The taste of the unpredictable and the astonishing

is the red thread of the final concert of

this year, in which are juxtaposed

seemingly distant composers

among them as Roussel, Haydn,

Sibelius and Gershwin.

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Text by Luca Ciammarughi

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Le festin de l'Araignée ("The Banquet of the Spider"), a ballet-pantomime written in 1912 by the Frenchman Albert Roussel (1869-1937) on a subject by Gilbert de Voisins, first of all astonishes for its unusual theme: dances and entrées present the arrival of a series of insects that, trapped in the web, make from meal of the spider, which to in turn is killed from a praying mantis. The eternal and merciless cycle of life and death is symbolized by the funeral of the ephemeral, which lives a few at: its last dance, fickle and Dionysian, seems to embody the very nature of music. Roussel was, before he was a musician, a naval officer: his attraction to nature is rather far from from that, captured in the instant but transfigured, of the Impressionists (although there is a reference to the atmospheres of Prélude à l'après midi d'un faune); there is in him, if anything, a precision, a realism and a use of dissonance close to Ravel's Histoires naturelles or Bartók's In the Open Air - and paving the way for Rued Langgaard's visionary Insektarium. The orchestral suite, recorded by Roussel himself in 1928, opens with a Prélude in which the flute, starting from a repeated B three times, draws a soft melopoeia in an unexpectedly pastoral mood, interrupted, however, by the first hints of microscopic life that manifests itself, over the rhythm of a tambourine, in the entrance of ants: Rising flickers of the violins represent their rapid motion, while oboe, clarinet and bassoon suggest the effort in trying to lift a fallen rose petal. The butterfly arrives: the violins suggest with string changes the lightning-fast beating of wings, the flute and piccolo converse in the treble suggesting the ethereal nature of the lepidopteron. A few ominous notes from the horns suggest the change of climate ("The spider invites the butterfly to dance closer, where its web is") and the motion of the violins stops abruptly as the butterfly becomes trapped: its death is described from only two notes, descending, of the solo violin. After the hatching of the ephemeral, the dance of the caducous efemeroptera is characterized musically from a pulviscular timbre and from oriental harmonies (perhaps sonic memory of Roussel's travels in Indochina). The crescendo is interrupted from a sudden chromatic descent of the woodwinds, representing the death of the ephemeral, whose funeral takes place in an atmosphere more elegiac than tragic. The procession recedes and disappears, to make way for the night that "falls on the solitary garden"-almost the lunar counterpart of the Ravelian Jardin féerique of Ma mère l'oye: the flute's repeated B note returns, in a cyclicality that corresponds to to that of nature.
Using an orchestra that is far from hypertrophic, with a highly refined use of instruments such as the celesta, harp and a few percussion instruments (triangle, cymbals, tambourine), Roussel manifests in this work a timbral imagination that attracted many of the great conductors of the twentieth century, to start from Toscanini, followed from Munch, Fourestier, Leibowitz, Paray, Ansermet, Martinon.

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In Haydn, as in Roussel, unpredictability is linked to the rejection of a precise collocation: if to long one labeled the Austrian composer as "classicist," today one is more inclined to to also highlight in his music the disturbances and anxieties of the Sturm und Drang and theEmpfindsamer Styl (sensitive style). But Haydn remains superbly isolated, unclassifiable. The last of the twelve so-called "London" symphonies, No. 104 in D major is emblematic of Haydn's inimitability and constitutes a kind of summa of his art. Performed on May 4, 1795, at London's King's Theatre as a special event organized by the famous impresario Solomon, under the baton of Giovan Battista Viotti, it was conceived for an ensemble that reached the number, extraordinary for the time, of sixty elements. The orchestra, in which woodwinds play a decisive role, is already Beethovenian, with the four woodwinds doubled to two parts, the brass to two (horns and trumpets), timpani and strings.
L'Adagio opening is marked from an alternation of moods that we will find throughout the score: grandiose and triumphant, the incipit is followed from an elegiac, mournful phrase. TheAllegro that follows is distinguished by a softly Viennese theme, Schubertian ante-litteram, which informs much of the exposition. from a fragment of the theme, composed from four simple rebates, takes off the development, whose tormented pathos is interrupted by the first of many silences that distinguish the 'opera, characterized by a taste for suspense. The pauses also play a crucial role in theAndante: noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, though it is precisely the silences and unexpected modulations to the minor that accentuate the subtle melancholy of this theme and variations, which features a harmonically visionary and sweetly dreamy coda.

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Even the Menuetto, seemingly regular in its progression, has oddities: the impetuous crescendo of the timpani, the long silence before the trill of the flutes, the unexpected modulation to B-flat, and the enigmatic, lonely two notes repeated by the oboe at the beginning of the Trio disrupt the horizon of expectation. In the finale, Allegro spirituoso, the folk element already hinted at elsewhere becomes apparent in the country theme (the Croatian chant "Oj Elena"), over a brounce of cellos, double basses and horns. Complex in polyphony, full of daring rhythmic gimmicks, this finale confirms the tendency toward mood oppositions: the festive spirit dominates and leads to an apotheosis "in glory," but elegiac islands interrupt the cheerfulness from time to time, like metaphysical suspensions often preceded or followed from significant silences.

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At odds with the glitzy atmosphere of the nineteenth-century waltz, the Valse triste Op. 44 No. 1 was originally part of the stage music Sibelius composed for the play Kuolema, in 1903; it was later revised in 1904 and had its premiere as a from concert piece on April 25 at the National Theater in Helsinki. In a note to the program, it is Sibelius himself to evoking the stage situation: "It is night. The son, who has been to watching beside his sick mother's bedside, has fallen asleep from utter exhaustion. Gradually a light spreads in the room. There is a sound of distant music: [...] a waltz melody floats far from our ears. The sleeping mother wakes up, gets out of bed and, in her long white dress, which resembles to a dress from dance, begins to moving silently and slowly back and forth. She waves her hands [...] as if she were summoning a crowd of invisible guests. And now these strange visionary couples appear, turning and gliding to a supernatural waltz rhythm." The woman sinks exhausted on her bed and the music stops, then gathers her strength and the dancers return, in a wild and crazy rhythm; when the strange gaiety reaches its climax, the mother lets out a desperate cry and the ghostly guests fade away as the music dies. "Death stands on the threshold." Sibelius evokes this moody, phantasmal atmosphere with dynamics at the edge of the audible, harmonic ambiguities (G major is asserted only to stretches, in an atmosphere of strong tonal instability) and continuous appoggiaturas that communicate a sense of spleen. The resurgence of vitality from the vestiges of the Viennese waltz, twice, is brief and undermined from elements of heightened patheticism. Before the final silence, the presence of death is felt in the closing "to four violins alone." Girl Crazy is the title of a musical that George Gershwin wrote in 1930 with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and libretto by Guy Bolton and John McGowan. Among the leads were Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers, who thanks to this show became a star. The Suite directed from Barbara Hannigan is an elaboration by Bill Elliott, who captures the elements of formal experimentation present in Gershwin's music and, instead of sweetening them, accentuates them. A number of famous Songs(But not for me, Strike up the Band, Embraceable You, I Got Rhytm) are stitched into a continuous flow, into which Elliott inserts quotations (in particular, a phrase from Mahler's Third Symphony, but also some references to Ligeti, a crucial composer for Barbara Hannigan) that emphasize the late Romantic ancestry of some of Gershwin's inspiration or explode the twentieth-century aspects: meter changes, bold harmonic connections, timbral daring. In addition, there are numerous nods to Berg's Lulu, which was composed in the same years as Gershwin's musical (the two composers were friends and respected each other). More than a pot-pourri, the Suite is thus a re-composition that, spectacular and theatrical, also invites to reflection on the dialogue between the jazz matrix of these immortal standards and their connection to the Western tradition.

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