Wunderkinds of Music
November 39, 2009 — 3 pm
Sanders Theatre
Gunther Schuller, Principal Guest Conductor
Winners, 2009 Concerto Competition, Guest Soloists
Shostakovich,
Cello Concerto No. 1, First Movement
Jonah Ellsworth, Cello
Beethoven,
Piano Concerto No. 3, First Movement
Daniel Kim, Piano
Mozart,
Overture to Don Giovanni
Honegger,
Symphony No. 2
Dvořák,
Nottorno Op. 40
Dimitri Shostakovich
Cello Concerto No. 1, Opus 107 (first movement)
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on August 25, 1906, and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. He composed his First Cello Concerto in 1959, for Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in Leningrad on October 4, 1959; Evgeny Mravinksy conducted the Leningrad Philharmonic. In addition to the solo cello, the score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), horn, timpani, celesta, and strings. Pro Arte last played this concerto with Yo-Yo Ma in 2007.
Shostakovich became famous at the age of nineteen with his Symphony No. 1. He was thus in the public eye for most of his life, a difficult place to be during periods of governmental control of the arts. Except for his sassy early piano concerto with strings and trumpet, he did not evince much interest in the concerto form until rather late in life, when he wrote a second piano concerto and two concertos each for the violin and the cello. All these works were composed only after the death of Stalin had, to some degree, loosened the strictures under which composers worked in Russia. In fact, Shostakovich had written his first violin concerto, one of his most original works, in the late 1940s, but he withheld it at that time and only brought it out in a "revised" edition in 1955.
The first cello concerto came a few years later. The soloist begins at once, introducing the fundamental motivic figure G, E, B, B flat, of which both the melodic outline and the characteristic rhythm dominate the proceedings, lively and chattering, but not really lighthearted. Rather it drives on with unremitting energy, fed by the virtuosic part for the solo horn. At times the intervals of the principal motif are squeezed together to produce a similar motif on C, B, E flat, D; this is a variant of Shostakovich's musical signature (D, E flat, C, B, which, in German musical terminology, would be read DSCH, for "D. SCHostakovich"). This personal musical reference is found frequently in Shostakovich's later works, and it gives the strong feeling of the composer himself asserting publicly, "I did this."
Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Opus 37 (first movement)
Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. Sketches for this concerto appear as early as 1796 or 1797, though the principal work of composition came in the summer of 1800. It may have been revised at the end of 1802 for the first performance, which took place in Vienna on April 5, 1803, with the composer as soloist. Sometime after completing the concerto—but before 1809—Beethoven wrote a cadenza, possibly for the Archduke Rudolph; most modern soloists play that cadenza. In addition to solo piano, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
When the concerto was first performed, it was part of a lengthy concert that Beethoven produced to introduce several of his newest works (this concerto, the Second Symphony, and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives); he also inserted the First Symphony, already becoming a favorite in Vienna, to attract the audiences. Critical response to the concerto ranged from lukewarm to cold; in fact, the only thing that really pleased the audience, it seems, was the familiar First Symphony. Still, in a pattern familiar throughout Beethoven's life, a work that was spurned at its premiere quickly established itself in the public favor. When Beethoven's pupil Ries played the second performance, the prestigious Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitschrift declared it to be "indisputably one of Beethoven's most beautiful compositions. "
Beethoven pays specific homage to Mozart's C-minor concerto, K. 491. That work contains a magical moment at the very end of the first movement, which Beethoven seems to echo intentionally. Beethoven's first movement begins with a lengthy orchestral statement that lays out all the thematic material at once, beginning with a marchlike theme pregnant with possibilities that closes the first phrase with a rhythmic "knocking" motive clearly invented with the timpani in mind (although Beethoven does not explicitly reveal that fact yet).
Much of the "action" of the first movement involves the gradually increasing predominance of the knocking motive, especially when the soloist engineers a definitive modulation to the new key. It completely dominates the development section, which twines other thematic ideas over the recurring staccato commentary of that rhythm. The recapitulation does not emphasize the knocking beyond what is minimally necessary for the restatement; even the cadenza, which Beethoven composed some years after the rest of the concerto, is based on all the important thematic ideas except the knocking rhythm. The reason appears as the cadenza ends. Beethoven (following the example of Mozart's C-minor concerto) allows the piano to play through to the end of the movement, rather than simply stopping with the chord that marks the reentry of the orchestra, as happens in earlier concertos. At last the timpani get the original knocking motive, played softly behind a wash of hushed arabesques in the piano. Here for the first time in Beethoven's concerto output he produces one of those magical "after the cadenza" moments of other-worldly effect, moments for which listeners to his later concertos wait with eager anticipation.
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Overture to Don Giovanni, K. 527
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who called himself Wolfgang Amadè after 1777, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna, Austria, on December 5, 1791. He composed his opera Don Giovanni to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte during the summer and early fall of 1787 for performance in Prague, where it was produced under the composer's direction on October 29 that year. The overture was the last part of the opera to be composed: it was apparently written on the night of October 27-28. The overture is scored for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
Mozart's first great opera buffa, The Marriage of Figaro, became a sensation in Prague after middling success in Vienna. When he was invited to compose a new opera specifically for Prague, he naturally attempted to recreate the successful formula of Figaro. His librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote for a cast almost identical to that of Figaro with the same mixture of the comic and the serious that had made such a vivid theatrical experience. The theme of Don Juan, the inveterate seeker after sensory pleasures, runs through European literature. Da Ponte produced a libretto that shows the amorous Don finally receiving his comeuppance via the supernatural apparition of the statue of an elderly, upright military man, the Commendatore, whom Don Giovanni (the Italian equivalent of Don Juan) had killed in a duel in which the Commendatore was attempting to avenge Giovanni's seduction of his daughter.
Overtures in the classical opera rarely attempted to foreshadow the drama to come. The Don Giovanni overture, however, provides more of a hint than most in the powerful opening music in D minor, which comes in the opera when a statue of the Commendatore comes to demand that Don Giovanni repent his misspent life. Though the rest of the overture is a sunny D-major Allegro, we can never quite forget the shudder that the opening music brings, and it naturally affects the way we hear the remainder of the opera.
Arthur Honegger
Symphony No. 2
Arthur Honegger was born in Le Havre on March 10, 1892, and died in Paris on November 27, 1955. He composed his Symphony No. 2 in Paris during the fall of 1941, completing the score in October. The symphony is dedicated to Paul Sacher, who conducted the Collegium Musicum Zürich in the first performance in Zürich on May 18, 1942. The score calls for string orchestra with a trumpet (ad lib.) in the closing measures of the last movement. Duration is about 25 minutes.
The casual mottos and oversimplified sloganeering—what we might call "music history by pigeonhole"—have caused Arthur Honegger to be thought of as a member of a group to which he had no fundamental affinity, the "Groupe des Six" that existed (insofar as it ever was an established entity at all) in Paris for a very short period around 1920. According to potted histories of the '20s, the example of Eric Satie encouraged a younger generation of French musicians to attack (largely by humor and parody) the conventions and the ultra-seriousness of the musical establishment.
But Honegger, a composer of very serious mien, never really was comfortable in the group and, indeed, got involved almost by accident, through some performances in the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. In fact, he cordially disliked Satie (who reciprocated) and had little sympathy with the aesthetic aims of the movement. His artistic interests were as much German as French, which would normally have put him in quite a different camp. All in all, the serious young composer, who was soon to turn to the Bible for his quasi-oratorio Le roi David, was in no sense a boulevardier. Perhaps the most direct musical reflection of this fact is Honegger's passion for the chorale in his music (including the last section of the Symphony No. 2), a trait developed through the experience of hearing Bach's cantatas performed in the Protestant church at Le Havre during his youth.
Honegger's Second Symphony was commissioned by Paul Sacher, who asked him late in the 1930s to compose a new symphony for one of the two musical ensembles he conducted, either the Basel Chamber Orchestra or the Zurich Collegium Musicum. Honegger made a few sketches, but eventually confessed that he was unable to make progress on the work. The impetus that saw the composition of the Symphony No. 2 in 1941 was an external one, a shock to the civilized world—the fall of Paris to the Germans.
Honegger was outside of Paris at the time of the city's fall, but after his return to Paris, he sublimated his understandable depression in the musical expression of outrage and hope—a striking mood to be found in a work completed in September 1941.
The first movement begins with a chantlike, lamenting phrase in the solo viola, expressing a mood of frustrated sadness (limited as it is to three pitches). We will hear a great deal of it in the events to follow. The Allegro that soon comes in brings with it a driving, pounding unison theme of the starkest possible contrast, soon followed by a more lyrical phrase high in the violins and cellos. These materials interact in energetic dialogue, but the "lament" constantly takes over, especially at the climactic passage of the movement, where it is found (at different speeds) simultaneously in first and second violins fortissimo. The violas, softly reiterating the original form of the lament, recall the opening mood, which echoes in our minds against one last statement of the more vigorous Allegro theme.
The slow movement (the first to be composed) reaches a still higher level of emotional stress. A pulsating rhythmic ostinato in the accompaniment introduces a nervously expressive, flowing melody in the cello, soon passing to first violin. Both accompaniment and melody refer often to a gently shuddering semitone figure that recalls the lament of the first movement. After building to a full-voiced climax, the shudder invades the accompaniment in the form of agitated triplets, against which the double basses wail a lamenting cantilena. The movement gradually dies away amid continual sobbing laments.
The last movement comes as a shock. The 6/8 Vivace would seem to be analogous to the lively rondo finales of a Haydn symphony. But here the humor is grim indeed and the harmony altogether grittier. The first violins introduce a melody in a pure C-sharp major over a constantly reiterated chord of D major in the second violins. Rapid gestures in viola and cello leap with unbounded energy, generating a powerful tumult. The first climax collapses almost to nothing, but a fugato builds again to a heady rhythmic section in which the cellos and basses maintain the rolling 6/8 of the meter, while the violins play against it a pattern of five eighth-notes and rests, so that each pattern begins at a different point in the measure. The tempo increases to Presto, and soon the trumpet enters, doubling the first violins in a simple melody in D major that sounds for all the world like a Bach chorale. In fact, the stormy rolling of the string parts throughout the movement against the rock-steady chorale melody at the end strikingly recalls J.S. Bach's setting of the third stanza of Martin Luther's hymn "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott" ("A mighty fortress is our God") in his cantata built around that chorale (BWV 80). Luther's text for the third stanza, "Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär'" (usually translated "And though this world with devils filled / Should threaten to undo us...") suggested to Bach just this sort of wild, boiling texture, with the orchestral strings representing the "devils" surrounding the chorus of faithful intoning the hymn tune. Honegger wished to regard his symphony as an abstract musical construction, but we would find it difficult to overlook the patent expressive element that clearly lurks here, and anyone who knows Bach's Cantata 80 can scarcely avoid reading into the close of the final movement a meaning of hope through perseverance.
Antonin Dvořák
Notturno in B major, Opus 40
Antonín Dvořá was born in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. The history of the Notturno in B major—from a string quartet through several reworkings—is traced below. It calls for a string orchestra. Duration is about 7 minutes.
Many of Dvořák's earliest works are string quartets, a natural consequence of the fact that he himself played viola and violin and that he could no doubt assemble a group of friends to try out his newest piece. The budding composer spent the years 1862 (when he was twenty-one) to 1873 in the viola section of the Czech National Theater orchestra in Prague. He also played in orchestras assembled for other musical events, the most significant of which was for Wagner's appearance in February 1863 to conduct some of his recent music. The program included excerpts from Die Meistersinger, Die Walküre, and Tristan.
The young Dvořák was entranced; for a number of years thereafter he became a thorough Wagnerian, but only gradually absorbing those elements of Wagner's style that were congenial to his own, and discarding the rest. In 1869 and 1870, still under the Wagnerian influence, Dvořák composed three string quartets, in B-flat, D, and E minor. Sometime later, in an excess of critical passion, he destroyed them all as unworthy of his goals. But the performing parts survived, so the scores could be reconstructed. All of these quartets betray Dvořák's Wagnerian fervor, with the "endless melody," sequential chromatic harmonies, and climactic intensification.
The most interesting part of the discarded quartets is the slow movement, Andante religioso, of the E-minor quartet. Antonin Dvořák salvaged this material and reworked it twice. First he added a part for double-bass and inserted it as the first of two slow movements in his G-major string quintet, Opus 77. Then, deciding that "two slow movements seemed to be too much," he removed it from the quintet, reworked it for string orchestra, and sent it out into the world as the Nocturne, Opus 40. It was one of the pieces Dvořák conducted in London in 1884, where it shared a program with the Scherzo Capriccioso. These concerts, as well as the overwhelming success of Dvořák's Stabat Mater, established his popularity in England and led directly to the Philharmonic Society's commissioning of the Seventh Symphony.
© Copyright 2009. Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)