Steven Karidoyanes kicks off his 33^rd season with the Plymouth Philharmonic tonight at 7:30pm with a program entitled “Fiddler of the Opera” featuring virtuoso Irina Muresanu [artist website HERE]. A few tickets are still available, although the concerts usually sell out [info HERE]. The conductor will present a free pre-concert talk at 6:30pm at the Plymouth High School Performing Arts Center.

A composer, cover conductor for the Boston Pops, and director of the New England Conservatory Youth Symphony, Karidoyanes is a well-respected artist and consummate technician, popular with local orchestras and choirs alike (he led Cambridge’s Masterworks Chorale for a decade in concerts at Harvard’s Sanders Theater). Tonight’s program includes works by Rossini, Borodin, Sarasate, contemporary Boston-based composer Elena Roussanova, and longtime Boston Pops arranger Alexander Courage’s Fantasy on Porgy & Bess.

A FESTIVE PIECE FROM ROUSSANOVA

Elena Roussanova (b. 1974) is a current professor of composition at Berklee, building on a successful career as a piano prodigy and a summa cum laude graduate of Moscow State University. She recently completed a tone poem based on the life of conductor Serge Koussevtisky for the Boston Symphony (Journey to a New Land, 2019). The Las Vegas Music Festival commissioned her Pictures from an American Exhibition (2001, based on paintings by O’Keefe, Rockwell, Warhol, and Bierstadt) and the original version of Festival Celebration Music for brass and percussion (2000). 

She remarks, “I was born during the Soviet Union … so many people had mixed origins. I have a lot of different nationalities in my ancestry – Ukrainian, Russian, Tatar. My grandmother was singing Ukrainian songs to me; my mother was singing Tatar songs. My grandfather was Russian, and my parents also loved Italian opera. One of my favorite rock groups of all time is the band Chicago.”

This performance will mark the World premiere of the new orchestral version of her Festival Celebration Music. It depicts a Slavic yármarka (ярмарка, from the German Jahrmarkt, or annual market fair). The composer notes these traditional country fairs, popular throughout Russia and Central Asia, featured “handmade crafts, music, foods… and skomorokhs (скоморох, from the Italian scaramouche). Dressed in masks and costumes, these East Slavic harlequin musicians/actors played traditional instruments: domra, balalaika, gudok, bagpipes, and tambourine.” The profession was largely banned by the 1650s.

The five-minute fanfare opens with a skomorokh theme, then a feature for low brass and tambourine: “a dance of the circus bear… trained to move rhythmically to music. This part of the act always gets a large crowd.” Roussanova incorporates the sounds of “acrobats, games, beautiful costumes, and dainties,” culminating in a warm, vibrant “Hymn, which magnifies the beautiful countryside with its colorful landscapes and deep expansive lakes.”

A FAVORITE BOSTON POPS ARRANGER

Alexander Courage (1919-2008) was a composer now best remembered for his theme and music for the original Star Trek series. A graduate of Eastman and fellow student of Bernstein during the early years of Tanglewood, Courage served as a World War II bandleader and brass player. His orchestrations are familiar to fans of American classic cinema (Showboat, the can-can from Gigi, the barn raising in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and major collaborations with John Wililams such as The Poseidon Adventure, Superman, and Jurassic Park). 

After dozens of colorful Boston Pops arrangements for Williams, he composed his Fantasy on Porgy & Bess for Violin and Orchestra for violinist Joshua Bell. In a 1998 NPR interview, Bell called it “the violin concerto that Gershwin never got around to writing.” It contains ten themes from Gershwin’s opera: “Prologue,” “It ain’t necessarily so,” “I got plenty of nuttin’,” “My man’s gone,” “Summertime,” “There’s a boat,” “Bess, you is my woman,” “Oh, where’s my Bess?” and “I’m on my way.”

George Gershwin (1898-1937) was a notable jazz pianist-composer whose music has featured in the films American in Paris and Funny Face. Born in Brooklyn to a family from Odessa (Ukraine), Saint Petersburg, and Vilnius (Lithuania), the young composer remembered “growing up in the Yiddish Theater District” in the East Village of Manhattan. After hearing a friend’s violin recital at the age of ten, George dove into piano lessons. His main teacher was Joseph Hambitzer, the pianist in the Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra. As a teenager, he worked as an extra in the Yiddish Theater and earned $15 per week as a song plugger and sheet music demonstrator on Tin Pan Alley (28th Street). By 1916, he was recording for Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls, producing hundreds of piano rolls under his own name and the pseudonyms Fred Murtha and Bert Wynn.

Gershwin’s magnum opus, his 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, is among the best-known of all American operas. He stipulated that all the singing characters should be played by Black performers and conducted extensive in-person research on folk melodies, local accents, and characters in Charleston, South Carolina while developing his score. Courage’s Fantasy is far more than just a medley of Gershwin’s great tunes: it encapsulates the entire opera in miniature form framing the beloved arias with elements of the incidental music, the haunting prologue, and leitmotifs.

Recent books on Gershwin’s fascinating life include an intimate history by Joan Peyser (2006), a document-based biography by Howard Pollack (2007), and a correspondence-based memoir by Richard Crawford (2019). Irish director John Carney (Sing Street, Once, Begin Again), has started to write a new Gershwin-based musical-biopic film with the working title Fascinating Rhythm (and Martin Scorsese has expressed interest in producing it – stay tuned!).

SARASATE, BIZET, and IRADIER

For two years, Georges Bizet (1838-1875) and Pablo Sarasate (1844-1908) were the shining stars of the Paris Conservatory. They remained lifelong friends, and the young pre-teen Sarasate probably taught Bizet many of the tunes later quoted in Bizet’s Spanish-inspired opera Carmen. 

Bizet was an excellent pianist and vocal coach who eventually won the Prix de Rome. Sarasate, a virtuoso violinist, arrived from Pamplona at age eleven in 1855. A brilliant soloist, Sarasate toured widely in Europe and the Americas, composing fantasies for violin on operatic melodies by Mozart, Verdi, and Bizet and flashy versions of Spanish dances, such as the Jota aragonesa.

Once the Spanish bolero’s steps had been codified, ‘authentic’ bolero was introduced to Paris by the Spanish singer/guitarist Manuel Garcia, who embodied a romanticized view of the Roma, in negotiation with concert culture. Chopin heard boleros performed by Garcia in 1831, inspiring his 1833 Introduction and Bolero, op. 19 (Souvenir d’Andalousie). Garcia’s daughter Pauline Viardot collected boleros, and her salon encouraged hybrids (1828-1880) from Russian composers, Liszt, and Saint-Saëns.

Spanish and Caribbean songs were also crucial sources of melody and rhythm for the Romantics. Carmen’s famous “Habañera” aria is a cover: it re-texts the popular song “El Arreglito” by Basque composer Sebastian Iradier, who had traveled to Havana. Viardot’s salons and Sarasate’s influence inspired Bizet to incorporate Spanish melodies into a dozen works. Lalo composed his Symphonie espagnole violin concerto for Sarasate, and Sarasate was most happy when performing his Fantasy on Bizet’s Carmen: he is, after all, Bizet’s most likely source.

A FIRST SHOT FROM WILLIAM TELL

As Boston Lyric Opera prepares to open its huge new production of Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell [tickets HERE], Plymouth gives us a foretaste and reminder of its most famous sounds (the Overture).

Rossini (1792-1868) was the best Italian composer of the generation following Mozart. A contemporary of Beethoven and Berlioz, he wrote dozens of works in French, Italian, and Latin (each adapted to local tastes), especially after falling for (and marrying) the composer and dramatic soprano Isabella Colbran, daughter of Spain’s court composer. Colbran and Rossini created eighteen operas together before separating in 1830.

Following successes in his twenties like The Barber of Seville (1816) and Cinderella (1817), Rossini announced that he would retire early: in 1828 a Paris newspaper confidently predicted, “Rossini has promised to write a work, Guillaume Tell, but he has asserted that he will not go beyond this promise and that this opera will be the last to come from his pen.” How famous was he? The author Stendhal had written Rossini’s Memoirs four years earlier: “There is no man who has been more frequently the subject of conversation, from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta, than the subject of these memoirs. His glory already knows no other bounds than those of civilization itself, and yet he is barely 32.”

In fact, William Tell was his last opera. The massive semi-historical French work premiered in 1829 and perfectly suited the anti-monarchist vibe in Paris (the 1832 June Rebellion Victor Hugo wrote about in Les Misérables was on the horizon). Tell was a legendary archer who led the Swiss to throw off the yoke of Austria in the early 1300s, and audiences rose to their feet in applause when Tell sang “Let Switzerland breathe” in Act III. Rossini’s music builds to taut climaxes through soldier’s choruses, tense stand-offs with the authorities, and a storm over Lake Lucerne. 

The famous Overture is almost 200 years old: it presents ten minutes of earworms from the five-hour opera, including a gorgeous depiction of dawn over the Alps (low strings and timpani), an E minor tempest over the lake (featuring trombones), a pastorale “Call to the Dairy Cows” (lyrical English horn and flute), and a famous cavalry charge of Swiss soldiers, played at a full gallop.

SOUNDS FROM THE BATTLEGROUNDS OF THE BLACK SEA

Seventy years ago, the gorgeous melodies of Kismet (can you hum “Stranger in Paradise”?) were the toast of Broadway. They earned a posthumous Tony award for Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), a military surgeon and organic chemist. While completing his post-doc at Heidelberg University under Bunsen (the burner) and Erlenmeyer (the flask), Borodin composed and played piano duets with his best friend Mendeleev (the periodic table). The two hiked the Italian Alps during the period chronicled by the recent Netflix series The Empress, then returned to St. Petersburg as professors of organic chemistry; Borodin was the first to offer medical courses to women there in 1872.

Music and history were lifelong interests of Borodin, who was named after a Russian serf owned by his biological father, a Georgian prince (Luka Gedevanishvili). His half-sister Princess Alexandra became a Romanov by marrying Nicolas Lukash, an illegitimate son of the future Tsar Alexander I. Lukash (Borodin’s half-brother-in-law) fought on the winning side during the Napoleonic Wars, then served as a senator. He helped to make sure that Borodin was educated by excellent private tutors and grew up insulated from political conflict.

As a composer he is praised for his expansive tone poem On the Steppes of Central Asia, and he spent eighteen years developing Prince Igor, an opera completed three years after his death by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. The story based on The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, the earliest Slavonic language writing (a favorite of Catherine the Great), set in the vast prairies north of the Black and Caspian Seas just after Khan Kobyak was captured in 1183 and Khan Konchak was able to unite many nomadic tribes. The titular Prince Igor of Novhorod-Siverskyi(just north of Kiev, Ukraine; occupied by the Russian army four years ago) led a failed (unauthorized) raid on the Cumans, called the Polovtsy (the blonde Ones) in medieval Slavic sources. These Polovtsians devasted the Kievan Rus and Hungarian steppes in a 175-year war (taking slaves annually) and helped to make Georgia the most powerful kingdom in the region, so the epic tale was a foundational one for Borodin. 

This may seem like a medieval version of “Remember the Alamo,” but the Romanovs were still fighting against Khanates and other locals to expand their empire during 1717-1895 (Crimea and the Cumanian prairies, both currently in disputed Ukrainian territories). Catherine the Great’s expansionist goals included a “Greek Project” to recapture Constantinople. In 1790, she even wrote a “musical spectacle” glorifying the (Viking) establishment of the Kievan Rus called The Early Reign of Oleg. Greek merchants were invited to settle around Kiev, mixing with large Jewish minorities and resulting in new dances (trepak) and musical hybrids. Central Asian Khanates were in the news during Borodin’s whole life. 

His Polovtsian Dances from the Act II finale of Prince Igor were orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov and Lyadov for an 1879 concert, and the sections festired tonight were meant to entertain the captured Prince Igor. They were featured in the first Paris season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, influencing Ravel’s dances for Daphnis and Chloe. The original choral texts sung to these tunes call for strength, solidarity, and finding hope in the winds of the southern prairies, echoing lost Ukrainian, Jewish, Greek, Russian, and nomadic Cuman voices.