Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra
Robert Spano, program director
Saebom Lee, low strings competition winner

Claude Debussy

from Nocturnes, L. 98: No. 1 Nuages | No. 2 Fêtes

Claude Debussy was born on August 22, 1862, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, and died on March 25, 1918, in Paris. He composed Nocturnes between 1897 and 1899. The first two parts of Nocturnes—Nuages and Fêtes—received their premiere together as part of the Concerts Lamoureux series on December 9, 1900, in Paris, conducted by Camille Chevillard. They are scored for three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings.

The Nocturnes underwent an unusually lengthy gestation in the 1890s. Debussy’s first biographer, Léon Vallas, drew a link between this orchestral suite and a project titled Trois Scènes au Crépuscule (Three Scenes at Twilight) that was inspired by a recently published collection by the Symbolist poet Henri de Régnier. Debussy began work on that piece in 1892, but two years later he proposed refashioning its ideas into a concerto-like format for the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe.

Although both the orchestral suite and the violin concerto failed to materialize—thus making it impossible to draw a definitive line from them to the Nocturnes—Debussy’s correspondence with Ysaÿe indicates that he was already thinking in terms of analogies with painting as well as poetry. The composer suggested that he intended to experiment with varying timbral combinations in each section in order to evoke different shades emanating from a single color—“like a study in grays in the realm of painting.”

The orchestral Nocturnes as we know them took shape in the final years of the century, in the aftermath of Debussy’s breakthrough with Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), which was also inspired by Symbolist poetry (in this case by Stéphane Mallarmé). Pierre Boulez famously identified the Prélude as the moment in which modern music was “awakened.” Debussy was also involved in the prolonged creation of his only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, which he began sketching in the early 1890s and completed just before its 1902 premiere. The Nocturnes represent a further consolidation of Debussy’s emerging orchestral language of texture, tone color, and harmonic nuance.

As with several of Debussy’s major works, including La mer (1905) and Images pour orchestre (1912), Nocturnes is cast in three parts, forming a kind of orchestral triptych. (He had also initially planned Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as the first panel of a larger three-part work—hence its designation as a “prelude”—but ultimately decided it could stand alone.) Anticipating Boulez, Debussy continued to revisit the score and make subtle modifications even after its publication in 1900.

While the title Nocturnes might call to mind the piano genre perfected by Chopin, Debussy derived it from the atmospheric paintings to which the American artist James McNeill Whistler began applying this name in the 1870s—Whistler borrowed the idea in turn from music. In his preface Debussy pointed out that he used the word Nocturnes “in a general and, more particularly, in a decorative sense”—rather than to signify a conventional form—and hoped to convey “the various impressions and special effects of light that the word suggests.”

In Nuages (Clouds), Debussy favors veiled, pale chord colors as an image for “the slow motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white.” The English horn voices a ruminative, wordless lament, while flute and harp later illuminate the cloudscape. Rather than develop thematic material in a conventional sense, Debussy subtly varies texture, phrasing, and instrumentation to achieve a sense of suspended movement.

By contrast, Fêtes (Festivals) ushers in a drastically different soundscape of kinetic, kaleidoscopic energy—“the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light,” as Debussy put it. Vallas reported that the composer was recalling festive parades in the Bois de Boulogne, a large public park in Paris. At the midpoint of the piece a distant procession begins to pass through, announced like “a dazzling, fantastic vision” by a muffled drumbeat. Gradually this procession grows louder and takes on clearer definition, eventually folding seamlessly into the surrounding revelry. “But the background,” Debussy remarked, “remains the same: the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm.” — © Thomas May

Robert Schumann

Cello Concerto in A minor, op. 129

Robert Alexander Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, on June 8, 1810, and died in Endenich, a suburb of Bonn, on July 29, 1856. Schumann composed his Cello Concerto between October 10 and 24, 1850, but the first performance was posthumous, given by Ludwig Ebert at the Leipzig Conservatory on June 9, 1860, in honor of the late composer’s fiftieth birthday. In addition to the solo cello, the score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, as well as timpani and strings.

Following a stultifying six years in Dresden, the Schumanns—Robert, Clara, and five children—moved to Düsseldorf, where Robert accepted the position as conductor of the Düsseldorf Music Society. The Düsseldorf appointment began with a warm welcome offered by the local musicians. Schumann’s conducting, however, was simply not up to the demands of the position. His mental health suffered so much that in February 1854 he was institutionalized following a suicide attempt; he died in a mental hospital two years later.

Yet this sad ending of the Düsseldorf experience came only after a period of tremendous creative energy. Over the course of the winter of 1850–51, he composed numerous pieces, including the Rhenish Symphony, two cantatas, and his Cello Concerto, which he completed in just two weeks in October. Though Clara Schumann was delighted by the new Concerto, describing it as “written in true violoncello style,” it was never performed in Robert’s lifetime. Despite Clara’s enthusiasm, he canceled a performance planned for 1852 and did not send the score to his publisher until 1854. It was finally performed in 1860 at a concert to celebrate the composer’s fiftieth birthday—but that was four years after his death.

Schumann briefly played the cello when he had injured his right hand as a pianist, and this experience seems to have given him a personal insight into the emotional depth of the instrument, which sometimes hides beneath a reticent surface. The concerto opens with distinctive woodwind chords that will recur throughout the rest of the piece. Schumann disliked having movements of a concerto interrupted by applause (as was customary in his day), so he made the coda of the first movement a passage that slows down so as to lead naturally to the quiet beginning of the second movement.

In the slow movement the chords derived from the piece’s opening are pervasive, and the cello, after a wonderfully songlike theme, turns to recitative, implying thoughtful speech rather than song. This in turn provides the bridge to the third movement, a lively sonata-form finale in which the soloist sings over the full orchestra. Only here does Schumann allow the soloist the virtuosic cadenza that would normally have appeared at the end of the first movement. This cadenza employs the unusual device of allowing moments of interplay with the orchestra. The closing passage shifts into time, a device that brings new interest to the theme. — © Steven Ledbetter

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Scheherazade, op. 35

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was born in Tikhvin, Novgorod governorate, on March 18, 1844, and died in Lyubensk, St. Petersburg governorate, on June 21, 1908. He composed Scheherazade during the summer of 1888; it was first performed in St. Petersburg under the composer’s direction on October 28 of that year. The work is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

During the winter of 1887–88, Rimsky-Korsakov was engaged in one of his many generous acts of pious devotion to a deceased Russian master: he was orchestrating the opera Prince Igor, left unfinished at the death of its composer, Alexander Borodin. A few excerpts played in concert—among them the overture and the famous Polovtsian Dances—demonstrated the effectiveness of the work. He put off original composition while engaged in this labor of love, but he did manage to conceive two new orchestral pieces, the completion of which was to be left to the following summer, spent on a country estate. They turned out to be among his best-known works. One was based on episodes from The Arabian Nights, the other on themes from the obikhod, a collection of the most frequently used canticles of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both works were finished in the summer of 1888: the first was Scheherazade, Opus 35, and the second was the overture Svetlïy prazdnik (The bright holiday), generally known in English as the Russian Easter Overture. As it happens, they were very nearly the last purely orchestral works Rimsky was to write; for the remaining two decades of his life, he devoted his attentions almost totally to opera.

The massive collection of tales known as The Arabian Nights or The Thousand-and-One Nights is built on a framework reflected in the orchestral score of Rimsky-Korsakov’s musical treatment: the Sultan Shakhryar, discovering his wife’s infidelity and convinced of the inconstancy and faithlessness of all women, has sworn henceforth to marry repeatedly in rapid sequence, putting each wife to death after the first night in order to avoid another betrayal.

To put an end to this bloodbath, Scheherazade, the daughter of the Sultan’s most trusted adviser, seeks to become his wife even though she had been exempted from this fatal rank because of her father’s position at the court. She saves her own life after her wedding night by telling a story that captures the Sultan’s interest, breaking it off just at dawn with the promise of continuing it the next night. As she continues each night, her story puts out roots and branches, becoming an intricate network of tales, some told by characters within other tales, so that at no point do all the stories in progress come to their conclusion. Each day at dawn the Sultan puts off her execution for another day in order to hear the end of the story first. Gradually her seemingly artless and endless series of colorful fairy tales softens the cruel heart of the Sultan, and after 1,001 nights, he abandons his sanguinary design and accepts Scheherazade as his one, permanent, loving wife.

Of course The Arabian Nights is much too long a work and much too intricate—in its complex networks of tales-within-tales—simply to be translated into music as a story-telling program. Analysts and program annotators have expended a great deal of ingenuity in attempts to identify precisely which tales Rimsky-Korsakov had in mind, especially since the traditional movement titles are not specific: the introduction purports to represent the stern Sultan Shakhryar (in the opening unison phrase) and Scheherazade the storyteller (in the solo violin); the remainder of the first movement is identified with the sea and the ship of Sinbad the sailor; the second movement is the tale of the Prince Kalendar; the third is simply “The Prince and the Princess”; and the finale is a festival at Baghdad and a shipwreck—quite a combination for a single movement! But it is vain to seek specific stories as the inspiration of this music. There is for example more than one Prince Kalendar with a story to tell in The Arabian Nights, and as the composer himself noted, he did not by any means reserve the very first theme—the so-called “Sultan’s theme”—for that grim personage, but rather wove it into the entire fabric of the score without regard to the details of storytelling. It becomes the rolling ocean beneath Sinbad’s ship in the first movement, and it appears as an element in the Prince Kalendar’s tale, where the Sultan himself does not appear at all. Even so, the theme presented first (and most often) by the solo violin quite clearly represents Scheherazade herself, telling her colorful tales and inserting her warmhearted personality into them. — © Steven Ledbetter

David Coucheron joined the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as concertmaster in September 2010 as the youngest musician to hold that position with any major American orchestra. Coucheron has worked with conductors including Robert Spano, Michael Tilson Thomas, Simon Rattle, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Charles Dutoit. He has performed as soloist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic

Orchestra, Sendai Symphony Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra. Coucheron has given solo recitals at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, as well as in Chile, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Serbia, and Singapore. His chamber music performances have included appearances at Suntory Hall as well as Wigmore Hall and Alice Tully Hall. Coucheron serves as the Artistic Director for the Kon Tiki Chamber Music Festival in his hometown of Oslo, Norway. He is also on the artist-faculty for the Aspen and Brevard music festivals. Coucheron began playing the violin at age three. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, his Master of Music from The Juilliard School, and his Master of Musical Performance from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying with teachers including Igor Ozim, Aaron Rosand, Lewis Kaplan, and David Takeno. Coucheron plays a 1725 Stradivarius on kind loan from Anders Sveaas Charitable Trust.