NEW PHILHARMONIA 2015-16 Prog 1 (11/7-8)

PROGRAM NOTES

By Steven Ledbetter

ARVO PÄRT

Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten

Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Estonia, on September 11, 1935; he now lives in Tallinn, Estonia.

He composed the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten in 1977, shortly after Britten’s death in

December 1976. The score calls for orchestral strings and one orchestral chime. Duration is

about 6 minutes.

Arvo Pärt was born in Estonia during the last years of the republic before Soviet

domination took over for several decades. His widespread acclaim in Europe and the United

States in the early 1980s came particularly as the result of a hugely popular recording of his

Third Symphony. He had been educated at the conservatory in Tallinn, graduating in 1963. His

early work showed the expected influence of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, but he broadened his

stylistic range and scope with two award-winning large-scale works: the children’s cantata Meie

aed (“Our Garden”) and the oratorio Maailma samm (“Stride of the world”). He was the first

Estonian composer to use the twelve-tone technique (Necrology, 1959), then not allowed in

countries of the Soviet bloc. He was awarded official prizes for some works, and attacked for

others, particularly the Credo for piano, chorus, and orchestra, which was banned because it

contained the text, “I believe in Jesus Christ.” Composing widely in orchestral, vocal, and

chamber forms, his early works often employed serial organization of pitch and rhythm, as well

as collage effects.

The twelve-tone phase passed into a long period of artistic silence, during which he

undertook profound study of Franco-Flemish choral music of late Medieval and early

Renaissance, from Machaut to Josquin. In the Third Symphony of 1971 he revived old

polyphonic forms and ideas from Gregorian chant. His studies led by 1976 to his rediscovery of

the triad and the possibilities of extreme simplicity. Soon afterward he and his family emigrated

to Vienna, then moved to Berlin.

Regarding his commemoration of Britten, Pärt has written:

In the past years we have had many losses in the world of music to mourn. Why did

the date of Benjamin Britten’s death—December 4, 1976—touch such a chord in

me? During this time I was obviously at a point where I could recognize the

magnitude of such a loss. Inexplicable feelings of guilt, more than that even, arose in

me. I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to

appreciate the unusual purity of his music—I had had the impression of the same

kind of purity in the ballades of [the Medieval composer] Guillaume de Machaut.

And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally—and now it

would not come to that.

The work is one of several now often performed that came out of Pärt’s artistic silence in the

1970s. It is a moving threnody based on the simplest of ideas—a melody that slowly descends,

step by step, starting in the high strings and picked up by the lower instruments. A solitary bell,

like a funeral chime, initiates the halting, dragging procession. The mood grows ever more

somber as more, and lower, instruments enrich the kaleidoscopic sound of one descending line

overlaid on another. At the same time, the rhythmic motion becomes gradually slower, as if a

procession of mourners is reluctant finally to take leave of an honored master.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

Violin Concerto in A minor, Opus 53

Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September

8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He composed the Violin Concerto between July 5

and early September 1879, though he did not complete final revisions until May 25, 1880. Franz

Ondříček gave the first performance, in Prague, on October 14, 1883, with the orchestra of the

National Theater conducted by Moric Anger, an old friend of the composer’s. In addition to the

solo violin, the score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two

trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 32 minutes.

The first person to suggest a violin concerto to Dvořák was the publisher Fritz Simrock,

who had found the Czech composer’s Slavonic Dances a veritable gold mine, and who knew that

some prominent Viennese violinists admired Dvořák’s music. Dvořák had already begun the

concerto when he went to Berlin on July 29, 1879, to hear the famous Joachim Quartet play two

of his chamber works.

Joachim, one of Brahms’s closest friends, had known Dvořák’s music for some time, but

the two had never met personally. Still, on the strength of some Dvořák chamber works that

Brahms had shown him, Joachim asked Dvořák for a concerto. The composer took the

opportunity of the Berlin meeting to consult the famous virtuoso about some points in the solo

part (just as Brahms had done with his concerto). Joachim was willing to help, so Dvořák sent

him the score in December. When the two men met in April 1880 for a detailed discussion,

Joachim made many suggestions that the grateful composer adopted in the final version,

completed on May 25. Yet Dvořák held onto the score for two more years before publishing it,

and in the end it was not Joachim but the Czech violinist Franz Ondříček who gave the first

performance. Possibly Joachim decided not to perform the work because in one significant

point—discussed below—the composer did not take his advice.

Given the period of its composition—while Dvořák was making his mark as a nationalist

Bohemian composer and simultaneously reveling in the friendship and mutual admiration of

Johannes Brahms—it can be no surprise that the influence of Brahms is as evident as the

presence of Czech folk dance types, though the work could have been composed by no one but

Dvořák.

Ever since Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, composers had the option of omitting or

foreshortening the opening orchestral statement. Dvořák gives the orchestra only a few chords of

challenge before the soloist appears in a more pensive vein, a melody filled with Slavic longing.

Normally a first movement is in some kind of sonata form, and Dvořák makes all the right moves

at the opening, especially with the transition to the flowing second theme, in C major, which is

surely an homage to Brahms. But from that point on, Dvořák abbreviates so drastically that the

opening movement seems more like a free-form rhapsody than the classical sonata form. He

plunges into a development section but surprisingly soon restates the orchestral opening full

force, as if this is already the beginning of the recapitulation. And then he actually avoids a

restatement of the luscious, Brahmsian second theme. Instead, he tames the violin’s opening

theme into a gentle echo, which allows it to flow, easily and without a break, into the second

movement.

Joachim had his doubts about Dvořák’s formal novelties; he was committed to the more

classical regularity of a Brahms, as in the concerto he had premiered at the beginning of the very

same year in which Dvořák was “breaking the rules.” This may well be the reason why, though

he accepted the dedication of the concerto, he did not play the work until some fifteen years after

its premiere..

The Adagio ma non troppo breathes the serene air of the countryside in its peaceful

strains, though Dvořák frequently offers delightful surprises in unexpected harmonic colors, and

there are unexpected outbursts and moments of climax before a pair of horns in duet and the

delicately embellishing solo violin issue their farewell.

The finale is filled with the spirit of the Czech countryside; almost every tune is in the

style of one or another kind of folk dance. Most prominent, and most frequently recurring, is the

furiant that opens the movement: a dance in triple meter, but with shifting elements of duple

meter inside it. Each time this dance returns it has a different color or mood, once even including

the imitation of peasant bagpipes. The contrasting episodes include a lilting waltz and another

especially Czech type, the dumka, a ballad style that alternates between gravity and gaiety. There

is hardly a moment in the finale when the soloist is not taking part with great brilliance, so

Dvořák saw no need for a cadenza, but simply let the music dance to its conclusion with

brilliance and vigor.

JEAN SIBELIUS

Symphony No. 2 in D major, Opus 43

Jean Sibelius was born in Hameenlinna (then known by the Swedish name Tavastehus), Finland,

on December 8, 1865, and died at Jarvenpaa, near Helsinki , on September 20, 1957. Sibelius

completed the Second Symphony early in 1902 and conducted the first performance on March 8

that year at Helsinki. The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four

horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 43 minutes.

It comes as a surprise to learn that a composer renowned as a nationalistic hero in his

homeland was not a native speaker of the language. Sibelius was born to a Swedish-speaking

family in a small town in south central Finland and only began to speak some Finnish from the

age of eight. He entered a Finnish-language school at eleven, but not until he was a young man

did he feel completely at home in the language.

Musical studies began with the violin, and soon he aimed at a career as a professional

virtuoso. But in 1885, after an abortive attempt at legal studies, he pursued composition with

Martin Wegelius in Helsinki. Further studies in Berlin introduced him to the newest music,

including Strauss's Don Juan, which he heard at its premiere. He was usually in debt, apparently

unable to avoid financial extravagance in the German capital, and already drinking heavily, a

habit that remained with him. After his return to Finland in 1891 he composed the choral

symphony Kullervo, which was so successful at its premiere in April 1892 that he was

immediately established as a leading figure in Finnish music, a position that was never seriously

challenged thereafter.

The following seven years saw the composition of a series of scores for dramatic

production, a failed operatic attempt, and—most important—a group of purely orchestral scores,

En saga and the four symphonic poems about Lemminkäinen, a character from the Finnish

national epic Kalevala. These culminated in his first symphony, composed evidently in part as a

musical response to Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony. During this period, too, Sibelius had

opportunities to appear as a conductor, both at home and abroad, through the good offices of

Robert Kajanus, conductor of the Finnish National Symphony and an enthusiastic supporter of

the composer’s.

Sibelius’s most famous single work—the one now known by the title Finlandia—and the

first of the symphonies that reveals the true nature of his art, the Second, both saw the light of

day during a period of great patriotic fervor in Finland, when many of the composer’s

compatriots sought to create a nation that was both culturally and politically independent of

Tsarist Russia, with which Finland shares a long border.

An admirer, one Axel Carpelan, a neurotic hypochondriac who loved Sibelius’s music,

had suggested Finlandia as a good title for a work, and also proposed that Sibelius compose

(among other things) a symphony, which would be the Second, a violin concerto, and a string

quartet. Best of all, he found two Swedish patrons who agreed to put up a sum of money

sufficient to allow Sibelius to spend some time during the winter of 1900-1901 in Italy, where he

worked steadily, produced some small pieces, and sketched ideas for a treatment of Don Juan,

though some of this material later ended up in the Second Symphony. While passing through

Germany, he met Richard Strauss, who formed an extremely favorable opinion of the young

Finn: “Sibelius is the only Scandinavian composer who has real depth,” he wrote in his diary.

When the new symphony was finally finished, Sibelius conducted four successive

performances in Helsinki on March 8, 10, 14, and 16, 1901, with a sold-out auditorium for each

performance. His friend Kajanus wrote an enthusiastic essay in which he interpreted the

symphony as a political statement, with the Andante expressing “the most broken-hearted protest

against all the injustice that threatens at the present time,” while the scherzo “gives a picture of

frenetic preparation,” and the finale moves to a “triumphant conclusion intended to rouse in the

listener a picture of lighter and confident prospects for the future.” These ideas were surely the

writer’s own; Sibelius himself never authorized them, nor spoke of a political content in the

work, though under the circumstances, it is quite likely that many of his countrymen responded

to it in much the same way Kajanus did.

The Second Symphony is expansive and spacious. What makes it characteristic of the

mature Sibelius is the way it grows from small musical motives, as short as a few notes, or a

characteristic chord progression, into a vast architectural structure, and does so with a kind of

fluidity, as if the symphony is congealing out of the northern mists. Still, while “mist” might be a

suitable metaphor for some of the later Sibelius symphonies, No. 2 begins in a sunny D major

with figures that are more evocative of the forests (especially in the rich echo by the four horns

of a little turn figure first presented by the woodwinds. It has a feeling of expansive openness,

partly generated by the spacious time signatures that Sibelius often uses (the symphony opens in

6/4; 12/4 in the slow section at the center of the scherzo; 3/2 for the finale). Although Sibelius’s

music could hardly sound more different, at least one writer has produced an entire book hailing

him as the true successor of Beethoven in shaping his magnificent musical edifices through the

development of a handful of purely abstract musical ideas—with results that seem far too

expressive to be abstract.

Sibelius arranges this four-movement symphony to fall into two parts. The bright

mellowness of the opening movement is shadowed by the minor-key second movement, which

unfolds some of the same musical ideas. Sibelius directly links the last two movements. The

furious, mysterious, driven scherzo pauses for the oboe’s contrasting, sustained melody, and this

eventually broadens the ending of the movement into an anticipation of the triumphant finale,

building it out of what might have seemed the ashes of the dark parts of the scherzo to the

brilliant and heroic close.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)