NOSPR / Bringuier / Inspirations and Impressions - NOSPR

Masques et bergamasques, Op 112, is a colourful orchestral suite inspired by Verlaine’s cycle entitled Fêtes galantes, itself a poetic evocation of the commedia dell’arte tradition. Gabriel Fauré composed the work at the request of Raoul Gunsbourg, the enterprising and imaginative director of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. Enhanced by choreography, the music enjoyed remarkable popularity and continues to captivate with its deft balance between Romantic tradition and the harmonic modernism of the 20th century – a stylistic hallmark of Fauré.

Albert Roussel did not devote himself fully to music until his forties, having previously served in the navy. His first major success came with the ballet Le Festin de l’araignée (The Spider’s Feast), staged at the Théâtre des Arts in 1913. The libretto tells the story of insects caught in a spider’s web; just as the spider begins its feast, it is vanquished by a praying mantis. The musical language of the work draws on Impressionism, which Roussel abandoned after the war in favour of neoclassicism. Owing to the sheer allure of the ballet’s orchestral score, excerpts from The Feast are nowadays more often heard in concert halls than performed in theatres.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No 4 in B flat major has been described as ‘a slender Greek maiden between two Nordic giants’ ever since Robert Schumann coined the epithet as a reference to the titanic and dramatic nature of Eroica and Fate, i.e. Symphonies No 3 and No 5, which flank it. The metaphor is somewhat imprecise, even though Schumann correctly identified the lighter character of the Fourth. This lightness resulted, however, not so much from the composer’s aesthetic choice as from the fact who commissioned the work – it was Count Franz Joachim Wenzel von Oppersdorff of Głogówek in Silesia, the aristocratic patron who maintained a competent private orchestra and commissioned a work that was to be refined and beautiful. Beethoven delivered precisely that – though to the dismay of audiences who had been expecting another dramatic and groundbreaking work. The originality of the Fourth lies not in stormy drama but in its sophisticated orchestration, admired even by the master of instrumental arrangement – Hector Berlioz.

Mateusz Ciupka (Szafa Melomana)

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