Spanish
Festival Volume 1
Mikhail
Ivanovich Glinka (1804 - 1857)
Capriccio brillante on the Jota aragonesa
Summer
Night in Madrid
Nikolay
Andreyevlch Rimsky-Korsakov (1844 - 1908)
Capriccio
espagnol, Opus 34
Emmanuel
Chabrier (1841 - 1894)
España
Edward
Elgar (1857 - 1934)
Sevillana,
Opus 7
Jules
Massenet (1842 - 1912)
Ballet
music from Le Cid
Sevillana
from Don César de Bazan
Spain
exercised a curious fascination over the nationalist composers of the nineteenth century,
with a particular appeal in Russia, a country that was finding again its own identity in
literature and music, after the Westernisation initiated by Peter the Great.
Mikhail
Ivanovich Glinka was a pioneer of Russian musical nationalism. He was born on the family
estate near Smolensk in 1804 and spent much of his childhood in the care of his paternal
grandmother, a woman whose care for him effectively undermined his health, which might
have improved with a breath of fresh air. In 1810, when his grandmother died, he returned
to his parents and began to widen his musical experience, which up to that time had been
largely of folk-music. Further musical opportunities occurred at school in St. Petersburg,
where he had a few lessons from John Field and played to the Bratislava virtuoso Hummel,
to his approval. He was later to avoid serious employment and to devote himself to music,
improving his abilities as a composer by study in Italy and in Germany.
Glinka's
first real achievement was in the creation of a genuinely Russian opera, A Life for the
Tsar, which he completed in 1836. Ruslan and Lyudmila, completed six years later, was
rather less successful at first, although it was gradually to win acceptance. It was with
some idea of composing a Spanish opera that in 1845 Glinka went to Spain. The result was
not an opera but the first of his so-called Spanish
Overtures, the Capriccio brillante on the Aragonese dance, the iota, a work in
the structure of sonata form. A second Spanish Overture was to follow in 1848, when his
application for a passport to Paris had been refused and he found himself obliged to spend
the winter in Warsaw. Making use of material he had gathered in Spain, he wrote the Recuerdos de Castilla, later revising it as Souvenir d'une nuit d'ete a Madrid. The piece is
based on four Spanish folk-tunes, varied and expanded.
Rimsky-Korsakov's
famous Capriccio espagnol began as a
Fantasia on Spanish Themes for violin and orchestra, but was eventually completed in 1887
in its present form. Rimsky-Korsakov belonged to the musical generation after Glinka and
once he had relinquished his original career as a naval officer devoted himself to the
cause of Russian music with a professionalism that some of his contemporaries lacked. He
was one of the five nationalist composers, Stasov's Mighty
Handful, under the influence of Balakirev, and possessed particular ability in
orchestration, a gift he was later to exercise in removing apparent crudities from the
music of Musorgsky and in completing what Borodin had left undone. He stressed that the
brilliant Capriccio espagnol was intended as
a display of orchestral colour, an aim which it achieves admirably.
The
French might be forgiven for a certain preoccupation with the very different traditional
music of their geographical neighbours. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries offer
various examples of this interest, from Saint-Saëns, Lalo and Bizet to Ravel and Debussy.
Emmanuel Chabrier, like his Russian contemporaries, was intended by his family for a
securer career than any that music could offer. He showed exceptional ability as a pianist
as a child, but studied law and took employment in the Ministry of the Interior in Paris.
It was not until 1880, eleven years after the death to his parents, that he became a
full-time musician. His colourful orchestral piece Españawas written in the following year, its inspiration a visit to Spain. It has
always enjoyed popularity, a success not shared by the dramatic works by which the
composer set considerable store.
Jules
Massenet was primarily a composer of opera, a field in which he dominated the French
theatre in the later years of the nineteenth century. From a relatively humble background,
he took piano lessons as a child from his mother and entered the Paris Conservatoire at
the age of eleven. He was to become a composition pupil of Ambroise Thomas and won the
important Prix de Rome, his stay in Rome bringing him the acquaintance of Liszt.
Massenet's
opera Le Cid is based on the great play on
the subject of the Spanish hero by Corneille. The work met little success, having none of
the pathos of Manon or the stormy
romanticism of Werther. The ballet music, however, preserves the spirit of Spain, a
feature apparent in the Sevillana taken from the earlier opera Don Cesarde Bazan, which had won success at the
Opéra-Comique in 1872. The work is based on Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias, which had had earlier musical offspring.
The
English composer Edward Elgar, whether pictured at Ascot, or, more appropriately, in his
beloved West Country, might seem particularly remote from anything Spanish. He was born in
Broadheath, near Worcester, in 1857, the son of a piano-tuner with a music-shop in
Worcester, where he was active in local musical life. Elgar rose from these relatively
humble origins to a position that was to identify him, in the popular mind at least, with
the confident Establishment of Edwardian England. The impression is misleading. While
Elgar did provide music for royal and imperial occasions and did celebrate patriotic views
that may no longer be fashionable, he was at the same time a composer of significance
among the late Romantic symphonists of European music, a musician of sensitivity and
imagination.
Sevillana,
completed in 1884, was the first orchestral work by Elgar to be played in London. The
composer's contact with Spain was purely literary, but it was an interest that was to
reappear from time to time in later works.
Czech
Radio Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava)
The
Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava), the oldest symphonic ensemble in Slovakia,
was founded in 1929 at the instance of Milos Ruppeldt and Oskar Nedbal, prominent
personalities in the sphere of music. The orchestra was first conducted by the Prague
conductor Frantiek Dyk and in the course of the past fifty years of its existence
has worked under the batons of several prominent Czech and Slovak conductors. Ondrej
Lenard was appointed its conductor in 1970 and in 1977 its conductor-in-chief. The
orchestra has recently given a number of successful concerts both at home and abroad, in
West and East Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, and Great Britain.
Keith
Clark
Keith
Clark studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Tanglewood, was awarded diplomas and the
conducting prize from the Chigiana Academy in Italy, and received his Ph. D. degree with
honors in composition from the University of California in Los Angeles. From Vienna's
Musikverein to the Royal Philharmonic Hall and from Lucerne to Los Angeles, Keith Clark
has appeared widely as conductor of orchestras and opera, He has participated in the
Vienna, Bucharest and Siena Festivals as both conductor and composer, conducted on BBC,
Austrian. Hungarian and Netherlands radio and television, and performed and recorded as
conductor of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. Following nearly ten years abroad, he returned
to California as Founding Music Director of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, and in five
years has brought the orchestra to national prominence. For Naxos he has recorded an album
of orchestral works with a Spanish flavour, Spanish Festival.