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Home , Samuel Dushkin, Symphony of Psalms

SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Fabien Gabel, conductor

April 1-2, 2017

CLAUDE DEBUSSY Printemps Très modéré Modéré

IGOR STRAVINSKY Concerto in D Major Toccata Aria I Aria II Capriccio Jeff Thayer, violin

INTERMISSION

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 70 Allegro Moderato Presto Largo Allegretto

MAURICE RAVEL Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloé

Printemps CLAUDE DEBUSSY Born March 25, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye Died March 25, 1918,

Printemps, the first orchestral work by Debussy to find a place in the repertory, has an extremely curious history. In 1884 Debussy won first place in the Prix de Rome competition. That award, the highest possible honor for a French composition student, involved several years of study in Rome. But Debussy, 22 years old and a very difficult young man, hated Rome and resented the time he had to spend away from Paris–he spent the minimal possible amount of time in residence at the Villa Medici in the years 1885-86. One of the requirements of the Prix de Rome was that the winners had to send back to the French Academy a series of envois, works composed in Rome that showed their progress. Debussy, never one to put up with rules, made life difficult for the Academy. He wrote three works for chorus and orchestra, and two of these mysteriously vanished: the score to Printemps (for wordless chorus and orchestra) was burned “accidentally” in a fire at the printer’s shop, while the score to Zuleima was “lost”; only the score to The Blessed Damoiselle survived. Some feel that the young composer, dissatisfied with his own work and reluctant to have it seen, destroyed the scores himself. But Debussy continued to feel some affection for Printemps, and in 1904 he published a version of it for four-hands and wordless chorus. Then in 1912 Debussy’s friend Henri Büsser, working under the composer’s supervision, prepared an orchestral version that eliminated the chorus but retained the piano four-hands as part of the . This final version was first performed in Paris on December 7, 1913, nearly 30 years after the music was originally composed. While he was at work on Printemps in 1886, Debussy wrote to a friend, describing his intentions: “I should like to express the slow and miserable birth of beings and things in nature, their gradual blossoming, and finally the joy of being born into some new life. All this is without a program, for I despise all music that has to follow some literary text that one happens to have got hold of.” The idea of life gradually springing into being is a fertile one, and it has inspired music as different as the first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony and Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. Though it lacks the savage power of those two scores, Debussy’s Printemps makes the same transition from primal beginnings to joyous rebirth. The inspiration for this music appears to have been not a “literary text” but a painting: Botticelli’s Primavera, in which dancers celebrate the coming of spring by dancing on the grass as flowers bloom in the trees over their heads. This painting would later inspire another piece of music, the first movement of Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano, but, unlike Respighi, Debussy does not write “pictorial’ music – his Printemps is a more abstract evocation of the idea of rebirth in the spring. Printemps is in two movements, both built on the same thematic material. The first movement, marked simply Très modéré, begins with the main idea announced simply by solo and piano. (Does this flute solo anticipate the beginning of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, still eight years in the future?) The falling-and-rising shape of this opening theme then evolves through a series of variants in different tempos and meters. The second movement, of somewhat livelier character but still marked only Modéré, continues this evolution: the original theme-shape is eventually transformed into a rhythmic dance and finally builds to a great climax, full of energy and bright color that mark the rebirth of life in the spring.

Violin Concerto in D Major Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum Died April 6, 1971,

Stravinsky had no interest in virtuosity for its own sake. Of his more than 100 compositions, only one is a concerto for solo instrument and full symphony orchestra, and he was at first reluctant even to write this one. In the fall of 1930, shortly after completing his Symphony of , Stravinsky visited his friend and publisher Willy Strecker in Wiesbaden. Strecker wanted Stravinsky to compose a concerto for the young violinist Samuel Dushkin, but Stravinsky was wary: “I hesitated because I am not a violinist and I was afraid that my slight knowledge of that instrument would not be sufficient to enable me to solve the many problems which would necessarily arise in the course of a major work especially composed for it.” But Stravinsky was so impressed by Dushkin’s skill and general culture that he took on the commission and consulted frequently with the violinist in the course of composition. Some years later, Dushkin left a reminiscence of working with Stravinsky, and it included an account of a seminal moment in the composition of this concerto: During the winter I saw Stravinsky in Paris quite often. One day when we were lunching in a restaurant, Stravinsky took out a piece of paper and wrote down [a] chord and asked me if it could be played. I had never seen a chord with such an enormous stretch, from the E to the top A, and I said “No.” Stravinsky said sadly “Quel dommage.” [“What a pity”] After I got home, I tried it, and to my astonishment, I found that in that register, the stretch of the eleventh was relatively easy to play, and the sound fascinated me. I telephoned Stravinsky at once to tell him that it could be done. When the Concerto was finished, more than six months later, I understood his disappointment when I first said “No.” This chord, in a different dress, begins each of the four movements. Stravinsky himself calls it his “passport” to that Concerto. Stravinsky wrote the first two movements during the spring of 1931 in Nice and completed the concerto that September at a summer estate in Isère. The first performance took place the following month, on October 23, 1931; Dushkin was soloist, and Stravinsky conducted the Berlin Radio Orchestra. Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto has become virtually a locus classicus of his neo-classical style: its movement titles come right out of a Bach suite, and the spirit of that composer’s violin music hovers over much of this concerto. Stravinsky himself was aware of this, and 30 years after composing the concerto he offered his perspective on this: “The subtitles of my Concerto – Toccata, Aria, Capriccio – may suggest Bach, and so, in a superficial way, might the musical substance. I am very fond of the Bach Concerto for Two , as the duet of the soloist with a violin from the orchestra in the last movement of my own Concerto may show. But my Concerto employs other duet combinations too, and the texture is almost always more characteristic of chamber music than of orchestral music.” The title of the first movement – Toccata – originally denoted brilliant keyboard music (it means “touched” in Italian), and so its use with violin music may seem anomalous. Here it points to a brilliance in the writing for both violin and orchestra. The concerto opens with the “passport” chord, its bright, stinging sound forming a brisk call to order. A profusion of thematic ideas follows, and Stravinsky quickly combines some of these in some very impressive (and graceful) contrapuntal writing. An absolutely literal recapitulation leads to a brief coda and the firm close. Both middle movements are titled Aria, though they are quite different in character. In Aria I, the “passport” chord leads to some subdued two-part writing for solo violin and the entire section; the central episode presses ahead energetically before the opening material returns and the movement evaporates in a wisp of sound. Aria II brings the most “Bachian” moments in this concerto: the “passport” chord introduces some writing for the violin that sounds as if it might have come almost verbatim from the opening movement of Bach’s sonatas for unaccompanied violin. This was clearly special music for Stravinsky, who takes care to remind the soloist repeatedly to play cantabile, even stressing at one point that the music should be dolce (an unusual marking from a composer who was characteristically reserved in his performance markings). The Capriccio bursts to life with the sound of the familiar chord, then races ahead on spirited writing for the soloist. This movement is episodic, almost mercurial in its quick leaps between moods and themes. Near the end come several remarkable passages. The first is the extended duet between soloist and concertmaster that Stravinsky felt had been inspired by the Bach Double Concerto. A one-measure grand pause introduces the coda, whose surging, sputtering rhythms and rapid alternation of bowed and pizzicato notes looks ahead 14 years to the first movement of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Stravinsky may have had no use for conventional virtuosity (this concerto significantly has no cadenza), and he may have referred to the technical demands here as “relatively tame,” but no violinist who has ever attempted to play this music would agree with him. Its rhythmic energy, wide skips, rapid string-crossings and complex chording make this a formidable challenge for any soloist. This concerto breathes the spirit of Bach in many ways; like Bach before him, Stravinsky wrote the music he wanted and in the process left the performer to solve some extremely difficult technical problems.

Symphony No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 70 Born September 25, 1906, St. Petersburg Died August 9, 1975, Moscow

Since the time of Beethoven, writing a Ninth Symphony has proven a daunting prospect for composers. Not only is Beethoven’s Ninth an unmatchable work, but there seems to be something fatal about Ninth Symphonies: Beethoven, Schubert, Dvořák, Vaughan Williams and Sessions wrote only nine, and Bruckner died while writing his Ninth. Mahler in particular was superstitious about writing a Ninth Symphony and regarded it as a potentially deadly act. After completing his Eighth, Mahler composed Das Lied von der Erde; once that was done and he had begun his Ninth, he claimed that Das Lied was a vocal symphony and so he had beaten the curse and was writing what would actually be his Tenth. Mahler had reason to be concerned: his Ninth turned out to be his final completed work, and he died before hearing a note of it. Given this heritage, it is not surprising that composers have been wary of writing a Ninth Symphony. The circumstances under which Shostakovich wrote his seemed in particular to call for a grand Ninth Symphony in the Beethovenian mold, for he wrote it in the summer of 1945, only months after the defeat of Nazi Germany. His two wartime symphonies – the Seventh and Eighth – had been huge, heroic works, and it was widely expected that Shostakovich would complete the trilogy with a Victory Symphony. But, as so often happened, what the Soviet government expected from Shostakovich and what it got were two different things. When first performed in Leningrad on November 3, 1945, Shostakovich’s Ninth came as a surprise, for the music seemed defiantly anti-heroic: instead of celebrating the Russian victory, Shostakovich returned to the nose-thumbing playfulness that had marked the music of his youth. During the six weeks it took Shostakovich to write the Ninth Symphony, he and composer Dmitri Kabalevsky had relaxed each evening by playing piano versions of Haydn’s symphonies. Some of the spirit of those symphonies – with their classical poise, energy and humor – makes itself felt in the Ninth Symphony. Shostakovich himself said of the Ninth: “It is a merry little piece. Musicians will love to play it, and critics will delight in blasting it.” He did not know how right he was. The official reaction was at first confused, then angry. Soviet critic Israel Nestyev described the Ninth as “a playful and fanciful trifle” and then denounced it for its “cynical and evil grotesquerie, a tone of merciless joking and ridicule, a cold irony of stylization.” Three years later, at the infamous General Assembly of Soviet Composers in February 1948, Stalin’s cultural czar Andrei Zhdanov ripped into Shostakovich’s Ninth for its “expressionistic tenseness, neuroticism, escape into a region of abnormal, repulsive and pathological phenomena.” Today it is hard to understand how anyone could have said such things about this music. Perhaps the Russian government resented Shostakovich’s failure to produce a Victory Symphony, perhaps the tensions of the Cold War had something to do with it, perhaps the humorlessness of Soviet officialdom did too. In any case, over the last 70 years Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony has proven a consistent crowd-pleaser and has become one of his most frequently performed symphonies. Though it is clearly a symphony in form, the Ninth feels more like a divertimento: a multi-movement work, light in character and written to entertain and please. The score calls for a large orchestra, but Shostakovich keeps textures lean and clear; his orchestration emphasizes woodwinds, with a particularly prominent part for solo . The opening Allegro is in traditional sonata form, complete with the exposition repeat of the classical symphony. (This is the only one of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies to call for an exposition repeat.) Strings state the first theme immediately, while the playful second belongs to solo piccolo, accompanied by and percussion; the movement concludes on a brassy restatement of the opening idea. Longest and most serious of the five movements, the Moderato has something of the character of a slow waltz, and its lonely, icy atmosphere results in part from its many wistful woodwind solos and the writing for dark, muted strings. The final three movements are connected. The brief Presto features a dancing and an acerbic solo whose crisp calls cut through the music’s busy textures. Its energy exhausted, this movement flows into the Largo, which functions as a bridge between the two fast movements. Here mock-heroic brass fanfares alternate with a mournful bassoon recitative until a saucy solo for that same instrument leads the way into the rondo-finale. This movement is full of fizzing energy: Shostakovich punctuates its climax with a swaggering circus-band march, and then a blistering coda sends the Ninth Symphony scurrying to its madcap conclusion.

Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloé Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrennes Died December 28, 1937, Paris

In 1909 the impresario Serge Diaghilev brought the to Paris, and that summer he asked Ravel to write a score for the company. The French composer, then 34, could not have had more distinguished collaborators: Diaghilev oversaw the project, Mikhail Fokine was choreographer, Leon Bakst designed the sets, and Vaclav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina would dance the lead roles. But it proved a stormy collaboration. For the subject, Diaghilev proposed the story of Daphnis and Chloé, a pastoral by the Greek Longus (fourth or fifth century B.C.). Translated into French in 1599 by Pierre Amyot, the tale had already attracted composers: Jacques Offenbach wrote an operetta called Daphnis and Chloe in 1870, and the young Debussy had thought of writing a ballet based on the same tale. It tells a gentle love story: a young man and woman, abandoned as infants by their respective parents and raised by a shepherd and a goatherd, meet and fall in love. She is kidnaped by pirates but rescued by the intercession of the god Pan, and the ballet concludes with general rejoicing. That story seems simple enough, but quickly the collaborators were at odds, as Ravel made clear in a letter to a friend: “I must tell you that I’ve just had an insane week: preparation of a ballet libretto for the next Russian season. Almost every night, work until 3 a.m. What complicates things is that Fokine doesn’t know a word of French, and I only know how to swear in Russian. In spite of the interpreters, you can imagine the savor of these meetings.” Part of the problem was that while Bakst had conceived an opulent oriental setting for the ballet, Ravel imagined “a vast musical fresco, less thoughtful of archaism than of fidelity to the Greece of my dreams, which identifies quite willingly with that imagined and depicted by late eighteenth-century French artists.” Paintings of the verdant sets suggest that Ravel’s conception – described by Madeline Goss as “a typically eighteenth-century atmosphere of Watteau shepherdesses” – finally prevailed. Once the libretto was settled, Ravel set to work. He composed the score in a quiet villa in Fontainebleau, working with such concentration that he was unaware of a flood that pushed the Seine over its banks and to the sill of the room where he was working. The premiere, conducted by at the Châtelet Théâtre on June 8, 1912, had an indifferent success: the production was under-rehearsed, the participants were still bickering and the dancers had problems with the 5/4 meter of the concluding Danse générale. However, for those who could see beyond the problems of the premiere, the ballet had an overwhelming impact. The poet and dramatist Jean Cocteau, then only 23, was among them: “Daphnis et Chloé is one of the creations which fell into our hearts like a comet coming from a planet, the laws of which will remain to us forever mysterious and forbidden.” Ravel planned the ballet with great care, saying that “The work is constructed symphonically according to a strict tonal plan, by means of a small number of motifs, whose development assure the symphonic homogeneity of the work.” Many of these motifs are introduced in the first few measures of the ballet: the muted horns’ gently swaying figure, the solo flute’s high melody, a soaring theme for solo horn that will be associated with Daphnis and Chloe themselves – all these will evolve and return in many forms across the hour-long span of the ballet. More immediately impressive is the sumptuous sound of this music; Ravel makes inspired use of his extravagant forces, which include not just a huge orchestra, but a wordless chorus, wind machine, fourteen different percussion instruments and offstage wind-players. Ravel drew two suites from the ballet for concert performance, and the Second Suite has become by far the more famous. As the Second Suite begins, Chloé has been rescued from the pirates by the god Pan. Now it is night and rivulets drip from rocks in the darkness. Rippling and echo the sound of these rivulets as Daphnis awakes and the sun comes up. This glorious music grows to an overwhelming climax as sunlight floods the stage. Chloé appears, and the joyful lovers are united. Told that Pan had saved her in memory of the nymph Syrinx, Daphnis and Chloé now act out that tale in pantomime, and Daphnis mimes playing on reeds, a part taken in the orchestra by an opulent flute solo. The two collapse into each other’s arms and pledge their love. The stage is filled with happy youths, whose Danse générale brings the ballet to its thrilling conclusion. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger

PERFORMANCE HISTORY by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist Debussy's two-movement work, Printemps, originally orchestrated by Henri Busser, has never before been performed at these concerts. In contrast, Gyorgy Pauk was the soloist when David Atherton conducted the first (and only, until now) presentation of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto in San Diego during the 1984-85 season. The first performance of Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony by the San Diego Symphony was given under the direction of Earl Bernard Murray in the summer of 1961. David Lockington conducted the most recent of the orchestra's four performances of the work during the 2006-07 season. Earl Bernard Murray also led the orchestra in its first performance of the Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2 in the 1965-66 season. The relative primitiveness of those days must be appreciated. I remember that the conductor, at the last minute, finally found a bass flutist who could fly down from San Francisco to play the important role for that instrument in Ravel's suite. It was hard raising and maintaining a symphony orchestra in those earlier years, but the orchestra played it seven more times over the seasons, most recently under Stefan Sanderling in the 2005-06 season – with our own bass flutist.