87: What’s Old is New

A new maestro for Cincy and two new operas for the world

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Jeremy. Here’s your hint: this composer was married to a noted Danish sculptor.

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 86
Saint-Saëns, String Quartet No. 2

I (Will) was the only one who guessed, and I got it right. Let that be a lesson to the rest of you: you should guess!

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Musical Chairs

This past week, the Romanian conductor Cristian Macelaru was named as the fourteenth music director of the Cincinnati Symphony orchestra, replacing my (Will’s) former boss, Louis Langrée.

I can’t claim to know much about Macelaru personally, but I know many people in the business who hold him in quite high regard, so this seems like a great acquisition for the Cinncinatians.

What I note is that the CSO seems to have established a pattern in choosing their music directors; they’ve stuck to it and made it work. Namely, they choose medium-profile, mid-career European men, but they just change up the country.

In Macelaru, we have a 44-year-old Romanian; when Langrée was hired in 2012, he was a 51-year-old Frenchman. Before him was Paavo Järvi, a 40-year-old Estonian (more of a Michigan kid, but same diff.) Jesús López Cobos was a 46-year-old Spaniard, Michael Gielen was a 53-year-old German.

To find an exception to the European part of the pattern, you have to go all the way back to 1970, when Thomas Schippers was appointed at the age of 40. Before him, there was Max Rudolph (German, 56). I’d say they last hired a conductor who could be considered “young” in 1947, also an American, who was 34 when he got the job in 1947.

Anyway, none of this is a criticism — I think they could hire American more often, but I can’t really say I care all that much — it’s just an observation. Clearly they have a type!

Concert Report

Harmonia Orchestra & Chorus, “Rhapsody” (part 2)
April 6, 2024
Shorecrest Performing Arts Center, Shoreline, WA

 Joey here to recap the other half of a concert held outside of Seattle some weeks ago, building upon last week’s section about Will’s and my Rhapsody in Blue. In that segment, he misleadingly describes the Rhapsody as the “central” work of the program, which is chronologically correct. In spirit, however, the central work was the world premiere of William White’s Cassandra, a new opera-oratorio telling the complete story of Cassandra, the unbelieved prophetess of Greek mythology.

As the largest-scale work of Will’s compositional career, this was an extremely ambitious project, clocking in at just over an hour. Collaborating with Jillian White on a classical Latin libretto, Will composed this mammoth work for full orchestra, chorus, and 8 soloists who play the parts of various characters in Cassandra’s story. As it turns out, telling the story of Cassandra happened to be a difficult task for Will and Jillian, as no single classical text tells the whole story, despite its high level of narrative and emotional interest.

Gushing time: having been present at the premiere of the work, performed wonderfully by the Harmonia Orchestra & Chorus and all soloists, I found Cassandra to be totally engaging, lyrically and musically, from start to finish. Cassandra is surely a sympathetic character, and as many listeners will have some baseline of familiarity with some part of her story, it was fascinating to take her “point of view” on the stories of Greek mythology, namely the fall of Troy. The music is dramatic, serious, and eminently melodic. I defy anyone to come away from a full viewing of the performance without humming “Festus dies est,” Agamemnon’s early in Act II.

Though the world premiere, semi-staged performance was wonderful on all parts, Cassandra deserves a full staging. The drama is high, the music is gorg; let’s get a big old set and costumes for all singers (Ellaina Lewis, soprano, playing the part of Cassandra, was decked out in a fantastic gown designed by Zahyr Lauren)! Yannick, are you reading this?

Bravo to Maestro Will, and all involved in this production!

The Dead City

Speaking of obscure operas receiving premieres, I (Will) stumbled across this article in the Times recently about an opera co-written by Nadia Boulanger that’s just received its American premiere.

Titled, La Ville morte, Boulanger co-wrote it with her teacher Raoul Pugno in 1912. Now let me just pause for a second to comment on something in the article that’s really skirted over, namely that (apparently) Pugno and Boulanger were also lovers, she an 18-year-old student, he her 60-year-old teacher. Seems problematic!

Anyway, the two co-wrote this piece, but then Pugno died and then Nadia’s sister Lili died, and Nadia gave up composing and the project never got any traction. Until now!

The opera just got staged with a new orchestration (scored for a pathetic 11 players; certainly not what Mlle. Boulanger would have envisioned) that was co-produced by the Greek National Opera and Catapult Opera in New York.

The Times article says that in the manuscript, you can clearly see where one composer’s handwriting starts and the other one picks up, but they don’t offer any analysis of how much of the score was written by one or the other. The writer also claims that the show has “feminism sizzling under the surface,” which I frankly find hard to believe, as Nadia Boulanger was a notorious anti-feminist.

Tone Praise

Lili Boulanger, D’un matin de printemps

OK folks, I don’t think I (Will) have ever had a Tone Praise that tied the room together quite like this week’s. Here we have Cristi Macelaru conducting the Seattle Symphony in a performance of Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps. You gotta give me props for this one!

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)