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Two-Piano Fantasies & Games by Rachmaninoff, Raff & TailleferreAlan Ragan and Rose Shlyam Grace (piano)
The Disney empire introduced the idea of musical fantasy to a wide audience through the 1940 film Fantasia, fashioning animated vignettes with orchestral accompaniment. But the musical term “fantasia” has been around since the early 1500s, originally applied to improvisational works and pieces that deviate from strict structural rules. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Vaughan Williams penned compositions of varying degrees of formality, giving them labels like “fantasia,” “fantaisie,” and “phantasie.”
This concert showcases two “fantasy” works from the late 19th century and a light-hearted depiction of children’s games penned in 1917. Although all three pieces were written within a span of forty years, they could not be more divergent structurally, rhythmically, harmonically, and texturally.
Joachim Raff’s Phantasie is written in the common three-part fast-slow-fast arrangement of most concertos, sonatas, and sinfonias. Filled with tuneful themes, innovative tonal shifts, and impeccable compositional technique, Raff’s rich Romantic writing suggests majestic vistas, pastoral lyricism, Alpine meadows, grand cathedrals, and even boisterous music halls – and it’s all great fun.
Germaine Tailleferre’s two-movement Jeux de Plein Air, or “Outdoor Games,” is all about fun. Tailleferre’s languid phrasing and easygoing melodies evoke an image of children playing cards while lounging beneath a spreading tree on a sunny day. In the second movement, she paints a raucous game of hide-and-seek, delighting in driving rhythms and crunchy dissonance, daring the listener to think, “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait!" (“If youth only knew, if age only could!”).
Rachmaninoff’s Fantaisie Tableaux for Two Pianos has been described as quintessentially pianistic. Poems by four authors inspire each of the four movements, in which Rachmaninoff demonstrates his mastery of musical imagery. In Barcarolle, gondoliers’ songs float across the canals, waves gently lap at hulls and oars, and swirling eddies appear and disappear as gondolas glide through the water. Lord Byron’s Parisina, with its vivid descriptions of “The Night … The Love,” provides ample source material in nightingales, gentle winds, amorous passions, blushes, and even “heaving bosoms.” In the third movement, Rachmaninoff takes Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem, “Tears,” to remind us that grief can feel overwhelming and inexhaustible, its manifestations “flow[ing] like torrents of rain.” The final movement gives a sonic representation of Easter bells, ranging from rapid high-pitched jangling and mid-range melodic pealing to the thunderous tolling of the immense “blagovestniks,” all collectively producing a joyous cacophony simulating the sounds of the most important cultural and religious holiday in Russian Orthodoxy.
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645 Oak St, Jacksonville, FL, United States, Florida 32204
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