SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA LING CONDUCTS PROKOFIEV and DVOŘÁK a Jacobs Masterworks Concert Jahja Ling, Conductor

SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA LING CONDUCTS PROKOFIEV AND DVOŘÁK A Jacobs Masterworks Concert Jahja Ling, conductor December 6, 7 and 8, 2019 NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Suite from The Snow Maiden Introduction Dance of the Birds Cortège Dance of the Tumblers SERGE PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26 Andante – Allegro Andantino Allegro ma non troppo Wei Luo, piano INTERMISSION ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Op. 88 Allegro con brio Adagio Allegretto grazioso Allegro ma non troppo Suite from The Snow Maiden NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Born March 18, 1844, Tikhvin Died June 21, 1908, Lyubensk In 1873 the Russian writer Alexander Ostrovsky completed a fairy-tale play that he called Snegurochka, or “The Snow Maiden.” Set in ancient Russia, it tells of a Snow Maiden (the love-child of spring and winter) who is unable to fall in love. Eventually she is granted the gift of love, and the world blooms around her, but when the sun’s rays strike her, she melts and her despairing lover throws himself in a lake. The play, written in verse, seemed to cry out for music, and Tchaikovsky composed 19 pieces of incidental music for its first production in Moscow on May 23, 1873. A few years later, Rimsky-Korsakov fell in love with Ostrovsky’s play, saying that upon reading it, “My mild interest in the ancient Russian customs and heathen pantheism flamed up.” He asked (and received) Ostrovsky’s permission to turn the play into an opera and composed The Snow Maiden in 1880-81. At the premiere in St. Petersburg on February 10, 1882, the part of Grandfather Frost was sung by the Russian bass Fyodor Stravinsky, just a few months before the birth of his famous son Igor. Rimsky himself assembled a suite of four orchestral excerpts from The Snow Maiden. The first two movements come from the opera’s Prologue. The Introduction is in fact the opening music from the opera, and it pictures icy winter gradually giving way to spring. The Dance of the Birds follows quickly: the birds complain that they are still cold, and Spring orders them to dance to warm themselves – Rimsky gives their chirping and twittering to the woodwinds. The Cortège may be mis-named, for there is nothing funereal about this music. It comes from Act II, when Tsar Berendey must issue a decree to resolve a dispute between lovers. The court assembles to this brief orchestral march, sometimes known as The Procession of Tsar Berendey. The famous Dance of the Tumblers, also known as The Dance of the Clowns, comes from Act III. At a celebration in the forest, Tsar Berendey asks for festive dances, and this is one of them. Rimsky based the dance on an old Russian folksong. It opens with a rousing flourish and then alternates two ideas: the first presented by solo oboe, the second by the violins. Rimsky simply repeats these two themes throughout the brief dance, which offers excitement, bright colors, and non-stop energy right through the breathless close. Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26 SERGE PROKOFIEV Born April 23, 1891, Sontsovka Died March 5, 1953, Moscow There were several quite different sides to the young Prokofiev. One was the enfant terrible who took a puerile delight in outraging audiences with abrasive, ear-splitting music. When the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1913 inspired a salvo of jeers and hisses, Prokofiev walked on stage, bowed deeply, and sat down to play an equally assaultive encore. Yet there was another Prokofiev, one so different that he seemed to have come from a separate planet altogether. This was a quite traditional composer, drawn to the form and balance of another era. This Prokofiev could compose a work like the beautifully-proportioned Classical Symphony of 1917, a gracious nod to the style of Haydn. When he was able to balance these two creative urges, Prokofiev wrote some of his best music, and the Third Piano Concerto is one of his finest scores. Prokofiev had been planning for some time to write what he called “a large virtuoso concerto” when he finally found time during the summer of 1921, only a few months after his thirtieth birthday. His ballet Chout had been successfully premiered in Paris in May of that year (it would shortly outrage London audiences), and for the summer Prokofiev took a cottage in Entretât in Brittany. There, on the coast of France, he pulled together themes he had been collecting over the previous decade, some of them dating back to his days as a student in Czarist Russia. The concerto took shape across that summer, and he was able to weld this variety of thematic material into a completely satisfying whole, a score that fuses the strength and saucy impudence of the young Prokofiev with his penchant for classical order. Completed in October, the concerto was first performed on December 16, 1921, with Prokofiev as soloist and Frederick Stock conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. One of the most impressive features of the Third Piano Concerto is the range of its color. The piano part – extraordinarily difficult – demands of the performer mechanistic and almost brutal blocks of chords one moment, the most delicate passagework the next. The orchestral writing is just as varied, and Prokofiev enlivens his tonal palette here with such unexpected instruments as castanets, tambourine and bass drum. For all its steely strength, this concerto begins with deceptive restraint. First one and then two clarinets lay out the innocent opening idea, which is briefly taken up by the strings before the music leaps ahead at the Allegro. The piano makes a slashing entrance here, suddenly breaking into the flurry of orchestral motion, and this opening episode pounds its way directly into the second subject, for woodwinds and pizzicato strings over clicking castanet accompaniment. A vigorous extension of these materials brings a surprise: the music rises to an early climax on the reticent tune that had opened the concerto. Solo piano leads the way back to the “correct” themes of the Allegro, and the movement drives to a muscular close. There is no separate cadenza here – or anywhere – in this concerto. The second movement is in theme-and-variation form. Solo flute lays out the lilting and nicely-spiced theme, which extends over several phrases. In the five variations, the piano usually occupies the foreground while the orchestra accompanies with lines woven from bits of theme. Particularly striking is the fourth variation, in which – Prokofiev notes – “the piano and orchestra discourse on the theme in a quiet and meditative fashion.” This variation is in fact marked Andante meditativo, and Prokofiev specifies that individual phrases should be delicatissimo, dolce, espressivo and freddo (cold). At the close of the movement, the complete original theme makes a striking return beneath a lacy piano filigree, and the movement concludes with the unusual combination of a quiet piano chord accompanied only by the stroke of a bass drum. The finale begins with the dry sound of bassoon and pizzicato strings stamping out what will be the main theme of the movement, but the piano has already intruded before this theme can be fully stated. A second subject, sung by the woodwinds in the wistful manner of the very opening of the concerto, is also quickly violated by the piano, which has what Prokofiev describes as “a theme more in keeping with the caustic humor of the work.” But this flowing second theme “wins”: it swells to an expansive statement that becomes the soaring climax of the entire concerto. The long coda grows out of the movement’s pointillistic beginning, stalking along at first and then gradually gathering power and speed. The ending is brilliant. Piano and full orchestra come hammering home on repeated chords that seem to create a halo of light, shimmering and finally burning through the hall. It is a perfect conclusion to a concerto that appeals to our minds and our senses – and finally satisfies both. Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Op. 88 ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK Born September 8, 1841. Muhlhausen, Bohemia Died May 1, 1904, Prague The summer of 1889 was an unusually happy and productive time for Dvořák. At age 48, he found himself a successful composer with a large and devoted family. Earlier that year, his opera The Jacobin had been premiered, and now he took his family to their summer retreat at Vysoka in the countryside south of Prague. There, amid the rolling fields and forests of his homeland, Dvořák could escape the pressures of the concert season, enjoy the company of his wife and children, and indulge one of his favorite pastimes – raising pigeons. Dvořák also composed a great deal that summer. He completed his Piano Quartet in E-flat Major on August 10, writing to a friend that “melodies pour out of me” and lamenting “If only one could write them down straight away! But there – I must go slowly, only keep pace with my hand, and may God give the rest.” A few weeks later, on August 25, he made the first sketches for a new symphony, and once again the melodies poured out of him: he began the actual composition on September 6, and on the 13th the first movement was done. The second took three days, the third one day, and the entire symphony had been sketched by September 23. The orchestration was completed on November 8, and Dvořák himself led the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in Prague on February 2, 1890. From the time Dvořák had sat down before a sheet of blank paper to the completion of the full score, only 75 days had passed.

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