Robert Johnson appears to be living the piece, using all the possible time he can find between work and family to practise the piece. It’s remarkable dedication and a composer could not ask for more.
His day job is principal horn with the Sydney Symphony. Ben Jacks also has that position and is now taking the more demanding concerts, like Bruckner 3 last week and the horn-packed Star Trek next week, so that Robert doesn’t wear himself out.
Rob is playing the two Kiri Te Kanawa concerts, even though they are only a couple of days before the Lighfall rehearsals, in the hope that the soprano’s program is not jam-packed with demanding horn solos or lip-breaking rips.
The park next door to my home is getting an upgrade thanks to the federal government’s economic stimulus program. On Wednesday they were banging metal poles, one at a time, with a hammer. The steady tempo was quite pronounced and only slightly slower than the music we were trying to rehearse. This was very off-putting but Robert persevered and fortunately the intrusion didn’t go on for too long, but it was touch and go for a bit.
Yesterday a photographer from the local newspaper came over for a few shots. He had the wrong time, so we lost quite a bit of rehearsal time and only looked at Part Two. The photos were taken with me at the piano, which as I mentioned before, is not how we actually rehearse. We then moved outside into the hornist’s natural woodland habitat. My wife also snapped a few photos for this blog.
During the composition of Lightfall Robert Johnson and I met just a few times mostly so he could start to familiarise himself with the material. But since the concerto was finished we have been meeting at my home more and more frequently until now we are rehearsing for two hours, two or three times a week.
Christopher Gordon (L) & Robert Johnson
At first we would run through the concerto with the synths and click. Gradually as he became more familiar with the work the click was dropped and now we only refer to it from time to time in difficult passages.
When Robert Johnson and I had our first run throughs I muddled along on the piano but my ears soon rebelled in horror. Rob, being the scholar that he is, said nothing about my two-pawed pianism but became quite eager when I suggested I make up a synth mock-up of the orchestra for him to rehearse to.
Normally that is quite an easy process of loading in the appropriate samples and having the notation software (Finale) create an audio file. This had worked well during the early stages of composition but somewhere along the line the full score files caught a bug and refused to make audio files, even though it would play back perfectly well on the computer. I hadn’t noticed because everything else was operating as required and I didn’t need these rehearsal files until the composition was finished. A lot of time was lost trying to sort this out.
Lightfall for Horn and Orchestra will fill the second half of the concert at its premiere. The major work in the first half is the Cello Concerto in B Minor, Opus 104 by Antonin Dvorák. This grand, lyrical work is one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire.
Dvorák
You can read about Dvorák here and about his concerto here. The full score (and piano reductions) can be viewed here but if you want to print or download to your computer be sure it is legal to do so.
The solo cellist in this concert will be Gautier Capuçon. You can see and hear him talking about and performing the Dvorák Cello Concerto on this YouTube clip from his record company, EMI:
Lightfall is composed for a fairly standard orchestra, the significant difference being the exclusion of trumpets. This omission makes the solo horn the highest and brightest brass instrument in the performance.
Trumpeters Fly Home at Interval
The orchestral horns are under-utilized for the same reason and only play in the higher registers when they are echoing the soloist in canon. Even during the brass chorales of Part Two they act more as a neutral extension of the trombone section than a colour of their own.
Well, I have spent far more time and words on analysis than I intended but there are two more features that need to be pointed out to complete the picture. [Don’t forget the full score can be downloaded and printed from here.]
Creation of Light (Gustave Dore)
A Melodic Cell The solo horn’s semitone rise of b5 is added to in b8, the new note is stretched in b9. Finally in b10 the whole figure is stretched with a fourth note added. This four note figure pervades the entire work and is so common I won’t waste time pointing the occurrences out.Read More…
The first two notes (Db-D) that the solo horn plays are a semitone apart; when heard with the basses (Bb) they outline a minor third to a major third. This semitone cell journeys through Lightfall in many guises.
(Gustave Dore)
It would be tedious in the extreme to list every occurrence of the semitone cell so here arejust a few pointers: Read More…
Whereas Part One is largely created with a melodic cycle, Part Two is created with a harmonic cycle. A group of seven chords is repeated over and over through the course of the movement.
(Gustave Dore)
The chords are in fact compressed from the opening phrases of the horn solo at the beginning of Part Two. This example shows both the horn solo and the seven chords: Lightfall-Part-2-Cycle-of-Chords
