SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA a JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Markus Stenz, Conductor
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SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Markus Stenz, conductor March 3-5, 2017 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Leonore Overture No. 2, Op. 72 DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 99 Nocturne Scherzo Passacaglia Burlesque Augustin Hadelich, violin INTERMISSION LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 Allegro con brio Andante con moto Allegro Allegro Leonore Overture No. 2, Op. 72 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, originally titled Leonore, is doubtless the only opera in history to have four separate overtures. This tale of marital fidelity, political idealism and resistance to tyranny comes to its climax in a dark dungeon when the heroine Leonore prepares to sacrifice her life to protect her imprisoned husband Florestan from the evil Pizarro; the couple is rescued at the last minute by the arrival of the good minister Don Fernando. The opera took Beethoven 11 difficult years to complete, it went through three different versions and even then Beethoven was not completely satisfied. The story of the creation of its four overtures tells us much about his painful progress toward a final version of the opera. What we know today as the Leonore Overture No. 1 was drafted in 1807 for a proposed production of the opera in Prague. That performance never took place, and Beethoven discarded this overture, which was not performed until after his death. (At that point, it was published with the absurdly high opus number of 138, which is Beethoven’s last opus number.) At the premiere of Leonore in Vienna on November 20, 1805, the opera was preceded by the piece we know today as the Leonore Overture No. 2 (the music played on the present concert). It is a daringly original piece of music. Rather than writing the expected opera overture in sonata form, Beethoven wrote what is in effect a dramatic tone poem: composed of themes from Leonore, this overture offers a sequence of the opera’s most dramatic events. Unexpected in form and difficult for its performers, this overture excited a firestorm of criticism. And so for the revision of the opera performed four months later, Beethoven re-cast that overture: he rounded off some of its rough edges and provided the recapitulation of themes that No. 2 was missing. Now known as the Leonore Overture No. 3 (and now in sonata form), this was the overture that introduced the revised opera on March 29, 1806. But there remained a fatal problem with Beethoven’s Leonore overtures. The beginning of this most serious opera is surprisingly light in tone: the first scene shows the frothy infatuation of the young Marzellina with the new jailer’s assistant. Prefacing such a scene with either No. 2 or No. 3 is deadly. When the Leonore Overture No. 3 is used as the overture to the opera, that overture – in Donald Francis Tovey’s wonderful phrase – “annihilates the first act” of the opera. Long before Tovey made that observation, Richard Wagner had seen the same thing. He said that this music “is no longer an overture, it is the most grandiose drama in itself…Far from giving merely a musical introduction to the drama, this overture tells the story more completely and more stirringly than the ensuing, broken theatrical action.” Beethoven came to the same realization. For his third and final (1814) version of the opera, now renamed Fidelio, he gave up on writing an overture that in any way foreshadows the events of the opera and instead wrote an entirely new piece. His brief Fidelio Overture – a conventional curtain-raiser full of thrust and noble sentiment – makes a perfect lead-in to the first scene of the opera. Beethoven’s decision to write the Fidelio Overture has banished the three Leonore Overtures to the concert hall, where they have led varied careers. No. 1 is seldom performed, but No. 3 has become almost too popular: its dramatic music and formal balance have made it a concert favorite. That leaves – somewhat in limbo – the Leonore Overture No. 2, and it should be noted that many people prefer this version to the more familiar No. 3. It is rawer (some would say “bloodier”) than No. 3, and it is also closer to the violent events of the opera. Despite rough edges and formal imbalance, No. 2 offers music of stark power, and – perhaps more effectively than in the popular No. 3 – it brings certain moments of the opera to vivid life. After the powerful opening chords, descending string lines mirror the descent into the dungeon where the hero Florestan is held by Pizarro, and soon woodwinds sing a bit of Florestan’s great aria at the beginning of Act II, “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen,” a sad account of how far he has fallen from his happy early life. A long transition leads to the Allegro, with its rising-and-falling main theme, first announced here only by cellos. This develops at some length, then is interrupted by the sound of an offstage trumpet. In the opera, this signals the arrival of Don Fernando, who rescues Florestan and has Pizarro jailed, and its appearance in the overture was one of the things that bothered early critics. Another thing that bothered those critics was the lack of a recapitulation: in the Leonore Overture No. 2 Beethoven simply ignores classical form and concludes with the heroic music that – in the opera – signals the triumph of good over evil. Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 99 DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Born September 25, 1906, St. Petersburg Died August 9, 1975, Moscow During the summer of 1947, in the icy political atmosphere that followed military victory in World War II, Dmitri Shostakovich began what seemed an entirely “safe” composition. For years he had been an admirer of violinist David Oistrakh, and that summer – in the village of Kellomäki on the Gulf of Finland – he began a violin concerto for his friend. He sketched the first movement that July and completed it in November after returning to his teaching position in Moscow. The second movement, a scherzo, came quickly and was done by the first week in December, while the third movement, a passacaglia, was completed in January 1948. But as Shostakovich continued to work on the concerto, the political and artistic climate around him turned deadly. This was the period of the crackdown on Soviet artists led by Stalin’s ideological pointman, Andrei Zhdanov. At the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in February 1948, Shostakovich – along with Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky and others – were attacked for their “formalistic distortions and anti-democratic tendencies” and for writing “confused, neuropathological combinations which transform music into cacophony,” music that “dwells too much on the dark and fearful aspects of reality.” Forced to read a humiliating apology and to promise to mend his ways, Shostakovich quickly learned that the government’s demand for conformity took more menacing forms: he was dismissed from his teaching positions, his music was effectively banned and there is evidence that the Shostakovich family subsisted during this period on the savings of their housekeeper. Stunned but alert to the dangers before him, the composer responded in two ways. The public Shostakovich wrote the music demanded by Stalin’s government – film scores and patriotic cantatas like Song of the Forests and The Sun Shines over Our Motherland. The private Shostakovich wrote the music he wanted to, but these scores went into his desk, waiting for a safer day. Among the latter was the manuscript for the violin concerto for Oistrakh. Years later, Shostakovich took pleasure in showing friends where he was in the composition of the finale of this concerto when he heard of the Congress’ denunciation of him – it was in the middle of run of sixteenth-notes – and he pointed out that the music before and after that news was exactly the same. The death of Stalin in 1953 seemed to promise a more liberal artistic atmosphere in Russia, but Shostakovich held the concerto back for two more years. It was finally premiered, by Oistrakh and the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeni Mravinsky, on October 29, 1955, eight years after its composition. The concerto had a popular success, though Soviet critics – still fearful of saying the wrong thing in that uncertain atmosphere – were non-committal. Oistrakh, however, loved the concerto and played it with American orchestras on his first tour of this country later that fall. From the perspective of a half-century later, it seems extraordinary that this music could have been considered dangerous, either to its audience or its composer. In many respects, the most remarkable feature of this concerto is how old-fashioned it is. It is a big virtuoso piece, conceived with the talents of a specific performer in mind and offering that soloist a cadenza so spectacular that it almost becomes a separate movement in itself. The Concerto in A minor has become so much a feature of our musical lives that the fact that Shostakovich had to keep it hidden for so many years speaks volumes about the political and artistic climate in Russia during Stalin’s paranoid final decline. We need not know any of its history, however, to feel the greatness of this music. The concerto has some unusual features. It has two dark slow movements, both of them almost night-music movements (one of them in fact is called Nocturne), and these alternate with two bright fast movements, both of which have titles that imply a degree of play: Scherzo and Burlesque.