Fanfares and Dances

Béla Bartók  said, “The right type of peasant music is most varied and perfect in its forms. Its expressive power is astonishing, and at the same time it is devoid of all sentimentality and superfluous ornaments… A composer in search of new ways cannot be led by a better master.”

His 1923 Dance Suite dance suite offers delicious snippets of the musical treasures he discovered among Arabic, Romanian, Wallachian, and Hungarian folkways.

For Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, he set the poetry of German lyric poet Friedrich Rückert to create beautiful, intimate songs of loneliness and love.

“Don’t love me for beauty or wealth or youth, but love me for love itself.” Mahler gifted that song to his wife Alma; perhaps hers is the “gentle hand” that breaks off the sprig of linden whose scent permeates one song. Another speaks of abandoning the world’s tumult to live, “alone in my love, in my heaven, in my song.” Mahler claimed these lines were “truly me”.

We’ll finish the year with Leoš Janáček’s best known work. His Sinfonietta explodes with fascinating colour drawn from his long study of Moravian, Slavic and Eastern European folk music. Sinfonietta’s tremendous opening brass fanfares pull the listener immediately into a large-scale exuberant orchestral tour de force. The asymmetric patterns of Czech folk dances give its melodies an exotic twist and its surprising final harmonies, with their sonorous brass and fluttering strings, rise to a glorious, joyful apotheosis — the perfect close to our season.