return to program notes homepage
NOTE:  These program notes are published here for patrons of the the Madison Symphony Orchestra and other interested readers.  Any other use is forbidden without specific permission from the author.

Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
November 7-8-9, 2008
83rd Season / Subscription Concert No. 3
Michael Allsen


This program is led by the young Estonian conductor Anu Tali, who leads a program of four works.  The concert opens with Barber’s brilliant School for Scandal overture.  Sarah Chang, who last joined us in 2004 for Dvorák’s Violin Concerto will play the challenging solo part of the Brahms concerto—Brahms’s tribute to his friend Joachim.  After intermission, we turn to a rare orchestral work by the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis, his forceful Overture No.2.  Shostakovich’s short—and sometime sarcastic—ninth symphony ends this concert.


Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Overture to The School for Scandal, Op.5

This concert overture was composed between 1931 and 1933, and was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the direction of Alexander Smallens, on August 30, 1933.  The Madison Symphony Orchestra played the work in 1997.  Duration 9:00.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 play The School for Scandal is takes place in the jaded social circle of the aptly-named Lady Sneerwell.  This comedy centers around the eccentricities and malicious gossip of Sheridan’s upper-class characters.  In the score to his Overture to "The School for Scandal" Barber notes only that the piece was “suggested” by Sheridan’s play, and though there is no explicit program, the wit and fast-paced nature of the music certainly resonate with the nature of the play.  Barber began work on this overture in 1931, while he was still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.  During summer break, Barber made an extended trip to Italy, most of which he spent staying with Giancarlo Menotti and his family.  He wrote home to his parents that he had begun a “new piece for orchestra” and that work was going well.  The premiere did not take place until two years later, when the Philadelphia Orchestra performed the work at one of its outdoor concerts at Robin Hood Dell.  The Overture to "The School for Scandal" was a landmark in Barber’s career:  it was not only his first completed orchestral work and his first work to be performed by a major orchestra, it also won the prestigious Bearns Prize for composition (the second of his student works to win this award).

The overture is set in a Classical sonata form.  The introduction is a brilliant fanfare for the entire orchestra, and contains a little two-note descending motive that is the seed of the overture’s main theme.   This theme is first stated very quietly by the violins. (Barber directs that the violins are to play at the very tips of their bows.)  It is a quirky, offbeat little jig that slowly builds in intensity.  The second theme, introduced by solo oboe, is gradually augmented by flourishes from the other woodwinds.  After a short development section and conventional recapitulation, the overture ends with a fortissimo coda, a fugue-style version of the jaunty main theme.


Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, Op. 77

Brahms composed this, his only violin concerto in the summer of 1878, and it was first performed at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, on January 1, 1879, with the composer conducting.  Joseph Joachim, to whom it is dedicated, played the solo part at the premiere.  It has been performed seven times by the Madison Symphony Orchestra, in 1936 (George Szpinalski), 1946 (Roman Totenberg), 1963 (Sidney Harth), 1975 (Dylana Jenson), 1991 (Itzhak Perlman), and 2000 (Shlomo Mintz).  Duration 38:00.

“One enjoys getting hot fingers playing it, because it's worth it!”
                            - Joseph Joachim

In the summer of 1878, Brahms retired to the town of Pörtschach in southern Austria to work on his violin concerto.  (Pörtschach apparently provided a fine creative environment for the composer—he had completed his second symphony there during the previous summer.)  The concerto was dedicated to his friend and colleague, violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), and the concerto was, in a limited sense, a collaboration between composer and soloist.   Brahms and Joachim first met in 1853, beginning a lifelong friendship and musical association.  When he had completed the first three movements in August of 1878, he sent a copy of the solo violin part to Joachim with a letter:

“After copying it, I am not sure what you can do with a mere solo part.  Of course, I would like you to make corrections;  I had intended to leave you no excuse whatsoever—neither that the music is too good, nor that it isn't worth the trouble.  Now, I would be satisfied if you write a letter to me or perhaps mark the music: difficult, awkward, impossible, etc.  I have just started the fourth movement, so you can overrule the awkward passages at once.”

Joachim promptly replied with a marked copy of the part and a letter of his own:

“It is a great, sincere joy for me that you are writing a violin concerto (even one in four movements!).  I immediately studied what you sent to me, and you will note a few remarks and notes for changes, but without the score, one cannot appreciate it.  Most of it can be executed and some parts have a quite original violinistic flair.  I cannot say whether everything can be played with ease in a hot concert hall until I have tried out the whole.”

Brahms incorporated several of Joachim's suggestions into the final version of the score, and rather than providing a cadenza for the first movement, he used one written by Joachim.

Joseph Joachim
The Violin Concerto stands as one of the largest and most challenging works in the solo violin repertoire.  While his projected fourth movement was not included in the final form of the concerto (Brahms successfully used a four-movement design three years later in his second piano concerto.), the concerto's traditional three-movement design nevertheless has symphonic proportions.  Indeed, there are several close ties between the Violin Concerto  and the Symphony No.2, written a year earlier (and in the same key).  Brahms also makes several subtle references to Beethoven's violin concerto, which is also in D Major.   The concerto, written with the talents of Joachim in mind, presents formidable challenges for the soloist.  One violinist, Bronislaw Huberman, referred to the work—only half- jokingly—as “...a concerto for violin against  orchestra—and the violin wins!”

The orchestral introduction to the first movement (Allegro non troppo) presents nearly all of the movement's thematic material in a single dramatic phrase.  Musical material is disengaged from this phrase—like single strands from a larger thread—as the movement continues.  The violin's opening music presents a fiery variant of a melody fully introduced later in the movement above the orchestra's presentation of the lyrical main theme.  Throughout the movement, Brahms restlessly develops his themes, even in the short coda that follows the cadenza. 

The second movement (Adagio) presents a theme and several variations, a form that interested Brahms throughout his life.  The theme is presented by the oboe, and then picked up by the soloist in variations that exhaustively develop the theme and its component parts.  There is an abrupt contrast between the reserved F Major close of this movement  and the spirited opening of the rondo-form finale in D Major .  The main theme of the third movement (Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace) is presented immediately by the violin: a Hungarian-flavored melody spiced with double stops.  A second section, presenting a stormy dotted figure, drifts gradually back to a restatement of the main melody.  A more lyrical central episode, which refers subtly to the opening melody gives way to a restatement of the second section.  The movement closes with a long and dramatic coda, in which both soloist and orchestra develop the main theme.


Veljo Tormis (b. 1930)
Overture No.2

Tormis composed this work in 1959 and it was premiered in Talinn that year, under the direction of conductor Roman Matsov.  This is our first performance of the work.  Duration 11:00.

Veljo Tormis is among Estonia’s most widely celebrated composers.  He was born into a farm family near the Estonian capital, Talinn.  His earliest musical studies were at the Talinn Music School and the Talinn Conservatory, though when he was in his early 20s he studied at the Moscow Conservatory.  Estonia was an occupied nation during much of Tormis’s career: the Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were annexed by the Soviets at the beginning of the second world war, and remained part of the Soviet Union until the so-called “singing revolution” in the Baltic states in the late 1980s.  Estonia formally declared its independence in 1991.  Though Tormis won a prestigious national composition prize in 1962, and his works were widely performed throughout the USSR and eastern Europe over the next decade, Tormis faced the same artistic restrictions as other Soviet composers.  He did manage to study and incorporate influences from the European and American avant garde that were considered suspect by the authorities.   Though incorporation of folk music was encouraged as a sign of proper socialist sentiment, Tormis’s preoccupation with Estonian folk music was nationalistic and his works sometimes contained fairly overt anti-Soviet themes.  (For Estonians, choral and folk song festivals were an ongoing source of national pride and a symbol of resistance.)  Though he did not face the kind of harassment as Shostakovich and others did in the 1930s and 1940s, Tormis did experienced official neglect in the late 1970s and 1980s, when his music was infrequently programmed, and only rarely heard in the West.  But with Estonian independence his music was heard with increasing frequency around the world.  By the time he retired in 2000, Tormis had composed over 500 works.  His large-scale choral works in particular are often heard today.  His works are profoundly influenced by his study of ancient Estonian music, though he channels influences from other folk music styles as well.

The Overture No.2 is an early work, written while he was working as a teacher at the Talinn Music School, and one of his few purely orchestral pieces.  It was one of the few works by Tormis to be played in the West before the 1990s, championed by conductors like Tormis’s countryman Neeme Jäarvi and by Maestra Tali.  The Overture No.2 begins with a bold, almost angry three-note rhythm, that grows into forceful music underlaid by the snare drum.  It quickly reaches a peak of intensity. A more flowing second theme is played out between upper strings and horns but the same nervous energy continues until the music reaches what sounds like a moment of crisis.  The mood collapses, and there is a long, rather mystical middle section that unfolds in series of quiet solos above muted strings.  Tension increases slowly and the opening music returns, hesitantly at first, but then with a kind of savagery.  The second theme returns, now almost exultantly in the full brass section before the piece closes with three ferocious statements of the opening rhythm. 

Does this music have a message?  Despite its title, Tormis seems to imply this, though he avoids being specific.  In an interview recently published by biographer Mimi Daitz, he said

“…in fact, I probably haven’t written so-called absolute music, music for the sake of music.  The concept for even the frequently-played second overture lies somewhere other than in the music.  I have said earlier, too, that never in my life have I merely constructed music. I have always had another purpose, some idée fixe,  a desire to express something, to emphasize an idea of some sort, even a political one.  Not a musical one.” 


Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Symphony No.9 in E-flat Major, Op.70

Shostakovich’s ninth symphony was completed in August of 1945.  The premiere took place in Leningrad, on November 3, 1945, with the Leningrad Philharmonic under the direction of Eugene Mravinsky.  We have performed the symphony once previously, in 1998.  Duration  27:00.

“It is a merry little piece.  Musicians will love playing it and critics will
delight in blasting it.”  - Dmitri Shostakovich

For Shostakovich—as for all artists working in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union—art was inexorably tied to politics.  Artists like Shostakovich were employees of the State, and it was expected that their art would be created in the service of Socialism.  An article published by the Union of Soviet Composers, directs that composers turn their thoughts “towards the victorious  progressive principles of reality, towards all that is heroic, bright, and beautiful.  This distinguishes the spiritual world of Soviet man, and must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and strength.”  Musical commissars and even Stalin himself took an intense interest in the works of Soviet composers, and scrutinized every measure for elements of bourgeois “modernism” and “formalism,” or for any sign that the work was contrary to the Socialist cause.  The consequences for delinquency were immediate and severe:  at best, censure and unemployment—at the worst, a one-way trip to the Gulag Archipelago.

Shostakovich’s career in the 1930s and 1940s seems to be a recurring pattern of official censure and rehabilitation—he never dropped into the abyss, but often came uncomfortably close to the edge.  At the height of Stalinist purges in the late 1930s, Shostakovich kept a small suitcase packed and by the door at all times, so that he would be ready if the police arrived to take him away.   One of the first times he suffered official censure was in 1936, when Stalin published a critical review of one of Shostakovich’s operas.  Only after a public apology and the performance of his Symphony No.5 did he regain some sort of security.

The composition of his ninth symphony marks another occasion where Shostakovich suffered Stalin’s displeasure.  His seventh and eighth symphonies were enormous, powerful works—each lasts well over an hour—that take their cues from events in the second World War.   Shostakovich had dropped hints that he would round out a trilogy with a symphony celebrating Soviet victory, but at the war’s end in 1945, he found that he had little desire to create yet another noisy glorification of Stalin.  The Symphony No.9, composed relatively quickly during the summer of that year, is a miniature in comparison to the wartime works:  it is under half the length of either the seventh or the eighth, and is scored for a standard-sized orchestra.  The work is cheerful and ironic throughout—certainly not the ecstatic and victorious mood that Soviet authorities expected.  Years later, when Stalin was safely dead, Shostakovich remembered that:  “When my ninth was performed, Stalin was incensed.  He was deeply offended, because there was no chorus, no soloists—and no apotheosis. There wasn’t even a paltry dedication.  It was just music, which Stalin didn’t understand very well, and which was of dubious content.”  The piece received a cool reception from the critics and Shostakovich again found himself on the wrong side of Soviet musical authorities.  It was not until after Stalin’s death in 1953 that he was rehabilitated again.

The opening movement (Allegro) is set in traditional sonata form.  The bright and cheery mood is set in the opening bars with a lively string theme.  The second theme features an almost hilarious combination of piccolo and trombone:  the piccolo playing a happy little tune in alternation with dour two-note fanfares from the trombone.  Only near the end of the development does the mood become dark and troubled, but it is only for a moment;  the original material soon returns to rescue the mood.  Underlying much of the movement is a vaguely military feel—this is clearly satirical in intent.

The sparsely-scored second movement (Moderato) begins with a plaintive clarinet solo.  This becomes a duet with the addition of a second clarinet, then a trio with the flute, and finally a woodwind ensemble.  This texture gradually thins out and there is a lengthy central passage for muted strings that becomes gradually more sinister.  The opening material returns at the end, now introduced by a solo flute.

The final three movements are played without pauses.  The brief Presto begins with woodwinds playing at breakneck speed, introducing a scherzo-style theme.  There are two contrasting episodes placed between repeats of this music:  first a passage dominated by the strings, and then a march-style theme for solo trumpet and trombones.  The final statement of the scherzo fades away and the mood darkens, setting up a bridge to the next movement.  The Largo opens with an ominous statement by trombones and tuba.  This idea alternates with a bassoon recitative.  The bassoon’s second recitative suddenly changes character, and becomes the main theme of the final movement (Allegretto)—a grotesque tune that is soon picked up by the strings, and then by string and woodwinds.  Like the first movement, the finale is set in sonata form, and here the contrasting idea is a limping string theme.  The development section is a gradual crescendo towards the climactic moment:  a return of the bassoon’s main theme, now shouted out by the brass.  The trumpet plays a military-style fanfare through much of the brief recapitulation.  The tempo suddenly quickens, and the movement ends with a brisk coda.
________
program notes ©2008 by J. Michael Allsen