Season 15 (2018-2019)

PROGRAM
Brahms Concerto for Violin and Cello in A minor, Op. 102

Brahms Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73

CONDUCTOR

Avner Dorman

SOLOISTS
Tessa Lark

Edward Arron

VENUES
St. Jerome Church, Temple Tifereth-Israel, St. Noel Church, Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus, Lakewood Congregational Church

Program notes

PROGRAM
Rossini L’italiana in Algeri Overture

Strauss Oboe Concerto in D Major

Mozart Symphony No. 39 in E Major K543

CONDUCTOR

Stefan Willich

SOLOISTS
Frank Rosenwein, Oboe

VENUES
St. Jerome Church, Temple Tifereth-Isael, St. Noel Church, Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus, Lakewood Congregational Church

PROGRAM NOTES

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

OVERTURE TO L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI (“THE ITALIAN GIRL IN ALGIERS”)

Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)

Composed in 1813.

Premiered on May 22, 1813 in Venice, conducted by the composer.

“Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta, his name is constantly on every tongue.” So begins Stendhal’s Life of Rossini, completed in 1823, two years after the Napoleonic demise. Rossini’s conquest of the musical world began a decade earlier, when, in 1813 in Venice, at the age of 21, he unveiled the opera seria Tancredi in February and the opera buffa L’Italiana in Algeri three months later. So popular was Tancredi that a Venetian court edict strictly forbade the humming, whistling or singing of its hit tune (Di tanti palpiti) in any of the city’s legal chambers. A similar success followed L’Italiana in Algeri, which was produced, Stendhal reported, in five Italian cities within months of its premiere. “No composer in the first half of the 19th century,” wrote Philip Gossett in the New Grove Dictionary, “enjoyed the measure of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim or artistic influence that belonged to Rossini. His contemporaries recognized him as the greatest Italian composer of his time.” In his two whirlwind decades as a full-time composer, Rossini completed some 35 operas — almost every one a resounding success.

L’Italiana in Algeri and Tancredi of 1813 were Rossini’s first full-length operas, his talent having been previously confined to such one-act farces as La Scala di Seta and Il Signor Bruschino. His fabled compositional celerity is exampled by L’Italiana: a report in the Venetian press after the opera’s premiere held that he devoted all of 27 days to preparing the score. (The composer himself, however, told a German correspondent that he had polished it off in a mere eighteen.) The zany plot of the opera presents Isabella, an Italian lady of respectable lineage, who sails to Algeria to rescue her lover, a captive of the Bey of Algeria. Isabella bedevils the Bey with her machinations, including one to persuade him to join the Pappatacci, a secret society dedicated to absolute luxury and complete indifference to the activities of spouses or lovers. Rossini calculated that this silly story would prove irresistible to the opera lovers of Venice. He was right. Amid Stendhal’s lavish praise for L’Italiana, he noted that “never has a public enjoyed a spectacle more harmonious with its character, and, of all the operas that ever existed, this is the one destined to please the Venetians most.”

The Overture reflects the opera’s high spirits. It begins with a slow introduction incorporating a languid melody sung by the solo oboe above a background of pizzicato strings. The main body of the Overture commences with a lively tune strutted out by the woodwinds and punctuated by chords from the full orchestra. The oboe gives the lyrical second theme before one of Rossini’s characteristic crescendi is unleashed to close the exposition. Rather than working up any more serious feelings in a development section, the music plunges directly into the reprise of the opening themes, using the crescendo to build to the brilliant closing pages.

OBOE CONCERTO IN D MAJOR

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Composed in 1945; revised in 1948.

Premiered on February 26, 1946 in Zurich, conducted by Volkmar Andreae with Marcel Saillet as soloist.

Strauss, having established an international reputation as a composer and conductor, largely withdrew from public life after 1935 to his villa at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. He lived there throughout World War II, spared the physical ravages of the conflict but deeply wounded by the loss of many friends and the bombing of Dresden, Munich and Vienna. In October 1945, under the threat of being called before the Denazification Board, he moved to Switzerland, where he lived for the next four years. He and his wife, Pauline, stayed in various hotels in several towns and cities (her shrewish tantrums and complaints led to frequent management requests for them to seek lodgings elsewhere) before settling into the Palace Hotel in Montreux. Strauss was cleared by the Denazification Board in June 1948, but he chose to stay in Switzerland for medical treatment that winter, returning to Garmisch in May 1949, just four months before his death. Though increasingly feeble during his Swiss sojourn, his mind was clear, and he continued to compose.

Strauss undertook the Oboe Concerto in September 1945, shortly before he left Garmisch for Switzerland, at the request of John de Lancie, a young performer stationed with the American occupation troops in Bavaria. De Lancie, who was one of several American musicians the venerable composer welcomed to his lovely villa in Garmisch, returned home to become principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and, later, director of the renowned Curtis Institute in that city. When Strauss and Pauline left for Switzerland in October, he took along his sketches for the new Concerto, and finished the score at the village of Baden-bei-Zürich soon after he arrived.

In his study of the composer’s life and works, Ernst Krause noted that the Oboe Concerto creates “an Arcadian atmosphere of shimmering transparency” and that it exhibits “a masterly command of form, and a predominance of spiritual elements over those of strong animation.” The Concerto’s three movements are played without pause, as though Strauss was loath to halt the flow of sweet lyricism that constantly unwinds from the oboe’s opening phrases. The first movement follows the traditional sonata pattern, though here the form’s structural junctures are smoothly elided rather than sharply demarcated. The Andante is a three-part song: a wistful aria for oboe surrounds a more animated middle section, incorporating the main theme of the previous movement. A mellow cadenza for the soloist leads without pause to the Finale, an animated, rondo-like chapter with several subsidiary episodes, some of which recall motives from the opening movement. This lovely Concerto is brought to an end by gossamer fillips and charming filigree.

SYMPHONY NO. 39 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, K. 543

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Composed in 1788.

Premiere uncertain; first documented performance given in Hamburg in March 1792.

The city of Prague fell in love with Mozart in January 1787. The Marriage of Figaro met with a resounding success when he conducted it there on January 17, and so great was the acclaim awarded to his Symphony in D major (K. 504) when it was heard only two days later that it has since borne the name of the Bohemian capital. He returned to Vienna in early February with a signed contract to provide Prague with a new opera for its next season. The opera was Don Giovanni, and Mozart returned to Prague on October 1 to oversee its production. Again, he triumphed. He was invited to take up residence in the city, and he was tempted to abandon Vienna, where his career seemed stymied and the bill-collectors harassed him incessantly, but, after six weeks away, he returned home for pressing reasons both personal and professional. Personally, his wife, Constanze, was due to deliver their fourth child in December, and she wished to be close to her family for the birth. (A girl, Theresa, was born on December 27.) Professionally, the venerable Christoph Willibald Gluck was reported near death, and Mozart, who had been lobbying to obtain a position at the Habsburg court such as Gluck held, wanted to be at hand when the job, as seemed imminent, came open.

Mozart arrived back in Vienna on November 15, one day after Gluck died. Three weeks later he was named Court Chamber Music Composer by Emperor Joseph II, though he was disappointed with both the salary and the duties. He was to receive only 800 florins a year, less than half the 2,000 florins Gluck had been paid, and rather than requiring him to compose operas, a form in which he had proven his eminence and to which he longed to fully devote himself, the contract specified he would write only dances for the imperial balls. Still, the income from the court position, the generous amount he had been paid for Don Giovanni and his fees for various free-lance jobs should have been enough to adequately support his family. However, his desire to put up a good front with elegant clothes, expensive entertaining, and even loans to needy (or conniving) musicians drained his resources.

Despite the disappointments inflicted upon him, his precarious pecuniary position, and an alarming decline in his health and that of his wife, Mozart was still working miracles in his music. On June 26, he finished the E-flat Symphony (K. 543), the first of the incomparable trilogy he produced within two months during that unsettling summer of 1788. The reason he wrote the E-flat, G minor and C major (“Jupiter”) Symphonies has never come to light. It has been speculated that they might have been composed for a series of concerts he planned originally for June, but which was several times postponed for lack of subscribers and eventually cancelled completely. A second possibility is that the symphonies were written on speculation to be published as a set. A third consideration might have been a trip that Mozart was trying to arrange to London. Should the tour materialize, he reasoned, these symphonies would make a fine introduction to the British public. None of those situations came about, however, and the genesis of Mozart’s last three symphonies will probably always remain a mystery.

The E-flat Symphony opens with a large introduction of surprising emotional weight. The remainder of the movement, however, uses its sonata form as the basis of a lovely extended song rather than as an intense drama. The halcyon mood carries into the Andante, a sonatina in form (sonata without development section) and a sunbeam in spirit. The Minuet, with its sweet central trio, is a dance of grace, elegance and prescient Romantic vigor. The finale combines wit and verve with suavity of style and harmonic felicity.

©2018 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

PROGRAM
Takemitsu Waltz

Dorman Still (Violin Concerto No. 3) World Premiere

Poulenc Sinfonietta

CONDUCTOR

Avner Dorman

SOLOIST
Sayaka Shoji

VENUES

St. Jerome Church, Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center, Lakewood Congregational Church, Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus, St. Noel Church

Produced with support from the Japan Foundation and Dr. & Mrs. Hiroyuki Fujita, QualityElectrodynamics.

PROGRAM NOTES

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

WALTZ FROM THE FACE OF ANOTHER

Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)

Composed in 1966.

Japanese in birth and sensibility, and Western in his compositional techniques and instrumental sonorities, Toru Takemitsu belied Kipling’s old adage that East and West would never meet by creating music that sings of universal human experience. Takemitsu sought in his many works to transmute dreams, water, trees, gardens, sky, birds, wind, the flickering images of film, the quiverings of the human heart, the resonance of a printed word into patterns of sounds and silence that would penetrate to the quiet, inner place where the spirit dwells. “When one life calls out to another,” he wrote, “sounds are born. Silence bordered with a necklace of sounds, which become scales. Little by little, the strands of scales are bundled into a sheath of light, rising into the sky, or gushing out, splashing, like the body of a river finding liberation as it reaches the sea. They fill the universe: enormous, soundless sounds.” Though Takemitsu’s music is meticulously structured and unified through the conventional European practice of transformation of thematic motives, it gives the feeling of spontaneity and freedom and space, of being released from the earth, of being at once substantial and equivocal. He was preoccupied with timbre and texture rather than with traditional rhythmic and harmonic organization, with the aural point hovering between sound and silence, with discovering music that seems to issue from the very air and earth, with giving, he said, “a proper meaning to the ‘streams of sounds’ that penetrate the world which surrounds us.” His creative voice — quiet/disturbing, joyous/sad, universal/personal — is unique in modern music, a manifestation of a world brought closer together by diversity, and expanded by individuality.

Takemitsu was born in Tokyo on October 8, 1930. He studied intermittently for a few years with Yasuji Kiyose (1900-1981), a student of Alexander Tcherepnin, but was largely self-taught, a circumstance that helps account for his highly individual style. A performance of his piano piece Futatsu no rento (“Lento for Two”) on a contemporary music series in 1950 brought him to the attention of the composer Jogi Yuasa and the conductor Kazuyoshi Akiyama, with whom he founded the Jikken Kobo (“Experimental Workshop”) for collaborations in mixed media combining traditional Japanese idioms with modernistic techniques. His Requiem for Strings of 1957, inspired by the death of his friend and fellow composer Fumio Hayasaka, drew praise from Stravinsky and brought Takemitsu his first recognition abroad. He won international fame with his 1967 November Steps for biwa (a traditional Japanese lute-like instrument), shakuhachi (a flute) and orchestra, commissioned for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. Takemitsu thereafter came to be regarded among the world’s leading composers: designer and director of the spherical Space Theater in the Steel Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka; guest lecturer at the University of California at San Diego, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Boston University; composer-in-residence at the Tanglewood, Colorado, Avignon, Stockholm, Canberra, Aldeburgh, Berliner Festwochen and other leading festivals; recipient of many prestigious awards in his native Japan as well as from the Akademie der Künste of the German Democratic Republic, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the French government (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and membership in the Académie des Beaux-Arts). His other distinctions include the UNESCO/IMC Music Prize (1991), the Grawemeyer Award (1994) and the Glenn Gould Prize (1996). Toru Takemitsu died in Tokyo on February 20, 1996.

Takemitsu devoted more of his career to films than any other classical composer of comparable stature, writing 93 scores between 1956 and his death forty years later. He was called upon by some of Japan’s most respected directors — Kurosawa, Teshigahara, Imamura, Shinoda, Oshima — to complement their images and stories with evocative music, and he collaborated closely with them from a film’s first unedited rushes to develop an appropriate sound world for each project. His music for films was honored with awards from the Mainichi Music Festival (for Seppuku, 1962) and the Los Angeles Film Critics (Ran, 1987).

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966) is a surreal tale in which a scientist is terribly scarred in a laboratory fire. A doctor fits him with a life-like new face, and the scientist takes on another identity with his changed appearance. He tests out both by trying to seduce his own wife. For a scene in a beer hall, Takemitsu provided a voluptuous waltz with a caustic Kurt Weill-like edge.

STILL

Avner Dorman (b. 1975)

Composed in 2018

Premiered March 13, 2019 in Cleveland.

Written for CityMusic Cleveland and Sayaka Shoji

According to Buddhist traditions and some prominent Western philosophers, only when the mind is still can we see the world clearly. Being still, or finding a still mind is the goal of many meditative practices and traditions.

In my third violin concerto, titled “Still,” I looked to explore these ideas through music. In this sense the piece is quite spiritual in its conception: can one find deep silence and calm in an art form that begins with sound?

As in most concertos, the protagonist of the piece is the soloist. The violin searches for silence and calm in the notes and the phrases with which it is familiar. The piece alludes to musical styes of the past as a symbol of one’s thoughts, as these elements of history make up a great deal of our memories and reflections. The piece is constructed in one movement, which can be divided into four large parts:

Opening section, in which the soloist and orchestra meditate slowly on materials alluding to mostly Renaissance and Baroque music, with specific quotes from J.S. Bach and Josquin Des Prez. Brief outbursts of energy foreshadow the struggles of the violin to find stillness despite internal and external distractions.

Fast tutti section in which the struggles of the protagonist grow and take over the soloist’s attention. The violin attempts to fight them with a variety of musical weapons, from technical passages to new allusions to expressive outbursts and familiar harmonic structures. None of these attempts are successful, and, in fact, they only add fuel to the energy and push our protagonist away from stillness. At the culmination of the movement the soloist breaks down and cannot compete with its own ideas, now manifested in the orchestra in a tutti whirlwind that seems to spin out of control.

In the cadenza, the soloist moves from extreme anguish through its own emotions back to balance and seeking calmness. At the end of the cadenza the soloist abandons all ideas and settles on on its lowest string, symbolizing the violin’s true unconditioned nature.

A slow finale begins with the orchestra still fighting the soloist. However, the long open G string is infectious in its stillness — soon enough the raucous discord is over, and the orchestra joins the soloist in the renewed meditation. Some outbursts remain, but they begin to abate. In the violin’s own open strings, its natural state provides stillness and calm. As the meditation grows deeper, the notes get longer and softer, and the changes occur less and less frequently until time seems to stand still.

SINFONIETTA

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Composed in 1947.

Premiered on October 24, 1948 in London.

Poulenc established the foundation for his lifetime’s music early in his career. “I seek a musical style,” he wrote, “that is healthy, clear and robust, a style as plainly French as Stravinsky’s is Slavic.” In forming the elements of his creative language, Poulenc was a pronounced eclectic, freely borrowing from the whole range of French composers active around the turn of the century: Fauré, Ravel, Koechlin, Stravinsky, Roussel and especially Debussy, Satie and Chabrier. The resulting concoction was, however, distinctly that of Poulenc, so much so that the American composer and devoted Francophile Ned Rorem could write, “He is among the magic few. Without his art, my world would weigh less.” Poulenc’s technical strength was melody, and it is not coincidental that he was one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. Though rooted in the traditional harmonic system, his melodies are peppered with frequent, surprisingly piquant dissonances and unexpected turns of rhythmic phrase. Roger Nichols assessed, “For him the most important element of all was melody, and he found his way to a vast treasury of undiscovered tunes within an area that had, according to the most up-to-date musical maps, been surveyed, worked and exhausted.” Poulenc’s melodies may be divided into two essential styles. One was a straightforward, tuneful type based on what he and his colleagues in the group of French composers known as “Les Six” called “Parisian folklore” — the ditties of such popular entertainers as street musicians, music hall performers and circus bands. The other was a more deeply felt manner, most evident in his religious works and the masterful opera Dialogues of the Carmelites. Both melodic genres are heard in the Sinfonietta.

Poulenc’s output for orchestra without voices or soloists is tiny — the two ballets Les Biches and The Model Animals, single movements for two collaborative projects of 1954 (Matelotte Provençale, based on pieces of André Campra, and Bucolique, variations on the name of Marguerite Long), the Suite Française (after themes of the French 16th-century composer Claude Gervaise), Two Marches and an Intermezzo (to accompany the pineapple and cheese courses and conclusion of a dinner in 1937) and the Sinfonietta. The Sinfonietta, commissioned in 1947 for the tenth anniversary of the BBC Third Programme, utilizes material originally intended for an aborted string quartet of that year. (Poulenc so disliked the quartet that he threw the manuscript into a Paris sewer.) Though the Sinfonietta is scaled on the dimensions of a full Classical symphony, Poulenc chose the diminutive title to show that he regarded the piece more as entertainment than as profundity. His biographer Henri Hell noted that the work “evokes Haydn and, closer to us, Bizet’s Symphony. It has the same limpidity, the same clearness of lines, the same harmony of form.” The opening Allegro posits the duality of sonata form with a precisely rhythmic scalar motive (next-of-kin to the starkly neoclassic, “white-note” Stravinsky of Apollo) and a sweetly lyrical melody entrusted to flute and violins — or, more precisely, a whole clutch of broad melodies that are spun out across much of the movement with varying degrees of expressive intensity. The opening motive, much abbreviated, and one of the lyrical ideas return as a coda. The second movement begins with a rollicking tune grown from the Parisian music hall, an idiom that gallivants uninhibitedly through many of Poulenc’s compositions. The music becomes more expansive as it proceeds, returning briefly to the first theme to round out the movement. The warmly lyrical Andante is winsome and touchingly nostalgic, qualities Poulenc captured better than almost any other modern master. The finale is a good-natured romp that includes a couple of rousing cabaret tunes and an almost Mozartian wealth of broad melodies.

©2018 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

PROGRAM
Yom Hashoah Day of Remembrance

CONDUCTOR

James Gaffigan

SOLOISTS
Chabrelle Williams, soprano

Nancy Maultsby, mezzo-soprano

Joshua Blue, tenor

Raymond Aceto, bass

VENUES
Milton & Tamar Maltz Performance Center

SUPPORTED BY

Temple Tifereth – Israel

Milton & Tamar Maltz

The George F., Stephanie M., and George L. Traub Fund of the Jewish Federation

The Harry K. & Emma R. Fox Charitable Foundation

The Meisel Family

The David and Inez Myers Foundation

Naomi and Ed Singer

Geraldo & Erica Rivera

Astri Seidenfeld

PROGRAM
Fanny Mendelssohn Overture in C Major

Saint-Saëns Symphony in A Minor, Op.55

Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto in A Minor, Op.33

Kodály Dances of Galánta

CONDUCTOR

Mélisse Brunet

SOLOISTS
Amit Peled, cello

VENUES
Shrine of St. Stanislaus, St. Jerome Catholic Church, Lakewood Congregational Church,Temple Tiffereth-Israel, St. Noel Church

PROGRAM NOTES

OVERTURE IN C MAJOR

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847)

Composed around 1830.

It would be difficult to find a more illustrative example of the genteel social engineering of the 19th century than Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, older sister of the renowned Felix Mendelssohn. Fanny was only six (Felix was one) when the family was forced by the Napoleonic juggernaut to abandon their native Hamburg for Berlin, but she had already been endowed with good genes and disciplined piano instruction by her talented mother, Lea, a student of the noted German theorist and pedagogue Johann Philipp Kirnberger, himself a pupil of Johann Sebastian Bach. (Lea’s sister, Sara Levy, was a gifted harpsichordist and a patron of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. It was through that association that a copy of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion descended to Felix, who revived the work in 1829.) Felix and Fanny were given equal privilege in the family’s cultured life — the best tutors, intensive musical study with outstanding teachers, travel, elaborate concerts for invited guests at which they displayed their talents as composers and performers, access to the finest strata of German artists and literati. Brother and sister blossomed — in an 1825 letter to Felix, Goethe asked his young friend to “give my regards to your equally talented sister.” That same year Felix went off to university while Fanny attended Humboldt’s lectures on physical geography and Holtei’s talks on experimental physics in Berlin, but thereafter their lives — but not their loving devotion to each other and their mutual respect — went different ways. Felix became one of the most highly regarded musical figures of his day, while Fanny stayed at home, taking part in the family’s Sunday musicales but otherwise discouraged by both her brother and father from pursuing the life of a professional musician. “You must prepare earnestly for your real calling, the only calling for a young woman — I mean the state of a housewife,” pronounced Papa Abraham. “Music should be an accomplishment, and never a career for women.” In 1829, Fanny married Wilhelm Hensel, a painter at the Prussian court, who urged her to continue composing, which she did, though with little public recognition. The Berlin publisher Schlesinger issued one of her songs in an album for voice and piano in 1837; one volume of Lieder and another of piano pieces were published in 1846. (Felix published two other of Fanny’s songs in a collection of his own works. When Queen Victoria expressed special pleasure at one of them, Felix quickly admitted that it was not his.) Fanny’s only formal concert appearance was as pianist in her brother’s G minor Concerto in 1838. While leading a rehearsal of Felix’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht on May 14, 1847, she suffered a massive stroke and died later that day; she was 42. Felix, already ill and exhausted from punishing overwork, was prostrated by her death; he died six months later. Fanny composed some 400 works in the conservative style that also informs much of her brother’s music, mostly songs and piano pieces, but also cantatas, a string quartet, a piano trio, a piano quartet, two organ preludes, and the Overture in C major for orchestra.

The Overture in C major, dating from around 1830 (when Fanny was 25), was intended for performance at the Mendelssohn Sunday concerts. A lovely slow theme serves as introduction. A sweeping violin passage leads to the Overture’s formal main theme, a galloping melody full of energy and joie de vivre. The woodwinds carry the music to its subsidiary subject, a succession of short string phrases that are nicely threaded into a handsome melody. The darkly colored development section rises to peaks of considerable expressive intensity before the Overture is rounded out by a full recapitulation of the earlier themes.

SYMPHONY NO. 2 IN A MINOR, OP. 55

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Composed in 1859.

Premiered on March 25, 1860 in Paris by the Société des Jeunes Artistes, conducted Jules Pasdeloup.

Camille Saint-Saëns was one of the most prodigiously gifted musicians France ever produced. Saint-Saëns’ father died just three months after the boy was born in Paris in 1835, and little Camille went with his mother to live with her aunt, a piano teacher who started the toddler on the instrument when he was three and taught him so effectively that he was composing little pieces by five and two years later was accepted by the noted pedagogue Camille-Marie Stamaty, a student of Kalkbrenner and Mendelssohn and the teacher of Gottschalk. Saint-Saëns made his formal debut in the Salle Pleyel at the age of ten playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and Mozart’s Concerto in B-flat major, K. 450 (for which he wrote his own cadenza) and then offered as encores any of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas; he played everything from memory. He soon thereafter gave a command performance for King Louis Philippe, demonstrated remarkable precocity in theory and composition, studied French classics, religion, Latin, Greek, mathematics, astronomy, archaeology and philosophy, and in 1848 was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, where he won the friendship of Bizet, Gottschalk and Guiraud and the admiration of Liszt, Rossini and Berlioz (who quipped that “he knows everything but lacks inexperience”). He wrote a Symphony in A major (not numbered) in 1850, even before he had started formal composition lessons with Fromental Halévy at the Conservatoire, and his First Symphony, Op. 2, three years later.

After completing his studies at the Conservatoire in 1853 (he was seventeen), Saint-Saëns was appointed organist at the Church of St. Merri, burial place of the 7th-century Saint Médéric, and there composed several pieces of service music, a piano quartet, songs, a concert overture and a symphony titled “Urbs Roma” (“City of Rome”), which won a competition and which he performed in his conducting debut but then withdrew and never published. (It became available only in 1974 and, like the A major Symphony of 1850, bears no number.) In 1857 he assumed the prestigious organist’s post at the Church of the Madeleine, where he became known during the two decades of his tenure as one of his generation’s foremost performers and improvisers on that instrument while also establishing himself among Europe’s leading composers and piano virtuosos.

In 1859, Saint-Saëns composed his Symphony No. 2 in A minor, Op. 55, the fourth of his five works in the form, a series capped by the justly celebrated Symphony No. 3, “Organ,” of 1886. The work was premiered on March 25, 1860 by the Société des Jeunes Artistes, an orchestra recently formed from young Conservatoire graduates by the influential conductor and faculty member Jules Pasdeloup. The A minor Symphony was published by Durand in 1878, and performed with great success during Saint-Saëns’ tour the following year to Leipzig, Milan, London and other European music capitals. The first movement is woven almost entirely from the chain-of-thirds motive that rises and falls through the halting gestures of the introduction before being forged into the strongly rhythmic and rather stormy main theme. The theme is given a precise fugal treatment (Saint-Saëns, only 24 and still a relatively new Conservatoire graduate, was not averse to showing off his excellent training in counterpoint) and becomes the subject of almost continuous development as the movement unfolds; the only additional thematic element is a smoother phrase in dotted rhythms first heard in the strings when the music’s mood temporarily brightens. The brief Adagio, an intermezzo rather than a full-scale movement, is in the nature of a quiet minuet, more memory than dance, with a complementary strain led by the English horn providing a wistful intervening moment. The Scherzo follows the expected progression through its energetic opening section and its contrasting trio, which features an infectiously syncopated melody in the woodwinds, but suddenly becomes curiously introverted and almost mysterious, with soft pizzicatos and thematic fragments suggesting a ghostly development of the trio rather than the usual reprise of the initial Scherzo. The finale, probably inspired by the last movement of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, is a propulsive tarantella, the traditional Italian dance whose exertions were said to rid the body of the poisonous bite of the tarantula spider. The movement is based, rondo-like, around the returns of its whirling theme, with an extended development section at the center and a slow passage inserted just before the end that echoes the Adagio’s minuet. The Symphony comes to a quick and fiery close.

CELLO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN A MINOR, OP. 33

Camille Saint-Saëns

Composed in 1872.

Premiered on January 19, 1873 in Paris, with Auguste Tolbecque as soloist.

Much of the history of 19th-century music could be written in the terms of Beethoven’s influence. Beside exploding the emotional and expressive boundaries of earlier music, he also bequeathed the composers who followed a whole arsenal of technical weapons with which to do battle against those devilishly recalcitrant musical notes: rich harmonies, complex textures, expanded instrumental resources, vibrant rhythmic constructions. Not the least of his compositional legacies was the process of total musical structure. His symphonies were created as great single spans of tightly integrated music rather than as four separate movements, as had been the models he inherited. He accomplished this structural unity in two ways. One was by connecting movements directly together, as in the closing two movements of the Fifth Symphony and the last three of the Sixth. The other was by recalling themes from earlier movements during the unfolding of the piece.

Most of the important Romantic composers followed the lead of Beethoven in finding such integrated structures for at least some of their large, symphonic works. Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, First Violin Concerto and this A minor Cello Concerto all exhibit carefully integrated formal structures. The Cello Concerto is in a single movement. It begins with an impetuous theme in rushing triplets for the soloist that recurs throughout the piece; the cello presents a contrasting, lyrical second subject. The vibrant motion of the opening theme soon returns and encourages the entire ensemble to join in a developmental discussion. The lyrical theme is heard again, this time as a transition to the Concerto’s central portion, a slow movement with the spirit of a delicate minuet. This mood is broken by a resumption of the rushing triplet theme acting as a link to the Concerto’s last large division. After a brief pause, the finale-like section begins with the cellist’s introduction of a gently syncopated theme. The music builds on this theme, and adds another in the cello’s sonorous, low register. One final time, the rushing triplet theme returns, to mark the beginning of the coda and launch the Concerto on its invigorating dash to the end.

DANCES OF GALÁNTA

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967)

Composed in 1933.

Premiered on October 10, 1933 in Budapest, conducted by Ernst von Dohnányi.

Kodály devoted his career to preserving and nurturing the musical culture of his native Hungary, collecting indigenous songs and dances and devising a system of music education based on Hungarian folksong and utilizing its stylistic components in his compositions. When the Budapest Philharmonic commissioned him to write a work for its 80th anniversary, Kodály dipped once again into his inexhaustible folk treasury for melodic material, turning to some books of Hungarian dances published in Vienna around 1800 that contained music “after several Gypsies of Galánta,” his childhood home. The Dances of Galánta follow a structure of alternating slow and fast sections. The introduction consists of a series of instrumental solos. The first dance, a slow one begun by the solo clarinet, displays a restrained Gypsy pathos. The quicker second dance, for solo flute, is based on a melody circling around a single pitch in halting rhythms. The first dance returns in the full orchestra as a bridge to a spirited tune first heard in the oboe. The finale is a brilliant whirlwind of music.

©2018 Dr. Richard E. Rodda