Some works, like Bach’s fugues, make their primary impact through intellectual intricacy. Others, like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, have a more direct sensual impact. Tonight’s closer, the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor (Organ) (1886) by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921), is one of those works that hits you immediately: It certainly doesn’t require musical training (or even program notes) to understand it. As tonight’s conductor Ho-Yin Kwok points out, “What needs to be paid attention to is so obvious,  you just can’t miss it. It tells you what ...

Some works, like Bach’s fugues, make their primary impact through intellectual intricacy. Others, like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, have a more direct sensual impact. Tonight’s closer, the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor (Organ) (1886) by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921), is one of those works that hits you immediately: It certainly doesn’t require musical training (or even program notes) to understand it. As tonight’s conductor Ho-Yin Kwok points out, “What needs to be paid attention to is so obvious,  you just can’t miss it. It tells you what it’s about: It’s about sonority, about sound.”

Calling the piece “obvious,” however, doesn’t mean that it’s shallow. Saint-Saëns was no stranger to music’s more rigorous side. Legend has it that, even before he was a teenager, he could play all of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas from memory—and even if the story is exaggerated, it demonstrates the kind of reputation he had. Novelist Marcel Proust, whose aesthetic standards were the highest, considered him an ideal Mozart pianist; and as a life-long organist, Saint-Saëns was fully immersed in the world of Bach, many of whose works he transcribed for piano.

Given his engagement in the most cerebral music, it’s no surprise that Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, for all its immediacy, is structurally inventive. On the surface, it’s a two-movement work; but each movement is divided in half, producing a totality that mirrors the symphony’s traditional four-movement form. At the same time, like several of Saint-Saëns’s earlier works, it has a lot in common with the single-movement tone poems introduced by Liszt (to whom it is dedicated) since—despite its dazzling melodic richness—the entire work is tightly unified by the use of shared thematic material throughout. Most important in this regard is the opening theme—tied to the Dies Irae, the plain-chant setting of the “day of wrath” from the Latin Requiem Mass—which serves as a foundation, constantly reappearing in new guises, but maintaining its fundamental quality.

Still, for all its intellectual ingenuity, the Third is primarily, as Ho-Yin points out, “a celebration of sound” in which Saint-Saëns exploited his full skill as a composer to produce what is generally regarded as his orchestral masterpiece. And a remarkably original celebration of sound at that. The introduction of keyboard instruments is especially striking: the sparkle of the piano (at the time, an almost unheard-of member of a symphony orchestra) about two minutes into the second movement comes as a refreshing surprise; the solo entry of the organ (similarly rare as an orchestral instrument) at the start of the second half of the second movement produces a jolt you won’t soon forget—although it turns out to be less of a climax than a preparatory announcement. As you’re listening, Ho-Yin says, “you think this is it. All the stops have been pulled out. But no! As we move towards the coda, we get three or four minutes of increasing intensity, up until the very last measure. That’s one of the things that excites me the most: Just as you think you’ve seen everything, Saint-Saëns—with an accelerando and a broadening of the theme—gives you just a little bit more at the end.”

Yet this exploration of sonority can be subtle as well as spectacular. The scurrying sixteenth notes in the strings near the beginning of the first movement have a marvelous effect: “Soft, but very energetic,” as Ho-Yin describes it, so that while the harmony isn’t agitated, “the bubbling of the sound is incredible.” Then, there’s the organ’s first entry, in the second half of the first movement. Here, as tonight’s organ soloist Dominic Fiacco points out, “the organ is often so soft, it’s tricky to hear.” Indeed, if you didn’t know already that this was a work with an organ, you might have trouble figuring out just what is adding that strange color to the orchestra. In any case, it’s an orchestral sound unlike anything before it in musical history.

The 1938 Concerto in G Minor for Organ, Strings, and Timpani, by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963 is markedly different—both in its treatment of the organ and in its overall spirit. In the Saint-Saëns, the organ part is not especially demanding for the performer, and there are only a few moments where it takes a starring role; most of the time, it’s either silent or only a part of a larger musical fabric. In the Poulenc, in contrast, the organist is the star throughout. Yet its starring role is a bit unconventional when compared to the soloist’s starring role in most concertos. In a traditional concerto, as Dominic puts it, you’ll often find “the entire orchestra against the soloist.” Here, they are less competitive, more cooperative. Much of the time, “the organ leads the argument, and the strings annotate it.” Sometimes, too, the organ will, unconventionally for a concerto soloist, “have both the melody and the accompaniment, whereas the strings and timpani are doubling it or just echoing what it’s saying. When the music needs to get loud, organ and strings and timpani work together instead of against each other to create really satisfying high points. And in the softer sections, the melody is passed between the organ and the strings.”

As for its spirit: In his earlier years, Poulenc developed a reputation as a “light” composer—chic, ironic, sometimes sentimental. His later works, by comparison, have a more serious tone. That’s especially evident in his opera Dialogues of the Carmelites, which ends with the execution of a group of nuns during the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution, musically depicted by having their voices, chillingly, disappear one by one as they are guillotined. The Organ Concerto, says Dominic, “inhabits…both his early and late worlds. Poulenc himself described the concerto as somber. I guess I could see that, since most of it is slow, which is unusual for a concerto. But that doesn’t capture the whole story. You also see Poulenc’s humorous side in the faster sections. There’s a local composer from the Syracuse area, Stephen Carpenter, who described this very well. He says it’s like a merry-go-round: You catch a glimpse of one thing, but you never stay there too long.” It’s hard to disagree. The Concerto begins, for instance, with Bachian grandeur—but it’s interleaved with eeriness, eventually leading to music with driving Stravinskian energy, then…. There are even a few touches of what might sound like typical carousel calliope music. It rarely goes where you expect it to go.

It’s easy to see how the Saint-Saëns and Poulenc fit on the same concert—in fact, they’re often programmed together. But how about our opener, Sleep Furiously by Syracuse composer Loren Loiacono (b. 1989)? This is one of those situations where a program takes on an unplanned coherence. When I was talking to Ho-Yin, he mentioned that it’s difficult to see where Saint-Saëns as a composer comes from—but that it’s easy to see where he led, to see his progeny in the French sound that followed. What neither of us (nor the orchestra’s Artistic Operations Committee, which originally constructed the program) knew at the time was that Loren thinks of herself as in this lineage, too. But she does: In her early years, she was an oboist, and Saint-Saëns (and Poulenc, too) is “foundational” to an oboist’s repertoire. “There’s a line,” she says, “between those pieces and mine, and those composers are prominent in my own subconscious.”

Not that her music could be confused with Saint-Saëns’s—on first hearings, Sleep Furiously seems to inhabit an entirely different musical world, with a clear connection to the American minimalism of Steve Reich and, even more, John Adams. But there’s a French spirit as well, and a similar interest in sheer sonority (you might want to pay attention to the way sustained lines change their color).

As for the title, Sleep Furiously: It comes from a famous sentence constructed by linguist Noam Chomsky (“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”). It was intended to demonstrate the way a sentence can be syntactically correct (that is, grammatical) while being semantically incoherent (that is, meaningless). In other words, says Loren, “the words are following in an order”— a syntax—“that’s intelligible; but when you start looking at it closely, things start to feel a little bit strange.”

How does this show up in the music? It, too, has intelligibility infected with strangeness. Thus, it’s fairly easy to hear what Ho-Yin calls the overall “almond shape” of the piece. It begins with nearly inaudible flutters that swarm around, and increasingly question, a luxurious cello melody; it dissolves slowly and achingly at the end; the loudest and most vehement music occurs toward the center. Yet while there’s a deceptively clear overall outline, the details of the trajectory are not straightforward: There’s a dream logic here, what Loren calls a “surreal” quality. It’s not simply that some of the music is “dreamy” in the sense of “diaphanous.” More important, the transitions are “slightly off-kilter,” even more than those in the Poulenc. A “recognizable idea” is followed by “another recognizable idea”; but “it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’d go from this one to that one.” To my ears, that’s what makes  the music simultaneously familiar and disorienting.

But there’s another level, too, one that’s more personal. Loren was studying at Cornell with Steven Stucky at the time she wrote Sleep Furiously—and he passed away in the middle of her composition. “This is not a core part of the piece. But in retrospect, I will say that, at least in my own ears, I can very clearly hear the moment … There is that moment where things just kind of come to a halt. And the ending of the piece is a lot more somber than I think it would have otherwise been.” This provides yet another link among the works tonight. The score of Saint-Saëns’s Third is dedicated to Liszt, who died shortly after the first performance; the sudden death of Poulenc’s friend, the composer and critic Pierre-Octave Ferroud, came in the middle of his work on the Organ Concerto, and caused a turn toward religion, which may well have influenced its tone.
Still, whatever the formal ingenuities of tonight’s program, whatever the vein of loss and regret, it remains, at heart, a celebration of sound. And we are confident that by the end of this rich and complex journey, the concert will leave you uplifted, even thrilled.

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