In 1904–1905, Ravel composed a set of five piano pieces under the title Miroirs (Mirrors). He later orchestrated three of them—Une barque sur l’océan, Alborada del gracioso, and La vallée des cloches—of which the most successful is certainly Alborada del gracioso. In its original keyboard form, it is filled with powerful accents and fast repeated notes that challenge even the most gifted virtuoso. Such overwhelming technical demands almost cried out to be translated to the orchestra, especially for Ravel, whose transcriptions are among his most successful and popular works.
The title is evocative, albeit a bit mysterious. Alborada is the Spanish equivalent of the French aubade, Italian alba, and German Morgenlied—all of them “dawn songs,” a characteristic genre from the lyric poetry of the Middle Ages, generally conceived as being sung by a friend watching out for the safety of two illicit lovers. As the night wanes, the friend, outside the bedroom window, sings that dawn is approaching, and it is time for the lovers to part. As such, the song is likely to be of a sentimental cast.
It is the second part of Ravel’s title that makes it elusive, for this is the aubade of the gracioso—a buffoon, a jester, a clown. So this “morning song” is not the end of a romantic interlude but a vigorous Spanish dance, built up from a typical Iberian rhythm and the frequent opposition of 6/8 and 3/4 meters, often heard simultaneously in different instruments, and here also shifting occasionally from 6/8 to 9/8. The introductory phrase, pizzicato in the strings, suggests a guitar refrain that recurs several times between “verses” of the song, which becomes a brilliant orchestral showpiece, presented with bright splashes of color and virtuosic solo interjections culminating in a glorious racket.
—Steven Ledbetter
Born in the Paris suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, Thierry Escaich attended the Paris Conservatoire as a student in organ, composition, and improvisation; since 1992 he has himself taught composition and improvisation there. In 1996, he, along with Vincent Warnier, succeeded Maurice Duruflé as organist at Paris’s Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. Escaich’s reputation rests nearly equally on his accomplishments as an organist and as a composer. He tours and records frequently as a performer, and his music is played by orchestras and chamber groups throughout Europe and by major ensembles in the US, including the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. With his new cello concerto, Escaich now has an association with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) as both composer and performer: He made his BSO debut as an organist in January 2020, performing Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ, Timpani, and Strings under Alain Altinoglu’s direction at Symphony Hall.
Organ is rarely a child’s first instrument; those who do become professional organists often begin as pianists. For Escaich, playing accordion as a child was a formative experience, leading to his first stage time and introducing him to folk and dance music—including the tango and the waltz—that he says continues to inform the energy and movement underlying all of his work. He professes to being unable to do without both the spontaneous, unpredictable excitement of improvising and the planning, long-term exploration of poetic and technical ideas, and problem-solving that go into composing. Escaich finds that improvising as accompaniment to silent films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis stimulates new performance and expressive pathways.
Escaich cites sacred music from Gregorian chant through the Baroque as influencing his work, along with such 20th-century composers as Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and György Ligeti. He sees Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as masterful in exploring how musical drama develops over the course of a piece. Given his earlier accordion activity, Escaich, when the piece calls for it, can also draw on elements of dance, popular, and jazz styles. Along with music itself, visual art—especially painting and film—and literature continue to shape Escaich’s aesthetic. He points to his 2004 orchestral work Vertiges de la croix (Vertigo of the Cross) as a watershed: The piece is a musical “transcription” of Peter Paul Rubens’s Descent from the Cross, attempting to reflect in musical form the colors, contrasts of light and dark, overall form, and emotional impact of Rubens’s early-Baroque masterwork. Films by such directors as Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini as well as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver provide models for his music in the natural fluidity of the action within scenes and the organic movement from one scene to another.
The great French novelist and poet Victor Hugo’s short story Claude Gueux was the basis for Escaich’s opera Claude, premiered by Opéra de Lyon in 2013. Hugo’s poetry collection Les rayons et les ombres (Rays and Shadows) provided the title and the impetus for the musical mood of the opening movement of Escaich’s new cello concerto. The composer’s opera Shirine, premiered in 2022 also in Lyon, sets Atiq Rahimi’s libretto based on the 12th-century Persian Nizami Ganjavi’s epic Khosrow and Shirin.
Escaich has composed more than 100 pieces, including a large catalog of chamber music, solo works for organ, and works for accompanied and unaccompanied chorus. Among his many works for orchestra for such ensembles as the NDR Elbphilharmonie and Rotterdam Philharmonic orchestras and Orchestre de Paris are concertos for viola, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, organ, and guitar, plus double concertos for violin and cello and for violin and oboe. He wrote his concerto for violin, cello, and orchestra Miroir d’ombres for the brothers Renaud (violin) and Gautier (cello) Capuçon, who premiered the piece with Orchestre national de Lille in Belgium in 2006. That concerto led to commissions for solo concertos for both Renaud and Gautier, both of whom Escaich has known for many years through the Paris Conservatoire. The concerto for Renaud was written first but will receive its premiere in 2024. The present concerto for Gautier took some time to develop, due to other projects; it was ultimately commissioned for Gautier by the BSO and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra as part of the ensembles’ ongoing partnership.
Les chants de l’aube (Songs of the Dawn) is constructed in an outwardly conventional three-movement form, with the movements linked by solo cadenzas. Escaich relates that in this concerto he was primarily concerned with lyricism, which is constantly audible in both the soloist’s music and in the orchestra.
The title of the first movement, Des rayons et des ombres (Of Rays and Shadows), underlines Escaich’s strategy of juxtaposing passages of great transparency with denser ones. He writes that it “looks like a kind of stained-glass window because it is clearly based on three superimposed musical worlds: a peaceful and limpid chorale in the high register, a dark and distorted ‘mirror’ of this chorale in the low winds, and some crumbs of Baroque phrases exchanged between the soloist and orchestra” presented in canon—that is, imitation—in the middle register. “The cello solo attempts to escape from this universe, introducing new rhythmic elements and leading the piece toward a more lyrical and dramatic climate.”
In the cadenza linking the first movement to the second, the soloist begins to create the new character of the second movement, Le rivage des chants (Riverbank of Songs). Escaich layers melodies of different characters and styles—e.g., imagined “traditional” songs of Africa and invented Gregorian chant—that transform into “grooving” music that hints at jazz. The transitional second cadenza “leads the piece into an unreal, transparent moment, like a sunrise where time seems stopped.”
In the last movement, Danse de l’aube (Dawn Dance), the cello plays a “long and peaceful song,” but from the orchestra gradually emerges a “ritual and obstinate dance” that grows in intensity and draws on music from the two earlier movements. The three sharply defined planes of register—high, medium, and low—that are a defining feature of the piece confront each other in quick succession for an intense, rhythmically lively conclusion.
—Robert Kirzinger
By the time he came to write his Second Symphony, Sergei Rachmaninoff had become such a celebrity in Moscow—as composer, pianist, and conductor—that he found he had to “escape” in order to be able to compose without interruption. This need was made more urgent by the increasing political unrest, especially the massacre before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in January 1905, anticipating the revolution that was barely a dozen years away and that made his conducting post with the state-run Bolshoi Theater awkward. Disturbances continued throughout the year 1905, and though Rachmaninoff was busy seeing two new operas, Francesca da Rimini and The Miserly Knight, through their premieres in January 1906, he clearly decided that it was time to leave Russia for a while. In early 1906, he resigned from his position at the Bolshoi and moved his family to Dresden for the year. There, virtually unknown to all, he could work in seclusion as a full-time composer. He began work on a new opera, Monna Vanna, based on a play by Maeterlinck, but he interrupted himself to compose the Second Symphony, and because the play was contracted to another composer he never returned to it.
The premiere of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in 1897 had been so disastrous that the 24-year-old composer nearly gave up composition entirely. Memories of that event were no doubt the reason that Rachmaninoff composed his new symphony in secret, not telling even his best friends in Russia until he was essentially finished and word had leaked out in a German paper. On February 11, 1907, he added a postscript to a letter from Dresden with the confession: “I have composed a symphony. It’s true! It’s only ready in rough. I finished it a month ago and immediately put it aside. It was a severe worry to me and I am not going to think about it anymore. But I am mystified how the newspapers got onto it!”
Rachmaninoff returned to Russia that summer, carrying with him the newly composed First Piano Sonata and the nearly finished symphony. He conducted the first two performances of the symphony, one in St. Petersburg, the other in Moscow. After repeating it in Warsaw he returned to Dresden, where he made the final adjustments to the score before sending it off to the publishers.
The Second Symphony’s very first phrase in the cellos and basses is the essential motto, which dominates the symphony on its surface or somewhere in the undertow. Its melodic turn is at once converted into an expressive figure in the violins in the first of many elaborations. A new one occurs in the restless Allegro that follows. The A-minor scherzo movement is one of Rachmaninoff’s most original in character and scoring, right from the opening horn theme, which is a rather festive march, and the violin figure that follows will return to open the symphony’s finale. Periodically, the movement softens into a lyrical stepwise melody before returning to the energetic business for which the movement is intended to serve. At the end, a coda dies away into nothingness.
A high point of the symphony comes in the third movement, one of the most romantic passages in the entire orchestral repertory. The passion hinted at in the introductory measures returns in full force at the climax. But first the clarinet sings a long, tender song that expands without repetition for 23 measures. The middle section is lightly scored, with brief questions and answers tossed back and forth by the English horn and oboe against reminders in the violins of the symphony’s opening motto. A long crescendo leads to the climactic statement of the romantic opening figure of the movement. This quickly collapses, though, and the motto intertwines with the romantic figure in mysterious dialogue, leading to the restatement of the clarinet song. Another romantic climax ensues, and the movement dies away in a dialogue of murmuring calm.
The finale abruptly breaks the romantic atmosphere with a theme full of triplets rushing headlong in a carnival mood. Recollections of earlier movements are woven into this madcap chase with great subtlety, and the string choir has the opportunity to introduce (in unison) another of Rachmaninoff’s great soaring, singing melodic inventions. A brief Adagio recalls the slow movement and the violin version of the opening motto before we plunge into the development section, which contains one of Rachmaninoff’s greatest masterstrokes. Gradually, one instrument and then another begins to play a descending scale, first in quarter-notes, then some in eighth-notes or whole notes, overlapping and making an extraordinary noise, as if someone were ringing the changes on all the bells of Moscow at once. A recapitulation and swift coda ends the symphony in a truly resplendent manner.
—Steven Ledbetter