Clarice Assad
Sin Fronteras (Overture for Orchestra)
Born: 1978
Composed: 2017
Premiered: Sept. 16, 2017 with the Chicago Sinfonietta
Most recent Pacific Symphony performance: This is a Pacific Symphony premiere
Instrumentation: two flutes including piccolo, two oboes including English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, one tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
Estimated duration: Approx. 13 minutes
A powerful communicator renowned for her musical scope and versatility, Brazilian-American Clarice Assad is a significant artistic voice in the classical, world music, pop, and jazz genres. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Clarice Assad has lived in Brazil, France, and the United States. She is fluent in Portuguese, French, and English, and sings in all three languages, as well as Spanish and Italian. One of the most widely performed Brazilian concert music composers of her generation, she is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including an Aaron Copland Award, several ASCAP awards in composition, a Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Van Lier Fellowship, the Franklin Honor Society Award, the Samuel Ostrowsky Humanities Award, the New Music Alive Partnership program by the League of American Orchestras, and a McKnight Visiting Composer Award. Assad holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Chicago’s Roosevelt University and a Master of Music degree from the University of Michigan School of Music.
In the dynamic music of Sin Fronteras, Assad presents us with an idealistic vision of humanity not unlike John Lennon’s in his song “Imagine” and Beethoven’s in his Ninth Symphony, “Ode to Joy.” On her website, Assad writes:
Sin Fronteras emerged from a utopian state of mind in which I found myself one day, daring to erase imaginary lines that disconnect us geographically, culturally, and morally: Boundaries that the human race has willingly subscribed to for thousands of years. But what would happen if the walls that separate us from getting to know one another were not there? While this idea would generate a fair amount of confusion in the real world, in the realm of music of the 21st century, this does not need to be so!
As a South American woman living in the United States for two decades, I chose sounds of places that felt closest to home: The Americas. In Sin Fronteras, we journey from the bottom of South America, traveling up both coasts and navigating to the Northern hemisphere via Central America. The piece follows no storyline, but its central concept begins with a shocking reaction between two or more distinct cultures coming into contact for the first time. After the initial resistance, everyone collectively begins aggregating each other’s ethnic fragments into their culture spheres to create something new – while still preserving their original roots.
The piece accomplishes this amalgamation effect by taking advantage of an old-time favorite musical form: Theme & Variation. Though it may not fit precisely into the cookie cutter format of this old tradition, there are several moments in the piece where familiar sounds, melodies, and motifs come and go, grounding the listener for a moment before morphing into something new.
Joaquin Rodrigo
Concierto de Aranjuéz for Guitar and Orchestra
Born: Nov. 22, 1901, Sagunto, Spain
Died: July 6, 1999, Madrid, Spain
Composed: 1939
Premiered: Nov. 9, 1940 at the Palau de la Música Catalana, in Barcelona. It was performed by guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza
Most recent Pacific Symphony performance: May 4, 2019 in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, conducted by Carlos Izcaray
Instrumentation: solo guitar, two flutes including piccolo, two oboes including English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, harp, and strings
Estimated duration: Approx. 21 minutes
So many of classical music’s great geniuses led tragically short lives—Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Bizet all died in their thirties—that when we encounter those blessed with longevity, we rejoice. The Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo, though blinded by diphtheria at age three, lived to be 98. He credited the apparent calamity of his illness for his lifelong involvement in music—a profound example of turning lemons into lemonade.
Rodrigo made rapid progress at the conservatory in Valencia, graduating early and going on to Paris, where he studied with Paul Dukas at the École Normale de Musique. But while he absorbed the elements of French style and refinement, his music remains Spanish to its very core. With Manuel de Falla (b. 1876) and Enrique Granados (b. 1867), Rodrigo was central to the flowering of musical creativity that raised the prominence of Spanish music in the 20th century. These composers burst upon the music world like a new discovery, though their cultural lineage extended back centuries. Musicians and audiences greeted them like long-lost brothers, but their distinctively Iberian sound, drenched in folk melodies and in the traditions of Spanish church music of the Baroque period, was like nothing to be heard in the rest of Europe.
While Manuel de Falla gained renown for ballet scores that traveled with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and Granados’ orchestral and piano compositions earned their standing as repertory staples (and his opera Goyescas in opera houses including New York’s Metropolitan), Rodrigo became known for his remarkable concertos. They reflect the Spanish affinity for the guitar; the two best-known examples, his Fantasy for a Nobleman and the Concierto de Aranjuéz, are both for that instrument. But there are other notable examples, including a spectacularly original concerto for harp. Rodrigo composed the Fantasy for a Gentleman in 1954 for Andrés Segovia, and though it is often mistakenly associated with Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme—inspiration for many musical adaptions—the gentleman of Rodrigo’s title is actually Segovia himself. But the Concierto de Aranjuéz remains his most popular and widely performed composition.
The Website devoted to Rodrigo’s life and work includes the composer’s charming personal account of “how and why the Concierto de Aranjuéz came about:”
In September of 1938, I was in San Sebastián on my return to France…It was during a dinner organized by the Marqués de Bolarque with Regino Sainz de la Maza and myself. We ate well and the wine was not bad at all; it was the right moment for audacious fantasizing…All of a sudden, Regino, in that tone between unpredictable and determined which was so characteristic of him, said:
-Listen, you have to come back with a ‘Concerto for guitar and orchestra’ – and to go straight to my heart, he added in a pathetic voice: - It’s the dream of my life – and, resorting to a bit of flattery, he continued: - This is your calling, as if you were ‘the chosen one.’
I quickly swallowed two glasses of the best Rioja, and exclaimed in a most convincing tone: - All right, it’s a deal!
Inspired by the gardens at the Palacio Real de Aranjuéz, the concerto opens with two themes in alternation. As Rodrigo notes, the movement is “animated by a rhythmic spirit and vigor without either of the two themes…interrupting its relentless pace.” Their rhythmic impetus makes the slow hush of the second movement all the more dramatic, with a dialogue between solo instrument and ensemble that is traditional in concertos. The last movement, as Rodrigo notes, “recalls a courtly dance in which the combination of double and triple time maintains a taut tempo right to the closing bar.”
The late George Jellinek—a perceptive musicologist and commentator not inclined to exaggerate—called Rodrigo’s concertos revolutionary and asserted that their freshness resulted from the composer’s use of the second interval. Even listeners with no musical background are likely to have heard about other harmonic intervals—thirds, fourths, fifths, and so on—but seconds, comprised of two notes that lie next to each other on the piano keyboard, are rarely heard or mentioned. And, yes, we do hear them frequently in this concerto. But are they so fully responsible for the concerto’s distinctive sound? Or do they function more like the rainfall on a streetscape in Paris or at the Palacio Real de Aranjuéz, adding a poetic dimension to a scene that is already beautiful?
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Symphonic Dances
Born: April 1, 1873 in Staraya Russa, Russia
Died: March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills
Composed: 1940
Premiered: Jan. 3, 1941 by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy
Most recent Pacific Symphony performance: May 15, 2010 in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, conducted by Michael Stern
Instrumentation: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English horn, three clarinets including bass clarinet, alto sax, three bassoons including contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, one tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings
Estimated duration: Approx. 35 minutes
Though he was born before the last quarter of the 19th century began, Rachmaninoff was essentially a figure of the 20th century. Still, we can call him the last of the Russian Romantics; his sound was rooted in the 1800s and in the Russian nationalist composers dating back to Glinka and Tchaikovsky. He trained as a performer and composer in Moscow and St. Petersburg, focusing on the piano in both disciplines. But all expectations for his future life, including his life in music, were shattered by the Russian revolution of 1917, when Rachmaninoff’s aristocratic family lost their long-held estate with its traditional way of life.
As we listen to the lush sound of Rachmaninoff’s music, with its opulent melodies and spectacular effects, melancholy is never far away. It haunted him in life as well, in fits of depression and composer’s block. A sense of statelessness tormented him; it was said he could not bear to stay in Russia and could not bear to be away from it. Though they did not share musical values, Igor Stravinsky was one of many colleagues who urged Rachmaninoff while on a concert tour of the U.S. to stay in sunny California. He did, and became a U.S. citizen, but found composing difficult during the last years of his life.
Rachmaninoff composed the Symphonic Dances at Orchard Point, an estate overlooking Long Island Sound in New York. Originally conceived as “Fantastic Dances,” the suite is symphonic in scope (large orchestra, more than a half-hour in duration) and may once have contained suggestions of a narrative line or theme; Rachmaninoff titled the movements “noon,” “twilight,” and “midnight,” and originally hoped the score would be the basis of a full-length ballet to be choreographed by Michel Fokine. But Fokine died in 1942, before he and Rachmaninoff had a chance to collaborate, and the original dance-worthy movement notations were replaced by conventional Italian tempo markings: non allegro, andante con moto, and—for the final movement—four separate markings. It begins with a slow lento pace that alternates with quick allegro vivace sections.
The Symphonic Dances proved to be Rachmaninoff’s final composition. The suite forms an apt valediction for his career, showcasing the exotic effects and evocative, shifting harmonies his compositions are known for. It also looks back on his earlier works, quoting motifs from his First Symphony and his All-Night Vigil. It was dedicated to Eugene Ormandy, who conducted the premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra in January 1941.
Whatever else we may love about Rachmaninov’s music, its sheer virtuosity is thrilling. His three-movement suite of symphonic dances is one of the great showpieces of the orchestral repertory, filled with ingenious craft and sparkling color.
Michael Clive is a cultural reporter living in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut. He is program annotator for Pacific Symphony and Louisiana Philharmonic, and editor‑in‑chief for The Santa Fe Opera.