#sandiegosymphony
The Third Republic in France began and ended with two catastrophes: the brutal invasion of France in 1870 by Bismarck and his North German coalition, which overthrew the Second Empire of Napoleon lll; and the even more brutal 1940 invasion by Hitler and the forces of Nazi Germany.
In between, came one of the most glorious periods in French culture: a revolution in the visual arts from the Impressionists to Matisse and Picasso; the creation of some of the greatest literary masterpieces in the French language; and an astounding torrent of music in every style and form, including scores which changed the sound of the symphony orchestra forever.
This was a time when foreigners from around the globe moved to Paris to be at the center of innovation. Russians like Turgenev and Stravinsky, and the great impresario Diaghilev with his Ballets russes; Americans like Henry James, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. And, of course, Picasso, from Spain.
This program celebrates two of the greatest names from French music of this period, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, with works not only beautiful in themselves, but making fascinating connections with painting, ballet and literature.
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L’isle joyeuse (The Joyful Isle)
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germaine-en-Laye
Died March 25, 1918, Paris
[~7 min.]
The original idea for Debussy’s piano piece L’isle joyeuse (The Joyful Isle) came from a poem, En bateau (On a boat), by Paul Verlaine from his collection Fêtes galantes, which in turn was inspired by a series of paintings by the great 18th century painter Antoine Watteau. These paintings – erotic, subversive and provocative – depict commedia dell’arte figures Pierrot, Harlequin and Columbine, and their friends and frivolous young aristocrats, playing, dancing, eating and making love in a mythical landscape half-French, half-Ancient Greek.
One painting in particular caught Verlaine’s and Debussy’s imaginations: L’embarquement pour Cythère (The Embarkation for Cythera). This world-famous image, now in the Louvre in Paris, depicts a group of obviously rich young people setting out on a short voyage to the Greek island of Cythera (Kythira), supposedly the birthplace of Venus, the goddess of Love. The painting is an outrageous celebration of the erotic light-heartedness and irresponsibility of youth.[1]
Verlaine’s witty and disturbing homage to this painting begins:
“The shepherd's star flickers
In the deep dark water, and the boat’s pilot
Searches for a lighter in his pants.
This is the moment, gentlemen,
Now or never, to be bold;
I’m putting my two hands everywhere!”
The poem ends with the sea at night:
“Meanwhile, the moon rises
And on its brief journey
The skiff skims gaily over the dreamy water.”
For Debussy, both poem and painting had a deeply personal significance. In the summer of 1904, he abandoned his wife Lilly and ran off with Emma Bardac, the wife of a wealthy Paris banker. The result was a public scandal. To escape the outcry, Debussy and Bardac retreated to the isle of Jersey, part of the British Channel Islands, and therefore beyond the French police and press. There, in the luxury of the Grand Hotel, St Helier, right above the beach, Debussy completed a work he had already sketched: a virtuosic piano celebration of the illicit joys of the Island of Love.
During this time, he wrote to a friend back in Paris:
“The sea has behaved beautifully towards me and shown herself to me in all her different guises. I am stunned.”
A few years later, toward the end of his life, Debussy made friends with the young Italian conductor Bernadino Molinari and encouraged and guided Molinari in the making of this fantastical orchestration of what was already a masterpiece for piano.
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La boîte à joujoux (The Toybox)
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
[~35min.]
In the final years before the First World War, Debussy wrote three ballets. In those days, Diaghilev, and his Russian dancers, designers and choreographers were taking Paris by storm (especially with three famous masterpieces by Stravinsky). Ballet was all the rage, and the impresario was keen to involve French or French-based artists in his project too. He invited Matisse and Picasso to design for him, and commissioned ballets from Ravel (Daphnis et Chloë) and Debussy (Jeux).
Around the same time, one of Diaghilev’s rivals, the Canadian dancer and choreographer, Maud Allen, commissioned Debussy to write a ‘legend in dance’, Khamma. Disliking the subject and Ms. Allen, Debussy wrote the piano score only, and left his friend the composer Charles Koechlin to complete the full score under his supervision.
A year later, in 1913, he was asked by the successful children’s writer and illustrator André Hellé to write music for his short book La boîte à joujoux (The Box of Toys). Originally, Debussy planned a musical puppet show to the charming story, but then changed his idea to human dancers.
It’s not hard to find a reason for Debussy’s fascination with this story. His daughter with his second wife, Emma Bardac – Claude-Emma, but known to her family as Chouchou – was born in 1905 a year after L’isle Joyeuse. Debussy famously loved Chouchou more than anyone else in his life. While she was still a toddler, he wrote for her his famous piano suite Children’s Corner, and when Hellé suggested The Box of Toys, he decided to write something his by-then 8-year-old child would enjoy. He even quotes in the ballet from the piano pieces and from other tunes he knew Chouchou would recognise and smile at.
Hellé’s story is both simple and (as is often the case with children’s books) somewhat peculiar.
The setting is a toyshop, presumably in Paris. When the shop-keeper closes up for the night, the toys come to life and emerge from their box. We meet the three main characters: a toy soldier; a wicked Polichinelle (the commedia dell’arte character of Pulcinella, familiar from Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name); and a pretty doll.
The soldier falls in love with the doll, but the scheming polichinelle tries to steal her away. A comical battle of toy-soldiers ensues, in which two armies fire dried peas at one another, and the soldier is wounded. Filled with pity, the doll nurses him back to life and marries him. The polichinelle is defeated.
The soldier and the doll buy a sheep farm and have many children. The polichinelle has become their servant. All the characters grow old.
Then dawn comes, the toys climb back into their box, the shopkeeper returns and another day begins.
Debussy completed a piano score, but – he was seriously ill by this stage – left the orchestral score to be completed under his supervision by another trusted friend and protegé, the composer André Caplet.
In 1919, a year after Debussy’s death, and shortly after the end of World War I, this score was first performed as a ballet; and Hellé published a charming version of it as a book for children, with quotations from Debussy’s music, and delightfully detailed illustrations which you will see projected above the orchestra in this performance.
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L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Magical Spells)
MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France
Died December 28, 1937, Paris
[~48 min.]
The First World War from 1914 to 1918 cost millions of lives and transformed life and society in many countries, and particularly in France in the last years of the Third Republic.
Many artists, including the ailing Debussy, created patriotic works in support of the French cause against the invading German Empire. Several younger ones, including Ravel, volunteered for service at the front. After being refused by the French Air Force, the composer became a lorry driver at the front for over two years, during which time he saw terrible things which took a heavy toll on his mental and physical health and eventually led to a breakdown.
It was during this wartime service that Ravel was contacted by the leading French writer Colette (best-known nowadays for her scandalous novels Chéri and Gigi, the latter of which became famous as a film-musical by Lerner and Loewe). Colette had sketched an idea for a fairy-tale ballet and wanted Ravel to write the music. He was interested but once the two artists discussed it further, they agreed that though dancing would be important, the piece would be better as a sung operetta.
By the time war ended, Ravel had started sketching musical ideas. But in 1920 he had a further breakdown and abandoned work. The following year, in search of peace and calm, he bought a beautiful little house in a small town about an hour southwest of Paris. Here he began work again. And as he did so, the style of his music began to change.
In these post-war years, to earn a living, Ravel began touring as a conductor and pianist, especially to the United States. America was a revelation to him, and especially American music. He visited jazz clubs in Harlem and Chicago. He went to musicals and to the cinema. And he listened to dance music. This was when he met Gershwin, whose music he adored, and Harry T. Burleigh, the great musician who years earlier had introduced Dvořák to the ‘spirituals’ which inspired the New World Symphony. Burleigh presented Ravel with a signed copy of one of his volumes of arrangements (including Deep River and other well-known songs) which Ravel kept beside his piano and used to play from as he composed L’enfant et les sortilèges, perhaps the most ‘American’ of all his compositions.
The title of this opera is difficult to translate. ‘L’enfant’ is easy; it means ‘the child’. But ‘sortilèges’ are not just ‘magical spells’, but also the things that are bewitched by those magical spells… which in the case of this opera, means furniture, ornaments, toys, books, animals, and all the plants and creatures in the garden. In other words, everything around the child is turned into magic.
Colette’s story, which she originally wrote for her 6-year-old, concerns a small boy who refuses to do his homework and is punished by his mother. Enraged, he trashes his room in revenge, scattering furniture and books, pulling the tail of his pet squirrel, and tearing the pendulum out of the ancestral grandfather clock.
As his rage dies down, all the objects he has spoiled start to come to life around him.
First to appear are a pottery shepherdess (which the child has thrown on the floor and broken) and an armchair (which he has cut with a knife). Together with other items of furniture, they sing about what the boy has done to them.
The grandfather clock appears, chiming madly as it no longer has a pendulum to regulate it.
Next – one of the most ‘American’ numbers in the show – we meet a black Wedgwood teapot and a Chinese porcelain teacup, with a bluesy number (half ragtime, half foxtrot), followed by a sudden operatic outburst of flames from the fire in the chimney.
Calm is restored with a procession of shepherds and shepherdesses from a paper wall-hanging which the child has torn to shreds, and a romantic encounter with a beautiful fairy-tale princess whom he had cruelly ripped out of his favorite story book.
After a brief but terrifying attack by the unfinished arithmetic exercises from his math book, the child follows his pet black cat out into shadows of the evening garden, where the moon shines bright in the sky and the magic takes a darker form. The trees, the frogs in the pond, the bats in the starlit sky and the insects (moths and dragonflies) all accuse the child of having tortured and mistreated them.
As they turn on him to punish him, he notices a baby squirrel, wounded on the ground. Filled with pity (for the first time in his young life), he tries to help it before calling out for his mother and then fainting. Moved by his remorse, the creatures of the garden echo his cry for his mother, who – in the very last bar of the opera – comes out through the French windows, as her child awakes.
In this performance, specially created for San Diego, the many characters portrayed by the singers in this story will be reflected in animated illustrations projected on to the beautiful new walls of Jacobs Music Center. Music, words and images will become a single thing.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ravel, and our production of L’enfant et les sortilèges is this orchestra’s homage to the man who created one of the most beautiful depictions of childhood in all of music.
-Program Note by Gerard McBurney
España, Rhapsody for Orchestra
EMMANUEL CHABRIER
Born January 18, 1841, Ambert, Puy-de-Dôme
Died September 13, 1894, Paris
[~8 min.]
Emmanuel Chabrier was a piano prodigy as a child, and he grew up longing to be a composer. But his parents insisted on a “sensible” career, and so Chabrier spent several decades as a minor clerk in the Ministry of the Interior who dabbled in composition in his spare time. Then in the spring of 1882 Chabrier and his wife took a vacation trip to Spain, where – like so many other French composers – he was intoxicated by Spanish music. Back in France, he noted down several characteristic melodies and dance rhythms that he had heard in Andalusia, and from these he fashioned what he called a fantasia for solo piano. When the conductor Charles Lamoureux heard Chabrier play this piece, he urged him to orchestrate it. Lamoureux led the premiere of the orchestral version, now titled España, in Paris on November 4, 1883. It was an instant success, and Chabrier woke the next morning to find himself famous. One hundred and forty years later, España remains his best-known work.
Chabrier himself noted that he had built España on two characteristic Spanish dances – the sultry malaguena and the lively jota – and he contributed a third theme of his own, a jaunty melody shouted out by the trombones. Much of the fun of this piece lies in its rhythmic vitality. España gets off to a steady start that convinces us that it’s in 2/4, and just when our ears have adjusted to that, Chabrier shifts the accents in a way that lets us know that this piece is really in 3/8. That sort of rhythmic displacement will occur throughout, and at several points Chabrier experiments with polyrhythmic overlapping: one part of the orchestra will stay in 3/8 while other sections within it are playing in 2/4. (Try beating time along with this piece – it will fool you again and again.)
As infectious as the rhythms are, the colors of España are just as memorable. Chabrier writes imaginatively for the orchestra, employing such unusual instruments as cornets and basque tambourine and such effects as col legno: requiring the strings to play extended passages with the wood of the bow. The Spanish dances sing and surge voluptuously, and España rushes to its close in a great wash of brilliant sound.
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Ephemerae, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
JIMMY LÓPEZ
Born October 21, 1978, Lima
[~30 min.]
The composer has supplied a program note for this work:
Fragrances may be amongst the most fleeting and ethereal sensations most sentient beings experience in their daily lives. They come in a myriad of varieties, making them incredibly hard to verbalize and categorize. Although elusive, they are also capable of making lasting impressions, remaining in our memory long after they are gone. The perfume industry has found ways to harness their power by meticulously studying them and classifying them. Michael Edwards’ Fragrance Wheel is perhaps the most known successful attempt and has become an industry standard.
Divided into three movements, Ephemerae journeys along the whole fragrance spectrum, from the high floral, fruity, and marine tones, all the way to the dark tones of dry and mossy woods. It all begins with a subdued motif on the piano, an oscillating minor second between C and B-natural that starts in earnest, but seems to faint with each passing repetition, like a fleeting scent. After a two-minute expository passage, Bloom, the first movement, goes on to evoke both the vigorous act of blooming and the freshness of the scents associated with Spring. It is a splash of orchestral colors mirroring the piano’s relentless energy, zest, and effervescence, all of it framed by the ever-present minor second motif.
In Primal Forest we explore the lush and dark dwellings of musk and wooden undertones. Here we enter an ancient realm, replete with suggestive aromas, some of which might have long vanished from Earth, but whose eerie and imperceptible vestiges can still be sensed by an imaginary, and highly sensitive, olfactory device. I cannot overstate how virtually impossible it would have been to conceive this movement had I not been inspired by Javier Perianes’ otherworldly touch. Not only is Javier capable of reaching the nether regions that exist beyond pianos and pianissimos—regions which most pianists find impenetrable—he thrives within them and is capable of producing an astonishing variety of tones and timbers. The movement swells into colossal heights only to dissolve again into the thinnest textures. After taking us through an extended transition, the movement does not end per se, but instead leads directly into our last fragrance chamber.
Oriental and spicy scents overwhelm our senses during the first five minutes of Spice Bazaar. Sensuous melodies and rhythms seduce us into a trance, blurring our senses and overloading our bodies to the point of abandon and ecstasy. The room fills with an intoxicating mix of cinnamon, sandalwood, incense, patchouli, and jasmine, later fusing with oak moss and lavender. Inebriated, this hypnotic trance comes to an end, leading us into fast and relentless rhythms evoking the first movement but tinged with the darkest colors of the fragrance wheel. With only a few minutes to spare, a cadenza begins, at first diaphanous, but then increasingly gaining in might and power until it reaches symphonic proportions, even though the orchestra remains silent. The last minute harkens back to the first five minutes of this movement, bringing the work to a decisive conclusion.
Ephemerae is dedicated to Javier Perianes, who I have had the privilege to know for almost twenty years and whose exceptional sensibility and artistry have not ceased to astonish me ever since. Co-commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo-Filharmonien, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, and Philadelphia Orchestra, Ephemerae received its world premiere performance on January 23rd, 2022 in London by Javier Perianes as soloist and the LPO under the baton of Jonathan Berman.
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Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau
Died July 29, 1856, Endenich
[~38 min.]
Schumann and his wife Clara made a five-month tour of Russia in 1844. Her piano-playing was acclaimed everywhere, but the always-vulnerable Schumann found himself somewhat in the shade, and on their return to Leipzig the composer began to show signs of acute depression: he said that even the act of listening to music “cut into my nerves like knives.” So serious did this become that by the end of the year Schumann was unable to work at all. He gave up his position at the Leipzig Conservatory, and the couple moved to Dresden in the hope that quieter surroundings would help his recovery. Only gradually was he able to resume work, completing the Piano Concerto in the summer of 1845 and beginning work on the Second Symphony in the fall. Schumann usually worked quickly, but the composition of this symphony took a very long time. Apparently Schumann had to suspend work on the symphony for extended periods while he struggled to maintain his mental energy, and it was not completed until October 1846. The first performance took place on November 5, 1846, with Mendelssohn conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
Given the conditions under which it was written, one might expect Schumann’s Second Symphony to be full of dark music, but in fact the opposite is true – this is one of Schumann’s sunniest scores, full of radiance and strength. And, considering the protracted and difficult period of the symphony’s composition, it is surprising to find the work so tightly unified. The symphony opens with a slow introduction – Sostenuto assai – as a trumpet fanfare rings out quietly above slowly-moving strings. During the earliest stages of this symphony’s composition, Schumann wrote to Mendelssohn that “Drums and trumpets (trumpets in C) have been sounding in my mind for quite a while now,” so apparently this trumpet-call was one of the earliest seeds of the symphony – it recurs throughout. The introduction gathers speed and flows directly into the Allegro ma non troppo, whose main subject is a sharply-dotted melody for violins and woodwinds. This opening movement is in sonata form, and near the end the trumpet fanfare blazes out once again.
The second movement is a scherzo marked Allegro vivace. In contrast to some of Schumann’s others symphonic scherzos – which can remain earthbound – this one flies. Almost a perpetual-motion movement, it makes virtuoso demands on the violins. Two trio sections interrupt the scherzo – the first for woodwinds in triplets, the second for strings – before the opening music returns and the movement speeds to an exciting close. At the climax of this coda, the trumpet fanfare rings out above the racing violins.
The Adagio espressivo, one of Schumann’s most attractive slow movements, opens with a long-breathed melody for the violins. This movement is the emotional center of the symphony, and though this music never wears its heart on its sleeve, its composition made such heavy emotional demands on the composer that he had to stop work temporarily after completing it.
The finale – marked Allegro molto vivace – bursts to life with a rush up the C-Major scale. Schumann said of the composition of this movement: “In the Finale I began to feel myself, and indeed I was much better after I finished the work. Yet . . . it recalls to me a dark period in my life.” The symphony’s unity is further demonstrated by Schumann’s transformation of the first four notes of the main theme of the Adagio into this movement’s second theme and then – at the climax of the entire symphony – by the return of the trumpet fanfare. It begins softly, but gradually grows to a statement of complete triumph, and – with timpani and brass ringing out – the symphony thunders to its close.
Though the Second Symphony may have been the product of a “dark period” in its creator’s often unstable life, it also appears to have been the vehicle by which he made his way back to health.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21
“Nocturne” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg
Died November 4, 1847, Leipzig
[~18 min.]
Felix Mendelssohn grew up in the most cultivated household in Berlin, and it is a measure of the Mendelssohn family’s sophistication that one of their recreations was reading Shakespeare’s plays together in the recent Schlegel-Tieck translation into German. Each member of the family would take different parts as they read, and Fanny Mendelssohn later remembered the impact of one play in particular:
We were saying yesterday what an important part the Midsummer Night’s Dream has always played in our home, and how we had all at different times gone through all the parts from Peaseblossom to Hermia and Helena… We were really brought up on the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Felix especially made it his own…
Felix indeed “made it his own” during the summer of 1826, when the 17-year-old composer retreated to a garden house on the family estate and composed an overture to that play that remains today the finest music ever inspired by Shakespeare. Young Mendelssohn captured the spirit of Shakespeare’s play so perfectly that the instant this music begins we feel ourselves transported to the woods outside Athens where Puck flits mischievously through the forest, the “rude mechanicals” rehearse their play, and lovers are mysteriously transformed.
The overture was widely performed as a separate work, and then in 1843 King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia asked Mendelssohn to write incidental music for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be given in Potsdam that fall. Now 34 years old, Mendelssohn reached back across the span of seventeen years to recapture the magic he had created as a teenager. Beginning with his overture, he wrote a series of movements to accompany the play – some of these are interludes and entr-actes, some are melodramas that accompany spoken text from the play with music, some are sung. It is a sophisticated conception of incidental music, as Mendelssohn interweaves music and sung or spoken text into the progress of the play on stage. The first production of the play with this music – which took place in the Neues Palais at Potsdam on October 14, 1843 – was an instant success, and today many regard the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Mendelssohn’s finest achievement. The overture and symphonic movements have become familiar from concert performances, but this program offers the rare opportunity to experience A Midsummer Night’s Dream much as Friedrich Wilhelm and the Potsdam court did in 1843: these concerts offer an abridged version of Shakespeare’s play with the complete incidental music that Mendelssohn composed for it.
The beginning of the Overture is magic. Four soft chords in E Major – played only by the woodwinds – lift us into the land of make-believe, and suddenly Mendelssohn shifts to E minor, where the violins’ glistening rush suggests the gossamer flickering of tiny wings. Violins sing the overture’s powerful main theme (back in E Major), clarinets and violins have the flowing second subject, and all seems set when Mendelssohn surprises us a third theme-group: over heavy stamping, the orchestra shouts out a vigorous tune that ends with a great hee-haw. This is the braying of Bottom, the rustic actor who is transformed into an ass, and Mendelssohn makes it sound all the more strident by having that bray screech downward across the span of a ninth.
This description of themes may help introduce the overture, but it does not begin to suggest the lightness of Mendelssohn’s touch in this music, its non-stop energy or its freshness. The overture’s structure is crystal-clear – Mendelssohn uses the opening sequence of four chords to mark the beginning of the development and also of the recapitulation. One nice little surprise: as the music rushes toward its conclusion, Mendelssohn gives us a cascade of shining E Major chords that will clearly bring the overture to a close. But they do not. This is a false ending, and the music instead rushes back into the flickering “fairyland” rush of the very beginning. This leads to the real ending: violins sings a relaxed version of the main theme, and the overture vanishes on the same four chords with which it began.
The Nocturne comes from the end of Act III. Puck comes upon the rustics in the woods (“What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here”) and squeezes a love potion in the eyes of the sleeping Lysander that will cause him to love the first thing he sees; here Puck offers the famous prediction: “Jack shall have his Jill.” The noble Nocturne features one of the great solos for French horn.
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Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35
ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD
Born May 29, 1897, Brno
Died November 29, 1957, Hollywood
[~24 min.]
Probably no child composer – including Mozart – has been as precocious as Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The son of a leading music critic in Vienna, the boy demonstrated his incredible gift very early. Korngold’s cantata Gold, composed when he was ten years old, amazed Mahler, and those impressed by his abilities included Richard Strauss and Puccini, who said: “That boy’s talent is so great, he could easily give us half and still have enough left for himself!” In the 1920s Korngold was one of the most admired young composers in Europe, and then his career took a completely unexpected turn that would re-define him as a composer.
In 1934 Max Reinhardt invited Korngold to Hollywood to arrange Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream music for use in a film, and Korngold discovered that his neo-romantic idiom was perfectly suited to the movies. With the rise of the Nazis in Europe, Korngold moved his family to Hollywood and over the next decade wrote a succession of brilliant film scores. These included the music for such swashbuckling epics as The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk, and Korngold’s success was rewarded with several Oscars. After the war, Korngold tried to return to writing “serious” music, but found that he could not escape his past as a film composer. And so Korngold is forever identified as a film composer, but he continued to write for the concert hall, and one of his finest compositions – the Violin Concerto – bridges these two worlds. Korngold’s Violin Concerto, completed in the summer of 1945, was written with Jascha Heifetz’s silky tone and breathtaking virtuosity in mind, and it was Heifetz who gave the premiere in Saint Louis on June 15, 1947.
A distinguishing feature of this “serious” composition is that it is largely based on music Korngold had written for movies produced during the late 1930s. A curious problem faced film composers of that era: they might write a wonderful score, it would be heard while the film was in distribution, and then – in those days before DVDs or soundtracks – that music would vanish into studio archives, never to be heard again. Korngold felt that some of his film music was too good to “lose,” and he used it as the basis of his Violin Concerto.
The concerto is in the expected three-movement form, with the solo violin entering in the first instant on a theme drawn from Another Dawn, an Errol Flynn film released in 1937. This theme arcs grandly upward and then soars dramatically – it is a theme perfectly suited to show off the violin (and a good violinist!). The second subject is taken from Korngold’s music for the film Juarez (1939). The movement is classical form, complete with development and recapitulation of these ideas, a cadenza and a grand close.
The main theme of the Romance comes from the film Anthony Adverse (1936), for which Korngold won an Oscar. The finale, a rondo marked Allegro assai vivace, sounds as if it was written specifically for Heifetz’s talents: after a dizzying beginning, the movement is built on music from yet another Errol Flynn film, The Prince and the Pauper (1937). The ending is guaranteed to send everyone involved – soloist, orchestra and audience – out the door with their hearts racing.
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Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90, Italian
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg
Died November 4, 1847, Leipzig
[~27 min.]
Mendelssohn’s parents encouraged him to travel, and as a very young man he made – on his own – a nine-month tour of Italy in 1830-31. It was a trip he had eagerly anticipated, and it brought pleasures beyond his dreams. He wrote: “Italy at last. And what I have all my life considered as the greatest possible felicity is now begun, and I am basking in it.” (A generation later, another native of Hamburg, Johannes Brahms, would be equally rapturous about Italy.) The young man – Mendelssohn celebrated his 22nd birthday in Italy – loved the clear blue skies, the lemon blossoms, the churches, paintings, statues – and even took part in the carnival of Rome.
While staying in Rome in October 1830, Mendelssohn began a symphony inspired by Italy and worked on it the next several years, finishing it early in 1833. Mendelssohn may have loved Italy, but he had no use for Italian music and incorporated no specifically Italian themes in his symphony – this is the music of a very happy young German composer who celebrates Italy in his own musical language. Mendelssohn conducted the premiere in London on May 13, 1833, to great acclaim, but he was unhappy with the score and thoroughly revised it. He remained dissatisfied and planned to revise the final movement, but his sudden death at 38 prevented this; the symphony was published in its second version four years after his death.
From its blazing beginning to its exciting close, the Italian Symphony is a marvel of color and energy, and it has one of the most effective openings in music: over bubbling woodwinds, violins sing the surging main idea, and the high spirits of this opening establish a rocket-like momentum that will drive the entire movement. Two beautifully-contrasted subordinate themes follow in turn: an amiable clarinet duet and a fugato (full of rhythmic snap) that the second violins introduce at the start of the development. This movement almost overflows with energy: Mendelssohn reminds the orchestra to play staccato seven different times, and the music drives to a close as exciting as its opening.
Commentators have been unanimous in hearing a religious procession in the Andante con moto, but beyond that they differ sharply: one hears an old Czech pilgrim song, another a religious procession in Naples; in Rome, Mendelssohn saw the installation of Pope Gregory XVI – perhaps this movement was inspired by that ceremony. Outwardly, the third movement has the minuet-and-trio form of the classical symphony, but here the outer sections flow elegantly on long and seamless phrases, while the trio section features fairyland horn calls reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s (as yet unwritten) incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The coda is built on both themes.
Mendelssohn’s one nod to native Italian music in this symphony comes in the final movement, which is a saltarello, an ancient Italian dance based on triplet rhythms and full of vigorous leaps. Mendelssohn uses three energetic themes in this movement (the sinuous third, which slithers between major and minor tonalities, is a tarantella), and the music dances happily to its fiery close, remaining in fierce A minor rather than returning to the key of the opening movement, A Major. So perfect a conclusion is this finale that it is difficult to imagine what changes Mendelssohn had planned during its revision: how could this movement possibly be improved?
A note on the orchestration: from the bright primary colors of the outer movements to the subtle woodwind shadings and brass fanfares of the inner movements, the Italian Symphony is such a model of inspired orchestral writing that it is sometimes cited as an example of how the Romantic composers expanded the possibilities of the orchestra. But the marvel is that Mendelssohn achieves all this with the classical orchestra: this symphony is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. That is the orchestra that Haydn and Mozart used, yet in Mendelssohn’s inspired hands it sounds like a completely new – and vastly more powerful – instrument.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Selections from The Boy’s Magical Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn)
Rheinlegendchen
Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen
Das irdische Leben
Urlicht
Revelge
Der Tambourg’sell
GUSTAV MAHLER
Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia
Died May 18, 1911, Vienna
[~35 min.]
In 1805-08, the German poets (and brothers-in-law) Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim published a three-volume collection of German folk-poetry that they called Des Knaben Wunderhorn: “The Boy’s Magical Horn.” Mahler discovered these poems as a young man, and their accounts of love, mystery, horror, magic and many other topics took hold of his imagination. Between 1888 and 1896 he set twenty-one of these poems, orchestrating twelve of them and publishing these under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn. This concert offers six of Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs in their orchestral arrangements.
Rheinlegendchen (“Little Rhine Legend”) was composed in August 1893 and tells a tale that is part love-song, part folk-song, and part magic. It dances easily along its 3/8 meter and finally comes to a sparkling (and charming) close.
Gustav Mahler composed Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (“Where the Shining Trumpets Blow”) in July 1898. This is one of the oldest types of song – a lovers’ farewell – but here it has a sharper edge: the young man is a soldier about to go off to war. The sound of a distant fanfare functions as a grim refrain here, punctuating the lovers’ conversation. The song is written for one voice, but it offers parts for both the man and woman and is sometimes sung as a duet. The shining trumpets may ring out distantly, but Mahler maneuvers us very carefully to the dark final line.
Das irdische Leben (“Life on Earth”) is another dialogue song, but a grim one. It is built on the conversation between a mother and her starving child, who finally have enough to eat when the child is laid out in a casket at the funeral. Mahler’s marking is Unheimliche bewegt: “With sinister [or uncanny] motion.”
Urlicht (“Primal Light,” composed 1882-94) was not published as part of Mahler’s set of twelve Wunderhorn songs, and audiences will more readily recognize it as the fourth movement of his Second Symphony. The opening chorale gives way to a slightly faster mid-section in which suffering humankind looks ahead to the promise of redemption. In the Symphony, this movement is a prelude to the cataclysmic “resurrection” finale, but in its original form the song trails off to a quiet close on the return of the opening chorale.
Mahler composed Revelge in the summer of 1899, when he was 39, at the summer home he had just purchased at Maiernigg on the Wörthersee in central Austira. Revelge (“Reveille”) is among Mahler’s latter Wunderhorn settings, and in fact he wrote it just as he was beginning his Fourth Symphony. This is another of Mahler’s “military” songs, complete with rolling drums and military flourishes. The story here is dark, offering an almost surrealistic portrait of wounded soldiers left behind by their comrades and a grim march with skeletons falling into the procession.
Tamboursg’sell, Mahler’s final Wunderhorn setting, comes from two years later, during the summer of 1901. The title translates as “Drummer Boy,” and this song is another march. But quite a different one – instead of heading into battle, a young drummer boy is led out to execution. His crime is uncertain (desertion? sleeping on guard duty?), but his doom is clear: as he’s marched grimly out to the gallows, he bids a fond farewell to his comrades, to his unit, and to the surrounding countryside. This is one of Mahler’s most effective songs, and the central episode (which begins “Gute nacht”) is music of unearthly beauty, even as it depicts a horrifying scene.
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Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major, WAB 104, “Romantic”
ANTON BRUCKNER
Born September 4, 1824, Ansfelden
Died October 11, 1896, Vienna
[~70 min.]
Anton Bruckner was the most compulsive, workaholic composer who ever lived. He worked for a year and a half on his Third Symphony, finally completing it on the last day of 1873. At that point Bruckner needed a rest, so he took New Year’s Day off, and the next day – January 2, 1874 – he began his Fourth Symphony. The composition of the Fourth went a little more swiftly: he completed it ten months later, on November 22, scrupulously noting in the manuscript that the symphony had been finished at 8:30 that evening. Bruckner revised the Fourth in 1878-80, replacing the original scherzo with a new one, and it was finally premiered on February 20, 1881, by Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic.
The Fourth represented an important change of direction for Bruckner. His first three symphonies (as well as two “practice” symphonies) and his liturgical works had all been in minor keys, which gave those works a somber cast. But Bruckner cast the Fourth Symphony in E-flat Major, and that one change brought a transformation of his music, as if sunlight had suddenly flooded the previously dark landscape. The Fourth Symphony is music of breadth, strength and majesty. It has always been one of Bruckner’s most popular symphonies, and that popularity is fully deserved.
The Fourth is the only one of Bruckner’s symphonies to have a nickname. It is sometimes known as the “Romantic” Symphony, and that nickname came from the composer. But that nickname should be taken with a very large grain of salt: Bruckner did not contribute it until several years after he completed the symphony, and he did it then only at the urging of friends who wanted his music to seem fashionably programmatic. And so Bruckner obliged them, preparing a scenario of what the symphony was “about.” He described the opening this way: “Medieval town – dawn – from the towers of the town voices ring out, bidding the townspeople wake – the gates are thrown open – knights on proud stallions thunder out into the open countryside – the magical spell of the forest enfolds them – forest murmurs – birdsong.” But just how lightly Bruckner took all this becomes clear as he goes on: “And in the last movement I’ve forgotten completely what picture I had in mind . . .” The nickname “Romantic” and the scenario are irrelevant and should be forgotten. This is music that should be enjoyed for itself.
Because it is a magnificent symphony. This is music of sunlight and strength, and it unfolds over the generous span of an hour. Bruckner clearly wanted a sense of breadth and monumentality: in his tempo markings, he specifies that the first and last movements (as well as the trio of the third) should be nicht zu schnell: “not too fast” – this is music that should unfold with a sense of space and grandeur.
We feel that from the first instant. The Fourth Symphony begins with a soft haze of E-flat Major sound from the strings, and above them a solo horn – sounding far, far away – sings the call that will become a central theme-shape of this symphony. Other ideas follow quickly: the characteristic “Bruckner rhythm” of 2+3 appears and turns powerful, then subsides for the relaxed second subject, chirped innocently by the violins in the unexpected key of D-flat Major. From these materials, Bruckner builds a sonata-form movement whose drama unfolds gradually: his tempo marking for the entire movement is Bewegt, nicht zu schnell – “Moderately, not too fast.” The ending of this movement is tremendous. The development has been very free harmonically, and Bruckner begins his coda in dark C minor. Gradually this builds in strength and sails into shining E-flat Major as the massed horn section thunders out the call of the solo horn from the very beginning.
The second movement marches steadily along its 4/4 meter, and the fact that it begins in C minor has led some to describe this music as a funeral march. But the music does not feel grim, or even very dark, and we are more likely to be struck by the movement’s wealth of good tunes: the cellos’ opening march, a string chorale, and a long-spanned idea for violas. Bruckner alternates these ideas, gradually building to a tremendous climax; this falls away to allow the timpani’s steady tread to march the music into silence.
The third movement has always been an audience favorite, and in fact it was not part of Bruckner’s original conception – he composed this movement during his revision of the symphony in 1880, the year before its premiere. This has often been called a “hunting” scherzo (though Bruckner never called it that) because its outer sections are built on what seem like hunting-horn calls from the brass. Bruckner’s writing for brass is always distinguished, and the beginning of this movement is exciting. Horns lead the way (once again on the 2+3 rhythm), gradually the other brass enter, and Bruckner piles their entrances up to a dissonant climax. The gentle trio takes us into another world altogether: it is a slow ländler – the old Austrian country dance, sung first by flute and clarinet. This passes quickly, and we plunge back into the “hunt” of the opening section.
Things change completely at the beginning of the finale. Gone is the sunlight of the earlier movements, and now the tonality wanders uncertainly between B-flat minor and E-flat minor. The music pulses ahead ominously (pushed on by memories of the scherzo), and then the entire orchestra stamps out the movement’s cataclysmic main theme; in its shaken aftermath, Bruckner recalls the horn call from the very beginning of the symphony as well. After so violent a beginning, the second theme-group brings relief – it is a surging string-melody that has reminded some of the music of Schubert. This sharp change of character will be typical of this movement, which – like the opening movement – unfolds over a very long span. The ending is magnificent. The music grows quiet and slows, and from this a horn chorale takes shape, slowly building in strength as it proceeds. The rest of the orchestra joins the horns, and the music rises higher and higher, taking on more power as it climbs. Finally the symphony sails over the summit and reaches its shining conclusion as the entire brass section stamps out the rhythm of the solo horn call that had opened the symphony an hour earlier.
TWO NOTES: The Fourth, like almost all Bruckner symphonies, exists in a variety of forms and is played in different editions. The performances at these concerts are of the version compiled by Leopold Nowak, editor of the International Bruckner Society. This version is essentially Bruckner’s version of 1880 (with the new scherzo) that was used at the 1881 premiere.
That premiere produced one of the classic Bruckner stories. Though he was a sophisticated composer, Bruckner was a simple, naive man, and he had a tough time in Vienna, where he was caught up in the war between the devotees of Brahms and Wagner, and where his music was savaged by critics and partisan audiences. During a break at a rehearsal for the premiere of the Fourth, Bruckner – overcome with happiness – approached conductor Hans Richter and pressed something into his hand, saying: “Take it, and drink a mug of beer to my health.” In his gratitude, the simple Bruckner had “tipped” Richter, pressing a coin into the conductor’s hand. The astonished Richter wore that coin on his key chain for the rest of his life.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), Op. 26
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg
Died November 4, 1847, Leipzig
[~10 min.]
In 1829, twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn made the first of many visits to England, and after giving a series of concerts in London he set off on a walking tour of Scotland, where he was able to visit the novelist Sir Walter Scott. On August 8, Mendelssohn made a voyage out to the Hebrides Islands to see the island of Staffa, with its famous Fingal’s Cave, a name that is said to come from the Gaelic Fionn na Ghal, which means “Chief of Valor.” The crossing was extremely difficult. The day was dark and violently stormy, and not until they were almost on top of the island did the famous black basaltic cliffs emerge from the mists as the ocean crashed against the mouth of the dark cave. Legend has it that on the spot the young composer jotted down the opening 21 bars of what would eventually become his Fingal’s Cave overture, but in fact Mendelssohn had actually sketched that theme the day before, after a rough crossing to the Island of Mull. Mendelssohn may have been inspired by the rough seas off Scotland, but he was in no hurry to complete the overture. He did not finish the score until December 11, 1830, while visiting Rome, and he revised it several more times after that.
This music goes under several names – it is sometimes called The Hebrides, and Mendelssohn briefly considered calling it The Lonely Island. It is built on two main ideas: the strings’ quiet but ominous opening and the cellos’ soaring second subject. Mendelssohn supplements these with a wealth of rhythmic secondary figures, and from this material he builds a concert overture in sonata form. Despite its disciplined classical structure, though, this music might best be understood as an evocative mood-piece that paints a picture of the gloomy vistas the young composer encountered on his various voyages to the islands of Scotland. Throughout, one feels the rocking sea, sees swirling mists, and hears waves crashing against forbidding cliffs. The music drives to a climax, then vanishes into the mists on fragments of its opening idea.
From the moment of its premiere in London on May 14, 1832, The Hebrides/Fingal’s Cave has been an audience favorite and has been praised by other composers. Wagner, no particular admirer of Mendelssohn or his music, called it “an aquarelle by a great scene painter,” and Brahms is reported to have said that he would give all his works just to be able to say that he had composed Fingal’s Cave.
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Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47
JEAN SIBELIUS
Born December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland
Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland
[~31 min.]
Sibelius composed his Violin Concerto – his only concerto – in 1903, between his Second and Third Symphonies. This was a time of transition for the 38-year-old composer, who was moving away from an early romantic style influenced by Tchaikovsky and toward a leaner, more concise language. Sibelius was dissatisfied when he heard the concerto premiered in Helsinki in 1904 by Viktor Novácek, and he revised it completely. The final version was first performed in Berlin on October 19, 1905, with Karl Halir as soloist and Richard Strauss conducting.
It is difficult to characterize this haunting music. The second movement may sing gracefully and the finale is full of energy, but the prevailing impression the concerto makes is of an icy brilliance, a craggy strength. Sibelius’ orchestral sonority emphasizes the darker lower voices – cellos, violas and bassoons – so that the violin, which often plays high in its range, sounds even more brilliant by contrast. Sibelius himself was a violinist who had hoped to make a career as a soloist before he (fortunately) gave up that dream and turned to composition, and he fills the solo part with complex technical hurdles. Long passages played in octaves, great leaps, sustained writing in the violin’s highest register, and such knotty problems as trilling on one string while simultaneously playing a melodic line on another make this one of the most difficult of all violin concertos.
The Allegro moderato opens with a quiet mist of string sound, and over this the solo violin presents the long, rhapsodic main theme: singing, dark, surging. Certain features of this theme – a triplet tag and a pattern of three descending notes – will assume important thematic functions as the movement develops. The originality of this movement appears in many ways. There are three main theme-groups instead of the expected two, but before we get to the second, Sibelius defies all expectations by giving the soloist a brief cadenza. The sober and steady second subject arrives in the dark sound of bassoons and cellos, while the vigorous third is stamped out by the violin sections. And then, another surprise: Sibelius presents the main cadenza – long and phenomenally difficult – before the development begins. After this lengthy and unusual exposition, the development and recapitulation are truncated, and the ending is abrupt: Sibelius drives with unremitting energy to the close, where the solo violin catapults to the top of its range as the orchestra seals off the cadence with fierce attacks.
Woodwind duets introduce the second movement before the violin enters with the intense main theme, played entirely on the G-string. This movement, in ternary form, rises to a great climax and falls back to end quietly and gently. The tempo indication for the last movement – Allegro, ma non tanto (fast, but not too fast) – is crucial: timpani and low strings set the steady tread that marches along firmly throughout much of this movement. The violin’s vigorous dotted melody dominates this rondo, but even here the mood remains somber. This movement has been described in quite different ways. The English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey called it “a polonaise for polar bears,” while Sibelius is reported to have referred to it as a “danse macabre.” The concerto concludes as the violin climbs into its highest register and – with the entire orchestra – stamps out the concluding D.
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Symphony No. 9 in C Major, D. 944, “The Great”
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Born January 31, 1797, Vienna
Died November 19, 1828, Vienna
[~48 min.]
Schubert’s final year has become the stuff of legend. Before he died in November 1828 at age 31, he composed a series of extraordinary masterpieces, including the Mass in E-flat Major, three final piano sonatas, the songs of the Schwanengesang cycle, and the Cello Quintet. Towering above all these is his “Great” C-Major Symphony, whose manuscript is dated March 1828. And, as the legend has it, Schubert never heard a note of any of these works – the manuscripts were consigned to dusty shelves upon his death, and it was years before the music was performed, much longer before it was understood. Not until eleven years after Schubert’s death did Robert Schumann discover the manuscript of the symphony in Vienna and send it off to Leipzig, where Felix Mendelssohn led the premiere on March 21, 1839. That dramatic beginning established it as one of the masterpieces of the symphonic literature.
This has always made a terrific story, even though most of it is untrue. Recent research (which includes dating the manuscript paper that Schubert used in different years) has shown that he actually composed this symphony during the summer of 1825. He had recently recovered from a serious illness, and now he went on a walking tour of Upper Austria with his friend, the baritone Michael Vogl. In the town of Gmunden, mid-way between Salzburg and Linz, Schubert began to sketch a symphony and worked on it all that summer and over the next two years. (The date “March 1828” on the manuscript may be the date of final revisions.) And Schubert did hear at least some of this music. Orchestral parts were copied, and the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde played through it in the composer’s presence before rejecting it as too difficult. Far from being welcomed into the repertory following Mendelssohn’s premiere, the symphony actually made its way very slowly. Attempts to perform it in London and Paris in the 1840s foundered when players jeered the music and refused to continue because of its difficulty; the American premiere had occurred (1851) before this symphony was heard in those two cities.
Schubert scores the symphony for classical orchestra (pairs of winds, plus timpani and strings), but he makes one addition that transforms everything. To Mozart’s orchestra he adds three trombones, which are given important roles thematically. (It is part of the originality of this symphony that Schubert is willing, for the first time, to treat the trombone as a thematic – rather than supportive – instrument.) Their tonal heft dictates a greatly increased string section and occasional doubling of the woodwind parts, and everything about this music – its sonority and range of expression – suggests that Schubert envisioned its performance by a large orchestra.
Very early this symphony acquired the nickname “The Great,” a description that needs to be understood carefully. It was originally called the “Great C-Major” to distinguish it from Schubert’s brief Symphony No. 6 in C Major, inevitably called the “Little C-Major”. And so in its original sense, “Great” was an indication only of relative size. But that description has stuck to this music, and if ever a symphony deserved to be called “The Great,” this is it.
It has a magic beginning. In unison, two horns sound a long call that seems to come from a great distance. In the classical symphony, the slow introduction usually had nothing to do thematically with the sonata-form first movement that followed but served only to call matters to order and prepare the way for the Allegro. It is one more mark of Schubert’s new vision that this slow introduction will have important functions in the main body of the movement. Schubert repeats this opening melody in various guises before the music rushes into the Allegro ma non troppo, where strings surge ahead on sturdy dotted rhythms while woodwinds respond with chattering triplets – Schubert will fully exploit the energizing contrast between these two rhythms. The second subject, a lilting tune for woodwinds, arrives in the “wrong” key of E minor (Schubert deftly nudges it into the “correct” key of G Major), and all seems set for a proper exposition, when Schubert springs one of his best surprises: very softly, trombones intone the horn theme from the very beginning, their dark color giving that noble tune an ominous power. That theme now begins to penetrate this movement, and the rhythm of its second measure will take on a thematic importance of its own. The development is brief, but the recapitulation is full, and Schubert drives the movement to a thrilling conclusion: trombones push the music forward powerfully, and the opening horn call is shouted out in all its glory as the movement hammers to its close.
The slow movement is marked Andante con moto, and the walking tempo implied in that title makes itself felt in the music’s steady tread. Solo oboe sings the sprightly main theme, while the peaceful second subject arrives in the strings. There is no development, but Schubert creates another moment of pure magic: over softly-pulsing string chords, a solo horn (once again sounding as if from far away) leads the way into the recapitulation. Schumann’s description of this passage, often quoted, is worth hearing again: “Here everyone is hushed and listening, as though some heavenly visitant were quietly stealing through the orchestra.” The recapitulation itself is not literal, and Schubert drives to a great climax where the music is suddenly ripped into a moment of silence, the only point in the entire movement where the steady opening tread is not heard. Only gradually does the orchestra recover as the cellos lead to a luminous restatement of the second subject, now richly embellished.
The Allegro vivace is the expected scherzo and trio, but again Schubert surprises us: the movement is in sonata form and develops over such a generous span that if all repeats are taken, it can approach the length of the two opening movements. Strings stamp out the powerful opening, and violins soar and plunge as it begins to develop. Part of the pleasure here lies in the way Schubert transforms the sledgehammer power of the opening into a series of terraced, needle-sharp entrances in the course of the development. By contrast, the trio sings with a rollicking charm before horns lead the way back to a literal reprise of the scherzo.
The finale, also marked Allegro vivace, opens with a salvo of bright fanfares. So quickly do these whip past that one does not at first recognize that they make the same contrast between dotted and triplet rhythms that powered the first movement – now these return to drive the finale along a shaft of white-hot energy. This is the movement that caused early orchestras to balk, and it remains very difficult, particularly for the strings. It is in sonata form with two subjects, the first growing smoothly out of the flying triplets and a second that rides along the energy of four pounding chords. The first theme provides the speed – those showers of triplets almost seem to throw sparks through the hall – while the second subject and its pounding chords take on a menacing strength as Schubert builds to the climax. Along the way, attentive listeners will hear a whiff of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony way, and Schubert’s own close is as powerful as those of the master he so much admired.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Shango Memory
OLLY WILSON
Born September 7, 1937, St. Louis
Died March 12, 2018, Berkeley
[~8 min.]
For its 150th anniversary in 1992, the New York Philharmonic commissioned works from a number of composers. One of these was the American composer Olly Wilson, who was then teaching at UC Berkeley. Born in St. Louis, Wilson was a composer who played the piano, clarinet and doublebass, as well as a scholar who specialized in the interface between African and Western classical music; he was also interested in electronic music and founded the first electronic music studio at Berkeley. Wilson earned his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, and he taught at Florida A&M University and Oberlin before joining the faculty at Berkeley in 1970. In 1971 Wilson spent a year in Ghana studying the music of West Africa on a Guggenheim Fellowship, an experience that shaped his own career as a scholar and a composer. Of that experience he said: “Because I studied African music and the history of African-American music doesn’t necessarily mean that I consciously draw upon that when I do my work as a creative artist. But I think the pleasure that that gives me and the understanding that gives me does reflect positively on what I do as a creative artist.”
For the New York Philharmonic commission, Wilson turned to the legend of Shango, one of the Orisha divine spirits of the Yoruba religion of West Africa. Shango was the god of thunder and lightning, a figure of supernatural strength who could hurl thunderbolts down upon the earth and who spewed fire when he spoke. Thought to have been of human origin, he was raised to divinity after his death, and while in some legends he exhibits a darker side, he remains a symbol of towering strength. Wilson explained his intentions in this music: “In this composition I attempted to use Shango as a metaphor for West African musical concepts that were reinterpreted in the American context and became the basis for African-American music.”
Wilson wrote to evoke the power of the god of thunder and lightning, so it comes as no surprise that this is violent music, seething with energy. Shango Memory is not pictorial music – it does not set out to tell a story but rather to let the power of that figure explode around us. The piece bursts to life in a great eruption of sound, full of thunderous percussion and blazing brass. A measure of relief arrives with a broad viola melody marked cantabile, but that relief is short-lived, and the music hurtles forward. Rather than writing in the steady rhythms of most classical music, Wilson obliterates any sense of a clear pulse here, choosing instead to leap instantly between such unusual meters as 7/16, 5/16, 14/16, 9/16, and many others. Rhythms are frequently syncopated, and at one point Wilson asks that the music be played in a “slow swing.”
Shango Memory employs a huge percussion section that requires four players to switch quickly between nineteen different instruments. These include antique cymbals, sizzle cymbals, marimba, metal wind chimes, xylophone and Gankoqui, an African two-tone bell.
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Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna
[~34 min.]
Beethoven could relax a little in the spring of 1806. Over the previous three years, most of his energy had gone to just two works – the Eroica and his opera Leonore – and with his lengthy labors on those heroic achievements behind him he could turn to the other works that had been germinating in his imagination during those three years. Now music poured out of him: the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, the three Razumovsky Quartets, and the Violin Concerto were all completed during the summer and fall of 1806. Yet despite this rush of energy, many have noted a calmer quality in this music, and the Fourth Piano Concerto in particular seems unusually relaxed and lyric. But if the surface of this concerto is serene, some unusual things are going on within the music itself, particularly in the relation between piano and orchestra.
The first movement in all three of Beethoven’s first piano concertos had been marked Allegro con brio, but here he begins with an Allegro moderato. And in that same instant he defies classical tradition by having the solo piano open the concerto. In the classical concerto, it had been the orchestra that would launch the music, laying out the themes before the entrance of the soloist. But now the solo piano opens Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, and only when it has stated the opening idea does the orchestra enter to begin the actual exposition. Just as intriguing are the four fundamental notes of the piano’s theme – they outline the same rhythm (three shorts and a downbeat) that would open Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, written the following year. But where those four notes blast that symphony to life, here – at a slower tempo and marked dolce – they give the music an easy forward impetus, and Beethoven uses that rhythm – which saturates this music – to underpin and propel much of the Allegro moderato. At eighteen minutes, this is a spacious movement, and Beethoven builds it on three-theme groups, all of a breadth and relaxation similar to the piano’s opening theme and all marked piano; the other two themes are the first violins’ dotted melody heard near the beginning and a noble, lyric idea introduced by the strings somewhat later. Beethoven’s detailed markings make clear the kind of performance he wants – despite moments of turbulence in the development, he repeatedly reminds the performers: dolce e con espressione, espressivo and leggieramente (“lightly”).
The relation between soloist and orchestra is even more unusual in the Andante con moto. Beethoven builds this movement on a dialogue between the orchestral strings – whose music is gruff, explosive, angry – and the piano, which is serene, calm and restrained. (Beethoven marks its entrance molto cantabile.) These exchanges between the rough orchestra and calm piano are one of the most famous moments in music (Liszt compared this movement to Orpheus taming the wild beasts). Gradually the piano’s serenity subdues the orchestra’s aggressiveness, and the movement flows directly into the rondo-finale.
The finale’s central theme is built on crisp martial rhythms, made all the more effective by being stated so quietly at first. Only after the piano has begun to develop this figure does Beethoven let go, and the orchestra stamps it out to launch the finale on its way. While this movement can have moments of power and brilliance, Beethoven generally keeps orchestral textures light, with one passage for solo cello, another for divided violas, and – at many points – an orchestral accompaniment of only pizzicato strings. The Presto coda seems to point matters toward a violent conclusion, but Beethoven suddenly turns whimsical, allowing the piano a few moments to mull over the movement’s main theme before the orchestra leaps back in to hammer out the shining final chords.
The first performance of the Piano Concerto No. 4, a private one, took place at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace in March 1807, with the first public performance in December 1808. The soloist on both occasions was Beethoven himself; though his hearing was seriously impaired by this point, he could still hear well enough to perform in public. And to perform very well – one of those who attended this concert said that Beethoven played “with astounding cleverness and the fastest possible tempi. The Adagio, a masterly movement of beautifully developed song, he sang on this instrument with a profound melancholy that thrilled me.”
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Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39
JEAN SIBELIUS
Born December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland
Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland
[~38 min.]
Writing a first symphony has proven a welcome challenge to some composers, and they have rushed to meet it: Mozart wrote his first at 8, Mendelssohn at 15, Schubert at 16, Shostakovich at 19. Others, all too aware of the intimidating achievement of earlier masters, have put off writing their first until they felt ready to face so daunting a prospect: Brahms did not complete his first until he was 43, Elgar waited until age 51, and Franck finished his first (and only symphony) at 66. Sibelius belonged to the latter camp. As a young man he had established himself as Finland’s leading composer with such symphonic works as Kullervo, En Saga, the Lemminkäinen Legends and Finlandia, and in recognition of these achievements the Finnish government awarded him a state pension at age 27. Yet Sibelius put off writing his First Symphony for some years: he began work in the spring of 1898 and completed the score early in 1899, when he was 34. The composer himself led the Helsinki Philharmonic in the first performance – a very successful one – at Helsingfors on April 26, 1899, and that orchestra included the symphony on its programs the following year at the Paris World Exposition, where it was again a success.
Those who identify Sibelius with the lean, sometimes austere, sound of his later symphonies will find his First Symphony a surprise. It is built on an unusually rich orchestral sonority – Sibelius assigns a prominent part to the harp (an instrument he rarely used), and he sometimes paints in primary colors here, with soaring melodies for unison string sections and blazing eruptions for brass. To be sure, there are hints of the Sibelius to come in the imaginative evolution of brief motives, unusual key relations, and the sound of lonely woodwinds, but in general this is music that looks back to the grand manner of the late-nineteenth-century symphony. Many have heard echoes of other composers in Sibelius’ First Symphony, and these are precisely the influences one might expect on a young composer in 1899: Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Wagner and Bruckner. Yet the Symphony No. 1 in E minor is unmistakably the work of Sibelius: in the sound-world it creates, in its techniques, and in its emotional atmosphere.
That atmosphere is evident from the first instant of this symphony. Sibelius opens with a long introduction scored for only two instruments: above a quiet timpani roll, the solo clarinet sings a long, almost bleak song of uncertain tonality and rhythmic pulse. The music leaps ahead at the Allegro energico on the bright sound of rustling violins and the slashing main idea, with its characteristic triplet at the end. This first theme is complex (there are several subordinate ideas here, some of them quite dramatic) before the “second” subject arrives in a pair of flutes over murmuring strings; the grace notes that encrust the flute duet will figure prominently throughout this group. The development is powerful, the conclusion striking: a climactic explosion in the brass drives to an enigmatic close on two quiet pizzicato strokes.
The Andante seems to inhabit a different world altogether, as muted strings sing the subdued opening melody. This ternary-form movement is scored with great delicacy, which makes the violent climax – at very high speed – all the more surprising in this “slow” movement. This energy subsides suddenly, and the movement concludes on a restatement of the violins’ opening idea.
Over strummed pizzicato chords, solo timpani smashes out the main idea (more rhythm than theme) of the Scherzo, which is quickly taken up by other sections. Though this movement bristles with a spiky energy (the opening figure is treated as a fugato at one point), the trio section brings a mellow episode for horn quartet before Sibelius makes a precipitous return to the scherzo.
The structure of the Finale is somewhat free, and Sibelius takes care to specify that it is Quasi una Fantasia. It opens with a surging string recitative derived from the solo clarinet tune from the symphony’s very beginning, and then the movement proceeds along the alternation of two quite different ideas: a brief, epigrammatic idea almost spit out by the woodwinds and what can only be called a Big Tune for strings. As these ideas alternate, the string tune takes on a glowing fervor, and at the climax of the movement Sibelius lets it soar in all its glory. The unsettling ending arrives quickly: Sibelius comes out of that climactic statement of the tune with fierce gestures for full orchestra, and suddenly the music falls away to conclude on the same two pizzicato strokes that closed the opening movement.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
subito con forza
UNSUK CHIN
Born July 14, 1961, Seoul
[~8 min.]
Beethoven has been an inescapable figure for every composer who followed him. Some composers have been haunted by his achievement (Brahms and Bruckner), some disliked his music (Debussy, Janáček, Stravinsky), some tried to imitate him. The year 2020 brought the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, and musical organizations observed that occasion in many ways. When the BBC Radio 3, the Cologne Philharmonic, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra commissioned a work from the Korean composer Unsuk Chin, she used that anniversary to respond to Beethoven in a very individual way. She said: “Beethoven’s struggle to communicate and his hearing loss frequently resulted in an inner rage and frustration. What particularly appeals to me are the enormous contrasts: from volcanic eruptions to extreme serenity. It profoundly and poignantly speaks of something fundamental about the human condition.” With that as her starting point, she composed a piece titled subito con forza: “suddenly with force,” a marking Beethoven used to establish just the contrasts that Chin recognized in his music. It was premiered on September 24, 2020, by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Klaus Mäkelä, and it has been performed many times since then.
Chin’s subito con forza has been described as a “curtain-raiser,” but more accurately it is a near-manic exploration of the sudden shifts, dislocations and contrasts implied in her title. Chin “lifts” the beginning of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture of 1807 as her starting point: she uses Beethoven’s marking for that overture (Allegro con brio), she writes in the same key (C minor), and she recreates Beethoven’s beginning almost exactly: a fiercely sustained C from the strings is cut off by a whiplash chord for full orchestra. In Beethoven’s overture that chord is followed by silence, but Chin’s chord produces a jangled, shattering mess – our expectations have been defeated, and off we go.
Over the next five minutes Chin takes us on a dizzying ride that re-imagines Beethoven’s music in some surprising ways. Listeners will hear whiffs of quotations from his music (the “Emperor” Concerto, the famous rhythm of the Fifth Symphony, the bravura violin runs from the Leonore overtures, here played backwards), but things will never be as they seem, as Chin leaps from one episode to another, surprises us with the violent shifts she associates with Beethoven, and assaults our ears. (At one point she calls for the orchestra to play quadruple forte, a marking Beethoven himself never used.) And in a nice touch after all this violence and surprise, subito con forza fades into silence, just as Beethoven’s overture had winked out 213 years earlier.
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Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk
Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg
[~33 min.]
In the summer of 1877, Tchaikovsky made an ill-advised marriage. It was a disaster – it lasted only a few weeks – and the composer, near mental collapse, fled Russia. He found refuge in Switzerland, where he gradually recovered in the quiet beauty of Clarens, on the Lake of Geneva. One of his visitors there was Yosif Kotek, a violinist and one of his former students in Moscow. Together, they played music for violin and piano, and Tchaikovsky began to compose for the violin. He wrote his Violin Concerto during the spring of 1878, sketching it in eleven days and then completing the scoring in two weeks. Without asking permission, he dedicated it to the famous Russian violinist Leopold Auer, who was concertmaster of the Imperial Orchestra and who would later teach Heifetz, Elman, Zimbalist and Milstein. Tchaikovsky promptly ran into a bad surprise. Auer refused to perform the concerto, expressing doubts about some aspects of the music and reportedly calling it “unplayable.” The concerto had to wait three years before Adolph Brodsky gave the premiere in Vienna on December 4, 1881.
That premiere was the occasion of one of the most infamous reviews in the history of music. Eduard Hanslick savaged the concerto, saying that it “brings to us for the first time the horrid idea that there may be music that stinks to the ear.” He went on: “The violin is no longer played. It is yanked about. It is torn asunder. It is beaten black and blue… The Adagio, with its tender national melody, almost conciliates, almost wins us. But it breaks off abruptly to make way for a Finale that puts us in the midst of the brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian kermess. We see wild and vulgar faces, we hear curses, we smell bad brandy.”
Hanslick’s review has become one of the best examples of critical Wretched Excess: the insensitive destruction of a work that would go on to become one of the best-loved concertos in the repertory. But for all his blindness, Hanslick did recognize one important feature of this music – its essential “Russian-ness.” Tchaikovsky freely – and proudly – admitted his inspiration in this concerto: “My melodies and harmonies of folk-song character come from the fact that I grew up in the country, and in my earliest childhood was impressed by the indescribable beauty of the characteristic features of Russian folk music; also from this, that I love passionately the Russian character in all its expression; in short, I am a Russian in the fullest meaning of the word.”
The orchestra’s introduction makes for a gracious – and very brief – opening to the concerto, for the solo violin quickly enters with a flourish and then settles into the lyric opening theme, which had been prefigured in the orchestra’s introduction. A second theme is equally melodic – Tchaikovsky marks it con molt’espressione – but the development of these themes places extraordinary demands on the soloist, who must solve complicated problems with string-crossing, multiple-stops and harmonics. Auer was wrong: this concerto is not unplayable, but it is extremely difficult (and to be fair, Auer later admitted his error and performed the concerto). Tchaikovsky himself wrote the brilliant cadenza, which makes a gentle return to the movement’s opening theme; a full recapitulation leads to the dramatic close.
Tchaikovsky marks the second movement Canzonetta (“Little Song”) and mutes solo violin and orchestral strings throughout this movement, which feels like an interlude from one of his ballets. It leads without pause to the explosive opening of the finale, marked Allegro vivacissimo, a rondo built on two themes of distinctly Russian heritage. These are the themes that reminded Hanslick of a drunken Russian brawl, but to more sympathetic ears they evoke a fiery, exciting Russian spirit. Once again, the solo violin is given music of extraordinary difficulty. The very ending, with the violin soaring brilliantly above the hurtling orchestra, is one of the most exciting moments in this – or in any – violin concerto.
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Pictures from an Exhibition (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel)
MODEST MUSSORGSKY
Born March 21, 1839, Karevo
Died March 28, 1881, St. Petersburg
[~35 min.]
In the summer of 1873, Modest Mussorgsky was stunned by the sudden death of his friend Victor Hartmann, an architect and artist who was then only 39. The following year, their mutual friend Vladimir Stassov arranged a showing of over 400 of Hartmann’s watercolors, sketches, drawings and designs. Inspired by the exhibition and the memory of his friend, Mussorgsky set to work on a suite of piano pieces based on the pictures and wrote enthusiastically to Stassov: “Hartmann is bubbling over, just as Boris did. Ideas, melodies, come to me of their own accord, like the roast pigeons in the story – I gorge and gorge and overeat myself. I can hardly manage to put it all down on paper fast enough.” He worked fast indeed: beginning on June 2, 1874, Mussorgsky had the score complete three weeks later, on June 22, just a few months after the premiere of Boris Godunov.
The finished work, which he called Pictures from an Exhibition, consists of ten musical portraits bound together by a promenade theme that recurs periodically; Mussorgsky said that this theme, meant to depict the gallery-goer strolling between paintings, was a portrait of himself. Curiously, Pictures spent its first half-century in obscurity. It was not performed publicly during Mussorgsky’s lifetime, it was not published until 1886 (five years after its composer’s death), and it did not really enter the standard piano repertory until several decades after that: the earliest recording of the piano version did not take place until 1942. Even early listeners were struck by the “orchestral” sonorities of this piano score, and in 1922 conductor Serge Koussevitzky asked Maurice Ravel to orchestrate it. Koussevitzky gave the first performance of Ravel’s version at the Paris Opera on October 19, 1922, and that quickly became one of the most popular works in the orchestral repertory: today over sixty different versions are available on compact disc.
The opening Promenade alternates 5/4 and 6/4 meters; Mussorgsky marks it “in the Russian manner,” and Ravel assigns the famous opening to the solo trumpet, quickly joined by the full brass section. The Gnome is a portrait of a gnome staggering on twisted legs; the following Promenade is marked “with delicacy.” In Hartmann’s watercolor The Old Castle, a minstrel sings before a ruined castle. Ravel makes a daring (and very effective) choice by assigning his song to a solo saxophone, whose mournful sound feels exactly right in this context. Tuileries is a watercolor of children playing and quarreling in the Paris park; Ravel portrays them with chattering woodwinds. Bydlo returns to Eastern Europe, where a heavy ox-cart grinds through the mud. The wheels pound ominously along as the driver sings, and Ravel assigns his song to the euphonium – a “brass band” instrument rarely heard in a symphonic setting. The music rises to a strident climax as the cart draws near and passes, then diminishes as the cart moves on. Mussorgsky wanted the following Promenade to sound tranquillo, and Ravel begins with the clear sound of high flutes, but gradually this Promenade takes on unexpected power. The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks depicts Hartmann’s costume design for the ballet Trilby, in which these characters wore egg-shaped armor – Ravel captures the sound of the chicks with chirping gracenotes in the woodwinds.
“I meant to get Hartmann’s Jews,” said Mussorgsky of Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle, a portrait of two Jews – one rich and one poor – in animated conversation. Ravel gives each of them a particular sound: the rich voice of Goldenberg is heard in the strings, while Schmuyle’s rapid, high voice is depicted by a trumpet solo, one of the most famous ever composed for that instrument. The Marketplace at Limoges shows Frenchwomen quarreling furiously in a market, while Catacombs is Hartmann’s portrait of himself surveying the Roman catacombs by lantern light; Ravel makes effective use of deep brass and woodwinds here. This section leads into Cum mortuis in lingua mortua: “With the dead in a dead language.” Mussorgsky noted of this section: “The spirit of the departed Hartmann leads me to the skulls and invokes them: the skulls begin to glow faintly”; embedded in this spooky passage is a minor-key variation of the Promenade theme. The Hut on Fowl’s Legs shows the hut (perched on hen’s legs) of the vicious witch Baba Yaga, who would fly through the skies in a red-hot mortar. Ravel’s version depicts her with slashing attacks for full orchestra. Mussorgsky has her fly scorchingly right into the final movement, The Great Gate of Kiev. Hartmann had designed a gate (never built) for the city of Kiev, and Mussorgsky’s brilliant finale transforms the genial Promenade theme into a heaven-storming conclusion. Ravel gives the first statement to a noble brass choir, then gradually builds to one of the most exciting orchestral sounds ever created, full of ringing bells and massed attacks.
A NOTE ON THE RAVEL ORCHESTRATION: So famous has Ravel’s orchestration become that it is regarded as a virtual treatise on orchestration all by itself, yet some observers have had doubts about it, and listeners may be surprised to learn that there are at least ten other orchestral versions by such varied names as Mikhail Touschmaloff, Sir Henry Wood, Leo Funtek, Leopold Stokowski, Serge Gortchakoff, and others. Pianist-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, who has prepared a version of his own, makes an interesting argument: effective as Ravel’s orchestration is, it gives this essentially Russian music a distinctly “French” sound – light, bright and brilliant. Ashkenazy set out to restore a “Russian” sound to Pictures, and his version is much darker and heavier, making the music sound unexpectedly somber. Ashkenazy has a point, but it is difficult to separate this music from Ravel’s superb orchestration, which is a creative act fully worthy of Mussorgsky’s original score.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna
[~44 min.]
Robert Schumann met Brahms when the latter was still just a rosy-cheeked boy of 20 but immediately recognized his talent and became his enthusiastic champion. In a review that must have seemed overpowering to the young man, Schumann proclaimed Brahms “a young eagle” and said: “When he holds his magic wand over the massed resources of chorus and orchestra, we shall be granted marvelous insights into spiritual secrets.” And almost immediately came disaster: Schumann went into steep mental decline, attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine, and died two years later in a mental asylum.
It was natural for the young composer to try to register his feelings in music (and at a subconscious level to try to justify Schumann’s faith in him), and in March 1854 – only weeks after Robert’s suicide attempt – Brahms set out to create that most dramatic and challenging of forms, a symphony. He was not even 21 at this time and had never written anything for orchestra, so he first sketched this symphony as a sonata for two pianos. Brahms soon realized that he was not yet ready to compose a symphony. He abandoned the project but salvaged a great deal of music from these sketches: ten years later the symphony’s projected slow scherzo became the second movement – Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras – of his German Requiem. Brahms saw more immediate possibilities in the pianistic brilliance of the sketches and decided to transform the first movement into the opening movement of a piano concerto. Once this was completed, he composed a new slow movement and a new rondo-finale. Still desperately uncertain of his abilities, Brahms worked on this concerto for four years before he was willing to try it out in a private performance in March 1858. The first public performance did not take place until January 1859, nearly five years after he had set out to write his symphony.
Brahms marks the first movement Maestoso, but it hardly feels majestic. Instead, it feels catastrophic. Brahms told Joseph Joachim that this violent opening was a depiction of his feelings when he learned of Schumann’s suicide attempt. At well over 20 minutes, this is a huge movement, and Malcolm MacDonald has described it as “nearly the longest, and probably the most dramatic, symphonic movement since Beethoven.” After the opening sound and fury, the piano makes a deceptively understated entrance, and this in turn points to a remarkable feature of this movement: in general, the orchestra has the more aggressive material, the piano the friendlier music. While the piano part is extremely difficult, this is not an ostentatiously virtuoso concerto in the manner of Liszt and other pianist-composers at mid-century. (This massive first movement has no cadenza, in fact.) To call this a “symphony-concerto,” as some have done, goes too far, but such a description does point toward the unusually dramatic character of this music and its refusal to treat the piano as a display instrument. The huge exposition leads to a relatively brief development that includes a shimmering, dancing episode in D Major, but the recapitulation is long and fairly literal. It offers no emotional release, no modulation into a major key, and the movement drives unrelentingly to its close in the mood of the very opening.
Relief arrives with the Adagio. In the early stages of its composition, Brahms had written in the manuscript “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini”: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” The young Brahms had playfully addressed the older Schumann as “Domini,” and some have felt that this must be a tribute to that composer, but in a letter from December 1856 Brahms wrote to Clara, he provides a very different source of inspiration: “I am also painting a lovely portrait of you; it is to be the Adagio.” And there is this: when this music was published, Brahms had removed the Latin inscription and any hint of larger reference. All conjecture aside, this movement has a quiet expressiveness in D Major, an almost consoling quality after the furies of the opening movement. It rises to a gentle climax before a brief cadenza leads to a quiet close.
The last movement, a vigorous rondo, returns to the mood – and D minor tonality – of the opening. Solo piano leads the way here, and all the movement’s thematic material seems to grow out of this opening theme. The theme itself makes few literal returns but is skillfully transformed on each reappearance, including one use as the subject for a brief but lithe fugue. Brahms offers two cadenzas in this movement, the first almost Bachian in its keyboard writing, and at the very end the rising shape of the rondo theme helps propel the movement – finally in D Major – to a heroic close.
Initial reaction to this concerto was harsh. After a performance in Leipzig, Brahms wrote to Clara: “You have probably already heard that it was a complete fiasco; at the rehearsal it met with total silence, and at the performance (where hardly three people raised their hands to clap) it was actually hissed.” A Leipzig critic described the concerto as “a composition dragged to its grave. This work cannot give pleasure . . . it has nothing to offer but hopeless desolation and aridity . . . for more than three quarters of an hour one must endure this rooting and rummaging, this straining and tugging, this tearing and patching of phrases and flourishes! Not only must one take in this fermenting mass; one must also swallow a dessert of the shrillest dissonances and most unpleasant sounds.”
It must have given Brahms particular pleasure when – thirty-five years later, in 1894 – he conducted a program in Leipzig that included both his piano concertos and heard this product of his youth cheered in the same hall where it had been reviled so many years before.
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Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Born September 8, 1841, Muhlhausen, Bohemia
Died May 1, 1904, Prague
[~35 min.]
Success came late to Dvořák. After years of obscurity, during which he supported his family by giving music lessons and playing the viola in orchestras, Dvořák achieved almost instant fame at the age of 37 when his first set of Slavonic Dances took his name around the world. Now Dvořák found his music in demand, and one of the most important signs of this new fame came in June 1884 when the Philharmonic Society of London nominated him for membership and invited him to compose a symphony that he would conduct in London. Shortly after beginning work on the score in December 1884, Dvořák wrote to a friend: “Now I am occupied with my new symphony (for London), and wherever I go I have nothing else in mind but my work, which must be such as to shake the world and God grant that it may!” Dvořák completed the symphony on March 17, 1885 and journeyed to London to conduct the premiere on June 22. It was a tremendous success: “The enthusiasm at the close of the work was such as is rarely seen at a Philharmonic concert,” wrote one critic.
Yet the new symphony, today numbered as Dvořák’s Seventh, came as a surprise. The composer of the snappy, exhilarating Slavonic Dances had written a dark and dramatic symphony, and critics ever since have been at pains to discover the source of this new gravity in the details of Dvořák’s own life. Some hear an intensified Czech nationalism in this symphony, some hear signs of an artistic crisis, others feel that the symphony represents an effort to please Brahms, still others feel that it reflects Dvořák’s reaction to the death of his mother in 1882. But it is better simply to take the Seventh Symphony for what it is: the effort by a powerful creative imagination to expand the scope and dimensions of his art. There can be little doubt that he succeeded. The Seventh is regarded by many as not just Dvořák’s finest symphony but as one of his greatest achievements.
This symphony has been called Dvořák’s most “Brahmsian” work, but that term needs to be understood carefully. It is not to say that this is an imitative work – every bar of the Seventh Symphony is unmistakably the music of Dvořák – but it is to say that this music has the same grandeur, seriousness of purpose, and dark sonority that we associate with the symphonies of Brahms, who would remain a close friend of Dvořák throughout his life. Those dark sonorities are evident from the first instant of the Allegro maestoso: over a deep pedal D, violas and cellos sound the brooding opening idea. The movement is in the expected sonata form, but Dvořák uses that form with unusual freedom – his themes are not so much clearly-defined single ideas as they are groups of ideas that spin off a wealth of material for development. In the first moments of this symphony we hear not just that ominous opening melody, but also the violins’ rhythmic “kick,” a sharply-rising figure, and a turn-figure first spit out by violins and eventually taken over by the solo horn. The second subject (if it can be called that, after such a dizzying parade of ideas in the opening moments) arrives as a gently-rocking melody for flutes and clarinets that Dvořák marks dolce, but quickly this section too is spinning off subordinate ideas. Though the development begins quietly, it soon turns dramatic, and the movement builds to a grand climax, then falls away to an impressive close as two horns sound the dark opening theme one last time.
The Poco Adagio stays in D minor. Woodwinds, singly or as a choir, announce most of the melodic material here. This music may be gentle on its first appearance, but this movement too grows to a series of great climaxes, and it is left to the cellos to sing the relaxed reprise of the main theme as the music makes its way to the quiet close.
The real fun of the Scherzo (and this is a fun movement) lies in its rhythmic vitality. Dvořák sets it in the unusual meter 6/4 and marks it Vivace, but then complicates matters by placing accents where we don’t expect them – sometimes this meter is accented in two, sometimes in three, and sometimes both simultaneously. The music dances madly into the trio section, which seems to begin quietly and simply (some have heard the sound of birdcalls here), but soon introduces complexities of its own; Dvořák makes a powerful return to the scherzo proper and drives the movement to a resounding conclusion.
The Finale, marked simply Allegro, returns to the ominous mood of the beginning of the first movement. The cellos’ arching-and-falling opening idea will shape much of this movement, and Dvořák winds tensions tight and then releases them with a timpani salvo that launches this movement on its way. Cellos eventually provide relief with one of those wonderfully amiable themes that only Dvořák could write, and from this material he builds another extremely dramatic movement. In fact, Dvořák stays relentlessly in D minor as the movement nears its climax, and it is only in the final seconds that he almost wrenches it into D Major for a conclusion that truly does – as Dvořák hoped – “shake the world.”
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna
[~26 min.]
Beethoven began sketches for a symphony in C Major in 1795, just three years after he arrived in Vienna, but the piece did not go well and he abandoned it. The symphony was the grandest of purely instrumental forms, and – because he did not want to rush into a field where Haydn and Mozart had done such distinguished work – Beethoven used the decade of the 1790s to refine his technique as a composer and to prepare to write a symphony. He slowly mastered sonata form and began to write for larger chamber ensembles and for wind instruments; he also composed two piano concertos before taking on the challenge of a symphony. Beethoven then wrote the First Symphony in 1799-1800, and it was first performed, along with his Septet, in Vienna on April 2, 1800.
The genial First Symphony has occasionally been burdened with ponderous commentary by those who feel that it must contain the seeds of Beethoven’s future development – every modulation and detail of orchestration has been squeezed for evidence of the revolutionary directions the composer would later take. Actually, Beethoven’s First is a very straightforward late-eighteenth-century symphony, the product of a talented young man quite aware of the examples of Haydn and Mozart and anxious to master the most challenging form he had faced so far. In fact, one of the most impressive things about Beethoven’s First Symphony is just how conservative it is. It uses the standard Haydn-Mozart orchestra of pairs of winds plus timpani and strings (though early reviewers commented on its heavy use of the winds); its form is right out of Haydn (with whom Beethoven had studied); and its spirit is consistently carefree. There are no battles fought and won here, no grappling with darkness and struggling toward the light – the distinction of the First Symphony lies simply in its crisp energy and exuberant music-making. There are some unusual features along the way, but these should be enjoyed as the striking touches they are rather than exaggerated in light of Beethoven’s future directions as a symphonist. The young composer who wrote the First Symphony was, frankly, looking backward rather than forward.
The key signature of this symphony may suggest that it is in C Major, but the first movement’s slow introduction opens with a stinging discord that glances off into the unexpected key of F Major. This leads to another “wrong” key – G Major – and only gradually does Beethoven “correct” the tonality when the orchestra alights gracefully on C Major at the Allegro con brio. Many have noticed the resemblance between Beethoven’s sturdy main theme here and the opening of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, composed twelve years earlier. This is not a case of plagiarism or of slavish imitation – only a young man’s awareness of the thunder behind him. This energetic movement, with its graceful second theme in the woodwinds, develops concisely and powerfully.
The second movement, marked Andante cantabile con moto, is also in sonata form. The main theme arrives as a series of polyphonic entrances, and Beethoven soon transforms the dotted rhythm of this theme’s third measure into an accompaniment figure – it trips along in the background through much of this movement, and Beethoven gives it to the solo timpani for extended periods. Beethoven’s stipulation con moto is crucial: this may be a slow movement, but it pulses continuously forward along its 3/8 meter, driving to a graceful climax as the woodwind choir sings a variant of the main theme.
By contrast, the third movement bristles with energy, and Beethoven’s marking Menuetto seems incorrect: this may well be a minuet in form, but the indication Allegro molto e vivace banishes any notion of dance music. This movement is – in everything but name – a scherzo, the first of the remarkable series of symphonic scherzos Beethoven would write across his career. (This movement is similar to the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Opus 18, No. 1, composed in these same years – that movement is marked Scherzo.) The trio section is dominated by the winds, whose chorale-like main tune is accompanied by madly-scampering violins.
The most amusing joke in this symphony comes at the opening of the finale, where a rising scale emerges bit by bit, like a snake coming out of its hole; at the Allegro molto e con brio that scale rockets upward to introduce the main theme. With this eight-bar theme, the movement seems at first a rondo, but it is actually in sonata form, complete with exposition repeat and development of secondary themes. A vigorous little march drives the symphony to its resounding close.
Beethoven’s First Symphony found enthusiastic audiences – it was soon performed in Berlin, Breslau, Frankfurt, Dresden, Munich, Paris and London, and there is even evidence that it may have been performed in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1817 (Beethoven would have been delighted). To those dismayed by the course of Beethoven’s subsequent music (their number included Haydn), the First Symphony – which so cheerfully trails clouds of eighteenth-century glory – remained a symbol of the direction his career should have taken.
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Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Born September 25, 1906, St. Petersburg
Died August 9, 1975, Moscow
[~61 min.]
Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, premiered in March 1942 during some of the darkest moments of World War II, had a popular success unequaled in the history of music. Subtitled the “Leningrad” and written during the Nazi siege of that city, the symphony became a worldwide symbol of resistance to Hitler. Within the first season the Seventh Symphony was performed over sixty times in the United States alone, and Shostakovich appeared on the cover of Time magazine wearing the hat of his volunteer fire brigade in Leningrad.
Yet in the midst of such acclaim Shostakovich found himself anxious to press on with another symphony, and this one would prove quite different from the heroic public oratory of the Seventh. He began work early in July 1943 and had the first movement complete by August 3. Shostakovich then moved to the retreat the Soviet government maintained for its composers in Ivanovo, 150 miles northeast of Moscow. There, working in a converted henhouse in the forest, he quickly wrote the second and third movements and had the entire Eighth Symphony complete by September 9. It left him exhausted. To his friend Ivan Sollertinsky he wrote: “There’s a certain vacuum in my soul, the kind that’s always there when a big work has been completed.”
Given the international triumph of the Seventh Symphony, its successor was eagerly anticipated, but its premiere on November 3, 1943, by Eugene Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic brought no comparable success. In fact, the reaction was confused. Audiences that had come expecting a repeat of the Seventh’s heroic sentiments were left puzzled. Performances in the United States and England had no greater success, one American critic describing the Eighth as “the least interesting” of Shostakovich’s wartime symphonies. The music fell into a sort of limbo, where it remained for several years.
Then it became infamous. At the horrifying Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers in February 1948, at which leading Russian composers were attacked for failing to write the sort of optimistic music Soviet society demanded, Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony was singled out for savage censure as one of those works full of “confused, neuropathological combinations which transform music into cacophony.” Shostakovich was fired from his position at the Conservatory, and performances of the Eighth Symphony (and many other works) were forbidden. That ban remained in effect until the cultural thaw after the death of Stalin in 1953. The Eighth Symphony began to be played again in 1956, and a memorable 1960 performance by Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic in London (at which the composer was present) symbolized its complete rehabilitation. Since then, the Eighth has been regarded as one of Shostakovich’s most important symphonies.
But it is not one of his most popular, and it can be as puzzling to audiences today as it was during the war. It is a big work, in five movements that span an hour, and it clearly reflects the experience of the war: a huge, dramatic first movement is followed by three much shorter movements of sharply-contrasted, often violent, character. The problem lies in the concluding fifth movement. It has been suggested that had Shostakovich written a powerful finale that made properly heroic noises about the war, there would have been no problem for audiences and the symphony would have escaped censure in 1948. But he did not. Instead, he wrote a finale that not only fails to resolve the issues the symphony had raised but refuses to address them at all. Consciously non-heroic, at moments even light-hearted, the finale draws this massive war symphony to a close in ambiguous silence. Even if one does not share the ideological priorities that demanded heroic conclusions, Shostakovich’s finale can feel mystifying and emotionally unsettling. Yet that ambiguous close is also the source of this music’s greatness.
The huge (25-minute) opening Adagio seems to recall the opening of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, composed six years earlier: both begin with powerful dotted rhythms from the lower strings, both introduce quiet violin material over this foundation, both develop their material by playing these themes up in an almost brutalized development, and both subside to a quiet close that seems only momentarily to resolve the movement’s tensions. Shostakovich was sometimes criticized for the plainness of his material, but how fine are his themes in this movement! Over slowly-dotted lower strings, first violins lay out the movement’s long, dark main idea, played entirely over the fingerboard to produce it soft, disembodied sound. Beethoven, who could write a similar kind of music, would mark such a passage ermattet: “choked.” The quiet second subject also arrives in the first violins over pulsing rhythms, its angular shape draped upon the unusual meter of 5/4. These subdued themes are then savaged in the long development, which is violent, brutal, strident. This is by no means pictorial music, but it is impossible not to feel this music a direct response to the war that was raging only a couple of hundred miles to the west of where it was written. The violence subsides, and over tremolo strings a long solo for English horn winds down the tensions, its melancholy sound exactly right for this moment and this music. Shostakovich revisits his main themes very briefly, and the movement fades into silence on quiet string chords – rarely has C Major sounded so grim. This Adagio, almost a complete work in itself, makes an overpowering beginning to the Eighth Symphony, and it is worth recalling Serge Koussevitsky’s description of it as music “which, by the power of its human emotion, surpasses everything else created in our time.” Extravagant praise, and perhaps the result of wartime fervor, but it does suggest the scope and intensity of this movement.
Each of the three interior movements has a distinctive tempo and character. The Allegretto sustains some of the brutality of the first movement as it lurches forward on heavy-footed three-note patterns. These furies subside as solo piccolo introduces the skittering tune that will make up the middle of the movement, but the three-note pattern returns to overpower this and drive the movement to a thunderous close.
The final three movements are played without pause. The viola’s steady rush of quarter-notes pounds through the Allegro non troppo, which hurtles along unstoppably. Was this movement inspired by newsreels of the huge battles between Nazi and Soviet armor that took place around Kursk in the summer of 1943, just as Shostakovich was writing this music? The unstoppable rhythms suggest the mechanistic grind of tanks, while shells shriek overhead and distant explosions punctuate the music. A drum roll leads directly into the fourth movement, which brings another complete change. Marked Largo, this is a passacaglia based on the cellos’ ten-measure ground bass, and it is a measure of Shostakovich’s skill as a symphonist that this ground is a transformation of the powerful cello figure that began the symphony. Gone is the brutality of the earlier movements, and in their place comes an icy stillness. Muted strings establish the veiled, murky atmosphere, and against this still landscape emerge lonely passages for solo winds: horn, piccolo, two clarinets. The tone is bleak, and the music flows without pause into the finale.
This finale is problematic in countless ways. It begins with the three-note figure that had permeated the second movement, but where that figure had sounded massive before, now it turns playful. The tone of the finale seems all wrong: Shostakovich concludes this wartime symphony with music that feels casual, almost light-hearted. The perky woodwind solos of the opening give way to a waltz in the cellos; brass fanfares are followed by cadenza-like passages for the violins, and suddenly the music roars up into a savage climax that revisits the furies of earlier movements. In the stunned aftermath, the bass clarinet’s insouciant little tune disarms tensions and pushes the movement toward its close. After the drama and sharp profile of the earlier movements, the symphony comes to an uncertain and quiet close.
Far from being it the “least interesting” of Shostakovich’s wartime symphonies, the Eighth Symphony is the greatest of them, and it is precisely this ending that is the source of its greatness. In the face of a devastating war (even at a time when that struggle was beginning to succeed), Shostakovich refuses to pound his chest. Instead, he registers a deeper, more complex reaction to war than he had in the packaged heroism of the “Leningrad” Symphony. The Eighth Symphony speaks not of jingoistic triumph but of the more immediate realities of violence and pain. If Shostakovich fails to wrap a satisfying artistic form around these raw emotions and if his music seems to end in the middle of nowhere, the Eighth Symphony nevertheless offers a direct response to the experience of war, undistilled by obligation to political or public oratory. It is no wonder that its effect should be so disturbing.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Symphony No. 7 in E minor
GUSTAV MAHLER
Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia
Died May 18, 1911, Vienna
[~77 min.]
The Seventh has always been the neglected stepsister among Mahler’s ten symphonies, and greater familiarity over the last several decades has not yet transformed it into Cinderella. The last of Mahler’s three purely instrumental “middle” symphonies, the Seventh had the strangest creation of any of his symphonies. In the summer of 1904, Mahler brought his family to their summer retreat at Maiernigg, on the southern shore of the Wörthersee in central Austria. There Mahler composed some of his darkest music, the finale of the Sixth Symphony, then pressed on to write two quite different movements. Both were relatively brief, both were relaxed, and Mahler referred to them as Nachtmusik movements: “night-music” or “serenades.” But he had no idea how they might fit into a larger symphonic context.
Mahler returned to Maiernigg in the summer of 1905, still with no idea how to proceed. A trip to the Dolomites and a walk around a favorite lake there brought no inspiration, and the dejected composer headed back to Maiernigg. At Klagenfurt, he got into a boat to be rowed across to Maiernigg, and “As soon as the oar touched the water the theme (or rather the rhythm and the feeling) of the introduction to the first movement came to me – and in four weeks the first, third and fifth movements were ready and done with!” In fact, Mahler wrote the third movement first, then the finale, and only then did he go back and compose the first movement. Mahler led the premiere of the Seventh Symphony on September 19, 1908 in Prague, where his wife Alma reported that it had only a success d’estime.
Mahler claimed to be wary of providing programs for his symphonies, yet he left a wealth of hints as to what the Seventh is “about.” The Seventh, he said, is about the progress from night to day. A massive opening movement, which depicts what he called “the power of darkness . . . [night as a] violent, stubborn, brutal and tyrannical force,” is followed by three briefer movements that offer different responses to night. The finale, which Mahler nicknamed “Der Tag” (Day), escapes the darkness and thrusts us into bright C-Major sunlight. For some years, the Seventh even had the spurious nickname “Song of the Night,” a title that did not originate with the composer (and which in fact is legitimately the nickname of Karol Szymanowski’s Third Symphony).
Mahler’s program seems a likely dramatic sequence, but for all its many strengths, the Seventh remains the least-familiar of Mahler’s symphonies. About one thing, however, everyone agrees: the Seventh is an uneven work of art. The three inner movements – the two Nachtmusik movements and the central scherzo – have an instant charm, and in the days before Mahler’s music became popular, they were sometimes performed by themselves. When in the 1950s Erich Leinsdorf led them with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he was taken to task the following day on the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, which demanded to hear the outer movements. And it is these outer movements, particularly the finale, that have occasioned sharp debate.
Mahler described the opening movement as “tragic night” and even went so far as to say that it is “dominated by a tragic and elemental power, that of Death.” It opens quietly with the pulsing rhythm inspired by the oars, and over this intrudes the strange sound of the tenorhorn. Mahler, who asks that this passage be played with großer Ton, referred to this beginning as the sound of “nature roaring.” Gradually the music eases ahead and becomes a march, and this in turn accelerates into the main body of the movement. A spectacular collection of night-sounds – shrieks, whistles, trills – accompanies the rush into the main theme, a mighty horn-call marked Allegro risoluto, ma non troppo. To the conductor Willem Mengelberg, Mahler described this theme as the force that would do battle against the forces of the night. The second subject is one of the most beautiful melodies Mahler ever wrote, a soaring theme for violins that he marks Mit großem Schwung: “With great energy, swing.”
The development is long and episodic, and one of its interludes deserves particular mention. The music grows quiet and solemn, and a harp glissando sweeps us into a moment that can only be described as magic: Mahler stacks up all four of his main themes – the opening oar rhythm, the march, the main horn theme, and the violins’ soaring second subject – and presents them simultaneously. It is a moment fully worthy of those other towering examples of symphonic counterpoint, the finales of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and Bruckner’s Eighth, and the wonder is that instead of sounding chaotic or forced, this episode sounds so luminous and beautiful. Mahler builds to a climax he marks Grandioso, and the march propels the movement to its firm close. Mahler may have believed this movement full of night and death, but it ends in a triumph that appears to have dispelled the forces of darkness.
The three interior movements, all much shorter, offer less ominous faces of the night. Mahler said that the second movement was inspired by Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch and felt that this particular patrol was moving through what he called “fantastic semi-darkness.” Listeners should not search for a literal depiction of a patrol at night but instead for the sense of moving through darkness. The opening horn call and its distant answer create a sense of space, and Mahler heightens this with periodic use of quiet cowbells, heard from afar.
Shortest of the movements, the central scherzo is full of “things that go bump in the night.” Mahler marks this movement Schattenhaft (“Shadowy”), and it rushes past like something flickering through the darkness. Much of the writing is in the depths of the orchestra (full of whirring, thumping, banging sounds from low strings, tuba, timpani), and the music keeps breaking into ghostly little waltzes that are more devilish than demonic – this movement is fun rather than frightening. At the end, the waltz falls apart, and the movement ends with a wry joke.
Mahler’s marking for the fourth movement – Andante amoroso – reminds us that there is another side to night: it is also the time of love. This is a moonlit serenade, and Mahler underlines that character by including guitar and mandolin, instruments that traditionally accompany such music, and scoring much of it for another instrument associated with the music of love, the solo violin. Night here is warm and perfumed, and this sensual music is scored with unusual delicacy: Mahler gives the percussion and all brass except two horns this movement off. Cellos and then violins sing luxuriously in the central episode, but the opening serenade returns to close out the movement on the guitar’s softly-strummed chords.
All this delicacy vanishes in the first instant of the finale, which opens with timpani salvos, wild horn trills, and a trumpet solo that rips into the stratosphere. We have left behind night, in its many apparitions, and are now in the full light of day. This finale, brilliantly scored and written, overflows with incandescent energy. It is also full of quotations from other music, and if the main theme seems to take the shape of another piece of celebration music – Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger – what are we to make of the other references? Some have heard a touch of Lehár’s The Merry Widow here, others a bit of Mendelssohn there, and there is even a whiff of Rimsky’s Russian Easter Overture along the way. More unsettling are the movement’s constant dislocations. This music hurtles through instantaneous changes of key, tempo, mood and even kinds of music, and while this has been described as a kaleidoscopic inclusiveness, sometimes it feels as if Mahler is shifting gears without benefit of clutch. Episodic and wildly varied as this music may be, Mahler provides a degree of balance by bringing back the main theme of the opening movement as he nears the conclusion, and it is a measure of the suddenness of his vision in the rowboat that the finale – written first – returns to the main theme of a movement written after it was complete. First we hear bits of that theme, and finally – to the sound of wildly pealing bells – the full theme is shouted out in all its glory, and the symphony hurtles to its close.
The finale of the Seventh Symphony has become a lightning rod for those who love Mahler’s music, and there have been many efforts to explain it. Even so devoted a Mahlerian as Deryck Cooke was brutally frank about this movement, saying that “there can be no question that the finale is largely a failure.” But others have found much to praise here. Some have viewed the finale as a dizzy festival of all human activity, seen in the bright light of day, its confusions and dislocations simply a portrait of the chaotic human state. Others believe it satiric, a withering look back at the rotting world of Hapsburg Europe; this, they say, would explain the number of quotations. Still others see it as prophetic, Mahler looking ahead from 1905 to foresee World War I and the destruction of Europe, and their argument is that of course such music should leave us unsettled.
The Seventh Symphony is the most fantastic music (in the literal sense of that adjective) that Mahler ever wrote. This long night’s journey into day is a dazzling passage: the three middle movements have considerable charm, and there is much to love in that strange, dark first movement. But more than anything else it is the finale – the destination point of that journey – that has proven the thorniest part of the Seventh Symphony. Listeners come out of this finale (and so out of the entire symphony) amazed, fascinated, dizzied – and challenged to make full sense of this fantastic symphonic journey.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Op. 33a
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
Born November 22, 1913, Lowestoft
Died December 4, 1976, Aldeburgh
[~16 min.]
Peter Grimes, which depends for so much of its force on Britten’s superb evocation of the harsh and violent Suffolk coast, has become one of the great operas of the twentieth century, and it comes as a surprise to learn that the opera got its start in Southern California. Britten had left England in 1939, believing that his homeland was blocked to him as an artist and intending to make a new life in America. Britten had some success here, but he also suffered bouts of ill health, and – wishing for a warmer climate than Long Island’s – he accepted an invitation to spend the summer of 1941 with the duo-pianist team of Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson at a home they had rented in Escondido. Britten and Peter Pears drove an ancient car across the country, arriving in Escondido that spring.
Two years in this country had made Britten increasingly ambivalent about his separation from England, and the summer in Escondido brought the event that drove him both to return and to compose Peter Grimes. Early that summer, Pears bought a volume of the poetry of George Crabbe (Pears was later unable to recall if the bookstore had been in Los Angeles or San Diego), and now the two young men found themselves enthralled by Crabbe’s poetry. Crabbe (1754-1832) was from Britten’s own Suffolk. His was a bleak vision of mankind and of Suffolk life; Britten probably did not know – but would readily have agreed with – the sonnet in tribute to Crabbe by American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, which begins “Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows.” To a friend in Long Island, Britten wrote: “We’ve just re-discovered the poetry of George Crabbe (all about Suffolk!) & are very excited – maybe an opera one day!”
Britten was particularly taken with Crabbe’s The Borough (1810), which tells of life in a Suffolk fishing village and of the outcast Peter Grimes. When Serge Koussevitzky asked Britten the following winter why he had composed no operas, the young composer spoke of the cost of such a project, and Koussevitzky promptly commissioned an opera from him. Britten returned to England in April 1942, armed with this commission and fired by a new passion for his native Suffolk; he composed Peter Grimes in 1944-45, and its premiere in June 1945 was a triumph. The opera is based on the deadly collision between a fishing village called The Borough – which represents convention, religion, law, and a great deal of smugness – and Grimes, an outcast, violent, perhaps demented, yet longing for acceptance by the community he despises.
The opera is in three acts, and as preludes to the acts or as interludes between scenes Britten composed six orchestral interludes, brief mood-pieces designed to set a scene, establish a mood, or hint at character. Even before the opera had been produced, Britten assembled an orchestral suite made up of four of these, which he called Sea Interludes, and led the London Philharmonic Orchestra in its premiere on June 14, 1945.
The opera opens with a Prologue, The Borough’s investigation into the death of Grimes’ previous apprentice William Sprode, and at its conclusion comes the first interlude, Dawn, which functions as the prelude to the opera. Here is gray daybreak on the bleak Suffolk coast, evoked by the high, clear, pure sound of unison flutes and violins. This is haunting, evocative music, full of the cries of sea birds, the hiss of surf across rocky beaches, and – menacing in the deep brass – the swell of the sea itself. Sunday Morning, the prelude to Act 2, opens with the sound of church bells pealing madly in the horns and woodwinds. The strings have the theme Ellen Orford sings in praise of the sunny sea: “Glitter of waves / And glitter of sunlight / Bid us rejoice / And lift our hearts high.” Moonlight is the prelude to Act 3 – its portrait of the tranquil sea is broken by splashes of sound from flute, xylophone and harp. The concluding Storm actually comes from early in the opera: a depiction of a storm that strikes the coast, it forms the musical interlude between Scenes 1 and 2 of the opening act. The violence of the opening gives way to a more subdued central section before the storm breaks out again and drives the music to its powerful close. Britten noted that “. . . my life as a child was colored by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships on our coast and ate away whole stretches of neighboring cliffs. In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea.”
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Piano Concerto in G Major
MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Pyrennes, Basses-Cibourre
Died December 28, 1937, Paris
[~23 min.]
Throughout his career Ravel had written no concertos, and then in the fall of 1929 – at the age of 54 – he set to work simultaneously on two piano concertos. One was the Concerto for the Left Hand for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, and the other – the Concerto in G Major – was intended for the composer’s own use. The Concerto for the Left Hand is dark and serious, but the Concerto in G Major is much lighter. Ravel described it as “a concerto in the truest sense of the term, written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. Indeed, I take the view that the music of a concerto can very well be cheerful and brilliant and does not have to lay claim to profundity or aim at dramatic effect . . . At the beginning I thought of naming the work a divertissement; but I reflected that this was not necessary, the title ‘Concerto’ explaining the character of the music sufficiently.”
The actual composition took longer than Ravel anticipated, and the concerto was not complete until the fall of 1931. By that time, failing health prevented the composer from performing this music himself. Instead, he conducted the premiere in Paris on January 14, 1932. The pianist was Marguerite Long, to whom Ravel dedicated the concerto. (Long had given the first performance of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin in 1919.)
Ravel may have taken Mozart and Saint-Saëns as his model, but no listener would make that association. What strikes audiences first are the concerto’s virtuoso writing for both piano and orchestra, the brilliance and transparency of the music, and the influence of American jazz. It is possible to make too much of the jazz influence, but Ravel had heard jazz during his tour of America in 1928 and found much to admire. When asked about its influence on this concerto, he said: “It includes some elements borrowed from jazz, but only in moderation.” Ravel was quite proud of this music and is reported to have said that in this work “he had expressed himself most completely, and that he had poured his thoughts into the exact mold that he had dreamed.”
The first movement, marked Allegramente (“Brightly”), opens with a whipcrack, and immediately the piccolo plays the jaunty opening tune, picked up in turn by solo trumpet before the piano makes its sultry solo entrance. Some of the concerto’s most brilliant music occurs in this movement, which is possessed of a sort of madcap energy, with great splashes of instrumental color, strident flutter-tonguing by the winds, string glissandos, and a quasi-cadenza for the harp. The Adagio assai, one of Ravel’s most beautiful slow movements, opens with a three-minute solo for the pianist, who lays out the haunting main theme at length. The return of this theme later in the movement in the English horn over delicate piano accompaniment is particularly effective. Despite its seemingly easy flow of melody, this movement gave Ravel a great deal of trouble, and he later said that he wrote it “two bars at a time.” The concluding Presto explodes to life with a five-note riff that recurs throughout, functioning somewhat like the ritornello of the baroque concerto. The jazz influence shows up here in the squealing clarinets, brass smears, and racing piano passages. The movement comes to a sizzling conclusion on the five-note phrase with which it began.
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Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique”
PETER ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk
Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg
[~46 min.]
Tchaikovsky made a successful visit to America in the spring of 1891, when he was one of the guest conductors at the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York City. During these years he frequently conducted abroad, including appearances in France, Belgium and Poland, but Tchaikovsky was always homesick for his native land when he was on tour, and he rushed back to Russia in 1892. At his home in the village of Klin, north of Moscow, Tchaikovsky drafted the first three movements of a symphony in E-flat Major, but he was dissatisfied and abandoned it, plunging once again into his perpetual terror that he had written himself out and would never compose again.
Then in February 1893 he began another symphony. This one grew out of a note he had written to himself the previous year: “The ultimate essence of the plan of the symphony is LIFE. First movement – all impulsive passion, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short. (Finale DEATH – result of collapse.) Second movement love; third disappointments; fourth ends dying away (also short).” This note would become the seed for Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, though the plan would be considerably modified in the course of composition. To his nephew Tchaikovsky wrote, “I had an idea for a new symphony, this time with a program – but a program of a kind that will remain an enigma to all. Let them guess it who can…This program is permeated with subjective feeling… While composing it in my mind, I wept frequently.”
The draft of the symphony was complete by April 1893, and the orchestration was done in August. Though he was perpetually unsure about his new works, this time Tchaikovsky was confident that he had written well: “I love it as I have never loved a single one of my offspring… Never have I been so pleased with myself, so proud, so happy in the knowledge that I have created something good.”
Clearly, the new symphony was important to its creator, and he wished to take measure of its emotional significance with a suitable nickname. At first he wanted to call it “Program” Symphony, but he was quickly talked out of so bland a suggestion. His brother Modest suggested the subtitle “Tragic,” but the composer disliked that. Then Modest suggested “Pathétique,” and the composer agreed immediately. The term “pathétique” is difficult to translate into English, and its automatic rendering as “pathetic” is misleading – as Tchaikovsky understood the term, it meant more nearly “emotional” or “passionate.” Yet the “meaning” of this symphony remains elusive. A generation or so ago, it was almost a convention that recordings of the “Pathétique” would feature a jacket illustration of a lugubrious hooded figure descending steps into the depths of a gloomy cloister. That image had nothing to do with the music, but it seemed a sort of visual equivalent of this music’s unsettling emotional impact.
The “Pathétique” begins in darkness. Over the contrabasses’ open fifth, solo bassoon sings the somber opening melody, and this smoothly evolves into the movement’s main subject at the Allegro non troppo. The second episode is built on one of the most famous themes Tchaikovsky ever wrote, a heartfelt falling melody for strings that he marks “tenderly, singing, expansive”; these two ideas will form the basis of this vast sonata-form movement. The exposition trails off in the woodwinds – Tchaikovsky wants the solo bassoon to play so quietly that he marks its part with SIX piano signs – but the opening of the development is the most violent in the symphonic literature. Out of that silence, the orchestra explodes (this is a moment famous for terrifying dozing concert-goers), and the tumultuous development centers on the opening theme. The climax comes on two huge smashes of sound – the first like a crack of thunder, the second exhausted and falling away – and finally a noble brass chorale draws this lengthy movement to its consoling close.
The second movement, Allegro con grazia, is a waltz, but instead of writing it in the waltz meter of 3/4, Tchaikovsky casts this one in 5/4. Despite the sour critic who claimed that this waltz could be danced only by someone with three feet, this is graceful music. Tchaikovsky keeps the flowing trio section in 5/4 as well, and its lightness is set off by a deep contrabass line that throbs along beneath the easy flow of melody.
The Allegro molto vivace, one of Tchaikovsky’s most exciting movements, is both a scherzo and a march. It opens with skittering triplets, and solo oboe quickly sounds the sharp-edged march tune. This movement is beautifully controlled: Tchaikovsky gradually builds these simple materials into a powerful march that drives to an incandescent close.
It is a close that inevitably brings a burst of applause, but the true ending is still to come, and it is dark indeed, for this symphony concludes with a grieving and dark slow movement that Tchaikovsky significantly marks Adagio lamentoso. The almost sobbing violin theme at the beginning is remarkable for its sound projection: Tchaikovsky has it played jointly by the two violin sections, and the melodic line moves back and forth between them at each note – in effect, neither section has the theme, which is heard only as product of their combined effort. The movement rises to an agitated climax, then slowly slips back into the blackness from which the symphony began. Tchaikovsky takes an artistic risk here, closing with slow and bleak music rather than with the traditional excitement. Yet his instincts proved correct, and this symphony’s vanishing into the darkness – however strange it must have seemed to that first audience – makes for a powerful conclusion.
Tchaikovsky led the premiere on October 28, 1893, before a St. Petersburg audience that could make little sense of so unexpected an ending. Nine days later Tchaikovsky was dead at the age of 53, apparently the victim of cholera, though the exact circumstances remain uncertain. At a second performance of this symphony twelve days after his death, the audience was overwhelmed by music that had left them mystified only a short time before, and the proximity of Tchaikovsky’s death to the premiere of this dark music gave rise to all kinds of retroactive interpretations of its meaning. Tchaikovsky himself gave no indication beyond his cryptic comment: “Let them guess it who can.”
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
A German Requiem (Ein deutsches Requiem), Op. 45
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna
[~68 min.]
In 1896, a year before his death, Brahms spent an evening with Dvořák, and in the course of a long night of talk, the men discussed religion. As the devout Dvořák walked home, a friend reported that he was silent for a long time, then finally burst out: “Such a man, such a fine soul – and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!”
By all accounts, Dvořák was right. Brahms was an agnostic, yet he had a profound knowledge of the Bible: he owned five copies of Luther’s German Bible and read from them daily. If Brahms could not accept Christian dogma, he had enormous respect for its teachings, and it was this man – an agnostic with an essentially religious temperament – who composed Ein deutsches Requiem (“A German Requiem”). This is very personal music, and it appears to have sprung from very personal sources. The first of these was the death of Robert Schumann in 1856. Schumann had been the first major figure to believe in Brahms and support his career, and in the aftermath of Schumann’s mental collapse and death in an asylum Brahms had set out to write music that registered his grief. But Brahms was unsure what form that music should take. He began to write a symphony and sketched it as a sonata for two pianos, but he abandoned that project. He did, however, save the music: part of it went into his First Piano Concerto, and the symphony’s slow scherzo eventually became the second movement of the German Requiem. Evidence suggests that Brahms sketched this movement and three others in the form of a cantata and then set the project aside.
It was the death of his mother in February 1865, when Brahms was 32, that brought him back to this music. Though his parents were divorced, Brahms remained extremely close to both of them throughout their lives. For his mother he felt a particular bond: she had been a source of love and support and had taken great pride in his accomplishments. At the news of her stroke, he had rushed back to Hamburg, but arrived too late to see her. A friend in Vienna reported that he found Brahms sitting at the piano, playing Bach and sobbing as he announced his mother’s death – and he would not stop playing. In the following months Brahms returned to his earlier sketches for a cantata and revised and expanded them.
The first three movements were performed in December 1867 in Vienna, and the occasion turned into a disaster. At the close of the third movement the timpanist either got lost or played much too loudly – accounts vary – and the music was actually hissed. Brahms revised the score, and a six-movement version – for baritone, chorus and orchestra – was successfully premiered on Good Friday 1868 in the Bremen Cathedral. At this point Brahms’ old piano teacher Eduard Marxsen advised him to add one more movement, one that spoke of a mother’s love. Brahms recognized that Marxsen was right, and he composed the additional movement – the fifth – in which a soprano sings a message of maternal consolation. This is the soprano’s only appearance in the Requiem, and her silvery sound cuts through the generally dark colors of the Requiem with a message emotionally crucial to the grieving composer.
This is one of the great Requiems, but it is not a setting of the Catholic Mass for the dead. Instead, Brahms chose his own texts from Luther’s Bible – sixteen separate passages from the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha – and set them in German. Brahms’ choice of texts – and his exclusions – give the German Requiem a very particular character. There is no Dies Irae section of the Catholic Mass here, no day of judgment and the separation of souls into the saved and damned. In fact, there is not one mention of Christ in Brahms’ setting, and he fiercely resisted suggestions that he include such a reference. Instead, his emphasis is on the living as they face the fact of death and loss. The first words of A German Requiem are “Blessed are they who mourn,” and this message of consolation continues throughout: A German Requiem closes with the words “Blessed are the dead,” and the progress is toward an acceptance of life and death and consolation for both those who die and those who mourn.
Brahms chose the title A German Requiem to indicate that it was different – that it was not a Catholic mass and was in German rather than Latin – but he was uncomfortable with that title. He wanted to call it “Requiem for Humankind” but in the end gave up and settled for the title we know today. The premiere of the complete version on February 18, 1869, was a triumph, and performances quickly followed throughout Germany and abroad – more than any other work, it was A German Requiem that established Brahms’ reputation at this early stage of his career.
The two opening movements, both somber in color, introduce central ideas, bringing consolation to the living and reminding them of the transitoriness of human existence. The opening movement is made even more somber by Brahms’ decision to do without violins, clarinets and trumpets, and he mutes the strings in the second movement, a slow march (despite the 3/4 meter) that rises to a great climax on “Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit” (“But the word of the Lord endureth forever”), then falls away to the quiet close. The baritone solo enters in the third movement, troubled and searching for direction within the confusion of existence. The music grows to a climax that breaks into a double fugue in D Major on the words “Der Gerechten Seelen sind in Gottes Hand” (“The souls of the righteous are in the hands of the Lord”) and drives to a triumphant conclusion (this is the part that was ruined by the timpanist in the December 1867 performance).
After this thunder comes a peaceful interlude. “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen” (“How Lovely Are Thy Dwelling Places”), which celebrates the beauties of life on earth, is one of Brahms’ loveliest choral settings, so beautiful that it is often performed by itself. The soprano soloist sings a message of maternal love and eventual reunion in “Ihr habt nur Traurigkeit” (“And ye now therefore have sorrow”); her heartfelt line floats over some luminous string writing – clearly this movement was important to Brahms.
The mood changes sharply at the beginning of the sixth movement: “Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt” (“For here we have no continuing city”) brings the dramatic climax of the Requiem. The dark opening repeats the message of the transitoriness of human life, but the motion of this movement is toward resurrection and triumph over the grave. Brahms builds this up to a magnificent climax and another double fugue, this time on a text from Revelation, “Herr, Du bist würdig” (“Thou art worthy, O Lord”), and the movement drives to a ringing close. Brahms concludes by returning to the message and manner of the opening movement – in fact, the Requiem ends with the same music that brought the first movement to its close. Humanity may eventually triumph over the grave, but now Brahms’ concern is with the living and the dead, and A German Requiem fades into silence with one final benediction of the dead and of those who mourn for them.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna
[~45 min.]
Brahms waited a long time to write a symphony. He had impetuously begun one at age 23 in reaction to Schumann’s death and got much of it on paper before he recognized that he was not ready to take on so daunting a challenge and abandoned it. Brahms was only too aware of the example of Beethoven’s nine symphonies and of the responsibility of any subsequent symphonist to be worthy of that example. To the conductor Hermann Levi, he made one of the most famous – and honest – confessions in the history of music: “You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us.”
Brahms began work on what would be his first completed symphony in the early 1860s and worked on it right up to (and after) the premiere on November 4, 1876, when the composer was 43. He was concerned enough about how his first symphony would be received that he chose not to present it in Vienna, where all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies had been first performed. Instead, he said, he wanted “a little town that has a good friend, a good conductor and a good orchestra,” and so the premiere took place in the small city of Karlsruhe in western Germany, far from major music centers. Brahms may have been uncertain about his symphony, but audiences were not, and the new work was soon praised in terms that must have seemed heretical to its composer. Some began to speak of “the three B’s,” and the conductor Hans von Bülow referred to the work as “the Tenth Symphony,” suggesting that it was a worthy successor to Beethoven’s nine. Brahms would have none of it. He grumbled: “There are asses in Vienna who take me for a second Beethoven.”
There can be no doubt, however, that Brahms meant his First Symphony to be taken very seriously. From the first instant of the symphony, with its pounding timpani ostinato, one senses Brahms’ intention to write music of vast power and scope. The 37-bar introduction, which contains the shapes of the themes of the first movement, was written after Brahms had completed the rest of the movement, and it comes to a moment of repose before the exposition explodes with a crack. This is not music that one can easily sing. In fact, themes are here reduced virtually to fragments: arpeggiated chords, simple rising and falling scales. Brahms’ close friend Clara Schumann wrote in her diary after hearing the symphony: “I cannot disguise the fact that I am painfully disappointed; in spite of its workmanship I feel it lacks melody.” But Brahms was not so much interested in melodic themes as he was in motivic themes with the capacity to evolve dramatically. After a violent development, the lengthy opening movement closes quietly in C Major.
Where the first movement was unremittingly dramatic, the Andante sostenuto sings throughout. The strings’ glowing opening material contrasts nicely with the sound of the solo oboe, which has the poised second subject, and the movement concludes with the solo violin rising high above the rest of the orchestra, almost shimmering above the final chords. The third movement is not the huge scherzo one might have expected at this point. Instead, the aptly-named Un poco allegretto e grazioso is the shortest movement of the symphony, and its calm is welcome before the intensity of the finale. It opens with a flowing melody for solo clarinet, which Brahms promptly inverts and repeats; the central episode is somewhat more animated, but the mood remains restrained throughout. That calm, however, is annihilated at the beginning of the finale. Tense violins outline what will later become the main theme of the movement, pizzicato figures race ahead, and the music builds to an eruption of sound. Out of that turbulence bursts the pealing sound of horns. Many have commented on the nearly exact resemblance between this horn theme and the Westminster chimes, though the resemblance appears to have been coincidental. (Brahms himself likened it to the sound of an Alpenhorn resounding through mountain valleys.) A chorale for brass leads to the movement’s main theme, a noble (and now very famous) melody for the first violins. When it was pointed out to Brahms that this theme bore more than a passing resemblance to the main theme of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he replied tartly: “Any ass can see that.” The point is not so much that the two ideas are alike thematically as it is that they are emotionally alike: both have a natural simplicity and spiritual radiance that give the two movements a similar emotional effect. The development of the finale is as dramatic as that of the first movement, and at the climax the chorale is stamped out fortissimo and the symphony thunders to its close.
It was as if the completion of his stormy Symphony in C minor freed Brahms from the self-imposed fears about writing a symphony that had restrained him for so long. After agonizing fifteen years over his First Symphony, Brahms immediately set to work on his next one, and the relaxed and good-natured Second Symphony was done in a matter of months.
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Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73
[~43 min.]
The premiere of Brahms’ First Symphony in November 1876 was a success, and Brahms himself conducted the new work throughout Europe during the winter concert season. With the stress of that tour behind him, he spent the summer of 1877 in the tiny town of Pörtschach on the Wörthersee in southern Austria, and there he began another symphony. This one went quickly. To Clara Schumann he wrote, “So many melodies fly about that one must be careful not to tread on them.” Brahms’ First Symphony may have taken two decades, but his Second was done in four months, and its premiere in Vienna on December 30, 1877, under Hans Richter was a triumph.
While the Second Symphony is quite different from the turbulent First, this music is not all pastoral sunlight. The first two movements in particular are marked by a seriousness of purpose and a breadth of expression. Brahms’ friend Theodor Billroth spoke of only one side of the Second Symphony when he said: “It is all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine and cool green shadows. How beautiful it must be at Pörtschach!” For all the sunshine in this symphony, the first two movements explore some of those shadows in depth.
The hand of a master is everywhere evident in the Second Symphony, particularly in Brahms’ ingenious use of the simple three-note sequence (D-C#-D) heard in the cellos and basses in the first measure. This figure recurs hundreds of times throughout the Second Symphony, giving the music unusual thematic and expressive unity. The constant repetition of so simple a figure might become monotonous or obsessive in the hands of a lesser composer, and it is a mark of Brahms’ skill that he uses this figure in so many ways. It gives shape to his themes, serves as both harmonic underpinning and blazing motor-rhythm, is by turns whispered softly and shouted at full-blast. Once aware of this figure, a listener can only marvel at Brahms’ fertile use of what seems such unpromising material.
The Allegro non troppo opens with this figure, and a rich array of themes quickly follows: a horn call, a flowing violin melody (derived from the opening three-note motto), a surging song for lower strings (Brahms characteristically sets the cellos above the violas here), and a dramatic idea built on the violins’ octave leaps. This wealth of thematic material develops over a very long span (the only longer movement in a Brahms symphony is the massive finale of the First), and – crowned by a wonderful solo for French horn – the movement comes to a relaxed close.
The expressive Adagio non troppo opens with the cellos’ somber melody; while this is in B Major, so dark is Brahms’ treatment that the movement almost seems to be in a minor key. The center section, with its floating, halting melody for woodwinds, brings relief, but the tone remains serious throughout this movement, which comes to a quiet conclusion only after an eruption in its closing moments.
After two such powerful movements, the final two bring welcome release. The charming third movement comes as a complete surprise, for in it Brahms offers an almost playful movement in rondo form. The oboe’s opening melody (Brahms marks it grazioso: “graceful”) leads to two contrasting sections, both introduced by strings and both marked Presto. Brahms’ rhythms and accents here are imaginative and complex: phrases are tossed easily between instrumental families, and complicated rhythms are made to mesh smoothly as one section gives way to the next. This movement so charmed the audience at the symphony’s premiere that it had to be repeated.
The Allegro con spirito opens quietly and quickly – so quickly that one may not recognize that its first three notes are exactly the same three notes that began the symphony. In sonata-form, the finale features a broad second subject that swings along easily in the violins. Full of energy and explosive outbursts, this movement drives to a mighty conclusion. We do not usually think of Brahms as a composer much concerned with orchestral color, but the writing for brass in the closing measures of this symphony is thrilling, no matter how often one has heard it.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna
[~38 min.]
Brahms spent the summer of 1878 in Pörtschach on the Wörthersee. He loved this resort town on the lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and to a friend he noted how much he felt like writing music there: “So many melodies fly about that one must be careful not to tread on them.” Brahms set out that summer to write something for his friend and colleague of twenty-five years, the great violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms did not play the violin, and he consulted frequently with Joachim during the composition of this concerto, asking for advice and criticism (some of which he took, some he did not). In its original form, this concerto was in four movements, but Brahms threw out the two middle movements, replacing them with what he called – with characteristic self-deprecation – “a feeble Adagio.” Joachim was soloist and Brahms the conductor at the premiere in Leipzig on January 1, 1879.
Brahms’ Violin Concerto is extraordinarily difficult for the soloist, and in a famous jibe it has been called “a concerto against the violin rather than for it.” But this music is not impossible, and in fact Brahms’ Violin Concerto is quite playable and even quite violinistic. It requires a tremendous violinist, one with the ability to make huge leaps and land with dead-center accuracy, to project the violin’s sound over a large orchestra, and to have hands big enough to play the tenths that Brahms frequently calls for. Yet this is not a showy or a flashy piece. Violin and orchestra are beautifully integrated, with the melodic line flowing seamlessly between them and the soloist’s skills always at the service of the music, rather than the reverse.
Brahms stays close to classical tradition in the first movement, where a long orchestral exposition introduces the themes before the entrance of the violinist. The very beginning, with its arching and falling main subject, is distinctive for the way Brahms manages to disguise the meter: it is in 3/4, yet the stresses of the opening phrases obscure the downbeats. Solo oboe introduces the second theme, and the full string section stamps out the third, (This last bears a close relation to the opening of Bach’s Chaconne for unaccompanied violin, a work Brahms very much admired.) Only when these themes have been fully presented does the solo violin enter with its dazzling two-octave run up the scale, followed by a series of blistering string-crossings. This is a big, dramatic movement, and it can make a huge sound, but the score itself is littered with Brahms’ performance instructions, and these make clear what he believed the true character of this music to be: dolce, espressivo, tranquillo, lusingando (a term that does not translate easily from the Italian, but means generally coaxing or charming). Much of the writing for violin is graceful and lyric, and in particular Brahms’ transformation of the second subject into a slow waltz is a moment of pure magic.
Perhaps as a nod to Joachim, Brahms did not write out a cadenza for the first movement. Joachim produced a splendid one, and others have been drawn to write their own. One of the other magic moments in this movement comes with the return of the orchestra at the end of the cadenza: over quiet accompaniment, the violinist lays out once again the movement’s opening theme and then takes it very high on long sustained notes as the orchestra sings far below. Gradually the music descends from these Olympian heights, gathers momentum and strength, and hurtles to the resounding D-Major chord that closes the movement.
The Adagio, in F Major, is anything but “feeble.” The entire opening statement is given to the wind choir, and it is the solo oboe rather than the solo violin that announces the main idea of the movement – when the violinist enters, it is with music that is already a variation of the oboe’s noble song. The center section, which moves to F-sharp minor, grows much more impassioned, with the violin burning its way high above the orchestra before the return of the poised opening material.
The last movement is the expected rondo, which Brahms marks Allegro giocoso (“fast and happy”), but he also specifies ma non troppo vivace: “not too fast.” Many have remarked on the Hungarian flavor of this movement, and some have seen this as another nod toward Joachim, who was Hungarian. In fact, Brahms loved Hungarian music (which for him meant – more exactly – gypsy music), and he hardly needed an excuse to compose in that style. This is a difficult movement for the soloist, full of extended passages in octaves and great leaps across the range of the violin, but there are some wonderfully lyric interludes along the way. A great cascade of runs from the violinist introduces the coda, where Brahms subtly recasts the 2/4 rondo tune so that it seems to be in 6/8. This gathers strength, and all appears set for the expected closing fireworks, but in the last measures Brahms springs one final surprise, winding the music down so that it seems almost to have lost its way before three great chords ring out to proclaim the true close.
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Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98
[~39 min.]
Brahms’ final symphony defies simple description. This music has been called autumnal, tragic, melancholy, sad, serious and elegiac, and all listeners instinctively feel its gravity and intensity in every bar. Yet from the tentative violin figure that opens the symphony to the mighty cataclysm that ends it forty minutes later, it is also exhilarating, glorious music, one of Brahms’ finest achievements and certainly one of the greatest symphonies ever written.
Brahms composed the Fourth Symphony in the tiny town of Murzzuschlag high in the Styrian Alps, about fifty miles southwest of Vienna. He wrote the first two movements in the summer of 1884 and the final two when he returned the following summer. Aware of the seriousness of this music, Brahms wrote the conductor Hans von Bülow: “I am pondering whether this symphony will find more of a public. I fear it smacks of the climate of this country; the cherries are not sweet here, and you would certainly not eat them.”
It was Brahms’ custom to send copies of his new works to friends for their comments; habitually he accompanied those copies with self-disparaging remarks to which his friends would have to protest as they praised the new work. This time, to his dismay, his friends did not like the new symphony. After hearing it played in a two-piano version, critic Eduard Hanslick complained that “All through I felt I was being beaten by two terribly clever men.” Elizabeth von Herzogenberg wrote to Brahms: “Your piece affects me curiously, the more penetration I bring to bear on it, the more impenetrable it becomes.” The stunned composer was left protesting to Clara Schumann that “the piece does not altogether displease me.” It did not altogether displease audiences either – the premiere in Meiningen on October 25, 1885, was a triumph.
The criticism by Brahms’ friends may seem strange today, but there is something severe about the Fourth Symphony. Many have noted the fusion of passion and intellect that marks Brahms’ finest music, but the Fourth Symphony takes both of these to an extreme, blending an impassioned emotional content with the most inexorable musical logic. One feels this concentration from the first instant. The Fourth is the only one of Brahms’ symphonies to open without an introduction: it simply begins with the rising-and-falling main subject in the violins, and much of the thematic material of this sonata-form movement is coiled embryonically within the intervals of this simple theme. A series of fanfares leads to the second subject, a broadly-striding melody for cellos and horns; while there is no exposition repeat, Brahms begins the development with so literal a repetition of the beginning that only gradually does the listener recognize that the music is pressing ahead even as it seems to go back. From the most understated of beginnings, this movement drives to one of the most powerful climaxes in all of Brahms’ music.
By contrast, the Andante moderato seems calm, flowing, and melodic, yet it too is in sonata form, and once again Brahms spins glorious music out of the simplest material: the opening horn call evolves smoothly into the main clarinet tune, and this in turn takes many shapes across the span of the movement. To the young Richard Strauss, assistant conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra, this movement sounded like “a funeral procession moving in silence across moonlit heights.”
When Brahms returned to Murzzuschlag in the summer of 1885 to compose the final two movements, he wrote the finale first, then the third movement. Knowing in advance just how rigorous the finale was, Brahms made the Allegro giocoso as rollicking a symphonic movement as he ever wrote. That marking means “lively, playful,” and this music is Brahms’ closest approach to a symphonic scherzo. Yet with many differences: once again, it is in sonata form (there is only a brief whiff of a trio section), and Brahms sets the movement in 2/4 rather than the standard 3/4 meter of scherzos. The mighty opening theme plunges downward (and is quickly inverted), while relief comes with the lovely second subject, a relaxed violin melody marked grazioso. Brahms enlivens the orchestral textures here with instruments he rarely used: piccolo, triangle, contrabassoon, and an extra timpani.
The Fourth Symphony concludes with one of the most extraordinary – and powerful – movements in the symphonic literature. It is a passacaglia, a musical form already old when Bach used it a century and a half before. Brahms in fact took this passacaglia theme from the concluding chorale of Bach’s Cantata No. 150, “Nach Dir, Herr, verlanget mich”: he re-barred Bach’s original five-measure theme into eight measures and changed one note to heighten chromatic tension. The trombones, silent to this point in the symphony, stamp out this theme, and this ground bass repeats thirty times. Above these thirty strict repetitions, Brahms spins out a set of variations extraordinary for their variety and expressiveness. Even more impressive is how this old baroque form is made to conform to the general shape of sonata form: after the powerful initial statements, the violins have a lyric variation, and this sequence leads a quiet central episode climaxed by a lovely flute solo over the (barely-suggested) ground bass. The “recapitulation” begins with an earth-shaking explosion over the passacaglia theme; there is then a brief flirtation with two waltz-like variations, followed by a majestic coda derived from the passacaglia theme. The very ending is unflinching in its implacable drive.
Brahms was 52 when he completed the Fourth Symphony and still had twelve years to live. Twice in that span he contemplated writing another symphony, and in each case he made a few sketches – yet he abandoned both projects. However much we may regret the loss of those symphonies, perhaps Brahms was right to let them go; it is difficult to conceive how he might have gone beyond the Fourth Symphony.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna
[~33 min.]
Brahms spent the summer of 1883 in Wiesbaden, where he took a second-story apartment looking out over the Rhine. He had just turned 50, which is a bad birthday for anyone, but at this moment in his life he was feeling new energy. In January of that year he had heard a contralto. Her name was Hermine Spiess, she was 26, she had a beautiful voice, and Brahms fell in love with her. Hermine lived in Wiesbaden, so Brahms found an apartment there, and that summer – with a magnificent view of the Rhine and very much in love with a young woman – Brahms composed his Third Symphony. At 50, Brahms was a supremely accomplished composer – powerful, subtle, refined and passionate – and his mastery is evident in every measure of the Third Symphony. Of his four symphonies, the Third is the shortest, most concise, and most subtle (all four movements end quietly), and it is marked by an attention to instrumental color rare in Brahms’ music.
The opening Allegro con brio is extraordinary music, even by Brahms’ standards. It is built around a three-note motto: the rising sequence F-A-flat-F. Brahms said that motto was a reflection of his personal credo “Frei aber froh: “Free but happy.” That rising three-note figure will saturate this movement: they are the first three notes of the symphony, and that motto will function melodically, serve as an accompaniment, and bind sections together. After the brass blazes out the motto to open the symphony, the main theme – marked passionate – comes crashing downward in the violins like a mighty wave. It is characteristic of this symphony that the three-note motto has been instantly transformed into the bass-line beneath this powerful theme, and over the next few moments the motto will be woven into the texture of the music countless times. The second theme, sung by solo clarinet and quickly taken up by the violas, dances gracefully in the unusual meter 9/4, but surprisingly the development is quite short. A noble horn call (derived from the opening motto) leads to an extended – and very agitated – recapitulation before the movement closes on a quiet restatement of the opening theme.
The two middle movements are also unusual: the Third Symphony has no true slow movement, nor is there a scherzo. Instead, Brahms offers two moderately-paced central movements, both littered with his constant reminder to performers: dolce, espressivo. The Andante (in sonata form) opens with a graceful tune announced by clarinets and bassoon, and – curiously – those two instruments also have the slightly-sprung second theme; the luminous closing moments of this gentle movement are particularly beautiful. The cellos’ C-minor melody at the start of the Poco Allegretto, with its subtle shadings and gypsy turns, is one of the most haunting themes Brahms ever wrote. A slightly rustic middle section, full of off-the-beat accents, gives way to the return of the opening theme, but now – in a magic touch – Brahms assigns it to the solo horn, which soars above shimmering string accompaniment.
The finale opens ominously in F minor, but this quickly gives way to the heroic main theme in C Major for cellos and horns. A powerful development – with secondary material derived from the second movement – leads to a conclusion full of even more original touches. The music turns quiet, and – very subtly – Brahms begins to bring back themes from earlier movements: the three-note motto from the first movement, the second theme from the Andante, and finally – at the very end – the opening theme of the first movement. That theme had been heroic at the very beginning of the symphony, but now it returns in dignified calm. Its quiet concluding descent has been compared by one critic to the fall of autumn leaves, and this very concise symphony ends not in thunder but on a restrained wind chord.
The premiere of the Third Symphony in Vienna on December 2, 1883, was the occasion of one of the major collisions between the Wagner and Brahms factions in that city. Followers of the quite-recently-deceased Wagner tried to hiss each movement of the symphony, but they were drowned out by the cheers of Brahms’ supporters. The young Hugo Wolf, a passionate Wagnerian and a sworn enemy of the “classical” Brahms, wrote a searing review of the symphony, calling it “Disgustingly stale and prosy. Fundamentally false and perverse. A single cymbal-stroke of a work by Liszt expresses more intellect and emotion than all three symphonies of Brahms and his serenades taken together.” Brahms’ lifelong friend Clara Schumann, however, had quite a different view. She wrote the composer: “What a harmonious mood pervades the whole! All the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of the heart, each one a jewel. From start to finish one is wrapped about with the mysterious charm of the woods and forests.”
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Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77
[~38 min.]
Brahms spent the summer of 1878 in Pörtschach on the Wörthersee. He loved this resort town on the lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and to a friend he noted how much he felt like writing music there: “So many melodies fly about that one must be careful not to tread on them.” Brahms set out that summer to write something for his friend and colleague of twenty-five years, the great violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms did not play the violin, and he consulted frequently with Joachim during the composition of this concerto, asking for advice and criticism (some of which he took, some he did not). In its original form, this concerto was in four movements, but Brahms threw out the two middle movements, replacing them with what he called – with characteristic self-deprecation – “a feeble Adagio.” Joachim was soloist and Brahms the conductor at the premiere in Leipzig on January 1, 1879.
Brahms’ Violin Concerto is extraordinarily difficult for the soloist, and in a famous jibe it has been called “a concerto against the violin rather than for it.” But this music is not impossible, and in fact Brahms’ Violin Concerto is quite playable and even quite violinistic. It requires a tremendous violinist, one with the ability to make huge leaps and land with dead-center accuracy, to project the violin’s sound over a large orchestra, and to have hands big enough to play the tenths that Brahms frequently calls for. Yet this is not a showy or a flashy piece. Violin and orchestra are beautifully integrated, with the melodic line flowing seamlessly between them and the soloist’s skills always at the service of the music, rather than the reverse.
Brahms stays close to classical tradition in the first movement, where a long orchestral exposition introduces the themes before the entrance of the violinist. The very beginning, with its arching and falling main subject, is distinctive for the way Brahms manages to disguise the meter: it is in 3/4, yet the stresses of the opening phrases obscure the downbeats. Solo oboe introduces the second theme, and the full string section stamps out the third, (This last bears a close relation to the opening of Bach’s Chaconne for unaccompanied violin, a work Brahms very much admired.) Only when these themes have been fully presented does the solo violin enter with its dazzling two-octave run up the scale, followed by a series of blistering string-crossings. This is a big, dramatic movement, and it can make a huge sound, but the score itself is littered with Brahms’ performance instructions, and these make clear what he believed the true character of this music to be: dolce, espressivo, tranquillo, lusingando (a term that does not translate easily from the Italian, but means generally coaxing or charming). Much of the writing for violin is graceful and lyric, and in particular Brahms’ transformation of the second subject into a slow waltz is a moment of pure magic.
Perhaps as a nod to Joachim, Brahms did not write out a cadenza for the first movement. Joachim produced a splendid one, and others have been drawn to write their own. One of the other magic moments in this movement comes with the return of the orchestra at the end of the cadenza: over quiet accompaniment, the violinist lays out once again the movement’s opening theme and then takes it very high on long sustained notes as the orchestra sings far below. Gradually the music descends from these Olympian heights, gathers momentum and strength, and hurtles to the resounding D-Major chord that closes the movement.
The Adagio, in F Major, is anything but “feeble.” The entire opening statement is given to the wind choir, and it is the solo oboe rather than the solo violin that announces the main idea of the movement – when the violinist enters, it is with music that is already a variation of the oboe’s noble song. The center section, which moves to F-sharp minor, grows much more impassioned, with the violin burning its way high above the orchestra before the return of the poised opening material.
The last movement is the expected rondo, which Brahms marks Allegro giocoso (“fast and happy”), but he also specifies ma non troppo vivace: “not too fast.” Many have remarked on the Hungarian flavor of this movement, and some have seen this as another nod toward Joachim, who was Hungarian. In fact, Brahms loved Hungarian music (which for him meant – more exactly – gypsy music), and he hardly needed an excuse to compose in that style. This is a difficult movement for the soloist, full of extended passages in octaves and great leaps across the range of the violin, but there are some wonderfully lyric interludes along the way. A great cascade of runs from the violinist introduces the coda, where Brahms subtly recasts the 2/4 rondo tune so that it seems to be in 6/8. This gathers strength, and all appears set for the expected closing fireworks, but in the last measures Brahms springs one final surprise, winding the music down so that it seems almost to have lost its way before three great chords ring out to proclaim the true close.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Cool Cat
ADAM SCHOENBERG
Born November 15, 1980, West Salem, Massachusetts
[~5 min.]
P-22 was a mountain lion that became a sort of folk hero in Los Angeles. Born in the Santa Monica Mountains, he made a dangerous migration eastward to Griffith Park, crossing both the 101 and 405 Freeways in the process. Over the period of about a decade, P-22 lived in the Hollywood Hills, where he appeared on countless video systems and lived the life of a lonely bachelor in that small urban wilderness. A particularly impressive photograph by a wilderness camera caught P-22 in front of the Hollywood Sign, symbolizing the ongoing presence of wildness even in a vast urban center. When P-22 was captured in a weakened state and euthanized in 2022, it was the occasion for mourning among his millions of admirers.
The following year, composer Adam Schoenberg wrote a piece inspired by P-22 and called it Cool Cat. A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and Juilliard, where he studied with John Corigliano, Schoenberg currently teaches at Occidental College. On his website, the composer has offered a concise introduction to Cool Cat: “Cool Cat is inspired by the extraordinary life of P-22, the mountain lion that captured the heart of Los Angeles and beyond. This playful and celebratory concert-opener, aka fanfare, is meant to get the party started. It is dedicated to my son, Leo, our very own cool cat.” (Adam Schoenberg)
Karen Kamensek led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the premiere of Cool Cat at the Hollywood Bowl on September 12, 2023, and it has gone on to a very successful life in the concert hall. Cool Cat has also been arranged for concert band.
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Century Rolls
JOHN ADAMS
Born February 15, 1947, Worcester, MA
[~31 min.]
John Adams composed Century Rolls for pianist Emanuel Ax, who gave the first performance with the Cleveland Orchestra and Christoph von Dohnányi on September 25, 1997. On his website, the composer has furnished an introduction to this work:
The germinating idea behind Century Rolls was an experience I had late one night listening to a recording of old piano roll music from the 1920’s. I was struck in an unexpected way by the fact that, regardless of the performer or the repertoire – be it Gershwin or Rachmaninoff, Jelly Roll Morton or Paderewski – the technology of the piano roll transformed the music into a realm that could not have been anticipated before what Walter Benjaman called the “age of mechanical reproduction.” So Century Rolls, a concerto requested by my friend, Emanuel Ax, became in part an attempt to recreate that initial response I had received to the sound of the piano as heard via the medium of the piano roll. That conceit is utilized for some but not all of the concerto. In other parts I was conscious of the special gifts of Emanuel Ax, and, particularly in the central slow movement, I attempted to tame my normally clangorous style of piano writing and create something that would fit the sense timbre and lyrical warmth that sets his performances apart from all other pianists.
The concerto takes a kind of polymorphous-perverse pleasure in the whole past century of piano music, both popular and classical. In retrospect I see that it owes more than I realized not only to my own Grand Pianola Music (1982), but also to the early studies for player piano by Conlon Nancarrow. The last movement, “Hail Bop” (so named in honor of my misapprehension of the name of last year’s comet, Hale-Bopp) is a kind of homage to Nancarrow’s peculiarly whimsical way of wedding American vernacular music to a spiky, disjunct rhythmic texture.
-John Adams, reprinted with kind permission of www.earbox.com
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Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44
SERGE RACHMANINOFF
Born April 1, 1873, Semyonovo
Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills
[~39 min.]
In the spring of 1935 Rachmaninoff and his wife fled to Senar, the opulent villa they had constructed looking out over Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Rachmaninoff was drained. He had just completed an exhausting concert tour that included recitals in Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Manchester, London, Zurich, Paris, Spain, and many other places. Now he lamented: “In the future I must cut down the number of concerts or find some remedy against old age.” But the 62-year-old Rachmaninoff had other plans for that summer than just rest–he wanted to write a new symphony. Now, looking out at the serene beauty of Lake Lucerne, he set to work. But still there were interruptions: he suffered from arthritis, and his doctor sent him off for two weeks of what the composer described as “pine-electrical baths.” Despite all this, he had the first two movements complete by the end of the summer. Then it was back to the grueling concert season: recitals in Paris, then on to the United States, where he played in Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York, then back to Europe where he gave recitals in Poland, Vienna, and London. Finally in the spring of 1936 he could escape to Senar, and there he completed the third and final movement of his Third Symphony. On June 30 he wrote to a friend: “Yesterday morning I finished my work of which you are the first to be informed. It is a symphony . . . With all my thoughts I thank God that I was able to do it!”
Leopold Stokowski led the premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra on November 6, 1936, and the symphony was widely performed in the United States and Europe. The reaction, however, was not what the composer had hoped. He described it: “Both audiences and critics responded sourly. Personally, I’m firmly convinced that this is a good work. But – sometimes the author is wrong, too! However, I maintain my opinion.” The Third Symphony has always been the dark swan among Rachmaninoff’s major works, but it has had many enthusiastic champions, including such conductors as Stokowski (who recorded it in 1975 at age 93), Koussevitzky, Ormandy, Previn, Ashkenazy, Slatkin, Zinman, Gergiev and many more.
The vast majority of Rachmaninoff’s works were composed before he was 45. These include his most popular works: the Second and Third Piano Concertos, his Second Symphony, and almost all his solo piano music. But when Rachmaninoff fled Russia in 1917 to escape the Communist Revolution, he lost everything, and he spent the next decade recovering his fortune by playing the piano. Between 1917 and 1926 Rachmaninoff composed nothing, and over the remaining seventeen years of his life he composed only six more pieces. These late pieces are quite different from the popular early works, with their big tunes and dramatic rhetoric. In his later years, Rachmaninoff wrote a much different sort of music: leaner in sonority, more focused in construction, and not so dependent on the great soaring melody.
Rachmaninoff’s late music is also more concerned with subtle instrumental color, and we sense that from the first instant of his Third Symphony. With a huge orchestra onstage, he begins with just four instruments, all playing pianissimo: clarinet, two muted horns, and muted cello. Their quiet introductory chant will return at moments in the symphony that follows but now it gives way to a great rip for that full orchestra as the Allegro moderato bursts to life. The movement is built on two themes: a lean woodwind chorale and a big soaring cello melody. This is dramatic music, full of excitement and color, and after all its energy, the opening chant returns to draw the movement to its subdued conclusion. The central Adagio ma non troppo is in ternary form, and it functions as both slow movement and scherzo. Once again, Rachmaninoff surprises us with his scoring: the opening belongs to just two instruments – horn and harp, soon joined by solo violin – only gradually does the rest of the orchestra join them. Rachmaninoff places the symphony’s scherzo in the middle of this slow movement: the music leaps ahead at the Allegro vivace, which features some brilliant writing for the trumpets, and the movement winds down on a brief return of its opening material. Out of this calm, the finale explodes. This is a high-energy movement, and at its center comes a blistering fugato introduced by the strings. Calmer episodes intrude on all this activity, but the music’s seething energy always manages to break free, and an Allegro vivace coda hurtles the Third Symphony to its sudden, violent conclusion.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Orawa
WOJCIECH KILAR
Born July 17, 1932, Lwów, Poland
December 29, 2013, Katowice, Poland
[~9 min.]
Wojciech Kilar studied piano and composition in Katowice and Krakow, then went on to a year of study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Kilar began as an avant-garde composer, but then his career took two entirely new directions. First, he began writing scores for films in Poland. These quickly attracted American directors, and Kilar wrote the music for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Pianist, The Truman Show and The Portrait of a Lady. The other direction, probably more important, came from Kilar’s discovery of the folk music of southern Poland in the foothills of the Tatras Mountains. Kilar was particularly attracted to “Podhale” music. That term means literally “below the mountains,” and it refers to the musical traditions of the high meadows of the Tatras. Podhale music, often scored for voices and ensembles of bagpipes, fiddles and basses, is lively and intricate – it is sometimes said to reflect the spirit of the mountains.
Kilar composed Orawa in 1986. Orawa is a region that lies along the border of southern Poland and northern Slovakia; it takes its name from the Orava River, which runs through the region, and Kilar has said that in Orawa he was trying to capture the “spiritual essence” of the Tatras Mountains. The basic tempo of Orawa is fast, and it grows faster as the piece proceeds. Listeners will recognize many of the techniques of minimalism here: short figures repeated constantly, pulsing rhythms, endless energy, no counterpoint. At moments, Orawa also shows some resemblance to the baroque concerto grosso, as solo instruments dart in and out of the larger orchestral texture.
Kilst noted that Orawa grew out of the “highlander folk band,” which might consist of two violins and doublebass. The music begins with a solo violin sounding what will be the principal theme. Gradually more instruments enter as this repeats, and rhythms and textures become more complex – this has been described as a “multiplication” of the piece’s basic material. At moments, the sound of Orawa can be rough, full of ricochet bowing and swooping glissandos – do we hear its heritage of folk-fiddling here? In its closing moments, Orawa grows ever faster, and Kilar’s performance markings make clear what he wants – Precipitous, Ferocious, Furious, Even More Ferocious – right up to the sudden, surprising ending.
Orawa has become Kilar’s most popular composition, and it is a measure of its popularity that it has been arranged for many different ensembles. This music was also a source of pleasure for its creator, both for its source and for what he was able to do with that. He wrote: “It is pretty much a piece for magnified folk band and one of the rare examples where I’ve been happy with my work.”
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Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
Born February 22, 1810, Zelazowa Wola,
Died October 17, 1849, Paris
[~32 min.]
Chopin’s extraordinary gifts were evident early – one of his teachers described him in his term-end evaluation in two words: “Musical genius.” His parents, however, were careful not to exploit the boy or to push him into a career as a prodigy. Chopin did not give an official public concert in Warsaw until March 1830, a few weeks after his twentieth birthday. In the fall of 1829, knowing that that occasion was coming, Chopin had set to work on a piece worthy of the event, a piano concerto. On March 3, 1830, a small orchestra crowded into the Chopin home in Warsaw as young Frédéric gave the premiere before invited friends. Two weeks later, on March 17, he played the public premiere at the National Theatre in Warsaw, and the reviews were rhapsodic. Wrote one critic just after the concert: “He plays with such certainty, so cleanly that his Concerto might be compared to the life of a just man: no ambiguity, nothing false…His music is full of expressive feeling and song, and puts the listener into a state of subtle rapture, bringing back to his memory all the happy moments he has known.” Later that same year Chopin wrote another piano concerto, in E minor, which would be published in 1833 as his Piano Concerto No. 1. But while on his way to Paris in the fall of 1830, Chopin mislaid the orchestral parts of the first work, the Concerto in F minor, and they had to be completely reconstructed. This delayed publication, and when this concerto finally appeared in 1836 it was listed as his “Concerto No. 2,” even though it had been written first.
Chopin’s two piano concertos are the work of a very young man, and he never wrote another. Mozart and Beethoven had transformed the piano concerto into a great form, a symphonic argument in which soloist and orchestra were equal protagonists. Chopin might respect such music, but it was not for him – he was interested, first and foremost, in the piano. In his concertos the musical interest lies in the piano part, and the orchestra functions only as a framework for the soloist. So subordinate a role does the orchestra play, in fact, that after his arrival in Paris, Chopin arranged both concertos for solo piano and played them in that form. Chopin’s writing for orchestra in the two concertos has come in for a hard time – Berlioz said that the “orchestral concertos are cold and practically useless” – but this concerto writing should be understood as the work of a very young man who was writing for a specific purpose, and the orchestral part is effective for that purpose. While he can create a “romantic” fullness of sound in the Concerto No. 2, Chopin scores it for what is essentially Mozart’s orchestra: pairs of woodwinds, trumpets and horns, plus timpani and strings, as well as one additional instrument – a single trombone.
Concerto No. 2 is in the conventional three movements. Chopin marks the first movement Maestoso (“majestic”), but the opening impulse is lyric, as the orchestra launches the concerto with a graceful falling idea that will shape much of the movement. With the entrance of the soloist, however, the orchestra retreats to the shade, and the pianist will dominate the remainder of the movement.
When Chopin wrote the Larghetto, he had (like many other teenagers) fallen in love, in this case with a young singer, Constantia Gladkowska. As he worked on this movement, he wrote to his friend Titus Woyciechowski: “I have – perhaps to my misfortune – already found my ideal, which I worship faithfully and sincerely. Six months have elapsed, and I have not yet exchanged a syllable with her of whom I dream every night. While my thoughts were with her I composed the Adagio of my concerto.” In ternary form, this movement has been compared to opera music, particularly to the music of Bellini, a great favorite of young Chopin. The quiet opening recalls bel canto, while the middle section grows more dramatic, as the piano declaims its animated song over rustling strings. This movement has been much admired. Schumann exclaimed “What are ten editorial crowns compared with one such slow movement!” and Liszt said: “The whole of this piece is of a perfection almost ideal; its expression, now radiant with light, now full of tender pathos.”
Solo piano leads off the concluding Allegro vivace, and Chopin marks its opening theme semplice ma graziosamente (“simple but graceful”). Some have heard folk-tunes in this movement, but all the material appears to have been original with Chopin. A great fanfare from the horns leads to a properly spirited conclusion.
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Symphony No. 2 in B minor
ALEXANDER BORODIN
Born November 12, 1833, St. Petersburg
Died February 27, 1887, St. Petersburg
[~33 min.]
In the late 1860s Borodin – then a young chemistry professor and lecturer at the medical school in St. Petersburg – set to work on an opera about a twelfth-century Russian prince who fought against Turkish invaders. But work on the opera did not go well, and in 1870 Borodin gave it up. A few years later he returned to the project and worked on Prince Igor over the final two decades of his life. It would have been his masterpiece, though he left it unfinished at the time of his sudden death at age 53.
Borodin’s first attempt at writing the opera did not go to waste, however, for he gathered some of his sketches and used them for a symphony. Borodin had the first and last movements of the symphony complete by the fall of 1871, and – working during vacations from his research and teaching – he sketched the two middle movements in 1874. The Russian Musical Society planned a first performance in 1876, and at that point Borodin made a frightening discovery: in the intervening years he had managed to lose the manuscript of the orchestrated outer movements. And so, laid up in bed with a leg infection that prevented him from teaching, Borodin re-orchestrated the first and last movements of his symphony. Able to maintain a sense a humor, he lamented: “Never has a professor of the Academy of Medicine and Surgery been found in such a position!” The first performance, on March 10, 1877, was not a success. Borodin’s orchestration was too thick, and one critic observed acidly: “you would have thought you were at a cat’s concert.” With the assistance of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin lightened and refined the instrumentation, and the premiere of the revised version in March 1879 (with Rimsky conducting) was a success.
Since that moment, Borodin’s Second has been universally acknowledged the great symphony of the Russian nationalist school. Given its origin in music about the struggle of medieval Russian princes against foreign invaders, it is not surprising that the symphony has some of that epic flavor, and while this is not programmatic music – it does not tell a story – Borodin let drop a number of tantalizing hints about the images that had guided its composition. Further, this symphony just plain sounds good. The revision of its orchestration was an unqualified success, and this music can offer great washes of burning primary colors that alternate with sensitive writing for solo winds. Add to this the music’s boundless rhythmic energy and its exotic flavor, and the effect is irresistible.
Borodin told a friend that the first movement had been inspired by a gathering of ancient Russian princes, and it takes little imagination to see the flashing armor and snorting horses of pagan warriors in the symphony’s magnificent beginning. This is music of barbaric power. The entire string section stamps out the opening eight-note figure, of narrow compass and full of harmonic tension. This will dominate the entire movement, and Borodin completes the first theme-group with an animated melodic tag for woodwinds. The movement is in sonata form, and its second subject, announced by the cellos, is one of those gorgeous Borodin melodies, yearning and instantly memorable. The development is built largely on repetitions of the barbaric opening theme, which recurs in different forms, speeds and colors, eventually building to the titanic restatement that brings the movement to its thunderous close.
The scherzo is extremely fast: Borodin marks it Prestissimo and sets it in the unusual meter 1/1. A striking wind chord modulates to the unexpected key of F Major, and off the music goes on the sound of pizzicato strings and chattering woodwinds. The central section offers a lovely melody for solo oboe, marked cantabile e dolce, before the opening material returns and rushes the movement to an unexpectedly subdued close. The writing for french horns in this movement is extraordinarily difficult, for they must furnish the racing, murmuring accompaniment that underpins the outer sections.
Borodin said that the Andante was inspired by the songs of the ancient Slav minstrels, the bayans, and certainly the haunting horn solo seems to evoke the lyricism of another age. This movement also develops by repetition, though there are some sharply-varied episodes along the way before Borodin proceeds without pause into the finale. Here the music races ahead, and bits of theme finally come together in a great explosion – some of the rhythmic vitality of this central theme comes from Borodin’s alternating between 3/4 and 2/4 measure by measure. He said that this movement was intended as a portrait of a “banquet of legendary heroes, held amid the rejoicing populace.” Once again, there are lyric episodes along the way, but finally the bright energy of the opening prevails and drives the symphony to a most resounding close.
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“Polovtsian Dances” from Prince Igor
ALEXANDER BORODIN
[~14 min.]
Borodin was a member of The Five, the group of Russian nationalist composers that included Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, Balakirev and Mussorgsky. But Borodin was a composer only in his spare time, for by profession he was a chemistry professor and research scientist at the Academy of Medicine and Surgery in St. Petersburg. So great were his professional demands that Borodin could find time to compose only when on vacation or when ill. Knowing of these demands, his friends would jokingly wish him ill health when they parted – it was their way of wishing that he could find more time to compose.
One of the consequences of the demands on his time was that Borodin left several works incomplete when he suddenly died in 1887 at age 53. Among these was the one that would have been his masterpiece, the opera Prince Igor, based on the story of Prince Igor of Novgorod, a Russian Christian who in 1185 led an expedition against an invasion by the nomadic Polovtsians. Borodin worked intermittently on Prince Igor from 1869 until his death, but even in those eighteen years he was unable to complete the opera, which was finished by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, working from the composer’s sketches.
Although Prince Igor is rarely staged, some of the music from the opera has become famous on its own. The “Polovtsian Dances” were written at an early stage in the composition of the opera – in 1875 – and first performed in March 1879; they had become popular while Borodin was still laboring on the rest of the opera. The Dances form the Finale of Act II of the opera. Prince Igor and his son have been captured by the leader of the Polovtsians, the mighty Khan Kontchak, who tries to cheer up his prisoners by offering them gifts, women from his harem, or even release if Prince Igor will promise to lay down his arms. When these offers are refused, Kontchak orders a brilliant entertainment for Prince Igor, whom he greatly respects.
Slaves enter to a brief Andantino, and the first dance quickly begins. The women slaves sing of the beauty of their homeland in music that is familiar to millions from the operetta Kismet, where it became the song Strangers in Paradise. This is followed by a savage dance for the men, given out first by a swirling solo clarinet. The timpani leads to the general dance: themes from the earlier dances are reprised as all sing of their devotion to their leader, the music gradually mounts in excitement, and the curtain to the second act comes down as slaves and dancers shout out “Hail Khan Kontchak!”
While the “Polovtsian Dances” are accompanied by chorus in Borodin’s opera, it has become customary to play them as a purely orchestral work in which choral part is duplicated by the orchestra. The Dances are heard in their orchestral version at this concert.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Coriolan Overture, Op. 62
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 16, 1770, Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, Vienna
[~8 min.]
Caius Marcius was a Roman general who was given the name Coriolanus after his capture of the Volscian city of Corioli. A haughty man of violently anti-democratic sympathies, Coriolanus insisted – as a condition for the distribution of Sicilian grain to the Roman poor – that the popular tribunate would have to be disbanded, and he was expelled from the city due to the backlash. Infuriated, he joined forces with the Volscians and helped lead their attack on his native city in 491 B.C. Coriolanus was at the gates of Rome and ready to lay it in ruins when emissaries approached to attempt to dissuade him. He angrily turned aside the official representatives, but his fury melted when he was approached by a delegation that included his mother Volumnia, wife Virgilia, and son Marcius. One of the earliest accounts of his life appeared in Plutarch’s Lives, and it was on this source that Shakespeare based his final tragedy, Coriolanus, written in 1608; in this version Coriolanus is slain by the Volscians when he refuses to attack Rome. Beethoven’s overture, however, was inspired not by Shakespeare’s play but by a version written by the composer’s friend, the Austrian dramatist Heinrich von Collin (1771-1811). In Collin’s play, first staged in Vienna in 1802, Coriolanus commits suicide rather than attack Rome.
Beethoven composed his Coriolan Overture early in 1807, and it was first performed at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace in March 1807 on a program that included the official premieres of the Fourth Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto. The overture is in C minor, a key Beethoven reserved for his most violent and dramatic music, and the Coriolan Overture is a spiritual twin to that other great example of Beethoven’s “C-minor mood” at its most furious, the first movement of the Fifth Symphony.
It does not really matter whether Beethoven’s overture was inspired by Collin or Shakespeare’s play, for this music is not a tone poem that tries to tell the story of Coriolanus in sound – rather, it is abstract music that creates an enraged (and finally tragic) atmosphere. That said, however, it takes little imagination to associate some parts of this overture with specific characters or events. Certainly the searing beginning, with it incisive attacks and huge chords, is our introduction to the dark hero of Collin’s play, and many have been ready to make out the entreaties of Coriolanus’ wife and mother in the flowing second subject.
The Coriolan Overture is a compressed sonata-form movement, but it has an unusual structure, one that intensifies its explosive atmosphere. The violent chords and attacks at the beginning (C minor with a vengeance) not only rivet attention but instantly establish the music’s fierce mood. The violins’ surging, rising first subject, with its nervous thrusts and tenutos, ratchets up the tension that underlies the entire overture, though the more lyric second subject relaxes those tensions momentarily with its move into E-flat Major. Beethoven blurs the line between exposition and development here – we have barely heard this second theme when the music leaps back into C minor and begins to develop the first theme. (In fact the flowing second theme vanishes completely from the development.) More surprises await – the recapitulation begins in the unexpected key of F minor, and now the lyric second subject finally reappears, but in the glowing key of C Major. The Coriolan Overture reaches its climax at the beginning of the coda: the opening chords return, but – instead of concluding heroically – the music now collapses on fragments of the opening theme. Things seem choked, shattered, and after all its furious energy the overture vanishes on barely audible pizzicato strokes that affirm C minor one final time.
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Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, “Emperor”
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
[~38 min.]
In the spring of 1809 Napoleon – intent upon consolidating his hold on Europe – went to war with Austria. He laid siege to Vienna in May, and after a brief bombardment the city surrendered to the French and was occupied through the remainder of the year. The royal family fled early in May and did not return until January 1810, but Beethoven remained behind throughout the shelling and occupation, and it was during this period that he completed his Fifth Piano Concerto. Some critics have been ready to take their cue from the French occupation and to understand the concerto as Beethoven’s response to it. Alfred Einstein identified what he called a “military character” in this music, and Maynard Solomon has particularized this, hearing “warlike rhythms, victory motifs, thrusting melodies, and affirmative character” in it.
But – far from being swept up in the fervor of the fighting – Beethoven found the occupation a source of stress and depression. During the shelling, he hid in the basement of his brother Caspar’s house, where he wrapped his head in pillows to protect his ears. To his publishers, Beethoven wrote: “The course of events has affected my body and soul…Life around me is wild and disturbing, nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, misery of every sort.” The concerto he wrote during this period may be noble and powerful music, but it is noble and powerful in spite of the military occupation rather than because of it. And in fact, Beethoven had done much of the work on the concerto before the French army entered Vienna: his earliest sketches date from February 1809, and he appears to have had the concerto largely complete by April, before the fighting began.
Beethoven defies expectations from the opening instant of this music. The Allegro bursts to life with a resplendent E-flat Major chord for the whole orchestra, but this is not the start of the expected orchestral exposition. Instead, that chord opens the way for a cadenza by the solo piano, a cadenza that the orchestra punctuates twice more with powerful chords before sweeping into the movement’s main theme and the true exposition. This first movement is marked by a spaciousness and grandeur far removed from Beethoven’s misery over the fighting that wracked Vienna. This is music of shining sweep, built on two main ideas, both somewhat in the manner of marches: the strings’ vigorous main subject and a poised second theme, sounded first by the strings, then repeated memorably as a duet for horns. After so vigorous an exposition, the entrance of the piano feels understated, as it ruminates on the two main themes, but soon the piano part – full of octaves, wide leaps, and runs – turns as difficult as it is brilliant. This Allegro is music of an unusual spaciousness: at a length of nearly twenty minutes, it is one of Beethoven’s longest first movements (and is longer than the final two movements combined). Beethoven maintains strict control – he does not allow the soloist the freedom to create his own cadenza but instead writes out a brief cadential treatment of the movement’s themes.
The Adagio un poco mosso transports us to a different world altogether. Gone is the energy of the first movement, and now we seem in the midst of sylvan calm. Beethoven moves to the remote key of B Major and mutes the strings, which sing the hymn-like main theme. There follow two extended variations on that rapt melody. The first, for piano over quiet accompaniment, might almost be labeled “Chopinesque” in its expressive freedom, while the second is for winds, embellished by the piano’s steady strands of sixteenths.
As he did in the Fourth Piano Concerto, Beethoven links the second and third movements, and that transition is made most effectively here. The second movement concludes on a low B, and then Beethoven drops everything one half-step to B-flat. Out of that expectant change, the piano begins, very gradually, to outline a melodic idea, which struggles to take shape and direction. And then suddenly it does – it is as if these misty imaginings have been hit with an electric current that snaps them to vibrant life as the main theme of final movement. This Allegro is a vigorous rondo that alternates lyric episodes with some of Beethoven’s most rhythmically-energized writing – this music always seems to want to dance. Near the close comes one of its most striking moments, a duet for piano and timpani, which taps out the movement’s fundamental rhythm. And then the piano leaps up to energize the full orchestra, which concludes with one final recall of the rondo theme.
At the time he wrote this concerto, Beethoven was 38 and his hearing was deteriorating rapidly. It had become so weak by this time that he knew he could not give the first performance of the concerto – this is the only one of his piano concertos for which he did not give the premiere. That premiere had to wait two years after the concerto’s completion: it took place in Leipzig on November 28, 1811, with Friedrich Schuster as soloist. That performance, which Beethoven did not attend, was a great success – a reviewer wrote that “It is without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, most effective but also one of the most difficult of all existing concertos…the crowded audience was soon put into such a state of enthusiasm that it could hardly content itself with the ordinary expressions of recognition and enjoyment.” But the Vienna premiere – on February 12, 1812, with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny as soloist – did not have a success. One journal noted the difficulty of the music and suggested that “It can be understood and appreciated only by connoisseurs.”
The nickname “Emperor” did not originate with the composer, and Beethoven’s denunciation of Napoleon’s self-coronation several years earlier suggests that he would not have been sympathetic to it at all. Despite various theories, the source of that nickname remains unknown, and almost certainly Beethoven never heard this concerto referred to by the nickname that we use reflexively today.
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Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
[~36 min.]
Beethoven turned 40 in December 1810. Forty can be a difficult age for anyone, but for Beethoven things were going very well. True, his hearing had deteriorated to the point where he was virtually deaf, but he was still riding that white-hot explosion of creativity that has become known, for better or worse, as his “Heroic Style.” Over the decade-long span of that style (1803-1813) Beethoven essentially re-imagined music and its possibilities. The works that crystalized the Heroic Style – the Eroica and the Fifth Symphony – unleashed a level of violence and darkness previously unknown in music, forces that Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon has described as “hostile energy,” and then triumphed over them. In these violent symphonies, music became not a matter of polite discourse but of conflict, struggle, and resolution.
In the fall of 1811, Beethoven began a new symphony – it would be his Seventh – and it would differ sharply from those two famous predecessors. Gone is the sense of cataclysmic struggle and hard-won victory that had driven those earlier symphonies. There are no battles fought and won in the Seventh Symphony – instead, this music is infused from its first instant with a mood of pure celebration. Such a spirit has inevitably produced a number of interpretations as to what this symphony is “about”: Berlioz heard a peasants’ dance in it, Wagner called it “the apotheosis of the dance,” and more recently Maynard Solomon has suggested that the Seventh is the musical representation of a festival, a brief moment of pure spiritual liberation.
But it may be safest to leave the issue of “meaning” aside and instead listen to the Seventh simply as music. There had never been music like this before, nor has there been since – Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony contains more energy than any other piece of music ever written. Much has been made (correctly) of Beethoven’s ability to transform small bits of theme into massive symphonic structures, but in the Seventh he begins not so much with theme as with rhythm: he builds the entire symphony from what are almost scraps of rhythm, tiny figures that seem unpromising, even uninteresting, in themselves. Gradually he unleashes the energy locked up in these small figures and from them builds one of the mightiest symphonies ever written.
The first movement opens with a slow introduction so long that it almost becomes a separate movement of its own. Tremendous chords punctuate the slow beginning, which gives way to a poised duet for oboes. The real effect of this long Poco sostenuto, however, is to coil the energy that will be unleashed in the true first movement, and Beethoven conveys this rhythmically: the meter of the introduction is a rock-solid (even square) 4/4, but the main body of the movement, marked Vivace, transforms this into a light-footed 6/8. This Vivace begins in what seems a most unpromising manner, however, as woodwinds toot out a simple dotted 6/8 rhythm and the solo flute announces the first theme, a graceful melody on this same rhythm. Beethoven builds the entire first movement from this simple dotted rhythm, which saturates virtually every measure. As theme, as accompaniment, as motor rhythm, it is always present, hammering into our consciousness. At the climax, horns sail majestically to the close as the orchestra thunders out that rhythm one final time.
The second movement, in A minor, is one of Beethoven’s most famous slow movements, but the debate continues as to whether it really is a slow movement. Beethoven could not decide whether to mark it Andante (a walking tempo) or Allegretto (a moderately fast pace). He finally decided on Allegretto, though the actual pulse is somewhere between those two. This movement too is built on a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the first five notes: long-short-short-long-long – and this pattern repeats here almost as obsessively as the pattern of the first movement. The opening sounds like a series of static chords – the theme itself occurs quietly inside those chords – and Beethoven simply repeats this theme, varying it as it proceeds. The central episode in A major moves gracefully along smoothly-flowing triplets before a little fugato on the opening rhythms builds to a great climax. Beethoven winds the movement down on the woodwinds’ almost skeletal reprise of the fundamental rhythm.
The Scherzo explodes to life on a theme full of grace notes, powerful accents, flying staccatos, and timpani explosions. This alternates with a trio section for winds reportedly based on an old pilgrims’ hymn, though no one, it seems, has been able to identify that exact hymn. Beethoven offers a second repeat of the trio, then seems about to offer a third before five powerful chords cut the movement off abruptly.
These chords set the stage for the Allegro con brio, again built on the near-obsessive treatment of a short rhythmic pattern, in this case the movement’s opening four-note fanfare. This four-note pattern punctuates the entire movement: it shapes the beginning of the main theme, and its stinging accents thrust the music forward continuously as this movement almost boils over with energy. The ending is remarkable: above growling cellos and basses (which rock along on a two-note ostinato for 28 measures), the opening theme drives to a climax that Beethoven marks fff, a dynamic marking he almost never used. This conclusion is virtually Bacchanalian in its wild power – no matter how many times one has heard it, the ending of the Seventh Symphony remains one of the most exciting moments in all of music.
The first performance of the Seventh Symphony took place in the Great Hall of the University in Vienna on December 8, 1813. Though nearly deaf at this point, Beethoven led the performance, and the orchestra was able to compensate for his failings, so that the premiere was a huge success. On that occasion – and at three subsequent performances over the next few months – the audience demanded that the second movement be repeated.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Perú negro
JIMMY LÓPEZ
Born October 21, 1978, Lima, Peru
[~16 min.]
Jimmy López, who is Composer-in-Residence with the San Diego Symphony this season, has prepared a program note for this work:
Perú negro was commissioned by Miguel Harth-Bedoya to celebrate the centennial season of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.
Miguel and I have collaborated closely for a number of years, and instead of simply dedicating the piece to him, I decided to imprint it with his initials right from the beginning. The first motive, played by the horn, establishes the notes E, B, Bb and G, which correspond to Miguel (Mi = E) Harth (H = B natural) Bedoya (B = B flat) Gonzáles (G). These four notes rule the intervallic and harmonic structure of the entire piece.
The main source of inspiration for this work is Afro-Peruvian music, but although the piece makes reference to six specific traditional songs, it is indeed very personal. I did not attempt to merely copy or reproduce Peruvian folklore. On the contrary, I assimilated it and created something entirely new and personal – an invented folklore of sorts, which bears the seal of my musical language.
The introductory section, “Pregón I”, captures the spirit of the old street-sellers, which used to walk the streets of Lima announcing their goods and creating miniature songs in the process. These songs became extremely popular among the people of the city and some of them have survived until today. When in a musical context, they usually appear in the form of question-answer. In Perú negro different sections of the orchestra play the main motif and later that same motif is answered by the full orchestra.
“Toro Mata”, the second section, is a traditional song in slow tempo with a very striking characteristic: the ascending perfect fifth, which, coincidentally, is also the interval produced between the notes E and B natural (the first two notes of the piece). In this way, this traditional melody has been embedded into the core of the piece, now constituting one of its building blocks.
The following section “Ingá” steps up the tempo considerably and lets the string section take center stage. The melodic gestures are directly derived from this song, but the melodies are adjusted to fit into the model set forth by the initial motive.
“Le dije a papá”, the fourth section, is agile and virtuoso and it reaches its climax right before “Pregón II”, marking an important structural divide. The percussion section rises and its propulsive energy brings us to a climactic moment where the orchestra, now in full force, reaches a sudden stop.
“Pregón II” is based on the first section of similar name, but the main motive is now transformed into a monumental musical phrase performed by brass and percussion in fortissimo. When the strings come in, a long-breathed melody, based on “Toro Mata”, takes over, creating a sustained build up that leads us to the final section.
“Son de los Diablos”, the fastest and final section, brings the piece to a close in a frenzy of Afro-Peruvian rhythms. The main four notes are brought back toward the very end concluding in unison on E, which is the very first and now the very last note of the piece. As it can be inferred from the above description, the general tendency of this piece is to increase in tempo and activity, and although the progression is not linear, it can be felt as an overriding arch moving the piece forward.
Perú negro is an homage to our Afro-Peruvian heritage but it also stems from a personal desire to assimilate Peruvian folk music to the point of blending it seamlessly with my own language. I leave it to the listener to judge whether this attempt has been successful.
The premiere of Perú negro took place on May 17, 2013 in Fort Worth, Texas, by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya.
(-Jimmy López)
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Violin Concerto
ALBAN BERG
Born February 9, 1885, Vienna
Died December 24, 1935, Vienna
[~22 min.]
In the winter of 1935 Alban Berg turned 50, a momentous occasion for anyone. But life was full, and he was very busy. He spent that winter working on the orchestration of his opera Lulu, completed in short score the previous year, and January brought the welcome news that the American violinist Louis Krasner had commissioned a violin concerto from him. And then came a string of catastrophes.
On April 22, Manon Gropius died. The eighteen-year-old Manon – daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler Gropius (the composer’s widow) – had been a promising actress when she contracted polio the year before. Berg had been strongly attracted to the girl, and – overwhelmed by her death – he laid aside his work on Lulu, took up the proposed commission for a violin concerto, and set to work. Normally one of the slowest of composers, Berg now worked very quickly – he had sketched the concerto by July 12 and completed the full score a month later, on August 11. Even the composer was amazed by the speed with which this music had come to life. To Krasner he wrote: “I am more surprised at this than even you will be. I was keen on it as I have never been before in my life, and must add that the work gave me more and more joy. I hope – no, I have the confident belief – that I have succeeded.” The completed score bore two inscriptions: it is dedicated to Krasner, but Berg specified that this music had been written “To the Memory of an Angel.”
And then, in the midst of this sense of joyful completion, came a hideous complication. Berg had composed the concerto at his summer retreat on the Wörthersee in central Austria, and while on a picnic sometime that August he was stung at the base of his spine by an insect. From childhood, Berg had been particularly vulnerable to allergies and reactions, and his response to the bite was severe. He developed an infection (foolishly, Berg and his wife tried to lance the abscess themselves, using a pair of scissors), and his condition worsened steadily. Seriously ill and in pain, Berg returned to Vienna that fall. He was able to attend a performance of orchestral excerpts from Lulu on December 11, but within weeks he was overwhelmed by infection and died on Christmas Eve.
What had begun as a requiem for a young woman who died an untimely death ironically became a requiem for its composer, who also died much too young. One of the finest violin concertos of the twentieth century, this music appeals on many levels: for the ingenuity of its construction on serial procedures, for Berg’s ability to find within these procedures consistent tonal bases for his music, and for his musical quotations from unexpected sources. At an immediate level, this concerto can be understood as Berg’s devastated reaction to the death of Manon Gropius, and in fact the concerto seems to “tell” that story: the opening two movements offer a portrait of Manon – young, carefree, dancing – but the third brings the catastrophe that kills her. The final movement comes to terms with that loss, and she achieves transfiguration in its quiet closing pages.
At a technical level, this music is absolutely ingenious, and it is astonishing that music so complex could have been composed so quickly. Berg’s fundamental twelve-tone row, introduced by the rising solo violin in the fifteenth measure, is particularly fertile: it consists of a series of four interlocked triads (G minor, D Major, A minor, E Major) and concludes with three whole steps. The root notes of those triads (G-D-A-E) are of course the open strings of the violin, and Berg hints at the tonal foundations of his theme by having the solo violinist rock up and back across the instrument’s open strings at the very beginning.
The structure of the concerto is quite clear. It is in four movements, the first and second of which are played without pause, as are the third and fourth; the opening two movements are in a slow-fast sequence, but the latter two reverse this to bring the concerto a solemn close. The slow (Andante) first movement functions as an introduction (Berg calls it a Praeludium); the opening – with its hints of what is to come – give way to the solo violin’s presentation of the row, which is then extended in several different episodes. A pair of dancing clarinets leads us directly into the second movement, marked Allegretto, the most carefree part of the concerto; Berg takes this opening figure through passages marked scherzando, wienerisch (Viennese) and rustico. In the course of this movement, Berg makes the first of his unexpected quotations: a solo French horn “sings’ an old folksong from Carinthia, a region of southern Austria (it includes the Wörthersee, where Berg had the summerhouse in which he wrote this concerto). After all its dancing energy, this movement comes to a sudden close.
The third movement explodes to life. Marked Allegro and cast in the form of an accompanied cadenza, this movement is the most overtly virtuosic in the concerto. As it proceeds, an ominous rhythm – dotted and forceful – begins to intrude. Finally this rises up to become a strident outburst (in the score, Berg stresses that this is the Höhepunkt – “climax” – of the movement), and clearly it marks the death of Manon. Quickly this falls away, and in the numbed aftermath the music proceeds directly into the concluding Adagio. At this point comes the concerto’s most striking moment and its biggest surprise (even Berg was surprised by what happened here). That summer, he had been studying Bach chorales, and to his amazement he discovered that the last four notes of his row (the whole steps) were the same four notes that begin the chorale Es ist genug (“It is enough”) from Bach’s Cantata No. 60, “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort”. This severe melody – Bach had taken it from its original composer, Johann Ahle – and its text of farewell to earthly existence perfectly captured the mood of mourning and acceptance that Berg intended for the close of his concerto. Now he in turn borrows that theme for his own purposes: he presents the chorale, marked doloroso, with his own harmonization, then offers two variations as well as fusing it with the Carinthian folksong. The concerto fades into silence on one final recall of the simple open-string figuration with which it began.
Berg’s Violin Concerto was quickly heard around the world, with performances in London, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York. Yet its composer never heard a note of it. Louis Krasner gave the premiere in Barcelona on April 19, 1936, four months after Berg’s death and almost exactly one year to the day after the death of Manon Gropius.
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Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56, “Scottish”
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Born February 3, 1809, Hamburg
Died November 4, 1847, Leipzig
[~40 min.]
Mendelssohn made his first visit to England in 1829 at the age of twenty, and after a successful stay in London – where he conducted his own music and played the piano – he set off with his friend Karl Klingemann on a walking tour of Scotland that would lead him to compose two pieces. The first was The Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave), inspired directly by a stormy sea trip to the misty Hebrides Islands, but the creation of the “Scottish” Symphony proved a more complex process. Mendelssohn claimed to have had the initial idea for this music during a visit to the ruined Holyrood Chapel in Edinburgh: “In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved; a little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the door… The chapel close to it is now roofless, grass and ivy grow there, and at that broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything round is broken and mouldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I today found in that old chapel the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony.”
Mendelssohn may have been precise about the inspiration for this music, but he was in no hurry to write it – not until 1842, thirteen years after his trip to Scotland, did he complete this symphony (listed as No. 3, it is actually the last of his five symphonies). Though Mendelssohn referred to the music as his “Scottish” Symphony, no one is sure what that nickname means. This music tells no tale, paints no picture, nor does it quote Scottish tunes. In fact, Mendelssohn loathed folk music, and it was during this walking tour that he unloaded a famous broadside: “No national music for me! Ten thousand devils take all nationality! Now I am in Wales and, dear me, a harper sits in the hall of every reputed inn, playing incessantly so-called national melodies; that is to say, the most infamous, vulgar, out-of-tune trash, with a hurdygurdy going on at the same time. It’s maddening, and has given me a toothache already.”
If one did not know that it bore the nickname “Scottish,” there would be little in Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 to suggest anything distinctively Scottish. And in fact Mendelssohn’s friend Robert Schumann managed to humiliate himself on just this issue. He had been sent a copy of the score and wrote a review of it under the impression that he was writing about Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony. So convinced was he of the Italian-ness of this music that he singled out for special praise its “beautiful Italian pictures, so beautiful as to compensate a hearer who had never been to Italy.”
In his preface to the score, Mendelssohn had originally marked the finale Allegro guerriero, and some critics have taken their cue from this and claimed to hear the sound of a battle between Scottish warriors in the last movement. Others have heard in this music a depiction of windswept moors, but all these critics are guessing wildly.
The four movements of this symphony, played without pause, are unified around the somber opening melody – the theme inspired by the visit to Holyrood Chapel – which appears in quite different forms throughout. Played by winds and divided violas, it opens the slow introduction; when the music leaps ahead at the Allegro un poco agitato, the violins’ surging main theme is simply a variation of the slow introduction. The first movement alternates a nervous, insistent quality with moments of silky calm, and all of these moods are built from that same material. A tempestuous climax trails off into quiet, and Mendelssohn brings back part of the introduction as a bridge to the second movement.
Mendelssohn was famous for his scherzos, and the second movement of this symphony, marked Vivace non troppo, is one of his finest. It is actually in sonata form (and in 2/4 rather than the 3/4 standard in scherzos). Throughout, there is a sense of rustling motion – the music’s boundless energy keeps it pushing forward at every instant. Solo clarinet has the swirling first theme, and some have identified this tune’s extra final accent as the “Scottish snap” (though typical of Scottish folk music, such extra cadential accents are part of the folk music of many nations). The scherzo rushes to its quiet close and proceeds directly into the Adagio, which alternates a long and graceful main idea marked cantabile with a martial fanfare as a second theme.
Out of the quiet conclusion of the third movement, the finale explodes. Marked Allegro vivacissimo, this movement is full of fire and excitement (this is the one originally marked Allegro guerriero), beginning with the violins’ dancing, dotted opening idea. Along the way Mendelssohn incorporates a second theme, derived once again from the symphony’s introduction, and this energetic music eventually reaches a moment of calm. And here Mendelssohn springs a surprise: back comes the simple melody that opened the symphony, but now – marked Allegro maestoso assai and set in bright A Major – it has acquired an unexpected nobility. That once-simple melody now gathers its strength and drives the symphony to an energetic conclusion.
Many regard the “Scottish” Symphony as Mendelssohn’s finest orchestral work, but no one can explain that nickname satisfactorily. Rather than searching for the sound of gathering clans or hearing bits of Scottish folktunes or seeing windswept moors in this music, it may be simplest – and safest – to regard this as a work inspired by one specific Scottish impression, which then evolved ingeniously into an entire symphony.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30
RICHARD STRAUSS
Born June 11, 1864, Munich
Died September 8, 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen
[~33 min.]
Between 1883 and 1891 the German philosopher-poet Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra, a philosophical tract in which he used the Persian philosopher Zoroaster, who lived in the sixth century B.C., as a mouthpiece for his own views. Also Sprach Zarathustra (“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”) consists of eighty discourses by Zoroaster as he sits in his cave in the mountains in a lonely search for enlightenment. At the climax of Nietzsche’s book, Zoroaster collapses into a trance from which he awakens to a new consciousness, and it is here that Nietzsche outlines his theory of the Übermensch, or Superman: that individual who can rise above the limits of conventional morality and find fulfillment through action in this world. Nietzsche’s theories would, half a century later, be distorted by the Nazis to support their notion of Aryan superiority, but that would have appalled Nietzsche, whose ideas had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the transformation of the individual through spiritual enlightenment.
These were heady ideas at the end of the nineteenth century, and in 1896, only five years after the appearance of Nietzsche’s work, the young Richard Strauss wrote a symphonic poem based on Also Sprach Zarathustra. It might seem impossible to render complex ideas musically, and Strauss took pains to explain his intentions: “I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically. I meant rather to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origins, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch. The whole symphonic poem is intended as my homage to the genius of Nietzsche, which found its greatest exemplification in his book Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
But Strauss made some important changes. From Zarathustra’s eighty discourses, Strauss chose only eight and structured his music around these different stages in man’s development. And, as we shall see, he made some significant changes in the ending, changes that alter the entire character of his music. Further, Strauss structured this music on the opposition between Nature and Man, underlining that conflict by assigning each a distinctive music and a different tonality. Nature is represented by C Major, Man by B Major/minor, and the collision of those quite different keys will energize this score.
Strauss begins with an introduction meant to represent sunrise and the earliest dawn of time. This beginning has, of course, become almost too familiar through its use in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, though it should be noted that Kubrick used the music accurately in that film: to suggest the beginning of time and of man’s history. (The popularity of that movie and its opening has insured that most people know only the first two minutes of Also Sprach Zarathustra, and many have been surprised to learn that there is another half hour of music after it.) Strauss has larger musical goals in this beginning. The trumpets’ rising three-note figure will become the theme of Nature in this music; in C Major, this theme will recur throughout and will take a variety of forms. Here it rises to a magnificent climax (in pure C Major) and then subsides for the first stage in man’s development, Von der Hinterweltern (that title translates loosely “Of the Backworldsmen”): those who take refuge in primitive beliefs and religion. From out of the smoky depths comes the rising, striving figure – first in the low woodwinds and then pizzicato strings – that symbolizes Man. Strauss gives us a whiff of an old plainchant tune to symbolize religion, and the music proceeds into Von der grossen Sehnsucht (Of the Great Longing). Man needs more than primitive creeds, and this section expresses that yearning. The music rises in excitement as Man’s theme becomes more animated and sweeps directly into Von der Freuden und Leidenschaften (Of Joys and Passions). Surging, powerful figures from strings and horns depict Man’s pleasures, and the music dances with wild sensual energy until a deep, stamping trombone line suggests his revulsion before purely physical pleasure.
Das Grablied (The Song of the Grave) is a quieter interlude, with Man’s theme rising as he yearns upward. Von der Wissenschaft (Of Science) depicts the appeal of science and learning with a complex fugue – an intellectual form – based on the three-note Nature theme. This fugue subject rises slowly from the depths of the lowest strings and changes keys so often than it includes all twelve-notes of the chromatic scale. But learning can be as empty as physical pleasure, and soon matters break loose and soar on music that includes the themes of both Man and Nature. Der Genesende (The Convalescent) is the discourse in Nietzsche’s book in which Zarathustra rises from a delirium, fasts for seven days, and is transformed. This marks the appearance of the Superman, and now trumpets scream out the Nature theme as the music proceeds into Das Tanzlied (The Dance Song).
Here at last is the Superman, and – in Strauss’ most controversial decision in this score – his music takes the form of a Viennese waltz played by the solo violin. This waltz, a transformation of the Nature theme, dances exultantly but comes to an end with the twelve strokes of midnight as the music proceeds into the final section, Nachtwandlerlied (Nightwanderer’s Song). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra ends in triumph, but Strauss’ conclusion is more ambiguous. The midnight bell ceases, and the music grows quiet, but its fundamental tensions remain in place: Strauss sets high woodwind and string chords in B Major, and against them he gives low pizzicato strings the Nature theme in C Major. The soft chords in B and deep strokes in C clash quietly and then fade into silence, and Strauss’ Zarathustra ends not in triumph but in mystery.
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Bluebeard’s Castle
BÉLA BARTÓK
Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós (Kingdom of Hungary)
Died September 26, 1945, New York City
[~60 min.]
[Program note by Creative Consultant Gerard McBurney coming soon.]
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
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