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What could be better? Jeffrey and Bruno performing together for the first time. The season opens with the return of Jeffrey Kahane as soloist on what many believe to be the greatest, most formidable of piano concertos, the "Rach 3." Heroic grandeur characterizes an all-Russian program not to be missed.

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

Nikolai Miaskovsky:Salutation Overture for Orchestra, Opus 48

Nikolai Yakovlevich Miaskovsky was born in what is now Modlin, Poland, on April 20, 1881, and died in Moscow on August 8, 1950. He composed Privetstvennaya Uvertura (the Salutation Overture) in 1939 as a greeting to Joseph Stalin on his 60th birthday.The premiere took place in Moscow that year. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, and strings. Duration is about 12 minutes.

Like many Russian composers, Miaskovsky studied music while training for another career, in this case a military one. The son of a Russian military engineer, he had been born in a fortress in Poland, where his father was serving the Tsar. He took a degree at the St. Petersburg Military and Engineering College in 1902, though by then he had already composed a series of piano preludes. From the autumn of 1903, he studied counterpoint and orchestration with a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov’s (Rimsky himself had been a naval officer as a young man). Then in 1906 he formally entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory and began his advanced studies with Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others. The following year he resigned his commission and devoted himself to music.

He became a prolific composer, particularly of symphonies, composing 27 of them over the four decades from 1908 until his death. During World War I, he was mobilized and sent to the Austrian front. After the war, upon his final demobilization in 1921, he became a professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatory, where he remained until his death.

Though his music was never as expressly “modern” as that of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Miaskovsky was always interested in new developments, and throughout his life the authorities often quibbled with the content of his symphonies for “individual pessimism” or other qualities deemed insufficiently positive. Thus at the very end of his life, Miaskovsky was attacked, along with Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian, in 1948, for the so-called “formalism” in his music.

To our ears, Miaskovsky sounds much more like a descendant of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, the darkly romantic masters of the period before the Russian Revolution.

The 1939 overture here translated as “Salutation” bears the Russian title Privetstvennaya overture. The word “Privetstvennaya” contains in its first six letters the most common casual greeting among friends in Russian, privet (pronounced pree-VYET), which essentially means simply “Hi.” The long adjective privetstvennaya that describes the Opus 48 overture is a slightly more formal greeting offering good wishes, something like “greetings and salutations.” To whom is the greeting sent? The piece turns out to be a celebration for the 60th birthday of Joseph Stalin, which took place in December 1939. Knowing that Stalin—whose musical taste was very limited, but who understood the propaganda value of dedications—liked music that gave an expression of positive celebration, in a major key, and feeling celebratory, Miaskovsky was able to serve up just the kind of thing Stalin liked.

The opening Allegro con brio e maestoso is a fanfare-like introduction full of energy and color. Soon, over pulsing eighth-note chords in the horns, the first violins begin a melody that starts with a dramatic upward-leaping octave followed by a vigorous tail of sixteenth-note runs, presenting itself as the principal theme, growing in alternation between the strings and woodwinds. Soon a broader melody, marked più cantabile, is sung by the strings with a background of syncopated triplets in the woodwinds. This almost dies away when a new section, marked feroce (fiercely), develops these elements with great energy, eventually returning to an almost literal recapitulation of the opening materials. The ending seems about to arrive in a tranquil close when a solo trumpet’s fanfare of rising fourths signals to the full orchestra for a fast close at full festive volume.

SergeI Rachmaninoff: Concerto No. 3 in D minor for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 30

Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninoff was born at Semyonovo, district of Starorusky, Russia, on April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943. He composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 during the summer of 1909 in preparation for an American tour and played the first performance at the New Theatre in New York on November 28 with the New York Symphony Society conducted by Walter Damrosch. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, and strings. Duration is about 39 minutes.

When Rachmaninoff came to write his third piano concerto, he had a far different problem from the one that had faced him when composing the Second. At the time he started the earlier concerto, there was a question whether he would ever compose again at all. His confidence and self-esteem had been shattered by the catastrophic premiere of his First Symphony in 1897. (One reviewer at that premiere, the acid-tongued composer Cesar Cui, had commented, “If there were a conservatory in Hell, if one of its talented students were instructed to write a program symphony on ‘The Seven Plagues of Egypt,’ and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would bring delight to the inhabitants of Hell.”) It took Rachmaninoff two years to develop the courage to compose again, and then only after extensive counseling sessions, partly under hypnosis, with a psychiatrist. The result, though, was the C-minor Concerto, which was instantly established as an audience favorite.

Thus, by 1909, when he began work on the Third, he had to compete with his younger self. In addition to the success of the Second Concerto, his Second Symphony had just won the Glinka Award of 1000 rubles, beating out Skryabin’s Poem of Ecstasy for the honor. He spent the summer of 1909 planning his first American tour, which began in Northampton, Massachusetts, on November 4 and continued until January. But the culminating event took place in New York City on November 28 when he premiered the new piano concerto with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Society. The same forces repeated it two days later at Carnegie Hall and Rachmaninoff played it once more on January 16, 1910, this time with the Philharmonic and Mahler conducting. It was considered a qualified success—respected, though by no means the instant hit of the previous concerto.

The general tone of critical response and this from critics who had heard the work three times in the space of seven weeks was that, despite its many and undoubted beauties, the concerto was too long and rather full of notes. The New York Herald predicted that “it will doubtless take rank among the most interesting piano concertos of recent years,” but added the observation as true today as it was then that “its great length and extreme difficulties bar it from performances by any but pianists of exceptional technical powers.”

Of course, Rachmaninoff himself was a pianist of “exceptional technical powers,” among the most utterly gifted of keyboard artists of all time, and he was, in the first instance, writing specifically for himself. Yet he opened the concerto not with a stunning blast of keyboard virtuosity but with a muted muttering in the strings of a subdued march character and then, after two measures, a long, simple melody presented in bare octaves in the piano. Like so many Russian tunes and so many of Rachmaninoff’s, this one circles round and round through a limited space, only gradually reaching up or down to achieve a new high or low note. Rachmaninoff was often asked whether this was a folk tune, and he always insisted that it was completely original and had simply come into his mind freely while working on the concerto. Musicologist Joseph Yasser has discovered a marked similarity between this theme and an old Russian monastic chant, which the composer might have heard as a boy when, while visiting his grandmother in Novgorod, they made visits to the local monasteries. The distant, buried memory of the chant might then have appeared unbidden, to be further shaped by the mature composer, into the concerto’s main theme. In any case, its essential Russian quality is palpable.

The theme itself, and its rustling accompaniment, both play a role in the progress of the movement. The orchestra takes over the theme while the piano begins rapid figuration to a solo climax and preparation for the second theme. This begins with a dialogue between soloist and orchestra emphasizing a rhythmic motif that soon appears in a leisurely, romantic cantabile melody sung by the piano. A literal restatement of the concerto’s opening bars marks the beginning of the development, which employs mostly material from the main theme and its accompaniment. This culminates in a gigantic solo cadenza which takes the place of the normal recapitulation, commenting in extenso on the motivic figures of first the principal theme, then the secondary theme; after its close, only a brief reference to both themes suffices to bring the movement to a close.

The slow movement, entitled Intermezzo, seems to start in a “normal” key, A major (the dominant of D minor) with a brief languishing figure in the strings that generates an elegiac mood in its extensive development. But the piano enters explosively to break the mood and carry us to the decided untypical key of D-flat, where Rachmaninoff presents a sumptuous and lavishly harmonized version of the main theme in a texture filled with dense piano chords. A bright contrast comes in a seemingly new theme, presented as a light waltz in 3/8 time, heard in the solo clarinet and bassoon against sparkling figuration in the piano. But Rachmaninoff has a very subtle trick up his sleeve here: the “new” theme is, in fact, note-for-note, the opening theme of the entire concerto, but beginning at a different pitch level of the scale (the third instead of the tonic) and so changed in its rhythm so as to conceal the connection almost perfectly! It would be easy to hear the concerto many times and still completely miss this “underground” link that nonetheless helps tie the movements together. (Compare the two themes in the musical example, in which each note in each theme is numbered to demonstrate their correspondence.) This passage leads back to D-flat and an orchestral restatement of the opening.

Although these two themes look and sound completely different, Rachmaninoff constructed the second one by using the exact melodic contours of the first, but in a different tempo and rhythm, and starting at a different place on the scale. In this example, the notes in each melody have been numbered to show the correspondence. Only six different pitches in the main theme do not appear in the clarinet melody of the second movement.

The soloist “interrupts” the end of the slow movement with a brief cadenza that leads back to the home key of D minor for the finale. This is the ne plus ultra of virtuosic concerto finales, filled with impetuous and dashing themes, rhythmically driving, syncopated, and sunny by turns. An extended Scherzando section in E-flat fills the middle of the movement. It involves both acrobatic and lightly spooky variations on a capricious theme which seems new at first but turns out to be related to the opening of the finale and the second theme of the first movement. Moreover, between the increasingly ornate miniature variations, Rachmaninoff inserts a reminder of both themes of the first movement. Following the restatement of all the thematic material, the piano builds a long and exciting coda that brings this most brilliant and challenging of concertos to a flashing, glamorous close.

Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 9 in E-flat major, Opus 70

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on September 25, 1906, and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. He completed his Ninth Symphony on August 30, 1945, at a Composers’ Rest Home near Ivanovo. Yevgeny Mravinsky conducted the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in the world premiere on November 3 that year. The orchestra consists of two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two trumpets, four horns, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, military drum, tambourine, and strings. Duration is about 27 minutes.

Few composers were so affected by external political events in the course of their life’s work as Dmitri Shostakovich. After producing his first symphony at the age of nineteen, Shostakovich was widely recognized as the most brilliant talent to appear in Soviet Russia. But his career was repeatedly sidetracked by the particular demands of the Soviet state for music that was accessible to the masses, avoided “decadent” western trends, and—wherever possible— glorified Russia and the Soviet political system. Stalin himself, though no musician, tried to assure that major musical works were composed to “suitable” texts, emphasized positive emotions, and bore congratulatory dedications to Stalin himself or his principal cohorts.

Already in the mid‑1930s Shostakovich went through a difficult, even dangerous, time when his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was viciously attacked in Pravda as “more noise than music,” and he withdrew the premiere of his difficult and elaborate Fourth Symphony (which was not heard for decades) for fear that it would only get him into still greater trouble. The Fifth Symphony restored Shostakovich to a position of prestige in the Soviet musical firmament, and during World War II his Seventh and Eighth symphonies were regarded as important contributions to the nation’s morale.

It was confidently expected that, in 1945, with the war clearly won, his Ninth Symphony would offer some kind of grand peroration to the struggle and the recent victory. He did in fact begin a large-scale work involving chorus and solo singers, but he dropped the plan, explaining that he feared “drawing immodest analogies” with Beethoven’s Ninth. But there was probably a more important reason, too: Shostakovich had long since learned that his symphonies, being large public statements, were frequently analyzed by party hacks for their “meaning”—signs of adherence to Soviet views or of slipping into westernisms. By writing a work in a consciously lighter style than the grand rhetoric that was expected of him, Shostakovich might avoid some of the more unpleasant results of politicized musical analysis.

Whether all of that was in his mind or not, the new symphony puzzled many listeners. It is perhaps the composer’s nearest approach to the classical symphony, though it has five movements rather than the usual four (the last three are played without pause, and the fourth movement is essentially an introduction to the finale). The first movement employs a straightforward sonata form; its second subject employs the kind of play with solo instruments—trombone and piccolo—that may even recall the Nielsen Flute Concerto; perhaps it is a parody of military music. There are certainly vaudeville-like fanfares that suggest a kind of “Bring on the clowns!” attitude, and it is not impossible that Shostakovich, rather than glorifying Stalin and his regime, was quietly making fun of them in a manner that could not be pinpointed and so was therefore a slightly safer mode of political criticism for him.

The slow movement is an elegy combining remarkable economy and breadth. The Scherzo is energetic and filled with Shostakovian gaiety, a humor tinged with an undertone of tension. For all its brevity, the fourth movement, essentially a recitative for bassoon, is deeply moving in its somber, epic tone, so that the last movement arrives with the shock of a sudden cold shower, the solo bassoon suddenly turning its poignancy to burlesque for the finale. The orchestra builds its air of witty sarcasm to the end.

© Steven Ledbetter www.stevenledbetter.com

 

 

 

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