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UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY In Association With Parke-Davis Research, Warner-Lambert Company Mstislav Rostropovich, Cellist with Sara Wolfensohn, Pianist Sunday Afternoon, January 10, 1993, at 4:00 Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan PROGRAM Sonata in F major for Cello and Piano, Op. 6 ......... Richard Strauss Allegro con brio Andante ma non troppo Allegro vivo Suite No. 5 in C minor for Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1011 ...... Bach Prelude - Fugue Allemande Courante Sarabande Gavotte I Gavotte II Gigue INTERMISSION Vocalise ......................... Rachmaninoff Sonata in D minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 40 ........ Shostakovich Allegro non troppo - Largo Allegro Largo Allegro Mstislav Rostropovich is represented by Columbia Artists Management Inc., New York City. Recordings: Erato, CBS Masterworks, Sony Classical, Angel/Melodya, London, and Deutsche Grammophon NINETEENTH CONCERT OF THE 114TH SEASON 114TH ANNUAL CHORAL UNION SERIES Program Notes Sonata in F major for Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor for and Piano, Op. 6 Unaccompanied Cello, BWV 1011 Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Richard Strauss's creative career began In 1717, Bach was appointed composer in 1870, when he was six years old, and and music director to Prince Leopold, ruler continued until he wrote his beautiful last of the tiny state of Anhalt-Cothen, an songs, in 1948, seventy-eight years later. accomplished musician with a great appe­ As a boy, he was brought up on a strict diet tite for instrumental music, and it was at of the classics - Haydn, Mozart, and Beet­ his court that Bach wrote much of his hoven - for his father, the famous solo horn chamber music. We know that Bach was player of the Munich court orchestra, was the greatest keyboard player of his time and dogmatically conservative in his musical that he liked to play the viola in ensembles, tastes. The elder Strauss disapproved of but he did not play the cello. Being Bach, such "modernists" as Chopin, Mendels­ however, he mastered any musical medium sohn, and Schumann, who had died some for which he chose to compose. In 1774, thirty or more years earlier, and he detested Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote to J. N. the music of the "radicals," Liszt and Forkel, the scholar who was collecting Wagner, who laid the foundation for Rich­ material for the first book-length study of ard Strauss's greatest mature works. his father, "He understood the capabilities Strauss composed the sonata during of all the string instruments perfectly. This the summer of 1882., when he had just is shown by his solos for the violin and cello completed his preparatory studies and was without bass [accompaniment]." These about to enter the University of Munich. "solos," six for violin and six for cello, are It was performed in public for the first time among Bach's most extraordinary inven­ in December 1883, by the great cellist tions. Hanus Wihan, his father's colleague in the They are full of mysterious musical and orchestra, who was later to be closely mechanical problems. There is more music associated with Dvorak, and to whom in them than can be played, much more Strauss dedicated the work. The music has music than is apparent from a simple read­ a natural fluency that is the sign of a true ing of the notes. Bach was a supremely composer, even a young one whose skills practical man, and he put down on paper are not yet fully formed. only the notes needed to tell the performer Although its structures are classical in where to put his or her fingers. Much of spirit, the work could not have been writ­ the rest of the music is really in the minds ten without knowing the music of Mendels­ of the listener and the player. It is implicit sohn and Schumann. The first movement, in what is written, and to apprehend it Allegro con brio, even opens with the kind requires acts of memory over a short period of leaping and soaring theme that would of time, measured, in places, in little frac­ distinguish Strauss's later compositions. tions of a second, a mental process like The musical high points of this movement "seeing" in a painting details that are only are the climactic fugal section of the devel­ hinted by the artist. opment and the marvelous combination of A suite, in Bach's time, consisted es­ its two principal subjects in the coda. The sentially of a formal opening movement central slow movement, Andante ma non that was a kind of musical call to attention, troppo, is a lyrical song without words, but and then a series of stylized adaptations of a song of great seriousness. In the Finale, 16th-century dances that had moved from Allegro vivo, the mood turns lighter, as the the ballroom to the concert-room in the young composer works his way through a 17th century. In Bach's six cello suites the witty rondo with a rather operatic melody preludes vary considerably in character, but as its recurring principal subject. they are all designed to fix the home key firmly in mind. With few exceptions, the single versatile composer, saying very dif­ movements of each suite are in the same ferent things in very different ways. In key, and Bach uses the same sequence of January 1934, his opera Lady Macbeth of dances in all the suites, except for the Mtsenk was performed for the first time, and next-to-last movements. These "galanter- in the course of that year he also wrote this ies" were then still popular as social dances: Cello Sonata. The harsh human realism of minuets, bourrees and gavottes. the opera did not conform to "socialist In the fifth cello suite, Bach also realism" - an aesthetic concept still in specifies a variant of the usual tuning of the process of formulation that would later get instrument's highest string, in order to the composer into serious difficulties with make a different harmonic vocabulary the authorities - but the Sonata is the kind available. The Prelude of this Suite is in of work that was always welcomed by the two parts, in the manner of a French opera debaters on all sides of the difficult overture, the first grave, the second a lively Shostakovich question. fugue. Next are a meditative Allemande, a A Soviet biographer of the composer dance of German origin; a quick Courante, found that "charmingly chaste purity of a complex French running (or jumping) feeling is a feature of the Sonata. The broad dance; a slow and stately Spanish Sara- melodies bring out its deeply rooted bonds bande; a pair of French Gavottes; and a with classical tradition, primarily with the closing Gigue, derived from the Anglo-Irish traditions of Russian classical music. It is Jig- like a sudden ray of sunshine, unlike the dismal grotesqueries of his operas or the sarcastic eccentricities of his orchestral Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14 suites. Periods of spiritual and purely musi­ Serge; Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) cal enlightenment existed in the Shostakovich of those years, in contrast Vocalise is the last song in a set of with parody and buffoonery." [Abridged] It welcomed fourteen that Rachmaninoff composed and is tempting to dismiss the works but published in 1912 as his Op. 34. They were by official propagandists and apologists, dedicated to some of the fine Russian to do so is like punishing the messenger that singers of the era - four of them to Feodor who brings bad news. The rich lyricism Chaliapin. The texts of thirteen of them accounts for the Sonata's warm reception were selected from the works of Pushkin, by Soviet critics is real, and it also accounts the Balmont and other great Russian poets, but for the fact that musicians in the rest of the fourteenth is a vocalise, or wordless world, to whom those critics' opinions this song. This Vocalise quickly became one of mean nothing, have also embraced not Rachmaninoff's most popular works and is work - for reasons purely musical, now often performed in instrumental ver­ political. is built sions too. The Sonata's first movement with classical simplicity. It is an Allegro non troppo based on two contrasting themes, the is Sonata in D minor for Cello first elegiac, the second romantic. Next and Piano, Op. 40 an energetic scherzo, Allegro, full of colorful Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) writing for the instruments, rich in the kind of musical wit and good humor of which Shostakovich was the greatest master since History seems to be preparing itself for Haydn. In the slow movement, Largo, a a long struggle to decide which was the true quietly dramatic introductory recitative Shostakovich - if any. It is generally agreed leads into a beautiful song of the kind called that he is not to be found in the occasional, a "romance" in Russian. The rondo-like political works. But the ironist and satirist finale, Allegro, is rich in events, as passing of the early films and ballets, the classicist episodes shift from perky to passionate to of some of the chamber music and sympho' to popular. of the last ones seem pastoral nies and the tragedian - Notes by Leonard Burkat to be wholly different people, not one About the Artists Mstislav Rostropovich is recognized tial Medal of Freedom, Knight Commander internationally as a consummate musician of the Most Excellent Order of the British and an outspoken defender of human rights Empire, and Commander of the Legion of and artistic freedom. Widely considered to Honor in France (making him only the be the world's greatest living cellist, he has second non-French citizen to receive this recorded virtually the entire cello repertoire most distinguished title).

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