This special program features violinist Joshua Bell in three works in a wide range of styles. Bruch's first concerto is a cornerstone of the Romantic solo repertoire for violin, but Mr. Bell also performs two much shorter works: a brilliant solo piece written by Corigliano for the film The Red Violin, and Ponce's sentimental Estrellita. We open with a blustery Rossini overture, and close with a familiar orchestral showpiece, Pictures at an Exhibition.
 

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
Overture to La gazza ladra

Rossini's La gazza ladra was composed shortly before its first performance, at Milan's Teatro la Scala, on May 31, 1817. Its overture has been played six times at these concerts, beginning in 1940. Our most recent performance was in 2001. Duration 10:00.

Rossini’s La gazza ladra ("The Thieving Magpie") features one of those melodramatic stories so beloved by the early Romantics. Buried in the convoluted plot of this opera is the story of a serving-girl named Ninetta, who is falsely accused of stealing silver cutlery from the kitchen of her master. In the final scene, Ninetta is saved from a death sentence (and several additional loose ends are neatly tied up) by the discovery of the stolen cutlery in the nest of the kleptomaniac bird. Rossini wrote this opera in 1817 for the theater La Scala, and though his previous two productions in Milan had been ignominious failures, La gazza ladra was a smash hit.

The overture was particularly well-received, and on several occasions, the audience demanded that it be repeated before the opera itself could begin. This overture is one of Rossini’s best efforts, and has survived as one of his most popular concert pieces. It begins with a striking passage with military drums, setting up the martial character of Giannetto, Ninetta’s lover. True to his standard operating procedure, Rossini moves from this slow introduction into a quick sonata form movement. In the body of the overture, a series of quick themes drawn from the opera itself are presented. Despite the comic-sounding character of this music, much of it is associated with the perfectly horrible things that happen to the opera’s main characters during the course of this potboiler.

Many years later, in response to a letter asking for advice about writing opera overtures, Rossini offered the following insight into his compositional procedure: "First general and invariable rule: wait for the eve of the first performance before composing the overture. Nothing is better inspiration than necessity, the presence of a copyist waiting for your music to appear sheet by sheet, and the sinister spectacle of the impresario tearing his hair in desperation. All true masterpieces in the form have been written thus..." In the same letter he remarks with pride about how the overture to La gazza ladra was written not on the eve of the first performance, but on the day of the first performance. In this case, the impresario had locked him in a room in near the roof of La Scala, guarded by four husky stagehands. As the pages of the overture were written, they were tossed out the window to copyists waiting in the courtyard below. According to Rossini "…in the event that there was no music to throw to the courtyard, the barbarians had strict orders to throw me to the copyists!"
 

Max Bruch (1838-1920)
Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra in G minor, Op. 21

Bruch's first violin concerto was completed in 1866, and the final version was performed for the first time by soloist Joseph Joachim in January 1868. The Madison Symphony Orchestra has performed the work three times previously, with soloists Gilbert Ross (1927), Arthur Kreutz (1936), and Chee Yun (2002). Duration 23:00.

Max Bruch is known today primarily for two solo violin works, the G minor concerto and the Scottish Fantasy, and for his Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra. However, Bruch was a tremendously successful composer in his day, with a catalog of nearly a hundred works that included three operas, three symphonies, several solo pieces, sacred and secular choral works, art songs, and chamber music. He was a well-regarded conductor and one of the most sought-after composition teachers in Europe. Ottorino Respighi and Ralph Vaughan Williams were among his more famous pupils, but he worked with dozens of others, including Sigfrid Prager, the first conductor of the Madison Symphony Orchestra. Not surprisingly, Bruch's works were frequent features at our concerts during Dr. Prager's tenure.

Bruch made the first sketches for a violin concerto as early as 1857. He finished the work early in 1866, and in April of that year, conducted a preliminary version at a benefit concert in Koblenz, where the solo part was played by a violinist from Cologne, Otto von Königsglöw. Bruch made several significant revisions after hearing this performance, even considering recasting the work as a "Fantasy" because of its relatively free form. Finally, Bruch solicited the advice of the greatest Austrian virtuoso of the day, Joseph Joachim, who was impressed, and suggested several additional changes. Joachim played the premiere of the revised concerto, and Bruch dedicated the published score to him. Almost forty years later, Joachim cited the Bruch G minor as one of the "four German violin concertos"--alongside the concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mendelssohn--calling it the "richest, most seductive" of the four.

The concerto is set in the traditional three movements, but none of the three follows a strict Classical form. Bruch titles the first movement "Prelude" and it serves as a kind of extended free-form introduction to the second movement. Two ideas are introduced and briefly developed: a very lyrical solo line played over a quiet orchestral accompaniment and a contrasting melody, played above pizzicato basses. The prelude builds to a peak and then dies away, leaving space for a lovely cadenza, which ties directly into the second movement (Adagio). The Adagio is carried entirely by the solo part, which plays almost without pause until a brief orchestral passage in the middle. The violin introduces three unhurried and beautiful themes, developing each in turn.

Joachim placed this piece alongside the more famous violin concertos of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, and it is in the finale (Allegro energico) that the resemblance is clearest. Though Bruch does not use the same Classical Rondo form as the others, the spirit is the same. After an opening orchestral flourish, the violin introduces the main theme--a lively Gypsy-style melody played in double stops. The family resemblance between this and the main theme of Brahms's finale is particularly close, though Brahms's concerto was written some ten years later. The movement proceeds in a loose sonata form, with a slightly more solemn second subject. The main theme dominates throughout in both the solo part and accompaniment, eventually becoming the basis for a flashy and exhilarating coda.
 

Manuel Ponce (1882-1948)
Estrellita (arranged by Jascha Heifetz)

Ponce published his song Estrillita ("Little Star") in 1912, though it may have been composed several years earlier. Duration 4:00.

Manuel Ponce was one of the most important Mexican musicians of the early 20th century. An influential teacher, performer, and conductor, he was also one of the group of composers that forged a distinctly Mexican style of art music. Though he used folk idioms in many of his works, he also incorporated an eclectic range of modernist influences from Europe. He composed orchestral music, chamber works, and operas, but he remains best known today for his song Estrellita. Its melancholy text may translated as follows: "Little star of the distant sky, you see my pain, you know my anguish. Come down and tell me if he loves me just a little, for I cannot live without his love. You are my star, my beacon of love! You know that soon I will die soon. Come down and tell me if he loves me just a little, because I cannot live without his love." This sentimental melody was published in dozens of arrangements, but the Jascha Heifetz's transcription for violin is one of the finest, transforming Ponce's serenade into a lyrical solo replete with double stops and surprisingly Impressionistic harmonies.
 

John Corigliano (b.1938)
Pope's Concert from The Red Violin

Corigliano composed this solo work in 1997. Duration 2:00.

In 1997, director François Giraud asked Corigliano to write a score for The Red Violin. Corigliano was no stranger to film scoring: his score for the 1980 film Altered States had received an Academy Award nomination, and he also wrote a score for Revolution in 1985. (Corigliano would later win the Academy Award for The Red Violin's score.) The Red Violin--simply one of the finest films ever made about the power of music--follows the 300-year history of a famed violin by the 17th-century master Bussotti. The unique structure of the movie posed special challenges: it unfolds in a series of historical chapters, with a linking story from the present. In the movie, "Pope's Concert" is from an episode in 19th-century England. The violin has come into the possession of the violin virtuoso, Frederic Pope--a figure clearly based upon Paganini (though much better looking!). Coming directly from the arms of his mistress to a concert, Pope ignores the conductor and orchestra who are prepared to play a concerto, and launches into a solo cadenza. He introduces this as work he had just composed "in a moment of inspiration" (announced with a knowing leer at his lover, who was just walking into the hall). This was performed for the film by Mr. Bell, who recreates this musical moment in the film tonight.  (Click here to watch this moment in the film!)
 

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel)

Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition was completed in June of 1874, and was published posthumously in 1886 with a dedication to Vladimir Stassov. The orchestration by Ravel dates from early 1923: it was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky, who conducted the premiere in Paris in May of that year. The work has been performed four times at these concerts: in 1979, 1985, 1992, and 2001. Duration 33:00.

When the Russian architect Victor Hartmann died at age 39 in 1873, the writer Vladimir Stassov and several other of Hartmann's friends and associates arranged a memorial exhibition of some 400 drawings and paintings by the architect. One of the visitors to the gallery was Mussorgsky, a good friend of Stassov, who had long admired Hartmann's work. Within a few months of the exhibition, Mussorgsky had composed a suite of piano pieces based upon some of his favorites among Hartmann's drawings. The form of this programmatic suite was unusual: it portrays the composer himself walking through the gallery, standing before several pictures and forming his own musical impressions of each one.

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition remained relatively obscure until 1923, when Ravel completed an orchestration of the suite for Serge Koussevitsky.  Ravel's scoring was not the first attempt to transform Pictures into an orchestral piece, nor was it the last--there have been at least a dozen arrangements of Pictures, beginning with an orchestration by Mikhail Tushmalov in 1891, and orchestral versions by Sir Henry Wood, Ravel, Leonidas Leonardi, Leopold Stokowski, Lucien Caillet, Walter Goehr, and Sergei Gorchakov. There have also been scorings for other groupings of instruments, including Elgar Howarth's brass ensemble version, a guitar version by Yamashita, Tomita's electronic scoring, and even a fancifully-staged version by the rock band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Ravel’s masterful orchestration is better known than any other, including Mussorgsky's own piano suite!

Here is a movement-by-movement "walking tour" of Pictures:

Promenade - This most familiar of Mussorgsky melodies, appearing between several of the movements, is used to bind the work together. In Stassov's descriptive notes for the first published edition of Pictures, he writes: "Mussorgsky has represented himself roving right and left, sometimes hesitantly and sometimes briskly, in order to get close to pictures that have caught his attention." The uneven 5/4-6/4 meter gives a characteristically Russian feel to this passage.

Gnomus - The first of Hartmann's drawings to be interpreted by Mussorgsky is of a nutcracker carved in the shape of an ugly, grinning gnome. Stassov's notes suggest that this contorted figure "...accompanies his droll movements with savage shrieks." Mussorgsky’s music is suitably gruesome, with awkward, limping lines.

Promenade

Il vecchio castello ("The old castle") - This was Hartmann's watercolor study of a medieval castle, painted when he was a student in Italy. A troubadour standing by the gate gives a sense of the castle's size. This movement gives the impression of the troubadour's lute quietly strumming in support of a melancholy melody played by the alto saxophone.

Promenade

Tuileries - This sketch shows children playing in the famous public gardens of the Tuileries in Paris. There is an argument and a chase after some high-spirited play, all portrayed in Mussorgsky's light-footed music and Ravel's transparent orchestration.

Bydlo - A sketch made by Hartmann in the Polish town of Sandomierz shows a wagon with enormous wheels being pulled by oxen (Bydlo is a Polish word for "cattle."). In Ravel's orchestration, this evocative melody has been given to the tuba.

Promenade

Ballet of the chicks in their shells - This was Hartmann's costume design for one of the scenes in Trilbi , a ballet presented in St. Petersburg in 1871. In this scene, children dance as baby canaries trying to break out of their shells.

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle - This movement is based upon two of Hartmann's drawings of Sandomierz: one showing a rich and well-dressed Jew wearing a fur hat, and the other showing an poor Jew in threadbare clothes. In Mussorgsky's inventive setting, the two characters have been joined in a conversation. Ravel scored the pompous tones of Goldenberg for unison strings and winds, while the whining Schmuyle is portrayed by muted trumpet. At the end, Goldenberg's music become even more imperious, ending with an abrupt dismissal.

The market-place at Limoges - There are several surviving Hartmann drawings made during a visit to the French town of Limoges, but the specific picture that inspired this movement has apparently been lost. According to a marginal note in Muussorgsky's manuscript, this movement shows the "good gossips of Limoges" exchanging the most important news of the day: Monsieur de Puissangeout's lost cow, Mme. de Remboursac's new false teeth, and Monsieur Panta-Pantaleon's excessively large nose."

Catacombs - This sketch shows the artist peering into the catacombs of Paris by the light of a lantern, which reveals several skulls. Ravel's orchestration brings out dark sonorities from the brasses and woodwinds.

Cum mortuis in lingua mortua ("With the dead, in the language of the dead") This rather spooky version of the Promenade theme is based not upon a Hartmann picture, but rather on Mussorgsky's reaction to Catacombs. In the margin of his manuscript, the composer wrote: "The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me to the skulls and calls to them; they begin to glow with a soft light."

The hut on fowl's legs (Baba Yaga ) - Baba Yaga was a witch who terrified generations of Russian children at bedtime. Her hut, hidden deep in the forest, was perched on chicken legs so that it could turn to face anyone who chanced to find it. No broomstick for this lady: she rode cackling through the woods in an huge wooden mortar propelled by an equally formidable pestle (no doubt in search of naughty children to eat). Ravel's orchestration is at its most colorful in this section. This movement leads directly into the finale.

The great gate of Kiev - After Czar Alexander II narrowly escaped assassination in Kiev in 1866, the city council of Kiev asked Hartmann to produce a design for a monument to commemorate God's intervention on behalf of the Czar. Hartmann's design (which was never built) was a fanciful and immense arch surmounted by the Russian imperial eagle, and other symbols of the Czar's authority. This picture was a great favorite of Mussorgsky's, and he commented on it with a massive and powerful hymn of thanksgiving.