Conductor
Bruno Ferrandis

featuring
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Violin

VASKS: Sala (Symphonic Elegy for Orchestra)
TCHAIKOVSKY: Concerto for Violin
RACHMANINOFF: Symphonic Dances

May 12, 13, 14, 2007
Wells Fargo Center
$27 - $50

We enter the fourth season of the Magnum Opus project with music director Ferrandis conducting a newly-commissioned work by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, and the powerful Symphonic Dances, one of Rachmaninoff’s last compositions. The incomparable Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg performs Tchaikovsky’s D major violin concerto. The piece was pronounced “impossible to play” by the violinist to whom the composer first presented it, but Salerno-Sonnenberg, a master musician at the height of her powers, belies that notion, and will dazzle you with her passionate interpretation.

Peteris Vasks: Sala
Music is the most powerful of all the muses, since it reaches the divine most easily. Yes, music is an abstraction, but sounds are able to express the spirit. That cannot be expressed in words. All around me the flesh is spoken about, but I want to shout: Where is the spirit, the soul? Souls are as overgrown as the jungle. That is why in my sounds I try to uphold a beam of light.

—Peteris Vasks

Peteris Vasks was born just after World War II in Aizpute, a small town in western Latvia. The political and military tug-of-war between the Germans and the Soviets that had played out violently on Latvian soil had created a complex cultural climate. While the strong 19th century Germanic influence on Latvia’s musical institutions (Liszt, Schumann and Wagner all spent time in Riga) remained in place, annexation by the Soviets in 1940 had already begun to shift the cultural focus. At the same time, a folk revival movement was already underway. Vasks absorbed all of these musical legacies and has forged his own musical voice. Initially influenced by the avant-garde mentors Lutoslawski and Crumb, Vasks successfully shifted the formalist approach to achieve an emotionally immediacy more reminiscent of Shostakovich and a spiritual identification not unlike Arvo Pärt. Much of his music focuses on the complex relationship between nature and man, with evocative portrayals of beauty and tragedy, all seen through the lens of the geography and tumultuous history of his homeland.

Vasks studied bass and composition at the Lithuanian State Conservatory and the Latvian State Conservatory in the 1960s and 70s. Today, he is the most prolific and influential composer from Latvia, with his works featured on dozens of widely released string quartets have been widely performed and recorded, includling a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. Music Dolorosa (1983) for string orchestra, composed as a lament for the death of his sister, is perhaps Vasks’ best known work and has been recorded multiple times. Vasks’ Symphony No. 3 saw its premiere last year by the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra in Finland.

Vasks world premiere of Sala (Symphonic Elegy for Orchestra) in January of this year by the Marin Symphony, was a commission through Kathryn Gold’s innovative Magnum Opus initiative, designed to provide nine new orchestral works over five years. The piece will receive its third performance by Oakland East Bay Symphony.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born at Votkinsk, district of Vyatka, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He composed the Violin Concerto at Clarens, Switzerland, in March 1878, completing it on April 11. A few days later he replaced the original Andante with the present Canzonetta. The first performance was given by Adolf Brodsky at a Vienna Philharmonic concert conducted by Hans Richter on December 4, 1881. In addition to the solo violin, the concerto calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.

Twice Tchaikovsky suffered the indignity of having one of his major concertos rejected by the musicians for whom they were intended. With both of his most famous and popular concertos—the Piano Concerto No. 1 in Bflat minor, and the Violin Concerto in D—he found a different musician to perform them and start their paths to worldwide renown. In 1875 the composer’s close friend Nikolai Rubinstein, the intended dedicatee of the piano concerto, sadly assured Tchaikovsky that the piece disgusted him from beginning to end. Three years later a similar scene occurred when Tchaikovsky brought the completed Violin Concerto—hot off the presses—to the great violinist and teacher Leopold Auer.

Auer regretted that Tchaikovsky had not shown him the work before committing it to print, for he found places where, for technical reasons, the solo part needed adjustment, and he had his doubts over its worth as a whole. The composer finally brought out a new edition dedicated to the young violinist Adolph Brodsky, who gave the premiere performance. (It is worth adding that both Rubinstein and Auer later made amends to Tchaikovsky for their first impressions, playing his concertos frequently and brilliantly. Auer, in particular, helped make Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto one of the most popular works of its kind in the world by teaching it to his students, including Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, and others.)

The response to the world premiere in Vienna, despite Brodsky’s valiant sponsorship of the work, was not at all that Tchaikovsky might have wished. The underrehearsed orchestra, out of sheer timidity, played everything pianissimo. And the conservative dean of Viennese music critics, Eduard Hanslick, found little to like in the piece. He claimed that Tchaikovsky was “obsessed with posturing as a genius, lacking discrimination and taste,” and that in his new concerto, the violin is “tugged about, torn, beaten black and blue.” Worst of all was the finale, which “transports us to the brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian church festival. We see a host of savage, vulgar faces, we hear crude curses, and smell the booze....[T]here may be compositions whose stink one can hear.”

A century later we can be amused and astonished by Hanslick’s animadversions. For the Tchaikovsky concerto quickly entered the international repertory, ranking in popularity with the violin concertos of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. As in his First Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky opens with a winning melody we’ll never hear again. This gracious beginning turns suspenseful, in preparation for the soloist’s first entrance. The violin part does indeed have technical fireworks—of the kind that evidently frightened Hanslick—but there is also plenty of opportunity for lyrical, singing themes.

The slow movement is a second thought, composed after Tchaikovsky and a violinist friend had played through the concerto for the first time (with a different second movement) in April 1878. In the present Canzonetta, the solo violin is a gem providing lovely melodies for which the accompaniment is the beautifully detailed setting. Tchaikovsky links his slow movement directly to the finale (quite possibly recalling Beethoven’s concerto in this matter). Here Tchaikovsky indulges cheerfully in nationalistic themes, hinting at (if not actually quoting) folk melodies. The energy and verve are utterly winning. By now, we are entirely used to composers like Bartók, who exploit folk material far more “authentically” than Tchaikovsky; from the distance of a century, his musical folklore even seems perhaps a little sanitized, though the urbane and “civilized” Hanslick clearly didn’t find it so. For us, though, it provides a close that is hearty, vigorous, and inspiriting.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF: Symphonic Dances
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born in Semyonovo, Russia, on April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943. He composed his Symphonic Dances at Orchard Point, Long Island, during the summer of 1940. The score is dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who gave the first performance on January 3, 1941. It calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, harp, piano, timpani, triangle, tambourine, bass drum, side drum, tamtam, cymbals, xylophone, bells, glockenspiel, and strings.

Most of Rachmaninoff’s last years were devoted to touring as a concert pianist and committing his works to records. Between 1936 and his death in 1943, he wrote only one new large composition, the Symphonic Dances. While sketching the work he intended to entitle the three movements “Morning,” “Midday,” and “Evening”—possibly intended as an analogy with youth, maturity, and death—but in the end he dropped any programmatic references.

Possibly because he was composing in America, the home of jazz, Rachmaninoff decided to write an extended part for saxophone. He consulted his friend Robert Russell Bennett (Broadway’s leading orchestrator for four decades) to discuss the saxophone part. Bennett’s recollections give us a charming glimpse of the usually dour composer:
...he played over his score for me on the piano and I was delighted to see his approach to the piano was quite the same as that of all of us who try to imitate the sound of the orchestra at the keyboard. He sang, whistled, stamped, rolled his chords, and otherwise conducted himself not as one would expect of so great and impeccable a virtuoso.
At the premiere critics labeled the Symphonic Dances “a rehash of old tricks,” putting a cloud over the work for a number of years. Lately it has come to be recognized as one of Rachmaninoff’s finest works.

As so often in his music, Rachmaninoff refers to the chants of the Russian Orthodox church and quotes the Roman Catholic Dies irae as well. The score also gave him an opportunity to come to terms with the most catastrophic failure of his life. The premiere of his First Symphony in 1897 must have been indescribably bad, to such an extent that the manuscript was put aside and then apparently lost in the Russian Revolution. The failure so deeply affected the young composer that he gave up composition entirely for several years, and only after extensive therapy and hypnosis did he return with one of his most successful works, the Second Piano Concerto.

Evidently he still recalled that old failure in 1940, since the first movement coda of the Symphonic Dances quotes the main theme of the First Symphony—music he was sure no one would ever hear again—but turns the darkly somber melody into something more gently resigned, as if all that he had produced in the meantime had somehow laid to rest the bogey of that first bitter failure.

A brief introduction hints at the prevalent rhythm leading to the principal material, elaborated through varied harmonies and orchestral colors. The main section dies away in a reversal of the introduction, and the middle section begins wonderfully with woodwinds alone. A gently rocking figure becomes the background to the ravishing melody in the alto saxophone. The return to the opening material comes by way of a developmental passage based on the principal themes. When C minor brightens to C major, the coda converts the dark, minor, chantlike theme from Rachmaninoff’s “lost” First Symphony into something altogether consoling in the major, a broad melody in the strings against brightly kaleidoscopic figures elsewhere in the orchestra.

Though written in 6/8 time, the second movement is a waltz—but not one of those lilting carefree Viennese waltzes that seduces the listener into joie de vivre. It is melancholy, oddly chromatic, turning strange melodic corners. The vinegary tunes recall the end of an era, much as Ravel’s La Valse does, and as Stephen Sondheim was later to do in his score to A Little Night Music.

The last movement draws together two of Rachmaninoff’s favorite sources for thematic inspiration: the chant of the Russian liturgy and the “Dies irae” melody—unlikely material to find in a dance! The chant tunes are subjected to rhythmic syncopations that change their character considerably. The “Dies irae” appears in the outer sections of the movement, sometimes plain, sometimes cleverly disguised. A important new theme first heard in the English horn is a rhythmically disguised version of the Russian chant to the words “Blessed be the Lord”; it forms the basis for an exhilarating dance passage. Shortly before the end of the piece, Rachmaninoff introduces a new chantrelated melody in clarinets and violins over bassoons and trumpets, the remainder of the orchestra being silent. He derived this from section of his 1915 choral All Night Vigil. But it is perhaps also the composer’s own hymn of thanks for having the strength to finish this, his last score. He made his thoughts still clearer at the end of the manuscript, which he signed with the words, “I thank thee, Lord.”

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)