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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
October 23-24-25, 2009
84th Season / Subscription Concert No. 2
Michael Allsen


Glinka’s delightful Russlan and Ludmilla overture is the apertif to two much larger works on this program.  Astor Piazzolla’s music makes its first appearance at our concerts, with his Tango-inspired Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.  The virtuoso solo violin part is played by audience favorite Nadja Solerno-Sonnenberg, making her fourth appearance with the Madison Symphony Orchestra at these concerts.  (She played the Mendelssohn concerto in 1991, the Tchaikovsky concerto in 2001, and the Barber concerto in 2005.)  After intermission, we turn to Mahler’s Symphony No.1, a sentimental favorite of both the orchestra and Maestro DeMain: this was the work with which he made his Madison debut in 1994, and the beginning of Mahler cycle that lasted well over a decade.


Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857)
Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla

Glinka’s opera Russlan and Ludmilla was completed in 1842, and was first performed on December 9, 1842 at the Bolshoi Theater in St. Petersburg.   The overture has been performed eight times previously at our concerts, beginning in 1937 and most recently in 2001.  Duration 5:00.
 
Glinka, widely viewed as the founding father of Russian musical nationalism, is largely known today through two operas.  The first of these, A Life for the Czar (1836), was a success both for its incorporation of elements from Russian folk music, and its contemporary plot, which resonated with burgeoning Russian political nationalism.  For his second opera, Glinka turned to an epic poem by Pushkin.  Pushkin’s Russlan and Ludmilla had secured his reputation when it was published in 1818, and it was widely known in Russian literary circles.  The poem is a fairy-tale recreation of ancient Slavic epics: in this case, an extremely complex version of the “sleeping beauty” legend.  Glinka had originally planned to work with the poet in creating a libretto, but Pushkin died in a duel before he could he could collaborate on the opera.  Glinka brought in a team of no less than five librettists, who turned Pushkin’s already convoluted story line into an even more complex series of tableaux.  The confusing plot probably contributed to a rather lukewarm response at the premiere performance.   Russlan and Ludmilla soon caught on, however, and became a recognized symbol of Russian music: the opera was performed over 300 times in St. Petersburg alone over the next half century, and was widely heard in other Russian cities. European and American audiences were a bit slower to accept the work (it was not performed in the US until 1942), but it is still heard occasionally today.

Though the opera Russlan and Ludmilla is a rarity on today’s stages, its brilliant little overture has become a staple of the orchestral repertoire.  The overture is set in Classical sonata form.  The opening melodies, accompanied by some absolutely furious violin lines, are borrowed from the opera’s final victory scene.  The contrasting theme, played by violas, cellos, and bassoons is borrowed from a battlefield aria sung by the hero Russlan in the second act.  Near the end, the trombones—as usual, relegated to the role of Bad Guy—play a descending whole-tone scale associated with the evil dwarf Chernomor, but this is soon drowned out in general rejoicing.


Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992)
Four Seasons of Buenos Aires

Piazzolla composed his Four Seasons in 1967-1970.  Piazzolla and his quintet played the works together for the first time at the Teatro Regina in Buenos Aires, on May 19, 1970. Leonid Desyatnikov created the version for solo violin and string orchestra heard here in 1999.  This is our first performance of Piazzolla's music Duration 25:00.

The Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla was a child prodigy on Argentina’s national instrument, the bandonéon—the large button accordion that is the lead instrument of the Tango.  His family moved to New York City when he was very young, and while still a teenager in the U.S., he met and was befriended by the great Argentine singer and matinee idol Carlos Gardel.  He returned to Argentina at age 16 and spent the next several years playing in dance bands, eventually leading his own successful orquesta típica, the standard ensemble of Tango.  He studied classical music with composer Alberto Ginastera, but in 1954 won a scholarship to study in Paris with one of the 20th-century’s great composition teachers, Nadia Boulanger.  It was Boulanger whom Piazzolla credited with helping to create his own style.  In an interview years later, he recalled how she spent two weeks working her way through the modernist scores he brought with him, before she finally concluded that they showed a complete lack of spirit, and goaded him into playing the kind of music he played at home.  He reluctantly played one of his own Tangos, and, according to Piazzolla, “When I finished, Nadia took my hands in hers, and with that English of hers, so sweet, she said, ‘Astor, this is beautiful.  I like it a lot.  Here is the true Piazzolla—do not ever leave him.’  It was the great revelation of my musical life.”

Piazzolla returned to Argentina after a year in Paris, and began to forge a distinctive style, eventually known as “Nuevo Tango.”  “New Tango” proved to be controversial in his homeland: while Tango is among the world’s sexiest dances, the music is quite tradition-bound, played by a standard ensemble, the orquesta típica, of bandonéon, violins, piano, piano, and double bass.  Piazzolla’s works eventually included electric bass and guitar, synthesizer, and other distinctly “non-típica” instruments.  He also channeled a wide range of musical ideas, from Jazz and Fusion to more avant garde idioms—but with the syncopated sensuousness of the Tango always present.  By the end of his career Piazzolla was widely heard and commissioned around the world.  And the creation of “new” Piazzolla works continued after he died—most strikingly by performers like Yo Yo Ma, who created a post-mortem duet with several of Piazzolla’s recorded bandonéon improvisations, but also by hundreds of arrangements and reinterpretations of his over 750 works.

The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (Cuatro estaciones porteñas) heard here is just such a posthumous collaboration.  Piazzolla wrote the four sections of this work for his quintet  (bandoneón, piano, violin, electric guitar, and electric bass).  In 1999, the Russian composr and arranger Leonid Desyatnikov, working with violinist Gidon Kremer, reworked Piazzolla’s originals into a set of four virtuoso movements for solo violin and string orchestra.   This arrangement transforms Piazzolla’s originals into a set of virtuoso character pieces, very much in the spirit of Vivaldi’s famous Four Seasons.   There is no standard ordering of Piazzolla's seasons, and Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg will be presenting them as follows:

Spring is a lively syncopated tango-fugue, with its opening phrases punctuating by scratches and sighs.  The movement has a languorous, sexy central section before returning to a frenetic version of the opening.  The orchestral strings set up a strong background groove in the Summer movement, above which the solo line plays a sighing melody.  Desyatnikov introduces a brief reference to Vivaldi’s Winter concerto after this opening section—a tongue-in-cheek reminder that while it is summer in Buenos Aires, it is winter in Italy and the rest of the northern hemisphere.  Again, the middle section is slow and sensuous—summer in Buenos Aires is, after all no time to move quickly for long—with solo line eventually surrounded by ethereal harmonics.  The movement ends with a varied reprise of the opening music, and a final riff on Vivaldi before the music disintegrates in a final orchestral moan. 

Piazzolla’s Winter opens with pure Tango—melancholy, with just a hint of menace.  This mood is broken by a brief solo cadenza, before the solo line and the cello return to the opening music, winding around one another like a pair of dancers.  A brief episode includes another sly reference to Vivaldi—the Summer concerto this time.  The slinky opening melody is eventually transformed into a more aggressive Tango (with some string background lifted from Vivaldi—blink and you’ll miss it), before a return of the opening mood.  The ending is a wry little pseudo-Baroque coda over a repeating ground bass.Autumn begins energetically with a series of unusual bowing effects, but here the violin solo gives way to a long, bluesy solo by the principal cello. After a brief reprise, the violin develops the cello’s music in a bravura cadenza style.  The opening music returns at the end, even more angular and belligerent.




Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Symphony No.1 in D Major

Mahler composer much of the Symphony No.1 between 1883 and 1888, but it was revised extensively over the next eleven years.  The composer conducted the premiere in Budapest on November 20, 1889.  Our only previous performance of the symphony was in 1994.  Duration 53:00.

Composing a symphony—particularly a first symphony—is a daunting task for any composer, and it often takes a good deal of time (Brahms's first was not completed until he was 43).  Mahler's monumental first symphony is no exception: well over twenty years elapsed between his earliest sketches and the published version heard on this program.  The earliest bit of sketch material that survives is a draft of the scherzo, possibly written as early as 1876.  He began work in earnest in 1883, and by 1888 he had completed the earliest version of the symphony, an immense five-movement work.  When he conducted the premiere  of the work in Budapest in 1889, it was listed in the program as Symphonic Poem in Two Parts with the movements disposed as follows: Part I — 1. Introduction and Allegro comodo / 2. Andante / 3. Scherzo; Part II — 4. In the style of a funeral ceremony / 5. Molto appasionato.  Four years later, when Mahler conducted the work's second performance in Hamburg, he revised the score extensively and affixed a new title, Titan, after a novel by Jean Paul Richter.  While he retained the structure of the original symphonic poem, he gave programmatic titles to each of the movements: Part I: “From the days of youth”: 1. “Endless Spring” /  2. “A collection of flowers” / 3. “Under full sail”; Part II “The Human Comedy”: 4. “Funeral march in the style of Callot” / 5. “From the Inferno to Paradise”

Over the next six years, Mahler's conception of the work changed one more time.  When he published the score in 1899, it was with considerable revision and without the fanciful titles.  As he wrote to the critic Max Marschalk in 1896:

“...at one time, my friends persuaded me to provide a kind of program for the D Major symphony in order to make it easier to understand—therefore I though up this title [Titan] and explanatory material after the actual composition.  The reason I have left them out is not only that I find them completely inadequate (and not even accurate), but also that I have learned through past experience how audiences have been misled by them.  But that is the way with every program!”

The published score was presented simply as Symphony No.1 in Four Movements for Large Orchestra.  Mahler had revised the music and dropped the original second movement.  (Over the past fifty years, this “flowers” movement has occasionally been revived and included in performances of the Symphony No.1.)

This first symphony was not an immediate critical success, but Mahler himself was satisfied with the work.  Writing to his friend and protégé Bruno Walter from New York in 1909, after he had led the New York Philharmonic in a performance of the Symphony No.1, he declared that he was “...really pleased with my youthful effort.”  After his death, Mahler's music lost popularity and it wasn't until the 1960s that his symphonies began to regain a firm place in the repertoire. The Symphony No.1, in many ways the most direct and easily grasped of his works, was one of the first of his ten symphonies to be revived and it remains the most popular.

The opening movement, marked Langsam (“slow”) begins in a hazy, undefined mood, with insistent “cuckoo” calls in the woodwinds—this same interval, a descending fourth, will eventually begin the movement's main theme, and will recur many times during the course of the symphony.  Distant brass fanfares and more bird calls from the clarinet lead smoothly into the main theme of this movement.  Mahler further identifies the feeling of this movement with the words schleppend wie ein Naturlaut (“drawn out, like a sound of nature”), and nothing could be more natural than this lovely melody.  The theme is taken from the most happy movement of Mahler's 1883 orchestral song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (“Songs of a Wayfarer”), the song Ging heut' morgern übers Feld—one of the earliest of Mahler's many self-quotations.  This pastoral song begins with a dialogue between the singer and a cheerful finch:

“I walked this morning over the fields—dew still hung upon the grass.  The merry finch spoke to me: ‘  Hey you!  Isn't it a good morning?  Isn't it?  You there!  Isn't it a lovely world?  Tweet tweet!  Beautiful and sweet!  How I love the world!’”

This theme is heard first in the low strings, and is quickly picked up by the entire orchestra.  It twice builds towards a climax before before returning rather suddenly to the hazy mood of the opening.  Intensity builds in leisurely way towards a final development.  A return of the trumpet fanfare from the introduction signals the beginning of the coda, which is dominated by the brass and which comes to an abrupt, almost comic ending.

Mahler marked the scherzo movement Kräftig bewegt, doch nicht so schnell (“with strong motion, but not too fast”).  With its robust character, it closely resembles the Laendler, a rustic triple-meter Austrian dance.  Mahler was closely tied to the Austrian music he had heard as a youth, and much of this movement emulates the sound of dances played by an Austrian military band.   In the central section the Laendler gives way to a gentle and whimsical Waltz.  The Laendler returns in an abbreviated form at the end of the movement.

In the published version of the Symphony No.1, Mahler rejected the notion of any programmatic element in the work.  However, he did acknowledge that the third movement was inspired in part by a well-known illustration from a children's book, a picture titled The Hunter's Funeral Procession.  Mahler evokes the satiric mood of this picture—forest animals pretending to be sad as they carry the hunter's coffin—by adopting a minor-key version of the children's tune Frere Jacques as the main theme.  After developing this in rather doleful counterpoint, Mahler interrupts the music with a return to the country-band character of the previous movement (with a healthy dose of Klezmer flavoring!).  Frere Jacques returns briefly, only to be interrupted again by a long quotation from the despairing final song of Mahler's “Wayfarer” cycle.  The movement ends by combining the band music with the main theme, and dying quietly away.

    The final movement follows immediately after the end of third.  This is a critical moment in the symphony, as Mahler explained in the 1896 Maschalk letter:  “…[in the third movement], the important thing is the mood which is expressed, from which the fourth movement then springs suddenly like lightning from a dark cloud.  It is the cry of a deeply wounded heart, preceded by the spooky, ironically brooding oppressiveness of the funeral march.”  Mahler's “lightning from a dark cloud” explodes with a cymbal crash and a dissonant brass chord.   The minor-key main theme is heard first in the brasses, and often takes on a rather violent marchlike character.  The mood changes drastically with lyrical passage for the violins (perhaps the journey from Hell to Heaven described in Mahler's Hamburg program).  The violence returns again, only to resolve suddenly into a major key, and dissolve into a reminiscence of the opening of the first movement and a placid interlude.  The marchlike theme returns once more, mingled with other fragments of other themes, building into a gigantic orchestral crescendo.  The exultant coda is dominated once again by the brass, particularly by the eight horns.  Bruno Walter best summarized the effect of this final movement:   “Here, he unleashes the tempest, a wild eruption, a life-and-death struggle leading to a triumphant conclusion.”
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program notes ©2009 by J. Michael Allsen