Festival Finale
Saturday - August 21, 8:00 pm

Boris Berman, Piano
Brahms - Piano Concerto no. 2, op. 83, B-flat major
Rachmaninoff - Vocalise
Rachmaninoff - Symphonic dances, op. 45

This concert is sponsored by Marcia Larsen in memory of her husband, Charles

Program 9

Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Composed in 1878 and 1881.
Premiered on November 9, 1881 in Budapest, conducted by Alexander Erkel with the composer as soloist.

Brahms was a complex person. The paintings and photographs from his later years show him usually stern, occasionally smiling, but always hidden behind that great hedgerow of beard. He was capable of hurling forth truly bitter insults — he called Bruckner’s works “gigantic snake symphonies” — but he also regularly passed out pocketfuls of candy to the little tots who followed him around Vienna on his daily walks. He loved the simple, comfortable pleasures of plain, abundant food, new wine and well-worn clothes, but composed the most sophisticated music since Beethoven and moved among the highest echelons of musicians and society to dispense it. He could playfully disparage even such a monumental undertaking as this B-flat Concerto as a “tiny, tiny little piano concerto” and “a couple of little piano pieces,” but was at the same time so serious about his work that he became violent over any intrusion while he was composing. One time, for example, a young man who had been trying for years to catch a glimpse of the great master heard that Brahms was working on the second floor of his (Brahms’) vacation retreat. The man commandeered a ladder, climbed to the second story, and silently looked in for a few minutes. Brahms saw the face at the window, stormed over to it, and threw the ladder into the street, with no little harm done to the young man. Before he slammed the window shut, he bellowed curses at the miscreant, and shouted that he was never to be disturbed. Brahms was, indeed, a complex person, brimming with seeming contradictions.

The contradictions that marked Brahms’ personal life are reflected in the Second Concerto. This work, “sober, reflective, philosophical” according to Milton Cross, is the largest concerto ever composed in traditional, classical form. (Busoni’s Piano Concerto is half again as long, but its unique, hybrid form, which includes a men’s chorus, puts it out of the running.) Vladimir Horowitz, who played and recorded the Concerto with his father-in-law, Arturo Toscanini, called it the greatest music ever written for piano, yet this majestic work was inspired by two light-hearted, sun-filled trips to Italy.

In April 1878, Brahms journeyed to Goethe’s “land where the lemon trees bloom” with two friends, the Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth and the composer Carl Goldmark. Though he found the music of Italy ghastly (he complained of hearing one opera which consisted wholly of final cadences), he loved the cathedrals, the sculptures, the artworks and, especially, the countryside. Spring was just turning into summer during his visit, and he wrote to his dear friend Clara Schumann, “You can have no conception of how beautiful it is here.” Still under the spell of the beneficent Italian climate, Brahms sketched themes for his Second Piano Concerto on his return to Austria on the eve of his 45th birthday. Other matters pressed, however, and the Concerto was put aside. Three years later, during the spring of 1881, Brahms returned to Italy and was inspired by this second trip to resume composition on the Concerto. The score was completed by July. Whether or not the halcyon influence of Italy can be detected in the wondrous music of the B-flat Concerto is for each listener to decide. This work is certainly much more mellow than the stormy First Concerto, introduced over twenty years earlier, but whether this quality is the result of Brahms’ trips to the sunny south, or of a decade of imbibing Viennese Gemütlichkeit, or simply of greater maturity is a matter for speculation.

In his biography of the composer, Walter Niemann cited the three most important characteristics of Brahms’ concerto style: “the suppression of all display of technical virtuosity by the soloist as an end in itself; the equal footing maintained by the soloist and the orchestra; and the approximation of the concerto to the symphony in intellectual content.” (The integration of the piano into the music’s texture at the expense of brilliant but vapid passagework stems from Schumann’s Piano Concerto.) The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick called the B-flat Concerto “a symphony with piano obbligato.” Musicologist Carl Geiringer viewed the piano part as “that of a chamber-music work, although it demands the technique of a virtuoso.” The work requires a pianist not only of stunning technical achievement, but also one of immense physical endurance and impeccable musicianship. The B-flat Concerto is a work large and serious while at the same time hauntingly beautiful in performance and in memory.

The Concerto opens with a sylvan horn call answered by sweeping arpeggios from the piano. These initial gestures are introductory to the sonata form proper, which begins with the robust entry of the full orchestra. A number of themes are presented in the exposition; most are lyrical, but one is vigorously rhythmic. The development uses all of the thematic material, with one section welded almost seamlessly to the next, a characteristic of all Brahms’ greatest works. The recapitulation is ushered in by the solo horn, here given a richer orchestral accompaniment than on its earlier appearance.

It is rare for a concerto to have more than three movements. The second movement, a scherzo, was added by Brahms to expand the structure of this Concerto to a symphonic four movements. The composer’s biographer Max Kalbeck thought that the movement had originally been intended for the Violin Concerto but that Brahms, on the advice of Joseph Joachim, had eliminated it from that work. In key and mood, its differs from the other movements of the Concerto to provide a welcome contrast in the overall architecture of the composition.

The third movement is a touching nocturne based on the song of the solo cello heard immediately at the beginning. (Brahms later fitted this same melody with words as the song Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer.) An agitated central section gives way to long, magical phrases for the clarinets which lead to a return of the solo cello’s lovely theme.

The finale fuses rondo and sonata elements in a style strongly reminiscent of Hungarian Gypsy music. The jaunty rondo theme is presented without introduction. It is carefully and thoroughly examined before two lyrical motives are presented. As a study in the way in which small musical fragments may be woven into an exquisite whole, this rousing movement is unexcelled.

Donald N. Ferguson summarized the mood of this wonderful product of Brahms’ maturity: “There is no extravagance of joy, but rather a keen sense of well-being, expressed in phrases unimaginable by any but the deeply experienced.”

Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

Composed in 1912, orchestrated in 1916.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was one of the preeminent musical figures in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and his friends included some of the country’s most distinguished artists. He immortalized a number of those friendships in his works, one of which was the Fourteen Songs, Op. 34 of 1912, inspired by and dedicated to the singers Leonid Sobinov, Felia Litvin and the legendary Fyodor Chaliapin. The last of the Fourteen Songs was an unusual wordless melody titled simply Vocalise written for Antonina Neshdanova, a beautiful and gifted coloratura soprano of the Moscow Grand Opera. The haunting Vocalise quickly became a favorite with audiences, and soon appeared in arrangements for almost every solo instrument, including double bass. The conductor Serge Koussevitzky was enchanted with the work, and urged Rachmaninoff to transcribe it for orchestra. He did so in 1916, and the piece has remained one of his most popular orchestral miniatures.

The Op. 34 Songs were written during the most successful and rewarding period of Rachmaninoff’s life. The Revolution that was to crush the culture into which he had been born was still several years in the future, he was in demand as a pianist and conductor, he was composing as suited his desire, and his family life was happy. These Fourteen Songs reflect Rachmaninoff’s general tranquility and optimism at the time, though they are indelibly flavored with his characteristic wistful nostalgia. The Vocalise in its orchestral garb calls to mind the plangent lyricism of his best symphonic slow movements. Its long theme is entrusted largely to the strings and the solo violin, with woodwinds contributing fragmentary comments and counter-melodies. Wrote Oskar von Riesemann, editor of Rachmaninoff’s memoirs, of this touching piece, “The wonderfully curved melodic arch, with its even tranquility, spans the song from beginning to end in one unbroken line We find in it a resemblance, without any similarity of notes, to Bach’s Air on the G String, which moves in the same clarified atmosphere of divine tranquility.”

Symphonic Dances, Op. 45
Sergei Rachmaninoff

Composed in 1940.
Premiered on January 4, 1941 in Philadelphia, conducted by Eugene Ormandy.

Above the score for the first movement of his Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff wrote the curious indication, “Non allegro.” Now, virtually all of the music written during the last four centuries bears some similar inscription as an instruction to the performers about the work’s tempo. What is unusual here is the negative instruction implied by “Non allegro.” Musically speaking, “Allegro” simply means “fast,” but “not fast” (slow? medium? very fast?) is frustratingly ambiguous, and it may be that with this unusual heading Rachmaninoff was trying to convey a message greater than merely the speed of the music.

When tempo markings first came into common use around 1600, they employed the lingua franca of the art — Italian. Originally, these markings indicated the mood and spirit of a work rather than its precise tempo. (Metronomes to measure exact speed were not invented until Beethoven’s time, and the method of determining tempo by heart beats suggested by certain 17th-century theorists was inherently problematic.) “Largo,” for example, means “wide, broad”; “Grave,” “heavy, stern, serious”; “Adagio,” “at ease”; “Andante,” “walking”; and “Allegro” means “cheerful, merry, happy.” If Rachmaninoff’s indication is interpreted in this wider sense, it means “not cheerful” or “unhappy,” and this seems to be as much a guide to the man himself as to his Symphonic Dances.

The word that most easily attaches to Rachmaninoff and his music is “melancholy.” His photographs, invariably unsmiling, tell of the basic strain of sadness inherent in his personality. It is said that the only time he laughed or showed any joy was among his family and his most intimate Russian friends, and even then, only rarely. Perhaps he never fully recovered from the complete failure of his First Symphony in 1897. Of that painful experience he wrote, “The despair that filled my soul would not leave me. My dreams of a brilliant career lay shattered. My hopes and confidences were destroyed.... When the indescribable torture of this performance at last came to an end, I was a different man.” He suffered a nervous collapse as a result of the fiasco, and was treated in Moscow by Dr. Nicholas Dahl, whose technique of hypnotic auto-suggestion (“I will compose again. I will be successful,” intoned Rachmaninoff for hours on end) proved effective in reviving the composer’s self-confidence, if not in altering his basic pessimism.

World War I, of course, was a trial for Rachmaninoff and his countrymen, but his most severe personal adversity came when the 1917 Revolution smashed the aristocratic society of Russia — the only world he had ever known. He was forced to flee his beloved country, leaving behind family and financial security. He pined for his homeland the rest of his life, and did his best to keep the old language, food, customs and holidays alive in his own household. “But it was at best synthetic,” wrote David Ewen. “Away from Russia, which he could never hope to see again, he always felt lonely and sad, a stranger even in lands that were ready to be hospitable to him. His homesickness assumed the character of a disease as the years passed, and one symptom of that disease was an unshakable melancholy.” By 1940, when he composed the Symphonic Dances, he was filled with worry over his daughter Tatiana, who was trapped in France by the German invasion (he never saw her again), and had been weakened by a minor operation in May. Still, he felt the need to compose for the first time since the Third Symphony of 1936. The three Symphonic Dances were written quickly at his summer retreat on Long Island Sound, an idyllic setting for creative work, where he had a studio by the water in which to work in seclusion, lovely gardens for walking, and easy access to a ride in his new cabin cruiser, one of his favorite amusements. Still, it was the man and not the setting that was expressed in this music. “I try to make music speak directly and simply that which is in my heart at the time I am composing,” he once told an interviewer. “If there is love there, or bitterness, or sadness, or religion, these moods become part of my music, and it becomes either beautiful or bitter or sad or religious.”

It is nostalgic sadness that permeates the works of Rachmaninoff’s later years. Like a grim marker, the ancient chant Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead courses through the Paganini Rhapsody (1934), the Second (1908) and Third (1936) Symphonies and the Symphonic Dances (1940). The Symphonic Dances were his last important creation, coming less than three years before his death from cancer at age 70. After they were done, he lamented that he no longer had the “strength and fire” to compose. “I don’t know what happened,” he told a friend about them. “That was probably my last flicker.” Despite all, however, there is nothing morbid about the Symphonic Dances. They breathe a spirit of dark determination against a world of trial, a hard-fought musical affirmation of the underlying resiliency of life. Received with little enthusiasm when they were new, these Dances have come to be regarded as among the finest works from Rachmaninoff’s pen.

The first of the Symphonic Dances, in a large three-part form (A–B–A), is spun from a tiny three-note descending motive heard at the beginning that serves as the germ for much of the opening section’s thematic material. The middle portion is given over to a folk-like melody initiated by the alto saxophone. The return of the opening section, with its distinctive falling motive, rounds out the first movement. The waltz of the second movement was inspired by the music of Tchaikovsky rather than by that of the Strauss family. It is more rugged and deeply expressive than the Viennese variety, and possesses the quality of inconsolable pathos that gives so much of Rachmaninoff’s music its sharply defined personality. The finale begins with a sighing introduction for the winds, which leads into a section in quicker tempo whose vital rhythms may have been influenced by the syncopations of American jazz. Soon after this faster section begins, the chimes play a pattern reminiscent of the opening phrase of the Dies Irae chant. The sighing measures recur and are considerably extended, acquiring new thematic material but remaining unaltered in mood. When the fast, jazz-inspired music returns, its thematic relationship with the Dies Irae is strengthened. The movement accumulates an almost visceral rhythmic energy as it progresses, virtually exploding into the last pages, a coda based on an ancient Russian Orthodox chant (which he had earlier used in his All-Night Vigil Service of 1915) whose entry Rachmaninoff noted by inscribing “Alliluya” in the score. Was a specific message intended here? As the Alliluya succeeds the Dies Irae, did the composer mean to show that the Church conquers death? Optimism, sadness? Rachmaninoff was silent on the matter, except to say, “A composer always has his own ideas of his works, but I do not believe he ever should reveal them. Each listener should find his own meaning in the music.”