Conductor
Bruno Ferrandis

featuring
Kymry Esainko, piano
Santa Rosa Symphony Honor Choir
Jenni Samuelson, soprano
Bonnie Brooks, mezzo soprano
Scott Whitaker, tenor
Hugh Davies, baritone

HAYDN: Symphony No. 94, Surprise
BACH: Piano Concerto in D minor
HAYDN: Lord Nelson Mass

Discovery, December 13, 2008 - 2pm

December 13, 2008 - 8pm

December 14, 2008 - 3pm

December 15, 2008 - 8pm
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50

For our annual choral centerpiece, Bruno and the orchestra present Haydn’s “Mass for Troubled Times,” a triumph of liturgical composition. Revel in the “Surprise” Symphony, so called because Haydn incorporates an entertaining musical joke. SRS principal pianist Kymry Esainko appears front and center to perform Bach’s high-spirited concerto.

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Symphony No. 94 in G major, Surprise

Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. His Symphony No. 94 was composed in London in 1791 and was first performed there on March 23, 1792, Haydn conducting. The symphony is scored for flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes.

Nicknames often boost the popularity of a composition because they make the piece easier to remember or refer to casually. Of Haydn’s late symphonies the most famous are those with nicknames—Oxford, Surprise, Clock, Military, Drumroll, and London. Yet the Surprise symphony became the most popular of them all long before the nickname was well established. Haydn was too good a showman to announce a nickname like “Surprise” in advance. It is not exactly clear when it arose, but it has certainly stuck.

The “surprise” in question is the sudden fortissimo chord early in the second movement, coming just when the quiet melody has been repeated even more quietly and seems to die away into nothing. From early in the symphony’s history the story spread that Haydn “wanted to awaken a large number of people who fell asleep during his concerts.”

Still, for all the attention given to the loud crash, there are many more reasons to cherish this symphony, surprises of an altogether richer and subtler sort. Chief among these is the fact that here, perhaps for the first time in the history of music, the timpanist retunes one of the kettledrums in the middle of a movement. This seems like a small point, but at the time, retuning was difficult and it was normal for the two instruments to stay at the same pitches throughout a movement, with the result that they were restricted to playing when the music was in or very near the home key. But Haydn asks the player to tune the low G up to A for a passage in the middle of the first movement (and then to return to G for the recapitulation), and thus begins the liberation of the percussion instruments.

The slow introduction to the first Allegro offers a still subtler surprise. It starts out in the normal way, grabbing the audience’s attention before setting out with a rushing whisper of a main theme. Here, however, the pastoral music soon begins to hint at dark things in its modulations before poising itself for the actual Allegro. The Allegro itself begins, as we expect from the close of the introduction, on B, the third degree of the scale of G. But for just an instant Haydn hints at an entirely different key, then rolls around to the expected tonic for the full orchestra’s entrance. And the “out-of-key” beginning gives rise to many later surprises, such as a back-door entrance to the recapitulation, hinting that we are in a key far from home, but it is a B, which once again leads us, surprised and delighted, to the home key and recapitulation.

The second movement’s “surprise,” was the principal cause of the symphony’s immediate fame. The surprise itself is gone by the sixteenth measure, but Haydn takes a theme of deceptive simplicity (one of the hardest things for a composer to achieve) and alternates simple variations with others that are more elaborate and dramatic. After a great marching climax, it disperses in a wisp of harmonic haze.

The minuet comes across, rather, as a lusty peasant dance. Bassoons cavort with strings in the Trio, picking up an eighth-note phrase from the minuet proper and turning it upside down.

The finale is a lively sonata-rondo, one of Haydn’s most brilliant achievements. Many of Haydn’s late symphonic movements are built up with all of the melodic material deriving from the opening idea. But in this symphony, both the first and last movements offer a wonderfully varied theme—an object lesson in the dangers of oversimplifying the stylistic features of any great composer. Haydn loved the superb London orchestra at his disposal. This finale, with its breathtaking pace and difficulties of ensemble (especially the headlong sixteenth-note rush of the unison strings just before the end) is a prime example his of Haydn’s response to their virtuoso playing.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Concerto No. 1 in D minor for Piano and Orchestra, BWV 1052

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany, on March 21, 1685, and died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750. The piano (that is, harpsichord) concerto in D minor, BWV 1052, took its present form in Bach’s Leipzig period, though precise details are lacking; it is a reworking of an earlier concerto, now lost. In addition to the solo keyboard, the score calls for strings and continuo. Duration is about 24 minutes.

The solo concerto was one of the highest developments of the concerto principle, and one of the most lasting. The balance of opposing musical forces is basic to Baroque style from the concerted madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi (about 1600) to the very end of the era and beyond. The establishment of the concerto as a flexible and powerful genre in its own right was largely the work of Antonio Vivaldi. Published editions carried his music all over the continent, affecting many composers who never heard it live in Venice. Thus they learned how the orchestral ritornello could unify a movement, first presenting the basic material, then recalling portions of it in different keys as the movement progresses, then finally restating the whole in the home key to conclude the process.

Bach had been gripped by the frenzy of discovery when he encountered the Vivaldi concertos during his years in Weimar (1708 17). He studied several violin concertos and rewrote them as keyboard concertos, thus learning the style he would adopt for his original concertos in later years.

In Cöthen (1717-1723), Bach wrote many concertos, but none for solo keyboard. He did compose the six Brandenburg concertos, at least two of the orchestral suites, and concertos for one or two violins or for violin and oboe, and evidently some oboe concertos, now lost. To us, the piano concerto is probably the most common type. We may marvel that Bach never thought of writing one when he was turning out so many concertos for other instruments.

The obvious reason is that, in his day, the standard keyboard instrument (the harpsichord) was usually used only in the background, filling out the textures in every kind of chamber music. But it was gradually being brought to the fore. In his Fifth Brandenburg concerto, the “accompanying” harpsichord suddenly becomes a featured soloist in the middle of the piece. Only after writing this piece did Bach begin to compose solo keyboard concertos; even then most of them were transcriptions for solo harpsichord of concertos already composed for violin and other instruments.

We can find the reason for this odd fact in the circumstances of Bach’s life in Leipzig (after 1724). At first he devoted his energies to the creation of church music—many dozens of cantatas and several Passion settings and other works. But by the end of the 1720s, Bach had become disillusioned with the town council, which provided the funds for music in the main churches.

So he began to find musical satisfaction through the “collegium musicum,” a free association of professional musicians and university students, which he directed from 1729 to 1741. The group gave weekly concerts during the year in a coffee shop and even more frequent performances during the annual trade fair. The seven surviving keyboard concertos for solo harpsichord, as well as those for more than one keyboard, were produced at this time to fill a pressing need for material. They were also vehicles for Bach’s burgeoning family of talented musicians, some of whom surely made their debuts in the coffee-house concerts.

The D-minor concerto is probably the best known of all of Bach’s keyboard concertos. The vigor and tensile strength of its opening ritornello is one of the most familiar passages in the composer’s entire output, and it generates an opening movement of great drive and panache. The very first measure provides most of the orchestral material for the movement, while the soloist’s interludes offer a wonderful range of virtuosic devices that Bach has imaginatively translated to the keyboard from the violinistic original. The Adagio provides the framework for a richly ornamented and sensitive aria in the keyboard part, while the final Allegro, based on a tiny motif of two sixteenth-notes and an eighth-note, is imbued throughout with a dance-like character.

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Mass No. 11 in D minor, Hob. XXII, Lord Nelson Mass

Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. He composed the original version of the D-minor Mass, popularly known as the “Nelson” Mass, between July 10 and August 31, 1798. The first performance took place in Eisenstadt on September 23 that year. The vocal forces required include five soloists—two sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass—and mixed chorus. The orchestral version to be heard here (expanded from Haydn’s original with his approval) calls for flute, two oboes, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, three clarini (high trumpets), and timpani, in addition to organ and strings. It is this last version that will be performed here. Duration is about 42 minutes.

The great works of Haydn’s last years were in the realm of vocal music. For a decade after writing the last of his symphonies, Haydn, universally acknowledged as the greatest living composer, turned out two great oratorios and a half-dozen splendid Mass settings. The oratorios became the most popular of all his compositions at the end of his life.

The Masses were more frequently performed in Austria and southern Germany even than the symphonies; every large church had occasion to provide elaborate music for particular feasts. In the largely Protestant countries of northern Europe and North America, however, Haydn’s Mass settings remain, with few exceptions, little known.

In concert, we hear the principal sections (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei) one after the other, without pause. In a church service, these sections are separated by certain liturgical actions, prayers, and other music. Haydn’s Mass becomes three substantial “pieces.” The Kyrie and Gloria come together; then, after a substantial break, the Credo stands alone; finally the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei come, one on the heels of the other, near the end of the service. Haydn therefore conceived his Mass settings as three related works, each laid out in the form of a “vocal symphony” consisting of three movements, generally fast-slow-fast.

During the summer of 1798, Haydn was in a state of near exhaustion following the composition and performance of The Creation; he was confined to bed rest under doctor’s orders. He turned the time on his hands to composing one of his largest and most tightly unified Mass settings. During those weeks of composition, one of the major events of the outside world was the great struggle between Britain (in the person of her naval genius Horatio Nelson) and France (in the person of Napoleon). Napoleon eluded a British sea blockade and sailed to Egypt, where he defeated the principal Egyptian army and entered Cairo by July 22, while Nelson was trying to find him.

On August 1, Nelson sighted the French fleet at anchor in the harbor of Aboukir. With extraordinary daring, the British sailed into the harbor (though lacking any chart of the shoals protecting it) and blew the French fleet to bits. News of the stunning victory spread throughout Europe as fast as possible, reaching Vienna by September 15 and Eisenstadt before the first performance of the Mass a week later. Two years later the Mass was played for Nelson himself when he visited Eisenstadt. So it was apparently either the timing of the premiere or the fact of the Admiral’s later visit that suggested the popular nickname.

The three “vocal symphonies” into which the Nelson Mass can be divided have one particular musical feature that ties them together—the use of martial trumpet fanfares, especially in the lower register, suggesting a kind of unusual nervous tension far removed from the normal splendor of the work. This effect begins in the opening measures, a dark D-minor Allegro, and reappears in several places throughout the Mass.

Even in Haydn’s own day, some critics found his church music altogether too “worldly,” too full of a joy and confidence that they regarded as merely secular. Certainly Haydn’s faith radiated a conviction that was altogether positive. He was not interested in speculative theology, but lived a faith that sustained him in his daily life. But he was also the last of his line, the last great composer to whom counterpoint came as naturally as breathing. In his Masses he preserved the centuries-old polyphonic traditions while also remaining at all times the master of the symphonic art of musical architecture.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)