Conductor
Bruno Ferrandis
featuring
Vadim Gluzman, violin
BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture No. 2
BARTÓK: Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta
BEETHOVEN: Violin Concerto in D major
Discovery, October 18, 2008 - 2pm
October 18, 2008 - 8pm
October 19, 2008 - 3pm
October 20, 2008 - 8pm
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50
Luxuriate in Bartók’s Music for Strings, by turns soul-touching, gritty and atmospheric. This piece figuresprominently in the film scores of Being John Malkovich and The Shining—a testament to its evocative power. Vadim Gluzman performs the vivacious, tender Beethoven concerto with as much passion, commitment and technical skill as you are ever likely to hear.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Leonore Overture No. 2 for Orchestra, Opus 72a
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, probably on December 16, 1770 (his baptismal certificate is dated the 17th) and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. The overture known today as Leonore No. 2 was actually the first composed and was used at the first performance of Beethoven’s only opera, which took place at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on November 20, 1805. The score calls for an orchestra consisting of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 13 minutes.
Beethoven’s struggles with musical drama in his single completed opera are well documented not only in the different versions of the opera itself (the earliest of which can now be heard on a recording, as Leonore, along with the definitive Fidelio) but also in the overtures—no fewer than four!—that Beethoven composed for his work. Of these, three are called “Leonore Overtures,” according to the title that Beethoven preferred (though it was not, in the end, used in performance since Giovanni Simone Mayr had recently written an opera with the same title), and the fourth is called simply the Fidelio Overture.
This embarrassment of riches has led to all kinds of confusion, not simplified by the fact that the numbering of the Leonore overtures is not chronological. To summarize the situation, Beethoven wrote what we now call No. 2 for the first performance; it was a lengthy work, but a daring one for various architectural reasons (of which more below). But when the opera proved to confuse and bore its audience (in the autumn of 1805, most of them were an occupying army of French soldiers, unable to understand the German words to the Spanish plot), Beethoven undertook a major revision, shortening the whole and rearranging the opera from three acts to two. In this form it was given in March 1806 with a new overture—the one we know as No. 3. Now, if Leonore No. 2 is too lengthy and sprawling, too architecturally uncouth (or daring), No. 3 is if anything too powerful and overwhelming. It remains one of the most dramatic and exciting overtures ever written. But in performance it is followed by Beethoven’s opening scene, a charming Mozartean flirtation far removed from the heroic strains of the overture’s coda, which was the composer’s response to the climax of the opera. Clearly the overture overwhelmed the beginning of the first act.
The overture published in 1842 as Leonore No. 1, Opus 138, has occasioned a good deal of debate over the years. One of Beethoven’s acquaintances, the notoriously unreliable Schindler, said that it was the first to be composed and that Beethoven rejected it after it was criticized at a private performance; but another Beethoven acquaintance, Ignaz von Seyfried, wrote that No. 1 was composed for a projected performance of the opera in Prague in 1807, for which Beethoven wanted an overture that was easier than No. 3. Over the years Beethoven scholars have ranged themselves to one side or the other of this issue, but it seems finally to have been resolved by Alan Tyson in a thorough study of Beethoven’s sketches for the work, including the watermarks of the paper on which the sketches were written and the other Beethoven sketches to be found on the same sheets. Tyson demonstrates convincingly that No. 1 must have been composed in late 1806 and early 1807, thus verifying von Seyfried’s view. In any case, Beethoven never made any attempt to perform or publish it in his lifetime.
The only overture that has never caused any confusion is the one that was finally used for Fidelio in the 1814 production, which proved to be a success and which marked the beginning of the work’s true history in the theater.
Much of the material in Leonore No. 2 and Leonore No. 3 is the same—or at least, closely related versions of the same ideas. But the overall treatment is strikingly different. The overtures begin with a slow introduction that slips surprisingly from the tonic C major to a dark B minor and then to A‑flat, where Beethoven quotes Florestan’s aria “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen”; it takes some time for Beethoven to return to his home key for the Allegro and the main body of the movement. In both the early overtures, No. 2 and No. 3, the exposition of the Allegro is quite similar in their thematic ideas and the modulation to E major for the secondary theme (another version, stated by clarinet, of Florestan’s aria). The development in No. 2 is on the grandest scale—so grand, in fact, that Beethoven must have realized that the overture had grown almost beyond all bounds. If it were to continue in this vein, with the expected recapitulation and coda, it would run far more than twice as long as any overture the audience had ever heard. So he resolved on a bold stroke: taking a cue from the opera itself, in which an offstage trumpet signals the arrival of help and the downfall of the villainous Don Pizarro’s murderous intentions, Beethoven interrupts the course of the action with that very trumpet call—a deus ex machina, to be sure. The orchestra attempts to continue the development, but the fanfare insistently repeats, and the orchestra, properly chastened, brings in one last reminiscence of Florestan’s aria (but now in the home key) before embarking on the Presto finale that concludes what is still—even without a full recapitulation—the longest overture Beethoven ever wrote.
Béla Bartók
Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
Béla Bartók was born on March 25, 1881, at Nagyszentmiklos, Hungary, and died on September 26, 1945, in New York City. Paul Sacher, founder and conductor of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, commissioned the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta and gave the first performance in Basel on January 21, 1937, in celebration of his orchestra’s tenth anniversary. Bartók had completed the score in Budapest on September 7, 1936, and the work was first heard there in February 1938, Ernö Dohnanyi conducting. The title of the work indicates its unusual scoring for small drums (with and without snares), cymbals, tam‑tam, bass drum, timpani, celesta, strings, harp and piano.
The Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, commissioned by Paul Sacher for the tenth anniversary of his Basel Chamber Orchestra, is one of the most powerful scores of the 20th century and quite possibly Bartók’s greatest single achievement. No other score of his shows more clearly his ability to organize the smallest musical units into an architecture based on a carefully laid-out structure of proportions, and yet, with all this “mathematical” paraphernalia, to produce music that speaks to ear, mind, and heart with astonishing directness.
When he accepted the commission in 1936, Bartók was fifty-five years old and had nine years to live—years which, though filled with important new works, were also interrupted by war, migration, and the onset of the leukemia that killed him. But in 1936, despite the ominous clouds arising over Germany, the composer was able to enjoy the height of his creative power and his growing international reputation both as a composer and as a scholar of Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian, and Arabic folk music.
He accepted Paul Sacher’s commission on June 27, 1936, and completed the score of his unusual work just ten weeks later, on September 7. He created a unique ensemble consisting of strings in two separated groups, with the percussion instruments in the middle in a specific plan. This spatial arrangement of the orchestra affects the way the music unfolds.
The first movement is a dark fugue, beginning with the strings, in which a tightly constricted chromatic theme (ranging no farther than the interval of a fifth) begins on A, then appears in one section after another, muted. Each entrance is a fifth higher or lower than the preceding one, so that the music moves quickly to the farthest harmonic pole away from home, E-flat. The moment it reaches E-flat is the dynamic high point: mutes have been removed, percussion joins in for a climax. Then the theme turns upside down and, more quickly than before, returns to its home base, as the dynamic drops again to that of the hushed opening, and the strings are muted once more. In the coda, both forms of the theme are played simultaneously.
Much of the rest of the work is derived from the shape of the opening fugue subject. For the second movement it is turned into a brighter kind of music, more regular in rhythm (though alive with syncopation). Piano and harp appear for the first time, and the two string orchestras play antiphonally. At the recapitulation, the first theme is squeezed tighter from 2/4 to 3/8 time. The Adagio is one of those eerily picturesque nocturnes in which Bartók excelled; it is laid out characteristically in a symmetrical “bridge” form. For the finale, Bartók creates a diatonic country dance music, first with a Bulgarian tune and then with the first movement’s theme made more open, diatonic, clearly harmonized.
For all its rigor of construction, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta is both rhapsodic and passionate, and it ends with the “easier” music of a type for which Bartók was to become known in his last years, particularly in his “Boston” score, the Concerto for Orchestra.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 61
Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. He completed the Violin Concerto in 1806, shortly before its first performance by Franz Clement at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on December 23 that year. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for flute, two each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
The popular image of Beethoven, derived from what has been called his “middle period,” is of a composer who writes dramatic, tempestuous music challenging in its energy and aggressive power the cozy assumptions of older music. This is not a false image, of course, yet it is a thoroughly one-dimensional view of the composer, utterly failing to notice the rather prominent appearance of works projecting a wondrous sense of lyricism. In the last half of 1806, to take a single instance, Beethoven finished in rapid succession the Violin Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, and the Fourth Piano Concerto, all of which feature a markedly lyric style for works of a kind that elsewhere are “heroic” or “dramatic.” Yet even this generalization is too easy: the “lyric” Violin Concerto (Opus 61) was followed almost immediately by the very dramatic Coriolan Overture (Opus 62).
Beethoven wrote the concerto for a remarkable musician named Franz Clement, who had been known as a child prodigy in the 1790s, when his father had taken him on concert tours. In 1794 Beethoven heard the fifteen-year old boy play in Vienna, and signed his autograph book as a memento of the occasion. Clement became the music director of the Theater an der Wien from 1802 to 1811. His musical memory was prodigious. When meeting with Beethoven to discuss possible cuts in the original version of his Fidelio, he played through the entire score at the piano without music. In April 1805 he was the concertmaster for the first public performance of the Eroica Symphony. It was for this remarkable colleague that Beethoven wrote his violin concerto. The story goes that he barely finished the work in time for the concert, and Clement is supposed to have played his part at sight, which must be, at the very least, a slight exaggeration.
Clement’s playing was renowned for grace, delicacy, and purity of intonation, and these are precisely the qualities called for in the soloist’s first entrance. In any case, it marks the concerto with a special benison, for Beethoven is far more concerned with the range and depth of his musical architecture and expression than he is with mere opportunities for the soloist to show off (the besetting sin of so many concertos designed primarily for virtuosos). Clement’s executive talents did not, however, prevent him from indulging in a little “showmanship” at the premiere, where he interpolated into the middle of Beethoven’s concerto—between the first and second movements—a stunt piece of his own, played with his instrument held upside down!
Beethoven was primarily a pianist, but he had also played the viola, and he surely understood the fact that the essence of the stringed instruments is a singing legato tone. To that end he created a concerto that begins with the ne plus ultra of violinistic themes, a tranquil, floating melody that hovers over the ensemble. Yet what we first hear as a melody in the strings is not quite the beginning: the very first thing we hear, most remarkably, is a solo measure for the timpani, playing four soft quarter‑note beats (and a fifth stroke at the downbeat when the rest of the orchestra enters). It is so quiet that it is easy to overlook; and few people in Beethoven’s day thought of the timpani as a “thematic” instrument. Yet those five beats on a single pitch form the true beginning of the theme, a fact that becomes clearer throughout the exposition of the material. And we are inescapably reminded of this at the recapitulation when the whole orchestra pounds it out.
Beethoven’s slow movement is a set of variations on a rapt theme, contemplative and almost motionless at first. Eventually though, the strings reject the idea of a new beginning mooted by the horns, and the soloist leads—with a trill—into the rollicking final rondo, a lively, even earthy, contrast to the ethereal mood of the slow movement. The rustic character is emphasized by fanfares connecting the main themes and by the humor of the soloist’s two pizzicato notes near the end—the only time the soloist is required to pluck, rather than bow, the strings in the entire concerto. That witty touch encourages all the participants to open up for a boisterous conclusion.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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“…elegance, precision and extreme tonal beauty.” – Cincinnati Post
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