March 19-20, 2016 — page 1
About the Music
by Dr. Richard E. Rodda
Symphony No. 4, “Classique Sturm und Drang” (1995)
— Nicolas Bacri
Born November 23, 1961 in Paris
The gifted and prolific French composer Nicolas Bacri, born in Paris in 1961,
studied piano, theory and composition as a youngster and was admitted to the Paris
Conservatoire in 1979; he graduated in 1983 with a Premier Prix in composition. For
the next two years, Bacri held a residency at the French Academy in Rome, where
he came under the influence of the Italian modernist Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988),
who sought to join Eastern transcendent philosophy with Western sensibilities and
musical resources in his meditative, hypnotic works. Bacri directed the chamber
music department of Radio France after returning to Paris, but he left that position
in 1991 to devote himself to composition. The large catalog of works he has created
since — two operas, six symphonies, nearly thirty concertos, many compositions
for chamber ensembles, piano, chorus and voice — have been performed widely
throughout Europe, recorded often on major labels, and recognized with a Prix
de Rome, Prix André Caplet de l’Académie des Beaux Arts, Prix Pierre Cardin
de l’Académie des Beaux Arts, Grand Prix de la Nouvelle Académie du Disque
and five awards from SACEM, the French association of authors, composers and
publishers. Bacri has held residencies with the Casa de Velasquez in Madrid and
with several French orchestras, and in 2013 made his debut as a conductor with the
London Symphony Orchestra.
From 1993 to 1998, Bacri was Composer-in-Residence with the Orchestre de
Picardie in Amiens, a hundred miles north of Paris. The ensemble’s Music Director,
Louis Langrée, dedicated several concerts during the 1995-1996 season to music of
the late-18th-century German “Sturm und Drang” (“Storm and Stress”) movement,
which created an emotionally charged style through the use of minor keys, sudden
contrasts, chromatic harmonies and a pervasive sense of agitation, and he asked Bacri
to write a new work appropriate to that theme. “I therefore gave myself over to the
kind of attempt at updating that was beloved by a good number of Neo-Classical
composers during the time between the world wars, and so wrote homages to Strauss,
Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Weill. Listeners will also find many gestures that are
personal to me as well as many that are inseparable from Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’
Symphony.” Bacri indicated that the opening Allegro fuocoso (“Fast, very fiery”) honors
“the Richard Strauss of [the comic opera] Ariadne auf Naxos” in the jesting quality
of many of its episodes, but its pungent harmonies and rhythmic dynamism are
more indebted to Prokofiev. The Omaggio a Igor Stravinsky recalls the cool emotion,
precise counterpoint and acerbic harmonies of that modern master’s Neo-Classical
idiom. The gruff Menuetto pays tribute to Arnold Schoenberg, who fitted some of
his earliest experiments in twelve-tone composition into old dance forms. The moto
perpetuo finale, an homage, according to Bacri, to “the Kurt Weill of the muscular
Second Symphony, not the Three-Penny Opera,” is capped by a furious fugue.
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Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107 (1959)
— Dmitri Shostakovich
Born September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg
Died August 9, 1975 in Moscow
By the mid-1950s, Dmitri Shostakovich had developed a musical language of enormous subtlety, sophistication and range, able to encompass such pieces of “Socialist
Realism” as the Second Piano Concerto, the Festive Overture, and the Symphonies
No. 11 (“The Year 1905”) and No. 12 (“Lenin”), as well as the profound outpourings of the First Violin Concerto, the Tenth Symphony and the late string quartets.
The First Cello Concerto, written for Mstislav Rostropovich during the summer of
1959, straddles both of Shostakovich’s expressive worlds, a quality exemplified by
two anecdotes told by the great cellist himself:
“Shostakovich gave me the manuscript of the First Cello Concerto on August 2,
1959. On August 6th I played it for him from memory, three times. After the first
time he was so excited, and of course we drank a little bit of vodka. The second time
I played it not so perfect, and afterwards we drank even more vodka. The third time
I think I played the Saint-Saëns Concerto, but he still accompanied his Concerto. We
were enormously happy....”
“Shostakovich suffered for his whole country, for his persecuted colleagues, for
the thousands of people who were hungry. After I played the Cello Concerto for
him at his dacha in Leningrad, he accompanied me to the railway station to catch
the overnight train to Moscow. In the big waiting room we found many people
sleeping on the floor. I saw his face, and the great suffering in it brought tears to
my eyes. I cried, not from seeing the poor people but from what I saw in the face
of Shostakovich....”
The ability of Shostakovich’s music, like the man himself, to display the widest
possible range of moods in succession or even simultaneously is one of his most
masterful achievements. (The same may be said of Mahler, whose music was an
enormous influence on Shostakovich.) The opening movement of the First Cello
Concerto may be heard as almost Classical in the clarity of its form and the conservatism of its harmony and themes, yet there is a sinister undercurrent coursing
through this music, a bleakness of spirit not entirely masked by the ceaseless activity.
The following Moderato grows from sad melodies of folkish character, piquantly
harmonized, which are gathered into a huge welling up of emotion before subsiding to close the movement. The extended solo cadenza that follows without pause
is an entire movement in itself. (Shostakovich had used a similar formal technique
in the Violin Concerto No. 1 of 1948.) Thematically, it springs from the preceding
slow movement, and reaches an almost Bachian depth of feeling. The cadenza
leads directly to the finale, one of Shostakovich’s most witty and sardonic musical
essays. With disarming ease, the main theme of the first movement is recalled in
the closing section of the finale to round out the Concerto’s form. “It is difficult to
think of any modern concerto,” wrote Alan Frank, “which pursues its objectives in
so purposeful a manner with little or no exploration of by-ways.”
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In addition to its purely musical value, Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto deserves
a significant footnote in Russia’s modern artistic history. The piece was written for
Rostropovich, about whom the composer said in his purported memoirs, Testimony,
“In general, Rostropovich is a real Russian; he knows everything and he can do
everything. I’m not even talking about music here, I mean that Rostropovich can do
almost any manual or physical work, and he understands technology.” Shostakovich
and Rostropovich were close friends during the composer’s later years, and they
lived as neighbors for some time in the Composers’ House in Moscow. Rostropovich
gave the Concerto both its world premiere (Leningrad; October 4, 1959) and its first
American performance (Philadelphia; November 6, 1959), and was the inspiration
for Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2 of 1966. In 1974, Rostropovich and his wife,
the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, defected to live and work in the West; four years
later they were deprived of their Russian citizenship and became “non-persons” in
their native land. In 1979 Dmitri and Ludmilla Sollertinsky published their Pages
from the Life of Dmitri Shostakovich, which was essentially the Soviet rebuttal to
the scathing criticism leveled in Testimony, issued several months earlier. Though
Rostropovich was one of Shostakovich’s best friends and most important artistic
motivators, his name is not even mentioned in the Sollertinskys’ Pages, and the fine
First Cello Concerto is dismissed in the book with a mere, passing half-sentence.
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36 (1802)
— Ludwig van Beethoven
Born December 16, 1770 in Bonn
Died March 26, 1827 in Vienna
In the summer of 1802, Beethoven’s physician ordered him to leave Vienna and
take rooms in Heiligenstadt, today a friendly suburb at the northern terminus of
the city’s subway system, but two centuries ago a quiet village with a view of the
Danube across the river’s rich flood plain. It was three years earlier, in 1799, that
Beethoven first noticed a disturbing ringing and buzzing in his ears, and he sought
medical attention for the problem soon after. He tried numerous cures for his malady,
as well as for his chronic colic, including oil of almonds, hot and cold baths, soaking
in the Danube, pills and herbs. For a short time, he even considered the modish
treatment of electric shock. On the advice of his latest doctor, Beethoven left the
noisy city for the quiet countryside with the assurance that the lack of stimulation
would be beneficial to his hearing and his general health.
In Heiligenstadt, Beethoven virtually lived the life of a hermit, seeing only his
doctor and a young student named Ferdinand Ries. In 1802, Beethoven was still a
full decade from being totally deaf. The acuity of his hearing varied from day to
day (sometimes governed by his interest — or lack thereof — in the surrounding
conversation), but he had largely lost his ability to hear soft sounds by that time,
and loud noises caused him pain. Of one of their walks in the country, Ries reported,
“I called his attention to a shepherd who was piping very agreeably in the woods
on a flute made of a twig of elder. For half an hour, Beethoven could hear nothing,
and though I assured him that it was the same with me (which was not the case),
he became extremely quiet and morose. When he occasionally seemed to be merry,
March 19-20, 2016 — page 4
it was generally to the extreme of boisterousness; but this happens seldom.” In addition to the distress over his health, Beethoven was also wounded in 1802 by the
wreck of an affair of the heart. He had proposed marriage to Giulietta Guicciardi
(the thought of Beethoven as a husband threatens the moorings of one’s presence
of mind!), but had been denied permission by the girl’s father for the then perfectly
valid reason that the young composer was without rank, position or fortune. Faced
with the extinction of a musician’s most precious faculty, fighting a constant digestive
distress, and unsuccessful in love, it is little wonder that Beethoven was sorely vexed.
On October 6, 1802, following several months of wrestling with his misfortunes,
Beethoven penned the most famous letter ever written by a musician — the “Heiligenstadt Testament.” Intended as a will written to his brothers (it was never sent,
though he kept it in his papers to be found after his death), it is a cry of despair over
his fate, perhaps a necessary and self-induced soul-cleansing in those pre-Freudian
days. “O Providence — grant me at last but one day of pure joy — it is so long since
real joy echoed in my heart,” he lamented. But — and this is the miracle — he not
only poured his energy into self-pity, he also channeled it into music. “I shall grapple
with fate; it shall never pull me down,” he resolved. The next five years were the
most productive he ever knew.
The Second Symphony of 1802 opens with a long introduction moving with a
stately tread. The sonata form begins with the arrival of the fast tempo and the
appearance of the main theme, a brisk melody first entrusted to the low strings.
Characteristic Beethovenian energy dominates the transition to the second theme, a
martial strain paraded by the winds. The development includes two large sections,
one devoted to the main theme and its quick, flashing rhythmic figure, the other
exploring the possibilities of the marching theme. The recapitulation compresses the
earlier material to allow a lengthy coda to conclude the movement. Professor Donald
Tovey thought the Larghetto to be “one of the most luxurious slow movements in
the world”; Sir George Grove commented on its “elegant, indolent beauty.” So lyrical is its principal theme that, by appending some appropriate words, Isaac Watts
converted it into the hymn Kingdoms and Thrones to God Belong. The movement is in
a full sonata form, with the first violins giving out the second theme above a rocking
accompaniment in the bass. Beethoven labeled the third movement “Scherzo,” the
first appearance of that term in his symphonies, though the comparable movement
of the First Symphony was a true scherzo in all but name. Faster in tempo and more
boisterous in spirit than the minuet traditionally found in earlier symphonies, the
scherzo became an integral part not only of Beethoven’s later works, but also of
those of most 19th-century composers. A rising three-note fragment runs through
much of the scherzo proper, while the central trio gives prominence to the oboes
and a delightful walking-bass counterpoint in the bassoons. The finale continues
the bubbling high spirits of the scherzo. Formally a hybrid of sonata and rondo, it
possesses a wit and structure indebted to Haydn, but a dynamism that is Beethoven’s
alone. The long coda intensifies the bursting exuberance of the music, and carries
it along to the closing pages of the movement.
©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
HARRISBURG SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Saturday, March 19, 2016 at 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 20, 2016 at 3:00 p.m.
STUART MALINA, Conducting
ZUILL BAILEY, Cello
Symphony No. 4, “Classique Sturm und Drang”
Allegro fuocoso: Omaggio a Richard Strauss
Arietta: Omaggio a Igor Stravinsky
Menuetto: Omaggio a Arnold Schoenberg
Finale: Omaggio a Kurt Weill
Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107
Allegretto
Moderato —
Cadenza —
Allegro con moto
Nicolas Bacri
(b. 1961)
Dmitri Shostakovich
(1906-1975)
— INTERMISSION—
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36
Adagio molto — Allegro con brio
Larghetto
Scherzo: Allegro
Allegro molto
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1770-1827)