VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
The Wasps: Overture
DIVE IN!
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was an English composer who had an enormous output in multiple genres during his compositional career. Vaughan Williams composed operas, ballets, chamber music, vocal works, and most notably nine symphonies. He is widely credited for creating a uniquely British classical music style apart from the stronghold of traditional German style music of the 19th century in part by leaning heavily on the use of English folk and folk-like tunes.
Overture to The Wasps is the opening incidental music to a production of Aristophanes’ play of the same name. This overture lasts about 10 minutes and I openly dare listeners to find anything Greek in it whatsoever. It begins with buzzing sounds, evoking the insect in the title, but then so quickly shifts into fun quirky and proud English folk style music that you would think he meant to title it The White Anglo Saxon Protestants instead of Wasps. If you’re a fan of florid insults make sure to listen to the full production recording. You’ll love the opening lines “Bastard! Bloody lickspittle! Pompous puritanical moralizing pseud!”
In this full production recording you can enjoy all of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music created for this production, or you can get the Cliffs Notes version by listening to the 5 movement suite he created which begins with the Overture.
KEVIN PUTS
Contact
DIVE IN!
Kevin Puts (1972- ) is an American composer from the US who has become one of the most awarded and frequently commissioned composers of his generation. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his first opera Silent Night, and more recently a 2023 Grammy for his triple concerto Contact. Puts is a melodist with an ability to create warm and deeply satisfying harmonies while playing with texture and dissonance in ways that immediately bring to mind the works of Baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as 20th century late Romantic minimalist John Adams and genre blurring genius Caroline Shaw.
Kevin Puts primarily composed Contact between 2017 and 2020, finishing it in 2022. Contact is a concerto for 3 solo instruments and orchestra. It was composed at the request of the group Time For Three, a boundary breaking trio of bassist Ranaan Meyer and violinists Nick Kendall and Charles Yang.
Contact is in 4 movements. The 1st movement is entitled The Call. In this movement the first notes you’ll hear are acapella vocalizing from the soloists. They sing in falsetto, outlining a harmonic progression which is then taken up by the orchestra, building it up layer by layer.
The 2nd movement is called Codes. This movement is built around terse rhythmic motives that are meant to evoke morse code communication. It’s quick, exciting, and punchy with an almost visual effect as the sounds are thrown back and forth from orchestra to soloists.
The 3rd movement is called Contact. In this movement we retreat inward while imagining vastness. There’s a powerful sense of space being created with silences and stillness, combined with searching woodwind melodies.
The 4th movement brings us back to a grounded sense of community and earthly pleasures. It’s built around two different Bulgarian dance rhythms, with melodic material based loosely on Bulgarian folk tunes, and features wild fiddle music erupting from the orchestra and a haunting powerful memory of the first movement’s opening chords.
A typical performance of Contact lasts about 30 minutes.
SAINT-SAËNS Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78, "Organ"
DIVE IN!
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 - 1921) was a French composer of the late Romantic era. He was also a successful pianist, organist, and conductor. Widely regarded as a genius and musical prodigy, he made his performing debut at the age of ten and began studying at the Paris Conservatory at thirteen. Along the way he received support and encouragement from composers Franz Liszt, Giaochino Rossini, Hector Berlioz and Pauline Viardot. You can hardly go wrong in that kind of company!
Many people have grown up on a steady diet of music by Camille Saint-Saëns, possibly without realizing it. His 1886 work for two pianos and orchestra “The Carnival of the Animals” was practically required listening in elementary school music class, and was reintroduced to an entirely new generation of people in the Disney animated feature Fantasia 2000.
Symphony #3 “The Organ” was composed during the same months as Carnival of the Animals. If you listen closely you can hear how each influenced the other! Symphony #3 is nicknamed “The Organ” due to its unusual instrumentation. He intentionally included piano and organ in significant roles within the orchestra instrumentation to stretch the symphonic genre.
Symphony #3 was composed primarily in the early months of 1886 and was premiered in April that same year in London. Saint-Saëns conducted this new symphony himself on the second half of a program that also included him performing as soloist in Ludwig van Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto. For all of this he was paid an honorarium of £30, which today is about 6 thousand US dollars. Great side hustle, amiright? [eye-roll emoji]
Symphony #3 is in a typical 4 movement structure - fast, slow, dance, fast - but Saint-Saëns marks it in two big sections such that the music flows seamlessly from the 1st to the 2nd movement, and then from the 3rd to the 4th movement. A typical performance lasts about 35-40 minutes.
FUN FACT ALERT
Symphony #3 was premiered in the US in New York City in 1887 but more notably Saint-Saëns traveled to San Francisco in 1915 as France’s Official Representative at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition where he conducted a performance of Symphony #3 and a piece he wrote specifically for the exposition called Hail! California (not to be confused with the hit Eagles song Hotel California), which incorporated John Philip Sousa’s famous band.
Funner Fact Alert:
The big melody from the final movement of Symphony #3 was turned into the 1977 reggae beat infused song “If I Had Words”, sung by Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley backed by a large band and London’s St. Thomas More School choir. The video is… everything.
That song was then used in the Farmer Hoggett dance scene of the 1995 movie Babe, and on the soundtrack featuring two “mice” singing a not at all creepy sped up version.
Songwriter credit is given as Camille Saint-Saëns, so if it had done well enough in the international market in 1977 he might’ve received a posthumous Grammy. Let’s just decide he did.
Your pre concert talks are wonderfully quirky and always bring a new perspective.
I really enjoy your work. You make leaning fun and make me laugh every time!