Danse Macabre, Op. 40
Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre from 1874 has become one of the composers’ most well known works, and is a fantastic testament to the power of orchestration in depicting stories and characters with music. Danse Macabre is a symphonic poem, a form pioneered by Franz Liszt that broke the orchestra out of the multi-movement symphonic structure, creating a shorter form genre where the music could be driven by narrative, telling a whole story in the space of one movement. The inspiration behind Saint-Saëns work was the legend that Death appears at midnight every Halloween, playing his fiddle to reanimate the dead for one night. This situation is represented brilliantly in music with the note D played 12 times by the harp, just like a clock striking midnight, after which comes the entrance of Death and his violin. The solo violinist must perform with a scordatura tuning, meaning that one of the strings is retuned to an unusual pitch, in this case Eb, enabling them to play a tritone between the 2 upper strings, an interval also known as the diabolus in musica (“the Devil in music.”)
Ravel Shéhérazade
Shéhérazade is a character well known in music, having been treated many times by composers, most notably as a purely orchestral work by Rimsky-Korsakov, and this song cycle by Ravel. Ravel was inspired by Shéhérazade, the narrator of The Arabian Nights, early in his career, first composing an overture for an opera that never came to be in 1898, followed by the song cycle which perhaps finally satisfied his ambitions for this subject. The text for the vocal part came from poems published by his friend and fellow member of the artist group Les Apaches, Arthur Leclère (pen-name Tristan Klingsor). The three poems Ravel chose were Asie, La flûte enchantée, and L’indifférent. Each poem appealed to Ravel’s impressionistic temperament with their strong exotic content, allowing for colorful orchestration and fluid melodies, additionally making use of several modes, notably the Phrygian mode in the La flûte enchantée.
Beethoven Symphony No. 5
This medley of traditional marimba tunes from the Southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas features multi-instrumentalist ensemble members Zacbe Pichardo and Eric Hines.
Encuentro: Suite de Danzas Yucatecas
Victor G. Pichardo (b. 1962) arr. Gustavo Leone
The Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, completed in 1808, has gained a legendary status more than most other orchestral works, despite being constructed from the most minuscule thematic material. In the first movement, Beethoven managed to create a tremendously exciting and cohesive work based entirely on the four note motif heard at the very beginning. The following movements are not without innovations and big ideas, and one can imagine that after completing his massive Third Symphony a few years earlier (during the composition of which he had begun sketching the Fifth) Beethoven felt drawn to larger and larger forms, bigger canvases to explore his revolutionary ideas. A particularly special moment comes at the transition between the third and fourth movements, where relentless timpani strokes underlie a brilliant motivic transformation to set up the finale, where the symphony ends passionately and heroically in C Major.
