The program begins with Mendelssohn's intensely dramatic Ruy Blas overture. Maestro DeMain and the Madison Symphony Orchestra then welcome violinist Cho-Liang Lin for one of the most beloved solo works for the instrument, Beethoven's Violin Concerto. The rest of the program is a contrast of the intimate and the enormous. On the intimate side, we have a small work for string orchestra by Puccini, his Crisantemi. As for enormous...there is Janácek's Sinfonietta, a work calling for more than a dozen additional brass players.
 

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Ruy Blas Overture

Mendelsson wrote this overture shortly before its premiere at the Lepzig Gewandhaus, on March 11, 1893. The only previous performance of the work at these concerts was in 1943. Duration: 9:00.

Between 1835 and 1840, Mendelssohn was comfortably settled in Leipzig, serving as a musical director of the Gewandhaus. He lead Leipzig's musical life during this period, building one of the finest orchestras in Europe. As busy as he was as a conductor, he remained amazingly prolific as a composer during this period as well. In 1839, the Gewandhaus planned a grand benefit performance of Victor Hugo's new tragedy Ruy Blas to support their pension fund, and asked Mendelssohn to provide incidental music, specifically a "Romance" and an overture. Ruy Blas (1838) is a rather convoluted story set in 17th-century Spain. The title character is a servant whose master, knowing that Blas has fallen in love with the queen, sends him to court disguised as a nobleman. What was intended as a cruel practical joke backfires, when Blas is a great success, becoming prime minister and earning the affection of the queen. When his master exposes him, Blas kills him, and to escape further humiliation, takes poison and dies...only, of course, after he confesses to the queen and hears her profession of undying love for him. Mendelssohn read the play--probably in a hasty German translation--and hated it, described it as "beneath contempt." Nevertheless, he did promptly produce the requested "Romance"--a women's chorus with string accompaniment--and presented it to the committee with his regrets that there had not been time to do an overture. But he obviously reconsidered a few days before the event. As he wrote to his mother: "I reflected on the matter the same evening, and began my score. On Wednesday there was a concert rehearsal, which occupied the whole forenoon. Thursday, the concert itself, and yet the overture was in the hands of the copyist early on Friday; it was rehearsed three times on Monday in the concert room, tried over once in the theater, and given that evening as an introduction to the odious play."

While its mood fits well with the tragic character of the "odious play," Mendelssohn does not seem to have tried to portray Ruy Blas directly in the overture, which stands perfectly well on its own as a piece of symphonic music. It begins with a solemn brass chorale. After the third forbidding statement by the brass, the strings launch directly into the stormy main theme of the overture. Brass interrupt once more, and Mendelssohn introduces a more flowing second idea, and finally a bright closing theme. There is a lengthy development section that interweaves all three ideas, and a short recapitulation, before the overture closes with a surprisingly triumphant coda.

 
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op.61

Beethoven composed this concerto in 1806, and it was first performed on December 23, 1806, at the Theatrer-an-der-Wein in Vienna, with Franz Clement as soloist. The concerto has been performed at these concerts seven times: with Gilbert Ross (1928), Marie Endres (1937), Roman Totenberg (1945), Andre de Ribaupierre (1951), Sidney Harth (1968 and 1988), and Ruggiero Ricci (1980). Duration 39:00.

Beethoven completed his only concerto for violin in 1806, during a burst of creativity that also produced the three "Razumovsky" quartets, the fourth symphony, the "Appasionata" sonata, and the fourth piano concerto. The concerto was written for Franz Clement, a violinist whose association with Beethoven went back to 1794, when Clement was a 14-year-old Wunderkind. The title page dedicates the work to Clement, while noting his "clemency" towards the composer. (Beethoven's puns were even worse than the normal lot.) The concerto was premiered at a concert that apparently included some pretty flamboyant showmanship. According to a review of the concert in the Weiner Theater-Zeitung, Clement inserted one of his own violin sonatas between the first and second movements of the concerto--a sonata played on one string, with the violin held upside-down! Perhaps because of this blatant showstopper, reviews of the performance were generally disdainful. (The fact that Clement was reportedly sight-reading the concerto may not have helped, either...)

This was not a work that caught on quickly--it certainly didn't follow the fashion of the time. By 1806, audiences were beginning to demand works that displayed astonishing feats of speed and agility: flash over substance. Even as late as 1855, when a young Joseph Joachim played Beethoven's concerto for the virtuoso Louis Spohr, Spohr's reaction was: "This is all very nice, but now I'd like you to play a real violin work." Beethoven's concerto is more symphonic in scope, focussing on careful development of his broad and profound themes, and brilliant orchestration, instead of empty virtuosity. The concerto finally came into its own in the later 19th century, as players like Joachim confronted the special challenges of Beethoven's work: thoughtfulness and musical expression.

The first movement (Allegro ma non troppo) begins in a striking fashion: five unaccompanied timpani beats that usher in the woodwinds. The orchestral introduction presents the themes that will provide the raw material for the solo violin's more extensive treatment. At the close of the introduction, the orchestra hushes and allows the opening violin line to burst forth--a flourish that spans the entire range of the instrument. The body of this movement is based on a set of beautiful themes that many writers have labeled "hymnlike." The violin's expansion of these melodies is never merely flashy decoration, but instead careful development. A lengthy cadenza leads to a final statement of the second main theme.

The Larghetto is certainly one of the most intriguing and expressive of Beethoven's compositions. Its form has variously been described as "theme and variations," "semi-variations" and even "strophic." In a classic essay, Beethoven scholar Owen Jander suggested that the deliberate ambiguities in the overall theme and variations form of the Larghetto reflect a burgeoning Romanticism--that the slow movement is a musical rendering of a poetic dialogue. In fact, the movement proceeds in a gentle by passionate dialogue between the soloist and the orchestra, culminating in a dramatic cadenza that leads directly into the final movement.

The last movement is more typical of Classical style--a spirited 6/8 Rondo. Here, it seems, Beethoven made a slight bow to audience demand and gave the violinist some flashier technical passages. There is a brief minor-key episode at the center, but otherwise the mood of this concerto is exuberant throughout. The concerto closes with an extended coda that gives the violinist one more chance for show off, with some soloistic fireworks.

 
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums)

Puccini composed this work in early 1890, and it was first played at the Brescia Conservatory in February of that year. This is our first performance of the piece. Duration 7:00.

This melancholy little gem was written in 1890, as Puccini was starting a much larger project, the opera Manon Lescaut. It was apparently inspired by the death on January 18 of Duke Amadeo di Savoia, a much-admired north Italian nobleman who had been--quite briefly--King of Spain. In a letter to his brother, Puccini said that he written the whole piece in a single night. Written originally for string quartet, Crisantemi is most often played, as at these concerts, by string orchestra. It lays out two quiet themes in a simple ABA form. The main theme, full of sighs and dramatic pauses, is highly chromatic and emotional. The contrasting idea has a more flowing accompaniment. Puccini valued these themes enough to recycle both of them at climactic moments in Manon.
 

Leos Janácek (1854-1928)
Sinfonietta

Janácek composed his Sinfonietta in 1926. It was premiered in Prague on June 29, 1926. This is our first performance of the work. Duration 23:00.

Janácek was the most important Czech composer of his generation. Born in the province of Moravia, he studied to become a music teacher, and briefly studied composition in Germany and Austria. Beginning in the 1880s, Janácek worked as teacher at the Organ School in Brno, but his activities also included editing a music journal, conducting, and intense study of Moravian folk music. He was increasingly taken up with choral music and opera, and his reputation as a composer grew gradually: his first truly successful work, the opera Jenufa ("Jealousy"), was not completed until he was 50 years old. By the beginning of World War I, he was among the most respected musicians in Czechoslovakia, though he remained largely unknown outside of his homeland. Always a fervent patriot, Janácek was deeply affected by the war, which Czechs saw a means to escape from the repressive control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A number of nationalistic works, including Taras Bulba, grew out of the war experience. The years after Czech independence in 1918 were among the most rewarding of his life, with international fame and financial success. Several of his most famous works were in fact completed after his 70th birthday, and his two most important works, the monumental Galgolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta heard here, were written when he was 72.

In 1926, Janácek was asked to compose a series of fanfares for a national gymnastic festival. He was inspired by a outdoor band concert he attended a few months earlier, where brass players dressed in traditional costumes stood to play solos and fanfares. The fanfares he wrote for the festival were eventually incorporated into the Sinfonietta. His unusual scoring reflects this--in addition to a fairly typical full orchestra, including four horns, three trumpets, four trombones and tuba, Janàcek calls for nine additional trumpets, two bass trumpets, two tenor tubas, and a second timpanist. These "extras" play the fanfares independently of the orchestra at the beginning of the work.

In an article published a year after he had written the Sinfonietta, Janacék wrote of the work's special connection to his home town, Brno. According to Janácek, he had grown to hate the town when it was occupied by the Austrians, with signs of Imperial repression on every side, but with the coming of independence:

"...I saw the town undergo a miraculous change. I lost my dislike of the gloomy Town Hall, my hatred of the hill from whose depths [the old dungeons] so much pain was screaming, my distaste for the street and its throng. As if by a miracle, liberty was conjured up, glowing over the town--the rebirth of 28 October 1918. I saw myself in it. I belonged to it. And the blare of the victorious trumpets, the holy peace of the Queen's Monastery, the shadows of the night, the breath of the green hill and the vision of the growing greatness of the town, of my Brno, were all giving birth to my Sinfonietta."