Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra 2018-2019 Mellon Grand Classics Season

March 22, 23 and 24, 2019

MANFRED HONECK, CONDUCTOR JULIAN RACHLIN, VIOLIN

EDVARD GRIEG Suite from the Incidental Music to Peer Gynt, Opus 23 Ingrid’s Lamentation Anitra’s Dance Solveijg’s Song Åse’s Death Morning Mood Arabian Dance Solveijg’s Cradle Song In the Hall of the Mountain King

Intermission

FELIX MENDELSSOHN Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 64 I. Allegro molto appassionata — II. Andante — III. Allegretto non troppo — Allegro molto vivace Mr. Rachlin

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Caprice bohémien, Opus 12

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PROGRAM NOTES BY DR. RICHARD E. RODDA

EDVARD GRIEG

Suite from the Incidental Music to Peer Gynt, Opus 23 (1874-1875)

Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway, on June 15, 1843, and died there on September 4, 1907. He composed two suites from the Incidental Music to Peer Gynt in 1874-1875, and they were premiered at Mollergarden Theater in Christiania (now Oslo) with conductor Johan Hennum on February 24, 1876. The Pittsburgh Symphony first performed music from the suites at Carnegie Music Hall with conductor Frederic Archer in March 1896, and most recently performed them with conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier in October 2014. Manfred Honeck’s suite includes music from Suites No. 1 & 2, as well as from the original incidental music. The score calls for piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Performance time: approximately 34 minutes.

In January 1874, Grieg received a letter from the playwright Henrik Ibsen asking him to provide incidental music for a revival in Oslo of Peer Gynt, a philosophical fantasy with moralistic overtones to which the composer was not immediately attracted. Grieg was, however, rather badly in need of money at the time, and Ibsen’s offer of a sizeable share of the proceeds from the production proved irresistible. Grieg thought at first he would need compose no more than a few short sections of music, but he failed to take into account the contemporary Norwegian taste in theatrical productions, which demanded an entertainment not unlike a modern musical comedy, with extended musical selections separated by spoken dialogue. Ibsen accordingly shortened the text of the original 1867 version of the play to accommodate the new music. As it turned out, Grieg’s score contained some 23 separate numbers and cost him nearly two years of work. His effort bore fruit. The music for Peer Gynt, in the form of two orchestral suites, won him international fame and personal economic security, and raised him to the highest position in Scandinavian music. Peer Gynt (George Bernard Shaw suggested that “Pare Yoont” is about as close to the Norwegian pronunciation as it was possible to get in English) is the central character of Ibsen’s play. The work is ostensibly a fantasy, but Ibsen used the genre as a thinly veiled essay on the apathy and vacillation he felt were characteristic of the Norwegian people. Grieg at first disagreed with Ibsen’s thesis — the main reason for his initial reluctance to become involved with the project — but he later changed his opinion. “How shockingly true to life the poet sketched our national character,” he wrote after Ibsen’s death. Most of the play’s characters assume allegorical functions: they are more Jungian archetypes than living individuals. The death of Åse, Peer’s mother, for example, represents not just the loss of a loved one but, on Ibsen’s allegorical plane, also evokes “the dying of nature in the autumn, far up in the North — the disappearance of the sun for months, leaving this globe in a ruddy darkness,” according to Henry T. Finck. Grieg outlined the plot of the play in the preface to the score of the Second Suite, though it needs to be pointed out that, as with Åse, the episodes and characters he mentions have a deeper, symbolic significance than is apparent from this brief précis: “Peer Gynt, the only son of poor peasants, is drawn by the poet as a character of morbidly developed fancy and a prey to megalomania. In his youth, he has many wild adventures — comes, for instance, to a peasants’ wedding where he carries the bride up to the mountain peaks. There he leaves her so that he may roam about with wild cowherd girls. He then enters the land of the Mountain King, whose daughter falls in love with him and dances for him. But he laughs at the dance and its droll music, whereupon the enraged mountain folk wish to kill him. But he succeeds in escaping and wanders to foreign countries, among others to Morocco, where he appears as a prophet and is greeted by Arab girls. After many wonderful guidings of Fate, he at last returns as an old man, after suffering shipwreck on his way to his home, which is as poor as he left it. There the sweetheart of his youth, Solveijg, who has stayed true to him for all these years, meets him, and his weary head at last finds rest in her lap.” Ingrid’s Lamentation portrays Peer’s kidnapping of the bride at a village wedding and her grief at later being discarded by him. Anitra’s Dance is a number of exotic character performed for Peer by the daughter of a Bedouin chief during his adventures in Morocco. Solveijg’s Song is sung by Peer’s true love, who waits

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faithfully at home for his return. Åse’s Death serves as the poignant background for the passing of Peer’s mother. Morning Mood, one of the most famous evocations of dawn in the orchestral repertory, occurs not at the beginning of the play but in Act IV, when Peer finds himself in Africa. The Arabian Dance is an evocation of Peer’s wanderings in that country. The drama closes as Solveijg, Peer’s faithful sweetheart, takes him into her arms and comforts him like a child with her serene Cradle Song. In the Hall of the Mountain King accompanies Peer’s terrified escape from the abode of the most fearsome of Norway’s trolls.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN

Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 64 (1844)

Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on Feburary 3, 1809, and died in Leipzig on November 4, 1847. He composed his Violin Concerto in 1844, and it was premiered in Leipzig with conductor Niels Gade, soloist Ferdinand David, and the Gewandhaus Orchestra on March 13, 1845. The Pittsburgh Symphony first performed the concerto at Carnegie Music Hall with conductor Frederic Archer and violinist Achille Rivarde in April 1896, and most recently performed it with music director Manfred Honeck and violinist Midori in February 2017. The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings. Performance time: approximately 28 minutes.

“I would like to compose a violin concerto for next winter,” Mendelssohn wrote in July 1838 to his friend the violinist Ferdinand David. “One in E minor keeps running through my head, and the opening gives me no peace.” It was for David that Mendelssohn planned and wrote his only mature Violin Concerto. Their friendship began when the two first met at about the age of fifteen while the young violinist was on a concert tour through Germany. They were delighted to discover the coincidence that David had been born only eleven months after Mendelssohn in the same neighborhood in Hamburg. Already well formed even in those early years, David’s playing was said to have combined the serious, classical restraint of Ludwig Spohr, his teacher, the elegance of the French tradition and the technical brilliance of Paganini. Mendelssohn, who admired both the man and his playing, saw to it that David was appointed concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra when he became that organization’s music director in 1835. They remained close friends and musical allies. When Mendelssohn’s health was feeble, David looked after much of the routine activity of the Gewandhaus, where he spent 37 years, and he even stepped in to conduct the premiere of Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul when the composer was stricken during a measles epidemic in 1836. Despite his good intentions and the gentle prodding of David to complete his Violin Concerto, Mendelssohn did not get around to serious work on the score until 1844. He had been very busy with other composition and conducting projects, including a particularly troublesome one as director of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The requirements of that position — which included composing the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream — took much of his time, and it was not until he resigned from the post in 1844 that he was able to complete the Violin Concerto. The Concerto opens with a soaring violin melody whose lyricism exhibits a grand passion tinged with restless, Romantic melancholy. Some glistening passagework for the violinist leads through a transition to the second theme, a quiet, sunny strain shared by woodwinds and soloist. More glistening arabesques from the violinist and a quickened rhythm close the exposition. The succinct development section is largely based on the opening theme. In this Concerto, Mendelssohn moved the cadenza forward from its traditional place as an appendage near the end of the first movement to become an integral component of the structure, here separating the development from the recapitulation. It leads seamlessly into the restatement of the movement’s thematic material. The thread of a single note sustained by the bassoon leads to the Andante, a wordless song of warm sentiment and endearing elegance; the movement’s center section is distinguished by its rustling accompaniment and bittersweet minor-mode melody. A dozen measures of chordal writing for strings link the Andante with the finale, an effervescent sonata form with the aerial grace of which Mendelssohn was the undisputed master.

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF

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Caprice bohémien (“Capriccio on Gypsy Themes”), Opus 12 (1894)

Sergei Rachmaninoff was born in Oneg (near Novgorod), Russia, on April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California on March 28, 1943. He composed Caprice bohémien in 1894, and it was premiered in Moscow with Rachmaninoff conducting on November 22, 1895. These performances mark the Pittsburgh Symphony premiere of the work. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Performance time: approximately 18 minutes.

Though he seldom burdened himself with study or regular class attendance, Sergei Rachmaninoff was one of the greatest products of the Moscow Conservatory: he wrote his celebrated Prelude in C-sharp minor in 1892, the year of his graduation; at one of his examinations, he played his own Song Without Words for a jury that included Tchaikovsky, and was given the highest possible rating; when he left the school, the faculty unanimously voted to place his name on its Roll of Honor. Among his first compositions as a new graduate was the one-act opera Aleko, whose premiere at the Bolshoi on May 9, 1893 so impressed Tchaikovsky that he offered to have it produced with his own one-act Iolanthe. Inspired by these early successes, Rachmaninoff spent the summer of 1893 at the country home of a friend named Lyssikov, a wealthy Moscow merchant, composing the Fantaisie-Tableaux for Two Pianos (Op. 5), three songs, a sacred choral work, Two Pieces for Violin and Piano (Op. 6) and a “Fantasy for Orchestra” titled The Rock (Op. 7). Rachmaninoff was back in Moscow by mid-September, when he attended a gathering of musicians assembled to hear Leo Conus’ piano arrangement of the brand-new Sixth Symphony by Tchaikovsky, which was scheduled for its public orchestral premiere the following month. “At the close of the evening, Rachmaninoff acquainted us with his newly completed symphonic poem, The Rock,” recorded the composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. “The work pleased us all very much, especially Tchaikovsky, who was enthusiastic over its colorfulness.” Indeed, Tchaikovsky formed so high an opinion of the piece that he asked Rachmaninoff if he could conduct it on his European tour the following winter, one of the few works by another composer in which he ever expressed such an interest. Those performances, unfortunately, never took place. Just six weeks later, only days after the premiere of his “Pathétique” Symphony, Tchaikovsky died. The loss was a deep personal and professional sorrow for Rachmaninoff, who composed the Trio Élégiaque (Op. 9) in memory of his mentor before the end of the year. In addition to the personal grief Rachmaninoff suffered with the death of Tchaikovsky, the loss also hindered the quick expansion of his career as a composer. In the fall of 1893, he felt confident enough about his future to take a modest furnished apartment in Moscow and give some display to the incipient fame he was gathering — “riding in the ‘better’ cabs, dressing well, tipping all, and enjoying the resulting smiles and bows,” according to the biography of Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda. With the prospects of Tchaikovsky’s performances of The Rock and Aleko suddenly dashed, however, his life style quickly outstripped the advances and royalties he was receiving from his publisher, Karl Gutheil. To generate some additional income, he accepted a position teaching music theory at the Maryinsky Academy for Girls and also took on a number of private students. He enjoyed the work at the Academy, and stayed there until 1901, but he despised the private teaching, a negative attitude that spilled out of him all too noticeably at lessons. According to Bertensson and Leyda, “Merely to glance at him during a lesson was enough to destroy the pupil’s last desire to become a pianist.” Despite his distaste for private teaching, Rachmaninoff spent the summer of 1894 at the country estate of the Konovalov family in Kostroma, giving daily lessons to their young son, Alexander. This light duty not only gave him a holiday away from Moscow but also a chance to compose, and by the time he left the Konovalovs to visit his aunt Varvara Satina and her four children at Ivanovka, near the Black Sea, he had completed his Caprice bohémien. The score was dedicated to Peter Lodizhensky, one of the many new friends he made during those years when his talent and ambition were giving him entrée into fashionable Moscow society. The music, however, was inspired by Lodizhensky’s beautiful wife, Anna, who was a Gypsy by birth. Rachmaninoff conceived a hopeless infatuation for “Darling Anna,” as he called her, and he dedicated to her Oh No, I Beg You, Do Not Leave Me (Op. 4, No. 1), his first published song, and considered doing the same for his Symphony No. 1, the next major work he undertook after the Caprice. The young composer conducted the premiere of the Capriccio in Moscow on November 22, 1895, and Alexander Glazunov introduced it to St. Petersburg two months later. Like Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, Rachmaninoff’s Caprice bohémien treats folk-inspired tunes in scintillating symphonic guise. It begins with a lugubrious

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introduction from which emerge two motives that figure later in the piece: a close-interval idea first given by the solo horn, and a related but distinct phrase entrusted to the woodwinds. These motives are worked into a climax, which quickly fades to make way for a lamenting passage grown from the first motive; a solo for the clarinet rounds out this section. The center of the Caprice is occupied by a lyrical, downward-stepping theme of brighter character that expands from the solo flute to the full orchestra. The work closes with a brilliant orchestral treatment of a vibrant dance melody, through which are woven reminiscences of motives from the introduction. ©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda