Romanian Concerto

Brahms’ Second Symphony is one of those works that is as satisfying for an orchestra to play as it is for the audience to experience. Every note of every instrument seems to contain musical DNA of the whole. The bass part, for instance, is so well written that by itself, it is evocative of all the other voices, even when played in isolation. CRAIG BROWN, NCS DOUBLE BASS Romanian Concerto GYÖRGY LIGETI BORN May 28, 1923, in Transylvania, Romania; died June 12, 2006, in Vienna PREMIERE Composed 1951; first performance August 12, 1971, at the Peninsula Music Festival in Wisconsin OVERVIEW The son of Hungarian parents from Transylvania, György Ligeti spent his youth in Cluj, Romania, where he attended the city’s conservatory, continuing his musical studies in Budapest. In 1942, he was sent to a forced-labor camp, Hungary’s reluctant sop to Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism; the rest of his family was annihilated when the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944 as they fled from defeat in the Soviet Union. Following the war, Ligeti resumed his studies and, in 1950, joined the faculty at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest as a harmony teacher. Until his escape from Hungary in 1956, most of his published compositions were arrangements of Romanian and Hungarian folksongs and Roma (Gypsy) melodies, while his more serious works remained unpublished since they did not conform to the politicized Soviet-style strictures. Once Ligeti had settled in the West, his music changed dramatically. In the studios of the West German Radio in Cologne, he learned the techniques of serialism and electronic music, experimenting in both systems but ultimately rejecting both. His own freely atonal style concentrated on shifting instrumental colors and textures. The Romanian Concerto, however, belongs to Ligeti’s earlier Hungarian period. He writes: “In 1949…I learned how to transcribe folksongs from wax cylinders at the Folklore Institute in Bucharest. Many of these melodies stuck in my memory and led in 1951 to the composition of my Romanian Concerto. However, not everything in it is genuinely Romanian as I also invented elements in the spirit of the village bands. I was later able to hear the piece at an orchestral rehearsal in Budapest—a public performance had been forbidden. Under Stalin’s dictatorship, even folk music was allowed only in a ‘politically correct’ form, in other words, if forced into the straitjacket of the norms of socialist realism: major-minor harmonizations…were welcome and even modal orientalisms in the style of Khachaturian were still permitted, but Stravinsky was excommunicated. The peculiar way in which village bands harmonized their music, often full of dissonances and ‘against the grain,’ was regarded as incorrect. In the fourth movement of my Romanian Concerto there is a passage in which an F sharp is heard in the context of F major. This was reason enough for the apparatchiks responsible for the arts to ban the entire piece.” WHAT TO LISTEN FOR Romanian Concerto is a concerto for orchestra, reflecting the influence of Bartók and Enesco — two composers whose takes on indigenous music were quite different. From Bartók, Ligeti learned the importance of careful research into the authentic modes, melodies, sonorities, and rhythms of peasant music; from Enesco he borrowed the tradition of Roma fiddling, heard primarily in the cafés of Middle-European cities. In the first movement, one hears a modality and harmony that seems almost medieval in style, its harmonies built on open fourths and fifths. The following Allegro is a “contest” in which various small orchestral groups repeat a single folk melody. At the opening of the third movement, two Romanian mountain horns call to each other from a distance. Ligeti instructs the players to use natural tuning, which produces a slightly out-of-tune quality to those used to equal temperament. This is the most Bartók-like of the movements; the woodwind writing closely resembles that of the slow movement from Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and may have been composed in homage to Bartók. The final movement is a fiddling showcase à la Enesco. It concludes with a reprise of the horn duet, plus a single violin at the almost-inaudible extreme top of its range. INSTRUMENTATION Piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, percussion, strings Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35 ERICH KORNGOLD BORN May 29, 1897 in Brno, Czech Republic; died November 29, 1957, in Los Angeles PREMIERE Composed 1945; first performance February 15, 1947, St. Louis Symphony, Vladimir Golschmann conducting, Jascha Heifetz, violin OVERVIEW Erich Wolfgang Korngold is a representative of the last gasp of late Romanticism in Vienna. He never veered from this established idiom and never ventured into modernistic experiments. He began his career as a true child prodigy, whose works were performed in public in Vienna by the time he was 11 (although the fact that his father was the music critic of Vienna’s most prestigious newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, may have helped). By the time Korngold came to Hollywood in 1934, his “classical” compositions were regarded as superficial and irrelevant to the proponents of mainstream 20th- century modernism. But Hollywood adored him. Korngold saw film as the true successor to the operatic stage. His success as a composer of film music was phenomenal; two of his scores, Anthony Adverse (1936) and Robin Hood (1938), won Oscars. The film music scene in Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s was dominated by German and Austrian émigrés who had escaped Nazism. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Korngold once again took up his classical pen in 1945 to write his Violin Concerto, he dedicated it to an old family friend, the doyenne of the émigrés, Franz Werfel’s wife and Gustav Mahler’s widow, the legendary Alma Mahler. No less a master than Jascha Heifetz premiered the concerto. WHAT TO LISTEN FOR It is an amusing exercise, when listening to the concerto, to note how many themes and passages immediately call to mind the musical conventions we have come to associate with certain kinds of film action. We make these associations on the basis of countless hours of movie-going, during which the musical “language” has implanted itself in the subconscious — perhaps even into the collective unconscious — and controlled our emotional response. In the concerto, Korngold reworked music from his successful film scores, including Juarez (1939), Anthony Adverse (1936), Another Dawn (1937), and The Prince and the Pauper (1937). But the concerto is not all “movie music.” Korngold transforms the themes to conform to the concert conventions of the concertos of composers from Mendelssohn to Max Bruch. The technical and expressive demands, as well as the harmonies, surpass melodic clichés. Although it reflects the composer’s nostalgic attachment to fin-de-siécle Viennese Romanticism, even the most discerning 21st-century ears are eclectic and accepting, no longer trapped in the clutches of atonal dogma. Most important of all, Korngold’s writing for the violin is everything a soloist could dream of. The first movement’s main theme, from Another Dawn, is a multifaceted melody and an ancestor of the Star Trek theme. The more sentimental second theme is from Juarez. The development inhabits the violin’s stratosphere. The second movement is a rhapsodic romantic reverie on a theme from Anthony Adverse. As opposed to the sprawling melodies from the first movement, this one is surprisingly simple. Heating up the passion, Korngold uses a more expansive melody for the middle section. In the energetic, humorous finale, Korngold teases the listener by delaying an outright statement of the movement’s single theme, from The Prince and the Pauper. Instead, the soloist starts with a fanciful melody containing hints of the theme for a couple of minutes, until the soloist finally “pins it down.” INSTRUMENTATION Solo violin, piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celeste, strings Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 JOHANNES BRAHMS BORN May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna PREMIERE Composed 1877; first performance December 30, 1877, Vienna Philharmonic, Hans Richter conducting OVERVIEW Unsure of his ability to compose symphonies, Brahms took 14 years to finish his first, in 1876. Its critical and popular success, while far from overwhelming, gave him the confidence to try his hand at a symphony again, and this time with much greater assurance; it took him just a few months in the summer and fall of 1877 to compose his Second Symphony. The contrast between the two is analogous to that between Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Brahms spent the summer of 1877 in Pörtschach, an out-of-the-way village in the Austrian countryside, from where he wrote to Vienna’s chief music critic, Eduard Hanslick: “So many melodies fly about, one must be careful not to step on them.” The symphony’s sunny spirit — especially the last two movements — and relatively transparent orchestration harks back to the young Brahms of the two orchestral Serenades (1856-60) and has less of the dense orchestration that permeates much of Brahms’ symphonic writing. It induced one of the composer’s friends to exclaim: “It is all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine, and cool green shadows. How beautiful it must be at Pörtschach!” But true to Brahms’ nature, the symphony has its darker moments. Clara Schumann commented on the somber mood in parts of the first movement; and when a friend objected to the gloom and harshness of the trombones in the second movement, the composer replied that it reflects his habitual melancholy.

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