#sandiegosymphony
Fairytale Poem (Poema-Skazka)
SOFIA GUBAIDULINA
October 24, 1931, Christopol, Tatar Republic
Died March 13, 2025, Appen Germany
[~12 min.]
Sofia Gubaidulina graduated from the Kazan Conservatory in 1954 and went on to the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied piano and composition. Drawn to both experimental music and to the spiritual dimension of music, Gubaidulina established herself as one of the leading members of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union at a time when that was a difficult identity. In 1971 she was asked to provide background music for a children’s radio play titled The Little Chalk, based on a Czech fairy tale. Her music was performed as part of that production, but since then it has been performed as a purely orchestral work.
The original fairy tale told a charming story, but Gubaidulina sensed a larger meaning behind that gentle story and came to regard it as “a parable about an artist’s destiny.” Her summary of the fairy tale makes clear the connection between a piece of chalk and the role of the artist in society: “The main character is a small piece of chalk used for writing on school chalkboards. The chalk dreams that someday it will draw wonderful castles, beautiful gardens with pavilions, and the sea. But, day in, day out, it is forced to write boring words, numbers, and geometric figures on the board. The children grow with each day, but the chalk becomes smaller and smaller. The chalk gradually becomes despondent and loses all hope of ever having a chance to draw the sun and the sea. Soon it will be so small that it will no longer be used in the school classroom and will end up being thrown away. Then the chalk once again finds itself in total darkness and thinks that it has died. What it thought was the darkness of death is actually the inside of a boy’s trousers pocket. The boy pulls the chalk out of his pocket and in the light of day begins to design castles, gardens with pavilions, and the sea with the sun on the asphalt. The chalk is so happy that it does not notice how it meets its end while drawing this beautiful world.”
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Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K.491
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg
Died December 5, 1791, Vienna
[~30min.]
In the spring of 1786 Mozart was hard at work on The Marriage of Figaro, but in March he paused briefly to compose two piano concertos for the Lenten concert season. They are two of his greatest works, yet they could hardly be more unlike. The Concerto No. 23 in A Major, completed on March 2, is all sunlight and gentle lyricism, but the Concerto No. 24 in C minor, completed three weeks later on March 24, is one of Mozart’s darkest and most powerful works.
The manuscript betrays unusual agitation: there are numerous passages scratched out and – remarkably for this composer – there are a number of mistakes: wrong notes, things left out, passages inserted in the wrong places. It is dangerous to attempt to make connections between the condition of a manuscript and its creator’s mental state, but everything about this concerto suggests trouble and turbulence.
C minor was the key Mozart reserved for his most emotionally charged music, and he employs the largest orchestra here he ever used in a concerto, requiring both oboes and clarinets. Everyone instinctively senses the symphonic character of this concerto: it exists not as a showcase for the pianist but as the most serious symphonic argument in which piano and orchestra participate as equals.
The orchestra’s quiet but ominous opening theme will form the backbone of the Allegro. There is no true “contrasting” second subject but instead a wealth of secondary material, some of it derived motivically from the rhythm of that fertile opening theme. Even the piano’s seemingly calm entrance can be traced to material already introduced, and it too is soon penetrated by bits of the opening theme. Mozart left no cadenza, but the ending of this movement is as remarkable as everything else in it: the orchestra’s entrance after the cadenza is not a gentle return but almost an explosion, and then–most unusually–the piano returns in the coda and helps propel the movement to a muttering close in which none of its tensions has been resolved.
Relief comes in the Larghetto, which moves to E-flat major. Solo piano introduces the singing main theme of what will be a slow rondo, but this one is ingenious: each of the three interludes is introduced by the woodwind band, and then piano and strings comment on their music.
The dark mood of the opening movement returns at the first instant of the finale: we are back in C minor, and the strings’ opening theme breathes the same air of suppressed power of the concerto’s opening. The finale is a variation-form movement, based on its opening theme. The variations are often double variations, with the second part a development of the first, and along the way Mozart offers two episodes, both introduced by the winds. At the end, Mozart pauses for a cadenza, but when the orchestra returns, he re-bars the main theme in 6/8, and on that flowing meter the concerto dances to its close. Or at least tries to, for Mozart remains firmly in C minor, and the music closes in darkness and defiance.
Mozart’s Concerto in C minor has moved countless listeners, but none more than a young pianist named Beethoven who arrived in Vienna six years later. Listening to a performance of this concerto with his friend the pianist Jean-Baptiste Cramer, the young Beethoven nearly despaired, exclaiming: “Oh, Cramer! Cramer! We will never be able to do anything like this!” Yet the influence of this concerto can be felt in much of Beethoven’s music: in the choice of key, in the dark and dramatic argument, and even in the shape of themes – the opening of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, composed in 1800, is clearly “lifted” from the opening of this concerto. It is as if the extraordinary power of Mozart’s music, still trembling in the air of Vienna, took hold of the young composer in a way he could not escape.
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Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), Op. 40
MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France
Died December 28, 1937, Paris
[~44 min.]
In the summer of 1898 Richard Strauss set to work on what would be his longest tone poem to date, Ein Heldenleben, or A Hero’s Life – the musical depiction of the life and struggles of an unnamed hero. In a letter to a friend that summer, Strauss offered a rather disingenuous explanation of why he had chosen this topic: “Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ is so little beloved of our conductors, and is on this account now only rarely performed that to fulfill a pressing need I am composing a largeish tone poem entitled Heldenleben, admittedly without a funeral march, but yet in E-flat, with lots of horns, which are always a yardstick of heroism.”
But the work that was completed that December and premiered the following March was far indeed from the spirit of the Eroica, and Strauss was probably right to note that the only thing the two pieces have in common is the same key, E-flat Major. Even if it was originally intended as a tribute to Napoleon, the Eroica remains an abstract representation of heroism, but Strauss sets out to tell the story of his hero in microscopic detail. In Ein Heldenleben he paints detailed portraits of his hero, the hero’s snarling adversaries, a coquettish lover, a terrific battle in which his enemies are chased off the field, and the hero’s reward of a contemplative if not entirely serene retirement.
Ein Heldenleben has one of the greatest openings in all of music. From the depths of the orchestra, Strauss introduces his hero with a long, sweeping theme whose powerful stride leaps up across three octaves, changing from the dark colors of lower strings and horns to the silvery sound of massed violins as it climbs. Here is a man of force and idealism, and the arc of his music is always upward – Strauss’ hero constantly strives toward something higher, and the hero’s music is riding a shaft of incandescent energy when it suddenly vanishes in mid-air.
Out of that silence come the hero’s enemies, and if the hero’s music is always arcing higher, the music of his foes is twisted and gnarled, depicted by ugly, carping solo woodwinds, each of whom seems to have a particularly nasty character. The hero’s theme grows somber as he muses on these adversaries, but before he can face them he is interrupted by the other important figure in this music-drama, his lover. Strauss confessed that she was modeled on his own wife: “She is very complex, very feminine, a little perverse, a little coquettish, never like herself, at every minute different from how she had been the moment before.” Here she is portrayed by the solo violin, and as he paints her mercurial portrait, Strauss gives the concertmaster passages marked “happy,” “flippant,” “tender,” “insolent,” “lovable,” and “scolding” (among others) before the union is consummated in soaring G-flat Major love music that intertwines the themes of the hero and his love.
Their happiness is brief. Distant trumpets pierce the warm calm of the love scene, calling the hero to battle. Over rattling drums, his enemies attack, their jagged trumpet call a wonderful transformation of the first theme from the adversaries’ section. Finally the hero triumphs and chases his enemies away, and he makes a magnificent entrance on the hero’s theme, now back in the original E-flat Major.
There follows the most controversial section of Ein Heldenleben. A recounting of the hero’s “works of peace,” it takes the form of quotations from Strauss’ own music, and critics have been quick to interpret Ein Heldenleben as a vehicle for Strauss’ ego – listeners will recognize quotations from Don Juan, Don Quixote, Macbeth, Guntram, Till Eulenspiegel and others
If the hero’s works of peace can seem self-indulgent, Strauss rewards our patience in the final section, a portrait of the hero in old age. He clearly suffers from bad dreams (memories of his enemies pop up from time to time to disturb his reveries), but the final moments of Ein Heldenleben bring serenity and repose. The enemies have been banished, and now the themes of the hero and his love return, at this stage in their lives transformed far from their initial hard-edged appearance. Borne along by some wonderful writing for solo violin and solo horn, the hero at last finds peace. At the close, a noble chord for winds (in pure E-flat Major) swells to a mighty climax, then falls away to silence as the hero completes his journey.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 46
ARAM KHACHATURIAN
Born June 6, 1903, Tbilisi
Died May 1, 1978, Moscow
[~37 min.]
At its best, Khachaturian’s music grows directly out of his Armenian heritage – his works have a fiercely energetic, almost barbaric quality that has made them a favorite of audiences around the world. Yet Khachaturian left Armenia fairly early in his life: he moved to Moscow when he was 18, studied there for many years, and eventually made his career in that city. His Armenian past always remained a part of his art, however, and like Bartók he absorbed the musical idiom of his native land so thoroughly that he did not need to quote folk tunes; instead he created a musical language that fuses the colorful Armenian (some would say “trans-Caucasian”) idiom with classical forms.
Not surprisingly, Khachaturian had particular success with music for the stage – his ballet Spartacus has been a specialty of the Bolshoi Ballet for the last half-century, and the "Sabre Dance" from his ballet Gayaneh is a classical “hit” – but he also wrote two distinguished concertos: the Piano Concerto of 1936 and the Violin Concerto of 1940. Khachaturian wrote his Violin Concerto specifically for David Oistrakh. The two young men (both still in their thirties) consulted during the course of its composition, and Oistrakh edited the violin part and wrote the cadenza in the first movement. Oistrakh gave the first performance in Moscow on November 16, 1940, and the Violin Concerto has remained one of the most popular violin concertos composed in the twentieth century.
Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto has a very classical shape (sonata-form first movement, variation-form slow movement, and a rondo-like finale), but its impact is wild and exciting. This is music full of blazing colors, primal rhythms, “exotic” melodies, and great blocks of sound. It is also terrific violin music, and we may feel the hand of Oistrakh here: the solo writing is both difficult and brilliant, but it sits sensibly under the hand and plays to the strengths of the violin, wedding virtuosity with lyricism.
The concerto gets off to a fiery beginning (Khachaturian marks the first movement Allegro con fermezza: “with firmness”), and the soloist enters quickly with the propulsive, thrusting main theme. A quiet second subject brings some repose, and Khachaturian builds the long opening movement out of these two quite different ideas. The striking cadenza comes somewhat early in the movement, and finally an exciting coda hurls the music to its close.
The orchestra has a long introduction to the Andante sostenuto, with the music growing out of the dark lower registers of the strings. Eventually the soloist picks up this melody, now marked cantabile espressivo, and embellishes it. The music rises to a great climax, then falls away to the quiet close. The orchestra also introduces the Allegro vivace finale, hammering the fundamental 3/8 meter into our consciousness before the solo violin makes its entrance on the springing and infectious main theme. This movement is full of fire and extroverted brilliance, and that makes some subtle touches along the way all the more surprising. Into the rush of this finale, Khachaturian brings back the lyric second theme of the first movement, and as the movement proceeds, he combines this theme with the main theme of the finale. The opening movement of the concerto may have been set in D minor, but this finale is in sunlit D Major, and at the end the music hammers its way home on pounding octave Ds.
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Symphony No. 9 in D minor
ANTON BRUCKNER
Born September 4, 1824, Ansfelden
Died October 11, 1896, Vienna
[~63 min.]
It cost Anton Bruckner a superhuman effort to compose his Ninth Symphony, and he died before he could complete it. Bruckner was already 63 when he began the Ninth during the summer of 1887, and he worked on it for the final nine years of his life. The composer’s health was increasingly frail in these years, and the composition of the Ninth was complicated by his setting it aside for long periods to revise his First, Second, Third, and Eighth Symphonies. Still, the huge new symphony gradually took shape. After making sketches for years, Bruckner completed the first movement in December 1893, the second in February 1894, and the third in November 1894, and then he began the finale. By this point the aging composer knew that the Ninth would be his last symphony, and – working desperately – he struggled to finish it. In 1896 Dvořák – recently back from America – came to Vienna and wished to visit Bruckner. Bruckner met Dvořák at the door but – weeping – turned him away, pleading that all his remaining time and energy must go to finishing the Ninth Symphony. On October 11 he rose and worked on the finale, went for a walk in the gardens that surrounded the house where he was living, returned and lay down, and died suddenly. There have been attempts to complete the finale from Bruckner’s substantial sketches and so bring the Ninth to a full four-movement form, but Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony – in its three-movement form – is so compelling that those three movements form a moving and satisfying symphonic journey by themselves.
Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony is monumental (its three movements span an hour), heartfelt (the composer dedicated it An den liebem Gott: "To dear God”), and an absolutely radical piece of music, profoundly original in form, harmony and expression. Bruckner’s lifelong fascination with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has often been noted, and that obsession is at its most acute in his final symphony. Both the Beethoven and Bruckner Ninth are in D minor, both begin in a sort of cosmic haze, and out of that uncertain murmur, bits of theme emerge, coalesce, and explode downward into the movement’s opening theme. But Bruckner will take his first movement in directions very different from Beethoven’s sonata-form structure. Bruckner’s marking for his first movement – Feierlich. Misterioso (“Solemn. Mysterious”) – sets the mood exactly. Over a misty, sustained D, distant brass calls and other bits of theme are heard. Gradually these build to the statement of the first theme, which arrives like a cataclysm: over a powerful timpani roll, the entire orchestra stamps out this titanic idea, and it is as if the heavens have spilt open around us. Then – silence, and a long pizzicato sequence leads to a new episode, begun by a consoling melody in A Major sung by the violins. This in turn leads to a third episode, marked Moderato and announced largely by the strings. Listeners should not expect the familiar outlines of sonata form in Bruckner symphonies, and here – in his final symphony – Bruckner’s sense of form is utterly original. Rather than thinking of first and second subjects, listeners would do better to think of three massive theme-groups, each built on a main idea but also full of subordinate ideas. These ideas do not develop in the classical sense, but they return, evolve, intermingle, and grow, and this movement’s long mid-section recalls all three theme-groups. A quiet chorale for winds and then brass leads to the soft timpani roll that introduces the coda. From pianissimo whisperings, bits of the first theme-group gradually build to the mighty brass calls that thrust this movement to its overpowering close.
After such an opening movement, the second might seem more conventional: it is in a classical form (scherzo-and-trio) and relatively brief. Yet the character of this music is far from the boisterous scherzos of Beethoven’s symphonies – there is something hard, dark, savage at the core of this movement. It begins innocently enough, and with a surprising touch: the entire first statement is played by pizzicato strings. An instant of silence follows, and the whole orchestra erupts with brutal chords that stamp across the music like an invading army. Bruckner offers gentler secondary material, but the menace of those stamping chords is never far away. The trio takes us into a different world altogether. Bruckner moves into the remote key of F-sharp Major, which feels positively sunny in this context. First violins dance up and down along the pulsing 3/8 meter, but the trio passes by in just a few minutes and we are back in the scherzo, which pounds its way to the violent close.
The Adagio was originally to be the symphony’s slow movement, third in the sequence of its four movements, but fate made it instead the symphony’s finale. Bruckner immediately sets out into unexplored territory as first violins make an unearthly upward leap of a ninth. “Slow, solemn” is Bruckner’s marking for this movement, and soon the violins recall the “Dresden Amen,” used by Wagner in Parsifal. This movement too can be thought of as a spiritual journey, and – after some stinging trumpet fanfares – the second subject arrives in the combined violin sections. Bruckner marks this “Very slow,” specifies that it should be “broad,” and keeps it entirely on the violins’ G-string–the warm A-flat Major tonality of this theme sounds particularly warm after the movement’s unsettling opening. The return of that opening theme begins what might be called the “development,” though once again Bruckner’s themes do not develop in the manner of the classical nineteenth-century symphony. After some treatment of the second theme-group the music reaches a radiant A-Major chord, almost prayer-like in its calm, and from here onward the atmosphere – the “feel” – of the movement is subtly different. A chorale-like passage gathers force and drives the movement to its shrieking, dissonant climax, which breaks off in silence. And from this shattered, shocking moment Bruckner winds down the movement – and the symphony. At the very end, horns rise up to strike the concluding E-Major chord, and the brass sustains that long, golden chord as Bruckner’s final completed movement fades into rapt silence.
THE INEVITABLE NOTE ON TEXTS: Bruckner never heard his Ninth Symphony, and in fact no one heard it until six years after his death: it was first performed in Vienna on February 11, 1903. But the version performed on that occasion – and for the following thirty years – was not what Bruckner had composed. Working with the best of motives and the worst of results, Bruckner’s student Ferdinand Löwe had completely revised the manuscript of the three completed movements to make them more palatable to contemporary taste. The effect was not so much to bowdlerize the Ninth Symphony as to de-fang it: Löwe softened Bruckner’s orchestration, excised dissonances that he thought might trouble audiences, and completely removed the savage climax of the third movement. This version was published in 1904, and for decades audiences thought that it was what Bruckner had written. It was not until a side-by-side performance of the Löwe version and Bruckner’s own version in Munich on April 2, 1932, that the full extent of Löwe’s well-intentioned meddling – and the full majesty of Bruckner’s original – became clear.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
"Nuages" (Clouds) and "Fêtes" (Festivals) from Nocturnes
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Born August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Died March 25, 1918, Paris
[~14 min.]
In the early 1890s, Claude Debussy began planning a new three-movement orchestral study in instrumental color. He was not thinking here of brilliant colors – in fact, his original working title was Trois scènes au crépuscule (“Three Scenes at Twilight”). Originally intended for solo violin and orchestra, Debussy explained: “It is, in short, an experiment with the different combinations that can be obtained from one color – like a study in gray in painting.” Once Debussy began to work, this conception evolved and he instead composed three orchestral movements without a soloist. He called this Nocturnes, and the first two movements were premiered in Paris on December 9, 1900. Those same movements are performed on this program.
The traditional meaning of “nocturne” is music that evokes the atmosphere of night, though Debussy’s music has nothing to do with night. He appears to have borrowed the conception of nocturne from the work of his friend, American painter James MacNeill Whistler. Whistler used the term “nocturne” to suggest a harmonious relationship of color, shape, and form, as in his famous Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge. And so, Debussy uses the title Nocturnes to suggest a visual experience. He wrote:
“Nuages renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in gray tones slightly tinged with white. Fêtes gives us the vibrating, dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision) which passes through the festive scene and becomes merged in it.”
Gently twining woodwinds open Nuages (“Clouds”), and their line is soon taken up by the strings. Bits of woodwind and brass calls emerge that Debussy said were suggested by the sound of boat horns on the Seine in Paris. Musically, this movement is almost static: just as with the movement of clouds, tints of color shift slowly and subtly. By contrast, Fêtes (“Festivals”) blazes with activity. Inspired by a festival in the Bois de Boulogne during which the brass band of Garde Républicaine marched through, Fêtes explodes to life with fast triplets in the strings. In its center section, over steady march rhythms from the harps, muted trumpets mark the appearance of the military bands the band approaches, the sound of brass and rolling snare drums ring. The band passes, but Fêtes preserves its rhythmic energy right through the quiet close where the music winks out before us.
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Shift, Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra
JIMMY LÓPEZ
Born October 21, 1978 Lima, Peru
[~24 min.]
The composer provides these notes about Shift:
Primarily associated with grand orchestral climaxes and epic themes, the trombone’s soloistic abilities remain yet to be fully explored. Shift is a step in this direction, placing the focus on the kaleidoscopic range of expressive properties that this remarkable instrument is capable of. Shift is a musical exploration of the behavior of waves as observed through the Doppler effect (or Doppler shift) in three different mediums: sound, water, and light, each giving its name to the first three movements, with a fourth and final movement bringing all these elements together within the frame of a phenomenon called sonoluminescence.
First described by Christian Doppler in 1842, the Doppler effect is the apparent shift in frequency of a wave between a fixed observer and a moving wave source. When the source approaches, the pitch goes up, and when it recedes, the pitch lowers. The Doppler effect is nowadays used in a wide array of real-world applications in the fields of medicine, astronomy, and meteorology, among others. In my trombone concerto, I created musical motifs featuring ascending and descending pitches, coupling them with fluctuations in dynamics that represent variations in volume due to proximity or distance from the sound source. I also use tempo changes to represent wave compression and decompression, plus I sometimes spread the same chord or musical gesture spatially among different sections of the orchestra to give the impression that the sound source is in motion. All of this, naturally, with the trombone soloist as our centerpiece and source of inspiration.
The first three movements explore these different attributes of the Doppler effect in three main mediums. Sound, the first movement, is quick, reactive, and agile as it pictures sound waves propagating through air. Water, the second movement, is slower and denser, making extensive use of glissandi to represent the much greater resistance that waves face when traveling through this thicker, liquid element. Light, the third movement, is lively, effervescent, and ethereal, as it deals with a most immaterial medium.
The final movement stands apart because it is not directly related to the Doppler effect but requires all previous elements to come together. Sonoluminescence occurs when a sound wave impacts a gaseous bubble enclosed within a liquid, making the bubble collapse quickly and emit a flash of light when it bursts. Musically, the last movement of the concerto starts with a snapping gesture in the orchestra and a bouncing theme in the trombone that is passed on to the orchestra. Motifs from the third movement appear, alternating with those of the fourth movement until a grand orchestral tutti reveals a theme from the second movement, augmented and transformed. A section reminiscent of the first movement makes its entrance, leading to a fiery cadenza, generating enough excitement and momentum to bring us to the finish.
Shift was co-commissioned by the Rotterdam Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and San Diego Symphony. The world premiere took place on June 14, 2024 with Jörgen van Rijen, the concerto’s dedicatee, as soloist.
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Alborada del gracioso
MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrennes
Died December 28, 1937, Paris
[~8 min.]
In 1904-5 Ravel composed Miroirs (“Mirrors”), a set of five piano pieces, and in 1918 he orchestrated its fourth movement, Alborada del gracioso. This became one of his most popular orchestral works, but the meaning of its title is elusive. An alborada (“dawn” in Spanish) has a range of musical meanings: it can be a song sung at morning, for the morning of a wedding day, or it can be a lively folkdance. A gracioso was a figure from Spanish comedy – a jester or a clown. This work opens with the sound of pizzicato strings imitating the strumming of a vast guitar, and hints of a theme spin out of this rush of energy. Those thematic hints suddenly rush together in a great explosion of sound, subtly tinted by castanets, tambourine, cymbals and harp. A sharp chord introduces the central episode – a solo bassoon sings its lonely song. The final section is particularly brilliant, and abrupt trombone glissandos thrust matters to the final chord.
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Suite from Les biches (The Does)
FRANCIS POULENC
Born January 7, 1899, Paris
Died January 30, 1963, Paris
[~20 min.]
Les biches is the music that made Poulenc famous. He was just 22 years old when Sergei Diaghilev appeared in March 1921 to commission a score for his Ballets Russes. The ballet premiered in Monte Carlo on January 6, 1924, the day before Poulenc’s 25th birthday. Les biches was an instant success and produced widely. A century later it remains in the active repertory of many ballet companies. It is a very curious ballet: Poulenc described it as a “ballet which will have no subject – simply songs and dances.” It takes place at a house party full of frisky young people, who pair off in various combinations. Overseeing all this saucy activity is the lead role, described as the Hostess; another important role is taken by a blue sofa. Part of the appeal of this ballet is its title, translated literally as “the does” (female deer). However, that term has another implication in French: attractive, flirtatious women. Poulenc originally thought of titling the ballet Les demoiselles, but settled on the more provocative Les biches. He said that the “subject” of this ballet was not love, but pleasure. Poulenc’s 1948 orchestral suite from the music of Les biches is in five movements – clear, bright, saucy, gay, energetic – and a lot of fun.
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Rapsodie espagnole
MAURICE RAVEL
[~16 min.]
Ravel’s mother was Basque and this heritage remained important to him: as an adult he made frequent visits to the region and tried on several occasions to write works incorporating Basque themes. These came to nothing, but a more potent musical influence came from across the border; Ravel was swept up with love for things Spanish that seem to have infected every French composer. This shaped many of his works – Bolero, Alborado del gracioso, and his opera L’Heure espagnole. Ravel composed Rapsodie espagnole in 30 days in August 1907. This “Spanish Rhapsody” may be thought of as a prelude followed by three dances, with the music progressing from shimmering night music to the brilliant festivities of the finale.
The opening movement, “Prelude to the night,” is based on a descending figure of four notes, first heard in muted violins and violas two octaves apart, but present almost the entire movement. Near the end, two clarinets swirl up out of the darkness, followed by a pair of bassoons, before the movement slips into silence.
The remaining three movements bring us three Spanish dances. The first, Malagueña, marked “Very quick,” proved such a success at the premiere that it had to be repeated. It opens with a walking pizzicato line before a strident trumpet stamps out a bit of a tune. The whole orchestra takes this up briefly, and then the music stops suddenly. Over eerie wisps of string sound the English horn sings a long, plaintive song. And then the falling four-note pattern from the very opening drops like a veil. The following Habanera is an orchestration of a piece Ravel had written for two pianos in 1905. The habanera may have come out of Africa but appears to have made its way to Europe via Havana, hence the name. Ravel specifies that this movement should be “Very slow and with a tired rhythm.” The brilliant finale – Feria, marked “Very animated” – is a portrait of a festival day. Great washes of orchestral sound drive to a quiet center section for languid English horn and clarinet. Themes from the first movement return, the music slowly picks up momentum, and the work ends with a great explosion of sound.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Elysium
SAMY MOUSSA
Born June 7, 1984, Barcelona
[~12 min.]
The title Elysium reflects Samy Moussa’s fascination with ancient Greek and Classical sources. Also known by the epithet “the Elysian Fields,” Elysium refers to a paradisiacal realm, distinct from the Underworld in Greek mythology, that offered a blissful afterlife to heroes and those favored by the gods. Its idyllic promise is described by Homer and Hesiod and echoes through the epics of Virgil and Dante down to the present – even occurring in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (in his setting of Schiller’s description of Joy as “daughter of Elysium”).
Moussa, however, insists on steering clear of any Romantic idealization of the Hellenic world. He particularly admires the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers (most of which survives only in fragmentary form), and singles out a text on the afterlife by Empedocles, a remarkable fifth-century BCE pioneer of natural philosophy who lived in what today is Sicily. Moussa notes that he interprets Empedocles’s image of Elysium “as the ultimate reward for an ethical life” – a reward no longer limited to an elite of god-favored heroes – as “a metaphor for a beautiful life, for a life well-lived on this planet.”
From Empedocles’s large-scale poem known as Purifications, which treats religious and ethical topics, Moussa cites this fragment, in which Elysium is envisioned as a final escape from the cycle of reincarnation:
But, at the last, they appear among mortal men as prophets, songwriters, physicians, and princes; and thence they rise up as gods exalted in honor, sharing the hearth of the other gods and the same table, free from human woes, safe from destiny, and incapable of hurt.
-This Program Note by Thomas May
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Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 35
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk
Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg
[~33 min.]
In the summer of 1877 Peter Tchaikovsky made an ill-advised marriage. It was a disaster, and the composer, near mental collapse, 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 just eleven days. Without asking permission, he dedicated it to the 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 and reportedly called 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. 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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The Firebird
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum
Died April 6, 1971, New York City
[~45 min.]
In 1909 the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev made plans for a new ballet to be presented in Paris the following season, based on the old Russian legend of the Firebird. He at first asked Anatoly Lyadov to compose the music, but when it became clear that the notoriously lazy Lyadov would never get around to it, he decided to take a chance on an unknown young composer named Igor Stravinsky. Recognizing that this was his big chance (and terrified that he would not be up to the challenge), Stravinsky set to work in November 1909 at a dacha owned by the Rimsky-Korsakov family (to which he had gone, he said, “for a vacation in birch forests and snow-fresh air”). He finished the piano score in St. Petersburg in March, and the orchestration was complete a month later. The first performance, which took place in Paris on June 25, 1910, eight days after the composer’s twentieth-eighth birthday, was a huge success: The Firebird remains his most popular creation.
The Firebird tells of a young prince, Ivan Tsarevich, who unknowingly pursues the magic Firebird – part woman, part bird – into the garden of the green-taloned Kastchei, most horrible of all ogres: Kastchei captures and imprisons maidens within the castle and turns all knights who come to rescue them to stone. Ivan captures the Firebird, but she begs to be released, and when he agrees she gives him a magic feather and vanishes. The prince sees a group of thirteen princesses playing with golden apples, and when dawn breaks and they have to return to Kastchei’s castle, he follows them. Instantly he is confronted by the hideous fiends who inhabit the castle and is about to be turned to stone himself when he remembers the feather. He waves it, and the Firebird returns, puts all the ogres – including Kastchei – to sleep, and shows him where a magic egg is hidden in a casket. When Ivan smashes the egg, Kastchei and his fiends disappear, the petrified knights return to life, the maidens are freed, Kastchei’s castle is transformed into a cathedral, and Ivan marries the most beautiful of the thirteen princesses.
This concert offers not one of the suites Stravinsky drew from The Firebird but instead the music for the complete ballet. This version preserves what Stravinsky called the “wastefully large” orchestra he used for the ballet, and it allows audiences to hear a great deal of generally unknown music from The Firebird.
The ominous Introduction, in the unusual key of A-flat minor, hints at the music that will be associated with the monsters; near the end of this section comes one of Stravinsky’s most striking orchestral effects, a series of rippling string glissandos played entirely in harmonics. The Enchanted Garden of Katschei leads to music that Stravinsky omitted from the suites, the Appearance of the Firebird, full of trills and tremolos from the strings. The music proceeds without pause into the shimmering, whirling Dance of the Firebird and The Firebird’s Variation, which were Stravinsky’s own favorite music from this score. But between these comes the unfamiliar Capture of the Firebird, full of quick-paced staccato writing that concludes with ringing horn attacks.
Appearance of the Thirteen Enchanted Princesses is marked by shimmering string chords, followed by a series of woodwind and violin solos and culminating in a flute cadenza. As Prince Ivan watches, the princesses engage in their Game with the Golden Apples, which bustles along energetically on its steady rhythmic pulse. Stravinsky himself was later critical of this movement, calling it too “Mendelssohnian-Tchaikovskyan,” but it is brilliant music, and it makes an effective scene in the ballet. The Sudden Appearance of Prince Ivan, with its striking horn solos, accompanies Ivan Tsarevich’s entry into the garden.
The music now proceeds into the familiar Khorovod, or Round. One of Diaghilev’s intentions had been to make The Firebird as “Russian” as possible, and Stravinsky bases The Princesses’ Khorovod on the old Russian folk-tune “In the Garden.” Announced by solo oboe as the thirteen captive princesses dance in the castle garden, the melody is then taken over by the violins and extended in the ballet’s most lyric section.
The Khorovod comes to a peaceful close, and it is at this point that listeners will find a long sequence of unfamiliar music. In the suites, the Khorovod gives way to the Infernal Dance of Katschei’s Subjects, but in the complete ballet, a number of scenes separate these two movements. Daybreak, with its fierce trumpet calls, leads to the Magic Carillon: bells ring wildly as Katstchei’s monsters appear and take Prince Ivan captive. Those monsters arrive to violent music, and then Kastchei the Immortal enters the garden on a series of brass fanfares and threatens Ivan. The princesses intercede to little avail, but the Firebird herself enters and gradually puts Katschei’s minions to sleep, and only now does the great Infernal Dance of Kastchei’s Subjects explode to life on one of the most violent orchestral attacks ever written. Sharply syncopated rhythms and barbaric snorts from the low brass depict the fiends’ efforts to resist the Firebird’s spell; without the slightest relaxation or slowing of tempo this dance powers its way to a dazzling close on a great rip of sound. In its aftermath, solo bassoon sings the gentle Berceuse, the music with which the Firebird lulls Kastchei and his followers to sleep. In the familiar suites, the Berceuse leads without pause into the Finale, but in the ballet Kastchei – rather than remaining conveniently asleep – comes back to life to the sound of contrabassoons, then bassoons, then the entire wind and brass sections. The Firebird lulls him not to sleep but to death (deep string chords), and this leads through a magical passage for tremolo strings into the Finale. Here the solo French horn sings the main theme, marked dolce and cantabile and based on another Russian folksong, “By the Gate.” Beginning quietly, this noble tune simply repeats, growing in strength as it recurs, and the ballet drives to a magnificent conclusion on music of general rejoicing.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23
PETER ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY
Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk
Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg
[~33 min.]
Peter Tchaikovsky drafted this concerto in November and December 1874, when he was a young professor at the Moscow Conservatory. Only modestly talented as a pianist and insecure about his handling of larger forms, Tchaikovsky sought the advice of Nicholas Rubinstein, head of the Conservatory and the man to whom he intended to dedicate the concerto. Rubinstein as Tchaikovsky played the new work through, and then –
“...there burst from Rubinstein’s mouth a mighty torrent of words. He spoke quietly at first, then he waxed hot, and finally he resembled Zeus hurling thunderbolts. It seems that my concerto was utterly worthless, absolutely unplayable. Certain passages were so commonplace and awkward they could not be improved, and the piece as a whole was bad, trivial, vulgar. I had stolen this from somebody and that from somebody else, so that only two or three pages were good for anything and all the rest should be wiped out or radically rewritten.”
Stung (and furious), Tchaikovsky refused to change a note, erased the dedication to Rubinstein, and instead dedicated the concerto to the German pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow, who had championed his music. Bülow promptly took the concerto on a tour of the United States, and it was in Boston on October 25, 1875, that Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was heard for the first time.
It was a huge success on that occasion, and Bülow played it repeatedly in this country to rhapsodic reviews. A critic in Boston, taking note of that success, described the concerto as an “extremely difficult, strange, wild, ultra-modern Russian Concerto.” Back in Russia the composer read the press clippings and was beside himself with happiness: “Think what healthy appetites these Americans must have! Each time Bülow was obliged to repeat the whole finale of my concerto! Nothing like that happens in our country.” Rubinstein eventually saw the error of his early condemnation and became one of the concerto’s great champions. (Also notable, in 1889 Tchaikovsky did in fact take the concerto through a major revision, and this is the form we know it as today).
The concerto has one of the most dramatic beginnings in all the literature, ringing with horn fanfares and cannonades of huge piano chords, followed by one of Tchaikovsky’s Great Tunes, in which a horn fanfare is transformed into a flowing melody for strings. This opening has become extremely famous, but this introductory section has many quirks. It is in the “wrong” key (D-flat Major), and – however striking it may be – it never returns in any form: Tchaikovsky simply abandons all this tremendous material when he gets to the main section of the movement. This “real” beginning, marked Allegro con spirito, is finally in the correct key of B-flat minor, and the piano’s skittering main subject is reportedly based on a tune Tchaikovsky heard a blind man whistle at a fair in Ukraine. To his patroness, Madame von Meck, Tchaikovsky wrote: “It is curious that in [Ukraine] every blind beggar sings exactly the same tune with the same refrain. I have used part of this refrain in my pianoforte concerto.” The expected secondary material quickly appears – a chorale-like theme for winds and a surging, climbing figure for strings – though Tchaikovsky evades expectations by including multiple cadenzas for the soloist in this movement. The piano writing is of the greatest difficulty, with much of it in great hammered octaves.
The Andantino simplice is aptly named, for this truly is simple music in the best sense of that term: over pizzicato chords, solo flute sings the gentle main theme, an island of calm after the searing first movement. A scherzo-like central episode marked Prestissimo leads to the return of the opening material. The finale, marked Allegro con fuoco, is also well named, for here is music full of fire. It is a rondo based on the piano’s nervous, dancing main theme, and while calmer episodes break into this furious rush, the principal impression this music makes is of white-hot energy, and the concerto rushes to a knock-out close that is just as impressive to audiences today as it was to that first Boston audience in 1875.
-Program note by Eric Bromberger
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Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Born September 25, 1906, St. Petersburg
Died August 9, 1975, Moscow
[~57 min.]
Dmitri Shostakovich was not a “pure” composer. He did not write music that stands beautifully alone like a jewel or an abstract sculpture. Instead, he crammed his symphonies, operas, songs, and quartets with all kinds of references, echoes, memories and feelings from the rest of his life.
His Tenth, one of his grandest and most muscular symphonies, is a classic example of this “impurity” at its richest. As we listen to it, we hear innumerable passing shadows of the music of other composers – especially of Shostakovich’s two favorites, Mussorgsky and Mahler – as well as snatches of film music, cheap dance music, military bands and, a particular obsession of Shostakovich’s at this time, klezmer (Jewish village wedding music). Whether or not each of us recognizes all these references is not the point. Shostakovich knew what he was doing, which was playing with the rich web of association and memory to which we are all joined in different ways. This is Shostakovich the public artist, the moralist.
Shostakovich took the artist’s public and moral responsibilities seriously. He once wrote furiously to a young friend who had complained that art should not contain moral instruction:
"You say you do not like it when someone stands on top of you and tells you what you already know: “Do not steal honey,” “Do not lie,” etc. … I also know one shouldn’t behave like that. And I try not to behave like that. Only it does not bore me to be told about these things yet one more time.
Probably Christ spoke about these things better than anybody… But that doesn’t take away the right to speak about them from Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, J. S. Bach, Mahler, Mussorgsky, and many others. Moreover, I consider they are obliged to talk about these matters… To remind us of these things once again is the sacred obligation of a human being…"
The brilliant, almost filmic drama of the Tenth Symphony, and its rich language of resonance and association, give this work the force of one of the composer’s most outspoken public declarations.
It is hardly surprising. The Tenth was written in the summer of 1953, in the tense months following the death of Stalin. Shostakovich did not discourage, indeed he seems actively to have encouraged, the idea that this music was a direct response to the death of the tyrant. (In fact – according to Testimony, his controversially ghostwritten “memoirs” – he specifically described the second movement as “a portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking.”)
Which brings us to a paradox: this most public of composers could be, at the same time, utterly private.
It has long been recognized that this symphony is shot through with the distinctive sound of Shostakovich’s personal cipher, the four notes D, E-flat, C, B, representing in German notation the initials D, eS, C, H (for D. Shostakovich). This is not an original idea; many composers have signed their names or initials in their works in this way – Bach and Schumann being the most famous examples. And Shostakovich himself used his cipher many times again in his later music.
What makes the four notes of his signature so distinctive is the way in which they seem to surface all over the place. At first we hear them only subtly, but by the end of the last movement, we have encountered them belted out by the whole orchestra in unison, repeated thunderously in the lower brass and strings, and finally in the closing bars, hammered out by the kettledrums against stabbing offbeat chords from the rest of the orchestra.
What can it mean, this relentless dramatizing of one’s own name in a work of art? In the past, the usual answer to this question tended to the idea of an artist’s voice opposed to the evil of Stalin and his regime. But scholars have discovered from one of Shostakovich’s private letters that there might be quite another way of understanding this.
The letter in question is addressed to an Azerbaijani student, the composer Elmira Nazirova, with whom Shostakovich was infatuated at the time. To Elmira, he revealed that in the slow movement, as well as his own name, he had secretly encoded her name too. He also pointed out that the musical notes he gets from her name – E, A, E, D, A (where the middle three are derived from the sol-fa names Lah, Me and Ray) – are close to the opening horn call of one of his favorite pieces, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Once you know that it is there, the Elmira theme is easy to spot. It is the unchanging horn call (usually solo) that appears 12 times during the slow movement.
Although the discovery of this Elmira theme might be thought just a curiosity – a merely private matter – it does have the advantage of shaking us away from the cliché of treating the language and rhetoric of this symphony simply as a response to history. It may even be that part of the growing fascination which many music lovers feel for this composer is to be found precisely in the often strange but alluring way in which he constantly balances the extremely public and garishly blatant with its opposite—the extremely private and often downright enigmatic.
In connection with this, about nine months before composing this symphony, Shostakovich wrote a haunting and little-known song to words by Pushkin. There are definite echoes of the twisting, waltz-like music of the song in the slow movement, the “Elmira” movement, of this Tenth Symphony. When one looks at Pushkin’s words in the song, one can imagine why:
What is there in my name for you?
It will die, like the sad sound
Of waves, splashing on a distant shore,
Like a sound at night in the deep forest.
On the leaf of memory,
It will leave a dead trace,
Like the outline of an inscription on a grave
In an incomprehensible language.
What is there in it? Forgotten long ago
In new and restless disturbances,
It will not bring pure and
Tender memories to your soul.
But in the day of sorrow, in silence,
Pronounce it longingly.
Say: There is a memory of me;
In the world there is a heart where I live.
Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony is in four movements. After the sombre opening Moderato, a wild scherzo comes second. The third movement, introducing his own name, Elmira’s, and the waltz-like suggestions of the Pushkin song, is slow, but not so slow. It carries Shostakovich’s favorite and most deliberately equivocating tempo marking: Allegretto. The finale begins quietly but gathers ever greater force, like a cinematic chase on a huge scale.
-Program note by Gerard McBurney
Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major
FRANZ LISZT
Born October 22, 1811, Raiding, Hungary
Died July 11, 1886, Bayreuth
[~19 min.]
During Franz Liszt’s youth, which was spent as a traveling virtuoso, he performed piano concertos by a number of composers, including Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn and others. So it is surprising that it took him so long to write one of his own. In 1830, while still a teenager, Liszt made the first sketches for what would eventually become his First Piano Concerto, but he had doubts about his ability with the form (and about his ability to write for orchestra), and he set the sketches aside. He began to rework them nearly 20 years later, in 1849, after he had given up the life of a touring virtuoso and become music director at Weimar. He revised the concerto once again in 1853 and finally had it ready to perform two years after that. Liszt himself was soloist at the premiere in Weimar on February 17, 1855. The conductor was Hector Berlioz. The premiere was a great success, but Liszt was still not satisfied with the concerto and revised it one final time after the premiere.
The most striking feature of the concerto – which is in the compact span of only 18 minutes – is that its movements are joined and are unified around the same thematic material: themes presented in the opening movements return in quite different forms as the concerto proceeds. The model usually cited for this is Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, a work Liszt loved and performed frequently, though the technique of transforming the same thematic material across a multi-movement work was fundamental to many of Liszt’s own works.
Liszt found writing for orchestra a challenge, and he had substantial help with scoring the First Piano Concerto from composer Joachim Raff. Liszt himself, however, was responsible for the final version. The orchestration of this concerto is varied and imaginative. There are dramatic moments for full orchestra, but more often Liszt creates a leaner sonority, often with just a few instruments playing: There are important solo passages in this concerto for viola, cello, two violins, and various woodwinds. And, Liszt used one instrument that got him into a lot of trouble.
The Allegro maestoso bursts to life with a fierce gesture for strings, punctuated by responses from the winds. This will become one of the concerto’s fundamental theme-shapes, but Liszt departs from tradition by having the soloist immediately launch into a cadenza, and the character of this cadenza is made clear by Liszt’s marking for the pianist: grandioso, marcatissimo, a capriccio, strepitoso (“noisy”). The opening gesture returns in many forms, but there are also graceful solos from the clarinet and other instruments, and the movement comes to a surprisingly restrained close.
The Quasi Adagio opens with another seminal theme, here first presented by cellos and basses. When the piano takes this up, in a passage marked con espressione, the spirit of Liszt’s friend Chopin seems to hover over the music. Things grow more impassioned, the music proceeds directly into the Allegretto vivace (the concerto’s scherzo), and at this point comes a surprise: Liszt creates an important part here for the triangle. Liszt was shredded for it by conservative critics, chief among them Eduard Hanslick of Vienna, who sneered at this music as a “Concerto for Triangle.”
The finale, marked Allegro marziale animato, opens with a powerful idea from the winds, and only gradually do we realize that this is a complete transformation of the luminous main theme of the second movement – what had been espressivo on its first appearance has magically become marziale: “martial.” This final movement reprises a number of ideas heard earlier, including the opening gesture and the part for triangle, before rushing to an exciting close, full of the sound of hammered octaves in the piano.
-Program note by Eric Bromberger
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Symphony No. 6 in A minor, "Tragic"
GUSTAV MAHLER
Born July 7, 1860, Kaliště, Czechia
Died May 18, 1911, Vienna, Austria
[~79 min.]
The creative journey of Gustav Mahler was a dizzying one, even by the standards of other great composers. Over little more than three decades from the late 19th century to the early 20th, he travelled from the post-Romantic world of Das klagende Lied (The Song of Lamentation) and the First Symphony; through dazzlingly varied landscapes of world-embracing visions and half-remembered folk-tunes in his Symphonies 2, 3 and 4; before returning to blisteringly inventive symphonic discourse in the next three symphonies; and then on past the vast choral edifice of Symphony No. 8 (seemingly tackling Beethoven head-on) to the Ninth and unfinished Tenth, framing Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) – all three of these last masterpieces forming a mighty bridge between the whole long history of earlier European music and the harshness, brutality and suffering of the modern world.
Somewhere around the midpoint of this astonishing trajectory, we find the Sixth Symphony, composed through 1903 and 1904, before being substantially revised and reorchestrated in 1906.
More than any other, his Sixth is the symphony in which Mahler discovered a new language for himself, and pushed his artistic and philosophical vision forward into worlds never before explored by any composer.
Which makes it curious that in some ways, this is the most tradition-conscious symphony he ever wrote: four movements (unlike some of his earlier symphonies with five or even six movements), with a sonata-form first movement, a scherzo and a slow movement, and a wild finale which seems to gather into itself all the music of the three other movements that came before. The orchestra is enormous, but there are no voices and no words; from beginning to end, this is pure orchestral music.
And yet, from the first bars, in every detail of this rich and complex music, we find ourselves hurled into a whirling snowstorm of strangeness. Everything seems created to seem strange. The harmonies are strange, sometimes sickly sweet, often brutal and twisted. The melodies are strange, sprouting in every direction and unfolding like fast-growing trees in a jungle. The orchestration is not just strange, but often savage and wild in sound and making huge demands on the musicians.
Even the composer himself seems to have struggled to understand what it was that he had created. After the first performance, which he himself conducted in 1906 in Essen, Germany (we should remember that Mahler was one of the greatest conductors who have ever lived), he gnawed and pawed over the score, changing astonishing numbers of details, especially of orchestration, and worrying about different possible combinations of instrumental sound, and especially – and most famously – about the legendary hammer that he asked for in the last movement… the "hammer of fate," as he apparently called it. In the first version of the symphony, there were five blows of this hammer, which he later reduced to three blows and then later on just to two. (It was said that he was superstitiously worried about the symbolism of three.) Some conductors today use two blows, others three.
And what about the actual sound of this hammer? He said he wanted it "like the fall of an axe," but he also said that he wanted nothing metallic in the sound and as little reverberance as possible, like the sound of wood on wood. There was no instrument like that, so orchestras have had to invent it.
He also decided to change the structure of the symphony, by reversing the order of the two central movements.
His original conception was as follows:
An epic first movement.
A wild scherzo, which takes some of the ideas from the first movement and twists and changes and transforms them even further.
An overpoweringly beautiful and emotional slow movement, about the gorgeous opening melody of which Mahler apparently told his wife Alma that it was a ‘portrait’ of her (how a melody can be a portrait is anyone’s guess, but certainly every note of this music suggests a love-song).
And a vast finale, lasting about half an hour.
However, as Mahler conducted the rehearsals for the first performance, he began to feel that something was not quite right about this shape, and so, after agonizing over it and discussing with friends and colleagues he changed the order of the central two movements to make this quite different effect:
Allegro opening movement – slow movement – scherzo – finale
Ever since he made this decision, performers and musicians have argued as to whether his first thought was better or his second. To this day, you can hear wonderful performances and recordings done in both these different ways. Our own Music and Artistic Director Rafael Payare definitely prefers Mahler’s second thought (his final decision), and so this is the way you will hear this music at this concert: with the slow movement second, followed by the scherzo.
There’s another argument about this piece too: concerning its supposed title. On the score and in publication and early performances, the piece is just called Symphony No. 6. But quite early on, the rumor started that Mahler himself had wanted to call this symphony, the "Tragic." Mahler’s friend and protégé, the great conductor Bruno Walter was adamant that was what Mahler himself had told him. But others, who knew Mahler just as well, have poured scorn on this idea and said that Mahler never wanted to give this piece a title. Probably we will never know the truth.
Mahler wrote this masterpiece in his beautiful composing hut in the forest on a steep hillside above the southern Austrian lake of the Wörthersee, just a few hundred yards above his elegant summer villa on the lake shore. (Mahler was an inveterate swimmer and oarsman and kept a boat down at a jetty on the shore.) Behind the hut – which is still there – rise the jagged and towering mountains of the Carinthian Alps, while at the front, from the window above his desk, Mahler looked out through green trees at the waters of the lake and northwards to the village where Brahms (whom Mahler had known well) in earlier years had spent several summers and composed several masterpieces.
For Mahler, a feeling of landscape and place – and especially a place far from the crowded city, where he could be surrounded by nature, water and mountains – was always an important aspect of his musical imagination. As he once said to a friend who visited him one summer in the countryside: “I have written everything you see into my music!” So, as we listen to this colossal score, we should have no fear of imagining for ourselves the beautiful and spectacular alpine landforms all around him.
-Program note by Gerard McBurney
Margariteña
INOCENTE CARREÑO
Born December 28, 1919, Porlamar, Margarita Island, Venezuela
Died June 29, 2016, Porlamar
[~14 min.]
Inocente Carreño was born on the island of Margarita off the coast of Venezuela, and he died there nearly a century later. Over the span of his long life, Carreño was a central figure in Venezuela’s vibrant musical life. Carreño taught theory at the José Lamas School of Music and other schools, and for a quarter-century he played horn in the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra. (He also sang and played guitar and trumpet.) Carreño conducted throughout Venezuela, helped found music schools, and in his 60s he served as Venezuela’s ambassador to UNESCO in Paris. At 90, he led the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra in concerts in Caracas. Carreño led the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of Margariteña at the First Festival of Latin American Music in Caracas on November 25, 1954.
Carreño was a prolific composer, but by far his most famous work is Margariteña, composed in 1954. Carreño said the piece was an act of homage to the island where he was born; he based it on the folk song "Margarita es una lagrima" (Margarita Is a Tear) and other folk songs. Carreño subtitled the piece "glosa sinfónica" or “Symphonic Variations.” His method is to introduce the various folk songs in turn, and then over the 14-minute span of the piece he varies and builds those melodies into an exciting climax. Solo horn introduces the gracefully arching main theme of "Margarita es una lagrima," which will serve as the backbone of this music; over the next few minutes Carreño introduces the folk songs "Canto de Pulon" and "Canto de velorio," as well as the children’s song "Tiguitiguitos." As the music builds to its climax the opening theme for horn – so quiet at the beginning – now returns to drive Margariteña to its ringing conclusion. Carreño led the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of Margariteña at the First Festival of Latin American Music in Caracas on November 25, 1954.
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Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Born April 23, 1891, Sontsovka
Died March 5, 1953, Moscow
[~34 min.]
It is hard to believe that this concerto – one of the most difficult ever written for the piano – is the work of a music student. Sergei Prokofiev was still a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory when he completed it in April 1913, the same month he turned 22. His energetic First Piano Concerto had created something of a furor at its premiere in 1912 – Alexander Glazunov described it as “a harmful trend” – and now the young composer set out to write music with more substance: “The charges of surface brilliance and a certain ‘soccer’ quality in the First led me to strive for greater depth of content in the Second.” Prokofiev was the soloist at the premiere of the Second Piano Concerto, which took place at Pavlovsk, a resort town near St. Petersburg, on September 5, 1913.
The young composer should have seen trouble coming. The audience at Pavlovsk was made up in large part of people on vacation, and they came expecting the sort of lighter fare usually heard on summer series. Instead, they got their ears scorched. The critic Vyacheslav Karatïgin described the audience as “frozen with fright, hair standing on end.” They hissed the music and drifted out during the performance so that, by the end, only a fraction of the original audience remained. These, though, were vocal enough. One critic quoted them: “To the devil with all this futurist music! We came here to enjoy ourselves. The cats at home can make music like this!” Another critic described the concerto as “a cacophony of sounds that has nothing in common with civilized music.” Prokofiev’s reaction was utterly characteristic: he returned to the stage, faced the jeering audience, bowed deeply, and sat down and played an equally abrasive encore.
Prokofiev left the score and parts to the Second Piano Concerto behind in Russia when he fled the Communist Revolution in 1917. In his absence, mobs broke into his apartment in Moscow, set it afire, and burned everything in it, including all the material for the concerto. Prokofiev was faced with having to recreate a now-vanished piece of music, and in 1923 – while living near Oberammagau in the Bavarian Alps – he gathered his sketches and reproduced the concerto. How closely the recreation resembles the original can never be known, but Prokofiev felt that the intervening ten years had made him a better composer and that the new version was an improvement. Prokofiev was soloist and Koussevitzky the conductor at the premiere of the revised version in Paris on May 8, 1924.
The Second Piano Concerto has an unusual form: two big outer movements frame two shorter inner movements. The solo piano part is perfectly suited to Prokofiev’s own virtues as a pianist, combining a steely brilliance one moment with a seductive lyricism the next. The first movement gets off to a deceptive beginning, with an almost dreamy first subject played in quiet octaves by the piano – only a web of soft dissonances in the accompaniment suggests the complexity ahead. The second section, marked Allegretto, opens with a jaunty staccato idea for the pianist, and these lead into one of the most gargantuan, knuckle-busting cadenzas ever conceived. This cadenza, in effect, serves as the development section of the first movement. It begins quietly at first but grows in complexity and power (some of it is written on three staves) until it reaches a grand climax marked both triple forte and precipitato. The orchestra makes a powerful brassy return, and the movement trails off to an unexpectedly quiet conclusion.
After the massive first movement, the second whips past in barely two minutes. This is a blistering perpetual-motion for the soloist, who plays a steady rush of sixteenths right through to the sudden, emphatic final chord. Prokofiev titled the third movement Intermezzo, but rather than being a quiet interlude it gets off to a massive beginning: the steady slog of great chords marked pesante, like the lumbering gait of some primordial beast, gives way to a quiet interlude. The return of the opening material feels mechanistic, and the pianist decorates this with brilliant runs.
The marking of the finale movement, Allegro tempestoso, gives some indication of its character. The violent beginning, glittering in its color and athleticism, leads to the violas’ rocking ostinato and a more reflective interlude for piano. Once again, Prokofiev offers the soloist a huge and challenging cadenza before the furies of the opening return and the Second Piano Concerto rips to a conclusion that will seem nearly as savage to contemporary listeners as it did to that unsuspecting first audience just over a century ago.
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Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43
JEAN SIBELIUS
Born December 8, 1865, Tavastahus, Finland
Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland
[~45 min.]
Jean Sibelius composed his Second Symphony in Italy in 1901 when he was 35, and it has become one of the most popular symphonies ever written. It is easily Sibelius’ most popular symphony, it is a favorite of audiences around the world, and it is a favorite of performers too. This popularity has been explained in various ways. Some sense the sunny atmosphere of Italy warming Sibelius’ austere Scandinavian sensibilities. Others hear a Finlandia-like program that dramatizes Finland’s struggle for national identity in the face of foreign domination. But Sibelius would have had none of this. He wanted his music considered abstractly – as sound-drama and not as a vehicle for extra-musical interpretation. There is no doubt that the Second Symphony, in all its austere grandeur, is a stunning success as sound-drama.
Sibelius’ music has the sweep of the true symphonist, yet his symphonic methods are unique. Rather than presenting themes and then developing them, a Sibelius symphony will often present its themes at first only as fragmentary shapes. These shapes can come together to assume a more complete form within the course of a movement, but then shatter into fragments once again. And this transformation of material takes place during violent contrasts of mood, long buildups that culminate in a constant series of climaxes, and great splashes of instrumental color that burst out of the leaden skies of Sibelius’ musical landscape. These methods may be unique, but they take us on a true symphonic journey: across the 40-minute span of the Second Symphony, Sibelius moves inexorably from the tentative beginning through the battlefields of the interior movements to the thrilling culmination of the heroic finale. No wonder this is one of the most emotionally satisfying – and most popular – symphonies ever written.
Many have noted that Sibelius seems to reverse the sequence of the first two movements. Rather than opening with a dramatic movement, Sibelius begins with a gentle Allegretto. The pulsing string figures at the opening will recur throughout, and over them woodwinds sing an almost innocent tune. These theme-shapes return in a variety of forms, but the movement resolves nothing and concludes on the same tentative chords with which it began. The drama one expects from a first movement erupts in the second, marked Tempo Andante. Over the deep pizzicato opening, a pair of bassoons chant the main theme, aptly marked lugubre, and soon the music explodes in furious brass and percussion outbursts. Such episodes alternate with melting lyricism in a lengthy movement that is never at peace for long.
The scherzo arrives like a blast of wind across frozen tundra. Its brief trio section, marked lento e suave, is in the unusual meter of 12/4. Solo oboe sings its gentle song, built of a number of repeated notes. A sudden return of the scherzo leads to a further surprise: Sibelius brings back the music of the trio one more time before the symphony proceeds – on gradually more excited waves of sound – directly into the finale.
This concluding Allegro moderato is heroic in every sense of the term: its broad D-Major opening strides ahead in thunderous octaves so powerfully that one may miss the fact that this appears to be a variation of the woodwind tune from the symphony’s very beginning, now played backwards. Trumpet fanfares and throbbing accompaniment push this music steadily forward, and this heroic beginning might prove anticlimactic were it not for Sibelius’ control of his material. More lyric secondary music intervenes, and Sibelius continually delays the return of the home key of D Major until the shining return of the main theme in the triumphant final moments.
-Program notes by Eric Bromberger
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