Zhuk Celebration (70 Years Young!)
Saturday - August 7, 8:00 pm

Valentin Zhuk, Conductor
Ilya Finkelshteyn, Cello
Prokofiev - Classical symphony, op. 25
Shostakovich - Cello Concerto No. 1, op. 107
Tchaikovsky - Suite no. 3, op. 55, G major

Program 3

Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 25, “Classical”
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Composed in 1916-1917.
Premiered on April 21, 1918 in Leningrad, conducted by the composer.

“In the field of instrumental music, I am well content with the forms already perfected. I want nothing better, nothing more flexible or more complete than sonata form, which contains everything necessary to my structural purpose.” This statement, given to Olin Downes by Prokofiev during an interview in 1930 for The New York Times, seems a curious one for a composer who had gained a reputation as an ear-shattering iconoclast, the enfant terrible of 20th-century music, the master of modernity. While it is certainly true that some of his early works (Scythian Suite, Sarcasms, the first two Piano Concertos) raised the hackles of musical traditionalists, it is also true that Prokofiev sought to preserve that same tradition by extending its boundaries to encompass his own distinctive style. A glance through the list of his works shows a preponderance of established Classical forms: sonatas, symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets, quartets, overtures and suites account for most of his output. This is certainly not to say that he merely mimicked the music of earlier generations, but he did accept it as the conceptual framework within which he built his own compositions.

Prokofiev’s penchant for using Classical musical idioms was instilled in him during the course of his thorough, excellent training: when he was a little tot, his mother played Beethoven sonatas to him while he sat under the piano; he studied with the greatest Russian musicians of the time — Glière, Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, Glazunov; he began composing at the Mozartian age of six. By the time he was 25, Prokofiev was composing prolifically, always brewing a variety of compositions simultaneously. The works of 1917, for example, represent widely divergent styles — The Gambler is a satirical opera; They Are Seven, a nearly atonal cantata; the Classical Symphony, a charming miniature. This last piece was a direct result of Prokofiev’s study with Alexander Tcherepnin, a good and wise teacher who allowed the young composer to forge ahead in his own manner while making sure that he had a thorough understanding of the great musical works of the past. It was in 1916 that Prokofiev first had the idea for a symphony based directly on the Viennese models supplied by Tcherepnin, and at that time he sketched out a few themes for it. Most of the work, however, was done the following year, as Prokofiev recounted in his Autobiography:

“I spent the summer of 1917 in complete solitude in the environs of Petrograd; I read Kant and I worked hard. I had purposely not had my piano moved to the country because I wanted to establish the fact that thematic material worked out without a piano is better. The idea occurred to me to compose an entire symphonic work without the piano. Composed in this fashion, the orchestral colors would, of necessity, be clearer and cleaner. Thus the plan of a symphony in Haydnesque style originated, since, as a result of my studies in Tcherepnin’s classes, Haydn’s technique had somehow become especially clear to me, and with such intimate understanding it was much easier to plunge into the dangerous flood without a piano. It seemed to me that, were he alive today, Haydn, while retaining his style of composition, would have appropriated something from the modern. Such a symphony I now wanted to compose: a symphony in the classic manner. As it began to take actual form I named it Classical Symphony; first, because it was the simplest thing to call it; second, out of bravado, to stir up a hornet’s nest; and finally, in the hope that should the symphony prove itself in time to be truly ‘classic,’ it would benefit me considerably.” Prokofiev’s closing wish has been fulfilled — the Classical Symphony has been one of his most successful works ever since it was first heard.

The work is in the four movements customary in Haydn’s symphonies, though at only fifteen minutes it hardly runs to half their typical length. The dapper first movement is a miniature sonata design that follows the traditional form but adds some quirks that would have given old Haydn himself a chuckle — the recapitulation, for example, begins in the “wrong” key (but soon rights itself) and occasionally a beat is left out, as though the music had stubbed its toe. The sleek main theme is followed by the enormous leaps, flashing grace notes and sparse texture of the second subject. A graceful, ethereal melody floating high in the violins is used to open and close the Larghetto, with the pizzicato gentle middle section reaching a brilliant tutti before quickly subsiding. The third movement, a Gavotte, comes not from the Viennese symphony but rather from the tradition of French Baroque ballet. The finale is the most brilliant movement of the Symphony, and calls for remarkable feats of agility and precise ensemble from the performers.

The Classical Symphony, in the words of Milton Cross, “was an attempt to approximate how Mozart would have written a symphony had he lived in the 20th century. Each of the four movements is epigrammatic in its brevity, and given to pellucid writing, old-world grace, and bright-faced wit.”

Cello Concerto No. 1, Op. 107
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Composed in 1959.
Premiered on October 4, 1959 in Leningrad, conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky with Mstislav Rostropovich as soloist.

By the mid-1950s, Dmitri Shostakovich had developed a musical language of enormous subtlety, sophistication and range, able to encompass such pieces of “Socialist Realism” as the Second Piano Concerto, the Festive Overture, and the Symphonies No. 11 (“The Year 1905”) and No. 12 (“Lenin”), as well as the profound outpourings of the First Violin Concerto, the Tenth Symphony and the late string quartets. The First Cello Concerto, written for Mstislav Rostropovich during the summer of 1959, straddles both of Shostakovich’s expressive worlds, a quality exemplified by two anecdotes told by the great cellist himself:

“Shostakovich gave me the manuscript of the First Cello Concerto on August 2, 1959. On August 6th I played it for him from memory, three times. After the first time he was so excited, and of course we drank a little bit of vodka. The second time I played it not so perfect, and afterwards we drank even more vodka. The third time I think I played the Saint-Saëns Concerto, but he still accompanied his Concerto. We were enormously happy....”

“Shostakovich suffered for his whole country, for his persecuted colleagues, for the thousands of people who were hungry. After I played the Cello Concerto for him at his dacha in Leningrad, he accompanied me to the railway station to catch the overnight train to Moscow. In the big waiting room we found many people sleeping on the floor. I saw his face, and the great suffering in it brought tears to my eyes. I cried, not from seeing the poor people but from what I saw in the face of Shostakovich....”

The ability of Shostakovich’s music, like the man himself, to display the widest possible range of moods in succession or even simultaneously is one of his most masterful achievements. (The same may be said of Mahler, whose music was an enormous influence on Shostakovich.) The opening movement of the First Cello Concerto may be heard as almost Classical in the clarity of its form and the conservatism of its harmony and themes, yet there is a sinister undercurrent coursing through this music, a bleakness of spirit not entirely masked by its ceaseless activity. The following Moderato grows from sad melodies of folkish character, piquantly harmonized, which are gathered into a huge welling up of emotion before subsiding to close the movement. The extended solo cadenza that follows without pause is an entire movement in itself. (Shostakovich had used a similar formal technique in the Violin Concerto No. 1 of 1948.) Thematically, it springs from the preceding slow movement, and reaches an almost Bachian depth of feeling. The cadenza leads directly to the finale, one of Shostakovich’s most witty and sardonic musical essays. With disarming ease, the main theme of the first movement is recalled in the closing section of the finale to round out the Concerto’s form. “It is difficult to think of any modern concerto,” wrote Alan Frank, “which pursues its objectives in so purposeful a manner with little or no exploration of by-ways.”

In addition to its purely musical value, Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto deserves a significant footnote in Russia’s modern artistic history. The piece was written for Rostropovich, about whom the composer said in his purported memoirs, Testimony, “In general, Rostropovich is a real Russian; he knows everything and he can do everything. Anything at all. I’m not even talking about music here, I mean that Rostropovich can do almost any manual or physical work, and he understands technology.” Shostakovich and Rostropovich were close friends during the composer’s later years, and they lived as neighbors for some time in the Composers’ House in Moscow. Rostropovich gave the Concerto both its world premiere (Leningrad; October 4, 1959) and its first American performance (Philadelphia; November 6, 1959), and he was the inspiration for Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2 of 1966. In 1974, Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, defected to live and work in the West; four years later they were deprived of their Russian citizenship and became “non-persons” in their native land. In 1979 Dmitri and Ludmilla Sollertinsky published their Pages from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, which was essentially the Soviet rebuttal to the scathing criticism leveled in Testimony, issued several months earlier. Though Rostropovich was one of Shostakovich’s best friends and most important artistic motivators, his name is not even mentioned in the Sollertinskys’ Pages, and the fine First Cello Concerto is dismissed in the book with a mere, passing half-sentence.

Suite No. 3 in G major, Op. 55
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Composed in 1884.
Premiered on January 24, 1885 in St. Petersburg, conducted by Hans von Bülow.

Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa was premiered in Moscow on February 15, 1884. One day later he set out for Paris, despite the fact that the conductor Max Erdmannsdorfer was giving the first performance of his Suite No. 2 that very evening. Erdmannsdorfer was incensed; nor were the audiences in St. Petersburg very happy when the composer missed the local premiere of Mazeppa on February 19th. Neither of these snubs could halt the spread of his burgeoning reputation as Russia’s greatest composer, however, and Tsar Alexander III, who was himself deeply affected by Tchaikovsky’s music, recognized his position by conferring upon him The Order of St. Vladimir, Fourth Class. Tchaikovsky learned of the honor in Paris in early March, and hurried back to Moscow to attend the presentation ceremony on March 19th, for which he fortified his shaky constitution with “several strong doses of bromide,” according to his brother Modest, “the last actually swallowed on the threshold of the room where the Empress was awaiting him.” Following that enervating interview, Tchaikovsky withdrew first to St. Petersburg and then to his sister’s country estate at Kamenka, near Kiev, and there developed a nearly insatiable thirst for tea, played whist, studied English, took long walks, read Otto Jahn’s Life of Mozart (the composer whom he revered above all others), and began his Suite No. 3 for Orchestra.

The genesis of the Third Suite may be followed precisely in the diary that Tchaikovsky kept during his stay at Kamenka between April and June 1884. April 28th: “[While walking] in the forest and indoors I have been trying to lay the foundation of a new symphony ... but I am not at all satisfied. [He had written nothing in that form since the Fourth Symphony of 1877.] Walked in the garden and found the germ, not of a symphony, but of a future suite.” May 1st: “Very dissatisfied because everything that comes into my head is so commonplace. Am I played out?” May 6th: “The suite will be in five movements, of which the last will be variations.” May 8th: “Worked with great intensity on the Scherzo this morning.” May 12th: “Spent all day writing the Valse for the Suite, but feel far from confident that it is entirely satisfactory.” May 14th: “The Valse gives me infinite trouble. I am growing old.” (He was 44.) May 15th: “Finished the sketch of the Valse.” And so on. The Elegy was completed on May 21st, after which he turned to the intended opening movement, tentatively labeled “Contrasts.” However, developing its theme (which he carefully noted in the dairy) proved so “hateful ... that I resolved to set it aside and invent something else.” (The music was discarded entirely from the Suite, and ended up as the second movement of the little-known Concert Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 56.) He therefore took up the variations-finale, starting with the closing Polacca section, and finished the sketch of the composition’s four movements on June 4th. A month later, while working on the orchestration, he wrote rather facetiously to his friend and publisher Peter Jurgenson, “A work of greater genius than the new Suite never was!!! My opinion of the new-born work is so optimistic; God knows what I shall think of it a year hence.” The finished autograph score was dated on August 1st.

Though Tchaikovsky dedicated the Third Suite to Max Erdmannsdorfer (“so as to assuage his bitterness over my flight from Moscow” at the premiere of the Second Suite), its first performance was entrusted to Hans von Bülow. Bülow, the phenomenal German musician famed as both pianist and conductor, had long been a champion of Tchaikovsky’s music (he gave the premiere of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in Boston in 1875), and he scheduled the Suite’s first performance for his concert with the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Musical Society on January 24, 1885. With the easy accessibility of the new music and Bülow’s splendid performance, the Suite won a superb success. “Never have I had such a triumph,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Nadejda von Meck. “I could see that the greater part of the audience was touched and grateful. Such moments are the best in an artist’s life.” Such unmitigated joy was essentially antithetical to Tchaikovsky’s pervading melancholia, however, and six days after the premiere he confessed, “The weariness afterwards is enormous. The next day I was just like a sick person.... I suffer rather than take pleasure in the growing awareness of my success. A wish to hide myself somewhere; a thirst for freedom, quiet, solitude prevailed over the feeling of a satisfied self-esteem.” “Tchaikovsky’s mind, seen for a moment from a scientific viewpoint,” analyzed Edward Lockspeiser, “constitutes a text-book illustration of the borderline between genius and insanity.”

The Suite’s opening movement, subtitled Élégie though thoroughly devoid of any morbidity, is a fine example of the skill Tchaikovsky had developed by the last decade of his life in sustaining simple lyrical expressions over an extended time span. The opening theme, a sweet melody in swaying 6/8 meter initiated by the strings, is followed by a step-wise motive in a contrasting rhythm, which in turn becomes the accompaniment for the repeat of the principal theme. The movement’s subsidiary theme is a smooth, flowing strain given by unison flutes in a new key area. The center section maintains the movement’s mood by suave juxtapositions and elaborations of the themes which use the techniques of symphonic development in a lyrical rather than a dramatic manner. The return to the home tonality is marked by a grand presentation of the second theme. The Élégie closes with a truncated recall of the opening melody and an extended coda led by the English horn.

The Valse mélancolique (“the obligatory waltz” he dubbed it in his diary because of the trouble it cost him) is based on one of Tchaikovsky’s most finely crafted melodies. To complement the breathy sound of unison flutes in their low register, the orchestral palate is dark and subdued, an effect that presages many of the murmuring pages of Sibelius. The movement’s climax, strewn with ribbons of woodwind scales, comes in its center section before the wistful waltz returns to round out the form. Tchaikovsky’s friend Herman Laroche characterized the following Scherzo as music for “a lilliputian army, tiny elfin-soldiers on parade.” Its scoring shimmers, and its mercurial filigree and rhythmic restlessness lend it an effervescence that looks forward to passages in the Nutcracker.

The finale is a splendid set of eleven variations with a concluding Polacca equal in length to the three preceding movements combined. It was one of Tchaikovsky’s favorites among his own works, and he conducted it frequently by itself and as part of the Suite. (He led the Suite during the inaugural week of concerts in New York’s Carnegie Hall in May 1891 with great success. Arthur Nikisch, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, heeded the public demand to hear the piece again, and played it on the BSO’s East Coast tour that November.) The movement’s theme is a four-square Classical melody, original with Tchaikovsky, which he elaborated into a wide variety of beautifully polished variations — lyrical, sweeping, balletic, fugal, folk-like, ecclesiastical, virtuosic — and concluded with a brilliant and stirring Polacca. These variations have excited much well-deserved praise, and the composer’s biographer Edwin Evans believed that “[they] stand in sheer plastic beauty above any modern set for orchestra, Elgar’s Enigma Variations alone excepted.”