Caltabiano: Poplars, for Orchestra

Poplars

Duration:

15 min.

Year:

1985

Orchestra
2(Picc.) 3(E.H.) 2(B.Cl.) 3 - 4 3 2(B.Tbn.) 1; Timp. 3Perc. Str.

Catalog No.:

rental only

	Opening (59" -- 463 K)		download

Poplars is based on Claude Monet's Les Quatre Arbres, known as Poplars, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The work is in no way programmatic and is not a mere reinterpretation of the scene in Monet's painting. Rather, it is a musical realization of certain elements of the painting's intricate substructure. The contrasts between the sharply angled substructure of the painting and its soft, sfumato (smoked) surface, as well as the contrasts within the substructure itself, provided the impetus for my composition.

Monet's carefully controlled spatial rhythms and proportions are represented temporally. The eye is led through the painting in multiple ways, and this is rep- resented in my composition by two simultaneously occurring levels of harmonic movement - one surrounding a climactic mirror point about two-thirds of the way through the piece, the other aiming always forward from the serene opening bars to the frenzied final moments of the coda.

The result is a work filled with extreme and dramatic contrast; slow, languid passages and quick, angry sections alternate. The changes sometimes occur through slow transformations and sometimes are completely unprepared. Monet finished his painting near his home at Giverny in 1891. My Poplars was begun as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, and was completed at my home in New York in 1985. Poplars was commissioned by Exxon Corporation for the New York Youth Symphony, and was premiered by that orchestra in Carnegie Hall in the year of its completion. In 1985, the conductor of that orchestra was David Alan Miller, to whom Poplars is dedicated.

-- R.C.

The 15-minute work was a riveting creation. The gently chromatic adagios feature longspun, Bergian string writing and pointillistic dabs of wind color, while the highly dissonant allegros highlight surging brass and crashing percussion.... A piece built around contrasts as violent as Poplars would crumble in less skilled hands; due to Caltabiano's compulsive desire for structural clarity, however, the listener can follow the composition's progress and sense the overall formal scheme. Poplars is deftly orchestrated, characterized by grandiose, arching brass lines, virtuoso percussion, lush string melodies and fluttering winds.
-- Musical America

The work is most active, possessing infectious imagery and energy, and the orchestral palette is used to the full.... Caltabiano delivers his message in an instantly appealing way.
-- [New York] Daily News