MARIINSKY ORCHESTRA Valery Gergiev Music Director and Conductor
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UMS PRESENTS MARIINSKY ORCHESTRA Valery Gergiev Music Director and Conductor Behzod Abduraimov Piano Saturday Evening, January 24, 2015 at 8:00 Hill Auditorium • Ann Arbor 33rd Performance of the 136th Annual Season 136th Annual Choral Union Series Photo: Mariinsky Orchestra with Valery Gergiev; photographer: Natasha Razina. 19 UMS PROGRAM Sergei Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26 Andante — Allegro Tema con variazioni Allegro, ma non troppo Mr. Abduraimov INTERMISSION Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 4 in c minor, Op. 43 Allegretto poco moderato WINTER 2015 Moderato con moto Largo — Allegro Endowed support provided by the William R. Kinney Endowment Fund and by the Catherine S. Arcure Endowment Fund. Media partnership provided by WGTE 91.3 FM and WRCJ 90.9 FM. Special thanks to Tom Thompson of Tom Thompson Flowers, Ann Arbor, for his generous contribution of lobby floral art for this evening’s concert. Special thanks to Kipp Cortez for coordinating the pre-concert music on the Charles Baird Carillon. Maestro Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra record for the Mariinsky Label and also appear on Universal (Decca, Phillips). VTB Bank is the Principal Partner of the Mariinsky Theatre. Sberbank and Yoko Nagae Ceschina are the Principal Sponsors of the Mariinsky Theatre. Mariinsky Foundation of America is the North American Sponsor of the Mariinsky Theatre. Maestro Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra appear by arrangement with Columbia Artist Management, LLC, New York, NY. MARIINSKY ORCHESTRA 20 BE PRESENT NOW THAT YOU’RE IN YOUR SEAT… The two giants of Russian music during the Soviet era — Prokofiev and Shostakovich — may appear to have a great deal in common at first sight, but in reality they were rather different in temperament and outlook. Prokofiev, 15 years older, was educated before the Bolshevik revolution and then spent the better part of two decades in the West. Worldly and sophisticated, he could appear nonchalant. After his return to the Soviet Union, he strove to shed his early bad-boy image and become the greatest composer of the country. In this endeavor, he found a formidable rival in Dmitri Shostakovich, who had come of age after the revolution and had never known another political reality. In this concert, we encounter both composers as young men in their late 20s or early 30s — Prokofiev scoring one of the big successes of his emigration years, Shostakovich attempting to make a major symphonic statement, only to be forced to withdraw it and consign it to the drawer of his desk for a quarter of a century. Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, for the Piano Concerto No. 3. Op. 26 (1917–21) Prokofiev wrote the bulk of the Sergei Prokofiev concerto in 1921 while summering in Born April 15,1891 in Sontsovka, Ukraine Brittany, on the northwest coast of France. Died March 5, 1953 in Moscow, Soviet Union He had been spending more and more time in Europe, connecting with influential WINTER 2015 UMS premiere: William Kapell with Russian expatriates in Paris including the Philadelphia Orchestra under the the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev baton of Thor Johnson, 58th Annual May and the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Festival, May 1951 in Hill Auditorium. Frustrated with the conservative tastes and career obstacles presented by the US, SNAPSHOTS OF HISTORY…IN 1921: Prokofiev eventually settled in Europe • The Communist Party of China is officially founded in 1922. This arrangement also proved • The first BCG vaccination against tuberculosis is given • Adolph Hitler becomes Führer of the Nazi Party temporary; in 1935, Prokofiev became the • White Castle hamburger restaurant opens in only major émigré artist to repatriate in Wichita, Kansas, the foundation of the world’s first the Soviet Union. fast food chain • Luigi Pirandello writes Six Characters in Search of Even as he drew closer to Europe, an Author Prokofiev kept American audiences in mind as he composed his Third Piano Months after the Bolshevik Revolution Concerto. He constructed an inviting and of 1917, Prokofiev left Russia on an open- virtuosic showpiece, one that could hope ended passport granted by the cultural to repeat the success of Rachmaninoff’s commissar. With World War I raging to Third Piano Concerto from 1909, also the west, Prokofiev traveled east through written for a US tour. Prokofiev performed Siberia and Tokyo before entering the US in the concerto many times in the course of San Francisco, where he was suspected of his wide-ranging concert tours, including being a spy. He struggled to restart his career premieres in Chicago and New York in in New York, but he did have some luck in 1921 and Paris in 1922. He also made the Chicago, where the resident opera company first recording in 1932 with the London agreed to mount The Love for Three Oranges Symphony, forever preserving his incisive and unsentimental approach to the score. and the symphony claimed premiere rights 21 UMS When Prokofiev assembled the Third Symphony No. 4 in c minor, Op. 43 Piano Concerto, he incorporated various (1936) themes composed before he left Russia. Dmitri Shostakovich The introductory passage, sketched in Born September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg, Russia 1917, has the flavor of Russian folk music, Died August 9, 1975 in Moscow, Soviet Union with a solo clarinet intoning a modal melody. The fast body of the movement UMS premiere: Detroit Symphony begins with the strings exchanging rising Orchestra conducted by Gunther Herbig, figures in constant motion, building to October 1989 in Hill Auditorium. the piano’s entrance in a sparkling reinterpretation of the clarinet figures. SNAPSHOTS OF HISTORY…IN 1936: The concerto’s wry streak emerges in the • Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind is first published second theme, accentuated by the bony • Construction of the Hoover Dam is completed click of castanets. • Steve Reich, American composer, is born Prokofiev developed this gift for • President Franklin D. Roosevelt attends the dedication of Thomas Jefferson’s head at Mount Rushmore ironic music early on, as demonstrated • Start of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge in the Soviet Union by the theme of the second movement, first drafted in 1913. The plodding The publication in 1979 of the book first statement grows into a rich set of Testimony, the Memoirs of Dmitri variations, led off by a solo episode from Shostakovich, as related to and edited by the piano. The second and third variations Solomon Volkov brought a new dimension to are driving and manic, while the fourth, in an understanding of the life, thoughts, words, a tempo marked “Andante meditativo,” is and works of the man who was arguably the haunting and sincere. The fifth variation most important Soviet-era composer of the elides into a restatement of the theme, 20th century. In many quarters, however, WINTER 2015 peppered with double-time decorations serious doubts have been cast on the from the piano. reliability of Volkov’s revelations, even those The finale begins with another concerning Shostakovich’s intense anti- Russian-inflected theme, this one adapted Soviet sentiments. In regard to the latter, it is from 1918 sketches for a string quartet. difficult to imagine that the composer would The woodwinds add a lyrical strain, and not have been extremely bitter toward the then the piano offers an ominous melody government that had caused him untold pain over oscillating accompaniment, which by twice censuring him publicly, and that he Prokofiev described as “more in keeping would not have disclosed these feelings to with the caustic humor of the work.” After a confidant. The question seems to be, did a drawn-out and dreamy elaboration, the Volkov really serve as a sounding board for muscular opening figure returns for a the composer’s deepest feelings, and if so, is final surge. the translation in English from its Russian text good and true? Program note by Aaron Grad. According to Volkov, a critic and musicologist, his relationship with Shostakovich began when he asked the composer to provide a preface for a book he — Volkov — was writing on young Leningrad composers. Shostakovich MARIINSKY ORCHESTRA agreed and met with Volkov on several 22 BE PRESENT occasions. As Volkov explains, when the eccentric, tuneless, leftist…” were some book was published in 1971, Shostakovich of the epithets heaped on an opera that was incensed that severe cuts had been was actually not as extreme as his opera made in his preface without consultation that preceded it: The Nose. Shostakovich either with him or Volkov. Bristling at this was understandably devastated by the latest attack by the Soviet officialdom, viciousness of this unexpected attack. Shostakovich became determined to Here he was, a veritable hero in his land by reveal to the world his version of the virtue of his First Symphony, composed events he had witnessed and experienced as a graduation exercise at the Petrograd during the course of his 50-year career. Conservatory, and then of two subsequent “I must do this, I must,” Volkov quotes the symphonies — the Second, dedicated composer as saying. “You must continue to the October Revolution, the Third, what has begun.” subtitled “May First,” the holiday of the By 1974, after an extended period working classes. Both the Second and of interview, Volkov had completed the Third Symphonies fit perfectly into the book and had sent the manuscript to the party line, its music glorifying the hope West, knowing that it would have been of oppressed peoples with exuberant, impossible to have it published in the triumphal marches and, in each, a Soviet Union. At what appears to be their choral ending proclaiming the ultimate last meeting, Shostakovich extracted a nationalistic fervor. Now, in 1936, the hero written agreement from Volkov that the vanquished.