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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
January 16-17-18, 2009
83rd Season / Subscription Concert No. 5
Michael Allsen

The Madison Symphony Orchestra welcomes back guest conductor Daniel Hege for this program. Maestro Hege—a favorite of audience and orchestra—was here in 2005, leading a program of Wagner, Barber, and Schumann. Here we begin with Mozart’s bright “Paris” symphony. A Scandinavian violist, Norwegian Henning Kraggerud, makes his Madison debut with a Scandinavian work, Sibelius’s dramatic Violin Concerto. We close with familiar music presented in an innovative way. American Players Theater actor James DeVita will set the stage for selected movements from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet with passages from Shakespeare’s text.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No.31 in D Major, K.297 (300a) “Paris”

Mozart completed this work in Paris on June 12, 1778, and it was premiered there on six days later. The Madison Symphony has performed the work once previously, in 1988. Duration 17:00.

In the spring of 1778, Mozart was in Paris, actively seeking a new position. Although he had caused a sensation in the French capital as a six-year-old prodigy, in 1778, he was just another 22-year-old musician looking for a gig. The trip was a professional disaster: his letters home to Salzburg are filled with scorn for French musicians and audiences, and he failed to find a permanent patron. But it was even more a personal disaster: his mother, who had accompanied him from Salzburg, caught sick and died in Paris on July 3, 1778. One of the few highlights of this expedition was a request for a new work from Joseph Le Gros. Le Gros was a composer and singer, who had recently taken over management of the Concerts Spirituel, Paris’s most successful and prestigious concert series. Though Mozart and Le Gros seemed to have butted heads, the impresario offered invaluable help—among other things, Mozart spent hours each day at Le Gros’s home, using his piano—and the offer for a premiere at the Concerts Spirituel was a real coup for a composer hoping to attract attention from Paris’s cultural elite. His well-known “Paris” symphony was the result.

Mozart did his best to adopt the fashionable French musical styles in the new symphony. One element that had been expected of French orchestras since the time of Lully was the premier coup d'archet—opening a work with a precise, coordinated bowstroke from the strings, reflected in Mozart’s symphony by the four crisp chords at the beginning. He was a little disdainful of this, writing to his father “The fuss the oxen here make of it. What the devil! I can’t see any difference—they all begin together—as they do in other places.” He omitted the usual Austrian minuet, and produced a three-movement symphony in the popular French style of the day. Mozart also had an extremely large orchestra available: some forty string players and, for the first time in his symphonies, a pair of clarinets. He wrote to his father on the afternoon of the first (and only) rehearsal on the day of the concert, complaining of the orchestra’s dismal playing, and:

“I cannot say whether it will be popular—and to tell the truth, for who will not like it? I can answer for its pleasing the few intelligent French people who will be there—and as for the stupid ones, I shall not consider it a great misfortune if they are not pleased. I still hope, however, that even asses will find something in it to admire.”

The concert itself was apparently a success, however, and a few weeks later (on the very day his mother died—he would break this news gradually over the next few letters) he wrote to his father with an enthusiastic report.

In the opening movement of the “Paris” symphony (Allegro assai) has the outlines of sonata form, but the focus is on a series of delightful themes rather than intense development. The chords and flourish of the premier coup d'archet dominate the movement, but there are several surprising contrasting ideas. (Mozart wrote that at one point the audience was so pleased by one of these, that they interrupted the movement with applause.)

The Andante is now known to be the original movement written for the symphony—for many years, an alternative middle movement, an Andantino in 6/8 was thought to be the original, replaced at Le Gros’s insistence. We now know that the Andantino was probably written after Mozart left Paris—possibly to conceal from his father that he had written relatively little music on this trip that had cost the family so much! The Andante is calm and elegant music, alternating a pair of courtly violin themes.

The Allegro opens with a surprise: the violins start with a quiet, blustery theme, which leads to an unexpected crashing entrance full orchestra. (The Paris audience once again interrupted the performance with applause at this point.) This fanfare-like motive is heard throughout the movement, but a brief but intense fugal passage, and several surprising twists of harmony before the movement ends with a brilliant coda.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Concerto in D minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op.47

Sibelius wrote this concerto in 1902-1903 and conducted the premiere in Helsinki, with Victor Novacek as soloist, on February 8, 1904. An extensively revised version—the version heard at this concert—was premiered in Berlin on October 19, 1905, with Carl Halír as soloist, and conducted by Richard Strauss. Previous performances on these programs have featured: Marie Endres (1943), Pinchas Zukerman (1974), and Elmar Oliviera (1984). Duration 32:00.

The years after the turn of the 20th century were frustrating for Sibelius—though his reputation in his native Finland was secure, international fame was proving to be elusive. His initial musical success had come with nationalistic works based on Finnish folk legends, like The Swan of Tuonela. By 1900, though, he was trying to break this mold and establish himself as a symphonist in the tradition of Brahms and Dvorák. This self-imposed pressure caused turmoil in his personal life, which was plagued by marital problems, alcoholism, and mounting financial difficulties. Despite all this, the period was amazing fertile: by 1915, he had written his first five symphonies, his violin concerto, six symphonic poems (including the famous Finlandia), and several smaller works for orchestra. By the time of World War I, he had won the wider recognition he desired and deserved.

Sibelius was a trained violinist, and had started his musical training with ideas of becoming a great virtuoso. A shoulder injury when he was in his 20s and an increasing interest in composition ended his hoped-for solo career, but he never lost his interest in the instrument. When he was in his late 30s, he wrote: “There's still a part of me that desires to become a violinist, and this expresses itself in unusual ways.” Shortly after he made this remark, he began work on the violin concerto, encouraged by German violinist Willy Burmeister, who promised to play the concerto in Berlin. For financial reasons, Sibelius decided to premiere it in Helsinki, and since Burmeister was unavailable to travel to Finland, Sibelius engaged Victor Novacek, a violin teacher at the Helsinki Conservatory. Novacek apparently played the concerto poorly, and the first performance was a flop. Sibelius was also dissatisfied with the piece itself, and set to work revising it. A year later, he got his desired Berlin premiere, with the Bohemian virtuoso Carl Halír as soloist. Though Sibelius referred to this concert as the concerto's “trial by fire,” it was a tremendous success, prompting one critic to a rather fanciful comparison to “the Nordic winter landscape painters, who through the distinctive interplay of white on white secure rare, sometimes hypnotic, sometimes powerful effects.” Sibelius dedicated his concerto to the Hungarian child prodigy Ferenc Vecsey, who played it in Berlin a year later, when he was just 13 years old. (Sibelius had in fact made the dedication when Vecsey was only 10!)

The concerto is an expansive work that calls for dramatic, forceful playing for the soloist. The opening movement (Allegro moderato) begins with a passionate melody from the soloist, supported by throbbing background of muted strings. This first section ends with a short cadenza, and a transition, before cellos and bassoons introduce a new major-key idea. The violin transforms this into a more passionate minor-key theme. Strings and woodwinds introduce a more forceful third idea. Though the movement has a the general outlines of sonata form, Sibelius follows a freer course, developing these main ideas until the very end, and introducing several new themes along the way. At its midpoint, this movement features brilliant solo cadenza.

Where the first movement was stormy and tense, the second (Adagio di molto) is quiet and lyrical. The movement opens with almost mysterious lines from the woodwinds, but the violin soon enters with a long Romantic melody, supported by horns and woodwinds. A central episode is more dramatic in mood, with a new melody introduced by the orchestra. The final section returns to the calm mood of the opening, with the main theme now played by the orchestra as the soloist provides a delicate ornamental filigree.

Forceful rhythms in the timpani and low string introduce the main theme of last movement (Allegro, ma non tanto), an energetic melody that critic Donald Tovey called “a polonaise for polar bears.” The second theme is a syncopated dance melody introduced by the orchestra and further developed by the violin. Most of the movement is concerned with deleloping these two themes, most often played by the orchestra as the soloist provides a kind of virtuoso commentary. The violinist throws in every virtuoso trick in the book in this dazzling finale: long lines of double-stops and octaves, harmonics, and breathtaking passage-work throughout the range of the instrument.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Selections from Romeo and Juliet, Suites 1-2, Opp. 64a-b

The ballet Romeo and Juliet was composed in 1934-35, and the first performance of the full score took place in Moscow in October of 1935. The ballet was not staged until 1938, with a production in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and it was finally performed in Russia in 1940, with a production by the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Prokofiev extracted three orchestral suites from this score—we will be performing excerpts from the first two suites at this concert. The Suite No.1 (Op. 64a) was premiered in Moscow in November of 1937, and the Suite No.2 was premiered in Leningrad five months later. Excerpts from the ballet suites have appeared on these programs in 1954, 1984, and 1999. Duration 40:00.

There is little doubt these days that Romeo and Juliet stands as Prokofiev’s most enduring ballet score. For several years, however, this enormous work was a victim of Soviet artistic politics. The original idea for this full-scale Romantic ballet on Romeo and Juliet seems to have come from Sergei Radlov, an influential Leningrad opera director who had collaborated on Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges. The “story-ballet” Romeo and Juliet was to have been produced at Leningrad’s Academic Theater, but at the end of 1934 the theater underwent a sudden change of administration. Sergei Kirov, the Party boss of Leningrad was assassinated, undoubtedly at Stalin’s order, and in an incongruous move, the Soviet authorities renamed the Academic Theater to honor this “Socialist martyr.” The new Kirov Theater was tightly controlled by the Soviet artistic bureaucracy, and Radlov—whose views had long been considered suspiciously avant garde—fell out of favor. Hopes for producing Romeo and Juliet in Leningrad evaporated, and Prokofiev began working with the Bolshoi ballet in Moscow. The score was completed in 1935 and played at the Bolshoi, whose directors pronounced it “undanceable” and canceled the planned production. At least part of the problem was the story line, which had been twisted so that a suicidal Romeo arrived at Juliet’s tomb just a minute after she woke up, thus providing the most famous of all tragedies with a happy ending.

Despite these disappointments, Prokofiev continued to work on the score, fixing the sappy ending, and extracting two orchestral suites from the score. The suites were enormously successful, both inside the Soviet Union and in Europe and the United States. (The rarely-heard Suite No.3 came several years later.) In late 1938, the Kirov Ballet finally agreed to produce Romeo and Juliet. Their change of heart seems to have been inspired in part by the enormous success of the suites, but also by embarrassment over the fact that a non-Soviet company (in Czechoslovakia) had actually staged the ballet in 1938. The Kirov’s lavish production in 1940 was a huge success, and the ballet finally found a secure place in the Russian repertoire—the critics hailed Romeo and Juliet as a triumph of Soviet art, and hailed Prokofiev the ballet composer as the first worthy successor to Tchaikovsky.

Movements from the orchestral suites are often mixed and matched, and at this concert, Maestro Hege has selected seven movements that illustrate the vast emotional range present in Prokofiev’s ballet score. The first two movements are taken from the Suite No.2. “The Montagues and the Capulets” begins with solemn music from Act I of the ballet, which accompanies the Duke as he forbids fights between the two families. The main theme, however, is the accompaniment to the dance of the Capulet knights in Act II—a march theme with a ponderous trombone accompaniment. A contrasting middle section, with a lovely flute solo, is Juliet’s more graceful version of this same music. “Juliet the Young Girl” is a portrait of Juliet from Act I—the mood of this music shifts constantly between quick and flirtatious to quiet and introspective.

The next three selections are the closing movements of the Suite No.1. “Masks” depicts Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio—all in masks—sneaking into a ball at the home of the Capulets. It is a quiet march with appropriately stealthy music from solo clarinet and trumpet. “Romeo and Juliet Balcony Scene” is unadulterated Romanticism from beginning to end. All is hushed at the beginning as muted violins and harp set the stage. Much of this quiet but passionate movement is a dialogue, with themes representing the two lovers presented alternately in strings and woodwinds. The music moves towards a gentle peak at the beginning, but subsides to a whisper at the end. “The Death of Tybalt” is a complete contrast, dominated by the brasses and blazing string lines. Here, Prokofiev brings together many of the significant moments of Act II: the duel, Tybalt’s death, and the funeral procession.

We end with two movements drawn from Suite No.2. “Romeo and Juliet before Parting” is sad, wistful, and unhurried, accompanying the lovers’ passionate conversation. Here Prokofiev presents a whole series of brief themes, but never allows the melancholy mood to break. The final selection, “Romeo at Juliet’s Grave,” opens with astringent string lines and begins a slow funeral procession. It builds inexorably towards a deep cry of anguish, and closes in mood of profound resignation as Romeo drinks his poison and dies next to Juliet’s sleeping body.

“Come, bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now run on
the dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!
… thus with a kiss I die.”