapsody’s police whistle and sirens heard in swirling string patterns. The wacky, off-kilter Rondo Burlesque pays homage to Marsalis’ hometown, New Orleans, with its sophisticated Expressionistic episodes, theatrical flourishes, chuckling solo violin, an extensive cadenza, and dynamic brasses. In the Blues, listen for the languid, deliberate pace of the solo violin line, with its signature blue notes (notes that slide deliberately between pitches). Stamping feet and clapping hands open the Hootenanny, with its propulsively joyful, off-beat accents and the soloist’s down-home blue-note melodies.
Symphonic Dances for Large Orchestra: First movement: repeated rhythmic motif (da-da-DAH da-da-DAH) in brasses, particularly trumpet, and plaintive alto sax solo, whose melody the orchestra repeats. Second movement: stop-and-start waltz rhythm; English horn solo. Third movement: Sweeping romantic episodes and featured moments for winds and brasses; ends with Rachmaninoff’s go-to musical quotation: the Dies irae (Day of Wrath) plainchant melody borrowed from the liturgy of the requiem mass.
Listening Guide
If you like Marsalis’ Violin Concerto, you might also enjoy his Concerto for Tubist and Orchestra; both works combine and juxtapose elements of jazz and Black vernacular music with classical forms and orchestral timbres.
Rachmaninoff is best known for his piano concertos, but his deft skills as a writer of orchestral music also make his orchestra-only works worth a listen. Like the Symphonie Dances, Rachmaninoff’s Second and Third Symphonies spotlight the composer’s masterful use of orchestral timbres to convey his seemingly endless supply of gorgeous melodies.
Other works by these composers
Marsalis: Concerto for Tubist and Orchestra; Blues Symphony; Swing Symphony
Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E minor; Isle of the Dead
Wynton Marsalis: Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra
Composer: born October 18, 1961, New Orleans, LA
Work composed: 2015, for violinist Nicola Benedetti
World premiere: Benedetti performed the solo part with conductor James Gaffigan and the London Symphony Orchestra on November 6, 2015, in Barbican Hall, London
Instrumentation: solo violin, 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
Estimated duration: 44 minutes
Internationally acclaimed musician, composer/bandleader, and educator Wynton Marsalis is also a leading advocate of American culture. Born into a New Orleans family of musicians and educators, Marsalis began playing trumpet at age six. In his teens, Marsalis studied at Tanglewood and Juilliard, and also toured with acclaimed bandleader Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers.
As a composer, Marsalis has created and performed music with diverse ensembles: quartets, big bands, chamber music ensembles, and symphony orchestras, all the while expanding the vocabulary for both jazz and classical music. In 1997, Marsalis’ oratorio Blood on the Fields became the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Marsalis composes his solo works for specific performers, rather than instruments, and the Violin Concerto was written for Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti. “Nicky asked me to ‘invite a diverse world of people into the experience of this piece,’” Marsalis writes in his program notes. “It takes inspiration from her life as a traveling performer and educator who enlightens and delights communities all over the world with the magic of virtuosity.” Marsalis goes on to describe his approach to composition in general: “Finding and nurturing common musical ground between differing arts and musical styles has been a lifetime fascination of mine … The shared vocabulary between the jazz orchestra and the modern orchestra sits largely in the areas of texture and instrumental technique. Form, improvisation, harmony, and methods of thematic development are very different. The biggest challenges are how to orchestrate the nuance and virtuosity in jazz and blues for an ensemble not versed in those styles (a technical issue); and how to create a consistent groove without a rhythm section (a musical/philosophical issue).
“The piece opens with Nicky whispering a solo note before the orchestra enters, as if to say, ‘And so it came to pass’ or ‘Once upon a time,’” Marsalis continues. “Then we are into a form constructed in fours – as in the four corners of the earth, where her travels take her. Each of the four movements - Rhapsody, Rondo Burlesque, Blues, and Hootenanny – reveals a different aspect of her dream, which becomes reality through the public storytelling that is virtuosic performance.
“Rhapsody is a complex dream that becomes a nightmare, progresses into peacefulness and dissolves into ancestral memory. Rondo Burlesque is a syncopated, New Orleans jazz, calliope, circus clown, African gumbo, Mardi Gras party in odd meters. Blues is the progression of flirtation, courtship, intimacy, sermonizing, final loss, and abject loneliness that is out there to claim us all. Hootenanny is a raucous, stomping and whimsical barnyard throw-down. She excites us with all types of virtuosic chicanery and gets us intoxicated with revelry and then … goes on down the Good King’s highway to other places yet to be seen or even foretold. As in the blues and jazz tradition, our journey ends with the jubilance and uplift of an optimistic conclusion.”
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances for Large Orchestra, Op. 45
Composer: born April 1, 1873, Oneg, Russia; died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills, CA
Work composed: the summer and autumn of 1940. The published score bears the inscription: “Dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra.”
World premiere: Eugene Ormandy led the Philadelphia Orchestra on January 3, 1941
Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, chimes, cymbals, drum, orchestra bells, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle, xylophone, piano, harp, and strings
Estimated duration: 35 minutes
Sergei Rachmaninoff had great regard for the Philadelphia Orchestra and its music director, Eugene Ormandy. As a pianist, he had performed with them on several occasions, and as a composer, he appreciated the full rich sound Ormandy and his musicians produced. Sometime during the 1930s, Rachmaninoff remarked that he always had the unique sound of this ensemble in his head while he was composing orchestral music: “[I would] rather perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra than any other of the world.” When Rachmaninoff began working on the Symphonic Dances, he wrote with Ormandy and the orchestra in mind. Several of Rachmaninoff’s other orchestral works, including the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Piano Concerto No. 4, were also either written for or first performed by Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The Symphonic Dances turned out to be Rachmaninoff’s final composition. Although not as well-known as the piano concertos or the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Rachmaninoff himself and many others regard the Symphonic Dances as his greatest orchestral work. “I don’t know how it happened,” the composer remarked. “It must have been my last spark.”
Nervous pulsing violins open the Allegro, over which the winds mutter a descending minor triad (three-note chord). The strings set a quickstep tempo, while the opening triad becomes both the melodic and harmonic foundation of the movement as it is repeated, reversed and otherwise developed. The introspective middle section features the first substantial melody, sounded by a distinctively melancholy alto saxophone. The Allegro concludes with a return of the agitated quickstep and fluttering triad.
Muted trumpets and pizzicato strings open the Andante con moto with a lopsided stuttering waltz, followed by a subdued violin solo. This main theme has none of the Viennese lightness of a Strauss waltz; its haunting, ghostly quality borders on the macabre suggestive of Sibelius’ Valse triste or Ravel’s eerie La valse. Rachmaninoff’s waltz is periodically interrupted by sinister blasts from the brasses.
In the Lento assai: Allegro vivace, Rachmaninoff borrows the melody of the Dies irae (Day of Wrath) from the requiem mass. Rachmaninoff had featured this iconic melody many times before, most notably in Isle of the Dead and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The Dies irae’s distinctive descending line carries particular weight and suggestive power in the Symphonie Dances, as we can hear it, in retrospect, as Rachmaninoff’s final statement about the end of his compositional career. This movement is the most sweeping and symphonic of the three and employs all the orchestra’s sounds, moods, and colors. In addition to the Dies irae, Rachmaninoff also incorporates other melodies from the Russian Orthodox liturgy, including the song “Blagosloven Yesi, Gospodi,” describing Christ’s resurrection, from Rachmaninoff's choral masterpiece, All-Night Vigil.
On the final page of the Symphonic Dances score, Rachmaninoff wrote, “I thank Thee, Lord!”
© Elizabeth Schwartz. All rights reserved.