Program Notes for Bridgeport Symphony November 17, 2012

Max Bruch

(1838–1920)

Violin Concerto No. 1
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings

Max Bruch still needs a good publicist. Outside of a handful of works, his music is seldom played and few people have any sense of his personality. But his music always has a distinctive sound and his works are designed with great formal imagination. His first violin concerto, written in his late 20s, is a work many musicians would rank at or near the top of the pile when considering favorite violin concerti from the 19^thcentury.

Bruch named the opening movement "Vorspiel," which means “prelude,” but the word also bears the imprint of operatic influences. It opens with an ominous whispering from the timpani. A soliloquy entrance by the soloist creates a sense of innermost confession that is contrasted by the orchestral gestures that envelope it. The world of opera often contrasts individuals against a collective, and so this concerto is operatic in that sense also.

The soloist plays double stops (two notes at a time) in music of forceful, angered language as the sonata movement commences, but listen for the way that tenderness is woven into the fabric of the music without seams. The close of this movement builds into the most fabulous orchestral tutti in the concerto repertoire—paradoxically the soloist does not play during this passage but afterward revisits the confessional music of the opening as a transition to the second movement.

The second movement adagio brings into focus the special understanding that Bruch had for the human voice. He wrote four operas and numerous works for chorus, but in this movement he treats the violin soloist as if it were a human voice. The music sings to us and dances slowly from the rich darkness of E-flat major.

The triumphal attitude and gypsy flavor of the finale served as a model for the finale of the Brahms violin concerto written ten years after the Bruch Concerto.

If you are moved by this concerto, promise that you will seek out some other works by Bruch. Listen to his three symphonies, to the other two violin concertos, or to his Concerto for Clarinet, Viola, and Orchestra in E minor.

Ludwig van Beethoven

(1770–1827)

Symphony No. 3 (Eroica)

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings

Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony is considered by many writers to be a dividing point in the history of symphonic music. It mapped a pathway for composers to access the realm of sonic philosophy.

Beethoven became fascinated with Napoleon. Legend has it that Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763-1844), a successful general in Napoleon’s army who later became king of Sweden and Norway, gave Beethoven the idea for writing a Napoleonic symphony while he was ambassador to Vienna for two months in the winter of 1798.

Beethoven continued to follow the news from France. After a successful coup, Bonaparte and Abbe Sieyes overthrew the French government late in 1799 and created the “Consulate;” which gave power, at least on the surface of things, to a Senate and a Council of Notables. Even though the first significant military action of the Consulate was to defeat the Austrian army in the summer of 1800, Beethoven saw the advance of the Napoleonic cause as having the potential to empower the common man and to end aristocratic governing. Talent, effort and creative ingenuity would win out over birthright in the transactions that comprised the commerce of daily life.

It was in 1803 that Beethoven wrote his third symphony. The manuscript of the score contained an unusual title page. “Not only I,” wrote Beethoven’s student Ferdinand Ries, “but many of Beethoven’s closer friends, saw this symphony on his table, beautifully copied in manuscript, with the word ‘Buonaparte’ inscribed at the very top of the title-page and ‘Luigi van Beethoven’ at the very bottom.”

Ries claimed to be the first to tell Beethoven that Napoleon, in 1804, had declared himself Emperor. With rage Beethoven tore the title page and prophesied that Napoleon would soon “tread under foot all the rights of man, indulge only his ambition; [and] will think himself superior to all men.” Beethoven changed his intended title for the work to “Sinfonia Eroica.”

The work may have changed with regard to its dedication, but it remained heroic across several dimensions. The length and the proportions of each of its movement exceeded all expectations of the time. It required virtuosic technical demands from the orchestra. It spoke in a new language of driving rhythms and extended syncopated accents. This was a symphony of quick textural shifts and unpredictable changes; the music of restlessness. 

The writer Anthony Burgess may be best known for his book “Clockwork Orange,” but he also frequently wrote about classical music. He called his 366-page novel “Napoleon Symphony,” written in 1974, a “novel in four movements.” Burgess consciously attempted to write historical fiction about Napoleon in the form of the Eroica Symphony; a work for which he had an engaging interpretation. In a poem that concludes the novel he described the first two movements as suggesting “some hero’s brief career.” In the first movement:

           

            “see him live and vigorous,

Striding the earth, stern but magnanimous,

In love with order, his regretful strife

Devoted to ennobling our life.

The Marcia Funebre: already dead,

The ironic laurels wilting round his head,

He’s borne to burial; we weep, we hear

The purple orators about his bier—"

Burgess then asks an obvious but often unasked question about this symphony: if the hero is dead in the second movement, then how are we to understand its third and fourth movements? Burgess chose an answer deeply nested in ancient history and mythology:

“In Plutarch’s Lives the heroes go in pairs—

One fabulous and one historic. There’s

The origin, one thinks, of this device:

The heroic is displayed not once but twice.”

The third movement is the hunting music of the Gods for Burgess, and the finale about the mythology of Prometheus. Prometheus, the cultural hero who stole fire and gave it to humans to use, was punished by the gods by being bound to a rock where an eagle tore out his liver each day…and each day it grew back to be torn out again the next day. Burgess observed that the bass line upon which the variations of the finale are based was taken by Beethoven from a prior work; the last movement of his ballet music “The Creatures of Prometheus,” Op. 43.

Even if one subscribes to an alternative view of this symphony’s content, it was nevertheless a work which seemed to forecast the complexity of an age in which seven coalitions were organized, defeated and reshuffled until Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815. But beyond its own time this work has always symbolized the heroic possibility as expressed in music.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Ives Concord in the Digital Concert Hall

The Concord Sonata spoke to the fourth Symphony across programs as pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard returned to the stage for a late-night concert transmitted in the Digital Concert Hall soon after the Berliner Philharmonic program of American Music. The event created the rare opportunity to draw comparisons between the Symphony No. 4 and the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives. Rarely would one have the opportunity to hear both performed live during the same evening.

The comparisons were surprising. The optional passage for viola in the first movement of the Concord spoke brought to mind the choral entrance that closes the first movement of the fourth symphony. Also, the flute entrance on the final page of the Concord harmonized the choral entry in the final movement of the fourth symphony. Both third movements spoke of the past; Ives referred to the Alcott movement of the sonata as proclaiming “Concord's common virtue—it seems to bear a consciousness that its past is living.” The juxtaposition of musical simultaneities even took on a different sense of spacial placement in the sonata after hearing the symphony. It was an enlightening event.

Aimard stopped playing abruptly only moments after beginning the sonata and said something to the audience. With the microphone placement I could not hear what he said. He began the sonata again but it was hard to focus for a short time after the disruption.

The camera angles were of interest, and occasionally amusing, during the performance. There was such a close shot during one scene of the first movement that one could see Aimard’s pencil markings on page 17 of the score. But one could be convinced that folks in the control panel were listening to the score in pdf format because there were several instances where the preparation for a page turn (always odd page numbers) were missed, and we got an unwelcome full-cheek view of the page turner from the floor camera.

Aimard caught fire during the Hawthorne movement, which was consistently supercharged in this performance and the energy from the second movement carried musical energy through the lyrical and mystic final movements until the work ended in near silence. Aimard remained in motionless in silence for almost 15 seconds after the sound died away. Applause broke the spell but the impact of the playing remained.

Emerson was “reaching out through and beyond mankind,” wrote Ives, “trying to see what he can of the infinite and its immensities.” Some of these immensities certainly found their way through the digital concert hall.

Connecticut Hears Berlin

I spent the day in Berlin. Not physically; but mentally. Connecting to the digital concert hall at 1:30 local time, I remained until 5:30. I was eager to hear Ingo Metzmacher lead a performance of the Charles Ives Fourth Symphony and later to hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard play the Concord Sonata. I had the homefield advantage. Bridgeport, CT, where I live, is close to Danbury where Ives was born, Yale, where he went to school, and is also close to Manhattan, where he worked.

The centerpiece of the program performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker was the Ives Symphony No. 4. The work was an experiment is accessing simultaneous realities projected from multiple spaces within the hall. The music always sounds too compressed in audio recordings; it has to be heard live in order to be understood. How would it translate through the Digital Concert Hall? The sound is unique to the medium; which transmits dimension and impressions enhanced by visual layering from its camera angles.

Metzmacher described the opening prelude as a “questioning.” The hymn-tune voiced by the choir at the close of the brief first movement is an encoded dialog between two “characters;” a “Watchman” and a “Traveller.” The phrases beginning with the word “watchman” are spoken by the traveller and vice-versa. At the close of the movement the watchman asks if the traveller has seen the “beautious ray.” The following three movements pose differing answers to the question—what might the ray look like? Where should we be looking for it?

Ives described the second movement as a comedy. It is about a contrast between the present; which Ives described as the loud and busy “easy life;” during which we are often distracted, and “the trials of the pilgrims through the swamps and rough country,” which progressed slowly through pain and deliberation. Had Ives lived into the 21st century he would have understood that he anticipated our playlists. The 21st century has perfected overlayed music, we soak in clouds of sometimes tinny, sometimes obtrusively loud simultaneities.
Metzmacher allowed the collisions to be sharply edged, and allowed some passages in locked ensembles to lead tempos slightly outside of his beats. This technique greatly amplified the richness of its spaces. The fourth of July celebration that closes the second movement was fabulous and as the movement stopped unresolved silence spread into the hall magnificent in itself.

The third movement was a response of the past—a fugue of hymn tunes, with additional voices sometimes voiced by horn and sometimes trombone (Ives allowed for either option in the score).

The finale had an elegant sense of procession in this performance; it became like a ritual. From the “Memorial Slow March” through the quodlibet of hymn tunes that collides and bumps together just before the entrance of the choir, there was a clarity that most orchestras give up on. The choir sang words at the closing; in prior performances I have always heard them sing wordless in this movement.

The Ives stood apart from the other repertoire on this program. I think the program would have made a better impression if the Cuban overture had been on the second half and Ives was alone on the first half of the program…the Cuban overture disappeared in the shadow of the Ives.

But the Cuban Overture, the Antheil Jazz Symphony, and the Symphonic Dances by Bernstein all featured crisp articulations and were relaxed and fun. The Berliner Philhamoniker’s performance remind us that these works are filled with traditional symphonic developments and motivic transformations. It made their orchestral influences seem as clear as their secular influences.

Program Notes for October 2012

What does it mean for music to be American? Is music as simple as birthright? Is it American music if the compositional styles in the work were strongly influenced by a different culture? What if a significant part of the composer’s training took place outside of the United States? And what if, within the diversity of the great American experiment, musical styles were mixed and boundaries were blurred…the music might be American, but is it still classical?

These questions have been asked in many contexts—sometimes with agendas—since the idea of Americanism began to form, and while it may remain elusive to define, American music is distinct. Tonight’s program is a celebration of musical Americana.

Samuel Barber
Essay no. 1, Opus 12
Instrumentation: 2 Flutes, 2 Oboes, 2 Clarinets, 2 Bassoons, 4 Horns, 3 Trumpets, 3 Trombones, Tuba, Timpani, piano and strings

Samuel Barber was born in West Chester Pennsylvania; a borough steeped in the American Revolutionary lore of nearby Valley Forge and the Brandywine Battlefield. West Chester is only twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia, and it was there, at the recently opened Curtis Institute that Barber began his academic musical training at the age of 14. When he was 21 he began to put himself on the map by composing works (like Dover Beach and the School for Scandal Overture) still in the repertoire today.

Barber was 28 on November 5, 1938 when Toscanini premiered both the “Adagio for Strings,” and this “Essay for Orchestra” on a single program. The live radio broadcast was heard by millions of Americans in that golden age where whole families huddled around a piece of technology that gave them new access to live events. The broadcast, like all of the NBC symphony Orchestra programs by Toscanini, was transmitted from studio 8H in Rockefeller Center; the same studio from which Saturday Night Live has been transmitted since its inception in the mid 1970s.

Both the “Adagio for Strings” and the “Essay for Orchestra” resonated with the concerns of an age on the very doorstep of the second world war. The Adagio remains the most frequently performed orchestral work by Barber, but the Essay allows us a glimpse into American music from the late 1930s and its associations remain almost completely unchanged.

By “Essay” Barber did not mean the kind of assignment drudgingly created for a teacher the night before it was due. Instead this was a reference to the classical essay; the highly personal exploration of a theme developed by writers of the age of enlightenment, like John Locke or Alexander Pope. Essays span the compositional career of Barber: he wrote a work called “Three Essays for Piano” at age 16 and wrote two other essays for orchestra, the second in 1942 and the third in 1978.

The Essay No. 1 opens in melancholic mood with a quickly identifiable “theme.” The music intensifies in steady and gradual motion until a massive brass fanfare is sounded three minutes into the piece. A transitional passage follows in which the mood of the opening in punctuated by swells and fanfares. Next is developmental music marked by quickly articulated string figures. The melancholy opening theme is overlaid on this playful music, then the piano enters and the texture intensifies quickly. A tense coda with echoed trumpets closes the work abruptly without a sense of finality.

Edward MacDowell
Piano Concerto No. 2 Op. 23
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani and strings.

Edward MacDowell was a versatile and internationally trained musician. He was born in New York City and began his musical studies there. As a young man he enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire and a year later traveled to Germany to study in Frankfurt before settling in Wiesbaden. He returned to the Boston in 1888 where he lived until 1896, then moved back to Manhattan to begin a professorship at Columbia University. He held that position until his health gave way in 1904. It was while he was living in Boston that he wrote his second piano concerto.

MacDowell spoke the language of Victorian chromaticism. When the floating string texture that opens the work is finally broken by otherinstruments it will sound like a modulation, but it is actually a clarification that brings us back toward home within the tonality of D minor. Like the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2, written less than ten years before it, the MacDowell concerto features a vigorous cadenza for solo piano just after the opening orchestral statement. The first movement sparkles with variety. Listen in particular to differences in the speed and flow of its articulations.

There is also a wit characteristic of MacDowell in transforming themes throughout the entire work; in developing ideas that are more related than they might appear to be at first to be. There is also a kind of pleasure taken in finding unexpected textures within this concerto. When the first movement finds its way into F major for its second theme group we might expect the piano soloist to articulate the gorgeous tune set against the flowing background, but instead the piano plays effervescent figuration throughout this passage, and even when the same passage is resolved in D major near the end of the movement the piano does not state the theme.

Another unusual feature is that both the second and the third movements explore playful textures. The third movement begins with a slow introduction developed from transitional music in the opening movement, but once the quicker tempo gets underway its puckish humor is marked by pastoral interludes.

MacDowell’s wife was also a talented pianist. She described his interest in “sprites” and other elfin spirits, and according to her he favored “the mischievous demons or elves who fly in clouds through the air, like pixies. They were light gossamery nothings, mischievous, but delicate as a feather, wafted by the swift March breezes.” Perhaps as you listen you will become aware of these and other fascinating spirits in the music.

George Gershwin
An American in Paris
Instrumentation: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 3 saxophones and strings.

At age 15 he was a “song-plugger.” He was paid the respectable salary of $15 a week to play new sheet music in a retail store to generate interest and promote sales. But George Gershwin also wrote his own songs, and at age 21 his song “Swanee” put him on the charts and changed the course of his life. In 1924 he began a string of legendary Broadway productions with “Lady Be Good,” and simultaneously broke into classical music with “Rhapsody in Blue.” Gershwin’s third significant orchestral work in the classical idiom (following the Concerto in F from 1925) was “An American in Paris.”

The original program notes indicate that Gershwin intended to “portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city and listens to various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere.” We can easily follow this “tourist” through the work if we set our aural GPS to mark occasions when the concertmaster plays alone, because the music divides into sections that are clearly divided by passages for solo violin.

The first half of the work is given to various transformations of “walking music.” The sound of car horns punctuates this extended section and gives it attitude. Throughout you will notice moments where the drive of energy pauses in reflective stances, or in melancholy lyrical interludes that pull at the otherwise cheerful proceedings.

The entrance of the celesta precedes the first passage for solo violin, which ushers in a slow blues in B-flat. Listen for the sound of the trumpet that plays with a special mute called a “felt crown.” Solo violin writing also marks the transition into a fast blues based initially on a 12-bar pattern.

Themes return and combine in new ways as the music seeks finality. The walking music brings us to the musical equivalent of an “escalator” that closes the work in high spirits.

George Gershwin
Rhapsody in Blue
Instrumentation: solo piano and 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 alto saxophones in E-flat, tenor saxophone in B-flat; 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba; percussion: timpani, banjo, and strings.

Imagine the surprise when he opened the New York Tribune on Friday morning January 4, 1924 and read that “George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto.” It was the first that he had heard of it. The concert was already booked for February 12—less than five weeks away, and though he had spoken informally about writing a short piece for this ensemble nothing had ever been finalized. The event was organized by a bandleader named Paul Whiteman (1890-1967) who had a golden touch and was recently dubbed “The King of Jazz.” Gershwin did not want to disappoint the “King.”

Whiteman’s 24-piece dance ensemble was to be featured in an educational program called "An Experiment in Modern Music." The intent was to show how jazz had developed in recent years and how it could hold its own in the concert hall. Gershwin could not resist, even though his show “Sweet Little Devil” was about to open and he was rehearsing for a recital with soprano Eva Gauthier. He produced a two-piano score and gave it to Whiteman’s pianist and speedy arranger Ferde Grofé (1892–1972) to orchestrate for the Whiteman ensemble. Gershwin played the piano at the premiere. Grofé expanded upon the orchestration of the work in 1926 and again in 1942, as the work became ever more popular.

The music opens by stating and developing a blues theme. The collection of episodes that follow have acquired colorful names: the “train theme,” followed by the “stride theme,” and the “shuffle theme.” Textures built from these themes mix and alternate until the appearance of the famous “love theme” in E major.

In 1976 United Airlines reportedly licensed segments of the “Rhapsody” from the Gershwin estate for $500,000, and the shuffle theme and love music became mainstays of United Airlines commercials in the mid 1980s. According to the Chicago Tribune the airline plans to continue the association even after its recent merger with Continental Airlines. This advertising context created an awareness of the music across audiences more diverse than either Gershwin or Whiteman would have ever predicted in their original “Experiment in Modern Music.” Is there another work of American classical music which has the visibility and general recognition factor of this Rhapsody?

Jeffrey Johnson
University of Bridgeport