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SoNA

Symphony of Northwest Arkansas

Rites of Renewal: The Firebird October 3, 2026 Walton Arts Center Akiko Fujimoto, Music Director

Roman Carnival Overture, Op. 9 (1844) Hector Berlioz b December 11, 1803 in south-eastern France d March 8, 1869 in Paris, France

to the dictates of the proletariat. He challenged listeners and offended the bourgeoisie. However, he wasn’t just some obnoxious agitator, all talk and no action. He meant it, he lived it, and he wrote it.

There never was a radical as radical as Hector Berlioz. It was simply not in his nature to kowtow to prevailing fashion or to acquiesce

He had his share of failures, many engendered by the exceptional difficulties that he imposed on the performers. Such was the case with his 1838 operatic spectacle

Benvenuto Cellini; it flummoxed the august Paris Opera and went so poorly that Berlioz described the premiere as being “dragged to execution.” Never one to admit defeat, Berlioz rummaged through the ill-fated score and extracted material to form the Roman Carnival Overture, which succeeded marvelously at its 1844 premiere. Berlioz made it a regular part of his conducting repertoire and to this day the Overture remains one of his most popular and often-performed works. That’s with good reason: the piece is a delight from beginning to end, from its boisterously festive opening to its all-stops-out finale.

Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo (1942) Aaron Copland b November 14, 1900 in New York d December 2, 1990 in New York

It is ironic that a musical idiom indelibly associated with America is that of the Jewish son of Eastern European immigrants who received the bulk of his musical education in France. But that’s America for you. Aaron Copland’s compositional

career is sometimes described as bifurcated, in that he wrote “modernist” works that were of interest primarily to cognoscenti and “populist” works that quickly became part of the very fabric of American music. That tidy distinction, like so many music-appreciation bromides, blurs upon closer inspection. Copland did not write in two separate styles; rather, he was the possessor of a single, vivid musical language that he could tailor to the situation at hand. Copland wrote Rodeo for the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo in 1942, to choreography by the brilliantly gifted Agnes de Mille, soon to make theatrical history with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Rodeo tells the story of a competition between a cowgirl and city girls for the attentions of the cowboys at the Burnt Ranch. Copland fills the score with authentic American folk songs—“If He’d Be a Buckaroo by His Trade,” “Sis Joe,” “Old Paint,” “McLeod’s Reel”—and wraps them into his own greyhound-lean style, characterized by slightly acerbic harmonies and vibrantly spiky rhythms, clothing the whole in his uniquely transparent orchestration that somehow combines sparseness with opulence.

Samson and Delilah: Bacchanale (1877)

The Firebird Suite (1945 version)

Camille Saint-Saëns b October 9, 1835 in Paris, France d December 16, 1921 in Algiers, Algeria

Igor Stravinsky b June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum, Russia d April 6, 1971 in New York

That heady and expensive genre known as Grand Opera includes a divertissement, or lavish ballet, usually as an enhancement to the last act. In the case of Samson et Dalila the big dance occurs in the final scene, prefatory to Samson’s valedictory pancaking of the entire cast as he pulls down the Temple of Dagon in one mighty heave. For their dance, the barbaric priests go to it with properly savage enthusiasm, as the luxuriant orchestra erupts in dazzling period exotica—evocative scales, snake-charming tunes, castanets, cymbals, and plenty of surging rhythms. To be sure, the overall effect might partake of Cecil B. DeMille movie epics, but that’s testament to the influence that Saint-Saëns and his late-Romantic brethren exerted on the imaginations of Hollywood film composers such as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

It was 1909 and Sergei Diaghilev was in a bind. That wasn’t unusual. The flamboyant impresario of the Paris-based Ballets Russes thought big. He needed a steady stream of hits to pay for his roster of highvoltage dancers. He could have churned out a few reliable chestnuts to fill the seats and balance the books. But Diaghilev didn’t do retreads. He wanted it exciting, innovative, and above all, brand new. For his 1910 season Diaghilev planned a ballet based on Alexander Afanasyev’s fairy tale The Firebird with a new score by Nikolai Tcherepnin. But Tcherepnin turned him down. Then Diaghilev offered the job to Anatoly Liadov, who accepted but did little except putter, fritter, and procrastinate. Thus, the aforementioned bind. With disaster looming, Diaghilev fired Liadov and decided to take a chance on a kid he had hanging around. Recently he had added the youngster – a former student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s

– to a team charged with refreshing Glazunov’s orchestrations of Chopin piano pieces for the company’s 1909 Les Sylphides. It wasn’t much of an assignment, and no doubt Diaghilev figured that if the kid blew it, the other composers could take up the slack. But the kid didn’t blow it, so Diaghilev gave him The Firebird. That little gamble on an untried young composer paid off spectacularly. At its 1910 premiere The Firebird knocked ‘em dead, established the Ballets Russes as a primal force in modern ballet, and launched Igor Stravinsky into overnight celebrity. Two more ballets soon followed— Petrushka in 1911 and the epochal The Rite of Spring in 1913. Those three scores ensured Stravinsky’s elevation to the topmost rank of the world’s composers, a position he would hold for half a century.

The ballet’s instant success is no mystery. The story has it all: a prince charming, a magical ‘firebird’ for his love interest, an evil wizardlike villain, a troupe of winsome dancing maidens, an enchanted egg, assorted monsters, and the requisite happy ending. But when all is said and done, it’s just your basic fairy tale. Stravinsky’s score makes all the difference. Steeped in Ukrainian and Russian folk music and blessed with an exceptionally vivid orchestration, The Firebird employs short melodies similar to the leitmotifs of Wagnerian opera to accompany the various characters and locales, such as the magic garden, the evil Koschei and his minions, and the wondrous Firebird herself. Stravinsky prepared a concert suite in 1919, which he expanded in 1945 by adding several dance numbers, including a pas de deux and a scherzo.