La Mer Shimmers with Orchestral Colors

We all know the experience of being outside in what we initially think is a quiet nighttime environment, and then we gradually realize that it’s neither quiet, nor dark. Our senses heightened, we become increasingly aware of a delicious cacophony of sounds – the birds, insects, the wind in the trees – and an overall brightening, thanks to the moon and the stars and maybe, if we’re lucky, those tiny glowing lanterns the scientists call photinus pyralis, and the rest of us call fireflies (and which are, alas, rare-to-nonexistent in the Pacific Northwest.).  

Katherine Balch, who frequently celebrates the natural world in her compositions, here conjures a magical nocturne vis à vis her new home in rural Connecticut, where fireflies adorn the night, along with the sounds of the wind, the trees, and the lapping waters of a pond. “Nature is the best orchestrator,” she writes. “I try to capture a glimpse of this miraculously transparent density in this (mostly) brisk concert opener and set to song the gently omnipresent twinkle of the photinus pyralis.” 

Listen particularly for the sound of a slightly detuned harp, which, when heard together with the piano, creates an intriguingly open harmonic space within the overall orchestral texture. Also listen for the string instruments as they suggest rustling leaves by using the wood of the bow, or the patter of insects via tapping gently on the sides of the instruments. 

© Scott Foglesong

We have Hollywood producer Hal B. Wallis to thank for the Korngold Violin Concerto. The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, promised to be the blockbuster epic of 1938 and demanded a thoroughly buff symphonic score. Wallis approached Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who doubted he had the requisite musical swagger; he had recently nabbed his first Oscar for Anthony Adverse, a three-handkerchief weepie that Korngold considered to be more up his compositional alley. 

But Wallis persevered and Korngold gave in after considerable hemming and hawing. The decision saved his life. He and his family were in California in 1938 when the Nazis annexed Austria, and as a prominent Jewish artist he never would have survived. As it turned out, he had the swagger and then some. For Robin Hood, he turned in one of the all-time great swashbuckling movie scores, won his second Oscar, and established himself at the pinnacle of Hollywood film composers. In fact, his film music has demonstrated a longer shelf life than most of the movies he scored. 

After the war, Korngold wound down his Hollywood career, determined to re-establish himself as a composer of concert music and opera. For some timetime, violinist Bronislaw Huberman had been pestering him for a violin concerto, and now with his slate cleared of film projects he took on the task. But he wasn’t actually finished with movie music; instead, he built the work out of materials mined from four of his film scores, out of which he fashioned an expertly well-paced and vital concerto. 

However, it wasn’t Huberman who wound up introducing the piece to the world. That honor went to Jascha Heifetz, who premiered the concerto in 1947 and gifted posterity with its first recording. But even Heifetz couldn’t get it past the critics, who condemned the work as a lumbering late Romantic dinosaur. “Almost totally lacking in any real inventiveness or development,” sniped New York critic Raymond Kendall. 

But you can’t keep a good piece down, and by the 1980s the Korngold concerto had come of age, performed just about everywhere by just about everybody. The expansive first movement takes its materials from two forgotten movies—Another Dawn and Juarez, while Korngold’s Oscar-winning score for Anthony Adverse provides the primary theme for the lyrical slow movement. Then comes the Allegro assai vivace third movement, a dynamite set of variations on the main tune from The Prince and the Pauper that easily stands amongst the most effective finales in all the concerto literature. 

© Scott Foglesong

Felix Mendelssohn was so good at so many things – composer, pianist, organist, conductor, administrator, painter, family man – that it’s something of a relief to learn that he was a lousy sailor, the sort of guy who got seasick at the slightest roll or yaw. Fellow travelers on an 1829 boat trip to the Hebrides off the coast of Scotland report that poor Felix spent most of the time with his head over the side of the boat. Nevertheless, he seems to have retained enough positive memories to have written the superbly constructed and nausea-free Hebrides Overture between 1830 and 1832. Nor was that his only aquatic composition; The Fair Melusine is loosely based on the legend of a water-nymph and her (awkward) marriage to a mortal.  

Then there’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage of 1828, the most waterborne of Mendelssohn’s orchestral works, based on Goethe’s eponymous paired poems that describe first the ominous stillness of a calm sea – potential disaster for a sailing ship that relies on the wind – followed by the prosperous voyage that results when the winds pick up and blow the ship home. Thirteen years earlier Beethoven had set Goethe’s text as a choral cantata, but Mendelssohn wrote for instruments alone, trusting his listeners to trace the path from lugubrious calm to rejoicing. 

Which isn’t particularly difficult, thanks to Mendelssohn’s masterful pacing and razor-sharp orchestration. The languidly sustained opening in the strings can be nothing other than the becalmed sea, but soon enough the wind instruments enter with a pair of lively themes that reflect the rise of the breezes. Eventually downright snappy trumpets play a resounding fanfare as the ship reaches port, to everyone’s joy and, no doubt, relief.  

© Scott Foglesong

Felix Mendelssohn might have been a dyed-in-the-wool landlubber, but Claude Debussy seems to have been born an old salt with seawater in his veins. We hear of an 1889 boat trip in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel during which a storm blew up; all on board succumbed to seasickness except for Debussy, who appeared to be having a fine old time – to everybody’s irritation. The sea and its volatile moods remained a fascination for Debussy throughout his lifetime and reflected itself in numerous water-themed vocal, keyboard, and orchestral works. With La mer, he would embark on his most significant sea journey and create his orchestral masterpiece. 

He commenced work around 1903, a time when his personal life was in even more of a chaotic uproar than usual, due to the breakdown of his marriage to Lilly Texier and her attempted suicide, the beginning of a passionate affair with wife-to-be Emma Bardac, and the accumulating impact of his always dire finances. He marked the manuscript as finished on March 5, 1905, at 6:00 PM, and originally added a dedication to Emma, then changed it to his publisher Jacques Durand. 

One would like to think that La mer was met with rapturous applause and acclaim at its premiere at the Concerts Lamoureux on October 15, 1905. But it bombed, mostly due to the insensitive and careless leadership of conductor Camille Chevillard. La mer had to wait until 1908 for another go, this time with Debussy on the podium of the other main Paris orchestra, the Concerts Colonne. Although Debussy was in no wiseway a natural on the podium – in fact, the whole thing terrified him – he acquitted himself well, and La mer received its first true measure of success. It has been a beloved orchestral staple ever since. 

La mer has been described as ‘the best symphony written by a Frenchman,’ this three-movement evocation of the sea and its many moods. It begins with From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, at first almost in total stillness, then gradually awakening into a brightly lit orchestral climax as the sun reaches noon. Play of the Waves is probably the closest this piece comes to that oft-misused term ‘impressionism’ in that its almost free-form orchestral canvas seems to play with the light sparkling off the motion of the waves, always changeable and fascinating. Then with Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, we leave the sunlight behind and enter the dark world of a storm at sea – powerful, dynamic, majestic, and the perfect counter to anybody who thinks that Debussy wrote nothing but pastel, pretty little things. 

© Scott Foglesong