Program Notes

New Century Chamber Orchestra
June 5-10, 2008
Rachel Barton Pine, Guest Concertmaster

Program Notes Written by Dr. Dominique-René de Lerma

Saint-Georges: Violin concerto in A major, Op. 5, No. 2

Had he not actually lived, one critic wrote, he would have been invented by Alexandre Dumas.  In fact, the father of Dumas served in the all-Black regiment of the French army, which had Saint-Georges as colonel.

For more than a century, the life of this composer, born on Guadeloupe in 1745, was subjected to shameless fictionalizing, needlessly so.  With the biography recently written by Gabriel Banat, the true story is finally provided, based on primary sources.  We know his father was French and had a plantation on the Caribbean island, complete with an African mistress.  Regardless of the absence of church participation, the father was very much a family man and took young Saint-Georges with his mother when he returned to France.  He provided the boy with education befitting a Parisian gentleman, including fencing lessons and more importantly, violin instruction.  In 1773, when François Gossec moved to head the Concert Spirituel, he left the Concert des Amateurs in charge of the young violinist.  The music played by this band of music lovers was, of course, contemporary, and Saint-Georges did not hesitate to schedule his own works for the ensemble – violin concertos and symphonies concertantes.  The choice of librettos for his operas was unfortunate, and condemned the music, however much praised, to endure only a few performances at most.  Saint-Georges was not active only as a violinist-composer.  He spent some time in England and in the company of pre-revolutionary liberals.  While in England, one of his fencing partners was the famed Chevalier (or Chevalière) d’Eon, a transvestite who came with her (his) épée to the match in drag.  In later years, Saint-Georges had a different ensemble, this of Masonic musicians, and it was this group that presented the first performances of Haydn’s ”Paris” symphonies, the publication of which Saint-Georges then arranged.  His meeting with Mozart about 1778 was less productive, but Mozart was not very pleased with any aspect of his return visit to Paris.  Saint-Georges went back to the Caribbean to fight for the liberation of Haiti, but then, back in Paris, he died in 1799.

His violin concertos substantially advanced violin technique, and demonstrate his own virtuosic ability.  They also, like the three violin sonatas and two symphonies, employ a clear sonata form in the first movement, with two contrasting themes, a modest developmental section, and restatement of the thematic material.  Further, the concertos have a double exposition so that the soloist gets a chance, after the orchestra, to state the themes, or even alternate ones.  The figuration work that appears in the development almost always s the violin to a much higher range than had been previously encountered, and with double stopping and rapid string crossing, identifies the idiomatic writing so characteristic of the instrument.  The second movement is, as expected, the slow one, but virtuosity is not shunned.  French concertos save the cadenza for the good-natured rondeau-finale, which always requires more dexterity and seems almost as if has come from the happy ending of a contemporary comic opera.

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Sinfonietta No. 2, Generations

Perkinson (1932-2004) was named for that Afro-British cultural hero, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) whose three visits to America in the early years of the last century that helped ignite the Harlem Renaissance.  As a child, Perkinson had been a dance student of Pearl Primus, but he entered the High School of Music and Art in his native New York as a music student.  Here he was mentored by the choral conductor, Hugh Ross.  He graduated in 1949 and entered New York University with a major in music education, but left in 1951 to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music.  During the summers of 1960, 1962, and 1963 he studied in Europe, both at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and in the Netherlands with Dean Dixon, the African American conductor who had been unable to secure a steady position in the U.S.  He was co-founder of the integrated Symphony of the New World in 1965, and later its Music Director.  He also held the same position with Jerome Robbins’s American Theater Lab and with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.  Leaving New York, he accepted an appointment at Indiana University before becoming Coordinator of Performance Activities for Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research and conductor of the Ritz Chamber Players.

His second symphony was completed in 1996.  Each of the four movements is dedicated to a family member.  The first, to his daughter, is based on the B-A-C-H motif and on “Mockingbird.”  The slow movement reflects on the sarabande, a dance of the past, and pays tribute to the women of his immediate family.  The third movement is dedicated to his grandson, and playfully makes reference to “Li’l Brown Jug.”  The finale recalls the quotations of the earlier movements and is offered to his family patriarchs.

George Walker: Lyric for Strings

One of the most remarkable figures on the contemporary scene is George Walker (b. 1922).  His musical education was as a pianist at Oberlin, the Curtis Institute and Eastman School of Music, but he was also a private student of Nadia Boulanger (she met most of her other pupils in class).  Toward the end of his academic career, he was in charge of the music program at Rutgers University in Newark.  Perhaps he first became known by the pioneering recording by his childhood friend, Natalie Hinderas -- his first piano sonata.  The Lyric, perhaps his most frequently played and readily accessible work, bears a resemblance to that sonata – in fact, to most of his works – fresh and unexpected cadences that redefine the tonality of the music just heard, but with an ardent aesthetic credo, Dr. Walker has stated that he does not repeat successes.  Therefore, each of his works has a new voice and fresh approach.  He has the distinction of being the first African American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize (1996).  This was for his Lilacs, set to Walt Whitman’s well known text, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The Lyric work was originally the slow movement of his first string quartet, and titled Lament, homage to his grandmother.  The version for string orchestra intensifies the harmonic richness inherent in the original setting.  One will certainly be immediately reminded of a similar situation with Samuel Barber’s Adagio, but Walker’s contribution is quite independent and unquestionably valid.

Johannes Brahms: Sextet in B-flat major, Op. 18

Brahms (1833-1897) successfully contributed to the Romantic movement without renouncing a heritage of the past.  He was born in Hamburg, a city where refugees from the 1848 revolutions found sanctuary, including Gypsies, whose music is reflected in many ways in Brahms’ work – particularly the intervallic leaps to an appoggiatura, and he added these influences to a Viennese vocabulary that allied him to Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn.  He could be termed an evolutionary Romantic, rather than a revolutionary one.  Thus he stood in opposition to the program music advocates of Liszt and Wagner, never once contemplating the composition of an opera.

He was one of the most active figures of his time in the area of chamber music with 24 essays for cello and piano, clarinet with piano and string quartet, violin sonatas, piano trios and the one for horn, quartets and quintets, the string quartets, and piano quintets.  Then there are the two string sextets, both for pairs of violins, violas, and cellos, both fairly early works.  The first, opus 18, is not without reflections of Schubert.  The six variations of the second movement hint at the extraordinary inventiveness he was to show later when he was not content merely to decorate the theme with ornaments, but to disguise the original material with thematic inversion and complex counterpoint.  Because the opening movement was in ¾, a meter he often employed, the scherzo which normally had taken that meter, is in duple meter.  The finale is a rondo, with a cello getting things underway, followed by antiphony with the violins and a viola on one side.

Dr. de Lerma’s career as a university professor began at the University of Miami, more than a half century ago.  He subsequently served on the faculties of Indiana University, Morgan State University, the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and as Director of the Center for Black Music research in Chicago, with guest residencies at Florida State University, Kent State University, Northwestern University, and Virginia State University.  He joined the faculty of Wisconsin’s Lawrence University Conservatory of Music in 1995.  He is currently also Chief Advisor to the Rachel Elizabeth Barton Foundation and is completing two multi-volume reference works, one on Black opera singers, and the second on the composers.