(Brendon Elliott, violin)
By Montague Gammon III
Heroes and prodigies fill the Francophile Virginia Symphony October 18-20 concerts.
The hero in whose honor the concert was programmed with French composers is Lafayette, the young Marquis who took part in the American Revolution, commanding troops during its decisive final battle at Yorktown when he was 24. He returned to Virginia 43 years later, landing in Norfolk to a hero’s welcome exactly 200 years ago October 17. Reportedly met by 15,000 people when his ship pulled into Yorktown, Lafayette triumphantly toured America for a year, even visiting the White House.
Marie-Juliette Olga “Lili” Boulanger, the French woman whom some musicologists rank alongside Mozart and Mendelssohn as a young composing prodigy, is represented by her 1916 setting of Psalm 24, which opens the concerts at the Ferguson Center, Chrysler Hall, and the Sandler Center under the baton of JoAnn Falletta, VSO Music Director Laureate.
Boulanger was 22-23 when she composed this work; she might have been the “4th B” of composers had she not died at 24. Her long-lived sister Nadia Boulanger, the 20th Century’s most influential teacher of composition to the great-to-be, said that Lili was the true genius of the family.
Boulanger was 19 when she became the first woman to win France’s most prestigious music award, the Prix de Rome, though women composers faced terrible prejudice from the notoriously conservative French musical authorities. She was so good, Falletta said in a phone chat, that “even the Establishment could not ignore her!” Falletta termed this achievement “Astonishing” and “So fantastic.” So Mlle. Boulanger can also be called a hero.
In less than five minutes her Psalm 24 provides a musical hint of the grandeur of the Lord, an aural picture of the calm and peace of faith and of the exaltation of the faithful. “It is a beautiful piece,” proclaimed Falletta, “She was indeed a great genius.”
The heroic achievements of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de St. Georges, the bi-racial illegitimate son of a slave, fathered by a European who owned multiple plantations in the Caribbean, seem straight out of some fantasy novel.
Bologne was simultaneously: a composer and acclaimed the greatest fencer in Europe, a violinist and a boxer who often sparred with of the Prince of Wales, an acquaintance and possibly music teacher of Marie Antoinette, and a military leader who earned that title of Chevalier.
He should have been Director of the Paris Opera. When his appointment was announced a coterie of female singers declared that they would not work with someone of mixed race, and the appointment was rescinded.
Bologne’s flashy yet substantial 1774 Violin Concerto in A major, Op.5 No 2 brings Virginia native and VSO violinist Brendon Elliott to the forefront. Elliott’s a triple veteran of NPR’s young performer showcase “From the Top,” a winner of the National Sphinx Competition Achievement Award, and a fast rising soloist on the American classical scene with one NY Phil appearance already.
Falletta commented on Bologne’s Concerto, “He was writing to impress the French audiences and they liked flash and they liked drama. Everybody does!…It’s wonderful music, joyful and airborne. I’m so glad to do it with Brendon… I probably conducted Brendon’s first appearance with a professional orchestra. I’m so proud of him!”
Gabriel Fauré was just 19 or 20 years old (depending on your source) in 1864-65 when he wrote his three stanza Cantique de Jean Racine, a five minute setting for voice and organ of Jean Racine’s 17th Century French translation/paraphrase of a 4th Century Latin prayer. It won first prize in a contest at École Niedermeyer de Paris, the the highly selective school for Church music where the precocious Fauré had been a boarding student since the age of 9.
Fauré’s 1905-6 arrangement for small orchestra and chorus brings on stage the Virginia Symphony Orchestra Chorus under Chorusmaster Robert Shoup, along with the Symphony’s woodwinds, strings and harp. Though written in the19th and early 20th Century, this sonic vision of the empyrean still transports one back to the Middle ages and Medieval times, when glorious voices resounding in great cathedrals must have seemed to the devout the literal sound of angels.
“Faure’s music is not often played by orchestras and this is a beautiful one and this has the chorus,” said Falletta, who mentions her special affection for the Chorus whenever it’s on one of her programs. It was formed shortly before she took the reins of the VSO, and in her words, “I love the chorus…I always feel like we kind of started together. We have done so many things together but we haven’t done Fauré so this is new for us.”
Fauré’s teacher in advanced piano at the École was Camille Saint-Saëns, whose Symphony No. 3 is the big piece that wraps up the program.
Falletta on this symphony: “He used the symphony [form] in such a light filled way, and such a way of color and buoyancy that he made it is own. This is a flawless piece. And it has everything! How [the organ] is used in the slow movement is so poignant but then it comes in, in the last movement, it’s something no one will never forget.”
The great pianist Franz Liszt described a 29-something Sait-Saëns as “the greatest organist in the world,” but Saint-Saëns had revealed his truly prodigious gifts as early as two years old, when he demonstrated perfect pitch, at 3 when he began to write music, at 4/12 when he gave a private recital…and so forth. Falletta said, “He was a tremendous genius, so, yes, I think he was .. the greatest prodigy of all time. His writing is astonishing.”
Born in 1835, Saint-Saëns gave his last, and critically praised, recital in November of 1921. He died a month later at the age of 86.
There’s one more hero involved in this program, not French but wholly American, of Sicilian ancestry. A coal miner’s granddaughter, as recently as the 1970s, when women’s rights were not a new issue,she was discouraged because of her gender from following the true musical calling she had recognized by her mid-teens. She persevered, and has been cited by various important sources as “the word’s most popular conductor,” one of “50 great conductors” of all time, Performance Today’s first Classical Woman of the Year, a multiple Grammy and an ASCAP award winner, and the pioneering “first woman to” do or become any number of things in the once male bastion of classical music.
Obviously, that’s JoAnn Falletta, wielding her baton for these concerts.
WANT TO GO?
Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony
JoAnn Falletta, conductor
Brendon Elliott, violin
Virginia Symphony Orchestra
Virginia Symphony Orchestra Chorus
Lili Boulanger: Psalm 24
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Violin Concerto in A major, Op.5 No 2
Camille Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3, “Organ”
7:30 p.m., Fri., Oct. 18, 2024, Ferguson Center for the Arts, Newport News
7:30 p.m., Sat., Oct. 19, Chrysler Hall, Norfolk
2:30 p.m., Sun., Oct. 20, Sandler Center for the Performing Arts,Virginia Beach
Box office: 757-892-6366
