STOP AND HEAR THE ROSES - Classical KUSCclassicalkusc.org/guide/2017/03/member-guide.pdf · Mstislav Rostropovich Arturo Toscanini Antonio Vivaldi Sir William Walton ... by Frederick

FROM THE PRESIDENT | PAGE 2Genealogy Leads to a Musical Connection

ON THE AIR | PAGE 4Specials & Weekend Programming Highlights

march 2017

m e m B e r s g U i d e

MARCH BIRTHDAYS

Thomas Adès Johann Sebastian Bach Samuel BarberBela BartókPierre Boulez Frédéric Chopin James ConlonFranz Joseph Haydn Lorin Maazel

Modest MussorgskyMaurice RavelNikolai Rimsky-KorsakovMstislav RostropovichBedřich SmetanaArturo ToscaniniAntonio VivaldiSir William WaltonKurt Weill

AS KUSC GETS READY FOR GREAT OUTDOORS WEEK, MEET SOME OF OUR FAVORITE COMPOSERS INSPIRED BY NATURE| PAGE

STOP AND HEAR THE ROSES

Technically, the 2017 Spring Equinox arrives at 3:29AM PDT on March 20. A few hours later, Classical KUSC will kick off a special week of programming in the spirit of springtime called Great Outdoors Week. For pretty obvious reasons, nature is a subject that composers throughout history have found particularly ripe with musical inspiration. When you listen to KUSC the week of March 20-24, you’ll hear a piece of music in some way inspired by nature, at the top of every hour from 8:00AM through 6:00PM.

Many of the great composers would take walks in nature as a source for musical inspiration. Beethoven, for example, would go for a walk every day after he ate lunch. He would always carry a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper with him, in case he should have any musical thoughts along the way that he needed to write down. Beethoven spoke often about feeling the press of the city (Vienna) around him and needing to escape to nature. His most famous “walk” is the Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” which begins with a movement he described as “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival

in the countryside.” There follows a scene by a brook (accompanied by the songs of nightingales, quail, cuckoos, and other birds). We even get caught in a thunderstorm along the way, which turns out to be only a momentary terror with lightning fl ashes in the violins and woodwinds and thunderclaps from the timpani and lower strings.

Richard Strauss uses timpani to depict rolling thunder in his epic tone poem An Alpine Symphony, which depicts a dawn-to-dusk hike in the Alps. But Strauss was a “go big or go home” kind of composer, so just timpani wasn’t enough for his musical tempest. He actually deploys a wind machine, a thunder machine, two sets of timpani, 20 French horns, a hugely beefed-up brass and woodwind section, and as many string players as a conductor can get his or her hands on. (Usually, the orchestra for An Alpine Symphony contains 130 or so musicians.) It’s one of the most visceral musical experiences you’ll ever have. But it’s not just about being loud. Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony is also about intricate musical tone painting. For example, when we hike past the waterfall, we hear the splash of the water on the rocks in the harps, bells, cymbals, triangle, and glockenspiel. At sunset, we hear descending musical motifs from the pipe organ, solo French horn and trumpet as the sun slips below the horizon and rays of light from the woodwinds pierce the impending darkness.2 Brenda Barnes

from the president

Why Music Really is a Universal Language

A couple of members of my family have become interested in genealogy, and they managed to get me hooked, too. I spend relatively little time on it but have been able to trace some ancestors back to Ireland, England, and Germany in the 1600s with help from family members working more intently.

It is fascinating to see the names of the people who left their homeland to come to America for a new life free of religious persecution. I try to imagine who they were and what their lives were like, but I fi nd that what helps me connect to them—more than dates and names and facts—is music.

My English ancestor who came to America in the mid-1600s was born the year William Byrd died. My German ancestor who immigrated to America was born four years after Bach, Handel and Scarlatti (and like Bach, he was Lutheran). I think of the music written during the lifetimes of my ancestors and feel more connected to them.

Two years ago this month, I had the opportunity to visit Almaty, Kazakhstan and work with Radio Classic, the only classical radio station in Central Asia. I was working with people from the other side of the world with diff erent experiences and a diff erent culture from my own, and yet our mutual love of classical music bound us together and provided a common language that we used to get to know one another and begin our work. The relationships established during that trip have continued and led to a series of features that aired on Arts Alive in January (and are available as podcasts on our website).

Music has a miraculous ability to span distance, culture, time, and experience and bring us together. Thank you so much for your support which gives us the opportunity to connect people through music on a daily basis.

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How the Great Composers Transcribed the Beauty Around Them Into Timeless Works of Musical Splendor

How the Great Composers Transcribed the How the Great Composers Transcribed the NOTES ON NATURE

by Brian Lauritzen

From the heights of the Alps to the depths of the sea. The Frenchman Claude Debussy is one of many composers inspired by the ocean. His most famous sea-faring work is titled simply La Mer, or The Sea, which curiously, he completed on the British side of the English Channel in the seaside resort town of Eastbourne in East Sussex. Each of the three movements has an evocative title:

1. From Dawn to Noon on the Sea

2. The Play of the Waves

3. Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea

Throughout the work, Debussy uses a kind of musical onomatopoeia as he evokes the swaying back-and-forth of the sea; gusts of wind; the splash of the waves; and salt spray in the air. You can taste it.

The sea is also the subject of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning work by composer and environmental activist John Luther Adams, Become Ocean. The title comes from words that John Cage wrote in tribute to fellow composer Lou Harrison, “Listening to it we become

ocean.” John Luther Adams frames the title in a more ominous way, which refers to climate change: “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing

the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.” It is music that begins and ends almost inaudibly, that rises and falls with the tides, that undulates and burbles and crests and showcases, in a unique way, the awesome power of the ocean.

And we’ve really only just scratched the surface. I didn’t mention Gustav Mahler, who, when he was at his lake house on the Wörthersee in Austria, would go for a long swim every morning around 5:00 or 6:00. Or Brahms, who decades earlier, had a composing retreat on the same lake as Mahler, writing his Symphony No. 2 and Violin Concerto there. Or nearly every single work by Frederick Delius, who spent some time growing oranges in Florida and said it was there that, “through sitting and gazing at nature I gradually learnt the way in which I should eventually find myself.” Or Mozart, who wrote music everywhere but most preferred to compose in the open air of a garden. Or Ferde Grofé, who not only famously wrote a piece of music depicting the Grand Canyon, but also wrote works about the Mississippi River, Niagara Falls, Death Valley, Yellowstone, the Hudson River, and Hawaii. Thank goodness we have an entire week’s worth of programming to dive into this music of great natural beauty! I hope you’ll enjoy KUSC’s Great Outdoors Week starting March 20.

Brian Lauritzen is heard on KUSC Monday through Thursday from 3PM to 7PM. He’s the host of Arts Alive (Saturdays, 8AM) and Soul Music (Sundays 6-9AM). He’s also the voice of the Los Angeles Philharmonic broadcasts for KUSC.

This final installment of the Naxos series devoted to little-known—and in the case of two of the three items here, completely unknown—orchestral music of Enrique Granados may be the most surprising and rewarding of all. That a pair of works written in the last years of the life of one of the founding giants of modern Spanish music had to wait more than a century for their first commercial recordings is frankly amazing, given both their quality, and what they tell us about this undeniably major composer.

Strangely, the most “Spanish-sounding” of the three pieces is also the earliest: the Suite oriental from 1889, finished a full decade before the composer premiered his magnum opus, the piano suite Goyescas. This souvenir of a trip to North Africa draws on some of the same Moorish harmonies and melodic twists that inform Iberian folk music, and while most of it rarely rises above the picture-postcard level, the orchestration is incredibly seductive for a composer still in his early 20s. If much of the music feels made-to-order exotic—the Marcha oriental especially so—then it’s still pleasantly effective and amply rewards repeated hearings.

Liliana (1911) and Elisenda (1912) were both inspired by poems of Apel-les Mestres, the Catalan writer, artist, cartoonist, and musician whose texts were set to music by several Spanish composers in the early decades of the 20th century. The one-act “lyric poem” Liliana concerns a water nymph who falls in love with a sylph named Flor de Lis—at least he’s not a human being, or worse yet, a prince—this in an enchanted forest also populated by gnomes, witches, and other mythical creatures. Apart from the use of castanets and tambourines, there’s nothing remotely Spanish about the music, except perhaps for a languorous sensuality that recalls the best moments of Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo. If not quite the “Modernist masterpiece” that the program annotator claims—its musical language remains firmly rooted in the 19th century—then Liliana is a colorful, absorbing, and eventful work and an important addition to the Granados canon.

Originally scored for soprano and orchestra, Elisenda was based on another Mestres poem and was described by Fernando Periquet—librettist of Goyescas, the opera Granados adapted from melodies heard in the piano suite—as “a wonderful bucolic poem that evokes the charms of nature, blossoming flowers on sunlit mornings, and the perfumes of the forest.” Here, as elsewhere, Pablo Gonzáles and the Barcelona Symphony respond with an effortlessly idiomatic grace to the composer’s evocative and ethereal writing, while pianist Dani Espasa seems as perfectly attuned to the idiom as his late, great countrywoman Alicia de Larrocha always was.

Everything about the album—including its price tag—is so attractive; why not pick up a few extra copies for friends?

GRANADOS, E.: Orchestral Works, Vol. 3 – Liliana / Suite Oriental / Elisenda; Pablo González, cond; Barcelona Symphony; Dani Espasa (pn); NAXOS 8.573265

by jim svejda

Surprises From A Founder of Modern Spanish Musicrecord shelf

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jim svejda hosts the evening program on weeknights from 7 pm to midnight and the record shelf sundays at 10 pm.

WeeKend highlights marCh 2017 on the air

KUSC SOCAL SUNDAY NIGHT: PACIFIC SYMPHONYHOST: RICH CAPPARELA

Sunday, March 5 | 7 pm Carl St.Clair, conductorHaochen Zhang, piano

TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 1PROKOFIEV: Symphony No. 5

Sunday, March 12 | 7 pm David Danzmayr, conductorNing Feng, violin

MACCUNN: Land of the Mountains and the FloodBRUCH: Scottish FantasyMENDELSSOHN: Symphony No. 3, “Scottish”

Sunday, March 19 | 7 pm Carl St.Clair, conductorPacifi c Chorale – John Alexander, artistic directorAida: Kelebogile BesongRadames: Arnold RawlsAmneris: Milena Kitic

VERDI: Aida

KUSC SOCAL SUNDAY NIGHT: LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONICHOST: BRIAN LAURITZEN

Sunday, March 26 | 7 pm Gustavo Dudamel, conductorYefi m Bronfman, pianoSt. Lawrence String Quartet

BEETHOVEN: Coriolan OvertureJOHN ADAMS: Absolute JestBEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 4

THE RECORD SHELF WITH JIM SVEJDA

Sunday, March 5 | 10 pmThe Young Celi, Part 1. A rebroadcast of the fi rst part of a two-part look at the early recordings of the controversial Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache.

Sunday, March 12 | 10 pmThe Young Celi, Part 2. In the second of two programs, little-known live performances featuring the young Sergiu Celibidache.

Sunday, March 19 | 10 pm A conversation with the Gramophone Magazine’s reigning Artist of the Year, pianist Daniil Trifonov.

Sunday, March 26 | 10 pm The Record Shelf Record Reviews. Jim Svjeda presents critical reactions to the latest compact discs.

METROPOLITAN OPERA BROADCASTS

Saturday, March 4 | 10 AMMassenet: WertherGardner, conductor; Christy, Leonard, Grigolo, Bižić, Muraro

Saturday, March 11 | 10 AMVerdi: La TraviataLuisotti, conductor; Yoncheva, Fabiano, Hampson

Saturday, March 18 | 10 AMRossini: Guillaume TellLuisi, conductor; Rebeka, Brugger, Zifchak, Hymel, Finley, Spotti, Youn, Relyea

Saturday, March 25 | 10 AMMozart: IdomeneoLevine, conductor; van den Heever, Sierra, Coote, Polenzani, Opie

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Classical KUSC Members Guide is published monthly by the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity Communications3434 S. Grand Ave., CAL 140 Los Angeles, CA 90089-2818

President Brenda BarnesVP|Program Director Bill LuethDirector of Corp Aff airs and Underwriting Abe Shefa

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