Program Notes: Scheherazade

Turbulent Flames by Jessica Meyer

A percussion flourish pivots to a flickering, dancing motif in the upper winds and strings, decorative trills and energetic rhythmic moments building to an explosive rush. The music remains bright and quick and inquisitive, layering melodies of different speeds atop one another, with heavier brass interjecting at times to up the chaos. There is a brief, serene middle section before the music crescendos to a great final burst in the entire orchestra.

A Long Island native, Jessica Meyer is renowned both as a violinist and composer. The Orlando Philharmonic is a part of a consortium of eight orchestras that pooled funds to commission Turbulent Flames, a common practice in today’s orchestral landscape that spreads costs around and guarantees composers multiple performances. The Auburn Symphony in Washington State gave the world premiere of the piece in 2024; other commissioners include the Idaho Falls Symphony, the Cape Symphony in Massachusetts, the Greenville Symphony in South Carolina, and others.

Meyer herself describes the work as follows:

Flames behave in very interesting ways, much like people – just the right trigger, environment, or situation can create vastly different states of being. The title of this piece was decided well before I started writing it, and I thought it was fitting since I wanted to write a fiery piece for orchestra that combined a good amount of virtuosity, unpredictability, and fun. When the time came, I started going down the rabbit hole of scientific articles and videos about various flame types and how a typical laminar flame (think gas stove or a Bunsen burner) could turn into a more unpredictable (and dangerous, in an uncontrolled situation) turbulent flame. I started seeing terms that seemed inherently musical to me; ones like Coherent Oscillations, Vortex Shedding, Luminous Zone, Phase Jitter, Pulsating Instability, and Propagation Velocity. While I played around with all of the sounds that remind me of these processes (including ominous “flamethrower” sounding rolls on the bass drum) I thought of all the years I have played in different ensembles and wondered how powerful and incendiary an orchestra could get all while enjoying the safety of a controlled burn.

This work would not be possible without the leadership of conductor Wesley Schulz and Executive Director Rachel Perry of the Auburn Symphony Orchestra. They have grown, and continue to build, a consortium of orchestras across the United States that will introduce this work into the world – and for that, I am forever grateful.

Nights in the Garden of Spain by Manuel de Falla

When the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla realized he wouldn’t make a living as a pianist or composer in his home country, he struck out on a pilgrimage to France in 1907 to explore new styles of composition and make his fortune. After meeting famous composers including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Maurice Ravel, he began to adapt his own melodies — often inspired by Spanish and Andalusian folk music — to these new styles and forms of composition, creating a synthesis of melody and style that would endear his music to the world.

De Falla first imagined Nights in the Garden of Spain as a trio of nocturnes for solo piano, but the melodies and fragrances of the music so captured his imagination that he increased the scale dramatically, scoring the work for full orchestra and piano. It’s not a piano concerto, per say, as the piano does not take center stage, but rather offers decorative commentary and embellishments on the melodies on equal footing with the orchestra.

The first movement is heavy and rich, with sparse textures allowing a simple and ruminative theme to waft from the orchestra. These are the gardens of the Generalife, the palace in Granada, jasmine-scented and sultry. The piano enters to add flourishes, and the theme becomes more animated and passionate and splendid at times during the movement. Some scholars have argued that this movement is inspired by the garden’s Islamic design, which features repeating and interlocking patterns in the architecture and layout of the gardens themselves.

Still, the music is not meant to be literally descriptive, according to the composer himself, who wrote,

“If these ‘symphonic impressions’ have achieved their object, the mere enumeration of their titles should be a sufficient guide to the hearer. Although in this work — as in all which have a legitimate claim to be considered as music – the composer has allowed a definite design… the end for which it was written is no other than to evoke places, sensations, and sentiments. The music has no pretensions to being descriptive; it is merely expressive. But something more than the sound of festivals and dances has inspired these ‘evocations in sound,’ for melancholy and mystery have their part also.”

The second movement is an unidentified garden in the distance that features an exotic dance, with trills and Eastern-sounding scales in the strings, oboes, and piano fluttering over a strong, rhythmic accompaniment. The movement transitions directly without pause to the “Gardens of the Sierra de Córdoba,” an ancient Andalusian city. To close, the composer invokes several dramatic, lively folk tunes.

A devout Roman Catholic, de Falla lived a shy, austere life at home and abroad. He moved back to Spain at the start of WWI to complete Gardens, and he increasingly turned to mystical subjects in his music later in life.

Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

It was only a matter of time before the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov fell prey to a traditional musical fascination: the exotic allure of the East. For centuries, Western artists had viewed the culture and imperial power of the East as both alluring and threatening — some artistic depictions were exaggerated and patronizing, and some were honest homages or fusions of Eastern and Western artistic styles.

Rimsky-Korsakov found inspiration in the famous 1,001 Arabian Nights, and he wrote a blazingly colorful and dramatic four-movement symphonic suite to musically illustrate several of the tales within. The resulting work, Scheherazade, so named after the heroine in Arabian Nights, is explicitly programmatic. In the original score, the composer wrote an introductory note for the premiere:

The Sultan Schariar, convinced that all women are false and faithless, vowed to put to death each of his wives after the first nuptial night. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by entertaining her lord with fascinating tales, told seriatim, for a thousand and one nights. The Sultan, consumed with curiosity, postponed from day to day the execution of his wife, and finally repudiated his bloody vow entirely.

The first movement begins with a vengeful, furious melody in the low brass and strings that represents the sultan and his murderous plot. Following a series of hushed woodwind chords, a harp sounds, invoking the centuries-old tradition of bards using harps to punctuate their stories. And then, a gorgeous, beguiling violin solo — the voice of Scheherazade herself. This music returns between the different tales to weave them together holistically, just as Scheherazade weaves each tale together.

The individual movements don’t track with individual tales precisely. Rather, they take thematic inspiration from their narrative elements. “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship” has an undulating, wave-like motif that rises and falls in the cellos, perhaps inspired by the composer’s service in Russia’s navy, which took him as far as Niagara Falls and Rio de Janeiro. The “Kalandar Prince” movement, based on the tale of a medieval Islamic character of a wandering mystic, passes solos around to be performed in an improvisatory style unique to each player and rushes along with a spirit of adventure.

The third movement, “The Young Prince and the Princess,” is a distillation of the love stories of the tales, a sentimental tune retaining just a whiff of the original Arabian Nights’ eroticism, with Scheherazade’s theme returning in the middle to interject something of her own passion, perhaps. Finally, the fourth movement references each movement in turn while adding a desperate, careening new melody. The Sultan’s vehement theme returns throughout before blending at the finale with Scheherazade’s music and resolving into harmonic bliss.

Scheherazade is especially famous for its orchestration. There isn’t all that much thematic material in the work, but the way Rimsky-Korsakov blends instruments and the variety of effects he creates by passing that material to different sections of the orchestra is still admired. (He literally wrote a textbook on orchestration that is still referenced today.) What’s all the more impressive is that he wrote for orchestra immediately from his ear and head — most composers in that day would write music for piano and then orchestrate later. His was a marvelous, instinctive talent.