Tonight’s concert is wide ranging, but as is usually the case with this orchestra, the works we’re presenting are linked in several ways. Three connections stand out. First, tonight’s offerings are all programmatic—that is, they’re all instrumental works that represent something extra-musical. More specifically, they’re all musical representations of love—although love of radically different types. Second, they’re all nourished, at least in part, by a cross-fertilization of Western and non-Western musical traditions. Finally, in terms of sheer sound, they’re all ear-opening.

The work with the clearest program is ...

Tonight’s concert is wide ranging, but as is usually the case with this orchestra, the works we’re presenting are linked in several ways. Three connections stand out. First, tonight’s offerings are all programmatic—that is, they’re all instrumental works that represent something extra-musical. More specifically, they’re all musical representations of love—although love of radically different types. Second, they’re all nourished, at least in part, by a cross-fertilization of Western and non-Western musical traditions. Finally, in terms of sheer sound, they’re all ear-opening.

The work with the clearest program is the Butterfly Lovers Concerto, jointly composed in 1959 by two students at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, He Zhanhao (b. 1933) and Chen Gang (b. 1935). This is an explicitly narrative piece, one that recounts a traditional story that is well known in China. A young girl, Zhu Yintai, disguises herself as a boy so she can attend a boarding school. There, she befriends a boy Liang Sanbo, who does not know her secret. When Zhu eventually goes back home, Liang promises to visit her. He delays his trip, however; and when he finally does go to see her, he discovers not only that Zhu is a girl, but also that, during their separation, her parents have arranged a marriage for her. Liang and Zhu come to recognize the love they have for each other (gloriously represented in the music), and Liang dies of despair. On the way to her wedding, however, Zhu jumps into his grave, and, after a huge tam-tam crash, the two of them are transformed into butterflies.

Composed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Communist Revolution, the Butterfly Lovers Concerto was an experiment in writing music that uses Western instruments to imitate traditional music of China. Thus, among other things, the solo violin impersonates a traditional Chinese instrument, the erhu. (The erhu’s ancestor, the xiqin, was also imitated by a trombone in the middle movement of Tan Dun’s Trombone Concerto, performed by Ben Dettelback at our last Masterworks Concert). Tonight, though, in what conductor Maurice Cohn calls a “retranslation,” this violin concerto is being performed not on a violin but on an erhu.

The violin and erhu are both string instruments, but as tonight’s soloist Jiebing Chen points out, they have significant differences. The erhu has two strings (as opposed to the violin’s four), tuned a fifth apart (D and A); and while it has a long neck, it doesn’t have a fingerboard. The two strings always sound together, since the bow passes between them (over one and behind the other); and since they are very close together, it may look from the hall as if there is only one of them. The erhu sounds quite different from a violin, too. If you were fortunate enough to hear Ben’s performance, you might well have been convinced by his claim that, in sound, the trombone is the closest instrument to the human voice—but after tonight, you may well feel that the erhu has a stronger claim.

How did that retranslation from violin to erhu come about? In an interview for these notes, Jiebing recounted the history behind it. She grew up in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution (a period during which, coincidentally, this concerto was briefly banned)—and her father, a blacklisted history professor working in a labor camp, wanted to ensure that his children had some skill to fall back on. When she was about five, therefore, he insisted that they all learn musical instruments—and chose the erhu (which he built himself out of a leg from their dining-room table) for Jiebing because, he said, “the erhu is lighter and you are so little.” Little in size, perhaps, but obviously not little in talent or perseverance. For within a few years, through sheer pluck and innate musicality, she was able to convince the Navy to accept her as a member of their military band—even though she was only nine, and position was officially limited to people over the age of sixteen.

Once she retired from the Navy, she went on to the Shanghai Conservatory, where Chen Gang, one of the Butterfly Lovers’ composers, heard her and suggested that she play the concerto on the erhu. When she asked, “‘How can I do this? I only have two strings,’ he replied, ‘You can do it’”—and with his encouragement, she gave the work’s first performance on erhu in 1988. Since the music often represents the voice of one or the other of the protagonists, she will be alternating between two different instruments, with different ranges.

Like the Butterfly Lovers, Scheherazade (1888) by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) is a programmatic work based on ancient folklore (in this case, A Thousand and One Nights)—and it, too, deals specifically with the intertwining of love and death. Here, though, they are connected in an entirely different (in fact, nearly opposite) way. Butterfly Lovers, like Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, builds to death as the ultimate expression of love (one might even say the ultimate goal of love); Scheherazade starts out with death as the enemy of love, as something that needs to be resisted.

The frame story is familiar: as Rimsky puts it, the Sultan Schakhriar, “convinced of the perfidy and faithlessness of women, vowed to execute each of his wives after the first night.” Scheherazade, a story-teller who has a savvy ability to construct cliff-hangers, convinces the Sultan to let her live so she can continue the story she begins to tell him on the first night—and she eventually wins his love (whatever that’s worth). Scheherazade’s mercurial spirit is brilliantly conveyed by the differences in the violin solos throughout the work.

Beyond this general outline, however, Scheherazade’s program is vague. Rimsky intended the score less to suggest particular stories than to nourish subjective flights of fancy. Yes, each movement has a programmatic title (although, at times, Rimsky wished to eliminate them), but they refer to general situations, rather than particular events. Thus, while the first movement, “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,” evokes the sea and its changing colors, it doesn’t call up any particular story. And the love music in the third movement, “The Young Prince and the Princess,” beautiful as it is, isn’t attached to particular individuals the way the love music in The Butterfly Lovers Concerto is. The one exception is the shattering climax of the last movement, when a ship “breaks up against a cliff,” leading to a peaceful conclusion.

Like the concerto, too, Scheherazade merges European and non-Western traditions—in this case, by inflecting its clearly Western score with references to Middle-Eastern musical traditions. I use the word “references” advisedly. Like most Western composers seeking musical exoticism (Mozart in his Abduction from the Seraglio, Borodin in his Polovtsian Dances), Rimsky was not a scholar of the traditions he was incorporating. But he knew the kind of gestures that his listeners would associate with the Middle East, and he handled them brilliantly. The results are no more “authentic” than the Middle Eastern architectural features of the Landmark Theater are—but they’re just as spectacular.

Scheherazade has been an audience favorite in part because of Rimsky’s skill as an orchestrator. In fact, almost nothing composed up to that time—except Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique—has as much coloristic ingenuity. But the piece is also popular because it allows an orchestra to show off its identity. It does so in a superficially contradictory way. On the one hand, it’s full of solos for first-desk players. On the other hand, it’s the ultimate ensemble piece. As Maurice puts it, “although Rimsky-Korsakov didn’t have the language to call it a concerto for orchestra, it really is one.” It’s the ability to navigate this combination of individuality and community that marks the best orchestras, where the players really know and listen to each other—and that ability will be on display tonight.

The concert opens with These Worlds in Us (2006) by Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980). This too is grounded in an expression of love—although in this case, it’s a child’s love for her father. The title comes from James Tate’s poem The Lost Pilot, a meditation on his father’s death in World War II; and as Mazzoli notes in the program notes appended to the score, the piece is dedicated to her father, who served in Vietnam. Like much of Mazzoli’s work—including Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), which was such a hit at our Masterworks 4 two years ago—this one is fundamentally paradoxical: it’s simultaneously concentrated and vast in scope, simultaneously enigmatic and direct. More specifically, the composer says, “In talking to [my father], it occurred to me that, as we grow older, we accumulate worlds of intense memory within us, and that grief is often not far from joy. I like the idea that music can reflect painful and blissful sentiments in a single note or gesture, and sought to create a sound palette that I hope is at once completely new and strangely familiar to the listener.”

At once new and familiar: I suspect you’ll agree with her description. And, if you’re intimidated by contemporary music, perhaps you’ll be relieved as well. There was a period in the twentieth century when composers felt pressure to produce music that was intricate yet unwelcoming to listeners; but Mazzoli is at the forefront of composers who, as Maurice puts it, have managed to be “musically sophisticated without being artistically obtuse.” He continues: “It’s really great that we’re not in that period anymore, and that there’s all this amazing stuff going on—but I think a lot of people haven’t gotten the memo yet.”

In Orbiting Spheres, the orchestra was transformed into “a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.” There are similarly wonderful sonic effects in These Worlds in Us: “The theme of this work,” says Mazzoli, “a mournful line first played by the violins, collapses into glissandos almost immediately after it appears, giving the impression that the piece has been submerged under water or played on a turntable that is grinding to a halt.” You’ll also hear important parts for melodicas (mouth organs, sort of like keyed harmonicas), which “in the opening and final gestures mimic the wheeze of a broken accordion, lending a particular vulnerability to the bookends of the work.”

Finally, as is especially appropriate on this program, you’ll also hear cross-cultural influence, perhaps reminiscent of what we heard in Ravel’s Pagodes at the last Masterworks: “The rhythmic structures and cyclical nature of [These Worlds in Us],” says the composer, “are inspired by the unique tension and logic of Balinese music.” At the same time, says Maurice, while “it’s difficult to put your finger on it, Mazzoli sounds very American—for instance, in her gestures and in the open intervals and in the kind of textures that she chooses to use. There’s a transparency to the writing, which you find in a lot of middle 20th-century music by people like Copland and Piston. She’s very straightforward, she’s not trying to hide the ball from the listener.”

All in all, then, a perfect opener that introduces, in concentrated form, so many elements of the two works that follow.

Peter J. Rabinowitz
Have any comments or questions? Please write to me at prabinowitz@SyracuseOrchestra.org

PS: SPECIAL CONTEST: I began these notes by mentioning three main connections among the pieces on the program. Maurice points to another: Mazzoli’s sweeping string writing links These Worlds in Us to Scheherazade and the Butterfly Lovers Concerto. This leads one to wonder how many other things they have in common. If you can think of any that haven’t been mentioned, send me an email after the concert—the best answer received within a week will get a pair of free tickets to any concert (other than Star Wars: A New Hope in Concert) between now and the end of the season.