Roberto Sierra: Fandangos (2000)                                                           Roberto Sierra’s Fandangos enchants with splashy orchestral color and infectious Spanish dance rhythms, but lurking beneath the swirling energy lies a sinister twentieth-century twist. Loosely based on the eighteenth-century fandangos of Spanish composers Antonio Soler and Luigi Boccherini, Sierra’s orchestral fantasy revels in postmodern playfulness as it spikes the staid historical costume with disorienting twentieth-century accents. Such effects include the dissonant clashes of overlapping melodies and the outrageously extravagant orchestration of a Hollywood movie score on steroids. Throughout the piece’s twelve or so minutes, nearly every instrument attempts some sort of death-defying pyrotechnics. The resulting menagerie of eclectic oddities evokes a sort of phantasmagorical fandangocircus. 

 

Though eminently charming, there is something threatening and almost terrifying about the swirling accumulation of musical activity as endangered melodic snatches tangle in a lawless fight for survival. As the triple-dance rhythms churns away, we witness the gradual devolution of an elegant dance into increasingly chaotic and contorted variations of itself, a primordial struggle between savagery and civility. 

 

Fandangos’ descent into pandemonium sheds a late twentieth-century light on the grace and poise of eighteenth century Spanish dances by allowing their controlled kinetic energies to explode in the jungle of the turbulent twentieth century. The French composer Maurice Ravel corrupted the Viennese waltz to similar effect some 80 years earlier, though with far more devastating implications in La Valse, his post-war portrait of the great European disaster. Although Fandango carries a far more convivial and light-hearted atmosphere than the darkly satirical La Valse, hearing a sinister and destructive undercurrent in Sierra’s celebrated showpiece only adds to its subliminal irresistibility. 

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Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings (1936) Andromache's Farewell (1962)

In a century that often that often prioritized the satisfaction of the composer over the satisfaction of the listener, Samuel Barber’s music stuck out for its direct emotional appeal to the audience. The eminently successful American composer achieved this through potent harmonies and memorable melodies, both qualities that were shunned and stigmatized by the modernist revolt against the romantic aesthetic. By far the most representative example of his neo-romantic approach is his Adagio for Strings. Perhaps one of the most widely recognized pieces of classical music from the twentieth century, it is also one of the saddest. 

 

Originally, the eight-minute piece was conceived as the second movement of his String Quartet. But it was the arrangement for string orchestra (performed here) that achieved prominence under the baton of the iconic conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini. His legendary performance resounded throughout depression-ravaged America in a high-profile radio broadcast. In the pre-television era, radio was a means of building a sense of shared identity and experience for the far-flung communities of an expanding America. Most importantly, Barber’s piece gave its listeners a space in which to mourn. Since its premiere, the piece has been used frequently at funerals (such as John .F Kennedy and Albert Einstein) and in the wake of horrific tragedies. Its wordless atmosphere of grieving communicates clearly and powerfully. Barber is able to achieve his effect in this piece by focusing on a few sparse musical ideas and intensifying them until they explode. It was the maximal simplicity of his approach that makes his piece a radical achievement of the twentieth century. 

 

The music is very slow and there are not many notes. The notes that Barber does use often tug painfully at each other in a manner reminiscent of late Renaissance vocal music, which he studied zealously. As the pitch rises and the volume increases, we feel the swelling of the emotional fabric and the tension elicits a desperate need for resolution. Since there is so little movement in the music, every new note is a fresh twist of the knife. The piece is in arch form, which simply means that it starts quiet and low, builds to a loud and high climax, and then comes back down for a subdued ending. 

 

A naked note in the first violins opens the piece before they are supported from below by a choir of strings with a ravishing chord. A simple melody emerges: a three-step climb up the scalar staircase. Always yearning upwards and hardly ever reaching its goal, the melody seems to be caught in a Sisyphean struggle. The glacial pace of the harmonic change ratchets up the tension with each new note. Frequent silences prolong the suspension. The dynamics swell and then quickly fall back down to an impassioned whisper. Soon, the growth becomes inexorable and the pressure seems as if it can no longer be contained. When the explosion does occur, the strings are all playing as high as they possibly can, as loud as they possibly can, and with as much expressive force as the musicians can muster. The listening experience is without parallel. The music works its way back down, a gradual exhale after such a cataclysmic release. In its last breaths, the piece sighs a chord that refuses to resolve, leaving a glaringly open ending. The lack of closure can be read many ways and how you interpret it may resonate powerfully with your own beliefs what lies beyond the earthbound boundaries of life. 

 

Taking an entirely different tone than the Adagio, Barber grapples with similar themes of loss and painful goodbyes in Andromache’s Farewell, his setting of Euripi­des’s tragic poem, The Trojan Women. This time, the music accompanies the story of a violent separation of a mother from her child. The composer left this note to set the scene for his song for soprano and orchestra: 

 

“Scene: an open space before Troy, which has just been cap­tured by the Greeks. All Tro­jan men had been killed or have fled and the women and chil­dren are held cap­tives. Each Tro­jan woman has been allot­ted to a Greek war­rior and the ships are now ready to take them into exile. Andro­mache, widow of Hec­tor, Prince of Troy, has been given as a slave-wife to the son of Achilles. She has just been told that she can­not take her lit­tle son with her in the ship. For it has been decreed by the Greeks that a hero’s son must not be allowed to live and that he is to be hurled over the bat­tle­ment of Troy.  She bids him farewell. In the back­ground the city of slowly burn­ing. It is just before dawn.”

 

Right away, the boisterous brass and crashing cymbal evoke the ravaged emotional landscape of war-torn Troy. The dissonance in the strings is searing and the violins scream expressionistically in sheer horror. Although formally a song, the piece is so dramatic and expressionistic as to draw comparison with the impassioned soprano soliloquies of Richard Strauss’s early operas, Salome and Elektra. The tortured strings seethe with Andromache’s psychological horror, the woodwinds - particularly the english horn - reflect her tenderness towards her son, and the percussion bang away with the savagery of the invading Greeks. Andromache’s music requires the wide range and bravado of a fully dramatic soprano. Dissonant, angular, and showcasing a quicksilver dynamic range, the part is an extraordinarily challenging and devastating portrayal of a mother desperate to protect her child. As the popularity of the film “A Quiet Place” shows, this deeply universal instinct to protect our offspring under any circumstances is still a powerfully resonant subject.