Program 3 - Russian Night

Suite No. 4, Op. 61, “Mozartiana”

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Composed in 1887.

Premiered on November 26, 1887 in Moscow, conducted by the composer. 

“According to my deep conviction, Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music,” Tchaikovsky told his diary on September 20, 1887. “No one has made me weep, has made me tremble with rapture, from the consciousness of my nearness to that something which we call the ideal, as he has done.” Tchaikovsky went into such raptures throughout his life over Mozart, the only composer, living or dead, who incited such strong admiration from him. He loved the Requiem (and pitied those who could not appreciate its beauties) and The Marriage of Figaro and the D minor String Quintet, of which he said, “No one else in music has known as well how to interpret so exquisitely the sense of resigned and inconsolable sorrow.” It was Don Giovanni, however, which stood above all other works in his estimation. He first heard the opera as a child; by eight could reproduce some of its arias on the piano. “He found such delight in playing,” remembered his brother Modeste, “that it was frequently necessary to drag him by force from the instrument. Afterwards, as the next best substitute, he would take to drumming tunes upon the windowpanes. One day, while thus engaged, he was so entirely carried away by this dumb-show that he broke the glass and cut his hand severely.” Tchaikovsky himself recalled, “The music of Don Giovanni was the first to make a deep impression on me. It awoke a spiritual ecstasy which was afterwards to bear fruit. By its help I penetrated into that world of artistic beauty where only great genius abides. It is due to Mozart that I devoted my life to music. He gave the first impulse to my efforts, and made me love music above all else in the world.” It is little wonder, then, that Tchaikovsky wished to observe the 100th anniversary of Don Giovanni’s premiere on October 29, 1787 with his own musical memento — a set of orchestral transcriptions of four of Mozart’s lesser-known pieces.

The first indication of Tchaikovsky’s interest in writing what became the Mozartiana was penned in his diary on May 17, 1884: “Played Mozart with great enjoyment. Idea for a suite from Mozart.” It was not until June 1887, however, that he began work on the Suite. He explained his intentions in the preface to the printed score: “A large number of admirable small compositions of Mozart are, incomprehensibly enough, practically unknown, not only to the public but also to musicians. The author of the present suite desires to give a new impulse to the performance of these little masterpieces which, in spite of their concise form, present incomparable beauties.” Tchaikovsky worked on his arrangements at Borzhom, in the Caucasus, during a visit to his brother Anatol, and at Aachen, where he spent six weeks nursing his mortally ill friend Nicholas Kondratyev, who had gone to the ancient city to take the curative waters. He completed the score on August 10, 1887 at Aachen, and immediately sent it to his publisher, Jurgenson, with an optimistic note: “I think this Suite, because of its successful choice of compositions and its originality (the past revisited in a contemporary work) will have an excellent future.... Should it win approval, I would wish later to do another one and perhaps even a third.” Successful, indeed, it was at its premiere, in Moscow on November 26, 1887, at the first all-Tchaikovsky concert in that city conducted the composer. “Never have I encountered such enthusiasm or had such a triumph,” he wrote.

Concerning this encounter of two century-closing musical giants, James Lyons noted that “the ingredients approximate a conservatively classical Martini: three-fourths Tchaikovsky, one-fourth Mozart.” Especially since the models that Tchaikovsky chose were not particularly characteristic of Mozart’s style (Ralph W. Wood called the first two “exercises in chromaticism and Bachian counterpoint”), recognition of the originals is considerably hampered by their rich orchestrations. The transcriptions are, however, sincerely done, and are colorful examples of the seemingly endless palette of instrumental sonorities that Tchaikovsky had developed by the later years of his life. The opening Gigue was based on a little piano piece (K. 574) that Mozart jotted into the musical album of Carl Engel, the court organist at Leipzig, on May 16, 1789. Its lightly contrapuntal style may be Mozart’s tribute to Engel’s distinguished predecessor in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach. The following Menuet derives from a tiny keyboard dance (K. 355/K. 576b) that Mozart wrote in Vienna in 1789. The most famous of Mozart’s works borrowed for the score — the motet Ave verum corpus — is the basis for the Preghiera (“Prayer”), though Tchaikovsky used not the original choral version but rather a somewhat rhapsodic piano rendition of it by Liszt called A la Chapelle Sistine. The Ave verum (K. 618), one of Mozart’s most perfect utterances and one of his last compositions, was written in the summer of 1791 for Anton Stoll, the parish choirmaster of Baden, a village outside Vienna, where Constanze had gone to escape the heat and dust of the city just before the birth of their last child. The closing movement is built on an extended set of variations (K. 455) that Mozart first improvised at a concert in 1783 on the theme of a buffo aria (Unser dummer Pöbel meint) from Gluck’s opéra comique Die Pilger von Mecca, and wrote down the following year.

Concerto della Passione for Cello and Orchestra

Yuri Falik (born in 1936)

Composed in 1988.

Premiered on June 12, 1989 in St. Petersburg, conducted by Alexander Dmitriev with Natalia Gutman as soloist.

Russian composer, conductor and cellist Yuri Falik was born into a musical family in Odessa on July 30, 1936, and began cello lessons at an early age in a school for gifted children. His first attempts at composition date from age eleven, and by the time he enrolled in the Leningrad Conservatory in 1955, he had produced a string quartet and some music for orchestra. He studied cello with Joseph Strimer and Mstislav Rostropovich and composition with Boris Arapov, and received degrees from the school in cello (1960) and composition (1964); he also participated in master classes with Dmitri Shostakovich. Falik performed to acclaim throughout the Soviet Union, and in 1962, he won First Prize in the Helsinki International Cello Competition. Three years later, he joined the faculty of the Leningrad (now, again, St. Petersburg) Conservatory, where he has since taught cello and composition and directed the school’s chamber orchestra. Falik is regarded as one of the outstanding pedagogues of his country, and he has been recognized with such distinctions as Honored Arts Worker of the Russian Federation and Chairmanship of the Symphony Music Section of the Leningrad Branch of the Composers Union. As a guest conductor, he has appeared with the Leningrad Philharmonic, Lithuanian National Symphony, Leningrad Chamber Orchestra, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Minsk Symphony and Rostov Symphony. His opera Polly and the Dinosaurs was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under his direction in 1990, when he was Visiting Professor at Northwestern University. In March 1999, he conducted the American premiere of his Mass for Soloists, Choir and Chamber Orchestra in Youngstown, Ohio, and the following year led the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and several leading soloists during the concerts of the Third World Congress of Cello Players.

In Baker’s Biographical Dictionary, Nicolas Slonimsky wrote, “In his music, Falik reveals a quasi-Romantic quality, making use of tantalizingly ambiguous melodic passages approaching the last ramparts of euphonious dissonance. His angular rhythms, with their frequently startling pauses, suggest a theatrical concept.” The music of Yuri Falik is both modern and accessible, very much music of our own time which still reveres its roots in the great Russian symphonic heritage. He makes use of the traditional musical techniques of melody, rhythm and tonality, but expands them with elements of modernism to signify the disenchantment of the intelligent soul in a bureaucratic society and life’s essential loneliness, both long-standing concerns of Russian artists. These same matters also touch much of the music of Shostakovich, whom Falik considers a mentor, and, like Shostakovich, Falik often tempers his melancholy with a surprising degree of warm humor, the quality of “smiling through tears” that characterizes much Russian art.

The eloquent Concerto della Passione draws its inspiration from the Easter story of the Crucifixion, which Falik distilled around the titles of four texts taken from the Requiem Mass for the Dead: Lacrimosa (“Oh, this day full of tears when from the ashes arises guilty man to be judged”); Dies irae (“This day, this day of wrath shall consume the world in ashes”); Libera me (“Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death”); and Lux aeterna (“May eternal light shine upon them, O Lord”). “The musical content of the Concerto is essentially described by the titles of its movements,” Falik wrote. “For me, they are not just the initial words of Roman Catholic liturgical chants. These are word-symbols pronounced by humankind for many hundreds of years — in singing, speech and whisper. These are word-signs of the spiritual being of man, symbolizing faith and despair, remorse and hope. These are word-subjects whose universal essence is the basis of many great works of literature, visual art and music. They denote for us the spiritual bearings that we must stand by as we go into the 21st century.”

The opening Lacrimosa is dramatic rather than formal in its structure, with the keening cello leading a musical service of mourning that draws sad, subdued responses amid tolling bells from the ensemble-congregation. The cello gives way to a moment of anger before regaining its composure, and the orchestra replies with winding contrapuntal lines that suggest the embraces of the bereaved. Leader and mourners join together to share their grief, intense at first, but gradually turning inward. The cello can ultimately utter only a few isolated pizzicato sounds, and then nothing at all, as the orchestra, able to offer little comfort, fades into silence as the funeral bells toll once again. The last three movements are played without pause. The Dies irae, with its driving rhythms, orchestral outbursts and ferocious, moto perpetuo cello part, evokes the awesome Day of Judgment. Libera me (“Deliver me, O Lord”) the cello beseeches in a long solo cadenza. The orchestra joins the cello’s plea with a quiet clarinet passage whose sonority and hymn-like texture recall Alban Berg’s quotation in his Violin Concerto of Bach’s harmonization of the Lutheran chorale Es ist genug! — “It is enough.” The orchestra carries on the clarinets’ supplication, which receives its answer when the bells, now the redemptive bells of Easter morn, sound the beginning of the Lux aeterna, music of visionary stillness that resolves the Concerto della Passione into a luminous state of acceptance and peace.

Symphony No. 1, Op. 10

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Composed in 1925-1926.

Premiered on May 12, 1926 in Leningrad, conducted by Nicolai Malko.

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 autumn 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 1924 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. “It had not seen fresh paint or a scrubbing for years, the walls were peeling, and the dirt lay thick in every corner. Three times a day a new crowd packed the small house; they carried the snow in with them on their shoes and overcoats. They munched food that they brought with them, apples and sunflower seeds that they spat on the floor. 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 not only sapped his strength and health, but also made composing virtually impossible — and it was composing that he burned to do. By spring the family decided that he would leave this musical purgatory to devote himself to composition. Shostakovich began the First Symphony immediately, and the hopes of his family were pinned on its eventual success.

By early 1925, Shostakovich had completed his formal studies at the Leningrad Conservatory, and he was seeking to gain a reputation beyond the walls of the school. He chose to write a symphony — a grand, public piece rather than a small-scale chamber work — as his graduation exercise: “the product of my culminating studies at the Conservatory,” as he called it. The new work, his first for orchestra, was grounded in the Russian traditions of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov and Scriabin that his composition teacher Maximilian Steinberg had passed on to him, but also allowed for such modern influences as the music of Hindemith, Prokofiev, Mahler and Stravinsky. Of the Symphony’s progressive traits, Nicolas Slonimsky noted that they show “some definite departures from traditionalism.... The harmony of the Symphony is far more acrid than any academic training would justify and the linear writing is hardly counterpoint conscious. There are such strange interludes as a kettle-drum solo. The melodic structure is angular, dramatic at times, and then again broad, suggesting folksong rather than a subject for a symphony. Yet there is enough academism in this first important work of Shostakovich to connect it with his Conservatory training.”

The Symphony was completed early in 1926, and scheduled for its premiere in May, though his family’s economic hardship was so severe at the time that Shostakovich could not afford to have the parts copied and the score published. The Conservatory, as a gesture of faith in the young composer’s talent, underwrote the expenses, and the Symphony was first displayed to the world on May 12th. It was an immediate success. Shostakovich was proclaimed the leader of the first generation of post-Revolution Soviet composers (Prokofiev had left for the West in 1918), and the twenty-year-old musician became a celebrity at home and abroad in a matter of months. The conductor Bruno Walter performed the First Symphony in Berlin in 1927, and Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra in the score’s American premiere a year later. Each year for the rest of his life, Shostakovich set aside May 12th as the day he celebrated his “birthday as a composer.”

“I sensed that music was not merely a combination of sounds, arranged in a particular order, but an art capable of expressing through its own means the most varied ideas and feelings,” wrote Shostakovich. In many later works, those “ideas and feelings” were specifically political in nature, but this Symphony is primarily an aesthetic expression rather than a tonal tract. The first movement follows a form derived from traditional sonata-allegro. The exposition consists of four theme groups, presented almost like large tiles in a mosaic: a melody with long notes presented by the solo trumpet, with a cheeky retort from the bassoon; a scalar theme punctuated by spiky intervals given by the violins alone; a mock-march strutted out by the clarinet; and a cockeyed waltz from the flute. All four themes are whipped together in the development, which reaches a noisy climax before the themes are recapitulated — backwards. First the waltz is heard (flute again), then the mock-march (low strings), followed by the long-note melody (clarinet) and a compressed version of the scalar tune (briefly, in the lower strings). This music exudes the distinctive personality, technical craftsmanship and wry wit that mark the best of Shostakovich’s works.

The second movement is a sardonic scherzo built on a cocky theme initiated by the clarinet. The woodwind-dominated trio, contrasting in mood and meter, is icy and detached in its quiet intensity. The third movement, full of pathos, begins with a lamenting theme for the oboe. A short, rhetorical gesture insinuates itself as accompaniment, and serves as transition to the second theme, a dirge, again entrusted to the oboe. Both themes are recalled, with the rhetorical gesture used as the bridge to the finale. A swell on the snare drum leads directly to the slow introduction of the closing movement. A snappy, chromatic melody from the clarinet is followed at some distance by the movement’s second theme, a broad melody with Tchaikovskian sweep (and Prokofievian “wrong notes”). These two themes, along with the rhetorical gesture (in mirror image — i.e., rising rather than falling) dominate the remainder of the movement, which ends with a stentorian proclamation from the full orchestra.

Of this invigorating work by the nineteen-year-old Shostakovich, Donald N. Ferguson wrote, “The style is perhaps more spontaneous than in any first symphony since Schumann’s. There is no pondering of the elaborate process which is ordinarily supposed to be indispensable in symphonic structure. Indeed, the charm of the work is largely owing to the absence of all recondite devices, in whose place there is a bubbling enthusiasm as infectious as the laughter of a child. Childlike, perhaps, is also the insouciant transition from one theme to another, at any moment when the idea under discussion, whether exhausted or not, has lost its grip on the composer’s attention.”

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda