Jean Sibelius
1865-1957
Finlandia, Opus 26
Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, cymbal, bass drum, triangle and strings
Estimated length: 8 minutes
Sweden relinquished Finland to the Russian Empire in 1809, where it became an autonomous duchy with significant control over its own affairs. However, beginning in 1870, Russia gradually began to rescind Finland’s privileges and autonomy. While Swedish was the language of the educated and of the middle class, Russian repression aroused strong nationalist feelings and initiated a revival of the Finnish language. Jean Sibelius was born into this new nationalism and in 1876 enrolled in the first grammar school to teach in Finnish. Finland finally gained its independence towards the end of World War I.
Sibelius was by no means a child prodigy. He started playing piano at the age of 9 but didn’t like it and took up the violin at 14. Although he had made several attempts at composition as a child, his ambition was to become a concert violinist. For his entire life he regretted not following this dream.
Sibelius’s first success as a composer came in 1892 with a nationalistic symphonic poem/cantata entitled Kullervo, Op. 7, which was premiered with great success but never again performed in his lifetime. During the next six years he composed numerous nationalistic pageants, symphonic poems and vocal works, mostly based on the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala. In appreciation, and in order to enable him to compose undisturbed, the Finnish government gave him a pension for life in 1897.
In February 1899 the Russian Imperial Governor published the notorious “February Manifesto,” designed to curtail Finland’s autonomy and facilitate its Russification. Among other restrictions, it imposed censorship of the press, forcing the demise of many newspapers. In order to support the dismissed staff, a three-day cultural festival was organized in Helsinki to raise funds for the Press Pension Fund. Sibelius provided the music for the grand finale in the form of a dramatic seven-tableaux spectacle depicting episodes from Finnish history. It culminated in a stirring patriotic anthem entitled Finland Awake. A year later, with some modification, Sibelius recast it as an independent tone poem, Finlandia. With its powerful opening and hymn-like middle section, it soon became the symbol of Finnish nationalism. Before 1917, in order to evade the Russian censor, it had to be performed under the euphemistic title “Impromptu.”
During the next 26 years, Sibelius composed the symphonies and tone poems that made him world famous. But in 1926, beset by a combination of bipolar disorder and alcoholism, he quit composing, secluding himself in his home bordering the starkly beautiful Finnish forests he had so effectively described in music. He died 31 years later.
Samuel Barber
1910-1981
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 14
Scored for solo violin, 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, snare drum and strings
Estimated length: 25 minutes
In early 1939, Samuel Barber was commissioned by Samuel Fels, a wealthy Philadelphia soap manufacturer, to write a violin concerto for his protégé and adopted son, the young violinist Iso Briselli. Barber’s commission was a hefty $1,000 and he received half of it in advance. This was Barber’s first major commission, and he immediately set out to fulfill it. But commissions, while usually sought after by artists, clearly carry their own risk. Things did not go according to plan, and what actually happened depends on whose memory you trust more. Since all the protagonists are deceased, there is no way to ascertain whose version is the correct one.
According to Barber and some of his friends and colleagues, he sent the first two movements, written in a conservative lyrical and romantic style, to Briselli, by the end of the summer of 1939. Briselli, however, considered them “too simple and not brilliant enough” and refused to accept them.
Barber apparently took his revenge by making the third movement fiendishly difficult. When he resubmitted it, Briselli declared it unplayable, and Fels wanted his advance back. At that point, Barber summoned a young violin student from the Curtis Institute of Music, gave him the manuscript and two hours to prepare. Accompanied by piano, the student demonstrated to Fels and his protégé that the movement was indeed playable. The unanimous verdict was that Fels had to pay the rest of the commission. Barber, however, forfeited the second half with the stipulation that Briselli relinquish his right to the first public performance and never perform the work in public.
Briselli, some 40 years later, told a different story. According to him, he was enthusiastic about the first two movements but found the third too lightweight and suggested that Barber expand it. The composer refused. We will probably never know for sure what really happened, but the Concerto was a popular success from the start.
The first movement, Allegro, opens with an expansive, lyrical theme on the violin alone. The second theme, introduced by the woodwinds, continues the romantic mood although it is syncopated and more rhythmic. The whole tone of the movement is that of a quiet discussion, with only occasionally raised voices in the middle, and ending in a tranquil whisper.
An extended cantabile oboe solo over muted strings opens the aria-like second movement. The violin eventually enters with a second theme that develops the mood introduced by the oboe. The violin then returns to the opening melody, rising to a climax, after which the quiet mood of the beginning returns.
The terse and fiery rondo Finale, Presto in moto perpetuo – the movement Briselli couldn’t or wouldn’t tackle – creates a stunning contrast, placing tremendous demands on the soloist, who has to play at a breathless tempo for 110 measures without interruption. Throughout the perpetual motion, Barber subtly changes the meter and every so often inserts a jazzy syncopated refrain.
Camille Saint-Saëns
1835-1921
Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Opus 78, Organ Symphony
Scored for 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, cymbal, triangle, bass drum, organ, piano (4 hands) and strings
Estimated length: 36 minutes
Composer, organist and pianist Camille Saint-Saëns was phenomenally precocious and gifted in everything he undertook. He was a man of wide culture, well versed in literature, the arts and scientific developments. As a child prodigy, he wrote his first piano compositions at age three and at age 10 made his formal debut at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, playing Mozart and Beethoven piano concertos. In his youth, he was considered an innovator, but by the time he reached maturity, he had become a conservative pillar of the establishment, trying to maintain the classical musical tradition in France and expressing open disdain for the new trends in music, including the “malaise” of Wagnerism. He premiered his five piano concertos with impeccable technique and effortless grace. But neither his compositions nor his pianism were ever pinnacles of passion or emotion.
Saint-Saëns professed to uphold the classical virtues of clarity, restraint and elegance, but none of these virtues appear in the C minor Symphony, a romantic work with colorful and grandiose orchestration throughout. There is thematic interconnection between the movements, and the traditional four movements are fused into two: “[the Symphony] embraces in principle the four traditional movements, but the first, halted in its development, serves as introduction to the Adagio, while the Scherzo is abandoned by the same process to lead to the Finale,” the composer wrote. The organ part is integrated into the orchestra and does not emerge as a solo counterforce, as in a concerto. Appropriately, it was dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt, whose virtuosic organ music served as a model for Saint-Saëns. The symphony was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society and premiered by that orchestra in May 1886 with the composer conducting.
Despite the composer’s insistence on the Symphony as a two-movement work, it is easier to think of the it as having four movements since there are four distinctly discernible sections each with its own mood and musical structure. Saint-Saëns borrowed from Liszt the technique of thematic transformation in which a single theme, or motto, recurs in various guises as an essential unifying device.
After a brief slow introduction, with a hint of the motto in the solo oboe and flute, the stuttering motto of the Symphony creates a kind of anxious tension. It is followed by a classically contrasting and lilting second theme. The Allegro comprises a continuous stream of transformations of the motto and via a reprise of the introduction, without pause, the movement blends into the Poco Adagio, where the organ first appears accompanying an expansive new melody in the lower strings. After a few minutes, the motto quietly returns, eventually combining with the Adagio melody, where it is played pizzicato by the basses and cellos.
The stuttering rhythm returns in the third movement Scherzo with a new theme, but soon the motto recurs in the flutes and oboes, eventually taking over. The Trio, yet another iteration of the motto, is accompanied by the addition of the piano into the orchestral mix. After the revised repeat of the scherzo and trio, the movement ends on a serene note.
The final section, which is entirely based on the motto, begins with a grand entrance of the organ, which with the strings, and piano, first states it as a majestic chorale. With a nod to Bach, a fugue then follows. Further transformations bring the Symphony to a triumphant conclusion.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
brian lewis
Brian Lewis has established himself as one of today’s most versatile, talented, and charismatic young violinists. In addition to concerto debuts in both New York’s Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, he has appeared with the Berlin, Louisiana, Kansas City, Syracuse, Odense (Denmark), Wichita, Hartford, Eugene, Spokane, and American Symphony orchestras, among others. In Asia, Lewis has appeared as soloist with the Taejon City Symphony in Korea, the Royal Metropolitan Orchestra in Japan, and the Taipei Conductors Orchestra in Taiwan. Activities in Central and South America include a residency in San Jose for the U.S./Costa Rican Cultural Center, recitals and master classes throughout Honduras for the United States Information Agency, as well as concerto performances with the Philharmonic of Lima in Peru.
In addition to his highly acclaimed recital debuts at both Wigmore Hall in London and Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series in New York, Lewis has concertized extensively throughout the United States and abroad. He has recorded six CDs, most recently for Delos as soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra of music by Leonard Bernstein and Hollywood composer Michael McLean.
Known for his variety in programming and ability to communicate with audiences of all ages, Lewis performs frequently as a member of the Mid-America Arts Alliance and Kansas Arts Commission Touring Programs as well as Young Audiences of Houston. He has won numerous awards and prizes, including Young Audiences National Artist of the Year, grand prize in the Mid-America Violin Competition, the Waldo Mayo Talent Award and the Sony ES Award.
Lewis holds both the Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, where he was a scholarship student of Dorothy DeLay, Masao Kawasaki and Hyo Kang. In 2002, he was appointed Associate Professor in Violin Performance and Pedagogy at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the youngest people in the U.S. to hold such a position.
Francis Scott Key
(1779-1843)
and John Stafford Smith
(1750-1836)
Arr. Igor Stravinsky
1882-1971
“The Star-Spangled Banner”
Scored for 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 3 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani and strings
Like most refugees who fled Europe at the outbreak of World War II, Igor Stravinsky arrived in America in September 1939 broke. Already a world-famous composer, he soon found sponsors and publishers interested in his music. In early 1941, at the suggestion of one of his students, he made the choral arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a gesture of gratitude and of goodwill towards his newly adopted homeland, waiving all performance fees. This rarely performed version was chosen by Kimbo specifically to be paired with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
Igor Stravinsky
1882-1971
Symphony of Psalms
Scored for 5 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 5 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 4 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 5 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, bass drum, harp, piano, cello, bass
Estimated length: 21 minutes
Although born into the Russian Orthodox Church, Igor Stravinsky left it as a young man. But in 1925, he gradually returned to become a regular communicant a year later. He took the opportunity to musically express his newly found religious faith when he received a commission in 1929 from Serge Koussevitzky – the legendary conductor of the Boston Symphony – to celebrate the orchestra’s 50th anniversary in 1930-31.
Stravinsky did not, however, use a Russian or Old Church Slavonic text for the Symphony. Instead, he set a Latin text to his music, making it a more inclusive religious statement. Other factors that may have motivated this stunningly original work are open to question since the composer himself was a notorious user of imagination when it came to biographical facts.
Stravinsky uses the term “symphony” in its broadest sense, reflecting its etymology as the coming together of sounds. In form and content it bears no relationship to the classical definition of the term. He had used the word in this manner once before in his Symphonies for Wind Instruments in 1920. By its title he wanted to indicate that the work had a coherent structure. The three movements are ingeniously related thematically and are performed without interruption. He built the two outer movements on psalm texts for particular feast days: Movement I for Assumption Day: Movement III for the week after Easter.
The orchestration is unusual, reflecting Stravinsky’s predilection during his neoclassical period for the more austere sonorities of the winds: five flutes, four oboes, English horn, three bassoons, contrabassoon, piccolo trumpet, four trumpets, three trombones, cellos, basses and two pianos, without violins or violas. The melodies are stark and archaic; Stravinsky employs the octatonic scale (alternating half steps and whole steps) that figures in his own earlier works and in those of his Russian contemporaries. The harmonies are equally austere, even cold, and the emotional climaxes, especially in the third movement, are intense but subdued.
The opening movement (Psalm 39, verses 13 and 14) is a plea to God, who seems not necessarily inclined to listen, much less respond. The core motive that unifies the entire work can be heard in the arpeggios in the upper woodwinds following the explosive initial opening chords. The choral intonation wavers on a semitone, suggesting the uncertainty of the supplicant. Stravinsky composed this movement after the second and third.
The second movement (Psalm 40, verses 2, 3 and 4) is more optimistic – Stravinsky pasted a drawing of a crucifix in his sketches with the caption “Adveniat regnum tuum” (“Thy kingdom come”). It is a double fugue, with the first fugue subject in the orchestra and the second in the chorus. The orchestra’s theme is derived from the arpeggios from the opening of the first movement and the woodwind accompaniment for the first entrance of the chorus. It is a paean to J. S. Bach, the greatest religious composer of the Protestant tradition.
The entirety of Psalm 150 comprises the text of the final movement, which Stravinsky composed first. The exclamation “Alleluia” frames a series of verses, each of which begin with the word “Laudate” (Praise). The movement begins as a stately processional, but in the middle, the tempo suddenly picks up, the chorus intoning, “Laudate Dominum. Laudate Eum” in excited syncopations while the orchestra plays the core motive. A brief joyous orchestral interlude reflects the Psalm verses praising God with trumpet, strings, cymbals, pipe and the human voice. After the repeat of the solemn “Alleluia,” the chorus again takes up the slow processional of praises as the tempo becomes gradually slower and more intense. The concluding chord resolves a sense of harmonic tension that has been sustained through all three movements.
Gabriel Fauré
1845-1924
Pelléas et Mélisande, Opus 80: Suite
Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, harp and strings
Estimated length: 18 minutes
The bulk of Gabriel Fauré’s music – whether piano, chamber, vocal or orchestral – conveys the impression of a personal and private statement, an intimate conversation between the composer and his muse. All his life Fauré’s ideal was, as he put it, to create musique de chambre; the larger forms – opera, symphonies or concertos – were not for him. His music is admirably suited for performance in private homes or small halls. The elegance and ease of much of his music belies the painstaking effort that went into the composition. Although Fauré was not one to wear his heart on his sleeve, he often experimented and surprised audiences with unexpected phrasing and harmonies, and elegant twists of musical development.
It took Fauré a long time to achieve recognition as a major composer. He was a gentle, modest man who rarely had a harsh word for anybody. Despite his early success as composer of songs and chamber works, he was only appreciated by a small circle of friends and he was 60 when he finally became Director of the Paris Conservatoire in 1905, a post he held until 1920.
Fauré composed his incidental music in 1898 for a production in London, commissioned by famed actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (the original Eliza Doolittle in G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion). It was a hasty job, and Fauré had his student, the composer Charles Koechlin, finish some of the orchestration. Soon thereafter he extracted four movements from the original nine to create an orchestral suite:
Prélude sets the mood for the play and Mélisande’s fate. The French horn symbolizes Golaud.
Fileuse (The Spinner) introduces Act III, which opens with Mélisande spinning, a beautiful oboe solo.
Sicilienne introduces Act II, in which Mélisande inadvertently loses the ring Golaud had given her down a well. Fauré originally composed this music in 1893 for Molière’s comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme and later transcribed it in 1898 for cello and piano. Here it is a flute solo, the best known of the movements and often played as a separate piece.
La mort de Mélisande (The Death of Mélisande) introduces Act V.
Those familiar with Claude Debussy’s opera of the same name will note the ephemeral atmosphere of both works, inspired by the dream-like quality of the play, despite its moments of violence.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the Belgian symbolist poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) touched a sympathetic chord with composers with his fantastic stories and plays of mystery and spiritual transcendence. The most successful of Maeterlinck’s plays was Pelléas et Mélisande, written in 1892. It has a mystical fairy tale quality, taking place in the ephemeral medieval past described as a “dissonant dream world.” The motives and motivations of the characters in the play are unimportant in themselves, as they are all helpless against fate.
Golaud, grandson of King Arkël, has discovered Mélisande, a mysterious young woman with luxuriant golden hair, lost in a forest. He marries her, but her life in the castle is unhappy. Gradually Mélisande develops a friendship with Golaud’s younger half-brother, Pelléas, but Golaud becomes suspicious of them and believes that Mélisande is unfaithful. The more he presses Mélisande for information, the more she withdraws from him, turning always to Pelléas for emotional support. In the climactic scene, Pelléas and Mélisande meet at night outside of the castle gates. Pelléas announces his departure, declaring that his love for Mélisande has made his life at the castle unbearable; hesitantly, Mélisande says that she loves Pelléas as well, and the two share a passionate embrace. At that moment, Golaud, dashes out and kills Pelléas. Mélisande flees but is found and brought back to the castle where she dies mysteriously a few days later, heartbroken over the loss of Pelléas but finally at peace with herself.
The story has everything to whet a composer’s appetite: jealousy, fratricide, belated remorse, wife abuse, even child abuse (Golaud forces his little son to spy on the lovers.) Claude Debussy converted the play into an opera, Arnold Schoenberg wrote a massive symphonic poem, and Jan Sibelius and Gabriel Fauré wrote incidental music to the play.
Vasily Kalinnikov
(1866-1901)
Symphony No. 1 in G minor
Finale: Allegro moderato
Scored for 2 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, harp and strings
Estimated length: 11 minutes
The son of an impoverished police official, Vasily Kalinnikov grew up in severely strained circumstances. His father encouraged his musical talents, but when, at age 18, he enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory, he had to withdraw after a few months for lack of funds. He finally won a scholarship as a bassoon player at the Moscow Philharmonic Society Music School where he studied until 1892. During these years he lived in dire poverty, playing violin, bassoon and occasionally timpani in theatre orchestras and working as a music copyist to make ends meet.
Tchaikovsky, who thought highly of him, recommended him for a theater conductorship in 1892 and in the following year as assistant conductor at the prestigious Italian Theatre. But, Kalinnikov suffered from tuberculosis and had to resign after a year to spend the rest of his short life as a semi-invalid in the Crimea. In spite of his illness, he devoted himself to composing, producing two symphonies along with a variety of piano, orchestra, solo voice and choral compositions. He died before completing an opera based on the Russian victory over Napoleon in 1812.
Kalinnikov composed the Symphony No. 1 in 1894-95; it was premiered in Kiev in 1897. The rousing finale shows a strong influence of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksander Borodin. It recapitulates in part themes from all previous movements, especially the opening one.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Mark O’Connor
b.1961
Americana Symphony
Scored for 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trombones, 3 trumpets, 1 tuba, timpani, agogo bell, bass drum, bell plate, bell tree, bongos, cabasa, celeste, chimes, claves, congas, cow bell, cymbals (Chinese, hand-held crash cymbals, finger cymbals, medium, large, ride, sizzle, splash), glockenspiel, gong, guiro with wooden scraper, hand bells, snare (side drum and field snare), piano, shake tambourine (with head and headless), timbale, tom toms, triangle, wooden blocks (high and low), vibraphone (with motor), xylophone, harp and strings
Estimated length: 32 minutes
Composed in 2006-07, Americana Symphony is actually a set of variations on Appalachia Waltz, one of O’Connor’s more popular works, composed in 1993. Using different phrase groups for each movement, O’Connor reveals the Waltz in its original form only at the end, thereby standing on its head the customary organization of theme and variations. The titles of each of the six movements contributes a programmatic element to the Symphony, not so much as a narrative, but evocative of different stages in the American experience and westward expansion.
O’Connor came to regard the Waltz as “the piece that embodied this idea of an American classical string sound, a signature composition that signalled that there was a place in music where classical settings and American folk music language could meet on equal footing.”
Brass Fanfare: Wide Open Spaces: The brass and percussion create the characteristic American sound, the familiar musical symbol associated with the American experience.
New World Fanciful Dance: In the rhythm of an Irish jig, this movement employs a variety of ethnic sounds that together symbolize the American melting pot.
Different Paths Towards Home: The slow tempo and strict fugal counterpoint harken back to classical models, suggesting a sense of nostalgia combined with the longing for a new idealized home.
Open Plains Hoedown: O’Connor writes of this movement: “I want the listener to ‘see’ the dust being kicked up by the wagons and horses as the prairie dogs and rabbits do their own hoedown and scurry out of the way!” Appropriately, the hoedown is a dance incorporating a variety of ethnic sources.
Soaring Eagle, Setting Sun: This movement is a canon. The musical rigor enforces a certain harmonic monotony that for the composer evokes the image of the slow, hazardous ascent of the Rocky Mountains in single file along narrow paths. Violins, piccolo and glockenspiel symbolize the arrival at the summit.
Splendid Horizons: In the finale, O’Connor envisions the settlers’ view of their hard-won goal, the Pacific. After an introduction, the Appalachia Waltz in its entirety emerges, not by the expected build-up of sound, but gradually as the instruments cease playing one by one, eventually leaving a trio of violin, cello and bass to reveal the theme in its simplest form. A coda brings back the rest of the orchestra.
In the same vein, O’Connor composed the soundtrack for the PBS series Liberty! The American Revolution, which evokes the atmosphere of the American experience from the Plymouth landing to the westward movement. The series aired in 2004 and featured performances by O’Connor, Yo Yo Ma and James Taylor.
Mark O’Connor
b.1961
Call of the Mockingbird
From Three Pieces for Violin and Orchestra
Scored for solo violin, 2 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, celeste, harp and strings
Estimated length: 20 minutes
In September 1993, Mark O’Connor travelled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of his favorite places, with the goal of writing a new violin concerto, a follow up to the Fiddle Concerto. Commissioned by the New York’s Meet the Composer organization and the Nashville Symphony for the Tennessee bicentennial, the concerto evolved into three separate pieces for violin and orchestra that can stand on their own or as a classic three-movement concerto. After completing the solo violin part of Mockingbird, O’Connor observed that the first theme “was like a bird’s song with trills, which seemed to reflect the habitat and beauty of the land.” The titles for the three movements also came to him after the fact, although O’Connor was inspired in a general sense by Tennessee’s history. The other two pieces are titled Trail of Tears and Fanfare for the Volunteer.
Although O’Connor says there’s no programmatic content in the Three Pieces, the first, Call of the Mockingbird, is so evocative of the bird’s actual song that it seems likely that some subconscious forces were at work. Anyone familiar with the mockingbird’s vocal virtuosity will recognize similarity in the way in which the composer makes use of series of short repeated phrases. The solo writing also recalls Antonio Vivaldi’s Gardellino (Goldfinch) Flute Concerto and the many other birdsong imitations scattered throughout the baroque composer’s works. An important distinction between the actual birdsong and O’Connor’s art song is that the bird’s repertory consists of literally thousands of different phrases, while O’Connor grounds his in variations and fragmentations of a single theme, first heard in the flute accompanied by the solo violin’s avian embellishments.
The birdsong quality of the violin part is sustained throughout. The piece blends true fiddling with classical violin technique and also gives the orchestra sections a major role. The improvised cadenza near the end features the characteristic “smears” of country fiddling.
Mark O’Connor
b.1961
Song of the Liberty Bell
Scored for solo violin and strings
Estimated length: 7 minutes
O’Connor composed Song of the Liberty Bell for violin and string orchestra in 1997, using the theme song for the PBS Kids series Liberty! The American Revolution. O’Connor subsequently arranged the piece in three different instrumental combinations: unaccompanied solo violin, folk ensemble, and string orchestra.
One of the principal features of O’Connor’s writing, in keeping with the American fiddling tradition, is the seamlessness of his melodies, where the fiddler never takes his bow off the strings. Although Song of the Liberty Bell is a ballad, the composer omits the expected pauses at ends of sentences of phrases to create a musical Möbius strip, a continuous, never-ending melody.
As a composer, O’Connor often works from powerful visual images in his mind. The Liberty Bell usually calls up the powerful image of the poorly cast and subsequently cracked bell, a symbol of freedom. The mood of O’Connor’s music suggests a more contemplative, even melancholy, association with this icon.
Mark O’Connor
b.1961
Fiddle Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (third movement)
Scored for solo violin, 2 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassons, 1 contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbal, snare drum, bass drum, xylophone, harp and strings
Estimated length: 14 minutes
Composed in 1992-93 on commission from the Santa Fe Symphony, the Fiddle Concerto was O’Connor’s first violin concerto (there are now six to date), as well as his first orchestral score. The title of the Concerto can be somewhat misleading, raising expectations that it will be a concert hall gentrification of country fiddling accompanied by orchestra. Rather, it is a paean to the great traditions of violin playing.
O’Connor is an American incarnation of the great 19th-century composer-virtuoso performers Niccoló Paganini, Franz Liszt and Henri Vieuxtemps, who composed for their own use and created individual styles of playing that inevitably raised the bar for technique and expressiveness. The fact that today every conservatory hot shot plays these works as a rite of passage is immaterial. Trained as a country fiddler, O’Connor employs themes and techniques of a distinctly American fiddling style, folding the folk elements into the melodies, structures and harmonies of the late-Romantic concerto. Fiddling is a particular kind of bowing and “smearing” of the notes, and in keeping with the technique, for all its virtuosic fireworks, O’Connor never takes fingertip to string to imitate or reference the pizzicato exploits of Paganini.
The Concerto is in four movements, the second an extensive improvised cadenza. The little rhythmic motive that opens and dominates the first movement of the Concerto is the feature that most readily suggests American country fiddling. The first of the work’s several cadenzas follows in the same style. Thematically, you will find everything from fleeting recollections of Mozart’s Haffner Serenade to sentimental Irish ballads.
The second movement cadenza, almost five minutes in length, is a virtuosic improvisation on the preceding themes, recalling the improvisatory fireworks of a country fiddler. Towards the end, the orchestra joins in, probably at a signal from the soloist that he’s finished showing off – for the time being.
The spirit of Antonio Vivaldi hovers over the entire slow movement. The harmony and counterpoint are all decidedly Italian Baroque; it is a serpentine rhapsody on a single languid theme.
The Finale presents a sudden geographical switch to a more American voice – but one that focuses on the Scotch-Irish tradition. O’Connor inserts another improvised cadenza into the middle of the movement, after which the orchestra joins the soloist for a rousing conclusion.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
mark o’connor
A product of America’s rich aural folk tradition as well as classical and flamenco music, Mark O’Connor’s creative journey began at the feet of a pair of musical giants. The first was the folk fiddler and innovator who created the modern era of American fiddling in the 1940’s, Benny Thomasson; the second, French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, considered one of the greatest improvisers in the history of the violin. Along the way, between these marvelous musical extremes, Mark O’Connor absorbed knowledge and influence from the multitude of musical styles and genres he studied. Now, he has melded and shaped these influences into a new American Classical music, and a vision of an entirely American school of string playing. As the Los Angeles Times warmly noted, he has “crossed over so many boundaries, that his style is purely personal.”
His first recording for the Sony Classical record label, Appalachia Waltz, was a collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer. The works Mr. O’Connor composed for the disc, including its title track, gained worldwide recognition for him as a leading proponent of a new American musical idiom. The tremendously successful follow-up release, Appalachian Journey, received a Grammy Award in February 2001.
With more than 200 performances, his first full length orchestral score Fiddle Concerto has become the most-performed modern violin concerto. Fanfare for the Volunteer, recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Steven Mercurio, was released by Sony Classical in October 1999.
The Newark Star Ledger notes: “As a composer, he understands the power of a thematic transfiguration and development throughout a 40-minute work.”
O’Connor regularly gives two-day residencies, lectures, demonstrations, or teaches workshops at a variety of prestigious musical programs. Some of his recent hosts include The Juilliard School of Music, Harvard, Rice University, SUNY Fredonia, University of Texas, Curtis Institute, Berklee College of Music, Eastman School of Music, Tanglewood, and Aspen Summer Festival. O’Connor was Artist in Residence at UCLA for the 2008-09 season. He is the founder and president of the internationally recognized Mark O’Connor Fiddle Camp and Strings Conference as well as the new Mark O’Connor String Camp in New York City. The Mark O’Connor String Institute at UCLA debuted in the summer of 2009.
O’Connor resides in New York City.
Anders Koppel
b. 1947
Marimba Concerto No. 1
Scored for solo marimba, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, timpani and strings
Estimated length: 14 minutes
For Danish composer, clarinetist and pianist Anders Koppel, communication with the audience is the be-all and end-all. It is a high-flying dialogue between the musical material, the musicians and the listeners – which, for Koppel, means all kinds of music, musicians and audiences. The product of a large family of musicians, Koppel was raised in the classical tradition yet began his musical career as the founder of a successful rock band that consumed his creative attention for seven years. Though in 1974 he struck out on his own as an independent composer and performer, he has not abandoned his youthful musical passion, but rather enhanced it with classical form and harmony, jazz and ethnic influences from South America to the Balkans. Improvisation plays a significant role in his music, much of it for theater, dance and film.
When Koppel turned 50 in 1997, he decided to concentrate his composing on scored music, preferably on a grand scale. Of his large output, he is particularly proud of his concertos for “peripheral instruments,” (i.e. the ones that have been ignored or slighted in the standard repertory). In addition to the Marimba Concerto No. 1, he has composed concertos for saxophone, accordion, double bass, bass trombone and tuba.
Koppel composed the Marimba Concerto No. 1 in 1995 for the International Percussion Competition in Luxembourg, where it premiered in the competition finals. He has since added three more concertos for the same instrument, which he refers to as his “piano concertos.” The choice of marimba with its piano-like keyboard, as opposed to the actual piano, corresponds to his father’s four piano concertos but reconfigured for the more extensive and eclectic sonorities and style mixtures of his own generation.
The Concerto roughly conforms to standard sonata structures: a sonata allegro first movement; a languid slow movement in modified A-B-A form; and a rondo finale. It is an accessible work with a definite film-music sound, especially in the second and third movements. The last movement is the most virtuosic and the longest; a spirited, often jazzy, dialogue between soloist and orchestra, concluding with a long multifaceted cadenza.
Emmanuel Séjourné
b. 1961
Concerto for Marimba and String Orchestra
Scored for solo marimba and strings
Estimated length: 17 minutes
“It is pleasurable to compose for instruments that have virtually no past in comparison to the piano,” writes French composer and percussionist Emmanuel Séjourné. Indeed, the classical music world has only relatively recently accepted the many voices of the percussion section into the glamorous world of the solo concerto. This percussive revolution was spearheaded in the late 20th century by virtuoso percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who so enthralled audiences that she was able to commission dozens of new works, as well as inspire young performing stars and composers.
Among them is Séjourné, who studied the conventional piano and violin repertoire at the National Conservatory of Strasbourg. At age 16, he discovered the world of percussion through the Percussions de Strasbourg ensemble, which inspired him to specialize in the so-called “mallet instruments,” vibraphone and marimba.
Séjourné’s early compositions were nearly all for theater, TV and radio. In the 1990s, he undertook a series of works for percussion instruments with full orchestra and chamber ensembles, including the Concerto for Marimba and String Orchestra in 2005, commissioned by Romanian marimba soloist Bogdan Bacanu.
The Concerto is in two movements, the first movement reflecting Bacanu’s love for the romanticism and lyricism in Rachmaninov: “slow, solemn, with long lyrical solo passages … at a point exuberant, then again melancholic.” Although Séjourné assigns the romantic legato melodies to the strings, sometimes accompanied by the marimba, the soloist performs two long cadenzas, both more languid than showy.
The composer saves the virtuoso voice of the marimba for the finale, with jazz, rock and flamenco influences. The more gentle middle section of the movement allows the soloist to freely improvise.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
1844-1908
Scheherazade, Op. 35
Scored for 2 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbal, suspended cymbal, snare drum, triangle, tambourine, tam tam, harp and strings
Estimated length: 42 minutes
In the tradition of Russian national music, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov holds a place of highest honor. Musically self-taught, he originally began his career as a naval officer, serving in that capacity from 1862 to 1873. He studied music on the side throughout his naval career until he won a faculty position at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1871 despite the fact that he had little formal training. Until his death, he taught and encouraged nearly every young Russian composer, from Alexander Glazunov and Anton Arensky to Igor Stravinsky and Serge Prokofiev.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s inspiration derived from the operas of Mikhail Glinka, whose music combined Russian melodies with Asian modes. Together with César Cui, Aleksander Borodin, Mily Balakirev and Modest Mussorgsky, he formed the group called “The Mighty Five,” whose aim was to promote Russian national music. Ironically, Rimsky-Korsakov was by far the best-trained musician among them. His use of instrumental color and masterful orchestration was so famous that any Russian composer with serious aspirations made the pilgrimage to his orchestration and composition classes, and some foreigners, like Ottorino Respighi, coming from as far away as Italy. After the death of Borodin and Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov edited and completed their manuscripts – especially their operas – and had them published. Unfortunately, he had a habit of “correcting” everything that he considered over the top, from harmonic progressions to the order of scenes. Putting side-by-side Mussorgsky’s original score of A Night on Bald Mountain with Rimsky’s changes is quite a revelation. It raises the moral question: Which is worse, completely changing someone else’s work and leaving his name on it, or borrowing someone else’s work under one’s own name?
The symphonic poem Scheherazade, based on A Thousand Nights and One Night (commonly called the Arabian Nights), was composed in 1888 and premiered in November of that year. It is among the most colorful works in the orchestral repertoire, glowing with brilliant orchestration and lush solos. The frame story of A Thousand Nights and One Night tells of a Khalif who was in the habit of killing his wives after a single night of lovemaking. His latest bride, Scheherazade, avoids that fate by telling him suspenseful stories, ending each evening with a cliffhanger. After years of such nightly entertainment, the Khalif finally decides to keep her.
The Suite comprises four tableaux, in which the yarn-spinning Scheherazade speaks through virtuoso passages for solo violin. None of the four tableaux refers specifically to any of Scheherazade’s tales; rather, they allude to the character types and incidents that make up the vast body of stories. The tone poem begins with the low brasses blasting out the theme representing the Khalif, followed by a passage that Rimsky snitched – although he modified it harmonically – from Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream denoting the world of fiction and fairytales.
The first tableau, “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,” includes a combination of rhythms and changing dynamics that imitate the motion of the waves in two principal themes, the second one a transformation of the Khalif’s theme. Scheherazade’s theme is transformed to fit the rocking of the waves.
“The Tale of the Kalendar Prince” changes the pace to reflect a number of loosely bound battle episodes, including a main theme introduced in an English horn solo, as well as virtuosic fanfare passages for solo trumpet.
The third tableau, “The Young Prince and the Young Princess,” is the most romantic. The violins introduce the first intimate theme, followed by an Asian dance
The final tableau is a passionate conversation between the Khalif and Scheherazade, as she readies herself for her last chance at survival. The tableau actually recalls a number of episodes, marked in the score “The Festival at Baghdad,” “The Sea,” (reprise of the theme from the first tableau), “The Ship Breaks Against a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman,” and “Conclusion.” The music is fiery and exciting until the end, when Scheherazade’s stories come to a quiet and plaintive end while she awaits the life-or-death decision of the Khalif, whose theme finally moderates to a gentle section solo for the cellos.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Eriko Daimo
Eriko Daimo is a new rising marimba soloist. She won first prize at the International Marimba Competition in Belgium in 2004 and first prize at the Japan Percussion Arts Society 20th Annual Percussion Solo Competition in 2004. Other awards include: International Marimba Competition in Paris in 2003; Japan International League of Artists Competition in Tokyo in 2003; South Japan Music Competition in 1999, 2002 and 2003; and All Japan Music Solo Competition in 2000.
Her recent performances include solo and duo marimba recital tours in Denmark; Marimba Recital - World of Toru Talemitsu in Sweden in 2009; solo marimba recitals and masterclasses at the Eighth International Marimba Festival in Mexico in 2008; Kirishima International Music Festival in Japan in 2008; duo with cellist Natasha Brofsky at Jordan Hall in Boston; “Dedicated to Eriko Daimo” solo marimba recital at the Universal Marimba Festival in Belgium in 2007, featuring works dedicated to Ms. Daimo; concerto performance with Orchestra Nipponika conducted by Tetsuji Honna in Kioi Hall, Tokyo, Japan; masterclass and recital at The Power of Drum Festival in New York in 2007; Kirishima International Music Hall in Kagoshima, Japan; Lisinski Concert Hall in Zagreb, Croatia; the VI Festival Internacional de Marimbistas in Mexico in 2006; Zeltsman Marimba Festival in Boston in 2006; KOSA International Music Festival in Vermont; Japan International League of Artists Marimba Festival in Tokyo; PASIC in Nashville; and masterclasses and recitals at renowned institutes such as Humboldt State University in California, Youth Performing Arts School in Kentucky, University of Michigan and University of Illinois,
Born in Kagoshima, Japan, Daimo began her musical studies at age 6 on the piano. She started studying the marimba when she entered high school in 1997, and went on to study at the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music and the Boston Conservatory.
Daimo is an endorser of Marimba One.
Frédéric Chopin
1810-1849
Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor,
Opus 11
Scored for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 bass trombone, timpani and strings
Estimated length: 39 minutes
The son of a French father and Polish mother, Frédéric Chopin was born and grew up in Poland: But after the collapse of the Polish revolution against Russia in 1831, he went into exile to France. He settled in Paris, which was then the center of Polish émigrés. Because of his own financial success, he was able to play at charity concerts held for his poorer exiled compatriots and organize similar events. Although he was never able to return to his native country, in accordance with his will, his sister brought his heart preserved in Cognac to Warsaw. There, it was placed in an urn installed in a pillar of the Holy Cross church in Krakowskie Przedmiescie.
Chopin’s chosen medium was the piano as a solo instrument. In his late teens, he attempted to combine piano and orchestra, creating, in addition to the two piano concertos, the Variations, Opus 2; Fantasia on Polish Airs, Opus 13; the Concert Rondo, Opus 14; and the Grand Polonaise, Opus 22. He was, however, uncomfortable with the orchestral medium and after age 20 never again wrote for orchestra. In all these works, the orchestral scoring is so light that during the 19th century it was fashionable to re-orchestrate and “improve” the accompaniment. It is probable, however, that Chopin intended the orchestra to serve merely as a delicate background fabric for the soloist. He himself was known to have had a rather light touch at the piano, and heavy orchestral accompaniment would have drowned him out. The concentration on solo piano works could not have brought in enough income to sustain him; most of his life was devoted to teaching piano, at which he was a master.
The E minor Concerto, although catalogued as No. 1, was composed after the second (1830) but published first. It was premiered in October 1830 in Warsaw, with the composer at the piano. He wrote to a friend the next day: “I was not a bit, not a bit nervous and played the way I play when I am alone, and it went well.”
This is a pianist’s concerto with all the frills and showy ornamentation for the soloist, but it also contains the kind of poignantly lyric melodies that were to characterize the composer’s subsequent music for solo piano. The opening movement, Allegro maestoso, is in the classical tradition, with a long orchestral introduction presenting all the main themes of the movement, the so-called double exposition. The development, too, is in the traditional classical form. Chopin wrote about the second movement, Romance: Larghetto: “[it is] of a romantic, calm and rather melancholy character ... a kind of reverie in the moonlight on a beautiful spring evening.”
The final Rondo Vivace is rhythmically related to the krakoviak, a rapid dance originating around the city of Krakow and considered Poland’s national dance. The opening piano refrain reappears a number of times, separated by graceful, highly ornamented melodies.
Although hailed as Poland’s foremost composer, less than a month after the premiere of the concerto Chopin left Poland, never to return. His solo piano works include numerous polonaises and mazurkas that bear witness to his love for his native land.
Béla Bartók
1881-1945
Concerto for Orchestra
Scored for 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, 2 harps, timpani, bass drum, cymbal, suspended cymbal, snare drum, triangle, tam tam and strings
Estimated length: 36 minutes
In the fall of 1940, Béla Bartók fled his native Hungary with his family and sailed for the United States. For a couple of years, he eked out a precarious living teaching piano and performing with his wife, Ditta, also a pianist. By the end of 1942, he fell ill with what turned out to be a form of leukemia. Early in 1943, he was too weak to deliver an entire series of lectures at Harvard University, the fee for which he had counted on to support him and his wife until the fall.
Then, in early summer, at the suggestion of violinist Joseph Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner – both fellow Hungarians – Bartók received a commission from Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, for a large orchestral work in memory of his late wife, Natalie. The commission so revived Bartók’s spirit that after spending the next few weeks at Saranac Lake, New York, he returned in October with the completed score of the Concerto for Orchestra. He finalized the orchestration during the winter in Asheville, North Carolina, and Koussevitzky premiered it with the Boston Symphony in December 1944 to resounding acclaim.
In notes for the premiere, Bartók wrote: “The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single orchestral instruments in a concertant or soloistic manner.”
The five-movement work is a showpiece for orchestra, allowing each of the sections and section soloists a chance to demonstrate their virtuosity. The Concerto is structured like an arch, as are many of Bartók’s works, with the central Elegy framed by two outer movements in sonata form and two inner intermezzo-like movements. Biographer Halsey Stevens provided an explanation for the huge appeal of this work, writing that it combines such diverse elements as Bach fugues and Schoenberg atonality, which had influenced Bartók throughout his creative years, while all the melodies, harmonies and rhythms are colored by the peasant music that was Bartók’s great love.
Among its most striking features is the Concerto’s kaleidoscope of orchestral colors emanating from the generally thin texture that showcases only a few instruments at a time in often stunning combinations.
The Introduzione opens with an eerie andante, the double basses and cellos accompanied by tremolo on muted high strings. Gradually other instrument groups enter, adding color. The violins then introduce the main theme with its vigorous rhythm. A second theme comes in soon after on a solo trombone.
The second movement, Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Pairs), begins with the side drum that maintains the rhythmic impetus throughout the movement. Five unrelated (according to Bartók) dance themes are then strung jauntily together, featuring in turn pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes and muted trumpets. A short chorale-like melody follows on five brass instruments, after which the five pairs of wind instruments return in order as before but with more elaborate accompaniment.
The Elegia third movement is the work’s centerpiece, described by the composer as a “Lugubrious death song…of misty texture and rudimentary motifs.” After a mysterious opening, the whole orchestra suddenly enters fortissimo restating the themes, followed by a reprise of the beginning of the movement.
The Intermezzo interrotto (Interrupted Intermezzo) is just that. Bartók described its structure as “ABA – interruption – BA.” It opens with the oboe introducing a lively theme, like a rhythmically asymmetric peasant dance, followed by a cantilena said to be based on a popular Hungarian national melody. Suddenly the movement is interrupted by what, according to the composer’s son Peter, is a parody of the first movement of Shostakovich’s Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony, popular at the time because of the war and the devastating siege of the city. Peter says that the banality of the march in the movement irritated his father to no end and that he parodied it by writing circus music that is a cross between the march and an aria “Nun geh’ ich ins Maxim” from Franz Léhar’s The Merry Widow. As the interruption fades away, the cantilena and then the peasant dance return, but in shortened form.
The finale, Pesante, opens with a riotous horn call, followed by a fiery Romanian dance, a perpetum mobile figure, by the whole orchestra. A second dance is introduced by the high woodwinds, and then a third on the horns. The themes are developed in a complicated fugue of brilliant orchestral colors.
Originally, the work ended 22 bars short of the version we hear today. Bartók, in spite of his frailty and illness, traveled to Boston to hear the premiere, and realized that his ending was unsatisfactory. He immediately sat down and wrote the brilliant 22-measure coda. There is a recording available of the premiere, with the original ending, which, indeed, does not match the quality of the rest of the Concerto.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Ian Parker
Canadian pianist Ian Parker captivates audiences wherever he goes. He has appeared with the Buffalo Philharmonic, Calgary Philharmonic, Cincinnati , CBC Vancouver, Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom, Edmonton Symphony, Greenwich Symphony, Honolulu Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Louisiana Philharmonic, Mobile Symphony, National Symphony, Quebec Symphony, and the symphonies of Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, and Winnipeg, among others.
An enthusiastic recitalist, Parker has performed across the United States, Western Europe, Israel, and throughout Canada on tours with Debut Atlantic and Jeunesses Musicales du Canada. He made his Lincoln Center recital debut at the Walter Reade Theater in 2004 and moderates a new recital series in Vancouver for the introduction of young artists.
Parker was invited to collaborate with the internationally renowned Vogler Quartet during its 20th anniversary tour in 2005-06 throughout the U.S. and Canada. Following the tour’s tremendous success, he was invited to join them again for several concerts in the spring of 2006, as well as an extensive North American tour in the 2006-07 season.
First-prize winner at the 2001 CBC National Radio Competition, Parker has also won the Grand Prize at the Canadian National Music Festival, the Corpus Christie International Competition and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra Competition. At The Juilliard School, he received the 2002 William Petschek Piano Debut Award and, on two occasions, was the winner of the Gina Bachauer Piano Scholarship Competition.
Born in Vancouver to a family of pianists, Parker began his piano studies at age 3 with his father, Edward Parker. He holds both the Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, where he was a student of Yoheved Kaplinsky. While at Juilliard, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded him the Sylva Gelber Career Grant, which is given annually to the “most talented Canadian artist.”
William Walton
1902-1983
Viola Concerto
Scored for solo viola, 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, harp and strings
Estimated length: 27 minutes
In June 1923, the young William Walton burst on the English musical scene with the tongue-in-cheek Façade, a witty and highly eccentric setting of poems by Edith Sitwell for narrator and chamber ensemble. While Façade earned him the reputation as an enfant terrible, Walton went on to compose a steady stream of works in all genres, by and large far more conservative, that earned him honors, medals, and a knighthood.
Walton’s most enduring compositions are the oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, with which the Amarillo Symphony closed out the 2008-09 season, and the violin, cello and viola concertos. He also composed two symphonies, an opera and 14 film scores. Three of them are Shakespeare’s classics: Hamlet, Richard III and Henry V, all starring Lawrence Olivier and the mid-20th-century Shakespearean pantheon.
Viola concertos are a rare breed, something violists have always been acutely sensitive about. In all of the 19th century, only one work, Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, made it into the standard repertoire. The 20th century fared somewhat better, and every new viola concerto is greatly welcome.
In 1928, conductor Sir Thomas Beecham suggested to Walton that he write a viola concerto for famed violist Lionel Tertis, even though Walton admittedly had no experience writing for solo strings and thought the viola made “an awful sound.” As if confirming Walton’s initial feelings for the instrument rather than the intrinsic quality of the Concerto, Tertis rejected the work outright, perhaps because he considered it too modern, and sent it back by return mail. Walton was deeply hurt, and since virtuoso violists were scarce, it fell to composer Paul Hindemith – the other great viola virtuoso at the time – to perform the premiere in 1929 with Walton conducting. Ironically, Tertis was in the audience and revised his opinion of the work. He wrote a letter of apology to Walton and even performed it occasionally thereafter. In 1961, Walton revised the Concerto for a smaller orchestra, but left both versions in print – although he stated that he preferred the revised version.
Walton greatly admired Serge Prokofiev, and the overall shape of the Viola Concerto resembles Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1. The slow lyrical first movement was also strongly influenced by Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto. A zippy Scherzo replaces the usual slow middle movement of a concerto. The Allegro Finale includes a lengthy coda in which the soloist returns to the cantabile of the first movement while the orchestra takes the main theme of the Finale as an accompaniment.
Despite his initial inexperience with strings, Walton developed his mastery in the course of composing the Viola Concerto. The work solidified his place in British music, and his subsequent concertos for violin and cello have become staples of the 20th-century repertoire.
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Opus 55, Eroica
Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Estimated length: 47 minutes
Few musical manuscripts have elicited so much musicological discussion as has Beethoven’s personal conductor’s copy of his Symphony No. 3. The story of its original dedication to Napoleon, the chief military defender of the French Revolution with its ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and the subsequent violent erasure of the dedication when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, has been told time and again.
Reality, however, is often more complex than history books would have it. Beethoven was clearly disgusted at Napoleon’s coronation, exclaiming: “Is he then, too, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of man ... become a tyrant.” But his original dedication and subsequent disappointment with the Emperor was tinged in no small part by self-interest. Hoping at the time to establish a foothold in the musical life of Paris, the composer had planned to travel there with his mentor, Prince Lobkowitz, using the premiere of the Symphony as a passport to the French capital and lucrative commissions. Napoleon’s coup, and the resultant political upheavals, disrupted these plans and are the probable reason why the Symphony, finished at the beginning of 1804, did not receive its premiere in Vienna until a year later.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Symphony is how Beethoven – who had surprising difficulty coming up with melodies – was able to make so much out of so little. The opening theme is nothing more than an arpeggiated E-flat major chord; the Scherzo theme is a descending E-flat major scale; and the theme for the Finale is a brief simple bass pattern that he had used three times previously – in the Piano Variations, Opus 35, in one of his Contredanses, and in the grand finale of his ballet The Creatures of Prometheus, Opus 43 – repeated beneath a set of spectacular variations. Only the second movement, the Funeral March, begins with a fully formed theme.
It is hard for us today to appreciate the revolutionary impact of this symphony on Vienna’s audience. The constantly modulating keys, rhythmic shifts, large dynamic leaps and unfamiliar harmonies baffled Beethoven’s friendly but conservative public, and the reception was anything but enthusiastic. It took a few years for the Viennese to warm to this innovative work.
Although it would take many pages of in-depth musical analysis to explain what was so different and disturbing about this Symphony, here are some highlights that we now take for granted after over 200 years of development and change in Western music.
To begin with, there is the sheer length and scope of the work. The first movement alone is longer than anything that had been written up to this time. It follows a complex and, at times, astonishing, key structure, whose wanderings and surprises blur the distinctions between the basic components of sonata form (The coda, for example, is another mini-development in a distant key.)
The Andante, entitled “Funeral March for a Hero,” counters even the most poignant Mozartian second movement with a totally new depth of emotional intensity and grandeur.
The Scherzo – an earlier Beethoven invention to replace the sometimes stately, sometimes thumping minuets of Mozart and Haydn – breaks with tradition in its Trio, scored as a section solo for the horns.
Instead of creating a sprightly and upbeat rondo, in the style of his predecessors, Beethoven gives a weight and importance to the Finale that would inspire both his own future symphonic writing (culminating in the Ninth Symphony) and that of his successors. The theme is nothing more then a skeleton, actually more a ground bass than a true melody. The variations that constitute this lengthy movement are also quite new in structure. While variation forms tended to be somewhat static, adhering throughout to a single key and the standard phrase length of the original theme, Beethoven includes variations in different keys and of varying lengths; he even breaks away from the variations altogether for a while in the middle of the movement. Whereas most sets of variations progress steadily from the simple to the complex – or, at least, the more ornamented – Beethoven was less interested in bravura than in giving each variation its own mood, for which he also employed an innovative use of orchestral solos and ensembles.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
Béla Bartók
(1881-1945)
Rhapsody No. 1 for violin and orchestra
Scored for solo violin, 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone, 1 tuba, cimbalom, harp, piano and strings
Estimated length: 10 minutes
By the end of the 19th century, classical music based on Hungarian folk music had come to a dead end. In fact, the themes and rhythms that Liszt and Brahms had incorporated into their “Hungarian” pieces were not indigenous folk music at all, but rather the popular Gypsy music heard in the cafés and bars of central European cities. The extreme nationalism that swept Hungary, beginning with the failed revolution against the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1848, revived interest in the authentic folk culture, inspiring the search for indigenous styles in clothing, food, language, literature and music.
Born in the midst of this revival, Bartók emulated Brahms, Richard Strauss and Liszt in his early compositions. However, in his 20s, he was swept up in the nationalist movement and, together with his friend Zoltán Kodály, became one of the first true ethnomusicologists. In 1906 the team began collecting the peasant folk songs of Hungary and Romania using the newfangled invention, the Edison wax cylinder. In later years, Bartók extended his collecting to other East European and North African ethnic groups, the last one taking him to Anatolia (Turkey) in 1936. He edited and published many of the folk melodies he had recorded; others he incorporated into his own works in highly creative ways.
Bartók’s compositions diverge in two directions that he continually endeavored to unite. On the one hand, he was exploring the limits of harmony using the extended tonality of late Debussy, and even the atonal language of Schoenberg and his students. On the other hand, he was drawing from authentic folk songs with their modal melodies, simple harmonies and complex rhythms.
Bartók composed the Rhapsody No. 1 in 1928 for his fellow countryman, violinist Joseph Szigeti. Originally it was written for violin and piano. However, shortly thereafter, Bartók transcribed it for violin and orchestra, and also for cello and piano. It was Bartók’s first use since his youth of the verbunkos style, the Hungarian Gypsy music popularized by Franz Liszt in his “Hungarian” works.
The verbunkos was originally the recruiting dance of the Austrian Imperial Army in the 18th century. Soldiers in full regalia used to publicly perform in the villages to attract young men to enlist. Gypsy musicians appropriated its slow-fast tempo sequence – called respectively lassú and friss – and popularized it in the cities. But Bartók flavored it with the characteristic scales and dance tunes of authentic rural folk music. Listeners familiar with the composer’s most famous works will note that the melodies in this rhapsody are more singable than those of his later compositions. Nevertheless, within the clearly tonal structure can be heard the more dissonant harmonies and use of melodic fragments that dominate his mature style.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
1756-1791
Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major, K. 364 for Violin and Viola
Scored for solo violin, solo viola, 2 oboes, 2 horns and strings
Estimated length: 30 minutes
In January 1779, Mozart reluctantly returned to Salzburg after a disastrous two-year trip to Germany and Paris. Not only did he fail in obtaining a court appointment, but private commissions were also few and far between. However, the most severe blow during his Paris sojourn was the sudden death of his mother, who was accompanying him.
One of the works that Mozart composed shortly after his return to Salzburg was the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola. The sinfonia concertante form is a cross between a symphony and a concerto, popular in the second half of the 18th century and which Mozart encountered on his travels. Like his contemporaries, he seldom composed large works without a commission, but we have no surviving record of this work’s genesis, who commissioned it or who premiered it. Perhaps he wrote it for his father Leopold as violinist and himself as violist. Subsequently it may have formed part of the portfolio he carried with him to Vienna in 1781 when he tried to establish his career as a freelance composer and performer in the Empire’s capital.
The Sinfonia Concertante, which is more of a formal double concerto than a symphony, may have also been an experiment in the writing of a double concerto since the Concerto for Two Pianos also in E-flat, K. 365, follows it by only one Koechel number. Both concerti are elegant creations with moments of breathtaking beauty.
The violin and viola parts weave in and out of each other in a way that harkens back to Bach’s Double Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. At other times the two soloists chase each other in the same way as the two pianos in the Concerto in E-flat. In all three movements, the solo parts are quietly echoed by a pair of oboes.
Although the Sinfonia Concertante is now one of Mozart’s most beloved works, its premiere in the United States, nearly 80 years after it was composed, was not a success. The critic of the New York Times wrote: “On the whole we would prefer death to a repetition of this production. The wearisome scale passages on the little fiddle, repeated ad nauseam on the bigger one, were simply maddening.”
Antonín Dvorák
1841-1904
Symphony No. 9 In E minor, Opus 95, From The New World
Scored for 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbal and strings
Estimated length: 40 minutes
Antonín Dvorák’s sojourn in the United States from 1892 to 1895 came about through the efforts of Jeanette B. Thurber. A dedicated and idealistic proponent of an American national musical style, she underwrote and administered the first American music conservatory, the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Because of Dvorák’s popularity throughout Europe, he was Thurber’s first choice for a director. He, in turn, was probably lured to the big city so far from home by both a large salary and convictions regarding musical nationalism that paralleled Thurber’s own.
Thirty years before his arrival in New York, Dvorák had read Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha in a Czech translation and was eager to learn more about the Native American and African American music, which he believed should be the basis of the American style of composition. He also shared with Thurber the conviction that the National Conservatory should admit black students.
While his knowledge of authentic Native American music is questionable – his exposure came through samples transcribed for him by American friends and through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – he became familiar with Negro spirituals through one of his students, as well as indirectly via the songs of Stephen Foster. He incorporated both of these styles into the Symphony No. 9, which he composed while he was in New York.
Just as Dvorák never quoted Bohemian folk music directly in his own nationalistic music, he did not use American themes in their entirety. Rather, with his unsurpassed gift for melody, he incorporated characteristic motives into his own themes. Nevertheless, listeners can discern fragments of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in the second theme of the first movement, as well as “Massa Dear” (also known as “Goin’ Home”) in the famous English horn solo in the second movement. We can deduce the importance of these musical motives from the fact that they appear as reminiscences in more than one movement, especially in the Finale. However, the symphony, is hardly an American pastiche; the second motive in the Largo movement is a phrase of wrenching musical longing that many listeners interpret as the composer’s nostalgia for his native Bohemia.
It is curious that Dvorák seemed to make no distinction between the folk music of American slaves and American Indians. While the second movement uses a theme from African-American spirituals, the composer claimed that it had also been inspired by Longfellow’s epic, perhaps by Minnehaha’s forest funeral. The third movement as well, in its rhythmic thumping, its use of the pentatonic scale and the orchestration dominated by winds and percussion, is meant to portray an Indian ceremonial dance described in Longfellow’s poem. Incidentally, Dvorák had also intended to compose an opera on Hiawatha, which never left the drawing board. But his symphonic use of what he believed to be an authentic Native American musical idiom may have represented his initial ideas for the opera.
One of the most important features of the Symphony is its thematic coherence. Whatever the origin of the melodies, they all have a modular characteristic in that they can be mixed and matched in many different ways. In the last movement, Dvorák brings nearly all of the Symphony’s themes together, sometimes as one long continuous melody, and other times in contrapuntal relationship to each other.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com
Joan Kwuon
Violinist Joan Kwuon is praised by the New York Times for her “fiery, intensely musical and impassioned playing.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Kwuon made her Tanglewood Music Festival debut with the Brahms Violin Concerto at the invitation of Sir André Previn. Following this debut, she was presented in her New York debut in recital at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Kwuon’s virtuosity and radiant stage presence have been recognized by media ranging from The Today Show, CBS News and Lifetime Television, to National Public Radio.
Highlights of Kwuon’s recent seasons include the United States tour with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Celebrating Mozart’s 250th birthday, she performed Mozart Violin Concerti conducted by Charles Dutoit and Matthias Bamert. Kwuon was the featured soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra and André Previn performing the Sibelius Concerto, and with Maestro Previn and the Prometheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall performing Mozart Concerto No. 3. In February 2008, Kwuon appeared in Sonata Recital with Previn at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. In that same season, Kwuon performed the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Mozart Concerto No. 1 with the Buffalo Philharmonic, and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Amarillo Symphony. Kwuon also performed the Brahms and Tchaikovsky Concerti with the State Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and Music Director Enrique Batiz on their American tour in Spring 2008.
Kwuon received advanced degrees from Indiana University, The Juilliard School and the Cleveland Institute of Music. She currently teaches at The Juilliard School, The Bowdoin International Music Festival, and has recently joined the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Kwuon is grateful to Elliott and Mona Golub for the generous loan of the 1734 Spagnoletti Guarneri del Gesù.
joel smirnoff
Encouraged by Seiji Ozawa to take up the baton, eminent violinist Joel Smirnoff has developed into a highly acclaimed conductor with an impressive and wide-ranging repertoire. He is consistently cited for his high energy and special attention to the stylistic demands of each work.
In 2000, Smirnoff made his official American conducting debut with the San Francisco Symphony, conducting an all-Tchaikovsky program. Guest conducting engagements include the Amarillo Symphony, Chicago Philharmonic, Juilliard Orchestra, Louisiana Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, Texas Music Festival Orchestra, Western New York Chamber Orchestra, and a European tour with the Basel Sinfonietta and Charles Rosen as soloist in the Elliott Carter Piano Concerto. He was a finalist to become the Music Director & Conductor for the Amarillo Symphony in 2006.
Joel Smirnoff has recently been named President of the Cleveland Institute of Music, a post he assumed in the late summer of 2008. He will retain his long-standing positions of first violinist of The Juilliard String Quartet and Chairman of the Violin Department at The Juilliard School until the end of the 2008-09 season.
Joel Smirnoff also plays jazz, performing frequently as improvising soloist with Tony Bennett. His solos were featured on the Grammy award-winning CD Tony Bennett Sings Ellington Hot and Cool. He has also been guest soloist with Gunther Schuller and the American Jazz Orchestra, and the Billy Taylor Trio.
A Joyful Noise!
8 p.m. April 24-25, 2009
Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts
Carol Bush Emeny Performance Hall
Kimbo Ishii-Eto, conductor
Tomas Cotik, violin
Leon Williams, baritone
Noah Littlejohn, cello; Grand-Prize Winner – Amarillo Symphony Guild Young Performers Competition
Amarillo Civic Chorus – Dr. Steven Weber, director
West Texas A&M University Choirs – Dr. Daniel Hall, director
Ralph Vaughan Williams
1872-1958
Two Hymn-Tune Preludes
- Eventide
Scored for 1 flute, 1 oboe, 1 clarinet, 1 bassoon, 1 horn and strings
During the latter half of the 19th century, composers of classical music were seeking the to uncover and understand the ethnic music of their homelands. Some, like Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt, approached folk music unsystematically, borrowing melodies that inspired them with little interest in authenticity or provenance. By the turn of the 20th century, others, including Béla Bartók and Ralph Vaughan Williams, conducted serious ethnographic studies, unearthing and cataloguing vast oral traditions, as well as using the indigenous melodies and rhythms in their work.
A great lover of English folk songs, Vaughan Williams collected over 800 tunes, arranging and transcribing many of them for various vocal and instrumental combinations. He also collected traditional English hymns, publishing them in 1906 as The English Hymnal. Melodies both ancient and modern subsequently found their way into much of Vaughan Williams’s own compositions, sometimes as brief melodic quote, at others as arrangements.
In 1936, anguished at the palpable gathering clouds of another war, Vaughan Williams composed what is probably his most heartfelt work, Dona nobis pacem. At the same time he arranged two hymns for small orchestra. The first, “Eventide,” is an arrangement of a hymn “Abide with me! Fast falls the eventide,” this one a modern tune composed by music teacher and editor William Henry Monk (1823-1889) for his 1861 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern.
Franz Joseph Haydn
1732-1809
Cello Concerto No. 2 in D major
- Allegro moderato
Scored for 2 oboes, 1 bassoon, 2 horns and strings
The authenticity of Franz Joseph Haydn’s cello concertos has been in question for the last 200 years. While the existence of No.1 in C major has never been in doubt since the composer listed it in his Entwurf-Katalog (a thematic draft catalog) of his works, which he began compiling in 1765 after his patron admonished him for “negligence,” the Concerto No. 2 in D major belongs to the recently authenticated category.
While the Concerto in D was always well-known, it is missing from the Entwurf-Katalog and was believed for over 100 years to be by Anton Kraft, one of the Esterházy cellists from 1778 to 1790. But in 1954, Haydn’s lost autograph dated 1783 was discovered in Vienna. He had probably composed the Concerto for Kraft, who became one of Vienna’s most sought after cellists and a member of the famous Schuppanzigh string quartet, one of Beethoven’s favorite ensembles in performances of his early chamber works. Beethoven also composed the cello part of his Triple Concerto op. 56 with Kraft in mind. Considering the technical and emotional demands of the D Major Concerto, Kraft must have been an outstanding musician.
In 1783, the year of the autograph manuscript, Haydn’s orchestra at Esterhásza was adequate, but still limited. Consequently, in the D major Cello Concerto, the soloist always played with the orchestra in all the tutti sections, a tradition that is not always followed today. Moreover, because at this time it was customary for soloists to improvise their own cadenzas, Haydn specified none in the autograph.
Haydn appears to have composed the D major Cello Concerto by the time he had already produced 80 of his more than 104 symphonies and around the time of the Op. 33 String Quartets. These were the two genres in which he was most prolific and innovative, significantly advancing the state of the art. His name was by then well known, especially in Vienna, where the Esterházy family spent a good part of the year, bringing their prize musician with them.
Franz Schubert
1797-1828
Rondo in A major for Violin and Orchestra, D.438
Scored for solo violin and strings
Estimated length: 14 minutes
In spite of his large and varied output, Franz Schubert never composed a full-length concerto. This Rondo for String Orchestra – or string quartet, as marked in the Gesamtausgabe (complete edition) of Schubert’s works – is one of only a handful of short works for solo instrument & orchestra.
Schubert composed the Rondo in June 1816 when he was still a schoolteacher, a job he detested. He wrote it for his brother Ferdinand, an amateur violinist, minor composer and teacher at an orphanage. He probably hoped that exposure of his music at the orphanage school before an invited audience would help him break into the prominent musical circles of Vienna; unfortunately, this hope never materialized. School orchestras being what they were, the technical demands on the student players are modest. The solo part, meant for his brother, is more demanding. The work was not published until 1897.
The Rondo opens with a lengthy and broad adagio, as if announcing the arrival of a more weighty work. The violin builds up to a slow climax before breaking into the allegro giusto main theme, which is immediately answered by the second and later a third theme, linked by the soloist with brilliant passage work. The themes are elaborated and modified before returning, and the work ends with a fortissimo climax by the whole orchestra.
William Walton
1902-1983
Belshazzar’s Feast
Scored for solo baritone, chorus, 2 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling E-flat clarinet, 1 doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 1 alto saxophone, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion (xylophone, glockenspiel, triangle, castanets, tambourine, gong, field drum, tenor drum, woodblock, cymbal, bass drum, whip, anvil), 2 harps, organ, piano and strings
Estimated length: 36 minutes
In June 1923, the young William Walton burst on the English musical scene with his tongue- in-cheek Façade, a witty setting of eccentric poems by Edith Sitwell for narrator and chamber ensemble. While Façade started him on his career with the notoriety of an enfant terrible, Walton went on to compose a steady stream of works in all genres – by and large more conservative – that earned him honors, medals, and a knighthood.
Walton’s most enduring compositions are the oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast and concertos for violin, cello and viola. He also composed two symphonies, an opera and 14 film scores. Three of them are Shakespearean classics featuring Lawrence Olivier: Hamlet, Richard III and Henry V, all of which frequently appear as concert openers.
In 1929, Walton was invited by the BBC to compose, for a fee of 50 pounds, a choral work for small chorus, small orchestra of no more than 15 players, and a vocal soloist. The result, to Osbert Sitwell’s libretto, was anything but small. Belshazzar’s Feast turned out to be an oratorio for double mixed chorus, baritone solo and greatly enlarged orchestra. It was premiered at the Leeds Festival in 1931 despite the grave misgivings of the festival’s director, Sir Thomas Beecham. According to Walton, the conductor said in his loftiest manner: “As you’ll never hear the thing again, my boy, why not throw in a couple of brass bands?” So he did, adding two additional brass sections of three trumpets, three trombones and a tuba each.
Belshazzar’s Feast rejuvenated English oratorio writing. Instead of the kind of bland semi-religious text popular in Victorian and Edwardian England, Walton and Sitwell surprised the audience at Leeds with a jazzy, perhaps slightly racy, shocker.
Belshazzar’s Feast has two protagonists, Belshazzar, the king of Babylon, and the Hebrew exiles, who have been taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar’s father, in large part because of their refusal to heed the commandments of the Lord and the warnings of His prophets. Most of the text comes from the Book of Daniel – in which, at King Belshazzar's decadent feast, a disembodied hand appears and prophetically writes a doom-laden message on the wall. During the night after the feast, the king is slain by the invading army of Darius, whose son Cyrus ultimately permitted the Hebrews to repatriate. Songs of rejoicing conclude the oratorio.
The book of Isaiah provides the opening choral recitative directed at the exiled Hebrews: “Thus spake Isaiah: ‘Thy sons that thou shalt beget, they shall be taken away and be eunuchs in the palace of the King of Babylon.’ ” The reference to castration was one of the reasons that the famous Three Choirs Festival – held annually in rotation in Worchester, Hereford or Gloucester – promptly barred Belshazzar’s Feast from their repertoire, a ban that lasted until 1957. Also meriting disapproval in some quarters was the garishly ostentatious description of Belshazzar’s decadent lifestyle. Critics saw it as a dig at Edwardian mores, strengthened by a parody of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches in the preparation for the feast and in Belshazzar’s praise of his gods: of gold, silver, stone, iron, wood and brass. The women of the Leeds’s choir also objected to singing the word “concubines.”
While the music of Belshazzar’s Feast falls within the scope of 20th-century tonality, it is often raucous and dissonant in keeping with both the decadence of the Babylonian court and the suffering of the Hebrews. Walton’s greatly expanded percussion section highlights the lively syncopated rhythms of the king’s excesses and idolatry.
The chorus plays a slippery role. Most often it is the direct personification of the exiled Hebrews, but at others it narrates the fate of Belshazzar and portrays his courtiers. As it describes in horror the use of the sacred vessels to toast the pagan gods, it is a description by imitation, allowing Walton to let out all the stops for the centerpiece of the oratorio.
Cry Victory!
8 p.m. March 27-28, 2009
Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts
Carol Bush Emeny Performance Hall
Davide Cabassi, piano
Amarillo Youth Symphony – Dr. Mark Bartley, conductor
Kimbo Ishii-Eto, conductor
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827
Coriolan Overture, Opus 62
Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Estimated length: 8 minutes
The inspiration for Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture came neither from Plutarch nor from Shakespeare, who made him the subject of his play Coriolanus, but from a play by Heinrich Joseph von Collin – poet, dramatist and functionary in the Austrian Finance Ministry (Austria’s way of supporting its artists). Von Collin’s play was a philosophical treatise on individual freedom and personal responsibility. It premiered in 1802 to great acclaim, using incidental music derived from Mozart’s opera Idomeneo.
Beethoven took just three weeks to compose the Coriolan Overture in January 1807. It was meant to stand on its own as a composition inspired by the play. The Overture was premiered in March at an all-Beethoven concert held in the palace of Prince Lobkowitz.
The stark, dramatic music of the overture is one of Beethoven’s more explosive and violent expressions, an apt portrayal of Coriolanus, who was known for his short fuse. Even in the lyrical second subject, the music remains quiet for a moment only, quickly reverting to a fortissimo outburst. Scholars usually assume that the music, rather than telling the story of the play, was intended as a musical portrait of Coriolanus himself.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No.5 in E-flat major, Opus 73 (Emperor)
Scored for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Estimated length: 38 minutes
Two of the signature aspects of Western thought are the importance of progress and individuality. Nowhere are these concepts more apparent than in the history of music, where we give special attention to innovation in form and harmony. While not always appreciated at first hearing – witness the audience riot over Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – innovators eventually receive their due – in hindsight.
In his greatest works, Beethoven was both an innovator and an individualist who attempted to put his personal stamp on everything from harmony and musical structure to advances in piano construction. While retaining the three-movement form of the concerto, he expanded the internal structure of the individual movements, especially in the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos. The dramatic use of the piano in the opening phrases of these concertos was tried only once before – by Mozart in his Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K.271 – and did not occur again in any major piano concerto until the B-flat major Concerto of Brahms. The thunderous opening of the Fifth Concerto was without precedent, as was Beethoven’s refusal to allow the performer to improvise a cadenza.
Beethoven composed the Concerto in Vienna during the summer of 1809, under conditions hardly conducive to creativity. Following a day of heavy bombardment, Vienna surrendered to the French army under Napoleon, and those citizens who could afford to flee did so, including Beethoven’s patron and friend, the Archduke Rudolph. Prices and taxes skyrocketed, food was scarce, parks were closed to the public and Beethoven remained in the city, alone and lonely. In spite of the hardships during those trying months, he managed to compose some of his greatest works: the Piano Sonata, Opus 81a (Les adieux); the Quartet in E flat, Opus 74 (the Harp); and the Emperor Concerto (the title bestowed on it by one of the publishers, without Beethoven’s approval.)
The Fifth Piano Concerto was premiered in Leipzig in 1811 to an enthusiastic reception. It was the only one of Beethoven’s piano concertos without the composer himself at the keyboard, since by that time his hearing had deteriorated too far for him to perform in public, especially with an orchestra. Two months later, however, the first performance in Vienna was a total failure, primarily because the Concerto was on the program of a Charity Society performance featuring three living tableaux on Biblical subjects – hardly a suitable milieu.
The Concerto opens with a powerful orchestral chord, followed by a sweeping cadenza-like flourish by the piano solo. Only after two more orchestral chords interrupted by the piano outbursts, does the orchestra introduce the principal theme. The movement is stormy and driven, with some of the same harmonic ambiguity as in the first movement of the Fourth Concerto. At the point where traditionally one would have expected a cadenza, the pianist’s score bore Beethoven’s directive: “Do not play a cadenza!” The music that follows, however, has all the characteristics of a cadenza as if the composer wanted to be sure that his ideas, not the performer’s, would prevail.
The hymn-like lyrical second movement opens with the muted violins introducing the theme, followed by a pianissimo aria by the piano. There follow two variations, the first by the piano, the second by the orchestra. There follows one of Beethoven’s most mysterious musical moments, the hushed transition leading without pause into the exuberant Rondo. Beethoven builds up immense tension by subtle changes in key and tempo with hints of the rondo refrain to come, until the Finale bursts out in its jubilant mood.
Georges Bizet
1838-1875
Excerpts from l’Arlésienne Suites
Scored for 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 1 alto saxophone, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (snare drum, cymbal, bass drum, tambourin provencal), harp and strings
Estimated length: 35 minutes
Georges Bizet was yet another of those composers who showed precocious brilliance as a child but never lived long enough to completely fulfill the promise. The difference, however, between Bizet and Mozart, who died at about the same age, is that Mozart left more than 600 completed compositions, many of them masterpieces, while Bizet is known primarily for a single work, the opera Carmen.
Hard up for money in 1872, Bizet composed incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet called l’Arlésienne (“The Woman from Arles”). Embroiled in a war between the proponents of “high” art and “low” art, the critics refused to attend and the play closed after 21 performances to an empty house. But Bizet did not let his incidental music, containing 27 numbers, go to waste. He extracted an orchestral suite that has remained popular in the repertory. After his death, his friend Ernest Guiraud extracted a second suite that has become equally popular. Both suites are considerably rewritten from the original incidental music, which was scored for only 26 musicians, including a saxophone. They conjure up the folk dances of the lovely setting in Provence, coupled with the atmosphere of doom of the play.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Pictures at an Exhibition
8 p.m. February 27-28, 2009
Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts
Carol Bush Emeny Performance Hall
Jeffrey Biegel, piano
Kimbo Ishii-Eto, conductor
Gabriel Fauré
1845-1924
Pavane, Opus 50
Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns and strings
Estimated length: 7 minutes
The bulk of Gabriel Fauré’s music – whether piano, chamber, vocal or orchestral – conveys the impression of a personal and private statement, an intimate conversation between the composer and his muse. Throughout his life Fauré’s ideal was, as he put it, to create musique de chambre (chamber music); the grander forms – opera, symphony or concerto – were not for him. He made a number of attempts to write a symphony but abandoned or rejected them; the same fate awaited his attempt at a violin concerto. His music is admirably suited for performance in private homes or small halls. But the elegance and ease of much of his work belies the painstaking effort that went into the composition. Fauré was not one to wear his heart on his sleeve.
Fauré was a student of Camille Saint-Saëns, the quintessential French neo-classicist of the late 19th century who considered form as an essential component of “good” music. Fauré respected Saint-Saëns greatly, and while the structure of his works usually adheres to classical models, he often experimented and surprised audiences with unexpected phrasing, harmonies and elegant twists of musical development. His Requiem, for example, represents a quiet, comforting revolution in the Catholic approach to death (it lacks the Dies irae, describing the panic damned souls awaiting judgment). Although a secret agnostic and freethinker, he worked for many years as organist and choirmaster at La Madeleine, one of the largest churches in Paris.
Fauré composed Pavane in 1887 for a small orchestra with an optional chorus part that is frequently omitted since it adds little to the delicate and nostalgic mood of the piece. The modest orchestration is in line with Fauré’s dislike of vivid colors and effects, which he considered a form of self-indulgence and a cover-up for a shortage of ideas. Pavane became quite popular, and Fauré made a piano arrangement in 1889.
Serge Prokofiev
1891-1953
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Opus 26
Scored for solo piano, 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbal, castanets, tambourine) and strings
Estimated length: 27 minutes
While still a student in the St. Petersburg Conservatory before the 1917 Revolution, Serge Prokofiev was already known as Russian music’s enfant terrible. His first piano concerto in particular, with its spiky dissonances and unromantic tone, clashed with the taste of the prevailing musical establishment and his teachers at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, especially its head, the conservative composer Alexander Glazunov. In the United States the New York Times review has become a classic: “(T)he piano all the while shrieking, groaning, howling, fighting back, and in several instances it seemed to rear and bite the hand that chastised it.... There were moments when the piano and orchestra made sounds that evoked not only the downfall of empires, but also of fine crockery...”
Apolitical and appalled by the mayhem created by the revolution – although unrepentant about his Concerto – Prokofiev left his native country in 1918, settling first in the United States and then in Paris.
In 1921, while composing his most famous opera, The Love for Three Oranges, for the Chicago Lyric Opera, he spent the summer in Brittany working at the same time on the Third Piano Concerto. Both works were premiered in Chicago; but while the opera was an outstanding success, the concerto met again with a decidedly cool reception.
Based on thematic material written between 1911 and 1916, which the composer had intended for other works, the Third Piano Concerto has emerged as his most popular. The Concerto opens with a solo clarinet intoning a gentle theme. There follows a section of several rapid, virtuosic motifs in the percussive style (the “fine crockery” that was lambasted in the Times) so common to the composer’s piano music, although here it takes the form of acerbic broken thirds and scales that eventually coalesce as a formal second theme.
The second movement is a theme and variations, but not in the classical sense with two repeated strains. Rather, the composer takes a long melody of 12 bars, giving it four increasingly elaborate and emotionally intense variations, the last of which fades off into a short, whispered coda.
Prokofiev had originally written two of the themes for the Finale for an aborted “white” string quartet, one without accidentals (sharps and flats), which if performed on a piano would be played only on the white keys. The Finale is in rondo-sonata form, the rondo theme, one of the original “white-note” themes, is introduced in the bassoons accompanied by pizzicato basses in 3/4 time, although its melodic shape renders the meter ambiguous at first. The second theme in the piano is characterized by glittering glissandos that are then taken up by the violins. After a return to the rondo, there is a shift in tempo and mood as the woodwinds introduce a broad melody, a third theme that dominates a good part of the development. A fourth theme in the piano was one of his original “white-note” themes. The rondo theme, with the piano establishing a clear beat, emerges as a clearly defined waltz. The coda, still in waltz time, becomes an insistent pounding restatement of motivic elements of the movement’s opening theme.
Prokofiev never felt comfortable on foreign soil, and by 1933, homesickness was consuming him: “The air of foreign lands does not inspire me because I am Russian and there is nothing more harmful to me than to live in exile,” he said to a reporter in Paris. He was spending more and more time in Russia, although his family was still living in France. In 1936 he returned permanently to Moscow, aware that he would have to change his compositional style to satisfy Soviet cultural demands. He was never again able to travel abroad.
1839-1881
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION
(Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel)
Scored for 3 flutes (2 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabasson, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, percussion (bass drum, chimes, cymbal, glockenspiel, snare drum, tamtam, triangle, woodblock, xylophone), harp, celeste and strings
Estimated length: 35 minutes
Modest Mussorgsky, one of the wild cards of 19th-century Russian music, left very few completed scores by the time of his early death from alcoholism. Of his meager output, the opera Boris Godunov, some of his songs, the short orchestral score St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition have stood the test of time. Although Boris and St. John’s Night are most often heard in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “corrected” form, they now are considered among the highlights of Russian music. Mussorgsky was a member of the “Mighty Five” – together with Mily Balakirev, Aleksander Borodin, Cesar Cui and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov – whose goal was to further the pan-Slavic movement and Russian nationalist music.
In July 1873, Mussorgsky’s close friend, the young architect and painter Victor Gartman, died suddenly. The following year a posthumous showing of his drawings, paintings and designs was presented in St. Petersburg. Much of Gartman’s work was fantastic and bizarre in nature, elements that held a special fascination for Mussorgsky, who set out to create a musical memorial to his friend in the form of a suite of piano pieces. He depicted his impressions of 10 of the pictures, portraying himself as the observer in the Promenade that introduces the work and serves as connector between the tableaux.
A striking aspect of the suite is the nearly complete absence of any subjective emotion in a work directly inspired by a great personal loss. Mussorgsky gives us his personal impressions of Gartman’s art, but rarely of his feelings about Gartman’s death. Even in the Promenade, strolling from picture to picture, he portrays a cool, objective viewer rather than a grieving friend.
There is no evidence that Mussorgsky ever planned to orchestrate the suite, although many of the pieces cry out for orchestration. The score was not published until five years after the composer’s death, at which point other composers started its long history of orchestrated versions. The first was Mikhail Tushmalov in 1890, followed by Sir Henry Wood, Lucien Cailliet, Leopold Stokowski, Vladimir Ashkenazy and others. But the most popular and by far the most successful version is the one by Maurice Ravel, done in 1922 under a commission from the conductor Sergey Koussevitzky.
One of the most striking features of Mussorgsky’s piano version, further enhanced by Ravel’s orchestration, is the vivid tone painting that enables the listener to sharply visualize the painting. And it’s a good thing too since the originals of most of Gartman’s works upon which the suite is based are either lost or inaccessible.
In addition to the Promenade, the pictures that inspired the ten tableaux of the suite are:
1. Gnomus – a sketch of a little gnome on crooked legs, said to be a design for a nutcracker.
2. Il vecchio castello – A medieval castle before which a troubadour sings a love song. The mournful sound of the alto saxophone was Ravel’s stroke of genius.
3. Tuileries– children quarreling and nurses shouting on a path in the Tuileries garden in Paris.
4. Bydlo – A Polish oxcart with enormous wheels is heard in the distance, gradually approaches, passes by and disappears again.
5. Ballet of Chicks in Their Shells – a design for a scene from the ballet Trilby.
6. Two Polish Jews – one rich, the other poor. No picture by Gartman corresponding to this tableau has ever been found. The subtitle “Samuel Goldenburg and Schmuyle” is a late addition, not by Mussorgsky. Ravel uses the basses and a solo muted trumpet to represent the two characters.
7. The Marketplace of Limoges – French women haggling violently in the market.
8. Catacombs – the interior of the catacombs in Paris illuminated by lantern light with the figure of Gartman himself in the shadows.
a. Cum mortuis in lingua mortua (“With the dead in a dead language”) – the Promenade, in the minor mode, constitutes the second part of the Catacombs.
9. The Hut on Fowl’s Legs – Baba Yaga, the hideous old crone of Russian folklore, who lives in a hut supported on fowl legs and flies around in an iron mortar, was Gartman’s design for the face of a clock.
10. The Great Gate of Kiev – Gartman’s design for a memorial gate in Kiev in honor of Tsar Alexander II. The design is in the massive Old Russian style, topped by a cupola in the shape of the helmet of the old Slavonic warriors. Ravel’s orchestration is particularly effective at representing the deep Russian bells.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com
East Meets West
8 p.m. January 23-24, 2009
Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts
Carol Bush Emeny Performance Hall
Karen Han, erhu
Kimbo Ishii-Eto, conductor
Yuzo Toyama, b. 1931, Rhapsody for Orchestra
Scored for 2 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings.
Estimated length: 7 minutes
Born in Tokyo, Yuzo Toyama studied composition at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, graduating in 1952. In the next few years, he started conducting, working at Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, before going to Vienna for two years to study conducting. At one time or the other he has served as conductor of most of Japan’s major orchestras. In 1968, he was invited to Moscow for the premiere of his Cello Concerto with Mstislav Rostropovich as soloist.
Like Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók, Toyama makes extensive use of authentic folk music in his works, but without modifying the melodies drastically as did Bartók. He has also been a strong promoter of Western twentieth-century opera in Japan, especially the works of Benjamin Britten and Francis Poulenc.
Toyama composed the Rhapsody for Orchestra in 1960 as an encore piece when he traveled to Europe as conductor with the NHK Symphony Orchestra. It is a medley of Japanese folk melodies. It opens with repeated clapping of the hyoshigi, the pair of wooden blocks used in Kabuki theatre to announce the beginning of a performance. The middle of the Rhapsody is a wistful flute solo, an oiwake-bushi or fork-of-the-road song from around Nagano in central Japan, sung by mule drivers when they came to a fork in the road. The Rhapsody closes with Yagibushi, a rousing song and dance performed at festivals and sport events. Toyama’s writing for a battery of traditional Japanese percussion instruments is particularly effective and novel to Western ears.
Wu Houyuan
20th century (dates unknown)
Capriccio for the Red Plum Blossom
Scored for solo erhu and orchestra
Estimated length: 10 minutes
Wu Houyuan was the founding director of the Central Conservatory Orchestra in Beijing, and a known performer on the da-yuan, an instrument similar to the bass guitar.
Capriccio for the Red Plum Blossom, composed in 1980, is a single-movement concerto for the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese violin that can be traced back to instruments introduced into China more than a thousand years ago. The erhu consists of a long thin neck, at the top of which are two large tuning pegs; at the bottom is a small round sound box covered with snake skin. Two strings are attached from the pegs to the base, and a small loop of string placed around the neck and strings pulls the strings towards the skin over a small wooden bridge.
Originally an instrument primarily used to accompany Chinese opera, the erhu became a solo instrument during the 20th century. Its repertoire has grown rapidly and now has become one of the most popular instruments in China. Incidentally, most contemporary Chinese can’t stand their traditional opera, and the erhu repertory has morphed into the popular fusion of traditional Chinese melodies and Western classical sonorities.
The Capriccio is a single-movement concerto based on a popular song, “Ode to Red Plum Blossom.” It is subdivided into an introduction and five sections: Moderato grazioso; Allegretto vivace; Lento; Allegro; Finale. The grand, slow music of the final section is said to represent the noble character of the plum blossoms that bloom in defiance of severe cold, as described in the lyrics of the song. Hundreds of flowers are awakened, celebrating the coming of a new spring.
Vittorio Monti
1868-1922
Czárdás
Scored for solo erhu, 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, harp and strings
Estimated length: 3 minutes
In the early 1800s, popular Gypsy dance music entered the aristocratic salons of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but in a tamed form, an idealized evocation of a happy and productive peasantry. In fact, much of the “classical” renderings of Gypsy or Eastern European folk music – for example, rhapsodies of Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms – had about as little connection with authentic folk music as did Bach and Mozart.
The czárdás is a case in point. Ostensibly a peasant dance from country inns, it was probably the invention of Count Béla Wenckheim in the 1830s, based on the verbunkos, the Austrian Army’s recruiting dance, which had an alternating slow-fast structure, called respectively lassu and friss. Gypsy musicians appropriated the czárdás into their own popular music, heard throughout the cafes of the Empire. It quickly spread throughout the rest of Europe, aided by Liszt and Brahms.
Vittorio Monti was an Italian violinist and conductor, who in 1900 became conductor of the Lamoureux Orchestra of Paris. He composed several ballets and operettas, but the only work of his that survived is Czárdás, composed originally for violin and piano – probably the best-known czárdás by far.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74 (Pathétique)
Scored for 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbal, tamtam) and strings
Estimated length: 46 minutes
The Sixth Symphony was Tchaikovsky’s final completed work, premiered to a lukewarm reception on October 28, 1893, only nine days before the composer’s death from cholera. Although its emotional intensity and title, Pathétique, suggest that this was yet another manifestation of the composer’s periodic depression, or even a foreshadowing of his own death, the fact remains that Tchaikovsky was extremely pleased with this work from the moment he set to work on it. The Symphony’s second performance was part of a memorial service for the composer, during which the audience seems to have suddenly perceived its significance. It has remained a favorite ever since.
Tchaikovsky’s original conception was that the Symphony should have a program, much like Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, but he refused to specify what the program was, wanting the listener to guess it. His early, and by now well-known, scenario for the program reads: “The ultimate essence of the plan…is LIFE. First movement – all impulsive passion, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short. (Finale DEATH – result of collapse). Second movement, love, third, disappointment, fourth ends dying away (also short).” The final version can be understood to conform to this program only in part, and then only in the first and fourth movements.
Still intending to call his work a “program” symphony, Tchaikovsky accepted his brother Modest’s suggestion of the Russian patetichesky, which the publisher insisted on translating into French, still the language of the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia. The English reader, however, should be aware that the adjective pathétique actually means “highly emotional” and does not have the derogatory connotation of “pathetic.”
The Symphony opens with a low bassoon solo introducing the first theme in a ponderous and pessimistic Adagio. The melody is then taken up in a nervous Allegro and repeated by the successive sections of the orchestra. The emotional turmoil, however, is resolved in the second theme, among the most famous in the canon of memorable Tchaikovsky melodies. The theme was specifically meant to be a transformation of Don José’s “flower aria” from Carmen – giving a hint as to the composer’s negative emotional take on love.
The second movement is a “waltz” in 5/4 time, giving the impression of alternating bars of 3/4 and 2/4. Strangely enough, this meter works as a waltz, for despite its limping quality, one can imagine the alternating foreshortened 2/4 bars used for a lift or emotive pause, if the movement were actually to be used for dancing.
Like the first movement, the third is best known for its second theme, a sprightly march. As in the second movement, however, the composer utilizes an unusual metrical structure, creating an ambiguity between duple and triple time by composing the march in 12/8 time.
The Finale can be interpreted as taking up the symphony’s original program. The opening theme, a series of short breathless, sighing motives, is a variation of the first theme of the opening movement. A programmatic interpretation of the movement suggests struggle and resignation upon the approach of the nothingness of death.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@ mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com
Mahler’s Titan
8 p.m. November 21-22, 2008
Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts
Carol Bush Emeny Performance Hall
Susan Platts, mezzo-soprano
Royal R. Brantley, narrator
Kimbo Ishii-Eto, conductor
Gustav Mahler
1860-1911
Kindertotenlieder
Scored for solo voice, 2 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 4 horns, timpani, percussion (glockenspiel, tamtam), harp, celeste and strings
Estimated length: 26 minutes
Most of Gustav Mahler’s music expresses his life-long battle with fate and with the uncertainty of existence, which may explain how he could have written two of the Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”) immediately following the birth of his second daughter in 1904.
One of the last great figures of the late Romantic movement, Mahler was at the same time one of the harbingers of 20th-century music. In the 1880s, he was building his reputation as a symphonic and operatic conductor. As he moved from one conducting post to another, usually as the assistant conductor in opera houses, he had only limited time for composing. Most of his early surviving compositions are lieder, and many of them settings of poems from the German folk poetry collection known as Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”). His volatile and neurotic personality was anathema to turn-of-the-century Europe where hiding behind a facade of stability was the norm. Although people pointed to him in the street and whispered, perhaps it is our uncertainty in the future that made Mahler’s music so popular in the second half of the 20th century.
The German Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866), linguist and Asian studies expert, was a master of 30 languages who made his mark chiefly as a translator of Asian poetry and a writer of poems conceived in the spirit of Asian masters. Many of his poems were discovered among his papers after his death and published posthumously. Among those were 428 poems – only 166 were published – that explored Rückert’s response to the death of two of his children in the winter of 1833-34 from scarlet fever. Rückert’s influence was widespread, and many famous composers set his poems to music, including Franz Schubert, Clara and Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss. He was one of Mahler’s favorite poets: “It is I to the letter, I could have written them myself,” he said of Rückert’s poems. In 1901 he started to set to music the five sensuous and romantic poems that became the Rückert Lieder.
At the same time Mahler set to music three poems from Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder collection. The subject appealed to him, perhaps because at age 14, his beloved younger brother Ernst had died of scarlet fever, the same illness that had killed Rückert’s son, also named Ernst. The unfortunate timing of the two poems Mahler added three years later, after the birth of his daughter, greatly upset his wife Alma.
Mahler, of course, was neither the first nor the last composer, classical or popular alike, to obsess about misery in his songs. Perhaps the greatest beauty of such cycles is in the emotional nuances, to which the listener must be sensitive, with often little hope of relief from the unrelenting gloom. And yet, with his sensitivity to each line of text, Mahler reflects the subtle changes in mood in the poems’ flashbacks, suggestions of a better eternal life, or the contrast between personal grief with ordinary lives of others for the moment untouched by tragedy.
Orchestral instruments have over time acquired particular affective personalities; the oboe, for example, is often associated with melancholy. So it is no surprise that this instrument bears a special relationship with the singer in these songs, frequently paired in duets with no other accompaniment.
1860-1911
Symphony No. 1 in D major (Titan)
Scored for 4 flutes (3 doubling piccolo), 4 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 4 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet, 2 doubling E-flat clarinet), 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 7 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, 2 timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, triangle, tamtam), harp and strings
Estimated length: 53 minutes
In the late 1880s, Mahler was building his reputation as a symphonic and operatic conductor; he had only limited time for composing. It took him from 1883 to 1888 to finish the First Symphony for its premiere and another 11 years to have it ready for publication.
At the time he began the symphony, Mahler was also composing a cycle of four songs with orchestra, entitled Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (“Songs of a Wayfarer”). The themes from two of these songs found their way into the symphony: The second song became the main theme of the first movement, while the fourth song became the middle section of the third movement.
In light of Mahler’s later symphonies, the First is relatively tame and conservative. Nevertheless, it was received with hostility and ridicule at the first performance, bewildering the audience and annoying the critics. Its originality lies in the innovative orchestration and harmonies, as well as in the intensity of the emotions it conveys. “Of all romantics, this arch-romantic has most to give to the music of the future,” wrote Aaron Copland in 1941, before the resurgence of Mahler’s popularity.
During the interval between the Symphony’s premiere and publication, Mahler made major changes. At its premiere in Budapest in 1889, Mahler had called it a “Symphonic Poem in two parts” with an elaborate literary program that he later repudiated. The origin of the symphony’s subtitle “Titan” is actually not known; some scholars believe it is derived from the title of a novel by Jean Paul, a popular literary figure during the heyday of the Romantic period. In its first version, the symphony had five movements, but Mahler immediately discarded the original second movement. He also expanded the size of the orchestra and revised the orchestration drastically. The discarded second movement, an andante titled “Blumine,” resurfaced only in 1967 and is occasionally performed with the symphony.
The first movement begins with an eerie introduction, the first two notes of which later morph into a birdcall, as well as the first two notes of the main theme. It is punctuated by a distant fanfare and a wailing oboe cry. The allegro section begins with the second “I” lied, Ging heut morgen Übers Feld (“I Walked this Morning over the Field”), in the cellos, the heart and soul of the symphony that serves not only as the main theme of this movement, but also as the basis of the themes of the second and final movements. The music of the introduction recurs in the middle of the movement. Mahler’s genius was his ability to keep all his thematic balls in the air at the same time, a feat brilliantly achieved in the coda.
The second movement, the scherzo, has the rhythm of the ländler, an Austrian folk dance. Although it conforms to the classic minuet and trio structure, Mahler spins out the first section far beyond the standard repeat structure. The trio recalls the birdcall theme from the first movement.
The third movement, a funeral march, opens with a macabre timpani beat, a lonely double bass introducing the main theme: none other than the nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” in the minor mode. The spooky parody, said to have been inspired by a popular picture by the French painter Jacques Callot of a dead hunter accompanied to his grave by the forest animals. In the middle section of the movement appears the theme from the fourth “Wayfarer” song, Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz (“My Sweetheart’s Two Blue Eyes”), hypnotic and calming. Mahler then transforms the theme into a dance with more than a hint of Jewish Hasidic music, an aspect of Mahler’s heritage toward which he manifested considerable ambivalence.
The movement leads directly to the stormy Finale, which in the original program notes was titled Dall’Inferno al Paradiso (“From Hell to Heaven”). It opens with one of the most threatening passages in classical music and is subsequently taken up in the main body of the allegro. In the finale, Mahler ties together the themes from the earlier movements, even those from the discarded “Blumine” movement as a gentle, even comforting, second theme. The resolution occurs in a coda of heroic proportions, including a triumphant, full-voiced reprise of the distant fanfare from the opening of the Symphony.
Program notes by:
Joe & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
Classical Frights
8 p.m. October 31-November 1, 2008
Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts
Carol Bush Emeny Performance Hall
Mayuko Kamio, violin
Kimbo Ishii-Eto, conductor
Johann Sebastian Bach
1685-1750
Toccata and Fugue in D minor
orch. Leopold Stokowski
Scored for 4 flutes (2 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, 1 English horn, 3 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 6 horns, 3 trumpets, 4 trombones, 1 tuba, 2 harps, celeste and strings
Estimated length: 9 minutes
The history of the toccata (from the Italian “to touch,” or play a keyboard instrument) dates back to the 16th century. Developed by Girolamo Frescobaldi during the early 17th century into an extensive, freely composed keyboard piece with several contrasting sections, the toccata underwent many alterations in form and style throughout the Baroque period. Among its principal exponents in northern Europe were Johann Pachelbel and Dietrich Buxtehude, both of who had a significant influence on the young Bach. Bach, in fact, is said to have walked over 100 miles from Eisenach to Lübeck just to hear Buxtehude play the organ.
As a genre, the toccata is similar to the keyboard fantasia, having no set rules as to form or structure, and serving primarily as a display of keyboard virtuosity. Until the late Baroque, there was no clear distinction between toccata (or prelude) and fugue, as one finds in Bach’s later works. A common feature of the toccata was rapid staccato repetition of a single note.
Composed for the organ, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor is one of Bach’s early works and shows the exuberance of youth in its bold, virtuosic statements. Apparently the composer considered it somewhat undisciplined (in maturer years he called such playing “Clavier Hussars”) and never used it later on for teaching purposes.
The work lends itself readily to orchestration, especially by such extroverted musicians as the conductor Leopold Stokowski. His controversial orchestration, done in 1927, became a hit after it was used as the opening section of Walt Disney’s film Fantasia in 1940.
Henri Wieniawski
1835-1880
Fantaisie Brilliante on Themes from Gounod’s Faust, Op. 20
Scored for solo violin, 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani and strings
Estimated length: 18 minutes
Composer, aesthetician and musical reformer Richard Wagner called Charles Gounod’s opera Faust (1859), based on Part 1 of Goethe’s epic poem: “A feeble French travesty of a German literary monument.” In spite of – or perhaps because – of that, the opera has continued to be a smashing success outside of Germany and Austria.
Adding to Wagner’s chagrin – as if to add insult to injury – the 19th century abounded with instrumental transcriptions of operatic themes. One of the most popular vehicles to show off technical display for virtuosos, they cropped up for nearly every instrument. Franz Liszt – incidentally, Wagner’s father-in-law – cranked them out by the dozen for the piano, and other composers followed suit.
Henri Wieniawski was one of the best-known violinists of the second half of the 19th century and a consummate showman. He was a child prodigy born in Poland, but from age 8 received his musical training in Paris. By age 15, he had embarked on a full career as a virtuoso, together with his younger brother Józef (1837-1912), an accomplished pianist. Henri soon started composing works full of technical bravura, over-ripe Romanticism and Slavic color, mostly intended for his own use. With his spectacular technique, he wowed Europe, often giving over 100 concerts a year – and this before the Autobahn, airplanes or high-speed trains. In 1860, at the behest of pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, who was making a determined effort to improve musical conditions in Russia, Wieniawski settled in St. Petersburg where he stayed until 1872. He became solo violinist to the Tsar, leader of both the orchestra and the string quartet of the Russian Musical Society, and professor of violin at the newly established conservatory.
In 1872, Wieniawski resumed his world travels, including an extended tour of North America with Rubinstein. Suffering from a severe heart ailment, he nevertheless continued to travel and perform. He collapsed while on tour in Russia, spending his last months at the home of Nadezhda von Meck, the benefactress of Tchaikovsky.
Although there is a fair amount of technical display in the Fantaisie, Wieniawski is sensitive to literary context, often choosing lyrical, emotive lines over mere showmanship. The medley follows the approximate order of the highlights from the first three acts of the opera.
Maurice Ravel
1875-1937
Tzigane
Scored for solo violin, 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 1 trumpet, percussion (suspended cymbal, triangle, glockenspiel), harp, celeste and strings
Estimated length: 10 minutes
Gypsy music, and especially Gypsy violin virtuosity, has fascinated composers ever since the late Baroque. Pablo Sarasate, with his supreme violin technique, composed numerous fiendishly difficult Gypsy-style works for his own use, but Maurice Ravel, himself not a violin player, did him one better.
In 1924, during the composition of his fairy-tale opera L’Enfant et les sortileges, Ravel took time off to compose Tzigane, a pastiche of Gypsy music inspired by Paganini’s Twenty-Four Caprices. He wrote it for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi, a fiery and spectacular performer: “What a personality and what a born violinist!” wrote the conductor Sir Henry J. Wood after hearing her perform the work in London. Ravel incorporated every trick in the violinist’s arsenal and then some, describing it as “a virtuoso piece in the style of a Hungarian rhapsody.”
First written for violin and piano, Ravel shortly thereafter orchestrated it, but the accompaniment is decidedly just that. It is a juxtaposition of themes and variations without much development. The question of whether this pastiche was meant as a parody of the 19th-century Liszt-Brahms-Sarasate infatuation with Hungarian music has persisted since its composition.
Modest Mussorgsky
1839-1881
A Night on Bald Mountain
Reworked by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Scored for 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion (cymbals, bass drum, tamtam, chimes), harp, and strings.
Estimated length: 12 minutes
A moral question: Which is worse, completely rewriting someone else’s piece but retaining the name of the original composer, or “borrowing” someone else’s work and pawning it off as your own?
St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain and the opera Boris Godunov were the only major works orchestrated by Modest Mussorgsky himself. The former’s harsh, unconventional harmonies were rejected by his contemporaries and mentors, especially Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Mily Balakirev. Upon Mussorgsky’s death, Rimsky-Korsakov undertook to re-orchestrate the work and “clean up” the harmonies in the version that it is usually performed today. This brilliant orchestration is more tempered than the original, but it loses much of the rough-hewn savagery and percussive orchestral imagery of Mussorgsky’s original score – published only in 1968, 101 years after its composition. The Rimsky-Korsakov version ends with midnight church bells signaling the end of the Sabbath, followed by the flute, clarinet and harp heralding the dawn. This anticlimactic – although more religiously orthodox – ending does not exist in the original score.
“Bald Mountain” in the title of this tone poem refers to Mount Tiglav near Kiev, well known in Russian folk literature. The work depicts the legendary witches’ Sabbath held there every year on St. John’s Night, June 23-24. Originally entitled St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain, Mussorgsky was proud of his creation and saw the work as “an independent Russian product, free from German profundity and routine – grown on our country’s soil and nurtured on Russian bread.”
According to the composer’s letters, the music depicts “the witches who used to gather on the mountain, gossiping, playing tricks and awaiting the arrival of Satan. On his arrival the witches formed a circle around the throne on which he sat and sang his obscene praise. When Satan was worked up into sufficient passion ... he gave the command for the Sabbath, choosing for himself the witches that caught his fancy.”
John Williams
b. 1932
Music from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Scored for 3 flutes (2 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet, 1 doubling E-flat clarinet), 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celeste and strings.
Estimated length: 17 minutes
Composer, conductor and arranger John Williams is probably the most successful and best-known movie composer of all time, with such blockbuster scores as Superman, Jaws, E.T., Raiders of the Lost ark, Schindler’s List and of course, Star Wars.
When Williams composed the music for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in 2001, he initially wrote “Hedwig’s Theme” – who, just in case anyone out there doesn’t know, is Harry’s owl – as a “darkly alluring orchestral waltz” for the first movie trailer. At the time Williams commented, “everyone seemed to like it, so I will probably use that music as one thread in the tapestry.” In fact, “Hedwig’s Theme” has become the most recognized theme in the entire series, acquiring a life of its own, in association with other magical characters and spells. Williams featured the bell-like celesta over a swirling string accompaniment. Williams worked other magical melodies into a suite of themes from the film that he called “Harry’s Wonderous World.”
Major instrumental numbers accompany specific scenes in the film. For Fluffy, the three-headed dog guarding the chamber where the Sorcerer’s Stone is located who can be soothed only by a magic harp, Williams created a duet for harp and contrabassoon. The creator of the Olympic fanfare provided a signature brass showcase for Quidditch. A “Wizard’s” chamber ensemble, including recorder, upper winds, finger cymbals, strings and a pair of xylophones, portrays the shopping emporium Diagon Alley, the fictional street in London.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Opening Night!
8 p.m. September 19-20, 2008
Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts
Carol Bush Emeny Performance Hall
Kyoko Takezawa, violin
Kimbo Ishii-Eto, conductor
Maurice Ravel
1875-1937
Menuet Antique
Scored for 2 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, 1 harp, timpani and strings
Estimated length: 7 minutes
Of Basque origin but raised in Paris, Maurice Ravel came from a musical family who encouraged his abilities from a young age. He gained admission to the Paris Conservatoire at age 14, but he and his teachers never got along. His free spirit and unconventional musical ideas ran counter to the school’s conservatism. By the time he graduated in 1903, he was already a well-established composer, but five attempts to win the coveted Prix de Rome – the obligatory passport to success with the French musical establishment – came to naught, creating a scandal when it was revealed during his last attempt that all the finalists were composition students of a single professor.
Ravel had a lifelong predilection for both old and new music, frequently basing his compositions on the music and courtly dances of the Renaissance, Baroque or Classical eras, as well as in the style of his favorite composers of all periods. His earliest published work, Menuet Antique (1895) was originally composed for the piano and dedicated to his colleague and close friend Ricardo Viñes, who premiered it in 1898. Subsequent pieces based on, or inspired by, early music were the suite Le tombeau de Couperin and the famous Pavane pour une enfante défunte.
Menuet Antique follows the standard Classical form, which includes a central contrasting trio section, familiar in the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn. It possesses an irregularity of phrasing and delicate dissonant harmonies that nevertheless maintain the spirit, if not the letter, of the models. The contrast provided by the Trio lies in more conservative harmonies.
Ravel orchestrated many of his own piano works; the orchestral transcription of the Menuet Antique in 1929 was the last of his orchestrations, premiering the following year. This later version combines the relative simplicity of a youthful work with the mastery of strikingly original orchestral tone color so familiar from his orchestration of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840–1893
Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35
Scored for solo violin, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Estimated length: 33 minutes
“Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto raises for the first time the ghastly idea that there are pieces of music that one can hear stinking.... [The finale] transports us into the brutish grim jollity of a Russian church festival. In our mind’s eye we see nothing but common, ravaged faces, hear rough oaths and smell cheap liquor.” This harsh assessment comes from the pen of the dean of 19th-century music critics, Eduard Hanslick, reviewing the Concerto’s Vienna premiere.
Why did the Concerto premiere in Vienna and not St. Petersburg? It is difficult to believe that this Concerto, probably the most popular in the literature, was declared to contain passages that were “almost impossible to play” by its first dedicatee, the famed violinist and violin teacher Leopold Auer, concertmaster of the Imperial Orchestra in St. Petersburg. Completed in 1878, it had to wait for three years for its premiere in Vienna, where Hanslick was not alone in his opinion.
What Hanslick and the other critics disliked most is what makes the Concerto so appealing today: its athletic energy, unabashed romanticism and rousing Slavic finale. Without diminishing our own enjoyment of the Concerto, attempting to hear it with the ears of its first audience is a fascinating exercise in cultural relativity. First of all, consider the sheer difficulty of the piece. What defeated Russia’s leading violin virtuoso is the stuff teenage prodigies cut their teeth on at Juilliard and Curtis, practicing the killer bits ad nauseam until they get it right or find some other career.
Then there’s the fact that there was no love lost between the two great 19th-century imperial behemoths, Russia and Austria-Hungary, who continued to slug it out until the end of World War I. That Tchaikovsky disliked Johannes Brahms, Hanslick’s favorite composer, probably also added fuel to the fire.
At the time of the Concerto’s inception, Tchaikovsky was just emerging from under the black cloud of a disastrous marriage to an emotionally unstable woman who had threatened suicide if he refused to marry. The marriage also was undertaken to quash rumors about his homosexuality; it ended two weeks later with his attempted suicide, although they were never legally divorced. The vibrant energy of the Concerto, however, seems to have been inspired by the visit of Josif Kotek, a young violinist, pupil and protégé who managed to raise the composer’s spirits and helped him with the Concerto, giving advice on technical matters.
The Concerto opens with a brief, gentle introduction, paving the way for the lyrical first theme. After some virtuosic fireworks, the emerging second theme is surprisingly similar in mood to the first. The development, full of technical acrobatics, leads into the very difficult cadenza that the composer wrote himself.
The current slow movement was Tchaikovsky’s second try; he discarded his first attempt, eventually publishing it separately as a violin and piano piece, Méditation, Opus 42, No. 3. The second version opens with a gentle melancholy song on the woodwinds that pervades the movement, serving as sharp contrast to the raucous Finale that follows without pause.
The unabashed use of Russian peasant dance rhythms in the third movement that so upset Vienna’s critics was even at the time becoming a signature of much Russian orchestral music and a symbol of Russian nationalism. Another peculiar divergence from tradition that must have raised a few Viennese eyebrows is the spectacular cadenza at the beginning of the movement that follows immediately on the fiery orchestral introduction and leads right into the main theme. Now, if these had been German or Hungarian dances, Vienna’s attitude might have been different.
Dmitri Shostakovich
1906-1975
Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Opus 10
Scored for 3 flutes (2 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 contralto trumpet, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion (snare drum, triangle, tamtam, glockenspiel, cymbals, bass drum), piano and strings
Estimated length: 28 minutes
Volumes have been written about Dmitri Shostakovich and his ambivalent relationship with the Soviet regime. Much of this writing is based on after-the-fact statements whose authenticity and veracity are often difficult to verify. What is clear is that the composer was a true son of the Russian Revolution and, as teenager, a true believer. But in his late twenties, he became caught up in the Stalinist nightmare and apparently only survived the purges because Stalin liked the music Shostakovich obediently churned out for propaganda films.
Shostakovich came from a music-loving family, and young Dmitri was exposed to good music from a young age. Upon starting piano lessons – admittedly with extreme reluctance – at age 9, he immediately displayed a level of innate talent, including perfect pitch, advanced sight-reading and, most important, a nearly photographic musical memory. At 13, he entered the Leningrad Conservatory, unsure whether he wanted to become a pianist or composer. Conditions, however, were so dire in the struggling new Soviet regime that the slight, nearsighted prodigy suffered from anemia and malnutrition, despite special food rations for talented students.
It was his outstanding composition teacher Maximilian Steinberg who encouraged him and promoted Shostakovich’s meteoric rise to fame. Shostakovich composed his First Symphony for his graduation project for Steinberg’s composition class in December 1925. He had been working on it for a year and a half, but his efforts were continually interrupted when the death of his father and economic necessity forced him to earn money by accompanying silent films on the piano. Although the First Symphony was technically a student work, it flew in the face of both the Russian academic tradition and the style established by the last generation of Russian masters, the “Mighty Five.” An interesting exercise is to contrast this idiosyncratic symphony with the First Symphony of Prokofiev, the Classical, composed only a few years earlier in 1918.
The premiere in May 1926 by the Leningrad Philharmonic conducted by Nikolai Malko, created a sensation; the Scherzo had to be encored. Conductor Bruno Walter shortly thereafter conducted the work in Berlin, and two years later Leopold Stokowski conducted it with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
With its combination of musical irony and intense pathos, the First Symphony foreshadows many of the composer’s subsequent works. Shostakovich himself called the music of the first two movements Symphonie-grotesque, poking fun at academic tradition. Later in his career, the “grotesque” elements would come to represent the repressive forces of Soviet politics, particularly the figure of Joseph Stalin. Even if his hidden musical symbolism was unknown, his musical acerbity and dissonant harmony periodically got him into trouble with the Soviet authorities. With the third movement, Lento, however, the mood turns somber, and in the last movement, threatening and tragic.
The question remains as to what it was about Shostakovich’s world as a teenager that contributed to the creation of such a personally prescient piece. Spurious reports of the 10-year-old Dmitri’s witnessing the brutal slaying of a child by a policeman at a workers’ demonstration made their way into the composer’s official biography. Yet, even if such a single incident cannot be verified, the boy certainly was witness – if even indirectly – to the human carnage of the early years of the Revolution, where lists of executed “Enemies of the People” were plastered on billboards throughout Petrograd (later Leningrad). The funereal timpani part in the third movement and in the fourth, the mournful introduction with its bass drum “gunshots,” the solo violin and saxophone laments, the trumpet calls and the return of the timpani tattoo bear musical witness to a life of menace and deprivation.
On the other hand, the composer, who later in life described in detail his extra-musical symbolism and coded writing, never spoke of any political significance for his First Symphony. Perhaps the dismal Finale merely reflected the young composer’s mood at the moment. He wrote in a letter: “I am in a terrible mood. I cannot find a room in Moscow. I cannot find work…. The horrid town of Moscow doesn’t want to nurture me in its cradle. Its teeming masses make a terrible impression on me ... but nevertheless, I want to go there with all my soul. So there. Sometimes I just want to shout. To cry out in terror. Doubts and problems, all this darkness suffocates me. From sheer misery, I’ve started to compose the Finale of the Symphony – it’s turning out pretty gloomy…”
Whatever the extra-musical meaning embedded in the Symphony, it is clear that even at this early stage, Shostakovich’s musical language of despair was already well formed.
Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com