180731 – Toronto Concert Orchestra

PROGRAMME

Debussy, Claude | Petite Suite
Fauré, Gabriel | Pavane Op.50
Debussy, Claude | La Cathédrale engloutie
Ravel, Maurice | Le tombeau de Couperin

[INTERMISSION]

Debussy, Claude | Nuit d'étoiles featuring Anastasia Pogorelova & Anna Shalaykevych
Offenbach, Jacques | Les oiseaux dans la charmille - Les contes d'Hoffmann featuring Anastasia Pogorelova & Anna Shalaykevych
Debussy, Claude | Prelude No.8: La fille aux cheveux de lin featuring Andrew Chan
Debussy, Claude | Arabesque No.1 featuring Andrew Chan
Satie, Erik | Gymnopédies No.3 & 1 (Paolo Fradiani)
Fauré, Gabriel | Masques et bergamasques, Suite, Op.112

Approx. Timing | 15, 7, 7, 21 [20] 3, 5.2, 4.5, 7, 16

Conductor | Kerry Stratton
Soprano | Anastasia Pogorelova
Harp | Andrew Chan
Piano | Anna Shalaykevych

PROGRAMME NOTES
Prepared by TCO's Assistant Conductor, Surinder S. Mundra

In the early 1860’s, four young men met while studying under the great Swiss master painter, Charles Gleyre. Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille would spend their time discussing over drinks at the Café Guerbois a new form of artistic techniques involving symbolism and impressionistic evocations of nature and everyday life, rather than the staunch restrictive form of realism in mythology.

Their struggle however for a novel form of artistic expression was not merely a struggle against the conventions imposed upon them by the academic and artistic elites, which they met with utmost resistance.

The people of France found themselves in the midst of political, cultural, musical, and religious tensions during this epoch where all things came to a confluence. This was of course a time that saw the symbolist movement (struggling in its own right) in literature, the exoticism of Oriental art ‘infiltrating’ a French cultural identity (in flux) brought about by the World Exposition of 1889, and anti-Wagnerism in music, perhaps bolstered by the overwhelming tensions which came to ahead in the Great Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Suffice it to say, the world was changing (as it is now), and it was tangibly experienced in daily life ,and through its art and especially music. It could certainly not be considered all bad of course. At least in theory (and not always in practice, especially under Napoleon III), the ideals of the Republic, Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality invariably meant the possibility for new ways and approaches in art and in life. Tonight’s programme presents music by those composers who lived in the midst of all of that.

Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel though so different from one another, are always paired together as the supreme figures and ambassadors of the musical period we know as, Impressionism. Ironically, both Debussy and Ravel seemed to have despised that very label. Debussy in fact wrote in a letter, “imbeciles call [what I am trying to write in Images] 'impressionism', a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, especially by art critics who use it as a label to stick on Turner”. Still, there seems to be a resemblance in the approaches between what Monet and his companions were doing with art and what Ravel and Debussy were doing with music. They all pushed the boundaries with new techniques that culminated in a new experience.

The music of Debussy and Ravel like the paintings of Monet and Renoir were revolutionary. Yet in the case of the musical impressionists, they did not reject their history, like the painters did. They built upon it.

Debussy and Ravel, were classicists! They knew full well the music of Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Palestrina, Lassus, and of course Fauré. And they admired those towering giants. Though they too were questioned with suspicion by the musical academics at the conservatory, they could not be stopped.

Tonight, we will hear in Debussy’s Petite Suite and Sunken Cathedral as well as Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin strict compositional treatises that follow an exacting form. We will hear the influences of the baroque, and neoclassicism, and the romantacism of Fauré as well as the incorporation of the Oriental and jazz tone colours in modal and pentatonic scales with unresolved 7ths and 9ths. Simply put, this music is all at once old, new, and consummately French!

‘If I had the time, I would re-orchestrate [Debussy's] La Mer.’
-M. Ravel

SYMBOLISM & IMPRESSIONISM

Week 9 | Casa Loma Symphony in the Gardens Series