Out of Our Minds Chamber Music Series – French Pastry
Saturday, April 13, 2024 @ 7:30 PM
Nola Starling Recital Hall

Artists, in order of appearance: 
Carolyn Drazich, oboe
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
Ann Schoenecker, soprano
Jeff Copp, bassoon
 
Program
 
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921)
Sonata for Oboe and Piano, Op. 166 (1921)
I. Andantino
II. Ad libitum - Allegretto
III. Molto allegro
 
Carolyn Drazich, oboe
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
 
Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918)
Quatre chansons de jeunesse/Four Songs of Youth (1882-84)
Pantomime (Poetry by Paul Verlaine)
Clair de lune (Poetry by Paul Verlaine)
Pierrot (Théodore Faullin de Banville)
Apparition (Stéphane Mallarmé)
 
Erik Satie (1866 –1925)
“La diva de l’empire/The Starlet of the Empire” (1924)
(Poetry by Dominique Bonnaud and Numa Blès)
 
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
La courte paille/The Short Straw (1960)
(Poetry by Maurice Carême)
Le sommeil
Quelle aventure!
La reine de coeur
Ba, be, bi, bo, bu
Les anges musiciens
Le carafon
Lune d’avril
 
Ann Schoenecker, soprano
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
 
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
Trio for Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon (1926)
I. Lent - Presto
II. Andante
III. Rondo

Carolyn Drazich, oboe
Jeff Copp, bassoon
Mary Ellen Haupert, piano
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Carolyn Haupert Drazich, oboist, studied under Mary Beth Hensel while growing up in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She continued her studies at the College of St. Benedict with oboist Andrea Fedele, and earned a BA in oboe performance with a minor in German. After graduating, Carolyn continued language studies in Bamberg, Germany before returning to the states and embarking on a career in nursing. She has is currently working as a registered nurse in the Emergency Department in Duluth, MN where she lives. In her spare time, Carolyn loves to return to the oboe, especially when she can collaborate with great musicians like her mother!

Soprano Ann Schoenecker has performed multiple genres of music from opera to oratorio to music theatre throughout the U.S. and Europe. Dr. Schoenecker has held teaching positions at the Performing Arts Studios, Vienna, Austria, Luther College, University of Minnesota, University of Missouri-Columbia and currently at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wis. Dr. Schoenecker teaches functional voice training and crosses many genres of music from classical, music theatre, pop and rock. She is sought after nationally and internationally as a singer, teacher and clinician in classical, music theatre and show choir. Her students have competed and performed on international and national stages in opera and music theatre , are highly sought after as music educators and have gone on to top graduate programs in voice. Schoenecker is a former regional Metropolitan Opera finalist, finalist in the Jenny Lind National Competition for Sopranos, and has sung many roles with Opera Boston among others. Dr. Schoenecker is a graduate of Luther College, the University of Missouri-Columbia under the tutelage of Costanza Cuccaro, and the University of Minnesota where she received a DMA in vocal performance under Lawrence Weller and Clifton Ware. She also carries three certificates in Contemporary and Commercial Music Vocal Pedagogy from Shenandoah Conservatory of Music and a certificate in Vocal Pedagogy from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Dr. Schoenecker serves on the board of the Wisconsin National Association of Teachers of Singing. She is chair and associate professor of music in the music department at Viterbo University, teaching applied voice (cross genre), lyric diction, song literature, and opera literature. Dr. Schoenecker resides in Onalaska, Wis., with her husband and four daughters.
 
Mary Ellen Haupert, pianist, is currently a professor of music in Viterbo University Music Department, where she teaches piano, music history, and music theory courses. She was also Director of Music and Liturgy at Roncalli Newman from 1998-2023. She was awarded the Alec Chui Memorial Award in 2012 (for fostering student research) and Teacher of the Year in 2014. Mary Ellen is passionate about chamber music and is credited as founder/artistic director of the One-of-a-Kind Chamber Music Series (2008-2018), the Out-of-Our-Minds Chamber Music Series (2018-present), and the Bonfire Chamber Music Series (2018 – present) – a summer series sponsored by the Reif Center in Grand Rapids, MN. Mary Ellen has presented her theory pedagogy at national and international conferences, recorded two albums of chamber by Louise Farrenc on the CENTAUR label, and is a published composer. Her most recent composition, "Variant," was recorded by the Galan Piano Trio, which was released in 2024.
 
Jeffrey Copp, bassoonist, is an Elementary School Principal at La Crescent-Hokah Public Schools.  He is an alumni of The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (B.S. Music Education 1999), and The University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.M. Bassoon Performance 2001).  He received his Minnesota Board of School Administration Licensure in 2015 through Winona State University, and just completed the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Principal's Academy (a two year MBA program for school administrators - Spring of 2023).  Jeff has performed with the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra, the La Crosse Wind Ensemble, and Viterbo University and UW-La Crosse alike.  When he's not at school, or music rehearsals, he enjoys spending time with his wife Jen, and two children:  Eleanor (2), and Everett (1).  For recreation, Jeff plans to travel to North Carolina this summer with a group of motorcycle enthusiasts from across the Midwest.

NOTES and TRANSLATIONS
Sonata for Oboe and Piano, Op. 166 (1921)
The last works of the great, French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns are actually products of the twentieth century, but these sonatas, one each for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon, remain faithful to his Romantic sentiments and even reach back to the Classical era for their basic structure and simple musical lines. The Sonata for oboe and piano, Op. 166, was the first of the three to be completed over the course of a couple of months in early 1921. As soon as he was finished, Saint-Saëns wrote to his publisher in Paris that he wanted to have them "tested" before they were edited for publication. The Oboe Sonata was played by his friend Louis Bas, who seemed so pleased with the work that Saint-Saëns dedicated it to him. The structure and lines of the sonata are not unlike what other French and neo-Classical composers were using around the same period and, in fact, the Oboe Sonata also has almost a preternatural resemblance to the works of the English pastoralists (Saint-Saëns was living in Algeria when he wrote it). The sonata opens with a gentle Andantino, followed by the bipartite second movement, an ad libitum recitative leading into an Allegretto gigue. The final Molto allegro is almost dance-like with shades of the energy of Saint-Saëns' more youthful works. All in all, the sonata is a standard work in the oboe repertoire, giving the performer a gratifying match between technical challenges and melodic expression.
 
Quatre chansons de jeunesse/Four Songs of Youth (1882-84)
I. Pantomime (Poetry by Paul Verlaine)
Pierrot, who has nothing of a Clitandre about him, empties a flask without delay, and, practical, cuts into a pâté. 
Pierrot, who has nothing of a Clitandre about him, empties a flask without delay.
Cassandre, at the end of the avenue, sheds a solitary tear for his disinherited nephew.
Harlequin, the scoundrel, plots the abduction of Columbine and pirouettes four times.
Columbine dreams, surprised to feel a heart in the breeze and to hear voices in her heart. 
 
II. Clair de lune (Poetry by Paul Verlaine)
Your soul is a chosen landscape charmed by masquers and bergamasquers,
     playing the lute and dancing and half sad beneath their fantastic disguises. 
Even while they sing in the minor mode of love triumphant and life opportune,
     they do not seem to believe in their felicity, and their songs blend with the moonlight,
     and their songs blend with the moonlight. 
With the calm moonlight, sad and beautiful, that makes the bird dream in the trees,
     and sob with ecstasy the fountains, the tall slender fountains among the marbles,
​     the tall slender fountains among the marbles,
Ah, in the calm moonlight, sad and beautiful.
 
III. Pierrot (Théodore Faullin de Banville)
The good Pierrot, whom the crowd watches,
Having finished at Harlequin's wedding,
Wanders as in a dream along the Boulevard du Temple.
A young girl in a flimsy blouse
In vain entices him with her scamp's eye;
And meanwhile, mysterious and shiny
Making him its dearest delight,
The white moon with horns of a bull
Casts a glance offstage
At his friend Jean Gaspard Deburau.
 
IV. Apparition (Stéphane Mallarmé)
The moon was saddened. Weeping seraphs,
Dreaming, clutching their bows,
Amid the calm of the gossamer blossoms,
Were firing chaste sobs from dying viols
Which slipped over the blue corollas.
It was the blessed day of your first kiss.
My reverie, taking pleasure in my martyrdom
Was knowingly intoxicated by the scent of sadness
Which, even where there is no regret or disappointment, is left by the
Harvesting of a Dream in the heart which harvested it.
So, I was wandering, my eyes fixed on the aged cobbles
When, the sun on your hair, in the street
And in the evening, you appeared to me laughing
And I thought I saw the fairy with her helmet of light
Who long ago would pass through my lovely, spoiled-child's dreams
Forever letting white bouquets of scented starts drift down in a
Snowfall from her open hands.
 
NOTES: Prior to Claude Debussy, few of the major composers had depicted Pierrot in their works. Telemann included a section inspired by him in his Burlesque Overture; Mozart, in his 1783 “Masquerade;” and, Robert Schumann, in Carnaval. Between 1881 and early 1883, Claude Debussy produced two settings of poems based on Pierrot, after which followed many more musical portraits by other composers including Arnold Schoenberg’s famous Pierrot lunaire. The second of Debussy’s two settings, that of Paul Verlaine’s Pantomime, was composed in 1882 or early 1883. Like the composer’s earlier Banville setting, there is a humorous quality to music in its angular rhythms and melodic lines. Yet, here the humor is darker to match Verlaine’s depiction of Pierrot as a gluttonous drunkard. Debussy’s focus, however, is not upon Pierrot’s plight, neither Cassandre’s concern for his disinherited nephew or Harlequin’s machinations to kidnap Columbine of the second and third stanzas, but instead on Columbine herself. She alone appears noble compared to the other three and Debussy’s treats her so in the dramatically different music accompanying the fourth stanza. Yet, the darkly comical music of the opening, embellished with the wordless melismas of the voice, concludes the song
 
Paul Verlaine’s 1869 poem Clair de lune drew from Debussy three musical interpretations: the widely known third movement of the Suite bergamasque for piano, composed between 1890 and 1905; and two lesser known vocal settings, the first in 1882, and the second, a decade later in 1892. This first setting for voice and piano renders Verlaine’s lyrics in an optimistic fashion. The poem blurs the distinction between reality and imagination, placing the cast of a Commedia del’arte troupe amongst the staged setting of the reader’s soul, while draped in moonlight, they sing of love and fortune. In a brilliant F-sharp major, the opening figurations of Debussy’s setting capture beautifully the imaginative scene while the triple meter reflects the movements of its players. The vocal melody, once appearing after the somewhat lengthy introduction, floats above this graceful accompaniment, shimmering with chromatic inflections as if struck by the gleaming moonlight. The music of the opening returns, in altered form, at the start of the song’s last line of text.
 
Between 1881 and early 1883, Claude Debussy produced two settings of poems based on Pierrot, after which followed many more musical portraits by other composers including Arnold Schoenberg’s famous Pierrot lunaire. The first setting, that of Théodore de Banville’s Pierrot, was composed in 1881, but was left unpublished until after the composer’s death. Debussy’s music is humorous with a particularly taunting melodic figure that appears within the first few measures of the song. This motif then becomes a principle element of the accompaniment, appearing both as a sort of counterpoint to the vocal line or as an addition to the end of its phrases. In the final line of text, treated by Debussy in a sort of quasi-recitative, Banville makes a direct reference to Deburau himself as the sad and hapless clown.  
 
Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Apparition was the basis of Claude Debussy’s 1884 setting. Debussy’s music, however, was left unpublished and did not appear in print until 1926. Beginning in E major with brilliant figurations in the high register of the piano, Debussy effectively captures the ethereal setting of Mallarmé’s text. Throughout the song, the listener follows with great awareness the passions of the poem’s narrator as he recollects the “sacred day” of his and his beloved’s first kiss and her appearance before him in the cobblestone streets. The piano accompaniment is active, painting an intricate picture in tones of Mallarmé’s scene. At the conclusion of the opening E major section (though by then that key had long been abandoned), a new section juxtaposing compound and duple rhythms emerges in G-flat major. Despite this initial intricacy, the music of this section begins to slow as it approaches what might be termed the central episode. Shifting to C major, the voice adopts a much more lyrical tune and the piano provides a steady and quiet accompaniment of reiterated chords. A reprise of the G-flat major section closes out the song, which concludes with soft chords, over resonant open fifths, ascending into the high register of the piano. © Joseph DuBose
 
“La diva de l’empire/The Diva of the Empire” (1924)
(Poetry by Dominique Bonnaud and Numa Blès)
Beneath her large Greenaway hat,
Putting on her dazzling smile,
The fresh and charming laugh
Of a wide-eyed sighing babe,
A little girl with velvet eyes -
She's the Diva of the Empire,
She's the queen they're smitten with,
The gentlemen
And all the dandies
Of Piccadilly.

She invests a single 'Yes' with such sweetness,
That all the fancy-waistcoated snobs
Welcoming her with frenzied cheers,
Hurl bouquets on the stage,
Without observing the wily smile
On her pretty face.

She dances almost mechanically
And lifts - Oh! so modestly -
Her pretty petticoat edged with flounces,
To reveal her wriggling legs.
It is very, very innocent
And very, very exciting too.
 
Notes: The Diva of the Empire is one of the Satie's finest successes in the Caf'Conc' genre. Calibrated for the voice and the look of her friend Paulette Darty, "the queen of the slow waltz", and dedicated to Paulette Darty herself, this sung march was written to serve as an "American intermezzo" in the revue « Dévidons la bobine (Let's unwind the reel), produced by Dominique Bonnaud and Numa Blès, and intended to tour around the seaside towns as soon as 1904.
 
La courte paille/The Short Straw (1960)
(Poetry by  Maurice Carême) 
Composed in 1960, these seven songs, settings of nonsensical, melancholy, and mischievous verses for children by Maurice Carême, were initially written for Denise Duval, a celebrated lead performer in Poulenc’s operas, to sing to her son.
  1. In “Le sommeil” (Sleep), a parent attempts to comfort a child (“…come back, sleep…the Great Bear has buried the sun and rekindled his bees”) who has been crying since noon, and is perspiring, perhaps from illness. The tempo is a soothing “très calme” with a steady underlying beat; syncopations in the piano and some chromatic movement in the voice hint at the child’s restiveness.
  2. “Quelle Aventure!” (What Goings-On!) delivers a charmingly absurd image: a flea in a carriage is pulling along an elephant who is absentmindedly sucking up a pot of jam. The flea is suddenly carried away by the wind as the elephant breaks away and runs through walls. The child is tickled by the “adventure,” and this is depicted by tripping chromatics and humorously dissonant sevenths.
  3. In “La Reine de coeur” (The Queen of Hearts), played “très calme at languide,” the Queen waves “a flower of the almond tree” at young dead lovers in a secret place where “there are no more doors, no rooms nor towers.” Each phrase of the pure minor (Aeolian) mode melody floats and then gently ascends, underscored by beautiful modal harmonies.
  4. “Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu…” in E flat minor is played “Très gai, follement vite” (very lighthearted, wildly fast), and has a kind of childish scary thrill about it. Puss-in-Boots uninhibitedly goes around “playing, dancing, singing” and is told like a child “you must learn to read, to count, to write”; nevertheless, he “bursts out laughing.”
  5. The heavenly harpists in “Les anges musiciens” (The Angel Musicians) are playing Mozart “in drops of blue joy” on a school holiday, progressing from B flat major (the key of Mozart’s last piano concerto which incorporates an actual children’s tune) to an undulating D major.
  6. “Le Carafon” (The Baby Carafe) is a nonsense song that trades on the punning near homophony of the words “carafe” and “girafe” (giraffe): an adult carafe wants to have a baby carafe just like “madame la Girafe” has a baby giraffe at the zoo. The music modulates all over the place with the same delight as a child’s sense of humour. The last song,
  7. “Lune d’Avril” (April Moon), played “Très lent et irréal” (very slow and unreal), is a retrospective epilogue. The text contains lovely surrealistic dream imagery: “the peach tree with the saffron heart, the fish who laughs at the sleet, the bird who…gently awakens the dead…the land where there is joy…sunny with primroses, all the guns have been destroyed.” This last line is set to a descending vocal line over a rich minor ninth chord voiced in strong yet somehow plaintive octaves, fifths, and fourths. The song then ends with the chant-like “Lune, belle lune, lune d’avril, Lune” (Moon, beautiful moon, April moon, Moon).  © Rebecca Cohen

​Trio for Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon (1926)
In a letter dated 1942 Poulenc wrote: “I know perfectly well that I’m not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Ravel or Debussy, but I think there’s room for new music which doesn’t mind using other people’s chords. Wasn’t that the case with Mozart–Schubert?” Indeed, Poulenc’s music was driven by a lively sense for melodic invention, set against traditional, even old-fashioned harmonic backgrounds.

This duality was one of many in the life of the composer. He suffered fits of manic-depression, characterized by deep sadness and doubt followed by maniacal states of optimism. French critic Claude Rostand remarked that: “In Poulenc there is something of the monk and something of the rascal.” Poulenc associated with the modernist circles at Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop in the rue de l’Odéon, where he met Apollinaire, Éluard, Breton, Aragon, Gide, Fargue, Valéry and Claudel, yet remained faithful to the simplicity and transparency of French neo-classicism. Introduced to Paris musical circles by his piano teacher, Spanish virtuoso Ricardo Viñes, Poulenc soon struck a friendship with a group of young composers who would present concerts at the studio of the painter Émile Lejeune, in the rue Huyghens in Montparnasse. In a 1920 review of a concert featuring all of them, Henri Collet baptized Poulenc, Milhaud, Auric, Honegger, Tailleferre, and Durey the “Groupe des Six.”

Though largely self-taught, Poulenc soon caught the attention of patrons and colleagues alike, including Stravinsky, one of his influences, who helped him to get his music published. Despite his many associations with other artists, Poulenc’s compositional style remained firmly independent throughout his long career. His delight in writing for the human voice, fuelled partly by the sacred works composed after his religious re-awakening in 1936, is already present in this early Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano (1926). Dedicated to Manuel de Falla, this sparkling piece opens with a presto movement, featuring the oboe and the bassoon as the story-tellers. A largely homophonic piano provides plenty of opportunities for the two wind instruments to alternate cadenzas. Poulenc uses long and contrasting lines, shifting between the harmonies of A major and A minor, to create narrative tension. The second movement is a lyrical pastorale, described by Poulenc himself as “sweet and melancholic.” The finale, a brisk rondo, continues the pastorale-feel of the preceding section, presenting miniature horn-calls, and concluding with a joyful fanfare.

Poulenc’s professional success was steady; his music was a welcome breath of fresh air, perceived as natural and impulsive, unrestricted by the overt formalism and intellectual games that many of his modernist contemporaries were accused of. Poulenc died in 1963 of a sudden heart attack in his apartment in Paris. © Barbara Moroncini