Respighi - Antiche Arie e Danze, Suite 3
Known mainly as a composer, Ottorino Respighi was also an avid musicologist, and this is very obvious as he wrote not one, nor two, but three collections of “Ancient Airs and Dances.” This third suite that you will hear today collects music originally composed for the lute, the most popular instrument of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. It is based on lute pieces by Besard, Santino Garsi da Parma, and a few anonymous composers, and it includes a piece for Baroque guitar by Ludovico Roncalli. A bit melancholy in character, these adaptations don’t only show Respighi’s interest in ancient music, but also the orchestrational genius that he developed after studying with Rimsky-Korsakov while a violinist with the Russian Imperial Theatre Orchestra in the early 1900s.

Andrews - Till Voices Wakes Us
Winner of the 2024 LCO Call-for-Scores

If you venture outside in late April or early May near a pond in the eastern Massachusetts countryside, especially around dusk, you are likely to hear a remarkable chorus. It is produced by the eastern American toad. It consists of a series of long, high-pitched trills each of which can last up to twenty seconds: the note each animal produces is different but very consistent, resulting in a magical, otherworldly, multi-layered counterpoint. This sound-world was the starting point for Till voices wake us.

Lovers of T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock will doubtless recognise the near quotation of the last three lines:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

For Eliot, the mermaids represent the world of the imagination, in contrast to the socially stifling life of 1920s London, and it seems to me that the drowning he refers to is not literal death, but being pulled back from our inner creative realms into the mundane world. Till voices wake us tries to inhabit this liminal space. Or, to use another Eliot near-quotation, it tries to depict “that place where three dreams cross.”

Stravinsky - Pulcinella Suite

This work marks Igor Stravinsky’s official start of his neo-classical period. Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, wanted to create a production around a musical libretto composed by Giovanni Baptista Pergolesi (now we know that it was written by other composers). The conductor Ernest Ansermet connected Diaghilev and Stravinsky. At first reluctant to agree to the project, Stravinsky studied the scores that Diaghilev chose, loved them, and set them up in his characteristically modern style. The suite from the ballet are eight selections out of the twenty-one from the full ballet.