Night of Bald Mountain - Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)

Mussorgsky was the most daring and most talented member of the group of composers known as ‘The Russian Five.” Born in Karevo, in northwestern Russia, Mussorgsky had little musical training other than some lessons on the piano. Most of his life was spent in government service, as an officer in the Imperial Guard and as a clerk in the communications and forestry departments. The turning point in his career came in his early twenties when a group of young Russian musicians, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balakirev, and Cui, persuaded Mussorgsky to join them in establishing a style of music based on Russian folk music and stories. He was encouraged to throw away German and Italian models and to invent his own musical language, which was generally nationalistic and individual. The lack of musical training that made Mussorgsky so inventive musically also made him unsure of himself and his work. He began to drink heavily, and this undoubtedly led to his early death. Many composers, in the years since 1900, have followed the musical paths first opened by Mussorgsky. No composer with so little musical education ranks with Mussorgsky in influence upon other composers.

Mussorgsky wrote no sonatas, concertos, or symphonies. His instrumental works are primarily musical paintings, such as Night on Bald Mountain and Pictures at an Exhibition, written in 1874. These works are completely original, unlike anything else written at the time. Night on Bald Mountain, which Mussorgsky called St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain, is programmatic music which Mussorgsky described this way. “If my memory does not deceive me, the witches used to gather on this mountain to gossip, play tricks, and await their chief, Satan. On his arrival, the witches would form a circle around his throne and sing his praise. When Satan was sufficiently worked up by the witches’ praises, he would give the command for the Sabbath, in which he chose for himself the witches who caught his fancy. My St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain is, in form and character, Russian. I want to feel sure that it is thoroughly in keeping with historic truth and Russian folk tradition. I wrote it quickly, in 12 days, without any preliminary rough drafts. It seethed within me.” This work comes as close as music can to making a listener “see” what he is hearing.

Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129 - Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Sharon Bogas, cello soloist

The son of a bookseller, Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony. At an early age, he showed ability as a pianist and a composer, as well as exhibiting literary leanings. In 1821 Schumann went to Leipzig to study law, but by 1930 he gave up the law and went to live with his piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, to pursue a pianist’s career. He soon had trouble with his hands and devoted his time to composition. Schumann founded a music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, and served as its editor and leading writer for ten years. He was a brilliant and perceptive critic. His writings embodied the most progressive aspects of musical thinking in his time, and he drew attention to many promising young composers. Schumann married the love of his life, Clara Wieck, in 1840 and the years immediately following his marriage were the happiest of his life. Clara was a concert pianist and Schumann wrote many beautiful piano pieces for her. 1840 is called his “year of song” because he wrote 150 songs, including most of his finest, at this time. During the next few years, Schumann turned to writing orchestral music, concertos, chamber music, choral music and opera. Schumann suffered from manic depression and he died in an asylum in 1856, cared for at the end by Clara and the young Brahms.

Schumann’s elegant Cello Concerto was composed in Dusseldorf in October 1850, where he served as town musical director. This work was not performed until 1860, in Leipzig, at a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Schumann’s birth. This concerto was long neglected, but is now regarded as one of the most significant and the equal of Haydn’s and Dvorak’s. Among its special merits may be mentioned the perfect suitability to the instrument of its songlike motifs.

Symphonie Fantastique - Hector Berliz (1803-1869)

Hector Berlioz was considered to be the father of French Romanticism in music. His music was always extremely original and grand in scale. As a result of his extreme ideas, he was often viewed as a crazy lunatic by many of his contemporaries. Fortunately, many of his great works survived. These days, some of his most famous works, including Symphnie Fantastique, The Damnation of Faust, and The Requiem, are periodically performed in concert halls. As a boy, Berlioz learned the flute, guitar and, from treatises alone, harmony. However, he never studied the piano. After two unhappy years as a medical student in Paris, he abandoned the career chosen for him by his father and turned decisively to music, attending Le Sueur’s composition class at the Conservatoire. Among the most powerful influences on him were Shakespeare, whose plays were to inspire three major works, and the actress, Harriet Smithson, whom he idolized, pursued, and eventually married. A lofty idealist with a leaping imagination, Berlioz was subject to violent emotional changes from enthusiasm to misery; only his sharp wit saved him from morbid self-pity over the disappointments in his private and professional life. The intensity of his personality is inextricably woven into the music. It seemed that Berlioz lived in a time of great musical flux. He was the supreme innovator of the early Romantic period, and without his work much of the music written after wouldn’t be conceivable. But such is the way the musical world works, that later in his life his work was looked upon almost as old-fashioned, much as Bach’s music was by his sons. Many studied his music, such as Richard Strauss and Mahler, but, on the whole, Berlioz joined the ranks of composers such as Bach and Vivaldi, to have been almost forgotten by the succeeding generations. Fortunately, like Bach and Vivaldi, Berlioz’s music has enjoyed a resurgence in recent times and his true significance as a composer and innovator is slowly becoming clearer.

Symphonie Fantastique, also title “Episode in the Life of an Artist,” was the first symphony by Berlioz and also one of the most original and fanciful works of the 19^th century. Completed in February 1830, the programmatic symphony described a romantic tale of a young artist meeting a woman, his un-reciprocated love, and the eventual tragic sequences. The story was concocted from Berlioz’s own despair and love for Harriet Smithson, the English actress who first dazzled Berlioz by playing Orphelia in a Paris production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. On its first performance on December 5, 1830, Berlioz handed out written programs of the symphony for the audience prior to its performance, a practice unheard of before. The concert was a great success. In this work, Berlioz gave us a full fancy of a tale that involved romance, a ball, a suicide, a guillotine, and a Witch’s Sabbath! Each of these events was imaginatively depicted by musical ideas of their own kind. For instance, the March to the Guillotine movement ends by having plucked strings representing the skips of a chopped head! This symphony was a first of its kind in every way.

November 21 Concert Notes

Appalachian Spring - Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Russian Jews who immigrated to America. The immigration authorities misspelled their name, Kaplan, and Copland it remained. At sixteen, he began studying with Rubin Goldmark in Manhattan, and at twenty, he left for the Summer School of Music for American Students at Fountainebleau, France. In France, Copland found a musical community unlike any he had known, and it was at this time that he sold his first composition. His first works relied heavily on the jazz idioms of the time. For Copland, jazz was the first genuinely American major musical movement. From jazz, he hoped to draw the inspiration for a new type of symphonic music, one that could distinguish itself from the music of Europe. By incorporating popular forms of American music such as jazz and folk into his compositions, he created pieces both exceptional and innovative. In the late 1920s, Copland moved away from jazz and began to concern himself with expanding the audience for American classical music. He believed that classical music could eventually be as popular as jazz in America. It was around this same time that his plans for an American music festival (similar to ones in Europe) materialized as the Yaddo Festival of American Music. By the mid-‘30s, Copland had become not only one of the most popular composers in the country, but a leader of the community of American classical musicians. His generous work as a teacher at Tanglewood, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research gained him a following of devoted musicians. As a scholar, he wrote more than sixty articles and essays on music as well as five books. He traveled the world in an attempt to elevate the status of American music abroad, and to increase its popularity at home. Through these various commitments to music and to his country, Aaron Copland became one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American music.

Copland’s Appalachian Spring captures the essence of an ideal America, one of open fields and endless possibilities. This ballet was written for dancer, Martha Graham, who had been commissioned to choreograph the ballet and dance the leading role. It was first performed in Washington, D.C. in 1944. When Copland began his Pulitzer Prize-winning ballet score, he couldn’t have foreseen that it would become one of the most inspiring and symbolic works of the century. An emotional highpoint of the score is a melody based on a traditional Shaker song, “Simple Gifts.” Throughout the work, Copland brilliantly weaves melodies that evoke simplicity and the “earnest but good-natured piety” of Shaker culture. The music reflects youthful aspiration in the American heartland and the pastoral beauty of Appalachia.

Poem, for violin and orchestra -Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)

Kristina Anderson, soloist

Chausson was the son of a building contractor who made a fortune in Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of central Paris. Since two previous children of his parents had not survived infancy, Ernest was brought up with extreme solicitude and educated by a private tutor. He naturally grew up a quiet, considerate and, as he put it, melancholy child. To please his parents, he took a degree in Law at the University of Paris, but he had no need to earn his living and could follows his own bent. He became a pupil of Cesar Franck when he decided in favor of music. Chausson married Mademoiselle Jeanne Escudier, who was an excellent wife and mother to their five children. In Paris, their house soon became a regular meeting-place for painters and writers as well as musicians. Among the guests were Manet, Degas, Renoir, Rodin, Franck, Chabrier, Faure, and Debussy. Chausson and Debussy developed a close friendship that enriched both of their lives. Chausson developed his own unmistakable style, which is determined by expressive melodic lines as well as by a strongly chromatic harmonic idiom. He wrote opera, church music, choral and orchestral music, chamber music, songs, and a few piano pieces. Chausson was killed in a bicycling accident in 1899 while spending his summer holiday at his house at Limay, near Mantes.

Chausson’s Poem, for violin and orchestra, was by far his most important composition of 1896. It was written in the comparatively short space of time between April and August. Many refer to the Poem as Chausson’s masterpiece, in which his warm imagination, his idealism and the real nobility of his musical mind are most clearly revealed. His old friend, Ysaye, played the piece in 1896 in Spain, in1897 in Paris, and for the first time in London exactly a week after the composer’s death.

Symphony #2 in D Major - Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Born in Hamburg, the son of a double-bass player and his older seamstress wife, Brahms attracted the attention of Schumann, to whom he was introduced by the violinist Joachim. After Schumann’s death, he maintained a long friendship with his widow, the pianist Clara Schumann, whose advice he always valued. Brahms eventually settled in Vienna, where to some he seemed the awaited successor to Beethoven. His blend of classicism in form with a romantic harmonic idiom made him the champion of those opposed to the musical innovations of Wagner and Liszt. In Vienna, he came to occupy a position similar to that once held by Beethoven, his gruff idiosyncrasies tolerated by those who valued his genius. Brahms is a tremendous personality, a distinctive, fascinating musical force, a composer who introduced so much of his personality that he reached the foremost rank. He brought a view of music and a mode of expression to a final culmination. On April 3, 1897, Brahms died of liver cancer.

Brahms wrote four symphonies, massive in structure, and all the result of long periods of work and revision. He was a careful, thoughtful composer, one whose inspiration was disciplined by his attentive technique. Within this discipline, he displayed great imagination, revealing new sounds, new harmonies, new rhythmic usages, and above all, a synthesis of nineteenth-century Romantic expression within clearly defined formal limits. His works are close-knit, concise, and even when long, always clearly defined in their structural architecture. As a craftsman, he was a perfectionist, suppressing some works altogether and wrestling with others for years before allowing them to reach the public. In 1876, Brahms completed a first symphony in C minor, and this he soon followed with a much more genially lyrical second symphony in D Major. The contrast between this symphony and the heroic First Symphony is complete. The opening with the four notes of the ‘cellos and basses and the reply of the dusky horn is the emotional, as well as the musical, key of the composition. The lyrical beauty of Brahms’ Second Symphony makes it perhaps the most popular of the four.

February 27 Concert Notes

Voyevode, Op. 78 - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky - (1840-1893)

Few composers typify the mood of the end of the nineteenth century, as does Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Born at Votinsk in a distant province of Russia, Tchaikovsky graduated at nineteen from the aristocratic School of Jurisprudence at St. Petersburg and worked in a minor post in the Ministry of Justice until he was twenty-three. At that point, he entered the newly founded Conservatory of St. Petersburg. Upon completion of his course, Anton Rubenstein recommended Tchaikovsky for a teaching post at the new Conservatory of Moscow. As professor of harmony, he diligently applied himself to composition and completed some of his most successful works. Tchaikovsky was Russia’s first native-trained composer.

Extremely sensitive by nature, Tchaikovsky was subject to attacks of depression aggravated by his irregular personal life. Following the failure of an ill-starred marriage, his kind benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck, appeared. Her support not only enabled Tchaikovsky to go abroad until he had recovered his health, but it freed him from the drudgery of teaching and launched him on the most productive period of his career. This famous friendship lasted for thirteen years and yet the two never met, except for the accidental glimpse of one another at the opera or during a drive. From the letters of this friendship we gain an insight into Tchaikovsky’s method of work. He wrote, “Instrumental composition is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry.” The exaggerated subjectivity that was a symptom of weakness in the man became a source of strength for the artist. He drew upon his innermost feelings, projecting these with a lack of inhibition that attracts many more than it repels.

Tchaikovsky was the first Russian whose music caught on in the West, and in 1891 he was invited to come to America to participate in the ceremonies that marked the opening of Carnegie Hall. He found Americans very remarkable people and he was convinced that he was ten times more famous in America than in Europe. Tchaikovsky went to St. Petersburg to conduct his Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique, and while there he contracted cholera and died within a week. He was fifty-three years old.

Opinions on Tchaikovsky’s music have always been divided and will probably long continue to be so – partly because it is linked to his personality to a greater extent than with most composers. Tchaikovsky had a deep and abiding, if fearful, love of life, which he expressed in music of great richness, vigor, and beauty.

The Voyevoda was Tchaikovsky’s last tone poem and a piece about which he was at best ambivalent. Before its premiere in Moscow in 1869, the composer asked his friend Taneyev what he thought of the piece. Taneyev didn’t like it, disconcerting Tchaikovsky, who evidently virtually sabotaged his own piece while conducting its premiere. Afterward, Tchaikovsky destroyed the score. It survives because the producer of the concert refused to turn over the individual parts. The Voyevoda story is grim. A “voyevoda” is a provincial governor. In the Pushkin poem on which this is base, our provincial returns home to find his wife sleeping with another man. He instructs his servant to shoot the wife, but somehow gets shot himself instead. Tchaikovsky’s music doesn’t tell the story any more than his Hamlet follows the twists of Shakespeare’s play. But there are sweeping melodies, stormy interludes and a sober ending – sober for Tchaikovsky, that is. Most listeners will be happy that this well-crafted and enjoyable piece survived.

Piano Concerto #3 in D minor - Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

Ray Arthur Wang, piano soloist

Rachmaninov was a Russian composer and pianist. He entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory at the age of nine, and three years later he moved to the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied under Siloti, Taneiev, and Arensky. It was here that he became acquainted with Tchaikovsky, and this friendship was of great importance to Rachmaninov’s artistic development. In April 1902, he married Natalie Satin, to whom he was related on his father’s side. The marriage was happy, blessed with children, and long lasting. Soon after the October Revolution in November 1917, Rachmaninov, with his family, left Russia for a Scandinavian tour. He had no expectation of an early return to a country where his birth and upbringing made him a stranger to the new political system. In 1918 he sailed with his family for New York where he mainly lived thereafter, though he spent periods of time in Paris, Dresden and Switzerland. Years of concert playing followed and were to continue with few interruptions until the time of his death in 1943 due to cancer. In the Soviet Union today, Rachmaninov is regarded as a major composer whose achievement links the generation of Tchaikovsky with that of Prokofiev. As a pianist he was famous for his precision, rhythmic drive, legato and clarity of texture, and for the broad design of his performances. Rachmaninov had great powers of invention and a highly developed sense of harmony. These qualities give his music a power and warmth of its own.

The Concerto #3 in D minor was completed as a major composition which Rachmaninov would “show off” in New York in 1909 during his first concert tour of the USA. He wrote the work in the peace of his family’s country estate, Ivanovka, and it was completed on September 23, 1909. Due to time constraints, Rachmaninov was unable to practice it on an actual keyboard in Russia, and had to do it on a silent keyboard during his voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on board ship. He played it twice in New York, on the second occasion under Mahler, whose musical insight and careful preparation of the score greatly impressed Rachmaninov.

Symphony #1 - Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Allegretto: Allegro: Lento: Allegro molto

Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, to musical parents. After receiving his early musical instruction from his mother, who was a fine pianist, he entered the Leningrad Conservatory in 1919, graduating in 1923. He had become an outstanding pianist and he faced the problem of whether to be a pianist or a composer. The latter won. Shostakovich’s First Symphony was performed in Leningrad in 1926 winning early recognition for its composer. At this time, it seemed that Shostakovich was firmly launched upon a distinguished career. Even in political terms he appeared to be strongly placed as the first wholly Soviet – that is, post-revolutionary – composer to make an international reputation. Throughout World War II, Shostakovich remained in the forefront of Soviet musical life. He was an ardent patriot and love of his homeland runs through many of his works in spirit, although he did not often use actual Russian folk songs. His wit, his verve, his melodic gift, and his brilliance of imagination place him among the masters of our time. He received many honors from his own government as well as from organizations in England, Sweden, Italy, and East Germany. In 1940 his Quintet for Piano and Strings earned him the Stalin Prize of 100,000 rubles. Interested in the peace movement in his country, he had also attended various conferences in other parts of the world and had twice visited the United States in 1949 and 1959. In 1954 the World Peace Council awarded him a Peace Prize. On his fiftieth birthday, in 1956, he was awarded the highest honor that the Russian government can bestow – the Order of Lenin. In the 1960s serious heart trouble was diagnosed, and in 1975 Shostakovich died in a Moscow hospital. After his death, his colleague Khachaturian described him as ‘the conscience of Soviet music’.

Shostakovich’s First Symphony was written in 1925 as a graduation piece when he was nineteen. It possessed great fluency, personality and youthful vitality and achieved performance as far afield as Germany and the United States, winning early recognition for its composer. It was only his genius that gave him the gift to write a symphony of such assurance, confidence and depth while still struggling with youthful insecurity. As the music unfolds, it becomes apparent that he is not taking tentative steps on the symphonic pathway. This is no student essay. From the opening phrases, the music is pure Shostakovich, a blueprint of ideas that would appear time and again in his later works. The composer’s son Maxim, himself a pianist and conductor, describes the opening march-like movement as “the beginning of a journey”, the second is “on the road, as if from an old fairy tale”. The deeply felt third movement is “one long phrase” and the Finale, prefaced by a side drum roll, is preferred to the other movements. Maxim continued, “I like it very much. It works very much like a film. The fast material means a lot of time is passing quickly. With the sound of the timpani, you’re back to real time.” Shostakovich is often acknowledged as the foremost symphony composer of the twentieth century.

April 3rd Concert Notes

Pines of Rome - Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)

Respighi was born in Bologna and studied there at the Liceo Musicale under Federico Sarti (violin and viola) and Guiseppe Martucci (composition). In 1900 he went to St. Petersburg as first violist in the Opera orchestra, where he took lessons in composition and orchestration from Rimsky-Korsakov who was to prove a cardinal influence on the development of his musical personality. Until 1908 his career was that of soloist and violinist in the Mugellini Quintet. Respighi was appointed a professor of composition at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome , and in 1923 he was made Director of that institution. He resigned in 1926 in order to devote himself to composition and performing. He died in Rome after a long illness.

In terms of instrumental music rather than operatic, Respighi alone brought his country back before the widest public, chiefly by means of his two symphonic poems The Fountains of Rome (1917, generally considered his best work) and The Pines of Rome (1924). Less well known is the third of the ‘Roman’ triptych, Roman Festivals (1929). His Fountains of Rome is a beautifully arranged and well-worked out composition, and the other two works are similar. Respighi’s orchestration is masterly with beauty of sound ever a major preoccupation, but the musical substance is derived from such composers as Rimsky-Korsakov, Strauss, Debussy and to some extent, Puccini. He possessed great skill in musical characterization, a pronounced sense of form, and an uncommon ability to keep in touch with contemporary developments. Yet he never became more than a passing figure. Respighi might, with some justification, be called an impressionist, but his love of pre-impressionist harmony and orchestration never left him, and his own musical language bore its stamp.

Carnival Overture - Anton Dvorak (1841-1904)

Dvorak is without question the greatest of all Czech composers, and his contribution to the literature both of symphonic and chamber music ranks alongside that of the most commanding 19^th century masters. He was born in the small Bohemian village of Nelahozeves , on the banks of the Moldau, some fifty or so miles north of Prague . His father was the village innkeeper and butcher, and Antonin never lost his love of the countryside and its people. As a child he became an accomplished violinist and violist, and after attending an organ school in Prague , he supported himself for the next ten years by playing the viola in the Czech National Opera Orchestra, which was conducted in the later half of the decade by Smetana himself. In 1873 he married Anna Cermakova, and they had six children. His domestic happiness, as well as his growing reputation, unleashed a torrent of creative activity. The spontaneity and melodious character of his music assured its popularity, and when the last decade of the century arrived, Dvorak was known throughout Europe . In 1892 he was invited to become director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City . His stay in the United States was fruitful. He produced what has remained his most successful symphony, From the New World; a number of chamber works, including the American Quartet; and the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra. After three years, when homesickness overrode all other considerations, he returned to his beloved Bohemia . Dvorak spent his remaining years in Prague in the happy circle of his wife and children, students and friends. He played an active part in training the younger generation of Czech composers and died in his sixty-third year, revered as a national artist throughout his native land.

Dvorak was a natural musician. His music emanates from a robust personality. It is sane and wholesome, makes an immediate appeal, and never reaches for more than it can grasp. Joy in life, love of man and nature, are the topics of its discourse, as are faith in God, devotion to country, and the pleasures of rustic existence. In an age given to tortured emotions, this happy music struck a welcome note.