Ernő Dohnányi’s composition Symphonic Minutes comprises of five short movements, each only a couple of minutes long. It has undoubtedly become one of the composer’s most popular works, a popularity that predates the more recent renaissance in the composer’s fortunes. Indeed for the past few decades, it has been performed regularly in Hungary and could frequently be heard on the radio.

We can thank Dohányi’s second wife, Elza Galafrs for the work’s inception. Elza was a Berlin born actress and from 1912 Dohnániy regarded her as a collaborative partner for his own stage music creations. It was she who successfully mounted Dohnányi’s pantomime Pierette in Vienna, where earlier it had been a failure.

Dohnányi had long been preoccupied with the thought of turning his successful Ruralia Hungarica composition into theatre music, but the work was self evidently too short. The Symphonic Minutes are, then, a supplement to the Ruralia movements, and the two cycles combined became the dance legend Holy Torch. This was premiered at the Hungarian State Opera House on December 6th 1934, with choreography by Elza Galafrs, who devised an entirely novel system of notation for the work, writing essentially a dance score. She had long sensed that the traditional method of notating dance steps was both cumbersome and misleading, and so taking the five line system of music as her starting point, she wrote her instructions, which thus became readily comprehensible to even a layman, between five lines, each a few centimetres apart. This contained the music, a textual description of the action, precise movements of the dancers, the placing of the dance groups on the stage and even instructions for the lighting. In the choreography, she endeavoured for the placing of the dancers in each group scene to evoke a Hungarian folk motif. (This remarkable “score” is now on display at the Paris Museum of Dance.)

The composition however was premiered not in its stage version but in an orchestral guise. Earlier of course, there had been occasions when new works by Bartók, Kodály and Dohnányi were premiered together, but this still counted as a very special occasion. The first occasion was the legendary concert marking the 50th anniversary of the unification of Pest, Buda and Óbuda into modern day Budapest, in which Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus, Bartók’s Dance Suite and Dohnányi’s Festival Overture were all given their world premieres. Ten years later in 1933, the Orchestra of the Philharmonic Society celebrated its eightieth birthday with a concert that gave the first performances of Kodály’s Galantian Dances, Bartók’s Five Folk Songs with Orchestral Accompaniment, and Dohnányi’s Symphonic Minutes. The critics were enthusiastic – Aladár Tóth wrote appreciatively: “What nation could present three such geniuses at the same time?” He had this to say about Dohnányi’s work: “This little bagatelle is all harmony, form and lightness, which frolics in one place, is capricious in another, and pure song elsewhere; when it is witty it is also wild, in other words, a divertimento which not only entertains the mind but also raises the soul. It transfixes and liberates.”

We think of Dohnányi’s artistry in terms of its light handed composition, its virtuosity, its remarkable craftsmanship and its largely unclouded, upbeat charm. The score of Symphonic Minutes matches these expectations perfectly.

The opening moment, marked Capriccio, is awash with filigree woodwind passages which evoke the technique of German Romantic piano virtuosity, although perhaps we ought rather to think in terms of Mendelssohn’s fairy music. The handling of the orchestra and the richness and virtuosity of the orchestration evokes the art of Richard Strauss.

The Rhapsody movement begins with a sad, discursive melody on the cor anglais to which the clarinet responds. In this evocative music, we encounter both the nature music of late Romanic opera – for example Wagner’s shepherd boy’s melody (and we also hear a near verbatim quotation from Tristan) – coupled with a night monologue closely related to folk music that occurs often in the works of Kodály and Wagner.
At the centre of the work is the Scherzo which is momentous robustly orchestrated dance music. We could be forgiven for thinking we can hear the influence of Prokofiev. The brass sonorities of the emotional, lyrical  melody that counterpoints the boisterous principal section is late Romantic in character, although we can find similar emotional devices employed by film composers in the mid 1950s.

Dohnányi’s Symphonic Minutes also employs a self-explanatory variation form. The Tema con variazioni takes as its subject matter a nobly simple 16th century melody (“Tema del seicento”). The variations initially resolve the rhythm of the theme into soft, constant motion, but then the music takes on a more steely edge. The mood of this music was to return in the chorale of Bartók’s Concerto. The gracefully shaped clarinet melody of the penultimate variation seems very distant from the original theme, but the final variation faithfully returns to the theme, whereupon a celesta joins in, and its secretive sonority raises the music into a hitherto unsuspected ethereal world.

The closing movement (Rondo) is full of energy and again, we find the virtuosity of the opening fairy scherzo music. But here the music takes on folk music character: it is good humoured, cloudless and joyful, a fitting successor to Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.

Although Dohnányi’s composition is a treasure trove of musical historical associations, when we hear the five movements performed together, we derive an unmistakeable impression of a first rate musical personality.

With music described as “breathtaking” (Kitchener-Waterloo Record), “imaginative and expressive” (The National Post), “a pulse-pounding barrage on the senses” (The Globe and Mail), and “Bartok on steroids” (Birmingham News), Kelly-Marie Murphy’s voice is well known on the Canadian music scene. She has created a number of memorable works for some of Canada’s leading performers and ensembles, including the Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, The Gryphon Trio, James Campbell, Shauna Rolston, the Cecilia and Afiara String Quartets, and Judy Loman.

Dr. Murphy’s music has been performed around the world by outstanding soloists and ensembles, and has had radio broadcasts in over 22 countries. Her music has been interpreted by renowned conductors such as Sir Andrew Davis, David Brophy, Bramwell Tovey, and Mario Bernardi. Her music has been heard in iconic concert halls, such as Carnegie Hall in New York, The Mozarteum in Salzburg, and The National Concert Hall in Dublin.

Besides many academic scholarships awarded in Canada and England, Dr. Murphy has also won prizes for her music, dating back to 1992. She won first prize and the People’s Choice Award at the CBC Young Composer’s Competition in 1994 (string quartet category); received 2 honorable mentions in the New Music Concerts competition in 1995; earned fifth place at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris in 1996 for her first orchestra piece, From the Drum Comes a Thundering Beat. . .; was awarded first and second prizes in the Maryland Composer’s Competition at Loyola College in Baltimore, 1998; won third place in the Alexander Zemlinsky Prize for Composition in 1999 for her work, Utterances; won first prize in the International Horn Society’s Composer’s Competition, 2001, for her work, Departures and Deviations; and in 2003 won first prize for her harp concerto, And Then At Night I Paint the Stars in the Centara Corporation New Music Festival Composer’s Competition.

Dr. Murphy has completed short residencies at the Snowbird Institute for the Arts, Utah, with Joan Tower; Tapestry Music Theatre/Canadian Opera Company, Toronto; rESOund Festival of Contemporary Music, Edmonton; Strings of the Future International String Quartet Festival, Ottawa; Soundstreams/Encounters, Toronto; and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2004 Dr. Murphy was honored with The Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Calgary, and in 2005 as the Roger D. Moore Distinguished Visitor in Composition from the University of Toronto. Dr. Murphy was granted the distinction of Honorable Mention in the 2008 Barlow Prize for composition. From 2006 to 2008, she served as composer-in-residence to the National Youth Orchestra of Canada.

Kelly-Marie Murphy was born on a NATO base in Sardegna, Italy, and grew up on Canadian Armed Forces bases all across Canada. She began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary with William Jordan and Allan Bell, and later received a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Leeds, England, where she studied with Philip Wilby. After living and working for many years in the Washington D.C. area where she was designated “an alien of extraordinary ability” by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, she is now based in Ottawa.

kellymariemurphy.com

Kinan Azmeh is a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. He sat down with Yo-Yo to talk about Art in a Time of Crisis.