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Celebrate the 200th anniversary of Franz Liszt’s birth with two opportunities for guest soloist Valentina Lisitsa to show her “combustible virtuosity” at the keyboard. Each instrument family of the orchestra shines in turn in Bartok’s accessible concerto, infused with elements of his native Hungarian folk music and percussive dynamics. A rhapsodic treat from Eastern Europe!

 

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

George Enescu: Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 in A major for Orchestra, Opus 11, No. 1

George Enescu was born in Liveni on August 19, 1881, and died in Paris on May 4, 1955. He composed his Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 in 1901. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets and two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, snare drum, triangle, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 11 minutes.

Far too frequently the general public knows a gifted composer by a single work. The inevitable result is to underrate his achievement, particularly if the single work happens to fall into a relatively popular mold. George Enescu, who adopted the spelling Georges Enesco during his years in Paris, is a case in point. Certainly his first Romanian Rhapsody has been world-famous almost from the moment of its first performance. Unfortunately it remains almost the only work by Enescu that most people know. Nor do they recall his work as a brilliant violinist and teacher (particularly of Yehudi Menuhin, whose autobiography speaks most warmly of him). His career as a composer was complicated by the conflicting demands made on him as a teacher and organizer. Many of his larger compositions took years to finish, so difficult was it to find the time to work on them.

Showing extraordinary early talent, Enescu entered the Vienna Conservatory at the age of seven, and by thirteen he had graduated with a silver medal in violin. His later career as soloist, teacher and conductor has tended to cast into shadow most of his works—including the opera Oedipe, which many regard as a real masterpiece—with the exception of this brilliant early showpiece.

Enescu attained success early with the first Romanian Rhapsody, and it came to haunt him. He was only twenty when he wrote it and not quite twenty‑two when he led the first performance, yet audiences demanded it constantly for the rest of his life. Though the rhapsody is frankly based on the Hungarian rhapsodies of Franz Liszt, bringing together native songs and dances in a colorful potpourri, it is nonetheless effective, from the simplicity of the opening clarinet phrase to the fiery flash of the closing section. For a short time, at least, it makes us all Romanian.

Franz Liszt Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major for Piano and Orchestra, S. 124

Franz (Ferenc in Hungarian) Liszt was born in Raiding, near Sopron, Hungary, on October 22, 1811, and died in Bayreuth, Germany, on July 31, 1886. Sketches for the First Concerto go back to 1830, though he evidently completed drafts of both concertos at roughly the same time in 1839. He seems to have worked on it further during the 1840s, making more revisions in 1853 and 1856. The score is dedicated to Henry Litolff. Liszt himself was the soloist in the first performance, which took place under the direction of Hector Berlioz at Weimar on February 17, 1855. In addition to the solo pianist, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, three trombones, triangle, cymbals, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 19 minutes.

For all his spectacular self-assurance at the piano, Liszt was astonishingly insecure as a composer. He would rework old compositions repeatedly, fussing with this detail or that, never quite sure if he had yet got it right. And, worse, he often took advice from random acquaintances, offered gratuitously, and then reworked pieces again. Almost every one of his major compositions went through stages of creation, and a number of works actually exist in two or more different “finished” forms.

Liszt sketched both of his piano concertos— almost simultaneously—in 1839 (and in the case of the E-flat concerto, he drew on a thematic sketch that went back to 1830, when he was only nineteen years old). At that point they were surely conceived as showpieces for his own talents as a traveling virtuoso; if he had actually finished and performed them then, they would no doubt have been much different in character than they finally turned out. As it was, the pressure of touring caused him to put both works aside for a decade until he had settled in Weimar and given up the vagabond life of the international concert star to devote himself to composition and conducting.

For many years it has been stated as an absolute fact that Liszt’s scores in the late 1840s and early 1850s were, to varying degrees, orchestrated by his assistant Joachim Raff (1822-1882). Raff was an extremely fluent and prolific composer eleven years Liszt’s junior. In 1875—the year before Brahms’s First Symphony—he was widely regarded as the greatest living German symphonist. His compositions, running to some 200‑plus opus numbers, are largely forgotten today, although all of his twelve symphonies can be heard on recent recordings, along with a virtuosic but unbelievably bland piano concerto. The symphonies have their attractions, but they will probably never be performed with great frequency.

For a long time it was impossible to determine exactly how large a role Raff played in these works because the manuscript sources were in East Germany and the Soviet Union. But scholars generally assumed that he prepared the first orchestral version of the Liszt concertos and that Liszt might have modified them to some degree later on. After the end of the Cold War, it became possible to get access to all of the sketches and manuscripts of the First Piano Concerto and other works that Liszt wrote when Raff was with him in Weimar, so, the problem has been approached anew, with striking results.

Why did scholars believe that Raff orchestrated Liszt’s works? The idea was never even suggested until the 1890s, after both Liszt and Raff were dead. At that time Raff’s widow made the claim that her husband had been an invaluable assistant to Liszt, who (she claimed) knew almost nothing about orchestration. Jay Rosenblatt, a musicologist at the University of Arizona, studied all the sketches, drafts, and scores of the First Piano Concerto and demonstrated conclusively that Helene Raff’s story was false; she was making these claims with virtually no basis in fact. (Raff did, on a handful of occasions, score parts of relatively unimportant pieces composed in haste for occasional use, but not for publication—and even then Liszt almost immediately crossed out many of Raff’s thick, overblown instrumentations.)

In fact, the idea that Raff had more experience as an orchestrator than Liszt was ludicrous when examined closely. Liszt was a full decade older than Raff and had had an opera performed with his own orchestration when he was only thirteen years old. And he had more opportunities to hear, and learn from, his own work in performance long before Raff had similar experience.

So the legend of Liszt’s learning how to handle an orchestra from a younger and (as we see him today) far less imaginative composer should be definitively thrown out as the wishful thinking of Raff’s widow, trying to draw some attention to the work of her late husband.

Nonetheless, even after Liszt “finished” the E-flat concerto in 1849, he clearly was in no rush to present it to the public. Perhaps he still entertained lingering doubts about its effectiveness. He made some slight adjustments to the score during the ensuing years. Finally he wrote to Hans von Bülow on May 12, 1853, “I have just finished reworking my two concertos and the Totentanz in order to have them copied definitively.”

The E-flat concerto underwent still another (quite minor) round of retouching after the first performances. A comparison of the various versions reveals that, in general, Liszt simplified the work for the soloist—hard as that may be to believe when we hear its final shape! In his days as a traveling virtuoso, he was willing to risk all in compositions that approached the limits of human speed and endurance. Later on, he found ways of making the virtuosity less an end in itself and more a servant of poetic expression—which is not to say that any of this music is ever easy!

The concerto has garnered a remarkable number of unpleasant reviews over the years. The conservative critic Eduard Hanslick wrote scathingly, dubbing Liszt’s work the “Triangle Concerto” because the composer was so bold as to give that instrument a prominent role in the scherzo section. This was surely grasping at straws; Beethoven, after all, used the triangle for the “Turkish music” in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, and Mozart before him had employed similar effects. Liszt’s sin, evidently, was to use the triangle for a purely musical effect, not to suggest musical exoticism. As if to forestall criticism for this boldness, Liszt added to his score the cautionary note, “The triangle is here not to be beaten clumsily, but in a delicately rhythmical manner with resonant precision”—good advice for any percussion instrument! Liszt was not deterred from inventing new percussion effects by the attacks of such as Hanslick; rather, he vowed to “continue to make use of them, and I think I shall yet win for them some effects that are little known.”

More daring and difficult for most audiences was that he cast his work in a framework that seemed to destroy the traditional fast-slow-fast relationship of movements within a concerto. Actually the “traditional” movements have been subsumed into the overall span of the entire work, which is unified by the transformation of themes into a well-organized whole, reworking the assertive opening figure in many ways and translating the poetic Adagio theme into the march-like finale. No less a musician than Béla Bartók hailed the E-flat concerto as “the first perfect realization of cyclic sonata form.”

The strain on audience expectations seems to have been intense until listeners grew accustomed to the work. In Boston the redoubtable but very conservative Dwight’s Journal of Music declared (in 1868) “anything more awful, whimsical, outré, and forced than this composition is unknown; anything more incoherent, uninspiring, frosty to the finer instincts we have hardly known under the name of music.” Yet by the 1890s the Boston Symphony was regularly programming the work as a featured attraction when it toured, suggesting that audiences had long since come round and accepted the views of an English critic in 1903 that the E‑flat concerto was “quite the most brilliant and entertaining of concertos.” The same writer added, “No person genuinely fond of music was ever known to approach it with an unprejudiced mind and not like it.”

Franz Liszt:Totentanz for Piano and Orchestra

Liszt planned Totentanz in 1838, completed a first stage in 1849, with revisions in 1853 and 1859. He published his definitive version in 1865, the year of the first performance, which took place in The Hague on April 15. The soloist was Hans von Bülow, to whom the score is dedicated, and the conductor was J.J.H. Verhulst. In addition to the piano solo, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, cymbals, triangle, tam‑tam, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.

Like the two piano concertos proper, Liszt’s Totentanz germinated late in the 1830s, during his years of travel and virtuoso showmanship. While in Italy with his mistress, the Countess Marie d’Agoult, he visited Pisa, and there saw the famous medieval painting of The Triumph of Death by Orcagna. It made a tremendous impression on him, portraying the female figure of Death flying towards her victims carrying a scythe. Some souls are ascending to heaven, but many are dragged down to the flames of hell. Deciding to compose a work on the subject of death, Liszt chose the plainsong melody Dies irae, which is sung as part of the Requiem Mass. The Dies irae is a dramatic and horrific description of the terrors confronting mankind at the Last Judgment. As a counterpart to the visual imagery of Orcagna, it offered to the composer a tune of striking profile that would have an immediate, dramatic effect.

Totentanz has been described sometimes as Liszt’s third piano concerto. Certainly it belongs with the two concertos in both brilliance and musical substance. Yet it has never become so well known. Perhaps its relative brevity prevents it from being programmed more often. Nonetheless it remains one of Liszt’s strongest works, both for the clarity of its structure (one of his few examples of variation form) and the poetic imagination he brings to the elaboration of the Dies irae, the various countermelodies, and the variety in the scoring.

The work begins with a darkly colored “dance of death,” with diminished harmonies underlying the first phrase of the plainsong melody sounded forth heavily in the bass instruments, like the most somber of funeral processions. An electrifying splash of piano cadenza announces that this work will be a showpiece of virtuosity despite its serious framework. Soon the full theme has been stated and we are off on a series of character variations in different tempi and moods, with striking touches of orchestration, fugal sections, and pianistic fireworks. Though some of the piece is Liszt in his most diabolist mood, there are romantic touches as well, and the canny range of moods contributes to making this brief concerto-like work one of its creator’s most dramatic works.

Béla Bartók:Concerto for Orchestra

Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (then part of Hungary but now absorbed into Romania), on March 25, 1881, and died in New York on September 26, 1945. The Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned in the spring of 1943 by Serge Koussevitzky through the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky. Bartók composed the work between August 15 and October 8, 1943; Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the first performances on December 1 and 2, 1944. The Concerto for Orchestra is scored for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets (with a fourth trumpet marked ad lib.), three trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, bass drum, tam-tam, cymbals, triangle, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 36 minutes.

Early in the 1940s, with a world war raging in Europe, Bartók immigrated to the United States, where he had a position doing research on recordings of eastern European folk songs housed at Columbia University. But he was concerned that his position there was only temporary. Worse, he had begun to have a series of irregular high fevers that the doctors were unable to diagnose, but which turned out to be the first indication of leukemia. By early 1943 the state of his health and the fact that Americans showed little interest in his music brought him to a low point. He insisted that he never wanted to compose again. The medical men were unable to do much, yet powerful medicine that spring came not from a doctor, but rather from a conductor—Serge Koussevitzky.

Violinist Joseph Szigeti had told Koussevitzky of Bartók’s situation, warning him that the proud composer would not accept anything remotely smacking of charity. Koussevitzky therefore offered work: $1000 to write a new orchestral piece with a guarantee of a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The commission was a tonic for the ailing composer; at once he was filled with ideas for a new composition, which he composed in just eight weeks—August 15 to October 8, 1943—while resting under medical supervision at a sanatorium at Lake Saranac in upstate New York.

Bartók described the premiere in Boston as excellent; Koussevitzky hailed the Concerto for Orchestra as the “best orchestra piece of the last 25 years,” and demonstrated his confidence in the score by putting it in the BSO program again only three weeks after the premiere performances! In the program book for the premiere, Bartók wrote that his work traced “a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.” He chose the title Concerto for Orchestra because his work was designed to spotlight by turn each of the sections and most of the principal players.

The Concerto opens with a soft and slightly mysterious introduction laying forth the essential motivic ideas that eventually explode in an Allegro vivace. The second movement is entitled “Game of Pairs,” a simple but original chain-like sequence of folk-like melodies presented by pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes and trumpets. The third movement, Elegia, is one of those expressive “night music” movements that Bartók delighted in.

The Intermezzo interrotto (Interrupted Intermezzo) alternates two very different themes: a rather choppy one first heard in the oboe, then a flowing, lush, romantic one that is Bartók’s gift to the viola section. Later there is a sudden interruption in the form of a vulgar, simple-minded tune that descends the scale in stepwise motion: it is Bartók’s parody of a theme from Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, which so incensed him when he heard the American premiere conducted by Toscanini on a radio broadcast that he created this nose-thumbing burlesque.

The last movement begins with characteristic dance rhythms in an equally characteristic Bartokian perpetuo moto that rushes on and on, throwing off various motives that gradually solidify into themes, the most important of which appears in the trumpet and turns into a massive fugue, complicated and richly wrought, but building up naturally to a splendidly sonorous climax.

 

 

 

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