Staunton Music Festival has the distinct pleasure of welcoming Grammy-nominated and Latin Grammy winner Roberto Sierra as the composer-in-residence for the 2024 summer season. For more than four decades, Sierra’s works of have been part of the repertoire of many of the leading orchestras, ensembles and festivals in the USA and Europe. Roberto was born in 1953 in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. He studied composition both in Puerto Rico and Europe, including stints at London’s Royal College of Music and a year devoted to electronic and computer music in The Netherlands. He spent several years working with György Ligeti at the Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg. These diverse experiences help to illuminate Sierra’s richly expressive style, combining elements of his Latin heritage with a command of European modernism.

Two works on tonight’s program showcase Sierra’s interest in percussion. The first, Mambo Metálico, for brass, percussion, and piano involves no fewer than four percussionists in addition to a full complement of brass: four horns, three trumpets, trombones and tuba. It was commissioned in 2012 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Wind Band at the Eastman School of Music. The work – from its title as well as its musical content – clearly pays homage to the sounds of Sierra’s upbringing. In brief, mambo emerged in the 1930s in Cuba as a combination of traditional folk dance (danzón) and North American jazz/big band sound. One of the leading figures in mambo’s development, Dámaso Pérez Prado, brought in large brass scorings. He may not be known by name to classical listeners, but his famous Mambo No. 5 has earned global iconic status for the genre of Cuban dance music. He was also directly influential on Sierra. As the composer notes, “The mambo sound of Pérez Prado has fascinated me for decades; this is the Latin sound of the 1940s and 50s that erupted from Cuba and captivated the ears of the world. Its angular rhythms, pungent melodies and static harmonies inspired Mambo Metálico.”

Lasting just six minutes, Mambo Metálico rushes past in a dazzling array of instrumental color. The first third of the work operates almost entirely at quiet dynamics, pierced by syncopated tattoos from solo trumpet and continuously enlivened by the percussion. Without obvious sectional breaks, our sense of the form hinges on a few moments of sustained brass swells – accompanied by cymbals – that help articulate new themes. The entire work unfolds as a single arc and builds to a brilliant conclusion. Mambo metálico offers a rhythmic feast, further enhanced by Sierra’s masterful orchestration.

Throughout the 19th century, harp manufacturers experimented with methods to widen the available compass of notes available to the performer. In the early 1900s the venerable firm of Pleyel patented a new approach to chromatic harps by simply increasing the size of the instrument and inserting additional strings to provide all desired pitches. Pleyel worked in direct competition with the Érard company and needed a showstopping work – by a major composer – to get its name in front of the world’s serious harp enthusiasts. They chose Claude Debussy (1862-1918).

In 1904 Debussy was at the peak of his fame and in the very middle of his compositional career. The early Impressionist works had ripened into mature, philosophical ideas tinged by Symbolism, as in the pivotal opera Pelleas et Mélisande (1902). At the same time, Debussy was embroiled in a divisive extra-marital affair with Emma Bardac. While pushing his first wife out of his life and fleeing negative press by taking Emma to London, Debussy completed his Dances for Harp and String Orchestra in May 1904. Not to be outdone, Pleyel’s rival Érard commissioned Maurice Ravel to compose a work showcasing its own, new chromatic harp a year later, resulting in the sublime Introduction and Allegro (1905).

The work’s two movements are similar in length and form but offer contrasting moods, and taken together they provide the piece with its more familiar name: Danse sacrée et danse profane (Sacred and Profane Dances). The “sacred dance” opens in reverential tones played by the strings, setting the stage for the all-important harp entrance. At first, the harp unfolds a series of chords moving in vast planes of sound in a quasi-D minor (actually Dorian mode). Soon, however, Debussy seems quite consciously to inject a high degree of chromatic moves. Carried along by the lush sound, we step abruptly from music centered on D to E-flat and F in just moments, followed by even more direct chromatic progressions. One can almost imagine Pleyel chief Gustave Lyon nodding approval from the wings, for this is precisely the kind of kaleidoscopic effect his new harp was intended to make possible. The central section combines circling chromatic motives in the strings with Debussy’s delight in coloristic scales placed in the harp, generating an amorphous sound without clear direction that dissolves into a reprise of the first theme.

The second movement is far more animated. Gone are the sliding planes of sound, replaced by a sensuous and undulating waltz idea. The modal color still remains, though now the favored collection is Lydian. Debussy’s biographer hears a link to Satie’s popular Gymnopédies, though no evidence exists that Debussy intended the connection. Virtuosic passages, including a mini harp cadenza, enliven the luxuriant mood and make the “profane dance” an audience favorite. The movement builds to a lavish display of harp glissandi and impish final cadence.

Roberto Sierra’s Mano a Mano (1987) is written for two percussionists who play different collections of instruments that include maracas, congas, bongos, and claves (wooden sticks). The composer describes his Mano a Mano thus:

In Latin culture, the term “mano a mano” is used mainly for the type of sport where two contestants confront each other directly. My idea was two wrestlers with their hands on each other’s shoulders, starting with similar motions and gradually separating in their moves while staying together. In Mano a Mano two percussionists start at the same tempo, gradually moving to different speeds. Like the wrestlers, they play together, but their movements (musical gestures) will be different, separated by their different speeds.

The performers begin with a lengthy passage for just maracas, followed by bongos that fade away to silence at the midpoint of the piece. The second half becomes increasingly active, as additional instruments take their turn in the spotlight. Toward the close, a powerful duet on bongos – now being struck with a mallet rather than the hand – highlights Sierra’s careful overlay of contrasting rhythms and tempos. The end is signaled by a maraca flourish and single cymbal strike.

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) was born not much later than his famous countryman Isaac Albéniz, though his longer lifespan exposed him to a very different world than the latter experienced. Falla’s first taste of success came after 1905, and he began to enjoy some fame outside his native Spain. Like Albéniz, however, he had the good fortune to study with Felipe Pedrell, the most important advocate for incorporating Spanish nationalist elements into European art music. He lived for some years in Paris and became familiar with Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky. But just prior to the outbreak of World War I, Falla returned to Madrid, where he completed his most popular orchestral works, including Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1916) and The Three-Cornered Hat (1919). After the war he settled for a longer time in Granada where he explored more a Neo-Classical style inspired by Stravinsky and his personal friendship with harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. The volume of new works dropped off substantially in later years. After the rise of Franco, Falla left Europe to settle in Argentina, where he lived until his death.

In 1914 Falla published Siete canciones populares españolas, arranging seven pre-existing popular Spanish melodies for voice and piano. The cycle offers a musical tour of Spain, taking its tunes from many different regions of the country: for example, an Asturian song (“asturiana”) from the north, a flamenco-inspired Castilian folksong (“seguidilla”) from the southeast, and an Aragonian dance (“jota”) from the northeast. This musical tourism might have been intended to present a diversity of Spanish song forms to outsiders; the initial audience for the piece was Parisian, as the cycle was dedicated to, and financially supported by, a Polish-Parisian patron of the arts and salonnière, Madame Ida Godebska. Despite the diverse geographical origins of the cycle’s seven songs, their lyrics all center on themes of love (Romantic and familial), and all feature appealing, driving syncopations and vocal ornamentations.

Perhaps because of their brevity, their memorable melodies, and Falla’s energetic settings, these are some of the most-arranged songs of all time, and we are proud to present the world premiere of Zachary Wadsworth’s arrangement for English horn, harp, voices, and string trio. Wadsworth writes, “In my arrangement I have aimed to enliven Falla’s already-very-lively piano parts with greater timbral variety and dynamic contrast. Throughout, the strings and especially the harp create guitar-like energetic strumming, and the English horn takes on many of the piano part’s more melodious lines.”


INTERMISSION


Readers may know that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) began writing symphonies quite late. Despite prodigious talent that saw him compared to a child Mozart, Beethoven matured slowly; he hesitated to enter the larger, public genres (symphony, opera, concerto) then dominated by Mozart and Haydn. Beethoven moved to Vienna from his native Bonn to study with Mozart, but the latter’s early death directed Ludwig to the door of 60-year-old Papa Haydn. The two developed a tense working relationship in the mid 1790s, the very same time Beethoven began sketching his first symphony. Beethoven was 25 years old by this point, and the Symphony No. 1 in C Major only appeared in 1800. Until that year, his entire published output consisted of piano sonatas, chamber duos and trios, and six string quartets.

Beginning in 1800, things began to move very quickly in Beethoven’s life – for good and for ill. His productivity blossomed with dozens of chamber works written between 1800 and 1802, and three piano concertos brought him public acclaim. Ideas were fomenting in his head for a new symphony, No. 2 in D major, as he left Vienna in spring 1802 for a short holiday in the pleasant suburb of Heiligenstadt. Despite the optimism instilled by recent successes, Beethoven’s mindset that spring was decidedly clouded. His nagging hearing issue was not improving, and professional treatment only seemed to make matters worse or confirm his gravest fears: the young composer realized by 1802 that his hearing loss might be incurable. Hampered by other recurring ailments, particularly gastric distress, Beethoven arrived in Heiligenstadt in need of solace. He found it mainly within himself and during long walks alone in nature.

The entirety of the Symphony No. 2 took shape in those six months spent in Heiligenstadt in 1802. The finished work projects abundant good cheer and energy, hardly betraying the deep depression that dogged Beethoven’s waking hours. In October, toward the end of his “holiday,” Beethoven penned one of the most famous documents in music history: the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament. In this letter and last will to his brothers, suppressed by the composer and not discovered until after his death, Beethoven admits how despair over hearing loss – and its accompanying inability to mix easily with society – drove him to the brink of suicide:

Ah, how could I possibly admit such an infirmity [i.e., hearing loss] in the one sense which should have been more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in highest perfection, a perfection such as few surely in my profession enjoy or have enjoyed . . . What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, and but little more and I would have put an end to my life — only Art held me back, for it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce. So I endured this wretched existence. With joy I hasten towards death . . . Come when thou will, I shall meet thee bravely.

Hearing the Symphony No. 2, it is admittedly hard to reconcile this picture of Beethoven with the ebullient music he created during these very same months.

The symphony is cast in four movements typical of the genre with one notable exception, as we will discuss below. It opens with a misterioso slow introduction, as fortissimo blasts interrupt more gentle themes. A diversion into the distant key of B-flat major signals a new level of intensity in the introduction that continues until the arrival of the main, boisterous Allegro theme. The second theme is built on rising arpeggiated chords, led by the winds and answered by overly-enthusiastic strings. Despite some passages clearly aimed toward comic grandiosity, Beethoven also takes care to integrate recurring motives across different sections in the form. For instance, an insistent turn figure that appears the second theme and development actually derives from the first theme. The coda in particular explores a powerful idea, vacillating between major and minor modes and culminating with a dramatic crescendo to a chain of biting dissonances (technically speaking, a chain of 2-3 suspensions). A page of reassuring D major is needed to dispel the tension and arrive at a satisfying final cadence.

The following Larghetto in A major opens with a simple yet beautiful rising theme. Its shape relates to other Beethoven melodies and was actually used verbatim by Mendelssohn a decade later in several “Songs Without Words” for solo piano. A dramatic outburst signals the arrival of the second theme, which descends overall from a soaring peak in E major. During the development section he moves quickly through various keys before landing in F major for a dizzying combination of multiple melodies heard earlier. A highpoint is attained just prior to the reprise, after which calm seas prevail until the end. This sonata-form movement may not offer earth-shattering intensity or formal innovations. But in comparison with most slow movements of the time, its scale (ten minutes long) and level of dialogic interaction between winds and strings certainly point to the future of symphonic writing.

Rather than a conventional Minuet in third position, Beethoven inserts a riotous Scherzo in a gesture that then became idiomatic for him; scherzos are used in all of his later symphonies except No. 8. Like Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven recognized that the predictable phrase design and basic harmonic patterns of the Viennese classical style opened the door to all manner of comic hi-jinks. These scherzos become a vehicle for play within the style, offering a respite between weighty slow movements and furious finales. The comedy in this D-major scherzo derives from the rapid alternation between loud and soft dynamics as well as frivolous call-and-response gestures (as in the horns over the opening phrase, which rise and then fall in mirror fashion). The central Trio section reinforces Beethoven’s command of the comic genre. Starting with a traditional folksy wind band, he tries to brusquely wipe the slate clean with unison strings – unsuccessfully, of course, as the winds then resume. The Trio closes with strings having learned their lesson and cooperating with winds to play the theme together.

The Scherzo’s light-hearted vein continues into the Finale, right from the outset. According to at least one commentator, this quixotic opening gesture – a two-note group, a trill, and a falling fifth interval – depicts flatulence. This colorful interpretation certainly resonates with Beethoven’s love of lowbrow humor and his current health woes at the time, but it merely distracts attention from observing how the composer transforms a “throwaway gesture” into something integral to the movement. Beethoven will use the motif as a vital transition idea, allowing the periodic returns of this main Rondo theme to recur organically. Moreover, by virtue of contrasting themes and pregnant pauses, the entire movement gradually takes on greater expressive power, such that the schoolboy antics of the opening measures are transcended by the end. It’s far too much to say that Beethoven himself – in the defiant spirit of his Heiligenstadt Testament – captures his own spiritual growth here. But in the Symphony No. 2, he does seem to be consciously laughing at or with the world. If such glib music helped him to cope with profound personal struggles, so much the better for us.

© Jason Stell, 2024