Overture Magazine: 2016-2017 Season September - October 2016 | Page 19
program notes {
works — is the Fifth, scored for soprano
and an orchestra of eight cellos, an earthy
ensemble unique to this composer, himself
a cellist. In the opening Aria/Cantilena
— in the haunting style of the Brazilian
modhina — the soprano is also treated
instrumentally, singing or humming a
wordless vocalise, doubled by the first
cellos, over guitar-like plucked cellos. In
the middle, she chants a poem in praise of
the evening sky written by Ruth Valadares
Corrêa, the Brazilian soprano who sang
this song’s premiere. The second movement, Dansa/Martelo, is a fleet song
imitating, with its melodic patterns and
onomatopoetic words, birdsongs that
Villa-Lobos had notated in northeastern
Brazil. The song’s rhythms follow the
embolada folk-song style of the same
region. “Martelo” probably refers to the
fast “hammering” rhythmic pattern with
which the song opens.
30
Instrumentation: Soprano and an orchestra
of celli.
Piano Concerto in F
George Gershwin
Born in Brooklyn, New York, September 26,
1898; died in Hollywood, California,
July 11, 1937
While George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in
Blue of 1924 has become an ubiquitous
showpiece in both classical and pops
concerts, it is by no means the only work
that America’s favorite composer wrote
for piano and orchestra. Well worth
discovering and every bit as appealing
is his longer and more adventurous
Concerto in F, which takes the Rhapsody’s
attractive mixture of jazz and classical
elements and builds them into a fullfledged three-movement concerto.
Although he had only the Rhapsody
as a concert-hall piece under his belt,
Gershwin boldly set to work on his
Concerto just one year later, completing
it with characteristic speed between July
and November 1925. Commissioned
by Walter Damrosch for the New York
Symphony Orchestra, it represented
a far more ambitious step into the
alien world of classical music than the
Rhapsody, written for Paul Whiteman’s
congenial jazz orchestra. Originally
feeling ill-equipped as an orchestrator,
Gershwin had turn