LSO conductor Elliot Moore finds common threads in contrasting music

By Peter Alexander Oct. 17 at 1:20 p.m.

Some of the most interesting classical music programs include apparently contrasting pieces, and then find the common links between them.

Elliot Moore, conductor of the Longmont Symphony

For example, the next concert by the Longmont Symphony Orchestra, titled La commedia dell’arte (Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 19 and 20, in the Longmont Museum’s Stewart Auditorium), juxtaposes works by Mozart and Stravinsky, two composers of different eras and different aesthetics that we do not usually think of together. But LSO conductor Elliot Moore finds connections between the two.

The works are the Overture and three well-loved arias from Le nozze di Figaro (The marriage of Figaro) by Mozart; a little known concert aria by Mozart; and the full score of Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella. Moore will be joined by soprano Christie Conover, tenor Joseph Gaines, and bass Joshua South. The performance is part of the LSO’s chamber orchestra series at the Longmont Museum.

Outdoor commedia dell’arte performance

“I was very intentional about pairing Mozart with Stravinsky, and in particular this Stravinsky,” Moore says. But exactly how they fit together takes a little explaining, starting with the title of the program. Commedia dell’arte is a form of improvised comedy that originated in Italy in the 16^th century and spread across Europe.

“It’s sort of the Saturday Night Live of the time,” Moore says. Taken from village to village and city to city by travelling troupes, it was often performed outdoors. Commedia performances relied upon stock characters, including scheming servants, foolish old men, naive lovers and know-it-all doctors.

The connection to Mozart is that his comic operas, including The Marriage of Figaro, were part of a tradition of Italian comic opera that went back to the commedia dell’arte. Figaro himself, for example, is a direct descendent of the commedia’s scheming servants.

Pulcinella costume design by Pablo Picasso

Stravinsky’s score, based on music by the 18^th-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and others, was written for a ballet to be produced by the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The ballet was a modern gloss on the commedia characters and situations, and takes its title from one of those characters, Pulcinella.

But Moore had other connections in mind, too. “The pairing has an Italian thread, obviously, but also it has this older, Baroque music thread,” he said. The Baroque connection is clear with Stravinsky, whose source was Baroque music. In the case of Mozart, the genre of opera, and many of the musical traditions of 18^th-century comic opera—structure, character types, styles of arias, plot design—were developed in the Baroque period from the commedia tradition.

Soprano Christie Conover

In Moore’s words, “Mozart took these Baroque ideas and concepts, through his music for the stage, and Stravinsky was inspired by Baroque music. These things in many ways are cyclical. They make comebacks.”

On the concert, Mozart’s arias will be sung by Conover. The three arias from Marriage of Figaro are among the musical highlights of the opera: Porgi amor (Grant, love, some comfort) and Dove sono (Where are the lovely moments), both sung by the Countess, and Susanna’s aria Deh vieni, non tadar (Oh come, don’t delay).

Mozart

In Mozart’s day, operatic roles and their arias were written to suit the individual singers in the original cast. When another singer took a role in a later production, they often asked for a composer—and not necessarily the original composer—to write a new aria that suited them better.

Mozart wrote many such arias, including Voi Avete un cor fedel (You have a faithful heart). A brilliant aria for coloratura soprano, it was most likely written to be substituted in the opera Le nozze di Dorinda (Dorinda’s marriage) by Baldassari Galuppi.

Stravinsky composed Pulcinella in the years after World War I. In 1919 Diaghilev, for whom Stravinsky had written the modernist scores for The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, approached the composer with a totally different idea: orchestrating the music of Pergolesi for a new ballet based on commedia dell’arte characters. At first Stravinsky rejected the idea, but eventually agreed to take a look at the music.

Stravinsky ca. 1920. By Pierre Choumoff.

“I looked and I fell in love,” he wrote later. His approach to the music—much of it actually not by Pergolesi, as it turned out—was completely new and helped create the style known today as neoclassicism.

“I began by composing on the Pergolesi manuscripts themselves, as though I were correcting an old work of my own,” Stravinsky wrote. “I knew that I could not produce a ‘forgery’ of Pergolesi; at best, I could repeat him in my own accent. . . . The remarkable thing is not how much but how little has been added or changed.”

Stravinsky kept the melodies and the bass lines of the Baroque-era originals, but rewrote the inner parts and then orchestrated the music in his own style. The result is a hybrid that keeps the charm of the original melodies, but adds a tartness that is pure Stravinsky. When the composer was criticized for not respecting the classics, he replied, “you respect, but I love.”

Scenic design for Pulcinella by Pablo Picasso

The completed score, which calls for a small orchestra and three singers, was premiered in 1920 with choreography by the celebrated Russian dancer Léonide Massine, and with scenery and costumes by Picasso. The production was a popular and critical success, but today the ballet has faded from memory and only the music is still remembered.

“This is the first time I’ve brought Stravinsky to our stage,” Moore says. “I think Pulcinella is a wonderful choice for our audience to get to know Stravinsky. And what I think is so cool about this piece is that Picasso did the costumes.

“I just love that combination, Stravinsky and Picasso; it brings that period to life, for me.”

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Longmont Symphony in Stewart Auditorium

La commedia dell’arte
Longmont Symphony, Elliot Moore, conductor
With Christie Conover, soprano; Joseph Gaines, tenor; and Joshua South, bass

Mozart: Overture to Le Nozze di Figaro (The marriage of Figaro)
Mozart: Three arias from Le Nozze di Figaro: “Porgi amor,” “Dove sono,” and “Deh vieni”
Mozart: Concert aria, Voi Avete un cor fedel
Stravinsky: Pulcinella (complete ballet music)

7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19
4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 20
Stewart Auditorium, Longmont Museum

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Soprano Christie Conover inspired the program with a Cowboy Song

By Peter Alexander Feb. 20 at 6:30 p.m.

The next concert of the Longmont Symphony started with, of all things, the notorious outlaw Belle Starr.

Belle Starr (l)

The program includes composer Libby Larsen’s Cowboy Songs, a set of three songs for voice and orchestra that opens with “Bucking Bronco,” a text loosely attributed to Starr. A warning to young girls, the text concludes “Now all young maidens, where e’er you reside/Beware of the cowboy who swings rawhide/He’ll court you and pet you and leave you to go/In the spring up the trail on his bucking bronco.”

Elliot Moore, by Photography Maestro.

Elliot Moore, conductor of the Longmont Symphony, heard soprano Christie Conover sing the song at an audition and fell in love with it. “She sang stunningly beautifully,” he says. “I thought (the song) was fantastic and I thought that she really sold it.”

Deciding that he wanted to have Conover perform the Cowboy Songs with the LSO, Moore thought that another piece that would fit her voice would be Samuel Barber’s sweet recollection of childhood, Knoxville, Summer of 1915.  

With an American theme starting to come together, he decided that Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo would be the perfect companion to the Cowboy Songs. The final piece of the puzzle—or the program—is an American piece that is little known but that Moore really wanted to present, the Symphony No. 2 of Robert Kurka.

Robert Kurka

“It is an amazing American symphony that has been forgotten and deservers a spot in the repertoire,” Moore says. “Kurka was born in 1921 and died at 36, in 1957. He was being compared to Copland, (as) the next great American composer, but he died, so there’s very little of his work performed.”

The Symphony is a relatively short work in three movements. “The first movement has a gravitas to it, the second movement has kind of a lilting, dance feeling to it, and the last movement is just super, super joyful,” Moore says. “It’s been recorded I think twice, and it has remained on the shelf for 60 some odd years. It’s exciting that we have an opportunity to bring it out.”

A graduate of the CU Boulder College of Music , Conover relates naturally to the Cowboy Songs. “I’m from Montana, and a lot of my family is still out on the farm and the ranch,” she says. “My parents both grew up on farms and ranches, and I grew up going to the farms and ranches of my family.”

After the first song, which Moore describes as “cute and fun,” the second has a bluesy quality “It’s called ‘Lift me Into Heaven,’ and it is more (about) the physical aches that come from working on the farm. It’s not about dying and going into heaven, simply ‘I need you to lift me into bed so that I can go to sleep after a hard day.’ That to me sounds like what heaven is in this song.”

Christie Conover

Moore and Conover both describe the third song as “sassy.” It’s very short, about Billy the Kid and all the people he shot, “one every morning.” “Billy was a bad man,” the song states. “One day he met a man who was a whole lot badder/And now he’s dead and we ain’t none the sadder.”

As a true Westerner, Conover knows that some of the wild-west mythology is exaggerated. “But there has to be some truth to legend, in order for the stories to take shape,” she says. “I think there’s some truth to it.”

She also believes American audiences should hear music of their own culture on concerts. “It’s our repertoire, and it is important that we experience our own culture through music,” she says. “This is who we are.”

For many Americans, so is Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a setting of James Agee’s description of a idyllic summer evening on the front porch and in the back yard with his family. It was published as a prologue to Agee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical novel A Death in the Family.

Ostensibly the description of a time of happiness, the poem takes on a darker meaning in connection with the novel, which relates how the death of the author’s father shatters the family. It is both a depiction of innocence through the eyes of a child, and a premonition of the loss of innocence, through the eyes of the adult recalling childhood.

“I think that Barber did such an incredible job that the sense of nostalgia and innocence paired with loss of innocence comes out in the harmonies,” Moore says.

Barber paints the images of the summer evening in the music. “As an example, the rocking of the rocking chair is painted with a triplet figure in the flute,” Moore says. “(The text) talks about street cars being noisy in the traffic, and he puts in the French horn that makes a clanging sound. There’s a lot that Barber has put into the music to really bring the text into musical relief.”

Since beginning her study to Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Conover has found a deeper meaning from becoming a mother. “I have a 5-month-old now, and it’s a child talking,” she says. “He speaks about how his mother and his father are good to him, and how amazing that we are put on this earth at the same time, and I kind of easily well up.”

She read the text over and over before learning the notes. “It has to be me singing the (words of the text), whether the specific part I think about my son, or the part I think about my own mother and my own memories. You have to have those sensations in your mind as you’re singing it.

“If you’re feeling it and you’re visualizing it, the way the music comes out of you is different. That’s what’s so great about live music!”

Agnes de Mille’s choreography for Rodeo. Pennsylvania Ballet, photo by Alexander Ilziliaev.

Following up the cowboy theme of Larsen’s songs, Moore and the LSO will perform the entire score of Copland’s ballet Rodeo. The ballet tells the story the courting of a shy cowgirl during a party with the ranch hands. The score includes a number of folk songs and fiddle tunes from American history, including “If He’d be a Buckaroo,” “Sis Joe,” “I Ride an old Paint,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” and “Miss McLeod’s Reel.”

“We’re performing is the complete ballet, which includes a movement that features a saloon-style solo piano called ‘Ranch-House Party,’ and that movement is generally omitted,” Moore says. “There’s also a big clarinet solo in the ‘Ranch House Party’ that is rarely heard.

“I think it’s neat that we’re bringing the complete music of the ballet to Longmont.”

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Sounds of America
Longmont Symphony Orchestra, Elliot Moore, music director
With Christie Conover, soprano

Robert Kurka: Symphony No. 2 (Colorado premiere)
Samuel Barber: Knoxville, Summer of 1915
Libby Larsen: Cowboy Songs
Aaron Copland: Rodeo

7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb 23
Vance Brand Civic Auditorium, Longmont

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