SAN DIEGO SYMPHONYORCHESTRA a JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Jahja Ling, Conductor

SAN DIEGO SYMPHONYORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Jahja Ling, conductor February 5, 2017 DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Festive Overture, Opus 96 SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 1 Vivace Andante Allegro vivace Lang Lang, piano INTERMISSION PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 Andante sostenuto Andantino in modo di canzona Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato Finale: Allegro con fuoco Festive Overture, Opus 96 DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Born September 25, 1906, St. Petersburg Died August 9, 1975, Moscow Early in November 1954, the directors of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow – who were planning a concert to celebrate the 37th anniversary of the Communist Revolution – suddenly realized that they needed a brief curtain-raiser for that concert. They turned to Shostakovich, who was a musical consultant for the Theatre, and asked him to write that piece. Faced with an immediate deadline, Shostakovich wrote as fast as he could, and his manuscript – the ink still wet – was taken by courier to the Theatre, where it was copied, rehearsed and premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra under Alexander Melik-Pashayev on November 6, 1954. The music had not even existed a few days before. The directors wanted a piece to open a celebration concert, and that is exactly what they got. The overture springs to life on a series of ringing trumpet fanfares, and at the Presto it zips ahead on a saucy clarinet solo. Soon cellos and horns announce the overture’s main theme, a broad, open-spirited tune, and this develops with a great deal of energy. The climax brings back the opening trumpet fanfares, and the overture rushes to its close in a blaze of sound. This music is rousing enough by itself, but to insure that it made a maximum impact Shostakovich authorized optional extra brass instruments – four horns, three trumpets and three trombones – to reinforce the climaxes. The Festive Overture may have been written to commemorate an anniversary of the Communist Revolution, but its title is neutral enough for it to be used on any happy occasion. And it has been – it remains one of Shostakovich’s most frequently performed and recorded works. Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 1 SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Born April 1, 1873, Oneg, Novgorod Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills Rachmaninoff was one of the greatest pianists who ever lived (his many recordings confirm this), and his talent was evident early: he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1891 at the age of 18 with the highest honors for his playing. But Rachmaninoff had already been seduced by the desire to compose, and he began to write music while still in his teens. During the summer of 1890, when he was 17, Rachmaninoff began work on a piano concerto at his family’s summer estate at Ivanovka. He returned the following summer to complete the concerto, and he was soloist when the conservatory orchestra performed the first movement on March 29, 1892. A few months later he composed the famous Prelude in C-sharp minor, a piece whose popularity would haunt him the rest of his life. He was still only 19 years old. The First Piano Concerto was quickly published, but Rachmaninoff came to recognize problems in his youthful effort and resolved to revise it. That revision, however, had to wait a long time: Rachmaninoff did not get around to it until the fall of 1917. As the communist revolution tore apart the country outside the window of his Moscow apartment, Rachmaninoff – then 44 – completely restructured the final movement and revised the orchestration. To a friend he commented: “I have revised my First Concerto; it is really good now. All the youthful freshness is there, and yet it plays itself so much more easily…It is incredible how many stupid things I did at the age of 19. All composers do it.” The Piano Concerto No. 1, in classical concerto form, is unmistakably the work of Rachmaninoff: the big romantic tunes, the dramatic gestures and the extraordinarily difficult writing for piano were all there from the very beginning. The first instant of the opening Vivace sets the tone of this youthful concerto: a ringing brass fanfare introduces the solo piano, which spirals downward in a brief cadenza. The principal themes of this movement, both announced by the violins, are yearning and dark, and their progress is interrupted by brilliant passagework from the soloist. There are in fact several cadenzas in this first movement, though the long principal cadenza comes just before the Vivace coda that propels this movement to its firm close. Solo horn opens the Andante, and the strings’ dark entrance at first obscures the fact that this movement will be in D Major. Most of it belongs to the solo piano, with the orchestra becoming an equal partner only in the closing minutes. The concluding Allegro vivace returns to the manner of the opening movement. Another fanfare-figure opens this movement, and the pianist quickly answers: the orchestra’s passages are in 9/8 here, but the piano responds in phrases set in 12/8, and Rachmaninoff will alternate those two meters throughout. The virtuoso writing for soloist is interrupted by a calm central interlude, built on the violins’ big tune in E-flat Major. The opening material returns, and at the end – transposed into F-sharp Major – the music rushes to a knock-out close fully worthy of the 18-year-old virtuoso who wrote it. Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg The Symphony No. 4 dates from the most tumultuous period in Tchaikovsky’s difficult life, and its composition came from a moment of agony. When he began work on the symphony in May 1877, Tchaikovsky had for some years been tormented by the secret of his homosexuality, a secret he kept hidden from all but a few friends. As he worked on this score, one of his students at the Moscow Conservatory – a deranged young woman named Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova – declared her love for him. Knowing that such a prospect was hopeless, Tchaikovsky put her off as gently as he could, but she persisted, even threatening suicide at one point. As fate would have it, Tchaikovsky was also at work on his opera Eugen Onegin at this time and was composing the scene in which the bachelor Onegin turns down the infatuated young Tatiana, to his eventual regret. Struck by the parallel with his own situation – and at some level longing for a “normal” life with a wife and children – Tchaikovsky did precisely the wrong thing for some very complex reasons: he agreed to Antonina’s proposal of marriage. His friends were horrified, but the composer pressed ahead and married Antonina on July 18, 1877. The marriage was an instant disaster. Tchaikovsky quickly abandoned his bride, tried to return, but fled again and made what we would today call a suicide-gesture. He then retreated to St. Petersburg and collapsed into two days of unconsciousness. His doctors prescribed complete rest, a recommendation Tchaikovsky was only too happy to follow. He abandoned his teaching post in Moscow and fled to Western Europe, finding relief in the quiet of Clarens in Switzerland and San Remo in Italy. It was in San Remo – on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean and far from the chaos of his life in Moscow – that he completed the Fourth Symphony in January 1878. The Fourth Symphony has all of Tchaikovsky’s considerable virtues – great melodies, primary colors and soaring climaxes – and in this case they are fused with a superheated emotional content. The composer’s friends guessed, perhaps inevitably, that the symphony had a program, that it was “about” something, and Tchaikovsky offered several different explanations of the content of this dramatic music. To his friend Serge Taneyev, Tchaikovsky said that the model for his Fourth Symphony had been Beethoven’s Fifth, specifically in the way both symphonies are structured around a recurring motif, though perhaps also in the sense that the two symphonies begin in emotional turmoil and eventually win their way to release and triumph in the finale. For his patroness, Madame Nadezhda von Meck, who had supplied the money that enabled him to escape his marriage, Tchaikovsky prepared an elaborate program detailing what his symphony “meant.” One should inevitably be suspicious of such “explanations” (and Tchaikovsky himself later suppressed the program), but this account does offer some sense of what he believed had shaped the content of his music. The symphony opens with a powerful brass fanfare, which Tchaikovsky describes as “Fate, the inexorable power that hampers our search for happiness. This power hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles, leaving us no option but to submit.” The principal subject of this movement, however, is a dark, stumbling waltz in 9/8 introduced by the violins: “The main theme of the Allegro describes feelings of depression and hopelessness. Would it not be better to forsake reality and lose oneself in dreams?” This long opening movement (it is nearly half the length of the entire symphony) has an unusual structure: Tchaikovsky builds it on three separate theme-groups which evolve through some unusual harmonic relationships. Like inescapable fate, the opening motto-theme returns at key points in this dramatic music, and it finally drives the movement to a furious close: “Thus we see that life is only an everlasting alternation of somber reality and fugitive dreams of happiness.” After so turbulent a beginning opening, the two middle movements bring much-needed relief.

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