Symphonic Waves: Alma & La MerAlma & La Mer

Symphonic personalities

Program

Paola Prestini

Barcarola
Alma Mahler

Seven Lieder (orchestration Matthews)
Debussy

La Mer

Media

The sun rises over La Mer, Debussy’s most well-known orchestral work. Seamless symphonic colours, texture and nuance paint the changing seas. In three sketches, La Mer presents vivid portraits of light, violent winds and a return to peace at sea.

With the voice of internationally renowned Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin, Alma Mahler’s work takes centre stage. The Viennese composer drew upon poignant and passionate verse by some of the greatest poets of her generation to craft a delicate and chromatic piece. In its orchestral arrangement, the composition’s sensual moments are intensified and elevated. The program opens with Barcarola, an early composition from Brooklyn-based Italian American Paola Prestini, internationally recognized for her music and innovative ideas.

Works

Paola Prestini

Barcarola

“Barcarola is a one movement work for orchestra that I wrote when I was still a student at Juilliard. It was never professionally premiered but was done at Alice Tully Hall by the Juilliard Orchestra. The work has been revised substantially for this premiere, and is dedicated to Speranza Scappucci, a lifelong friend who I attended school with at Juilliard and is a fellow Italian!”

“The work is one movement and 15 minutes long. It is in the form of a wave inspired by the Venetian form and rocking rhythms of a barcarole. The work takes its poetic inspiration from Neruda’s Barcarola, which likens longing to the ocean and its tempests. The poem evokes noise: from the sound of wind, to a foghorn, to a beating heart. The image is ghostly and sensual. The sections of the poem highlight structural shifts, and once it rises to its highest peak of longing it resolves into a simple steady heartbeat.”

“I’m beyond thrilled to premiere Barcarola with the Orchestre Métropolitain. My work has long been influenced by the world of poetry, and this piece is no exception. It evokes the natural songs of a tempestuous ocean, resplendent with winds, foghorns, and beating hearts. The sensitivity of the Orchestre Métropolitain is an excellent match for this work, which was written during my formative years and edited for this premiere and, as such, holds a special place in my heart.”

Alma Mahler

1879 – 1964

Seven Lieder (orchestration Matthews)

Published in Vienna in 1910 and 1915; orchestration by Colin and David Matthews

Alma Schindler was born in Vienna in 1879 into a family that, with a painter father and a singer mother, held the arts in high esteem. She began learning the piano at a young age. Her father, whom she would lose when she was 13, encouraged her to “play to seduce the gods,” guidance she would take to heart. At age 18, she studied composition with Alexander von Zemlinsky, an avantgarde musician and outstanding pedagogue who also became her first lover. From that early age onward, Alma Schindler had many love affairs and was a very active socialite, keeping company with all the imperial capital’s leading poets, writers and artists of the day. She also began to compose.

At a soirée in 1901, she met Gustav Mahler, then director of the Vienna Court Opera and 19 years her senior. They would marry a year later, though not without Mahler gravely warning her in a letter that he would not tolerate having two composers under the same roof and that a wife’s duty was to be fully committed to her husband. He wrote: “But how can you imagine both husband and wife being composers? Have you any idea how ridiculous and degrading such a rivalry would become? . . . From now on you have only one job: to make me happy!” She obligingly abandoned her artistic aspirations, put away her compositions and gave birth to two girls. The couple’s relationship was not without its ups and downs. In the summer of 1910, Alma was introduced to architect Walter Gropius, future founder of the Bauhaus, and became his mistress. In an attempt at reconciliation, Mahler arranged for five of Alma’s lieder to be published before dying the next year at age 51. But her creative impulse was broken, and she never returned to composition. However, four additional lieder were published in 1915, the year she married Gropius, with five more to follow in 1924.

In the ensuing years, Alma Mahler remarried yet again, in 1929, this time to novelist Franz Werfel after 10 years of living together. Fleeing Nazism in 1938, the couple reached France before settling in Los Angeles. After Werfel’s death, she moved to New York, where she died in 1964 after playing an active role in the city’s cultural life.

Besides a few chamber music works and a scene from an opera, all now lost, Alma Mahler left 17 lieder, 14 of which were published during her lifetime. All were composed in the early 1900s, when she was in her early 20s. They demonstrate a sure melodic talent, with more than a whiff of Brahms, one that embraces a harmonic language inherited from Zemlinsky and flirts with the radically new one of Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. Taking from Richard Dehmel, Rainer Maria Rilke and Gustav Falke poems written in a melancholic mood or evoking an idealized and empathetic nature, her musical imagery or word painting, as it was also known, is delicate, never overly emphatic, even in the accompaniment, with its sometimes daring and unexpected turns of phrase. As mezzosoprano Sarah Connolly puts it, “The music is in part voluptuous, coquettish, Wagnerian in intensity and harmony, yet intimate, sensual, charming and surprising.”

Debussy

1862 – 1918

La Mer

Premiered at the Concerts Lamoureux in Paris on October 15, 1905, conducted by Camille Chvillard

“The sea is like a child; it plays around without knowing exactly what it is doing . . . and it has a soul; it comes and goes, constantly changing.” — Claude Debussy

Cleaving to the ancient notion that art should, above all, imitate nature, composers have often attempted to depict in music not only creatures and the elements but also human activity. In the 18th century, a number of concertos, symphonies and opera arias evoked the sea and its storms – reflecting the turmoil of the heart – through rapidly rising and descending scales over a rumbling bass, musical clichés that composers deployed with greater or lesser skill. Though program music and symphonic poems would have their heyday in the following century, Claude Debussy’s La Mer is far more than its simple title would seem to indicate.

Debussy began composing the work in 1903 during a stay in Burgundy, giving it the subtitle Trois esquisses symphoniques (Three symphonic sketches). He confided to André Messager that “While the ocean doesn’t exactly lap the hills of Burgundy… I have innumerable memories. They are worth more than a reality that in general weighs too heavily on one’s thoughts.” However, it was from Dieppe on the English Channel that Debussy wrote his publisher Jacques Durand, whom he had kept waiting due to a bad case of the flu, that “I still have to complete the orchestration, which is as tumultuous and varied as… the sea!”

The work’s premiere, in October 1905 at the Concerts Lamoureux, was far from a success. Not only was it poorly conducted but critics tore it apart. Incomprehension was a common reaction, with Pierre Lalo of Le Temps writing “I have the impression of standing, not in front of nature but of a reproduction of nature… I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea.” The reception was somewhat less chilly when Debussy, though considered a mediocre conductor, led a performance in January 1908 at the Concerts Colonne.

What was Lalo expecting? An evocation with a few recognizable clichés? A Romantic vision of the unleashed forces of nature? As Vladimir Jankélévitch notes, “Debussy’s music is not characterized by a descriptive function but rather by a suggestive energy, and this power of suggestion he achieved has an irresistible magical force… There is a harmonic sensuality and especially a fondness for sonorities that make his the complete opposite… of any introverted subjectivity.” Using unprecedented means, going beyond imitation, Debussy seeks to arouse in the listener the same emotions, the same effects, as would contemplating the sea over the course of a day.

In a completely original musical language, the work materializes “without needless repetition or a true thematic unity… yet following a finely drawn and balanced plan,” remarks François-René Tranchefort. Far from formal constraints, there are developments that are more commentary than elaboration, seemingly cyclical themes that actually aren’t, a harmonic sense and series of tonalities that blur the paths, while woodwinds, brass (sometimes muted), harps, various percussion instruments and strings appear in constantly changing combinations. As Jean Barraqué notes: “The music becomes a mysterious and secret work that reinvents and destroys itself in an uninterrupted outpouring that allows the work somehow to self-propel, without relying on a preestablished model.”

The first movement, De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From dawn to midday on the sea), begins with a slow introduction evoking the coiled power of the ocean at rest. The waves then come to life “dans un rythme très souple” (in a very supple rhythm), building “un peu plus mouvementé” (with somewhat more movement) until the final burst of day at its zenith. In the second movement, Jeux de vagues (Play of the waves), time is suspended to make room for the glittering of the sun’s rays on the quivering liquid surface. In the finale, Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue between the wind and the waves), the wind rises, its din in opposition to the ocean’s constant, tormented swells, interspersed with occasional moments of calm, until its final triumph, bringing to a close a work that remains “a pillar of the entire symphonic repertoire.”

Conductor & Soloists

Kensho Watanabe

Conductor

“The dynamism, attentiveness and accuracy emanating from the new American conductor on the international scene give hope of seeing him again as often as possible in Montreal.” (Translated) Margot Charignon/L’Opéra (Quebec)

Critically acclaimed for his “midas touch” (OperaWire, 2024) Kensho Watanabe is known for his collaborative leadership and intelligently crafted performances.

The 2025/26 season includes his debut at Houston Grand Opera with Kevin Puts’ Silent Night, Don Giovanni at Opéra de Montréal, and symphonic performances with orchestras including the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Orchestre Metropolitain and his debut with the Florida Orchestra conducting Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony.

Recent highlights include returns to the Metropolitan Opera (La bohème, Champion, The Hours), Detroit Opera (Madame Butterfly) as well as his debut at the Suntory Hall with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. He has led world-class ensembles, such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Calgary Philharmonic and Opera Theatre St Louis (Don Pasquale) as part of their 50th anniversary season.

Other symphonic highlights include Watanabe’s debuts with the London Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Turku Philharmonic, Edmonton Symphony and Filarmonia Szczecin. Watanabe has also enjoyed collaborations with the Houston and Detroit Symphony Orchestras, Brussels Philharmonic, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, RTE Concert Orchestra and at the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival.

Based in Paris, Watanabe was the inaugural conducting fellow of the Curtis Institute of Music from 2013 to 2015, studying with his longtime mentor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. An accomplished violinist, Watanabe received his Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music and served as substitute violinist in The Philadelphia Orchestra from 2012 to 2016.

He is also a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with distinguished conducting pedagogue Otto-Werner Mueller. Additionally, he holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Yale, where he studied molecular, cellular, and developmental biology.

Karina Gauvin

Soprano

Canadian soprano and Grammy nominee Karina Gauvin has impressed audiences and critics the world over from La Scala in Milan to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw to Carnegie Hall in New York with her luscious timbre, profound musicality and wide vocal range.

Described by Opera News as “a queen of Baroque opera”, Ms. Gauvin has sung with the world’s leading orchestras including the San Francisco, Chicago, Montreal and Toronto Symphonies, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Venice Baroque Orchestra, Tafelmusik, Les Violons du Roy, Musica Antiqua Köln, Accademia Bizantina and Il Complesso Barocco.

Ms. Gauvin has worked with conductors such as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Ivor Bolton, Teodor Currentzis, Bernard Labadie, Sir Roger Norrington, Kent Nagano, Fabien Gabel, Semyon Bychkov, Michael Tilson Thomas, Christopher Hogwood, Andrea Marcon, Helmuth Rilling and Christophe Rousset. Also active as a recitalist, Gauvin has collaborated with pianists Marc-André Hamelin, Michael McMahon and Roger Vignoles.

During the pandemic, Karina Gauvin was privileged to participate in a recording project, the complete songs of late 19th century composer Jules Massenet. Her extensive discography – over 50 titles – has won her numerous awards, including a “Chamber Music America Award” for her “Fête Galante” disc with pianist Marc-André Hamelin, 3 Grammy nominations for her recordings with the Boston Early Music Orchestra and several Opus Prizes. Recent projects have included Merab in Handel’s Saul at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and Paris Théâtre du Châtelet, Giunone in Cavalli’s La Calisto at the Staatsoper München and at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

Among the numerous distinctions she received in her early career, Ms. Gauvin was named soloist of the year for the International French Radio Community, won first prize for the CBC Radio National Competition for Young performers, the Virginia Parker Prize as well as the Maggie Teyte Memorial Prize in London and the Lieder and Public’s prize at the ‘s-Hertogenbosch International Competition.

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