Rachel Barton Pine Returns!
September 26, 2009
Rachel Barton Pine, violin
PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
Sir William Walton
Crown Imperial
William Turner Walton, knighted by King George VI in 1951, was born in Oldham, Lancashire, England, on March 29, 1902, and died on Ischia, Italy in the Bay of Naples, on March 8, 1983. He composed Crown Imperial for the coronation of George V in 1937. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, glockenspiel, triangle, tenor drum, cymbals, bass drum, gong, chimes, harp, optional organ, and strings. Duration in the original uncut version was 9 minutes; in 1963 he prepared a version in 7 minutes.
During the half century and more of his composing career, William Walton was first of all a notorious “bad boy” for the prankish and sassy Facade, composed when he was barely 20, then a composer of fashionably modern (though not “modernistic”) music in his Viola Concerto and the oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, and finally as a respected senior composer often regarded as old-fashioned for a generally conservative musical language. In all three of these stages, his music was too often praised or attacked not for its own inherent qualities, but because of the labels placed on it by outside observers. Walton was a private man who regularly withdrew to Italy, finally settling on the island of Ischia for the last 35 years of his life, working carefully and at his own pace on his compositions.
Walton’s First Symphony (1935) was an expansive work in a broadly romantic vein, with a Beethoven-like character of “struggle to triumph” - yet at the same time it revealed that sense of pageantry that is thoroughly English and reminiscent of Edward Elgar. It is not surprising that a composer capable of such good, ringing, broad tunes should be commissioned to write a march for a royal coronation. Indeed, Walton was twice so commissioned, in 1937 for the coronation of George V, and again in 1953 for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. On the first occasion the result was Crown Imperial. As might be expected, given the purpose, it is a splendidly sonorous and noble march, richly serious, but with good tunes. In that respect it is a worthy (and conscious) successor to Elgar’s four Pomp and Circumstance marches - exactly what it was intended to be.
Johann Strauss, Jr.
On the Beautiful Blue Danube, Waltzes, Opus 314
Johann Strauss the younger was born in Vienna on October 25, 1825, and died there on June 3, 1899. He composed the waltz set On the Beautiful Blue Danube in 1867. The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, trombone, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, bass drum, harp, and strings. Duration is about 9 minutes.
The waltz was the great dance craze of the nineteenth century, moving (like so many other popular dances over the years) from scandal to popularity to old-fashioned quaintness. At first fathers were horrified if their daughters dared to dance the waltz, since it was regarded as unseemly, almost pornographic, for an unmarried man and woman to dance in a close embrace (in earlier social dances, only the hands touched). The waltz began as a strictly German and Austrian dance for couples in 3/4 time in which the partners embraced. Soon after, Vienna became the site of the conference of the European powers after Napoleon abdicated in 1813. For over a year, representatives of all the major European countries met to work out a peace agreement. But they did not spend all of their time at the conference tables. They also learned the delights of Vienna’s many wine-houses, with dance bands of (usually) four instruments, where they could waltz the night away.
Before long, a rage for waltzes had spread all over Europe and, indeed, around the world. But the heart of this craze remained Vienna. In the mid-1820s two young men, Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss, wrote waltzes for the ensemble in a Vienna wine-garden. Before long the two men became leading competitors. And in just over 20 years, the son of one of them, Johann Strauss the younger, outshone them both and became the great master of the waltz.
The son formed a popular orchestra and wrote one dance piece after another for it—not only waltzes but also polkas, marches, and quadrilles. Many of his pieces employed musical jokes that attracted the attention of the audience even as listeners, not as dancers, and when he toured, Strauss gave what must be recognized as the first “pops concerts.” He hated touring, and soon turned that aspect of his work over to his brother Josef Strauss so he could concentrate on writing more elaborate waltzes and later operettas.
The Danube was no more blue in Strauss’s day than it is today, but that makes no difference. The famous waltz suite that Strauss called “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” has become virtually the theme song of Vienna—and it has been great PR for more than a century. Like Strauss’s other waltz compositions, this is not simply a single waltz, but rather an entire series of tunes. (In German, the word Walzer is both singular and plural, and it should almost always be translated as “waltzes” when we are speaking of one of these works of Strauss.)
It might seem easy for a composer to write a group of dance tunes, then to string them up in a row for a hit composition. But in fact it is a challenge to have winning melodies that fit together offer real contrast as well—particularly when the composer is limited to a single meter, as in the 3/4 of waltz time. Strauss was one of the rare geniuses with this special and unique ability to succeed in a genre that challenged the most advanced composers. Nothing indicates the special quality of Strauss’s music—and the respect he earned from other musicians—better than the famous story of a Viennese composer who was asked to sign someone’s autograph book, with a few measures of music. This composer wrote out the opening bars of the Blue Danube melody, then signed: “Unfortunately, not by Johannes Brahms.”
n.b. – This piece was first performed by the RSO on May 20, 1934 at the orchestra’s first concert performance.
Alexander Glazunov
Violin Concerto in A Minor, Opus 82
Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov was born in St. Petersburg on August 10, 1865, and died in Paris on March 21, 1936. He composed his Violin Concerto in 1904 for the Russian virtuoso Leopold Auer, to whom it is dedicated, and who played the world premiere under the composer’s direction in St. Petersburg on February 17, 1905. Auer’s pupil, the young Mischa Elman, played the solo part in the first performance outside of Russia; this took place in Queen’s Hall, London, on October 17, 1905, with Henry J. Wood conducting. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, bells, triangle, cymbals, harp, and strings. Duration is about 21 minutes.
Alexander Glazunov is one of those artists who achieved high fame early in life and then never really surpassed that youthful brilliance, with the result that his career seems in retrospect almost to have stagnated. It certainly did not start that way: when he began harmony lessons with Rimsky‑Korsakov at the beginning of 1880, the astonished teacher remarked that “his musical development progressed not by days but by hours.” Two years later, when young Glazunov was just seventeen, he appeared as the composer of a symphony, described by his teacher as “young in inspiration but already mature in technique and structure.” He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to write out the overture to Borodin’s unfinished opera Prince Igor, which Borodin had played for his friends on the piano, but never written down; after the composer’s early death, we have the overture only from Glazunov’s memory of those drawing‑room performances.
He became a busy conductor, an activity he enjoyed enormously, though he was never a real master of the podium. He spent decades in service to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, 20 years as its director. He was tireless in that capacity, working to improve the school at all levels.
When he took on the position, he was at the height of his powers, but gradually over the years his music showed something of a decline. The great nationalist school of the preceding generation had done its work, and Glazunov was part of the generation that produced a rapprochement with the art of western Europe. But despite the fact that he composed eight symphonies (he left a ninth unfinished), the logic of symphonic structure was never his great strength. He created elegant, attractive melodies; when these were employed in ballets, where they needed relatively little development, they achieved lasting success (particularly Raymond and The Seasons). His symphonies, on the other hand, were regarded by many younger musicians (including Stravinsky, himself a Rimsky‑Korsakov student some 20 years after Glazunov had been) as increasingly academic, growing ever farther away from the Russian spirit.
Still, Glazunov’s orchestral works have been appearing on recordings with increasing frequency during the last few years, allowing us the opportunity of drawing our own conclusions. The most recent evaluation of Glazunov’s work, Boris Schwarz’s article in The New Grove, maintains that the Eighth Symphony and the Violin Concerto are his best pieces. Certainly the Violin Concerto reveals a wonderful imagination for the possibilities of the solo instrument, which the composer did not play himself (though he did play piano, cello, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and percussion). His melodic gift, the sweetness of his invention, and the imaginative orchestral coloration—especially in the last movement—were surely responsible for the work’s immediate and lasting success.
The concerto is played straight through without pause; on paper it appears to have two movements, but it really offers the expected three movements in a somewhat unusual arrangement, with the slow movement (Andante sostenuto) appearing in the development section of the first movement. Immediately at its end the soloist begins an extended cadenza. The cellos and basses begin a sustained pedal on E, over which the soloist completes the cadenza; it runs directly to the appearance of the trumpets with a jovial hunting theme in 6/8 that leads off the rondo finale. Here the brilliance of Glazunov’s writing for the solo instrument is seconded by the bright sounds of piccolo, upper woodwinds, harp, and triangle in a shimmering bell‑like effect - not the great deep bells of the Kremlin, but rather perhaps of sleigh bells. A later episode offers the soloist in pizzicato chords possibly intended to suggest a balalaika. The concerto ends with a rush of harmonics.
Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 3 in F, Opus 90
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. He completed his Third Symphony during a stay at Wiesbaden in the summer of 1883; the two middle movements may date back to a never‑completed “Faust” project on which Brahms was working in 1880‑81. Hans Richter led the Vienna Philharmonic in the first performance of the F major symphony on December 2, 1883. It was first heard in America at one of Frank Van der Stucken’s “novelty concerts” at New York’s Steinway Hall on October 24, 1884. The symphony is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 33 minutes.
By the time Brahms wrote his Third Symphony, he had come to be regarded with great respect, at least, by many of the critics and the public, particularly those who saw in him a bulwark of instrumental abstract music against Wagner’s “Music of the Future.” That is not to say that new works were received with universal acclaim. For one thing, Wagner’s partisans were always as vicious in their denunciations of Brahms as the Brahmsians were in their attacks on the Wagnerian faction. And many well-intentioned music-lovers simply found Brahms’s elusive, complex music unclear, demanding, highly intellectual rather than emotional. When the Third Symphony was first performed in Boston in the fall of 1884 (its second performance in the United States), the response was all-too typical: “Like the great mass of the composer’s music,” wrote a critic, “it is painfully dry, deliberate and ungenial; and like that, too, it is free from all effect of seeming spontaneity.”
For the average listener it took decades—and many hearings—to find the extraordinary lyricism, the rapturous interplay of lines and rhythms that create a complexity that does indeed benefit from the sorting-out acquired by familiarity. A hundred years ago it was commonplace to say that Wagner was the avatar of musical modernism and Brahms of a musical conservatism. And yet the situation cannot have been so simply stated, or the music of Brahms would have been much easier to grasp. No less a musical mind than that of Arnold Schoenberg, whose Transfigured Night may be the apotheosis of Wagner’s Tristan, also wrote a profound essay entitled “Brahms the Progressive”, in which he drew attention to Brahms’s unsurpassed genius at melodic variation and the complex richness of his rhythms, to which no other composer of his time came close.
It is well known that Brahms waited until he was well into his forties—in 1876—before daring to bring forth his first symphony (though he claimed to have written and destroyed several before that). But once having broken ground for a symphonic edifice, he quickly moved onto his second such structure the following year. Then for five years he moved in other directions.
Finally, in the summer of 1882 he began his Third Symphony, completing it the following summer. Indeed, so ready was he to give birth to the work that he interrupted a journey on the Rhine and rented lodgings in Wiesbaden so that he could write out the score, which he apparently did without pause. The first performance took place that December in Vienna, where it was well received except for the noisy opposition of a few members of the Wagner-Bruckner camp. In those days, of course, there were neither recordings nor radio broadcasts to carry the sound of a new work beyond the audience that first heard it in the concert hall. Brahms’s friends in other cities—particularly his oldest and dearest friend and confidante, Clara Schumann—were eager to hear the piece. But they did not have to wait long; orchestras all over Europe and even the distant United States undertook to perform it in 1884 (before the end of the year performances had taken place in Cambridge, England, throughout Germany in Berlin, Leipzig, Cologne, and Meiningen, as well as both New York and Boston.
Brahms had prepared an arrangement for two pianos (in those pre-recording days, most music-lovers studied new compositions at home, playing them on the piano, before going to hear them in concert) and twice allowed the powerful Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick to hear the score in a two-piano reading before the official premiere. After the performance, Hanslick hailed the new work as “a feast for the music lover and musician… artistically the most perfect” of the composer’s works to that time.
Clara Schumann’s response to the two-piano score was enthusiastic:
I have spent such happy hours with your wonderful creation.... What a work! What a [musical] poem! What a harmonious mood pervades the whole! All the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of the heart, each one a jewel! … I could not tell you which movement I loved most. In the first I was charmed straight away by the gleams of dawning day, as if the rays of the sun were shining through the trees. Everything springs to life, everything breathes good cheer, it is really exquisite! The second is a pure idyll; I can see the worshipers kneeling about the little forest shrine, I hear the babbling brook and the buzz of the insects. There is such a fluttering and a humming all around that one feels oneself snatched up into the joyous web of Nature. The third movement is a pearl, but it is a grey one dipped in a tear of woe, and at the end the modulation is quite wonderful. How gloriously the last movement follows with its passionate upward surge! But one’s beating heart is soon calmed down again for the final transfiguration which begins with such beauty in the development motif that words fail me! How sorry I am that I cannot hear the symphony now that I know it so well and could enjoy it so much better.
For all the immediate fame and success that the symphony achieved (and for all its influence on Brahms’s contemporaries, including Dvořák and the American George W. Chadwick, whose own Third Symphony is in some ways an homage to this piece), the Brahms Third is the least-often programmed of the four symphonies. And this in spite of the fact that Brahms’s great devotee Hans Richter referred to the piece “Brahms’s Eroica.” Actually that epithet could have hindered the cause of the symphony, because the two works have almost nothing in common except the fact that they are both “third symphonies” and bear the tempo marking “Allegro con brio” for their first movements.
The Beethoven work shatters the past with a two-fisted aggressive outburst of dynamism; the Brahms is altogether quieter, more internalized, and more evocative. Every movement ends quietly, including the finale, and this may be another reason why it is heard rarely, since audiences are psychologically more attuned to applaud a loud, brilliant finish rather than the quiet close.
The first, second, and fourth movements of the symphony are linked by the presence of a “motto” that appears in the opening measures: three chords underlie a three-note melody that consists of F rising to A-flat, the soaring upward to the F in the higher octave. In this context, A-flat would suggest that the symphony is to be in F minor, but the chords underlying the first and third pitches have instead an A natural, which suggests (as indeed the score officially decrees) that the symphony is in F major. From the first three measures, then, the symphony unfolds an expressive scheme that is constantly playing with the opposition between major and minor, sometimes forcefully, but most often in delicate ways.
Nearly thirty years earlier Brahms had composed a violin sonata movement based on the musical emblem F-A-F, which (according to the composer’s biographer Kalbeck) stood for the phrase “frei aber froh” (“free but happy”). Here the same phrase recurs, except its middle member is now A-flat, bringing in a totally different mood. A and A-flat contend dramatically throughout the movement, a harmonic competition that helps to generate the great forward thrust that continues even past the more delicate and ravishing secondary theme, first heard in the clarinet.
The two middle movements are both more delicate, lighter—a type that Brahms often (though not here) chose to call “intermezzo.” The second movement features a melody that seems almost as simple as a folk song, developed with rich changes in the orchestration. The lyric flow is twice interrupted by a succession of chords that sound vaguely ominous.
The cellos sing a gorgeously poignant melody at the opening of the third movement, and the first violins soon take it up. Though this movement lacks specific references to the continuing struggle between A and A-flat, its mood of overall melancholy fits right in with the nature of that harmonic combat.
The finale opens in F minor, giving the impression that the A-flat will ultimately triumph. A chorale-like passage and a succession of motives build a powerful symphonic struggle. But rather than carrying this through to anything like a heroic conclusion, Brahms draws all of the thematic materials of this movement together in a calm apotheosis that finally settles the original question—minor or major?—in favor of the latter, with shimmering strings and a hushed close.
© Steven Ledbetter
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