The Two Seasons
Paul Desenne
About this work:
Commissioned by the French Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela for violinist Virginie Robilliard
Premiered at Sala Corpbanca in Caracas, Dec. 2003, with Virginie Robilliard and the Orchestra of the Mozarteum Foundation, conducted by Olivier Grangean.
PROGRAM NOTES
The seasons of the Caribbean tropics are as intense and important as the seasons of temperate climates. The rainy season, which takes place roughly during the summer and autumn of the northern hemisphere, can be extremely annoying, with endless and sometimes devastating rainfall. The dry season comes during the northern winter and spring, roughly speaking, and it can be as devastating as the wet season. It usually ends in forest fires, and it is the time when nature's territory shrinks in agony.
There is a rather tragic tone in these comments, but now more than ever, the seasons have reached extremes. Our tropical seasons in the Caribbean seem to imitate some features of the northern ones, but upside down. For example, at the height of the dry season at the end of March, most of the coastal forests shed their leaves to save moisture. The skies are grey – a northern winter scene – but temperatures reach the high thirties (centigrade), and suddenly many flowers bloom. The winter scene becomes a flower carnival. In Spanish, to keep things upside down in relation to the north, the dry season is called "verano" – summer. The rainy season is called "invierno" – winter – yet it is the greenest; but it can also be the coolest and darkest time of the year, ending in the October and November floods. (The disastrous floods and landslides on the Venezuelan coast in December 1999 took thousands of lives.)
In this context it is easy for a composer to imagine a tropical remake of Vivaldi's most famous piece, The Four Seasons. The transposition is even easier in Latin America, where baroque is still alive and well. Everything here is baroque: colonial Spanish architecture, contemporary literature, visual arts, and above all, music. And it is so in many ways, not only because music in Latin America springs in many cases from baroque Iberian forms, but because it is often built on simple and clear forms which are ornamented to extremes.
My own creative path has led me towards rebuilding an imaginary repertoire of baroque Venezuelan and Caribbean music. I share this obsession with Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who invented the theme of Vivaldi meeting a Mexican in Venice during the creation of his opera Moctezuma, in his famous short story, Concierto Barroco. Carpentier creates a seamless flow of ideas and characters connecting the Caribbean baroque period with Venice at the cusp of its Vivaldian time. His personal obsession was music, and his novels, many of which were written in Venezuela during the 1950s, developed the conceptual shell of what I am composing today.
After writing Tocatas Galeonicas (Toccatas of the Galleons – a set of five chamber works in twelve movements) in the 1980s, and many other pieces, such as Puntos Navegantes for the Palladian Ensemble; the double concerto Pas de Deux sans for Jacques Zoon (flute) and Iseut Chuat (cello), strings and harp; Tocata Cuarta for harpsichord and strings in three movements; Haydn Tuyero, Chicharras, Galeones for chamber trio; and after exploring different and aesthetically suggestive combinations of ancient and new forms of Latin music, I decided to compose The Two Seasons for violin and strings, combining bits and pieces of Vivaldi in a Latin sauce, with many links and ideas of my own.
The treatment of the solo violin in this chamber concerto is relatively classical. No special effects, no innovations aside from the style and the language used – a combination of Latin rhythms and baroque developments. The innovation is mostly felt in the general contents of the piece, with a great injection of Caribbean music, an intensely rhythmic treatment of the orchestral material, and a humoresque transfiguration of famous Vivaldian fragments. The descriptive character of this music follows Vivaldi's own programmatic rhetoric, without the sonnets.
WINTER (RAINY SEASON)
1 - Goteras (Roof Leaks)
Over a melancholy introduction, we hear raindrops falling from leaking roofs into tin cans. It's the endless tropical rain, and the tin and cardboard houses of the shanty towns are soaked; everything is grey and wet. Suddenly a transfigured Vivaldi appears: motifs from his "Summer," first in a 5/8 Venezuelan merengue, then as a tango. A kaleidoscope of Latin styles takes us from the Dominican merengue to the Colombian cumbia, and back to a modern Argentine tango setting in a modulating baroque progression. In Argentine slang, where everything is said backwards, "tango" becomes "gotan," and "gota" is a drop. Tropical rain is dense and melancholic, but it can also be intensely rhythmic like the tango, which comes to us from the deepest south. This opening piece is also a homage to Piazzolla, the creator of the "Seasons" of Buenos Aires – another powerful comment on the same theme from a totally different vantage point. "Goteras" bows to this previous version of the same idea.
2 - Coquiloquio (Frog Assembly)
These peculiar frogs can be heard almost anywhere on a Caribbean night, and very frequently in the city of Caracas, where they have become the symbol of the rainy season. It is said that the melodious nocturnal Costa Rican and Puerto Rican species were brought to Venezuela by a rich woman who wanted to hear the songs of these small batrachia in her garden in Caracas. From that first garden, the invisible black frogs invaded the whole city with their high-pitched mating calls. The song of the Coqui frogs is heard throughout this movement, replacing the barking dog in Vivaldi's famous slow movement before the summer storm. I used the exact transcription of the interacting Coqui calls over Vivaldi's accompaniment, used as a cantus firmus. The dotted sixteenth motif of the original text goes through several transfigurations, stressing the nocturnal character: jazzy swing, nocturnal invasion by other insects and batrachia, atonal romantic drama, and back to Vivaldi with frogs. The movement represents the tropical night in Caracas, where human and animal rhythms meet without canceling each other out, each one on a different wavelength.
3 - Wipers' Gigavalse/Deslave (Landslide)
The spirit of the spring shower (last movement of Vivaldi's "Spring," not quoted textually) lands on an automobile windshield, becoming a windshield-wiper jig. The droplets dance to the pulse of the wiper arms, the only moving things in a highway blocked by commuting traffic. After the wipers' jig, traffic moves ahead slowly; the solo violin plays a languid Venezuelan-style valse, accompanied murkily by the orchestra. (Our tropical cities in the rain can be as gloomy as any rainy city in the north.) The movement ends with a thick Afro-Venezuelan drumming dance, another typical Venezuelan rainy-season icon that is often heard on and around the summer solstice, particularly for the June 24 St. John celebrations, which are always drenched in rain. The orchestra becomes an Afro-Venezuelan drum ensemble, imitating everything in this exciting musical universe, from the complex puzzle of percussion lines to the antiphonal dialogue of the choir with the solo voice, in a dense and furious dance. This ending represents the deadly landslide – a tragic ending to the rainy season.
SUMMER (DRY SEASON)
1 - Noche del Grillo Transfigurado (Night of the Transfigured Cricket)
A high-pitched night-cricket sings in the coffee groves of the mountains around Caracas. This insect announces the end of the rainy season. I made an exact transcription of this interesting microscopic litany, consisting of a high G sharp in an endless rhythmic ritornello, like a labyrinth. The solo violin becomes the cricket, and the orchestra the nocturnal setting for this peculiar voice. Gradually, a typically Venezuelan rhythm seeps in, along with the ghost of Vivaldi's "Winter." (Remember our hot and dry leafless forests of the dry season.) The imported Italian baroque designs are transformed into a tight tropical dialogue in Caribbean dress. The movement ends with a Venezuelan merengue, an irregular songform in 5/8, showing the original harmonic progressions of Vivaldi's "Winter" under a different light, with a dialogue of "battuto" bowings in the orchestra imitating the Venezuelan cuatro – a small, strummed four-string guitar.
2 - Cumbión Tostao (Big Toasted Cumbia)?Cumbia is the typical rhythm of the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The highest social moments of that region are the festivities surrounding the Carnival – Mardi Gras – during the dry season. The cumbia is played, sung and danced on every street for several weeks, right after the celebrations of the New Year. It is a binary rhythm with a strong syncopation, and the typical lead instruments are a pair of long wooden flutes of amerindian ancestry known as "gaitas." The solo violin plays gaita lines dancing in and out of Vivaldi's "Autumn." This intense dance is very popular in Colombia, where it is seen as part of the famous Carnaval de Barranquilla – the Caribbean equivalent of the Rio Carnival. The title refers to the middle of the dry season when the fields and forests begin to shrivel and burn. The movement ends with a melancholy bolero flavor.
3 - Polo Quemao (Burnt Polo)
"Polo" is a Spanish song that was imported to America centuries ago. An exact harmonic coincidence linking one of the famous progressions of Vivaldi's "Summer Storm" to the form of the Venezuelan "Polo Margariteño" explains the title, and takes our living Caribbean forms back to the Mediterranean baroque. Here, I pictured the agony of nature at the end of the dry season. The movement is built almost entirely on transfigured and charred quotations of Vivaldi's music. The heat and flames melt the harmonic discourse and change the rhythmic forms of the various sections of the storm, turning the storm of waters into a storm of fire. The big unison tuttis of the original are played here as limping episodes of heavy metal; the delicate song of the Gardellino becomes the tortured call of an animal trapped in concentric flames; the famous slow chromatic episode of solo violin and continuo becomes a sort of apocalyptic, baroque Alban Berg in the fumes of burning plastic. In the end, our two tropical seasons are not always optimistic. They may be colorful, but they always take their toll on nature. Fortunately, Latin America usually faces its tragedies with the spontaneous philosophy of optimism.
- Paul Desenne
Version: Concerto for violin, strings and harpsichord
Year composed: 2003
Duration: 00:22:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Other Combinations, 10+ players
Instrumentation: 1 Harpsichord, 1 Strings (General), ,1 Violin soloist(s)
Instrumentation notes: strings (4.3.2.2.1)