New York to Paris, Paris to Paradise
Caramoor Schwab Vocal Rising Stars in collaboration with
The New York Festival of Song
Sunday, March 11 at 4:00pm
Tickets: $25.00   Buy Now    ABOUT THE MUSIC

Members of Caramoor's 2012 Schwab Vocal Rising Stars program:
Meredith Lustig, soprano; Kristin Hoff, mezzo-soprano; Brent Ryan, tenor; Eugene Chan, baritone
Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, pianists

New Yorkers' and Parisians' eloquent hymns to their hometowns and their dream vacations: Americans in Paris, Parisians in exotic climes. Featuring songs by Ned Rorem, Charles Trenet, Darius Milhaud, Albert Roussel, George Gershwin and others. This concert concludes NYFOS's fourth annual professional training residency at Caramoor.

Please note: Because this program is the product of a training residency for young artists, it will run just under two hours, and will have an intermission. This format will ensure each young artist enough time on stage to spread his or her vocal wings and make the program a meaningful and artistically enriching experience.

Caramoor’s Vocal Rising Stars program is made possible by generous support from the
Terrance W. Schwab Fund for Young Vocal Artists.

ABOUT THE MUSIC
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM BY STEVEN BLIER

It has always been hard for some people to warm up to France. There was recently a flare-up of anti-French sentiment in our country after France opposed the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. For a brief, bizarre time, French fries were renamed “Freedom fries” and French toast was called “Freedom toast.” But no matter what antipathies have cropped up between the two countries, Paris seems to be exempt. Everyone loves Paris. The city’s name seems to bear its own beautiful fragrance and the promise of love. We New Yorkers like to think of Paris as our dangerously sexy twin sister.
    
By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris had become the destination for a generation of American painters, ranging from John Singer Sargent to Mary Cassatt. After World War I, writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein flocked to the City of Light, joining visual artists like Man Ray and Alexander Calder. But Paris was a special magnet for musicians because of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), the legendary teacher of Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Theodore Chanler, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, and many others. (Later on she would mentor Quincy Jones and Philip Glass.) In Harris’s words, “Going to Paris was the best thing I ever did. I was just a truck driver then and had written my first works out of the fullness of my ignorance.” In Paris, these composers felt they were living in a society that valued serious musicians. And they flourished.

Tonight we celebrate a roster of composers who capture the essence of these two great musical capitals. Our celebration is divided into four chapters: Parisians at home; New Yorkers in Paris; Parisians traveling the world; and finally, New Yorkers at home. We’ll hear the way French musicians annexed the sounds of American jazz, and the way Americans added their own moxie to the ice cream colors of French impressionism. Through the magic of music, France and America become compatible bedfellows.

Our journey begins with a musical portrait of Paris delivered by two of its quintessential composers, Charles Trenet (1913-2001) and Francis Poulenc (1899-1963).  Neither of these icons needs much introduction to American audiences. Trenet was one of France’s premier balladeers, with a legacy of over 1000 songs for which he wrote both words and music. His melodies are simple and infectious, and they ride on a propulsive sense of rhythm. Many of his tunes are laden with nostalgia, like “Que reste-t-il de nos amours?,” better known on these shores as “I Wish You Love.” But he also had a tremendous sense of fantasy, with lyrics that sweep the listener from streets and gardens up to the treetops and all the way to heaven. I think of Trenet as the Marc Chagall of songwriters: colorful, joyous, sad, and sweet, with the imagination of a brilliant child. And like Chagall, Trenet can surprise the listener with the sudden intensity of his feelings.

Poulenc is in many ways a kindred spirit to Trenet. He has a bit of that songwriter’s daffy sense of humor (best heard in the opera Les mamelles de Tirésias), his bopping sense of mischief (which we can sample tonight in “Vous n’écrivez plus?”), his sensual melancholy (“La grenouillère”). Poulenc’s musical thumbprint is unique and instantly recognizable, in the same way that William Bolcom’s music is instantly recognizable. And like Bolcom, Poulenc is a wily magician. Within what seems at first like a small, repetitive set of musical gestures, he finds eloquence and unique ways to create atmosphere. He is certainly one of the greatest masters of words-and-music. In his hands, the most elusive poems take on specificity and clarity. The pianist Julius Drake confided to me, “I don’t think I understand Eluard’s poetry—and then when I play Poulenc’s settings I suddenly do.” Poulenc’s range extends from the bedroom to the church; a man both deeply sensual and deeply religious, he was famously described as “half monk, half thug” by the critic Claude Rostand in 1950. Tonight we’ll hear him in his boulevardier mode, extolling the mysteries of Paris.

Among all American composers, Ned Rorem (b. 1923) is probably the best known for his years in Paris. Not only is his music saturated with the sounds of France, but he published the exploits, sexual and otherwise, of his ten-year sojourn there in his widely read Paris Diaries. I had always assumed that he too was a student of Nadia Boulanger, but Rorem maintains that he never really had lessons with her. “Certainly she was a friend during my decade in France that began in 1949; she did perform my music and helped with money, meals, prizes, and with advice on the good life and concern for the bad.” But Boulanger decided that Rorem had already found his voice. In the composer’s words, “She weighed the pros and cons but concluded that at 24 I was now formed—her nudging could only falsify what she termed my nature bête.” If Boulanger was not Rorem’s musical mother, she was in a sense his musical grandmother: two of his most important teachers, Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, had been in her studio.

Soon after his arrival in Paris, Rorem got a chance to spend some time with one of his idols, Francis Poulenc. Five months after Poulenc’s death, Rorem wrote a song in tribute to the French master, set to a poem by his close friend Frank O’Hara. “For Poulenc” evokes a precious youthful memory: his first day in Paris, a time of wonder and loneliness and promise.

In 1921, the American Conservatory of Music opened its doors in a wing of the royal palace in Fontainebleau. Under the aegis of Walter Damrosch, a prominent German-born conductor whose career flourished in America, American musicians could study with some of France’s finest teachers. Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was the first to enroll in this summer session, and of course he went there to work with Nadia Boulanger who was on the faculty. “Pastorale” might have been one of the things he showed her in an early lesson; he had just written the song in April of that year. There is no trace of Copland’s homespun folksiness in this early work. Instead the composer plunges the listener into a world of exotic sensuality, an uncharacteristically French palette for this American master.

Paul Bowles (1910-1999) was also part of Copland’s circle of Americans in Paris. And when Bowles buckled down to study counterpoint with Boulanger, it was one of his few successes as a student. He had dropped out of the University of Virginia and was essentially self-taught as a musician. Somehow the redoubtable Nadia found a way to impose discipline on this gifted free spirit. Bowles was a denizen of another Parisian salon, that of Gertrude Stein. He may have needed two such granitic mentors, since he was interested in writing both music and fiction. In “Letter to Freddy,” we hear a perfect amalgam of his two doyennes. Bowles’ musical setting of a letter from Stein evokes her imperious, take-charge personality with wit, economy and perfect timing. Eventually Bowles morphed from the composer-who-writes-books into the novelist-who-used-to-write-music. These days, Bowles is remembered as the author of The Sheltering Sky, which was made into a movie in 1990 directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich.

New York-native Philip Lasser (b. 1963) never got to work with Nadia Boulanger, but his mentor, Narcis Bonet, was her closest colleague and disciple. I first introduced Lasser’s lovely music to the NYFOS audience in 2006 at our premiere NYFOS@Juilliard concert, dedicated to songs by composers who trained or taught there. Philip falls into both categories; he studied with David Diamond at Juilliard, and he has been on the graduate faculty since 1994. His music draws on a French tradition of sinuous elegance and transparent textures, qualities that flatter both poetry and the human voice. About “Parisian Evening,” Lasser writes:

How to sum up all that is “Parisian Evening” for me? Imagine a dark narrow street in the northwestern reaches of the seizième arrondissement. The coolness of the damp pavement. Three in the morning. I, a student, young pianist, composer. Nadia Boulanger, no longer with us, but her sibyllic teaching resonating in my ears from my mentors Narcis Bonet and Gaby Casadesus both of La Boulangerie, as they say. Me, American , so loving every inch of that Paris which seemed both to embrace me and to deny me complete entry.

Both the poem and song came to me at the same time. I wanted to pin down the feelings that were so potent and so wonderful inside of me forever. Like a perfume, I wanted the song to convey the fragrance of life which I knew to be a moment of heaven; short, intense, and so loved. And years later, I could pop the cork and drown in that memory of a world which screams of copper air.

Irving Berlin (1888-1989) did not have any special connection to Paris. But he did write a great song inspired by an American who took Paris by storm: Josephine Baker, the St. Louis-born actress, dancer, and singer who rose from poverty to become one of the most sought-after entertainers in Europe. In “Harlem on My Mind,” Berlin conjures up the quintessential poor little rich girl, pining for the down-home pleasures of her homeland while sipping champagne out of slippers. His comic take on the glamorous superstar probably doesn’t have much truth to it, but the song was a big hit for another great African-American performer, Ethel Waters. She introduced it in Berlin’s wildly successful 1933 revue As Thousands Cheer.

George Gershwin (1898-1937) did make a famous trip to Paris in 1928. He had met Maurice Ravel in America and asked to study with him. Ravel turned the young man down —“Better to be a first-rate Gershwin than a second-rate Ravel”—and when he heard how much money Gershwin earned as a composer, Ravel said, “Perhaps it is I who should study with you.” But Ravel did write him a recommendation letter to study with—who else?—Nadia Boulanger. After hearing him play, she too rejected him. “What could I possibly give you that you haven’t already got?” she asked. As if to demonstrate the truth of her perception, Gershwin composed the iconic An American in Paris, at first dismissed by music critics but now one of the most beloved works in the repertoire. Later on, Gershwin celebrated Paris in his first Hollywood musical, Shall We Dance. For this movie he wrote one of his most elaborate songs, the brilliant “Hi-Ho,” in which Fred Astaire was to dance through the streets of Paris drunk with love for an unknown woman (Ginger Rogers, of course). The studio loved the song but cut it from the film because they thought it would be too expensive to shoot on their backlot “Paris.” It remains one of the hidden gems of this great songwriter’s output, first published in 1968 and rarely performed.

While Americans were pouring into Paris in search of refinement, many French artists were seeking inspiration from foreign cultures. The trend had started at the end of the nineteenth century with works in all genres on exotic subjects. Novels like Pierre Loti’s Les Trois dames de la Kasbah and operas like Delibes’ Lakmé offered sensuous, alluring travelogues for French audiences in need of a bit of spice. I suppose that “Les roses d’Ispahan” and “Tarentelle” by Gabriel Fauré (1945-1924) could be said to fall into that genre. In his early songs, Fauré wasn’t trying to épater le bourgeois; he simply wanted to attract patrons in the salons of Paris by writing works that would please them. But even Fauré’s simplest music is marked by a unique refinement, elegance, and imagination. And in “Les roses d’Ispahan,” Fauré offers us time travel as well as geographical travel, sweeping us back to a romantic vision of Persia before it became today’s war-torn Iran.

Exoticism gave way to primitivism definitively on May 29, 1913, when Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused riots in the streets of Paris. Soon the rhythms of jazz invaded poetry and music, African art inspired the Cubist movement, and the sounds of Asia and Latin America began to fascinate classical composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Paris-born Maurice Delage (1879-1961) was a student of Maurice Ravel. Inspired by his teacher’s interest in ethnomusicology and encouraged by his radical fellow-artists, Delage took a trip to the subcontinent in order to absorb the music of India. He brought home a new musical vocabulary and a fresh approach to scoring. Delage was not a prolific writer, but his Quatre poèmes hindous continue to haunt the heart on the hundredth anniversary of their composition.

Albert Roussel (1869-1937) spent his early years in the Navy, and in his travels he heard indigenous music all over the world. Eventually he realized that he needed to return to Paris where he could devote himself to composing. But the sounds of Asia continued to permeate his compositions, and Roussel set a number of Chinese poems to music. In both “Réponse d’une épouse sage” and “Amoureux séparés” we hear a perfect amalgam of French transparency and Chinese modes. The original poems by Chang-chi are a thousand years old; they were first translated by the British diplomat Herbert Giles (1845-1935), whose English version became the basis for Roché’s French verses. Reserve, desire, and exoticism are Roussel’s playground; these two masterpieces represent the composer at his best and most characteristic.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) was born into a Jewish family and grew up in Aix-en-Provence. At age 24, he became the secretary to Paul Claudel, who had been appointed French Minister to Brazil. This took the young Milhaud to Rio de Janeiro for two years, where he became fascinated by the exuberant music of carnivals and the seductive sounds of the samba. When he returned to Paris in 1918, he fell in with Jean Cocteau’s circle of writers and composers. And in 1920, he heard American jazz for the first time on a trip to London. Milhaud’s best music shows the benefit of his crazy salad of influences—Provençale, Jewish, Brazilian, ragtime.  You can sample them in “Mon histoire,” from the Chansons de négresse. The songs originated from a play called Bolivar by Jules Supervielle, where they were sung by a slave girl named Précipitation. The setting may be Afro-Caribbean, but Milhaud’s music is pure Brazil.

I had thought it would be a snap to program the final group of songs celebrating New York City. There is no shortage of material—writing about the Big Apple is practically a cottage industry. But we all wanted to avoid songs NYFOS had done in the past, and I wanted to capture something authentic about the city where I was born. Our portrait of New York mirrors our portrait of Paris that began the evening: a story of exuberance, romance, foreboding, and joy.

Our tour begins on the Upper East Side with Irving Berlin’s perennial “Slumming on Park Avenue.” Berlin was born in Russia and came to America at the age of five. He was self-taught, self-motivated, and self-assured as very few people ever have been, and he cleverly fought his way up the Tin Pan Alley ladder to dominate Broadway and Hollywood.  Of all the composers who worked in Tinseltown, only Berlin was able to maintain control of how his songs were used in his movies. He was the envy of his fellow composers: during World War II, his rival Harry Warren famously said, “They bombed the wrong Berlin.” “Slumming on Park Avenue” comes from the 1937 movie On the Avenue where it was introduced by Alice Faye. As a confirmed Upper West Sider, this song sums up perfectly my feelings every time I take the crosstown bus.

A pair of songs by Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) captures two other quintessential New York neighborhoods. “jimmy’s got a goil,” set to a poem by e. e. cummings, is written in old-fashioned Brooklynese. They offered it as a contribution to the Cos Cob Songbook, a project that sought to promote and disseminate American art song to a wider public. The endeavor fizzled, but “jimmy” lives on, its loud mouth and offbeat rhythms still spitting in the listener’s face 75 years later. “In Twos” was part of a 1957 choral piece called This Is the Garden. The music had some of the sizzle and sass of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, which was just about to have its premiere. Blitzstein had constant bad luck getting his music performed and published, and he also refused the ministrations of collaborators and editors who might have helped him smooth his path. In the 1950s he watched his mentee Bernstein spring up the ladder of success, while Blitzstein seemed to be hell-bent on consigning himself to semi-obscurity. In spite of some awkwardness in his writing, Blitzstein was capable of great eloquence, as we are now rediscovering. “In Twos,” which follows a couple walking on Riverside Drive, is one of his most moving pieces. NYFOS performed and recorded it as a duet over twenty years ago; tonight we are finally going to offer the original four-part arrangement.

The last two songs emerged from specific requests. Meredith Lustig asked me if I would assign her a beautiful ballad about New York, since she is about to take a brief leave of absence from the city she loves. (Don’t worry, she’s not going far away.) I thought of Rodgers and Hart’s “A Tree in the Park,” from their 1926 “Freudian” musical Peggy Ann. The unusually free-form show was largely composed of the heroine’s dreams, including talking fish, out-of-control traffic lights, and policemen sporting pink moustaches. “A Tree in the Park” is a hymn to the Ramble in Central Park, which becomes a home to all kinds of lovers at dusk—including a few with pink moustaches.

After a lot of soul-searching about the end of the concert, I finally decided to go with my gut instinct and program that old standby “The Boy from New York City.” It was the one and only chart-topper by the Bayonne-based group called The Ad Libs; its composer/lyricist team, John Taylor and George Davis, do not have any other well-known songs in their oeuvre. By 1965, this kind of call-and-response song was a little out of date, but the cleverness of the lyric and the irresistible groove of the music created a hit not just for the Ad Libs but also for Manhattan Transfer, who made an even more famous recording of it in 1981. I danced to this song just after my bar mitzvah, and I think I have spent the last 47 years of my life trying to be the kind of New York guy they describe. One day I’ll even own a mohair suit.
    
Ernest Hemingway said, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Tonight we move our feast all over the globe, and finish the evening at a New York dance party. Santé!

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