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GODDESS
Festival Concert 3
August 15, 2023
Tuesday
7:30 pm – Festival Concert
6:30 pm – Pre-Concert Lecture
Lincoln Theater, Damariscotta
Tickets available in advance or at the door.
PROGRAM
Dawn Avery Iethi’sotha Ahsonthehnéhka Karáhkwa (Grandmother Moon) (commissioned by SBC)
Sean Lee, violin; Susie Park, violin; Oliver Herbert, cello; Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Ottorino Respighi Il tramonto
Kate Aldrich, mezzo-soprano; Sean Lee, violin; Susie Park, violin; Che-Yen Chen, viola; Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Antonín Dvořák String Sextet in A major, Op. 48
Sean Lee, violin; Susie Park, violin; Natalie Loughran, viola; Che-Yen Chen, viola; Oliver Herbert, cello; Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Artists
Kate Aldrich, mezzo-soprano
Sean Lee, violin
Susie Park, violin
Che-Yen Chen, viola
Natalie Loughran, viola
Oliver Herbert, cello
Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Program Notes:
As part of the Salt Bay Chamberfest theme to honor stories of sacred women, I thought immediately of the Haudenosaunee stories of our Grandmother Moon. I was fortunate to participate in moon ceremonies brought back after 200 years by Mohawk elder and cultural specialist, Jan Kahehtí:io Longboat. On the full moon, Indigenous women from all over Ontario gather around her fire on Mohawk territory to sing songs, offer tobacco, and thank Iethi’sotha Ahsonthehnéhkha Karáhkwa. In the Kaniènkéha (Mohawk) tradition, we are grateful that Grandmother Moon moves the ocean’s tides and lights the nighttime sky with her adornment of stars. She is an elder to women all over the world, watching over us and our children’s births. We measure time as her face changes through each cycle of the 13 moons.
As I was composing this work, I thought of the Indigenous grandmothers with their breadth of experience and commitment toward keeping traditions, communities, and families alive. As elders pass on, I have seen great sadness and strength in these remaining knowledge keepers. Their roles and responsibilities, along with the emotion that I imagine they carry, are reflected in this piece, through syncopated rhythms, soaring melodies, various dances, harmonic ostinati, layered thematic material, and a song in the style of a Haudenosaunee women’s song. One can hear the Indigenous soundscapes of the drum, rattles, ancestral spirits, sky world, and waters depicted through string harmonics, col legno battuto ricochet (bouncing the wood of the bow on the string), chromatic patterns, and repetitive bass notes. The musicians are asked to recite the words for Grandmother Moon as a means of honoring her and invoking the ancient vibration of the Kaniènkéha language. The work ends with the gentle sounds of the ancestral grandmothers walking amongst the stars toward our Grandmother Moon.
This work commissioned by Wilhelmina Smith and Salt Bay Chamberfest is scored for two violins and two cellos. The performers depict the power and the beauty of the moon and its connection to us all.
By Dawn Avery
Il tramonto is from quite early in Respighi’s career. The work was composed in 1914, just before Respighi brought considerably greater attention to himself with The Fountains of Rome. Until 1913, Respighi had been supporting himself as an orchestral violist, but an appointment as a composition professor in Rome allowed him to devote himself more fully to creative work.
Il tramonto is an unusual work in many ways. The combination of voice and string quartet is already distinctive, but the piece also seems to elude generic classification. It is quite long and dramatically varied for a song, but fits comfortably into no other type of poetry setting. The text is an Italian translation of Shelley’s “The Sunset,” which tells the tale of a young couple who share a summer night of passion. The woman wakes to find her lover dead, and lives to tend for her father, physically fading as she grieves.
Respighi seems to read the poem as a series of emotional states, as his changes of musical texture do not always coincide with the structure of the poem. The vocal writing is almost entirely syllabic, but still ranges in affect from a quasi-recitative (often for reported speech) to highly expressive lyricism. The vocal writing is very similar to that for the strings, and it is commonplace to suggest that the singer is treated more like the fifth member of a quintet than like a vocal soloist. At the risk of an overly sentimental interpretation, the cello plays an increasingly prominent role as the piece progresses, perhaps standing in for the memory of the silenced youth.
By Derek Katz
In 1878, when Antonin Dvořák composed his String Sextet, the 30-something composer was entering his prime and just starting to be recognized internationally; this is the Dvořák of the Wind Serenade, the Stabat Mater, and the first set of Slavonic Dances. In the Sextet one can hear a mastery of long form, a sureness of voice, and yet there is also a sense of a still-young composer who is eager to experiment, to reach beyond traditional structure and try out new flavors and ideas.
The genre of the string sextet, birthed by Johannes Brahms just a few years earlier, extends the sound of the standard string quartet to a deeper, richer tint by the addition of a second viola and a second cello. Dvořák uses this sound to lovely effect in the opening of the first movement, weaving a texture of patient, reminiscent melancholy that evokes an old pipe organ in a country church. Already experimenting, he tries an approach in this movement where, instead of giving each of his two themes a separate lengthy section, as would be standard procedure, he alternates them more tightly, so that they recur around each other in a kind of negotiation, the sighing, singing first melody against the nimble, dancing second one. Across its rather ambitious length, this movement continually trends towards the brighter, more energetic side of things, but it is the opening material, with its deeply nostalgic character, that stays with us when all is said and done.
The second movement is a “Dumka”, a concept that came out of Ukraine. The word dumka in Ukrainian literally means “thought” or “idea”, and in its musical form was a lamenting kind of ballad. In Dvořák’s hands, the form took on a very particular flavor: an expression of gentle melancholy that alternates with brighter, more hopeful passages, smiling through its tears, dancing in the midst of sorrow. To the composer, there was something ineffably Slavic about holding the bright and the dark in balance with each other, and he returned to his own version of Dumka over and over, most famously in his “Dumky” Trio, which consists of six Dumka movements in a row. In the sextet, Dvořák utters his Dumka phrases in five-bar lengths, rather than the more symmetrical and traditional four bars, which gives an easy, rambling comfort to the narrative, a grandmother unfolding her tale in her own good time.
The third movement is another Slavic form: a Furiant, an exuberant and uplifting triple-meter dance. In this case, Dvořák keeps both the material and the spacing comically simple, good-humored, repetitious just for the sheer fun of it. Despite the slightly gentler middle section, there are no shadows here, just flirtation, the dance, and a few oafish grunts from the low instruments at the very end.
In the final movement, Dvořák pays a kind of homage to Beethoven. The older composer was fond, when it came to last movements, of choosing a theme and variations, often with a calm, measured opening—in his “Harp” Quartet, his “Eroica” Symphony, his late piano sonatas. Here Dvořák offers a variations movement with a viola solo as its theme, graceful but sultry. In a nod, perhaps, to Beethoven’s Heilige Dankgesang, Dvořák uses a “modal” approach to harmony here: that is, he straddles the knife-edge between two keys, clinging to B minor while seeming to long for A major. Each section then finally relents and comes to rest in the latter key. The movement winds through many variations in different characters—meandering, sparkling, gloomy, menacing. Always there is the feeling of ambivalence, of mulling the problem of the two key centers. This dilemma finally loosens in the final section, a stretta, or “squeezing” passage, where the B minor material starts to sparkle, effervesce, and finally explode in an A major version of itself. The original problem is now tossed playfully around the group, a game of hot potato, escalating yet further to a frantic presto—can the second violin really play that fast?—before reaching an emphatic, stamping conclusion.
By Misha Amory