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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
February 5-6-7, 2010
84th Season / Subscription Concert No. 5
Michael Allsen


This program features violinist Pinchas Zukerman and cellist Amanda Forsyth.  Zukerman makes his fourth appearance with the Madison Symphony Orchestra at these concerts: he was last here in January 2007, as both conductor and violin soloist (featured in the Bach Violin Concerto No.1).  Zukerman and Forsyth both appeared with us in October 2001, when he performed Mozart's third violin concerto, and the two of them played Brahms's “double” concerto.  Zukerman first appeared with the orchestra in 1974, playing the Sibelius violin concerto.   Here, each of our soloists begins with a solo turn: Ms. Forsyth on Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, and Mr. Zukerman on Mozart’s fifth violin concerto.  We then turn to two works by Saint-Saëns: one a rarity, and the other his most beloved work.  The rarity is an expressive violin/cello duet, The Muse and the Poet.  Organist Samuel Hutchison in soloist in the closer, the grand Symphony No.3.


Max Bruch (1838-1920)
Kol Nidrei, Op. 47

Bruch composed this work in 1880, and it was first played at a private concert in Liverpool in November of that year, with Joseph Hollmann as soloist. The public premiere was eleven months later in Leipzig, with cellist Robert Hausmann.  The Madison Symphony Orchestra has performed the work three times previously, with soloists Ennio Bolognini (1938), Victor Gottlieb, (1941), and Helen Potter (1957).  Duration 11:00.
 
Max Bruch is known today primarily for two solo violin works, the G minor concerto and the Scottish Fantasy, and the Kol Nidrei heard here.  However, Bruch was a thoroughly successful composer in his day, with a catalog of nearly a hundred works that included three operas, three symphonies, several solo pieces, sacred and secular choral works, art songs, and chamber music.  He was a well-regarded conductor and one of the most sought-after composition teachers in Europe.  Ottorino Respighi and Ralph Vaughan Williams were among his more famous pupils, but he worked with dozens of others, including Sigfrid Prager, the first conductor of the Madison Symphony Orchestra.  Not surprisingly, Bruch's works were frequent features at our concerts during Dr. Prager's tenure.  As noted above, it has been over 50 years since our last performance of his Kol Nidrei, however.

Bruch was fascinated by all kinds of folk material, and incorporated musical styles from several national traditions into his music—most famously in the Scottish Fantasy.  While he was in Berlin, in the late 1870s, Bruch conducted a Jewish community chorus, and became particularly friendly with Berlin’s most important cantor, Abraham Lichtenstein.  When he moved to Liverpool to take a conducting post in 1880,  Liverpool’s Jewish Society almost immediately gave him a commission for a new composition.  Bruch found the Hebrew melodies he had heard in Berlin very attractive, and settled on one of the most profound of all Jewish chants as the basis for the new work.  Kol Nidrei (“all vows”) is recited on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as a prayer for God’s forgiveness for all rash commitments.  The melody was probably German in origin, and was at least 150 years old at the time Bruch wrote his setting.

Nol Nidrei, subtitled “Adagio on Hebrew Melodies,” is a rather freeform work, and after a prayerful introduction, the cello lays out the Kol Nidrei melody in unhurried phrases.  The low strings play a rather stern pair of statements, and the cello answers with a brighter, more optimistic theme. The orchestra introduces a more ecstatic third idea which the cello develops into a relaxed cadenza.  In the end it is this more hopeful mood that dominates.  


Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 5 in A Major, K. 219

This concerto was completed in Salzburg in December of 1775.  The first performance probably took place soon thereafter.  This work has been performed once previously by the Madison Symphony Orchestra, in 1991, with Tyrone Greive as soloist. performed once.   Duration 31:00.

All five of Mozart’s violin concertos were written in a single year, 1775, when the teenage composer was working as concertmaster for the Archbishop of Salzburg.  There is no record of when the Concerto No.5 was first performed, but it is likely that it was not too long after Mozart completed the score—new works seldom laid around for long in Salzburg.  Nor are we sure who played the solo part.  Mozart himself was a fine violinist, good enough to lead the Archbishop’s orchestra, and by his father’s account, a player with potential to become “the finest violinist in Europe.”  Leopold Mozart was, as always, speaking with promotion and encouragement of his son in mind, but he was also a good judge of fiddling:  he had published an influential text on violin-playing several years earlier.  While young Mozart was certainly capable, he seems to have viewed playing violin as a somewhat unpleasant chore, and he abandoned the violin in favor of the keyboard almost as soon as he moved out from under his father’s wing.  We do know that Mozart performed a few of the concertos in the next few years, but here are some indications, that at least some of the five concertos may have been written originally for his Salzburg friend Joachim Kolb, or for Antonio Brunetti, another violinist of Archbishop’s court orchestra.

These are youthful works, and works that still bear some traces of the old Baroque concerto in their formal outlines.  However, they are also amazingly cosmopolitan in style.  Mozart had spent most of his young life travelling across Europe as child prodigy, performing on both violin and harpsichord.   Though Leopold never realized his goal of finding a lucrative court post for Wolfgang, his son picked up something equally valuable along the way, musical styles from across the Continent.  The violin concertos bear traces of all of the Austrian, German, Italian, and French courts he visited as a child.  They also show the impact of the genial and rather free style of the serenades that were so popular in Salzburg in their profusion of musical ideas

The Concerto No.5 is in many ways the most ambitious on the concertos—it is both the longest and musically most adventurous of the five.    The opening movement, with the unusual designation Allegro aperto (literally an “open” Allegro) begins with a conventional orchestral introduction, but the main theme is only hinted at.  When the violin enters with this idea, it changes the character to quiet sweetness, virtually sneaking in with the main idea.  The rest of the exposition continues without further surprise, but then there is a startling twist, a new theme, mood, and tempo: an expressive Adagio melody that stands in for a more traditional development section.  This material does not reappear in the recapitulation, but Mozart does insert even more new material here.  There a solo cadenza at the end, and the brief orchestral coda ends with a flippant upward gesture, as if to end this movement with a question rather than an answer.  

The second movements of Mozart’s concertos contain some of his most beautiful music, and this no exception: the Adagio is calm and unhurried as it presents and develops two lovely melodies.  There are constant surprises along the way: quirky twists of harmony and one brief fugal passage.  Again, there is space for a lyrical solo cadenza at the close.

The last movement is a rondo—a favorite form for concerto finales in which a single main idea alternates with contrasting episodes.  But here there is a courtly Minuet in place of the usual blazing rondo theme.  The first two episodes are fairly conventional:  an energetic violin line and a minor-key idea.  But the third is a shocker.  Turkish music was all the rage in Austria at the time, and suddenly the music changes meter and mood for a long episode of Turkish—or perhaps Gypsy—fiddling.  Mozart even approximates the drums and cymbals of Turkish bands by having the cellos thump on their instruments with their bows!  (Because of this section, the Concerto No.5 is sometimes called the “Turkish.”)  The episode ends with a solo cadenza, and a restatement of both the main theme and the second episode, and the movement ends, like the first movement, with a wry question.


Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
The Muse and the Poet, Op.132

Saint-Saëns wrote this work in 1909-10.  It was premiered in London in 1910 by violinist Eugene Ysaÿe and cellist Joseph Hollmann.  This is our first performance of the work.  Duration 15:00.

Saint-Saëns was a towering figure in French music: a prolific composer, a virtuoso pianist, longtime organist at the Madeline church in Paris, and one of France’s leading music journalists.  He composed in every genre—even writing one of the first true film scores (music to accompany a silent film from 1909)—but in most of his late career his music was being played less and less often in his homeland.  His music remained romantic in tone and classical in construction, and French taste passed him over in favor in favor of more modern composers.    While his reputation as a composer was declining in France, however, both Saint-Saëns and his music remained wildly popular in England and America. Many of the large-scale pieces he wrote in the last forty years of his long career were commissioned or premiered by English and American ensembles.  (His very last completed orchestral work, for example, was a now-obscure overture called Hail! California.)

The rarely-performed The Muse and the Poet is one such late work, written while Saint-Saëns was on vacation in Egypt in the winter of 1909-10.  It was first composed (and is still sometimes performed) as a trio for violin, cello, and piano, but Saint-Saëns seems to have thought of this as orchestral work from the start.  The composer himself later endorsed the idea that this was a programmatic characterization of a Muse (the violin) and a Poet (the cello), but this does not seem to part of the original conception: the title was applied a few years later by his publisher.  Saint-Saëns himself described it as “a conversation between the two instruments instead of a debate between two virtuosos.”   The work is laid out in three broad sections.  In the opening section, the two soloists trade lyrical phrases throughout, as the orchestra provides colorful support to their dialogue.  The second section is more passionate in character, beginning with long solo statements by the cello and violin.  It reaches an emotional peak in an agitated cello cadenza, which the violin answers with a serene passage that changes the mood completely.  This third section contains reminiscences of the opening music and ends in a fiery coda.


Symphony No.3 in C Minor, Op.78 (“Organ”)

Saint-Saëns completed the Symphony No.3 in 1886, and conducted the premiere in London on May 19, 1886.  The Madison Symphony Orchestra has performed the symphony twice  previously, in 1958 and 2004.  Duration 36:00.

The “Organ” symphony was written for the London Philharmonic Society.  Its premiere was a huge success, and it remains the most popular of his three published symphonies, and the single most popular work for the combination of organ and orchestra.  Though Saint-Saëns was always something of a conservative, the Symphony No.3 has several innovations, above and beyond its unusual orchestration (in addition to the organ part, there is also a prominent role for piano, four hands).  Though it has the usual four-movement outlines of a Classical symphony, Saint-Saëns has absorbed those sections into two large movements: the first combining the traditional, though incomplete sonata-form first movement and slow movement, and the second bringing together a kind of scherzo and majestic finale.  the symphony is also highly unified, with close connections among its themes, and hints of the grand closing theme sprinkled throughout the earlier sections.  It was published with a dedication to one of the greatest Romantic innovators, Franz Liszt.  Saint-Saëns met Liszt for the first time when he was a 10-year-old prodigy, and Liszt was already the preeminent pianist in Europe. They remained friends for forty years, until Liszt's death just a few months after the symphony's first performance.

After a short and dark Adagio introduction, the stormy main theme enters (Allegro).  The second theme is actually taken from the introduction. They are both developed and combined, but where we expect a full recapitulation, the mood turns calmer, and the organ enters for the first time, as a quiet background to lovely Romantic melody (Poco adagio) presented in a series of gentle variations.  There is a brief moment of darkness when the main Allegro theme returns, but serenity wins out in the end, until there is a rather mysterious closing passage.  

The second movement  (Allegro moderato) begins with astringent music for strings and timpani, which is developed in intense counterpoint.  The Presto that follows is in true scherzo style, with quick woodwind and string lines above rolling piano figures.  This music is developed thoroughly, and there is a repeat of the second movement's opening theme.  The scherzo returns briefly  in combination with a solemn low brass theme, but then the organ, silent or in a supportive role so far, suddenly takes control: a colossal C Major chord that sets up a transition to the final section.  The majestic theme that closes the piece is a brilliantly transformed version of the brooding Allegro melody of the first movement.  This is developed in a great fugal finale that closes in joyous fury.  Saint-Saëns reportedly said of this ending: “I have given everything that I had to give; what I have done here I shall never do again.”

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program notes ©2010 by J. Michael Allsen