John Corigliano
The Red Violin (Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra)
"It is the job of the composer to reach out to the audience with every
means at his disposal," says composer John Corigliano. Named after his
father, who was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for 25 years,
Corigliano studied composition at Columbia University and the Manhattan School
of Music. After working as music programmer and director at a number of
classical radio stations in New York, the composer launched his career by
winning the top prize for his Sonata for Violin and Piano (1963) at the 1964
Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Corigliano's classical compositions
include five concerti; his Symphony No. 1 (1990), dedicated to the memory of
many musician friends who died from AIDS, and Symphony No. 2, which won the
Pulitzer Prize in 2001; a Grammy-winning string quartet (1995); and the opera
The Ghosts of Versailles (1991). His score for Ken Russell's movie Altered
States (1980) was nominated for an Academy Award, and he finally took home the
Oscar for his score for The Red Violin (1997).
His work on the The Red Violin led to the creation of the Chaconne for Violin
and Orchestra. The movie depicts the "lifetime" of a violin and its
various owners, following it from its creation in 17th century Cremona, Italy,
across the centuries and the world to Vienna, Oxford, Shanghai, and Montreal.
Only at the movie's end do we learn how the violin's creation is tied to the
tragically short life of the violin maker's wife, who died as the violin was
being crafted.
Although movie scores are typically begun only after most of the film has
been shot, Corigliano had to write several violin themes before filming began,
because the actors had to mimic playing the violin during the movie. After
completing these, Corigliano took director François Girard up on his suggestion
to create a work for orchestral performance based on themes from the movie.
Corigliano chose to write a chaconne, a baroque form that was originally a dance
in slow triple time with a repeating bass figure. As he explains, "a story
this episodic needed to be tied together with a single musical idea ... I
composed a singable theme, hummed by the violin master's wife Anna, which
mutates into a solo violin melody. Underpinning this is an inexorable
seven-chord chaconne, evoking the Tarot and the fate it signals."
Corigliano completed the piece in 1997, and it was premiered that year by the
San Francisco Symphony with guest conductor Robert Spano and violinist Joshua
Bell, who played the violin solos for the movie score as well. The piece met
with immediate success, and in 2003 the composer expanded the work into a full
violin sonata, dedicated to his father. Writing the Chaconne, Corigliano said,
gave him "an opportunity to strip away any inhibitions and write a
passionate and romantic essay that I probably would not have written had it not
been accompanying a film."
And passionate it is. The work opens with quiet chords played by the soloist
against a whirl of notes from the orchestra -- an aleatoric progression, in
which each player is given a set of notes to play within a certain set of
measures, but the moment at which the notes begin is up to each individual
musician. A pair of bassoons enter, followed by low brass, intoning the ominous
pattern of chords that form the chaconne's "ground." The piece slowly
grows in emotional intensity, with soloist and orchestra continuing to alternate
in stating Anna's theme and the chord progression of the chaconne. "I was
trying to be very careful in this piece so that, while the orchestra was full of
fire, it never covered the violin," Corigliano writes. The work is filled
with virtuosic episodes for the soloist that, says the composer, "follow
the instrument from country to country, century to century." The emotional
peaks are fiery indeed, and lead, as the composer intended, to a sense of
inexorable fate as the work draws to its explosive end.
June, 2004
|