In this section...

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Program Notes

Ludwig van Beethoven (Born in Bonn in 1770; died in Vienna in 1827)

Consecration of the House Overture, Op. 124

Alfred Jenkins Shriver died in 1939 and this Baltimore lawyer and philanthropist, and graduate of Johns Hopkins University, left a will that specified the building of a lecture hall on Homewood Campus. It was completed in 1954 and was named after him. The auditorium has been the focal point of some very grand moments, as writer Dennis O’Shea said in the Hopkins campus news post, The Hub (2017): “In Shriver Hall’s more than 60 years, global leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and presidential candidates have made news from behind its lectern.” And of course, the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra has graced its stage for nearly three decades. After a major renovation closed Shriver Hall’s doors for the entire 2018 concert season, it now reopens with much ado and community excitement, and is, this weekend, orchestrally re-christened by the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra. Fittingly, the first notes to consecrate this new hall will be Beethoven’s own Consecration of the House Overture.

Nearly 200 years ago, in 1822, the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna was reopening after its own renovation. The reopening festivities included performance of the play, The Ruins of Athens, and Beethoven’s incidental music to it, celebrating the Austrian Hapsburg’s rule. The play with Beethoven’s music (Op. 113) had premiered in 1812 in dedication for a new theatre in Pest, Hungary. So successful were these two works that the Josefstadt wanted to repeat it in 1822, but Beethoven felt that musical revisions were first necessary. They included writing an entirely new Overture, titled Consecration of the House Overture, which we hear in this performance. It’s a remarkable example of Beethoven giving homage to his early Classical roots. In writing the new Overture, Beethoven had one of his heroes, Handel, in musical mind, and it made for a wonderful blend of “Beethoven meets Handel” – sometimes referred to as his “Overture in the Handelian Style” – and it is indeed both a typically visionary work by Beethoven mixed with the joyous, Baroque expressions of Handel’s time – making for a marvel of a celebratory piece.

Like any good musician who claps upon arriving in a new concert hall, Beethoven’s Overture begins by testing out the acoustics with five loud orchestral claps of the hands. This is then followed by a dignified introductory section that is very much modeled after the Baroque French-style overtures that Handel would have composed. Peppered with drums, fanfares and ascending scales, the introduction nonetheless takes on the air of a hymn. But in typical Beethoven fashion, excitement begins to build directly into a magnificent double fugue. Conceived in the spirit of Handel, the fugues are headlong plunges into Beethoven’s love for forward momentum, and are grand and glorious like a finale to one of his late Symphonies. By the final and bracing bars, consecration has indeed been bestowed.

Franz Liszt (Born in Raiding, Hungary in 1811; died in Bayreuth, Germany in 1886)

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp minor, S.244/2

Gifted with one of the great musical memories in music history, with a brilliance at the piano that remains legendary even today, and living in a time that made travelling as a virtuoso very possible, Franz Liszt became history’s first international music superstar. His performances and his dashing sex appeal created a phenomenon called “Lisztomania,” complete with adoring fans fainting and swooning, who begged for relic locks of his hair. Like many virtuoso composers in his day, Liszt wrote works that showed off his unique talents, but as a composer he wasn’t merely about glitter. Liszt was also a path maker, especially in his use of folk and nationalistic elements in much of his music, inspired by his Hungarian countrymen’s struggle for autonomy from the Austrian rule. His most successful piano works in this vein are his 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies, written in the 1840’-50’s and 1880’s.

These 19 tours de force are some of the great gems of Liszt’s writing as a virtuoso, compositional poet, and as a Nationalist. Liszt himself transcribed their folk melodies, believing them to be authentic from the Romani (gypsies) of the Hungarian countryside, and arranged them into lively settings. Of the 19, none is more popular than the beloved Second Rhapsody that brims with two of the most memorable themes Liszt ever captured. Shortly after their piano premieres, many of the Rhapsodies were arranged for orchestra. No. 2 was first arranged by Franz Doppler, a flute virtuoso and contemporary of Liszt’s, and then revised by Liszt himself. The version heard tonight was arranged by Karl Müller-Berghaus.

No. 2 is fashioned as a czárdás, a Hungarian folk dance typically comprised of two segments: a lassan (meaning “slow”), and a friska (meaning “fresh”). Liszt’s opening lassan is at once a vast survey of Hungarian landscapes as well as deeply saturated with rapturous desire – brooding, smiling, dreaming, hoping. Two lovely mini-cadenzas for clarinet especially evoke these feelings, and Liszt underscores the entire lassa with rich harmonies and colors. The friska then begins the dance portion, starting with a long build up. When the main tune arrives, preceded by a dramatic pause, the dance becomes cheerily riotous. The friska wends its way through accelerations and dramatic shifts of tempo, like inhaling and exhaling, until the final section explodes in fire and fun. Liszt uncannily combined Hungarian folk song with virtuosic appeal to create, truly, one of the great showstoppers in Western music.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Born in Lomonosov, Russia in 1882; died in New York in 1971)

Symphony in C

  1. Moderato alla breve
  2. Larghetto concertante
  3. Allegretto
  4. Largo – Tempo giusto, alla breve

In 1938 Stravinsky premiered his exquisite chamber concerto Dumbarton Oaks for Washington, DC art patrons Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. It was so successful that Stravinsky was then persuaded to write a piece for the 50th Anniversary Season, 1940-41, of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Still living in Paris, Stravinsky began writing the first movement of that commission, creating a very unconventional symphony in conventional form, his Symphony in C, when a series of family tragedies began.

In the midst of beginning work on his Symphony in C, his daughter, wife and mother all died from tuberculosis, and Stravinsky himself was diagnosed with it. He later reflected that “For the third time in six months [mid-1939] … I dropped a handful of dirt in an open grave.” He added that writing his Symphony was what saved his own life; its second movement written while he lived in a sanitarium. When he emerged from the family devastation, World War II was full on and Stravinsky left Europe forever, going to America in the winter of 1939. The final two movements of his Symphony were finished on American soil.

The Symphony was completed and premiered in Chicago, with Stravinsky conducting, in the Orchestra’s anniversary season. It was loved at its premiere and since, but its tone gives few hints of the considerable grief that accompanied Stravinsky during its creation. The work is spry, humorous and “Classical,” at least in a structural sense – devoid of any outpouring of grief – and considering its birthing bedfellows, it’s astonishingly abstract. It is not, however, without character or intensity. The first movement is a brisk, Beethovian kind of driving machine, where rhythms propel the themes along in a grand way. The second movement, although crafted within the white, sterile walls of the sanitarium in Paris, is playful and topsy-turvy – a delightful song that occasionally favors its accompaniment more than its melody.

The third movement was written in America, when Stravinsky’s life was being put back together anew, and here we might pick up on the surroundings of its creation. Early on you’ll hear a galloping bassoon solo that Stravinsky said never would have occurred to him had he not sped through the glittering streets of downtown Los Angeles. The fourth and final movement feels like a car ride too. As the movement gets rolling, there’s the splendid feel of driving fast, exhilarated, past shifting scenes in a new country, presented like changing tableaus before your eyes and ears. And what makes them so splendid are Stravinsky’s creative sounds.

In all of Stravinsky’s works, and especially famous in his three early ballets (The Firebird, Petrouchka, and The Rite of Spring), there are instrumental concoctions that sound extraordinary, singularly different than anything we’ve ever heard before, as if Stravinsky were musically describing fantastical beasts. The Symphony in C is packed, too, with these wonderful sounds, and a great example is the very beginning of that soon-to-be exhilarating fourth movement: two bassoons and horns plod and stumble about like a giant train in super slow motion – unexpected and magical. The ending of this finale, as well, is something only Stravinsky could conjure: a decelerating woodwind chorale, with everything melting to a halt, with the music arriving at an almost pinpoint, final refinement. As Stravinsky explained, with undoubtedly some impish glee:

Instead of all the chords gravitating toward one final tonic chord, all notes gravitate toward a single note. Thus this symphony [is] neither a symphony in C major nor a symphony in C minor but simply a symphony in C.

Johannes Brahms (Born in Hamburg in 1833; died in Vienna in 1897)

Double Concerto for Violin and Cello in A-Minor, Op. 102

  1. Allegro
  2. Andante
  3. Vivace non troppo

The genesis behind Brahms’s Double Concerto for Violin and Cello began long before its premiere in October 1887. It really began 30-plus years earlier when Brahms met the great violinist Joseph Joachim in 1853 on tour in Hanover, which began a lifetime of friendship and collaboration. Their talents culminated in one of the great violin concertos in the repertoire – Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 of 1878 – written for and premiered by Joachim. Joachim had much to do with helping launch Brahms’s career and Brahms in turn provided more than a handful of masterpieces with which Joachim toured. Besides the Violin Concerto, Brahms composed some superb chamber works with Joachim in mind. It was in the violinist’s own touring ensemble, the Joachim String Quartet, where Brahms met the noted German cellist Robert Hausmann in the late 1870’s and promised him a cello concerto.

Other commitments, however, claimed the better part of Brahms’ time until 1887, some ten years later, when Brahms was able to work on Hausmann’s concerto. It was generally complete when Brahms considered the ramifications. In the intervening years Joachim had broken off his friendship with Brahms entirely – a nasty divorce between Joachim and his wife caught Brahms on the “wrong” side, and that falling out was heartbreaking for Brahms. Even so, Joachim continued to promote and champion Brahms’s music. How painful would it be for Joachim when his own ensemble’s cellist, Hausmann, received Brahms’s Concerto? Brahms felt he had no choice but to expand the erstwhile cello concerto to include violin and dedicate it to Joachim. The olive branch was accepted, and Brahms and Joachim rekindled their friendship, if perhaps with some caution.

Although a “double concerto” was a less-than-fashionable piece to write in 1887, Brahms was devoted to writing music in the tradition of Mozart, Beethoven, and in the spirit of Bach. Given those great Masters’ concerti for multiple soloists, a double concerto for violin and cello keenly interested Brahms, himself a respected music historian. But, somewhat surprisingly, it was the beginning of an intriguing new path – melding the essence of chamber music into the essence of a Romantic era symphony. It is this blending of intimacy with grandiosity that makes this Concerto such a delightful masterpiece, and which would soon influence composers like Mahler and Bruckner.

Performing Brahms’s Double Concerto is a tricky feat for an orchestra. First, the prospect of securing two virtuoso soloists is not an easy task – and to be sure, virtuosity is essential to making this great piece work – the violinist and cellist have to be first class soloists as well as extremely adept chamber musicians. And second, Brahms’s lightning switchbacks between gestures of intense gravity with moments of breathtaking tenderness, even humor, need be treated with a master poet’s skill. The very beginning of the Concerto illustrates this well – the orchestra introduces the work with a grandiloquent phrase comparable to the beginning of Brahms’s First Symphony, and then, the cellist enters with gentle passion and quietude. The Concerto’s masterstrokes come in these kinds of ingenious subtleties, the exquisite dialogues both between the two soloists and them and the orchestra, and its lavish tonal colors and beauty. And there are few passages in Western music that can match the rich autumnal hues of the main theme in the second movement. The gypsy-dance flavor of third movement is wonderfully light-hearted even in its minor key, but underneath the brightness there flows a subtle sadness, an emotional complexity not unlike what Mozart, whose works Brahms adored, perfected in his late works. The Double Concerto stands as a timeless masterpiece, perched between Music’s past and its future, and as a late and beautiful testament to Brahms’s unique career.

Program notes by Max Derrickson