NEC First Monday: Buvant à la Source, Laurence Lesser Explains a ‘French’ Program

T   onight’s program is… ‘French’. Stravinsky? French? Well, yes, at least part of him is.”
  —  Laurence Lesser, cellist, introductory remarks.

T he New England Conservtory ‘First Monday’ program featured, among other things, Belgium-born violist Dimitri Murrath introducing each movement of Couperin’s ‘Le Parnasse’ homage to Arcangelo Corelli by reading aloud the movement’s title and subtext, in impeccable French. Quel réalisme! Quel charme! Vive l’authenticité!

• Couperin – Le Parnasse, ou L’apothéose de Corelli (James Buswell, John Holland, violins; Laura Blustein, cello; John Gibbons, harpsichord)
  
• Stravinsky – Apollo (Masuko Ushioda, Wanzhen Li, violins; Dima Murrath, Sarah Darling, violas; Laurence Lesser, Natasha Brofsky, cellos; Donald Palma, double bass)
  
• Ravel – Piano Trio (Hung-Kuan Chen, piano; James Buswell, violin; Laurence Lesser, cello)

L esser gave a 15-min pre-concert talk, explaining various things to us… about his experiencing the then-elderly Stravinsky’s pungent advice to him first-hand, when he was a young cellist just starting out in the mid-1960s; about how Couperin was enthralled with what was shaping music in Italy in the 17th Century and early 18th… the unifying, glorious transnationally-strategic possibilities of it. Parnassus, the home of the Muses, is where the soul of Corelli is conducted—ascension (‘remerciment’) to join the god, Apollo… who is the subject of the second work on the program by Stravinsky. And the piano trio after that… Ravel, who in his own time meditated upon his musical predecessors and the debt owed to them (‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’, etc.).

T he violin cadenza performed by Masuko Ushioda in the Prologue of the Stravinsky was spectacular… indicative of the sonic aggressiveness and beautiful iconoclasm ahead.

I  love that the words ‘analysis’ and ‘performance’ have such wide purviews. The ensemble surely ‘analyzes,’ in preparing and interpreting each work, examining the score and its style including notational idiosyncrasies (e.g., ‘void’ functions, expanded tunings, etc.), music theory, historical practices, and so forth. And ‘performance’ may refer to the live performance, to recordings, to practice, to memorization, to improvisation, and to aesthetic, hermeneutic, social, psychological, cognitive, or motoric/musculoskeletal/neurophysiological aspects of all of these.

U shioda’s cadenza served the rhetorical function of announcing the Apollo character in the story and establishing that figure’s authority. It clarifies which key that character operates in, and transforms the thematic material that has preceded the cadenza. The cadenza provides convincing proof of Ushioda’s violinism prowess. But the supervening ensemble members’ parts reveal that there will be disagreement ahead—Apollo may be a god, but he doesn’t rule the Universe.

T his piece was originally orchestrated by Stravinsky for a 28-piece chamber orchestra. Last night’s performance was arranged for string septet. Both orchestrations have their merits, but I especially liked the septet last night. How clear everything is! How much more intimate, compared to the larger version!

T hought #1: Each of these three pieces is characterized by motives and phrases, repeated and massaged and turned round and round through the whole piece and all the movements and variations... Is this particular delight in variational permutations psychologically an archetypically ‘keyboardist’ thing to do (i.e., composers who are not primarily keyboard artists tend not to do it), or is it in some way idiomatically ‘French’, across these centuries?

T hought #2: Each of these three pieces is ‘cinematic’ in terms of structure and narrative. Is the fondness for the picturesque a distinctively ‘Gallic’ trait, or is this feature more an artifact of what it takes to make a living as a musician/composer in each century, in an exchange-economy, market-driven society?

• First Monday at Jordan Hall (NEC)
  
• Laurence Lesser, President Emeritus, New England Conservatory; Walter Naumburg Chair in Music
  
• Laurence Lesser page at NEC
  
• James Buswell page at NEC
  
• Natasha Brofsky page at NEC
  
• Laura Blustein page at NEC
  
• Dima Murrath page at NEC
  
• John Gibbons page at NEC
  
• Don Palma page at NEC
  
• Masuko Ushioda page at NEC
  
• Hung-Kuan Chen page at NEC
  
• Wanzhen Li page at NEC
  
• Sara Darling page at Arcturus Ensemble
  
• John Holland website
  
• Janof T. Interview with Laurence Lesser. Cello.org, 2001.
  
• Clark J, Connon D. The Mirror of Human Life: Reflections on François Couperin’s ‘Pieces de Clavecin’. 2e. Keyword Publ, 2011.
  
• Tunley D. François Couperin and ‘The Perfection of Music’. Ashgate, 2004.