This program marks the return of pianist Emmanuel Ax. He first appeared with Madison Symphony Orchestra in 1979, playing Chopin's first concerto, and in 2005, he performed Brahms's Piano Concerto No.2. At these programs, he performs Chopin's Romantic second concerto. We begin with a set of joyous Spanish dances from Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat. Rounding off the program is a landmark of early 20th-century English music, Vaughan Williams's A London Symphony.
 

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
Suite No.2 from the Ballet The Three-Cornered Hat

The first full-scale performance of this ballet took place at London's Alhambra Theatre on July 22, 1919. The orchestral suite heard tonight was publisged in 1921. Duration 12:00.

Manuel de Falla's ballet El sombrero de tres picos, like many of the great ballet scores of Stravinsky, Ravel, and Prokofiev, was the result of a commission by choreographer Serge Diaghilev. Diaghilev originally approached Falla in 1915 with a plan for turning the composer's Nights in the Gardens of Spain into a ballet. Falla refused to allow this (one of the few times Diaghilev was turned down in any way!)--but he did promise a ballet score based upon Pedro de Alarcón's novel El Corregidor y la molinera (The Corregidor and the Miller's Wife). Falla was at first thwarted by a troublesome clause in Alarcón's will, but he was eventually granted permission to use the story, and set to work on the score. With the limitations imposed by the first world war, it was impossible to for Diaghilev to mount a full-scale ballet production, but he did produce a preliminary version--as a mime set to music--in Madrid in 1917. This early version had been scored for a chamber orchestra, but with the end of the war in sight, Diaghilev insisted upon a full orchestral score. The premiere of the full ballet featured choreography by Diaghilev's protégé Léonide Massine and sets and costumes by Picasso. The immediate success of this performance led Falla to extract two orchestral suites from the ballet score.

The ballet is in two scenes, with Alarcón's story set in a series of traditional Spanish dances. In the first scene, the Miller's wife eludes his embraces and flirts with the old Corregidor, a local magistrate who wears a three-cornered hat as his badge of office. The Corregidor sneaks back later, and hides, watching the Miller's wife dance a fandango. Revealing himself, he attempts to dance a minuet with her, but she makes a fool of him in front of her husband, who was also in hiding. The Corregidor stomps off furiously, and the Miller ad his wife complete the fandango. The second scene begins at a feast given by the Miller and his wife. Their neighbors dance a slow and stately seguidilla, followed by the Miller's farucca, a lively dance that moves increasingly faster at the end. The Corregidor's bodyguard bursts in and arrests the Miller on a trumped-up charge. The Corregidor returns in the middle of the night to chase the Miller's wife, but, while in hot pursuit, he falls into the mill pond. He hangs his wet clothes on a chair and falls asleep. The Miller, who has escaped, returns, and seeing the clothes, he believes his wife has been unfaithful. He steals the Corregidor's clothes, and goes off to seduce the Corregidor's wife. The Corregidor awakes, and is forced to put on the Miller's clothes--just in time to be arrested by his own men, who are looking for the escaped Miller. A crowd gathers, and the Miller returns to dance a mocking chufla around the Corregidor, just before the old man is dragged away. The ballet closes with the entire ensemble dancing a joyful jota.

Falla's second orchestral suite contains the three most prominent dances from the second scene. The Neighbors' Dance is a languorous 3/4 seguidilla , a couples' contradance that includes some of the sexier moves from the fandango. (The seguidilla was one of many dances condemned by the Church in Spain as too lascivious for young women!) The Miller's Dance is a farucca, a form that was typically danced by a solo man as a display of virility and physical prowness. Falla added this dance added at the last minute--at Diaghilev's insistence--as a showpiece for Massine. It begins with a pair of thoroughly macho flourishes from the horn and English horn and continues in a series of dramatically rhythmic phrases, leading to furious ending. The Final Dance, a jota , is characterized by a lively by a lively 3/4 - 6/8 cross-rhythm throughout. The dance is alternately light-hearted and serious, but in the end brings this set to a joyful conclusion.
 

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Concerto No.2 for Piano and Orchestra in F minor, Op. 21

The Concerto No.2 was composed between 1828 and 1830. Chopin was the soloist at the first performance, a private concert in Warsaw on March 3, 1830, which was conducted by Karol Kurpinski. The same performers gave a public performance of the concerto at the National Theater in Warsaw two weeks later. The Madison Symphony Orchestra has performed the work once, with Janina Fialkowska in 2002. Duration 31:00.

As a young man, Chopin was the darling of Parisian musical society: a phenomenally talented performer, whose Polish background gave him just a hint of exoticism. It was expected on many sides that he would move from performance and compositions for solo piano towards more "important" genres. Chopin resisted--when he was 24, Chopin wrote to a friend: "Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I’ve only got the keyboard in my poor head. I know my limitations, and I know I’d make a fool of myself if I tried to climb too high without having the ability to do it. They plague me to death urging me to write symphonies and operas, and they want me to be everything in one--a Polish Rossini and a Mozart and a Beethoven. But I just laugh under my breath and think to myself that one must start from small things. I’m only a pianist..."

"Only a pianist" indeed! Chopin’s solo piano works are certainly the most sublime and powerful works in this medium to come from the Romantic period. Why, then, do we have two youthful piano concertos by Chopin? (The Concerto No.2 was completed when he was 19, and the E Minor concerto--known as No.1 because it was published first--was written about a year later.) At the time, the concerto was the vehicle to stardom for young virtuosos, and the public fully expected that instrumentalists would follow the path established by Mozart, Beethoven, and others, and perform their own original concertos. Chopin’s concertos had the desired effect. When he performed the Concerto No.2 in Warsaw, it gained him public exposure and audience adoration that no number of private salon performances could. In his description of the concert, he wrote that: "The first Allegro of my concerto, unintelligible to most, received the award of a single ‘Bravo,’ but I believe that this was given because people wanted to show that they understand and appreciate serious music… The [slow movement] and Rondo produced a very great effect; after these, the applause and ‘Bravos’ really came from the heart." After these two concertos, however, Chopin concentrated almost exclusively on solo piano works--it is almost as if, having gained success and security as a composer, he could put this genre away and follow his heart.

We know from descriptions of his playing that Chopin had an exceedingly delicate touch as a young man, and drew amazing amounts of expression from within a relatively small dynamic range. His Concerto No.2 suits this kind of playing beautifully--this is not a piece in which there is a profound dialogue between soloist and orchestra as in Beethoven’s works, nor is there any of the crashing bombast of the later concertos by Liszt. Here the orchestra provides a light accompaniment, and it is the solo line that dominates throughout. (In fact, Chopin often performed the concerto as a solo, without orchestral accompaniment.)

The opening movement (Allegro) begins in the manner of Mozart concerto, with orchestral introduction of contrasting themes--one forceful and the other more lyrical. When the piano enters, it dominates the texture entirely, with only the barest of accompaniment beneath florid piano lines. One of the few moments of dialogue in the concerto comes in the development section, where the soloist briefly plays above a countermelody from the bassoon. The slow movement (Larghetto) begins mysteriously in the orchestra, but the piano soon enters with a phrase of undiluted Romaticism. (According to Chopin, this melody was directly inspired by an affair of the heart!) There is a more impassioned middle section before the opening mood returns. The main theme of the final Rondo (Allego vivace) is clearly a younger cousin to Chopin’s mazurkas for solo piano--a rollicking dance that alternates with more lyrical interludes. At the end, a horn call introduces a coda of startling virtuosity.
 

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2)

Vaughan Williams composed this work in 1912-1913. The premiere, with the Queen's Hall Orchestra of London, conducted by Geoffrey Toye, was on March 27, 1914. The composer made substantial revisions to the work over the next twenty years, and it is the final version, published in 1934, that is played here. The Madison Symphony Orchestra has played the symphony once before, in 1984.* Duration 44:00.

Vaughan Williams is among music's notable "late bloomers." He had studied at both the Royal College of Music and at Trinity College, Cambridge, working with two of the composers who began a second Renaissance of English music in the late 19th century, Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. He later became a disciple of the great English folksong collector Cecil Sharp and spent years travelling the English countryside transcribing the music he heard. He studied composition with Max Bruch in Berlin, and with Maurice Ravel in Paris, but he composed almost nothing of consequence until he was in his mid-30s. This began to change around 1909-1910, when he introduced a series of compositions that finally made his reputation as composer, including the song-cyle On Wenlock Edge, the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, and the massive Sea Symphony. Vaughan Williams's personal style in these works draws upon the heritage of older English music from Elizabethan times to that of his contemporaries, upon the worship music of the Anglican Church, and upon the rich heritage of English folksong.

Vaughan Williams's friend George Butterworth, a composer and fellow folksong enthusiast, suggested in 1911 that he should write a symphony about London. Butterworth later died in the Great War, and Vaughan Williams dedicated a published score of the symphony to his memory. He completed the score in 1913, his first large-scale purely orchestral piece. (Though it clearly has "symphonic" elements, his Sea Symphony of 1910 is first and foremost a choral work.) The premiere in 1914 was a smashing success, but Vaughan Williams revised the score completely over the next few years, publishing the revised version of the score in 1920. A dozen years later he returned to the score, producing a definitive version that appeared in 1934.

One early review is typical of the enthusiastic response to the symphony at its premiere: "Whatever Vaughan Williams's intentions may have been, the result is a symphony that is full of noble and unforgettable music. Its popularity was instant and will be permanent..." This question of "intentions" is an important one. Though it was initially sketched out as a tone poem, Vaughan Williams was uncomfortable about a purely "programmatic" reading of A London Symphony. He suggested that it might better be titled A Symphony by a Londoner and that the musical references to London be considered "accidentals" rather than "essentials." He did, however, allow conductor Albert Coates, who conducted the premiere of the revised version in 1920, to write a detailed and rather fanciful program. The reality was probably somewhere in between: A London Symphony stands on its own as a piece of "absolute" music, but all of the musical references to London the composer includes create an unmistakable sense of place.

The opening movement (Lento) begins with quiet, flowing music--Vaughan Williams later wrote that he had "unconsciously cribbed" from Debussy's La Mer in this introduction. The theme that emerges in bits and pieces is eventually recognizable as the theme of the Westminster chimes, the famous Big Ben clocktower. The bustling main body of the movement (Allegro risoluto) begins rather abruptly, with a kind of fanfare. Vaughan Williams uses a series of themes that evoke, without directly quoting the sound of English folk song. A passage for solo cello introduces a long and quite lovely interlude. The movement closes with a fine brassy coda.

The second movement (Lento) begins with quiet pastoral music, a short English horn solo, and a lush theme played by strings and solo horn. This theme is developed in fuller orchestration, and then there is an episode for solo viola and woodwinds that quotes from a lavender-seller's street-cry that Vaughan Williams had heard in Chelsea several years before. The broad main theme returns once more and builds to grand statement for full orchestra. The ending is a short epilogue that combines all of the movement's main ideas.

The scherzo (Nocturne: Allegro vivace) begins with busy music for strings an dwoodwinds that was probably intended to suggest London's nightlife. Cellos and horns begin a strident fugato that competes with the main theme. Bassoons and lower strings announce the trio, a brief dancelike section. The movement ends with quiet, tranquil music, that fades away to nothing at the end. According to Vaughan Williams biographer Michael Kennedy, "...this musical evocation of the mood of a city at night has not been excelled by any composer, of any nation."

The finale--the movement Vaughan Williams reworked the most extensively after the premiere--begins with an introduction that refers to the second movement. The main idea is a solemn march theme. This is followed by more savage music before the march returns in a more serene form. There are a series of references to the opening movement culminating in the quiet reprise of the Westminster chimes. In London, this marks the tolling of the half-hour, but here is signals the beginning of the epilogue. The epilogue would become one of Vaughan Williams's trademarks: seven of his nine symphonies end with some kind of summing up of the actions and emotions of preceding movements. In A London Symphony, he brings back several themes quietly over a shimmering string background. A hushed violin solo ends the movement in a mood of serenity. Vaughan Williams later revealed that there was indeed a literary inspiration for the epilogue, the final chapter of H. G. Wells's novel Tono-Bungay: a description of London as seen from a steamship heading down the Thames towards the sea.
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program notes ©2008 by J. Michael Allsen

*A personal (self-indulgent) note: This concert, the opening of our 1984-85 season, was also my very first set of notes for the Madison Symphony Orchestra, and it was enjoyable to come back to this piece after so many years. While my notes of nearly a quarter century ago were not embarrassingly bad, I certainly welcomed a chance to write a new set for this program. - M.A.