Opening Night with Jeffrey Biegel
September 18, 2010
Jeffrey Biegel, piano
PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
BEDŘICH SMETANA
Overture to the Bartered Bride
Bedřich Smetana, whose first name is recorded in the baptismal register as Fridrich, was born in Leitomischl (Litomyšl), Bohemia, on March 2, 1824, and died in Prague on May 12, 1884. He composed the opera Prodaná nevĕsta (The Bartered Bride) between 1863 and 1866. The premiere of the original version took place in Prague on May 30, 1866, but Smetana revised it three times before it took its present form and was premiered on September 25, 1870. The famous overture calls for two flutes and piccolo, pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 7 minutes.
Though Smetana was to become a leading spokesman for Czech nationalism, his first spoken language was German (Czech was the language of peasants, and Smetana’s family was firmly in the middle class). From early on he had received support from Franz Liszt, who found him a publisher for some of his early piano pieces. It was while visiting Liszt that Smetana found his true calling when he heard the conductor Johannes von Herbeck remark that there were many gifted musicians among the Czechs, but no original composers. Smetana determined to make himself an original Czech composer. He embarked on the creation of music for his people, and did so particularly through opera, which gave him the opportunity to pick grand, patriotic historical themes, as in The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, or to find charming and delightful stories of village life among the peasants, as in his single most famous work, the winning comedy The Bartered Bride.
Strictly speaking the opera should be called The Sold Bride, a literal translation of its Czech title, Prodaná Nevěsta. It tells a simple and amusing tale of a young woman’s love emerging triumphant over the obstacles of circumstance, obstructionist parents, and an energetic marriage-broker. Smetana was so eager to compose a comic opera after completing the grand heroic opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia that he wrote the overture before he had even received the libretto from the poet. Most of the music of the overture never appears in the opera, though Smetana did work some of it into the second act finale. The crafty hero assembles the townspeople to witness what they think is an act of treachery—he will “sell” his right to marry his sweetheart, and withdraw any claim to her hand, for 300 gulden. Only at the end of the opera does everyone learn that he has in fact played a clever trick that will earn him the money and the girl, while preserving her from a forced marriage to man she does not love. The Bartered Bride remains the Czech national opera, the one 19th‑century Czech opera that is performed with any frequency outside its homeland. Smetana’s overture sets the mood of the evening with brilliant effervescence.
Frédéric Chopin
Andante spianato and Grand Polonaise in E-flat major, Opus 22
Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin—or, as he called himself during his many years in France, Frédéric Chopin—was born in Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, probably on March 1, 1810, and died in Paris on October 17, 1849. The polonaise was composed between September 1830 and July 1831. The Andante spianato was composed (as a piano solo, but conceived as an introduction for the Grand Polonaise) in 1834. The whole work was premiered in Paris on April 26, 1835. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, plus one trombone, timpani, and strings. Duration of the Andante spianato is about 4 minutes.
Not long after completing his two piano concertos—both works completed before he had turned twenty-one—Chopin wrote another brilliant showpiece for piano and orchestra in the form of a Grand Polonaise in E-flat. Soon after that, he moved to Paris, where he settled for the rest of his life (barring occasional visits and short stays elsewhere). There he developed his mature style, which was not so consciously “showy” but rather developed deeper connections between the melodic and harmonic elements of his pieces, and usually in smaller forms.
Before the Grand Polonaise, he created a dreamy pastoral for solo piano that he called Andante spianato (the unusual second word means “level” or “even”) and connected it to the earlier unperformed showpiece by means of a brief linking passage to move from the key of the Andante to that of the Polonaise. The solo opening is a kind of idyll, mostly built of rippling figures in 6/8, but with a central section in 3/4 that is more chordal. None of this particularly appealed to the Paris audience at the premiere, who were out for brilliance and flash. The Grand Polonaise, however, provided these elements and was much liked. Chopin realized that the general run of Paris audiences had little interest in the music he wanted to write, and for the rest of his life he mostly performed in private salons of cultivated people who could appreciate what he had written. He never performed this early work again.
KEITH EMERSON
Piano Concerto No. 1
Keith Noel Emerson was born in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, England, on November 2, 1944. He composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 for himself in 1977. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings. Duration is about 18 minutes.
Keith Emerson began classical piano studies as a child and was locally renowned by his early teens. He began to form and play with bands that were unusually open-minded in the sources of their repertory. He developed his own style by drawing upon the work of a number of major jazz pianists (Oscar Peterson, Fats Waller, Dave Brubeck, and others) and composers ranging from J.S. Bach to 20th century figures, including Copland, Shostakovich, Bartok, and Ginastera.
Even in his rock bands he continued to make use of his classical background, such as in the debut of his best-known ensemble, the trio Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, which made its name instantly at the group’s first appearance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, when they stood out from the other performers with a rock version of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He must feel close to this work, since he cleverly entitled his 2003 autobiography Pictures of an Exhibitionist.
Classical music audiences are rarely aware of the musical training that many modern rock musicians have undergone, with leading teachers and in major conservatories. Many rock musicians have developed an astonishingly virtuosic technique on their instruments. Keith Emerson has been famous for four decades as a leading keyboardist on the piano, the Hammond Organ, and the Moog Synthesizer.
Emerson’s 1977 Piano Concerto No. 1 is cast in three movements in the traditional fast-slow-fast pattern of the vast majority of concertos. The first movement, Allegro giojoso, is the longest, taking up about half the length of the piece, and filled with driving energy and high spirits. The slow movement, Andante molto cantabile, is a brief interlude, while the pounding and vigorous finale, Toccata con fuoco (viewable in a performance by the composer himself on YouTube), calls for all of the player’s force to capture the pounding rhythms that race, virtually without break, to the close.
At its first appearance in 1977, Emerson’s Piano Concerto No. 1 must have seemed a strange bird indeed, at a time when, in most musical circles, rock and classical music were not on speaking terms. In the intervening 33 years, the musical world as caught up with the idea. Not only is Emerson’s work being played by enthusiastic performers in many countries, but it is also increasingly clear that contemporary concert composers are drawing upon rock as one of many sources of inspiration—no doubt because they not only heard rock music as they were growing up, but because many of them, like Keith Emerson himself, have a foot in more than one musical world, and are pursuing ways to cross-pollinate them.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna, Austria on April 3, 1897. He completed his First Symphony in 1876, though some of the sketches date back to the 1850s. Otto Dessoff conducted the first performance in Karlsruhe on November 4, 1876. 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 45 minutes.
Brahms was only too aware that he was treading in the footsteps of giants. He knew the music of his great predecessors Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, and others, better than almost anyone living at his time (or any other time, for that matter), and he did not welcome direct comparison to their achievements. Beethoven in particular was an overwhelming gray shadow behind him, because by the middle 1850s, when Brahms’ career as a composer got going in earnest, Beethoven was rapidly approaching the position he has never since left, that of being the one composer to whom all others must bow in homage. Brahms keenly felt the power of Beethoven’s example. His fear of direct comparison and his own high standards made it difficult for him to create works in any medium that Beethoven had made uniquely his own. Thus Brahms was fully mature before he created a string quartet that he was willing to allow out into the world, and even older before he began a symphony. It was not for want of trying! He had started symphonies time and again for nearly two decades, but he ended up turning all of that music into some other kind of piece (such as his First Piano Concerto or his Requiem), or he simply destroyed his work.
Finally, at the age of forty‑three, in 1876, Brahms completed a symphony that met his standards. He had been working on it at least since 1868, when he wrote to Clara Schumann quoting the horn theme of the finale. It was a tough nut for first listeners to crack. Brahms himself admitted that it was “not exactly amiable.” The work traces a lengthy progress from the dark tension of its opening C minor to a glorious and sunny conclusion in C major. In this respect it follows a plan similar to that of two of Beethoven’s most famous symphonies, the Fifth (in its choice of key) and the Ninth (in achieving its bright conclusion with the aid of theme with such direct and simple melodic appeal that it lingers forever in the ear).
The symphony opens with a tense and dramatic introduction that provides the
principal musical seeds of the first movement (it is hard to believe that this slow introduction is an afterthought, so closely knit is it to what follows, but that is in fact the case). This introduction—pounding timpani strokes and rising chromatic line—seems to begin in the midst of some titanic struggle. Yet this lengthy moderato opening prepares the main argument of the movement; the Allegro takes up the idea of the timpani strokes (abstracted into the other instruments of the orchestra) and the rising chromatic line. It is prevailingly somber, its darkness only slightly relieved by the horn and wind colors in the secondary theme.
As the work continues, Brahms’s concern for unity reveals itself through the reworking of musical ideas from one movement to another. There are frequent references in later movements to the passing chromatic notes of the first movement’s introduction, an oboe theme in the slow movement seems to predict a clarinet theme in the next movement, and so on. These inner movements are essentially lyrical, expanding on the character of the dolce (sweet) and espressivo (expressive) markings that appear occasionally in the opening movement. The oboe theme in the second movement is wonderfully calm and expansive, though the middle section threatens its stability.
The third movement is entirely grazioso (graceful), far removed in mood from the struggles of the first and last movements. It is also harmonically far afield from the home key. Indeed, Brahms has planned a symmetrical architecture in which each movement appears in a key a major third higher than the previous one. After beginning in C minor, the second movement appears in E major. Its middle section (in G-sharp minor) anticipates the key of the third movement, A-flat major (A-flat and G-sharp are the same note, differently written). Finally, following the barely-resolved conclusion of the third movement, one more rise of a major third brings us back to C, closing the circle.
Like the opening movement, the finale begins with a lengthy introduction that plays an important part in the character of the whole movement. It starts out in the minor mode (as the whole symphony had done), but there is a constant sense of struggle, of reaching for a new goal, and this is finally achieved with the arrival in C major and the appearance of the magnificent horn theme that Brahms had sent to Clara in 1868. (This long-breathed theme offers a trompe-l’oeil to the audience: it sounds like a solo melody, but Brahms has divided it between the first and second horns to allow it to seem virtually unending.) The trombones enter, for the first time in the entire symphony, with a chorale melody, building up to the first statement of the main theme—a hymnlike C-major melody first hinted at (though in the minor) in the opening bar of the movement. Brahms was short-tempered with those who pointed out that it sounded like a rerun of Beethoven’s Ninth: “Any ass can see that!” he retorted. It marks the onset of the final struggle to establish C major, which is achieved with a climax for the entire orchestra on the trombone chorale melody and a powerful affirmation of C-major, achieved through a carefully crafted battle plan that conquers all in the end. Beethoven would have been pleased with his pupil.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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