MNO Program Notes

 

Program 1 | Program 2 | Program 3 | Program 4

Program 1 ~ October  26, 4:00 p.m. ~ Pinnacle Presbyterian Church

 

“Romantic Masterpieces“

**Raff:  Festmarch

**Henselt:  Piano Concerto (Janice Weber, piano)

**Raff:  Symphony No. 10

 

OK, I will say it up front—the famous Rachmaninoff Prelude and Tchaikovsky Symphony are two special guests in this concert of supposedly unfamiliar music!

 

How can that be? Well, keep reading...

 

This program is a departure for us. Over the first five seasons of our existence, we have never done a program consisting exclusively of 19th Century music.  So for the first time, we have music written in the 19th Century that completely fits the MusicaNova mission.

 

But here is the curious part: if I had announced this very program in 1900, patrons of the New York Philharmonic or the Chicago Symphony would not have batted an eye. The Raff  Symphony was more popular than any of the Brahms symphonies in America between the time of its composition in 1880 and around 1900, and the Henselt was considered as much a part of the repertoire as the Schumann Concerto, and was played about as often. 

 

So what happened? Even the composers' names are virtually unknown today; string players may know the lovely Raff Cavatina, which still appears occasionally on concert programs; pianists with even a slight interest in the history of their instrument know the name Henselt, but few have ever played a note of his music.

 

At the time of his death in 1882, Joachim Raff was considered one of the great composers of his time. Yet his decline in favor was rapid and complete after his death, and by World War I his music was played no more than it is today.  The reasons for this decline are many. A terrific website about Raff is maintained at www.raff.org, and they have a fascinating article on the decline of his reputation on the site.  History and fashion can be cruel and arbitrary, and the story of Raff's decline shows that vividly.

 

Was Raff a good composer?  The answer is, he was very good indeed. He wrote a lot—over 300 opus numbers—and the quality varies, but at his best he is the equal of any composer who ever lived. He had a great gift for melody; his orchestration was superb, imaginative, original and gorgeous; his sense of structure was astonishing; and his music is totally distinctive. Once you know it, his fingerprints are on every bar.

 

Because record companies often look for new things to record, a great deal of his music has made it to disc; the symphony we are doing has been commercially recorded four times. It says something for the timidity of concert promoters that this has not led to any concert performances at all.  In it, you hear all the Raff fingerprints. The tonal strategy is unusual; the key of the piece is supposedly F minor but only the first movement is in that key. The second is in A major, the third is in C#minor, and the last in F major. It tells you a lot about the composer that he wrote a slow movement in C minor and then rejected it—and part of the reason for writing a new one in C#minor was that he thought the succession of keys going FACF was too boring! This slow movement also contains the most famous melody Raff ever wrote. About half-way through an already gorgeous movement, the bassoon starts to play a plaintive song that sounds awfully familiar—it’s Tchaikovsky‘s Symphony No. 5! Raff wrote his tune about 8 years before Tchaikovsky. With its amazing gossamer scherzo, beautiful and teasing opening movement (which depicts aimless wandering in the most attractive way), and a rousing finale, this work absolutely deserves a place in the concert repertoire.

 

Adolf von Henselt‘s Concerto is a fascinating document as well. It was written in 1844 and was premiered by no less than Clara Schumann. Henselt himself was one of the greatest pianists of his time, but he was a terribly nervous performer, and it is likely that he never played the work publicly. After the premiere, it quickly established itself. By 1855 the first great American pianist, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, was playing it in Boston (not very well, apparently). Liszt played it; many of his students played it; Rachmaninoff and Scriabin performed it; Godowsky and Busoni played it; as late as early in the 20th century, the teacher of Claudio Arrau, Martin Krause (himself a Liszt pupil) taught it to all of his students, as a preparation, he said, for Chopin‘s concertos (a rather odd sequence in my opinion, as the Henselt is harder to play than either Chopin concerto). Egon Petri, the great Dutch pianist and Busoni student, played it into the 1930‘s. After he stopped playing it, it was not revived in concert until Raymond Lewenthal played it in the 1970's. Lewenthal also recorded it, it has also been recorded by Michael Ponti and Marc Andre Hamelin.  I have not been able to locate any public performance with a professional orchestra since 1975.


The piece became a repertoire staple because it has everything—great tunes, an exciting piano part, wonderfully written and conceived accompaniment, and great climaxes to each movement.  Although I do not know the reason for its decline in popularity, I suspect that part of the reason is the advent of recordings.  Once it became standard for well-known pianists to record their repertoire, the Henselt was forgotten—and I suspect it is because their performances might have been fine for the concert hall but would not have worked on recording, where every note is heard and every mistake noted. Henselt's passagework is distinctive and often tricky, and it would be very easy to substitute similar sounding but easier notes for the ones he wrote—and I suspect that some of the older players did just that! (We know that Gottschalk did. One reviewer said that he “substituted the difficult runs Henselt wrote in the middle section of the first movement with his own usual easy ones“—ouch!)

 

Given the obscurity of the man and his music, it is interesting to note that Henselt's influence on piano music is profound. At about the age of 30 he moved to St. Petersburg, became friends with the Czar, and soon was in charge of all piano instruction in the Russian Empire! Piano students throughout Russia played his etudes and concerto, and his distinctive writing for the piano was adopted by all the composers of the Russian school.  The layout of his music is virtually identical to that of Rachmaninoff or Scriabin. In fact, I have described his music as “Rachmaninoff without the chords“, because his harmonic language is from an earlier time. Rachmaninoff paid tribute to this Concerto in his own most famous piece of music. The Prelude in C#minor—the piece once so ubiquitous that Ernest Newman referred to it as “It“—starts with a quote from the opening of the Henselt!

 

 Program 2 ~ January 4, 4:00 p.m. ~ Tempe Arts Center

 

“Forbidden Music—Extraordinary Survivals“

 **Aldo Finzi:  L'Infinito

**Korngold:  Die Kathrin (selections from the opera)

**Tubin:  Symphony No. 4 

 

“Extraordinary survivals“—none of this music should be here.  In our series of forbidden or suppressed music, we have unearthed a number of remarkable pieces, but few have come as close to total extinction as these three works.

 

Aldo Finzi was considered a composer of great promise in Italy during the 1920's and early 30's. Despite the alliance with Hitler, the fascist regime in Italy was not initially anti-semitic. In fact, one of Mussolini's important deputies was a Jewish politician named Aldo Finzi! However in 1938, the Fascist regime instituted a series of anti-Semitic laws. The composer was forced underground; his music disappeared from concert programs and the catalogue of his publisher Ricordi. During the war, he at one point bribed an SS officer with some of his manuscripts in return for his freedom when he was imprisoned. Most of his music was lost, some of it only found in the last decade! After the huge success of another Finzi Symphonic Poem that we premiered in 2005, we offer the American premiere of his beautiful depiction of Infinity.

 

While Erich Wolfgang Korngold was in Hollywood writing the film score for “Robin Hood“, the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany occurred. The other members of Korngold's family had left just days before the event, abandoning the family home. The Nazis arrived and ransacked the place, but Korngold's publisher, Josef Weinberger, found out about the raid and showed up at the house. He managed to save the manuscript of the recently completed but as yet unpublished opera, Die Kathrin, from certain destruction. Were it not for his courageous actions and quick thinking in the moment, the music to Korngold's last completed opera would have been lost. 

As it is, the opera  is among the composer's least  known works. It has only been staged twice, and has never been performed in America. However, just last season, Renee Fleming sang the gorgeous “Letter Aria“ at the Proms in London, and the performance and its appearance on You Tube has made many more aware of the beautiful music in this opera. Its day may finally come.

 

As for Eduard Tubin’s Symphony No. 4, the survival of this score may be the most bizarre story of all.  In 1944 Russian forces bombed the Estonian National Theatre. The entire building was destroyed. Tubin had sent the score to be kept there in preparation for the scheduled premiere about a month later. The director of the Theatre had stored the score in the safe. When looking through the rubble, it was discovered that although the safe was smashed, the score had survived intact—the only article in the entire theatre that had escaped unharmed!

 

What survived was one of the great symphonies of the Twentieth Century. Few outside of Estonia or Sweden had heard of Tubin until his countryman Neeme Jarvi recorded and performed his works in other countries. Today, his reputation is very strong, but performances of his works in America are still rare.

 

 Program 3 ~ March 15, 4:00 p.m. ~ Tempe Arts Center

 

“The Search for Supreme Beauty“

**McPhee:  Nocturne

**Eröd:  Viola Concerto  (Toby Appel, viola)

**Alwyn:  Symphony No. 4

 

The three composers on this program are all musicians who are seekers after beauty. The search in each case was very different: Eröd, through a kind of personal spiritual journey; Alwyn, through the expression of various artistic media—he was a painter and poet as well as a composer; and McPhee, through his discovery of the music and people of Bali, where he found brief happiness in an otherwise unhappy life.

 

Each of these works aims for a comprehensive beauty–it is not just beautiful orchestration, or beautiful melodies or harmonies;  the works themselves express beauty as a totality of the experience.

 

Colin McPhee was a bundle of contradictions. He was a Canadian who hated Canada, moved from there at the age of 20 but never gave up Canadian citizenship; a homosexual whose happiest years were the few he spent married to a woman; and a person who longed to free himself from the style of his greatest success, the Two-Piano Concerto, Tabu-Tabuhan, yet he never really tried to work outside the stylistic parameters of that extraordinary work. All of his symphonic writing bears the effect of his years spent in Bali, where he wrote a definitive book on Balinese music. To this day he is a household name in Bali. After leaving and taking up residence in New York he wrote Tabu-Tabuhan, his masterpiece. His later music, such as the Nocturne we will play, takes over where the earlier work left off, invoking the unreal beauty of the Balinese Gamelan orchestra with modern western instruments.

 

The Viola Concerto by Ivan Eröd was part of the composer's return to writing tonal music after a period in which he composed several atonal scores. The tension between tonal and atonal elements in the first two movements is resolved in the serene  finale, whose simplicity and straightforward expression is a kind of coming to peace with this new style. And it is one of the most beautiful 5 minutes of music written in the last years of the 20th Century.

 

William Alwyn had the idea of writing a cycle of four symphonies, which would be conceived of as all part of the same great tonal plan. The last of these works was this remarkable culmination of the series. The skills developed from writing these other works and the many movie scores Alwyn composed to keep himself solvent are shown in the conciseness of the writing, the glorious orchestration, and the charming melodic invention. The composer said that the expression of beauty was his only reason for existing. In this piece he expressed beauty as perfectly as he ever did.

 

 

Program 4 ~ May 31, 4:00 p.m. ~ Pinnacle Presbyterian Church

 

“Latin Color“

Villa Lobos:  Bachianas Brasileras No. 4

Rodrigo:  Concerto Pastorale (Alexander Viatzosvez, flute)

*Ficher:  Symphony No. 6

 

“Latin Color“ is a very generalized term for this eclectic program.  The works include a nationalist score written by Brazil's most famous composer (with a tribute to a great German master, and composed in France), a concerto for an Irish flutist (James Galway) by a Spanish composer, and the premiere of a symphony by an Argentinian composer who was born in Russia, and whose music always reflected a tension between his Russian and Jewish roots, and his adopted Argentinian home. 

 

Heitor Villa Lobos‘ Bachianas Brasileras exploit a tension between the folk elements of Brazilian song and dance, and contrapuntal Baroque manner and forms. But as Bach lends himself to many treatments, the mixture here is both original and extraordinarily attractive. The 4th Bachianas is one of the most symphonic of the series, with a rousing conclusion.

 

Joaquin Rodrigo's Concerto Pastorale for many years represented the pinnacle of technical achievement on the flute—the first movement is still among the most difficult works ever written for the instrument. James Galway recalls that he asked Rodrigo for a virtuos work, but when he saw how far Rodrigo had gone, he almost regretted the request! The style uses all the color and skill we know from Rodrigo's popular works for guitar and orchestra, and it also has a haunting slow movement.

 

Jacobo Ficher was regarded as one of the foremost composers in Argentina during his lifetime, but his reputation never spread beyond the borders of his country. He wrote 11 symphonies, which demonstrate a wonderful neo-classical humor and brightness, along with a great skill in developing musical effects and creating powerful emotional landscapes within an accessible idiom.