Concerto No. 3 in B Flat Major Karl Stamitz ( ) Romanze Rondo

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1 Concerto No. 3 in B Flat Major Karl Stamitz ( ) Romanze Rondo Occasionally there are people who have great ability, work very hard and yet end up in unfortunate circumstances Stamitz was such an individual. The son of a violinist in the renowned Mannheim Orchestra, he showed promise and received early musical training, becoming a violinist in that orchestra by the age of seventeen. Karl played in the orchestra for eight years then left for Paris to seek his fortune. A long series of positions ensued while he served as concertmaster, court composer and touring soloist in many of Europe's major cities. But it was an age when true job security meant being a court musician and having the patronage of an aristocrat. He was evidently unwilling to settle down, hoping instead to support himself through the sale of his music and by concertizing. Unfortunately, this was a lifestyle that only became possible during the nineteenth century. Nearing the age of forty, he married a girl nineteen years his junior whose health was soon shattered by the births and subsequent deaths in infancy of their four children. No longer able to travel to perform because of his wife's health, he sank into debt. Both Stamitz and his wife died in His possessions were auctioned to cover his debts but apparently were of such little value that they brought nothing and were discarded a sad end, indeed, for an individual with such obvious gifts. There is a silver lining to the foregoing gloomy story, however at least for succeeding generations of musicians and audiences; during all of those years of travel and short-term positions he composed prolifically. His output included more than fifty symphonies, thirty eight symphonies concertantes, a great deal of chamber music and, most importantly for us, more than sixty concertos for the violin, viola, cello, clarinet and a variety of other instruments! During his Paris years, Stamitz became acquainted with the Bohemian clarinet virtuoso Joseph Beer and it is because of this association that he became interested in writing for the clarinet. His eleven clarinet concertos are significant because of their high quality idiomatic writing and they constitute an important part of the solo repertoire. Johannes Wojciechowski the editor of the Peters edition of Concerto No. 3, states categorically that Stamitz,...ranks as the originator of the clarinet concerto having been the first to recognize the soloistic possibilities of the clarinet and to establish it in the orchestra! As is evident from his dates, Stamitz was a classical composer a contemporary of Haydn and Mozart and, stylistically, his music is very similar. He had a gift for graceful, appealing melodies and the concerto being performed on this program exemplifies this quality. The Romanze movement is in ABA form and is gentle and expressive. The Rondo is sprightly and offers melodies with contrasting rhythms and dynamics and includes some challenging, virtuosic writing. Piano Concerto No. 2 in B Flat Major, Opus 83 Johannes Brahms ( ) Allegro appassionato

2 Travel to Italy can be inspirational for a composer. Regular members of our audience may recall past references in their program notes to the experiences of Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky that inspired their creation of the Italian Symphony and Capriccio Italien. Similarly, Brahms had recently returned from his first trip to Italy when he sketched the themes for his second piano concerto. After setting it aside for three years, he completed it shortly after a second Italian jaunt. But Italian sunshine wasn't the only source of inspiration. During this time period he had composed the D Major Violin Concerto for the virtuoso Joseph Joachim and had intended to include an unconventional scherzo movement in that work. Joachim requested that the scherzo be omitted leaving Brahms with its outlines ready for use; logically, he decided to adapt his violin scherzo for his new piano concerto instead. It is this scherzo movement, the Allegro appassionato that is being performed for this concert. Brahms must have had very positive feelings about this concerto. He had waited more than twenty years after his poorly-received Opus 15 Concerto No. 1 in d minor to write another and it was this new concerto that he dedicated to his beloved teacher and mentor Eduard Marxen, certainly a sign that he was satisfied with it. Additional evidence can be found in letters he sent to his friends Clara Schumann and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg in which he ebulliently referred to his, tiny little piano concerto with a tiny little wisp of a scherzo. Brahms, of course, was joking: this is one of the most gigantic concertos ever written! The concerto's premiere was on November 9, 1881 in Budapest with Brahms himself at the piano. The primary key of the Allegro appassionato is d minor. The movement's opening is energetic, at moments almost ferocious. Though it may be the power of suggestion, with the knowledge of its violin-concerto heritage, the listener can easily imagine a violinist digging in with powerful double stops on the opening eighth notes! A middle section changes the mood entirely becoming joyous and almost triumphant in D Major. Enormous in both scope and energy, the coda returns to d minor and ends the movement in a resounding manner. Writer Michael Steinberg suggests that this movement was written to produce an ovation and points out that such between movement applause was common in Brahms's day. He laments, how priggish and out-and-out-anti-musical [is] our present custom that indiscriminately forbids such demonstrations between movements. Fortunately, our audience is under no such constraints; the musical richness of this movement, performed singly, can be freely applauded. Pohjola's Daughter Jean Sibelius ( ) It is not unusual for composers to be identified with the country of their birth or ethnic origin. Liszt the Hungarian, Chopin the Pole and Smetana the Bohemian come to mind as ready examples. But, if one were asked to name a single composer whose identity is most closely associated with his or her nationality that composer would almost certainly be Jean Sibelius. His best-known composition is Finlandia, a piece that fired the passions of Finland's independence movement and made him a national hero a fact attested to by the Finnish government's later giving him a lifetime grant that enabled him to live comfortably and compose without financial worries.

3 Given Sibelius' identification with his country, it is not surprising that much of his music is based on Finnish themes. Pohjola's Daughter, like several of Sibelius' tone poems, is based on the Kalevala, or the Finnish national epic, a massive poem that tells the story of Finland's mythic history and thus it, like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, is programmatic in nature though the program is not quite so clearly delineated as that of Dukas. At it's December 1906 premiere in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Pohjola's Daughter appeared with a preface from Runo eight of the Kalevala: Väinämöinen, old and truthful Rides his sleigh and travels homeward From the dark realm of Pohjola From the land of gloomy chanting "Hark! What sound?" He glances upward Up above there on a rainbow Sits and spins Pohjola's Daughter In the airy blue so radiant Thrilled and drunken with her beauty Come down here to me, O fair one Thus he pleads. Coy, she refuses At his new plea, her demand is You must conjure from my spindle What I've long desired: a vessel. Show to me your wondrous powers Then most gladly I will follow Väinämöinen, old and truthful Toils and shapes and seeks...but vainly Ah, the proper incantation Never will it be discovered! Full of anger, sorely wounded Since the fair one has renounced him To his sleigh he springs...and onward! But once more his head he raises Never can the hero falter All his grief is put behind him Gentle tones from his remembrance Bring him hope and lighten sorrow." Väinämöinen, the protagonist, is a magician. Seeing Pohjola's daughter he is smitten and wants to take her away with him. She demands that he perform a feat of magic: he must make a boat from a splinter of her distaff or spindle. Though a resourceful magician he cannot remember the incantation, fails the task and dejectedly climbs back into his sleigh. He cheers up as he travels onward. Some may find that this story line seems a bit weak to be the basis for a great piece of music. No doubt it reads better in Finnish. What cannot be denied, however, is that Sibelius' musical story has extraordinary power and depth. Many consider Pohjola's Daughter to be the most descriptive of Sibelius' tone poems. In sonata form, the development describes the magician's frustrations as he struggles to build the boat. As is typical of Sibelius' music, the form is not clearly discernible; the work employs evolving

4 thematic fragments that culminate in a grand statement and eventually it ends as it began, on a quiet unison B flat in the low strings. No doubt of little significance but of interest nonetheless is the fact that the musical motif Sibelius used to depict the derisive laughter of Pohjola's Daughter rejecting Väinämöinen, is thought to have been the inspiration for film composer Bernard Hermann's musical depiction of the stabbing scene in the movie Psycho. Who could have known that the slaying scene was originally a sleighing scene! The Sorcerer's Apprentice Paul Dukas ( ) As anyone who has been to Disney World's MGM Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida can tell you, Mickey Mouse's giant wizard hat dominates the skyline, and has become the iconic symbol of that park. The hat, of course, is from Walt Disney's 1940 production of Fantasia. Disney's Fantasia depiction of Mickey as the apprentice, set to the music of Paul Dukas, has firmly cemented what was already a well-known classical work, into the repertoire. A French composer, Dukas was a Parisian, a graduate of the Paris Conservatory where he was later a professor, and a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. Though brilliant, Dukas was intensely self-critical by nature and he destroyed many of his works feeling them to be inferior. Sadly, only fifteen of his compositions survive. These include a symphony, an opera and a ballet. Though these surviving pieces are uniformly excellent, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is easily the best-known. Though popular entertainment often distorts original content when it interprets artistic material, the Fantasia portrayal of The Sorcerer's Apprentice is exactly what Dukas had in mind when he composed this music. The score is subtitled A symphonic scherzo after a ballade by Goethe. Goethe's story tells of the young apprentice who attempts a magic spell without the sorcerer's knowledge and, having set an enchanted broom to work carrying buckets of water, is unable to stop it. These program notes often allude to program music, or music that tells a story. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is surely among the most concise examples of program music in existence. Dukas prefaced his printed score with the entire fourteen stanzas of Goethe's ballad and, in his manuscript, actually identified the principal themes. The ethereal opening phrases of the violins and the subsequent rising phrases of the woodwinds represent the magic spell. The woodwind's sudden scampering flurry depicts the apprentice and the fanfare played by muted trumpets and stopped horns is the evocation or summons. The introduction ends with a sharp whack of the timpani and is followed by a long silence. A faint grunt from the depths of the orchestra suggest the stirring of the broom. The grunt repeats irregularly at first and then acquires a rhythm that becomes the accompaniment figure for the melody in the bassoons the broom has come to life and awkwardly begins to carry water.

5 The woodwinds seem to chatter and giggle as the apprentice's theme returns. A climax suggests the apprentice's vain attempt to stop the broom with his hatchet but, of course, the broom's splinters carry on the task. The bassoons repeat the principal theme and it is intertwined with that of the apprentice. The sustained blast of the trumpets and horns signifies the return of the sorcerer who soon restores order. The mysterious sounds of the opening strings is again heard and the spells dissipate. The sudden ending seems an explosion of comic relief. The Sorcerer's Apprentice was premiered on May 18, 1897 at a concert of the Société Nationale in Paris. Writer Ted Libbey calls The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a masterpiece of orchestration as well as rhythmic and metrical sophistication, and describes it as possessing, Beethovenian tautness, saying also that it,...pioneered harmonic usages that would later be taken up by Stravinsky and Debussy. Undoubtedly most music scholars would agree with Libbey's assessment. Probably for our audience, however, another of it's attributes is of greater significance: it's an amazingly fun piece to listen to! Symphony No. 2 in C minor, Opus 17, Little Russian Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky ( ) The program notes that have accompanied this orchestra s past performances of Tchaikovsky s works have often alluded to his gift for suffering. Indeed, his biography and much of his music seem almost inseparably saturated with pathos. But in the Little Russian we find a different Tchaikovsky one who is uncharacteristically cheerful. No doubt youth played a part in Tchaikovsky s happiness. He was only thirty-two when he began to work on the symphony and most of his emotional disasters lay in the future. Another factor contributing to the good humor of the work is likely to have been the setting where it found its impetus: the estate of his beloved sister Alexandra and her husband in Kamenka, a little town in Ukraine a place where he found comfort during a vacation early in the summer of 1872 among those who loved and understood him. Most of Tchaikovsky s music is not overtly nationalistic in character. His Russian contemporaries, the highly nationalistic composers of the Mighty Five generally took a dim view of it especially in view of Tchaikovsky s conservatory education and what they regarded as his unnecessary adherence to formal musical structures. The Little Russian, however, aroused their enthusiasm due to its uncharacteristic nationalism. This nationalistic flavor was a result of Tchaikovsky s extensive use of Ukrainian folk melodies the melodies he heard in and around Kamenka during his sojourn there. The appellation Little Russian derives from the then common custom of referring to what was then the province of Ukraine as Little Russia. Having begun work on the symphony during his summer in Kamenka, he completed it in Moscow late in the year. The first performance was given by the Imperial Music Society in Moscow on February 7, 1873, conducted by Nicholas Rubinstein. It was so successful that Rubinstein repeated its performance later the same season. Tchaikovsky, however,

6 was not completely happy with the symphony and, in 1879, began a revision that included extensive rewriting of the first movement and a major cut in the fourth. The first performance of the revised version (the version that will be heard in our performance) took place in St. Petersburg on February 2, The first movement is marked Andante sostenuto; Allegro vivo. A slow introduction with solo horn opens the movement. The melody is from a folk song variously translated as Down by Mother Volga and Down the Mother Volga. The fast main theme and a contrasting lyric theme are developed and are followed by a return to the original horn melody. The second movement, Andantino marziale, quasi moderato is based on a march that Tchaikovsky originally composed in 1869 for his opera Undine an opera with which he was dissatisfied and later destroyed. The third movement, Scherzo: Allegro molto vivace prances rhythmically forward in an energetic romp. A brief trio dominated by woodwinds interrupts the energy but the romp soon returns. The fourth movement, Finale: Moderato assai is based on the Ukrainian folk song The Crane. Tchaikovsky employs changes in instrumentation, harmony and counterpoint to bring the symphony to its rip-roaring and satisfying finale. Although much has been made in the preceding paragraphs of the characteristics of the Little Russian that differentiate it from the majority of Tchaikovsky s compositions, the listener who is familiar with Tchaikovsky s music will have little difficulty recognizing the composer s work. The similarities most certainly outweigh the differences; the individuality that has engaged audiences in Tchaikovsky s better-known symphonic works and made them staples of the concert hall is present in full measure.