BRATTLEBORO — Hugh Keelan has returned to Vermont from Erie, Penn., where he has conducted a performance of The Nutcracker during the cold winter months, and now the Windham Orchestra music director is gearing up to present a musical celebration of spring.
At its first concerts of 2014, the orchestra will present the world premiere of a new composition by Jan Norris, proprietor of Delectable Mountain on Main Street.
Her “Melting Spring” is a short work celebrating the arrival of the new season, written especially for Windham Orchestra by another of its Citizen Composers, “those contemporary friends and neighbors whose talent for composing until now has been hidden,” as described on the orchestra's website.
Keelan believes that “Melting Spring” very comfortably fits in a program with music by Anton Bruckner, Jean Sibelius, and Franz von Suppé on Friday, Jan. 17, at 7:30 p.m., at Vermont Academy in Saxtons River and on Sunday, Jan. 19, at 3 p.m., at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro.
The program includes “The Swan of Tuonela” by Sibelius, featuring James Adamson on English Horn; the world premiere of “Melting Spring” by Norris; the “Overture: Light Cavalry” by Suppé, and “Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major” (“Romantic”), by Anton Bruckner.
Keelan thinks he has an exciting and varied program of music in the upcoming concerts.
“I want everyone to come and delight in all the contrasting works from these diverse backgrounds, including from here and now in Brattleboro,” he writes in his notes for the program.
“The first half of our program starts in a remote place of mystery as a swan glides in the lake surrounding Tuonela, the Finnish Isle of the Dead, and ends very brightly with a popular operetta overture, Light Cavalry, brilliant and full of mischief.”
Keelan continues, “There is something monumental about Sibelius' extraordinary mood piece that speaks of death and transcendent sadness. The Suppé overture, in contrast, is cheery. Here, we are in the world of operetta, of lightness and humor and fun. And in Jan's four-minute 'Melting Spring,' we have another mood piece, but this one, glorious in its softness, gentle in its asymmetry, yet easy to follow, is evocative of springtime and melting.”
For the very first time, the Windham Orchestra will be performing a work by Bruckner, a monumental 19th-century composer.
“Time stands still in the spiritually transcendent music of Bruckner,” Keelan writes. “Some of the images that are evoked are a 'cathedral in sound,' the Romanticism of German folk tales, the sounds of brass and hunting horns, the quality of a massive pipe organ, and heart-stopping chorales of intense fervor.”
Lasting nearly an hour, Bruckner's “Romantic” symphony is “one huge piece,” Keelan says.
“The orchestra needs to be big to perform Bruckner. Perhaps not as big as with Mahler's music, but certainly bigger than Brahms.”
Keelan is especially excited about the brass playing in the Windham Orchestra for this concert.
“Our brass players are pillowed and supported by a rich string sound, and together we are entering a new world of power, subtlety, and orchestral heft,” says Keelan. “Bruckner's Symphony No. 4 represents a new pinnacle for us all.”
Keelan himself has played the works of Bruckner many times throughout his career, and he is excited about introducing him to the Windham Orchestra and the audiences of southern Vermont.
He feels that Bruckner is less well-known than he should be because he is a difficult composer to categorize.
“Bruckner is one of a kind,” he says.
As Keelan writes in his program notes for this concert, “Bruckner's lineage may be from Beethoven and Wagner, but he sounds like neither. Listeners will be awestruck at the intersection of simplicity and complexity, the extremes of loud and soft, density and lightness. Bruckner creates a vision of life beyond the earthly, and there is nothing like it in all of music.”
Keelan believes that the case could be made that all German composers of the 19th century are children of Beethoven.
“In that sense, so is Bruckner,” he says. “Much like Beethoven uses choral singing in his 'Ode to Joy' of his 9th Symphony, Bruckner uses the organ in his music. Nonetheless, I feel that Bruckner's music flows, not out of Beethoven, but from Schubert, whose music is a different animal than Beethoven's. There is that remarkable leisurely quality the pervades Schubert's symphonies. Buckner's music also has that heavenly length and those sublime harmonies.”
Chalk and cheese
Bruckner was also profoundly influenced by the music of the opera composer Richard Wagner.
“His harmony comes out of Wagner, whom Bruckner worshiped and knew note by note,” Keelan says. “But Wagner and Bruckner are different as chalk and cheese. They really don't have much in common.”
While Keelan says Wagner “is filled with the stage and grease paint,” Bruckner has its roots in his devout Catholicism.
“I think Wagner might have found Bruckner's spiritual music a little strange since, unlike his own, there was nothing theatrical about it,” says Keelan. “There also was no feeling, how shall I put it, of the erotic, which you find so pronounced in Wagner, and Bruckner's contemporaries Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.”
Keelan points out that Bruckner is often paired with Mahler, although they are quite-dissimilar late-Romantic composers.
“If Mahler became much more famous of the two in the last few decades,” explains Keelan, “that is because his music fits our times better. Mahler's music is a huge magnification of emotion in an extreme expansion of personality and feeling. In Mahler's music, we discover a personal diary of love, death, self pity, and happiness.”
Bruckner was totally different, Keelan says, calling his music “elusive, shy, indecisive, and quite unsettled. Bruckner never was satisfied with what he had done. He spent his whole life teaching and improving himself. There is no apprenticeship phase in Bruckner as you find in other composers, for he was always learning. So in the end, he became a completely self-taught musician whose expertise thoroughly informs whatever he wrote.”
Keelan notes that there may seem nothing heroic about Bruckner.
“Unlike many of the other towering figures of Romantic music, Bruckner can seem a rather dull person,” he says. “Nonetheless, it is remarkable the way this little small man tapped into a transcendent world which we all now can share.”