Program Notes
Overture to Candide (1956)……………………………………………..Leonard Bernstein
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons
unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure
that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that
something is right in the world.—Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918, making him the
first American-born and trained musical director of the New York Philharmonic. He was
also the youngest person appointed to the post. He was an active musician and made an
impact in all the major musical fields—composition, performance, conducting, and
education.
Although his adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide would prove to be one of Bernstein’s
most successful works for the musical stage—along with On the Town (1944) and West
Side Story (1957)—it actually ran fewer than eighty performances when it opened on
Broadway on December 1, 1956. Candide was collaboration between Bernstein and
Lillian Hellman. Hellman’s concept was to adapt Voltaire’s original work to modernity,
satirizing the Joseph McCarthy anti-communism of the early 1950s, which she
experienced first hand.
The piece is an overture-style work that states several of the main themes of the
songs found in Candide. It received its first concert performance in 1957 by the New
York Philharmonic with Bernstein conducting and has been a favorite of American
audiences ever since.
Concerto No. 1 in F minor, Op. 1 (1891/1917 rev.)………………… Sergei Rachmoninoff
A composer's music should express the country of his birth, his
love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, and the
pictures he loves... My music is the product of my temperament, and so it
is Russian music. — Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest pianists of all time and one of the most
outstanding melodists amongst composers, was born at Oneg, near Novgorod, on 20
March 1873 (1 April New Style), into a musical family: his grandfather had been a pupil
of John Field and his father, too, played the piano. When Sergei was nine, financial
difficulties forced the sale of the family estate and they moved to St Petersburg, where he
took piano lessons at the Conservatoire. Rachmaninoff’s cousin, the pianist and
conductor Alexander Siloti, had studied in Moscow with the strict Nikolai Zverev, and
suggested that Rachmaninoff go to Zverev as well, and so in 1885, he made the journey
to Moscow, staying with Zverev for three years. In 1888 Rachmaninoff began to study
piano with Siloti himself and composition with Sergei Taneyev and Anton Arensky; he
also received advice from Tchaikovsky, who was a friend of Siloti and his former
teacher.
Even before his graduation as a pianist in 1891, Rachmaninoff had composed what
was to become his best-known work, the Prelude in C sharp minor. His graduation as a
composer came in 1892: he was awarded a gold medal for his Pushkin opera Aleko. The
premiere of his First Symphony, in Moscow in 1897, was a disaster (word was that the
conductor, Alexander Glazunov, was drunk), and Rachmaninoff destroyed the score
(fortunately, a set of parts survived, which allowed the reconstruction of the score after
Rachmaninoff’s death).
Rachmaninoff’s early career established a pattern he was to follow throughout his
life: an uneasy struggle between performing and composing, with economic pressures
usually ensuring that precedence needed to be given to the demands of the platform. He
was an international figure as early as 1899, when he conducted a concert of his
orchestral works in London, also playing some of his piano music.1
Although Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto has been woefully underappreciated
in modern concert circles, it is brimming with enthusiasm, fury, and passion. This
tendency toward over dramatization certainly brands it as the work of a young composer.
But there is no doubt that the seeds of a mature Rachmaninoff are there, even within the
starry-eyed enthusiasm of a young man. Considering this, it’s easy to see the First as a
snapshot of youth – not to mention a good deal of fun.
From the beginning, the piece is a non-stop showcase for piano. The first movement
is by far the longest, nearly twice the length of the center movement, and could almost
stand on its own, especially considering its vivace/moderato/vivace structure. The
movement tears through a series of themes, from the famous opening descent into the
keyboard’s low range, to a lazy romance, to the sudden explosion of trills set to fierce
orchestral accompaniment. A wild ride, but one that is charming from its opening to its
final cadence.
The second movement could almost be an entirely different piece of music; it opens
not with a recapitulation of the first movement’s drama, but instead with a mournful horn
solo. The piano comes in after a series of woodwind cadences, and it launches from their
music into a cadenza-like interlude; the piano weaves the fragments of the movement’s
opening into a main theme before being joined by the rest of the orchestra. Dream-like in
its meandering, the second movement exposes Rachmaninoff’s skill for dialogue, and the
piano takes time to speak with the ensemble at some length before fading quickly and
quietly away.
The final movement returns to the furor of the first, introducing a dance-like theme
that, like so much of Rachmaninoff’s music, echoes Russian idioms without being
explicitly nationalistic. What follows are seven minutes of a maniac dance that barely
stops to catch its breath. Even the quiet passages shine a spotlight on the pianist’s
endurance and skill. The end of work arrives with punctuated percussion and a truly epic
final.
1
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes
Scheherazade, Op. 35 (1888)…………………………………... Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
The folk song, the Orient, and the sea were the three influences or
inspirations which pursued Rimsky-Korsakov throughout his career, and
he never got very far away of them . . . . He tuned everything in his life
to artistic account: his early life at sea, his trips to the Crimea, his
summer vacations, when he noted down folk and bird songs. He was
always seduced by the picturesque and the exotic. He might be called,
indeed, a music Eurasian.—Carl van Vechten
Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade is loosely based on the Persian fairy tales of A
Thousand and One Nights, famously related by the Sultana Sheherazade to her despotic
Sultan husband in a two-and-a-half year series of cliffhangers designed to postpone the
ever-present threat of execution.
Sultan Shakhriar, convinced of the infidelity and fickleness of women, has vowed
to execute each of his wives after the first night (the words On the next day after the
wedding are crossed out in the autograph score); but the Sultana Sheherazade saved her
life by the fact that she was able to occupy him with her stories, which she told him over
1001 nights, so that, roused by curiosity Shakhriar continually put off her execution and
finally completely abandoned his intention. Many wonders Sheherazade told him of
Sinbad's voyages at sea, of the wandering Kalender princes, of the knights turned into
stone, of the great bird Rul, of the evil geniis, of the pleasures and amusements of the
eastern rulers, of Sinbad’s ship smashed to pieces on the magnetic rock with the bronze
horseman and much else, quoting the verses of poets and the words of songs, weaving
story into story and tale into tale (wow, she had quite the imagination!).
Rimsky Korsakov did not keep to a line by line reproduction of any one tale in
particular, recommending the listener to find out those pictures to which the program
refers. In a letter to Glazunov, dated July 7, 1888, the composer reiterated that the work
had no specific program, but that the first movement was a prelude (E Major), the second
a narrative (B Minor), the third a Reverie (G Major) and the fourth an Eastern festival, a
dance, in a word a kind of Middle Eastern carnival (E Minor-E Major). Scheherazade’s
international success stems from its performance in Brussels under the composer's baton
on March 18, 1900 when it was given at the Fifth Russian Symphony Concert at the
Theatre de la Monnaie. It was staged as a ballet in Paris in 1910 at the Grande Opera as
part of Sergei Diaghilev's celebrated season.
~Notes by Dr. Stephen Crawford
Associate Professor of Music
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor