PMF Program Notes - August 3, 2006

Shostakovich :: Prelude and Scherzo for strings
Prokofiev :: Piano Concerto No 3 in C, Op. 26
Rachmaninoff :: Symphony No. 3 in a minor, Op. 44

Sponsored by OC & Pat Boldt

Shostakovich entered the Leningrad Conservatory in 1919 as a student of piano, composition, counterpoint, harmony and orchestration. He was thirteen. His father died three years later, leaving a widow and children with no means of support, so Dmitri’s mother, a talented amateur musician and an unswerving believer in her son’s talent and the benefits of his training at the Conservatory, took a job as a typist to provide the necessities for the family. She constantly sought help from official sources to sustain Dmitri’s career, but by the autumn of 1924, it became necessary for the young musician to find work despite the press of his studies and the frail state of his health. (He spent several weeks in 1923 at a sanatorium to treat his tuberculosis.) Victor Seroff described Shostakovich’s new job: as pianist in a movie house. “The little theater was old, drafty and smelly,” wrote Seroff. “Three times a day a new crowd packed the small house; they carried the snow in with them on their shoes and overcoats. The heat of the packed bodies in their damp clothes, added to the warmth of two small stoves, made the bad air stifling hot by the end of the performance. Then the doors were flung open to let the crowd out and to air the hall before the next show, and cold damp drafts swept through the house. Down in front, below the screen, sat Dmitri, his back soaked with perspiration, his near-sighted eyes in their horn-rimmed glasses peering upwards to follow the story, his fingers pounding away on the raucous upright piano. Late at night he trudged home in a thin coat and summer cap, with no warm gloves or galoshes, and arrived exhausted around one o’clock in the morning.” The taxing job sapped his strength and health, but Shostakovich still eked out a little time to sketch a First Symphony that would serve as his graduation exercise following completion of his Conservatory studies early in 1925. In December 1924, he set aside the Symphony to write a movement for string octet in memory of his friend, the young poet Volodya Kurchavov. The following July, after his family had scraped together sufficient resources to extricate him from his celluloid purgatory so that he could complete the gestating First Symphony, Shostakovich added a Scherzo to the earlier Prelude to create the Two Pieces for Strings, Op. 11, which were issued by the State Publishing House in 1927.

Though modest in scale and scoring, the Prelude and Scherzo encompass an almost symphonic range of expressive states. The Prelude takes as the outer sections of its three-part form (A–B–A) a somber Adagio. At the center of the movement lies an animated paragraph with much conversational interchange of motives among the participants. The Scherzo, one of Shostakovich’s most determinedly modernist creations, reflects the period of avant-gardism that flourished briefly in Soviet art before Stalin came to power in 1927. The music is cheeky and brash, overflowing with insouciant dissonance and youthful energy.

Composed in 1921.
Premiered on December 16, 1921 in Chicago, conducted by Frederick Stock with the composer as soloist.

In a 1962 interview, Madame Lina Llubera Prokofiev, the composer’s first wife, recalled her husband’s working method at the time he wrote the C major Piano Concerto: “Prokofiev toiled at his music. His capacity for work was phenomenal. He would sit down to work in the morning ‘with a clear head,’ as he said, either at the piano or at his writing desk. He usually composed his major works in the summer, in the mountains or at the seaside, away from the turmoil of city life. Always he sought places where the rhythm of work was not interrupted, where he could rest and take long walks. So it was with the Third Piano Concerto, which he completed during the summer of 1921 while staying at St. Brévin-les-Pins, a small village on the coast of Brittany in France.”

Prokofiev provided the following description of the score: “The first movement opens quietly with a short introduction. The theme is announced by an unaccompanied clarinet and is continued by the violins for a few bars. Soon the tempo changes to Allegro, and the strings lead to the statement of the principal subject by the piano. Discussion of this theme is carried on in a lively manner, both the piano and the orchestra having a good deal to say on the matter. A passage in chords for the piano alone leads to the more expressive second subject, which is heard in the oboe with a pizzicato accompaniment. The second movement consists of a theme with five variations. The finale begins with a staccato theme for bassoons and pizzicato strings, which is interrupted by the blustering entry of the piano. The orchestra holds its own with the opening theme, however, and there is a good deal of argument, with frequent differences of opinion as regards key. Eventually the piano takes up the first theme and develops it to a climax. With a reduction of tone and a slackening of tempo, an alternative theme is introduced in the woodwinds. The piano replies with a theme that is more in keeping with the caustic humor of the work. This material is developed, and there is a brilliant coda.”

Composed in 1935-1936.
Premiered on November 6, 1936 in Philadelphia, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

Following the burst of creative activity between 1895 and 1910 that brought forth three piano concertos, two symphonies, two operas, a symphonic poem and the “choral symphony” The Bells, Sergei Rachmaninoff did not issue another work for orchestra until the Fourth Piano Concerto of 1927. After being forced from his beloved Russian homeland by the 1917 Revolution, he established a career as a pianist and conductor in Europe and the United States whose enormous success almost completely prohibited composition. (“When I am concertizing I cannot compose,” he said. “When I feel like writing music I have to concentrate on that — I cannot touch the piano. When I am conducting I can neither compose nor play concerts. Other musicians may be more fortunate in this respect; but I have to concentrate on any one thing I am doing to such a degree that it does not seem to allow me to take up anything else.”) His return to the orchestral idiom with the Fourth Concerto was poorly received (he revised the score extensively in 1941), and it took him until 1934 to gather enough courage to try again. That attempt — the splendid Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini — met with exceptional acclaim, and it encouraged him to undertake a long-delayed successor to the Second Symphony of 1907. The Third Symphony was begun on June 18, 1935 at his Swiss villa, “Senar,” on Lake Lucerne, not far from “Triebschen,” the house in which Wagner lived from 1866 to 1872. (“Senar” was named for SErgei and his wife, NAtalyia, Rachmaninoff.) Though he had to spend three weeks taking the waters at Baden-Baden for his rheumatism in July, he finished the first movement by August 22nd and the second movement a month later. By then, however, it was time for him to again begin his strenuous annual international tours, and the Symphony had to await its completion until June 1936.

Rachmaninoff gave the honor of the Symphony’s premiere to Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with whom he had enjoyed an especially close association since making his United States debut as a conductor with that ensemble in 1909. The work was received by American and European audiences and critics with certain misgivings (“sourly” was the composer’s word), with much of the grumbling engendered by Rachmaninoff’s writing in an admittedly reactionary Romantic style at a time when Schoenberg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Bartók and a host of other path-breaking modern composers were already long established on the musical scene. “I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien,” Rachmaninoff once said. “I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.” Though he recognized only too well the anachronism of his Third Symphony, he continued to believe in it, and did not withdraw it, as he had the Fourth Concerto. His faith has proven to be justified. The Symphony was taken into the standard orchestral repertoire during the last years of his life and remains one of his most popular orchestral works.

After being driven from Russia in 1917, Rachmaninoff pined for his homeland for the rest of his life. Whether in his New York apartment or his Swiss villa, he did his best to keep the old language, food, customs and holidays alive in his own household. “But it was at best synthetic,” wrote music historian 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.” The Third Symphony is certainly touched by this emotion, though Rachmaninoff steadfastly denied that it was in any specific way nationalistic or pictorial. It is, however, imbued with the grand, brooding passion and epic sweep that mark Rachmaninoff’s greatest music, whatever the impetus behind the notes.

As do his two earlier works in the genre, Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony opens with a motto theme that returns in later movements. The motto, here presented immediately in unison by clarinet, muted horn and cellos, is a small-interval phrase derived from the style of ecclesiastical chant. A few measures of vigorous orchestral warming-up introduce the movement’s main theme, a doleful plaint issued by the double reeds. The second theme is a lovely, lyrical strain, initiated by the cellos, which gives testimony that Rachmaninoff retained his wonderful sense of melodic invention throughout his life. (He was 63 when he finished the score.) Following a development section of considerable ingenuity and rhythmic energy, the two principal themes are recalled in the recapitulation. The motto theme returns quietly in the trumpet and bass trombone and then in the pizzicato strings to bring the movement to a subdued close.

The second of the Symphony’s three movements combines elements of both a traditional Adagio and a Scherzo. The motto theme in a bardic setting for horn accompanied by strummed harp chords is heard to open the movement. The solo violin gives out the principal theme of the Adagio, a languid melody in triplet rhythms; the flute presents a graceful complementary idea that ends with a cadential trill. These two motives are elaborated until a sudden change of tempo and the introduction of a bustling rhythmic figure usher in the Scherzo section of the movement. An abbreviated recall of the music of the opening Adagio rounds out the movement, to which the motto theme played by pizzicato strings serves as a tiny musical benediction.

The finale is a virtuosic tour-de-force for orchestra. (The work was written with Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra in mind.) The main theme, presented by violins and violas, is a motive of martial vigor; the contrasting second theme, given by the strings doubled by harp, is chordal in shape and lyrical in style. The center of the movement is a thorough working-out of the melodic materials, beginning with a fugal treatment of the main theme. As a bridge to the recapitulation, Rachmaninoff employed the Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”), the ancient chant from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead that courses like a grim musical marker through the Isle of the Dead (1907), the Paganini Rhapsody (1934), the Second Symphony, this Third Symphony and the Symphonic Dances (1940). This evocative traditional tune as well as the Symphony’s motto theme are woven into the recapitulation of the movement’s earlier motives. A brilliant coda brings the work to an exhilarating close.