‘Fanfare and Concerto’ Program Notes
Dmitri Shostakovich – Festive Overture in A major
[See image gallery at www.socophil.org] It was 1954, the 37th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. Vassili Nebolsin, the conductor at the famed Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, found himself without a suitable new work to open the commemorative concert. Within days of the performance, he turned to Dmitri Shostakovich to ask him to write something. The composer, famous for working quickly, penned this overture in just three days.
Shostakovich’s close friend Lev Lebedinsky provided a glimpse into what those three days were like. Lebedinsky was with Shostakovich when Nebolsin visited his apartment to make the last-minute request. Almost immediately, according to Lebedinsky, Shostakovich sat down and began to compose. “The speed with which he wrote was truly astounding,” Lebedinsky recalled. “Moreover, when he wrote light music he was able to talk, make jokes and compose simultaneously, like the legendary Mozart. He laughed and chuckled, and in the meanwhile work was under way and the music was being written down.” Much of that laughter, in spirit at least, makes its way into this light-hearted and inventive piece.
Despite its hurried composition, Shostakovich’s Festive Overture has become a staple of the orchestral repertoire. Indeed, the overture was featured in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and the 2009 Nobel Prize Concert.
The rollicking work begins with a rousing brass fanfare, followed by a racing melody carried by the winds. The melody is then taken up by the strings. A more lyrical counter-theme, played by the horns and cellos, enters. Shosta-kovich develops the two themes in counterpoint — his signature style of composition — and then ends the piece with a return to the fanfare and a rousing coda. The overture manages to be both monumental and almost prankish in its playful inventiveness. In every measure, it seems to burst with life.
W.A. Mozart – Sinfonia Concertante
[See image gallery at www.socophil.org] In 1779, returning to Salzburg after a triumphant tour to Mannheim and Paris, the 23-year Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was bursting with new ideas, inspired by some of the music he’d heard abroad. The composer’s Sinfonia Concertante was his first expression of some of those thrilling new ideas. With his characteristic joyfulness, Mozart explored new sonorities and novel instrumental combinations with supreme artistry. As critics have pointed out, this piece is both a summing up of what the young composer had already produced and the first step toward the mature work he would go on to compose. The work, as one critic notes, represents “a dramatic gesture of self-assertion if not an actual declaration of independence….”
As its title suggests, the piece is a hybrid of concerto and symphony, featuring violin and viola. (It is sometimes referred to as a double concerto.) Mozart, an accomplished violinist, also loved to play viola. That love is reflected in his writing for viola here, which is some of the most beautiful ever composed for the instrument. As for the violin, some critics regard this work as the greatest of Mozart’s violin concertos, surpassing even the five official concertos for violin. The two instruments are given equal roles in the Sinfonia Concertante; the exquisite sonorities Mozart achieves by pairing them are unequaled in the orchestral repertoire.
Combining concerto and symphony, this work also calls to mind other musical genres. The legendary choreographer George Balanchine created a famous ballet based on this music. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine the two featured instruments dancing together. But the Sinfonia Concertante is also operatic in its emotional depth and range. In one particularly lovely passage, the violin plays a mournful aria and the viola seems to respond, as if offering consolation. Listening to it, it’s worth remembering that Mozart himself was grieving at the time he wrote the Sinfonia Concertante. His beloved mother, who had accompanied him on his tour, had died in Paris in July 1778. But if the piece eloquently expresses grief and consolation, it ends with an exuberant expression of joy and playful high spirits. Indeed, one critic has likened the Presto finale to Greek drama, which traditionally followed a tragic story with a bit of comic relief.
César Franck – Symphony in D minor
[See image gallery at www.socophil.org] Poor César Franck. The Belgian composer, born in 1822, had to endure a tyrannical and demanding father during his youth. Even after he left home, he had his share of difficulties. Franck’s wife, the daughter of a famous actress, is said to have despised most of his music, dismissing it as too “emotional” and even, scandalously, too “sensuous.” As a composition teacher at the Paris Conservatory, Franck was beloved by his students but often belittled and isolated by the faculty. As the French musicologist Leon Vallas wrote, Franck “with his simple and trusting nature was incapable of understanding…how much gossip of a nasty kind there could be.”
Even Franck’s towering masterwork, his Symphony in D minor (the only symphony he wrote), was roundly derided by the conservatory faculty and dismissed by some leading critics when it was first performed by the Conservatory orchestra on February 17, 1889.
During his lifetime, in fact, Franck’s work was rarely performed in public. In the 1880s, he composed several works now recognized as masterpieces, including two symphonic poems, Le Chasseur Maudit in 1882 and Les Djinns in 1884, his Symphonic Variations in 1885, and a brilliant Violin Sonata in A Major in 1886. In 1887, a private concert of his work was organized, but it drew very little attention. When his symphony was premiered in 1889, it was doomed from the start; the orchestra had no interest in the music and turned in a lackluster performance.
A year later, in 1890, Franck’s String Quartet in D was performed to positive reviews – the first and only time a work of his was roundly praised. As bad luck would have it, Franck was struck by an omnibus at the end of that year and, though he recovered briefly, he soon died of inflammation of the lungs, probably brought on by his injuries.
Time has been kinder to Franck and especially to his glorious symphony. Along with Saint-Saëns’ “Organ Symphony,” written around the same time, it is considered one of the most important French symphonic works of the late 19th century. During the 20th century, some of the greatest conductors in the world recorded the work, including Wilhelm Furtwängler, Leopold Stokowski, and Leonard Bernstein, giving Franck’s symphony a secure place in the orchestral repertoire.
Franck was a renowned organist, and many of his compositions for the organ are performed today. Keep that in mind as you listen to his symphony. As one writer noted, “The first movement unfolds through a series of sweeping modulations reminiscent of a masterful organ improvisation. In fact, in Franck’s hands the orchestra becomes a living, breathing pipe organ. Instruments are mixed and doubled as if a rich array of stops are being negotiated.”
In the second movement, listen for the lovely pastoral lament played by the English horn, accompanied by plucked harp and violins. (The English horn, by the way, is neither English nor a horn. Invented around 1720, it is a close relative of the oboe. Because the new instrument resembled horns played by angels in Medieval iconography, it was dubbed an engellisches Horn, or angelic horn. “Angelic” eventually became “English.”)
The final movement of the symphony is one of pure joy. With consummate artistry, Franck manages to weave the many themes of the work together into a lush and spirited conclusion.
Program notes by Peter Jaret.