Program Notes for Nov 13 Concert - Not Just for Kids

Program Notes
November 13, 2010
By Composer in Residence
Bruce Brown

Tonight’s program of music is truly “Not Just for Children.” Many stories are written so that children can read them at one level while adults recognize deeper meaning. In the same way, many pieces of music are both entertaining for children and rich for adults, and grownups might even savor them as a memory from their own childhood.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books certainly appeal to readers of all ages! They have sold over 400 million copies and been translated into at least 67 languages.

Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra is a wonderful introduction to orchestral instruments, but it is a very effective concert piece without the explanatory narration. Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals depicts beasts and birds in a very entertaining way, but the music is beautiful and colorful on its own merits. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf weaves a spellbinding tale of the courage of impetuous youth. Its memorable themes have made the piece a perennial favorite of orchestral audiences all over the world.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Several composers have been involved in writing music for the enormously popular Harry Potter movies, but the first three were scored by John Williams (b. 1932), the composer of many of the most memorable themes in Hollywood history.

In his illustrious, six-decade career, Williams has won five Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and 21 Grammy Awards. His enormous output includes music for dozens of films, four Olympic Games, the NBC Nightly News and the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, and he has also written several concert works. Williams is the laureate conductor of the world famous Boston Pops orchestra and regularly makes guest conducting appearances with the finest orchestras in the United States and Europe.

On June 30, 1997, J.K. Rowling introduced her phenomenally successful series of books with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (or “the Philosopher’s Stone” outside the United States). Rowling sold the film rights for her first four books to Warner Brothers in 1999, reportedly for 1 million British pounds. That’s the equivalent of 1,982,900 American dollars! Filming began in October of 2000, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was released in London on November 14, 2001.

In his score, Williams fashioned two themes for the diabolical Voldemort; two themes for the stately school, Hogwarts; a theme for Diagon Alley, the off-kilter marketplace; a tune for the sport of Quidditch, played on flying brooms; a flying theme; a friendship theme; and the main theme – representing the bumbling, lovable Hedwig – which has been used in all films so far.

Peter and the Wolf

The brilliant, irascible Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory when he was only thirteen and proceeded to give his teachers fits. “I didn’t show my compositions to Liadov,” he once said, “because, if I did, he probably would expel me from the class.” When admirers expressed pleasure at meeting him, he would curtly reply “On my part there is no pleasure!”

Prokofiev left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and he was an internationally famous composer when he returned in the 1930s. By an odd coincidence, he died on the same day as Joseph Stalin, March 5, 1953. Prokofiev’s funeral took place with paper flowers and a recording of the funeral march from his ballet Romeo and Juliet; the real flowers and live musicians were all taken for Stalin’s state funeral!

Natalia Satz, the director of the Moscow Children's Musical Theater, asked Prokofiev to write a musical symphony for children in 1936. Her aim was to encourage "musical tastes in children from the first years of school." Satz and Prokofiev agreed the music would tell a story and themes heard in instrumental solos would represent animals and characters in the tale. One of Satz’s friends wrote a text, but Prokofiev rejected it immediately saying it had too many rhymes. It only took him four days to write his own text and a piano version of "How little Peter fooled the Wolf!” The orchestral score was finished a week later.

The reaction to the first performance, on May 6, 1936, disappointed Prokofiev, but the piece quickly became enormously popular.

The Carnival of the Animals

The history of music is full of astounding child prodigies, but Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) was certainly one of the greatest. He wrote his first composition when he was three, and when he gave his first recital at the age of ten, he offered to play any one of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas as an encore! Saint-Saëns toured as a virtuoso pianist, and Franz Liszt called him “the greatest organist in the world.”

Saint-Saëns wrote his Carnival of the Animals (Le carnaval des animaux) in 1886 while he was vacationing in Austria. The menagerie of musical portraits is full of humor and playfulness, and Saint-Saëns includes wryly-distorted quotes from famous composers – Rameau, Offenbach, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Rossini and himself – to add to the fun.

Saint-Saëns refused to allow the music to be performed during his lifetime, thinking such “frivolous” music would damage his reputation as a serious composer. Only one movement, Le cygne (“The Swan”) was performed and published while he was alive. The first public performance of the full suite was given on February 26, 1922, about two months after his death.

Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was another child prodigy who began to compose at age five, started piano lessons when he was eight and took up the viola two years later. By the time he was fourteen he'd written ten piano sonatas, six string quartets, three piano suites, an oratorio and "dozens of songs." Britten became famous when his opera Peter Grimes premièred in London in June of 1945. That November he wrote to a friend “I have a small film to write for the Board of Education.” The goal of the project was to create a piece of music that would entertain schoolchildren and teach the instruments of the orchestra at the same time.

Britten started work on The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in mid-December, 1945 and finished at midnight on New Year’s Eve. The piece was first performed in concert the following October by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and the film debuted on November 29, 1946. Britten dedicated the piece to the four children of his friends John and Jean Maud for their “edification and entertainment.”

The work is subtitled “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell.” The theme is taken from Purcell’s incidental music for the 1676 play Abdelazar, or “The Moor's Revenge,” by Aphra Behn. Britten greatly admired Purcell and later wrote “I had never realized, before I first met Purcell’s music, that words could be set with such ingenuity, with such colour.”

Britten adapted Purcell’s theme ingeniously to exhibit the unique capabilities of each instrument, and just to show off, he crafted it into a rollicking fugue that puts the orchestra back together and ends the piece with thrilling energy and enthusiasm.