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"Allegro" to 4 mm. after reh. B
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Skills & Techniques: Dynamic Contrast, Loud Playing, Marcato Style, Staccato Style
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Horn 1-2 (F)
Horn 3-4 (F)
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BBC Philharmonic (1999)
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Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1967)
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Composer & Composition Information
Edouardo Lalo (1823-1892)
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He was a French romantic composer of the 19th-century. He is best known for Symphony Espagnole 1875 his most popular work, was written for the virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate. His parents initially encourage his musical interest and allowed him to attend the Lille Conservatory, studying the violin and cello.They opposed his decisions to become a professional musician.He left Lille without any money to make a name for himself by pursuing a musical career in Paris. After leaving home he struggled to make his own living and to pay for tuition at the Paris Conservatory. He supported himself by making his living as a violinist, performer and teacher in Paris. He played in some of Hector Berliozs concerts. While at the Paris Conservatory he studied violin with teacher Francois Antoine Habeneck and he studied composition privately with the pianist Julius Schulhoff and the composer J. E. Crevecoeur.
The text is reprinted from The Kennedy Center where more information about the composer can be found. The image is reprinted from Britannica. |
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Le roi d'Ys (Overture)
Lalo, like nearly all French composers in his generation, was deeply impressed by Wagner’s works; Le roi d’Ys, like many French operas of the period from Carmen to Pelléas et Mélisande, can be interpreted as a response to the challenge posed by Wagner’s artistic supremacy: a clue is given in the overture, which briefly quotes the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Tannhaüser. The choice of Celtic – as opposed to classical – mythology as subject may be seen as a Wagnerian gesture. The contrast between the two couples, one virtuous (Rozenn and Mylio), one guilty (Margared and Karnac) obviously recalls Lohengrin, while Margared’s final leap into the ocean may also bring to mind the end of The Flying Dutchman. But these are superficial resemblances. As he himself explained in a letter to the critic Adolphe Jullien after the premiere, Lalo had toyed with the idea of couching the work as a lyric drama, with a leitmotiv-based, continuous symphonic texture and the voices blending with the orchestra. Fearing he would produce only a pale imitation, he decided instead to remain faithful to a typically French eclecticism in the tradition of Berlioz and Gounod: the work is organized in short, clearly separated numbers (arias, duets, and ensembles) while the vocal writing, rather than being subservient to broad, highly developed symphonic textures, is unabashedly melodic and lyrical. Local color is provided by citations of folk tunes in three of the choruses. By Lalo’s own account, these were sung to him by his Breton wife, even though one of them, as the Lalo scholar Joël-Marie Fauquet has pointed out, was in fact from the Île-de-France rather than Brittany. The intervention of St Corentin, popular in that region, reinforces this folk quality, rooted in the French soil. At a time when Bizet, Delibes, and Massenet turned for inspiration to Spain or India, Le roi d’Ys, by contrast, comes close, as Hugh Macdonald has perceptively argued, to being a “national” opera. Next to those rather traditional features, the work, however, is not lacking in modernism and originality: these are found in the robust, rhythmic vitality of its orchestral writing; its highly personal sense of color; and perhaps above all in the emotional intensity conveyed by the part of Margared, the role Lalo had conceived for his wife, and which reminds us that this once beloved opera was itself a labor of love.
The text is written by & reprinted from Vincent Giroud (American Symphony Orchestra) where more information about the composition can be found.
The text is written by & reprinted from Vincent Giroud (American Symphony Orchestra) where more information about the composition can be found.
Notable Performances/Recordings:
Detroit Symphony Orchestra (2022)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2015)
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (2014)
Detroit Symphony Orchestra (2022)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2015)
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (2014)