Thursday Evening, December 17, 2015, at 8:00 Isaac Stern Auditorium/Ronald O. Perelman Stage Conductor’s Notes Q&A with Leon Botstein at 7:00 presents Russia’s Jewish Composers LEON BOTSTEIN, Conductor ALEKSANDR KREIN The Rose and the Cross (“Symphonic Fragments after Aleksandr Blok”), Op. 26 (NY Premiere) The Castle of Archimbault at Dawn The Rooms of Isaure On the Ocean Shore Gaetan’s Song The Death of Bertrand: Epilog ANTON RUBINSTEIN Cello Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 96 Allegro moderato Andante Allegro (no pause between movements) ISTVÁN VÁRDAI, Cello Intermission PLEASE SWITCH OFF YOUR CELL PHONES AND OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES. MIKHAIL GNESIN From Shelley (“Symphonic Fragment after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound”), Op. 4 (U.S. Premiere) MAXIMILIAN STEINBERG Symphony No. 1 in D major, Op. 3 (U.S. Premiere) Allegro non troppo—Poco più tranquillo— Tempo I Scherzo: Allegro vivace—Un poco più tranquillo—Tempo I Andante molto sostenuto Finale: Allegro moderato This evening’s concert will run approximately two hours and 15 minutes including one 20-minute intermission. American Symphony Orchestra welcomes the many organizations who participate in our Community Access Program, which provides free and low-cost tickets to underserved groups in New York’s five boroughs. For information on how you can support this program, please call (212) 868-9276. FROM THE Music Director Jews and Russians: The Case of Music as such. Yiddish rather than Hebrew by Leon Botstein was considered the Jewish national lan- guage and under Soviet rule (until the The history of the Jews in Russia, devastating purges of the late 1940s before and during the first decades after during Stalin’s final years), the Yiddish the 1917 revolution, is a complex amal- language, and the theater and music gam of segregation, poverty, exclusion, associated with Yiddish culture, received persecution, and extraordinary intellec- extensive state patronage. The sup- tual and cultural achievement both posed elevation of Jews to a national within the confines of Jewish society status, however, was both ambivalent and culture and also outside in the and disingenuous. It was designed to larger non-Jewish Russian world. The blunt the allure of Zionism and Hebrew, significance of Russian Jewry to the as well as to circumvent, with a fatal development of modern Russian cul- embrace, the hope that under commu- ture, and indeed to the central elements nism, anti-Semitism would disappear. of the modern Russian national self- The official recognition of Jewish nation- image, cannot be overestimated. ality actually ensured the persistence of anti-Semitism; after all, on all official It is therefore not surprising that from documents, including passports, one’s the very start of communism and the nationality was identified. Every Jew Soviet Union, Jews were treated as a was labeled as such. distinct nation rather than a religious group, comparable to the Georgians or All the composers on this program were the Armenians. Jews were given status Russian Jews by birth. The oldest is the piano virtuoso, conductor, and com- for their contributions as explicitly poser Anton Rubinstein, whose fame— “Jewish” composers. Both men, influ- particularly in the United States—was enced by Rimsky-Korsakov, celebrated legendary. Rubinstein, who taught the folk roots of their own specific Tchaikovsky, also was chosen to lead national origin as Jews. They became the celebrated Gesellschaft der Musik- leading members of the legendary and freunde in Vienna. His works won wide seminal St. Petersburg Society for Jew- acclaim. Posterity, however, has been ish Folk Music, founded in 1908. less kind. Despite its once enormous popularity, his “Ocean” symphony has Yet the works on this program remind lapsed into obscurity, together with the us that their distinction and contribu- rest of his orchestral oeuvre. Rubinstein’s tion as composers were not limited to family (including his almost equally the extent to which they utilized their famous musician brother Nikolai) con- Jewishness in their music. It is easy to verted from Judaism when Anton was a overlook the extent of acculturation young boy. Rubinstein was brought up and symbiosis between the Jewish and as a Christian but like so many converts the Russian in ways that bypassed the he realized that baptism was never a Fiddler on the Roof stereotype; we asso- cure or antidote for anti-Semitism, since ciate that process of cosmopolitan the prejudice was racial and political, intermingling more readily with the his- not theological—once a Jew, always a torical dynamics between Jews and Jew. Rubinstein is alleged to have non-Jews in German-speaking Europe observed, “Russians say I am German, before 1933. Krein and Gnesin absorbed Germans think me Russian, Jews call and extended—as did their contempo- me a Christian, and Christians say I am raries Joseph Achron, Lazare Saminsky, a Jew.” and Sergei Prokofiev—the influence of symbolism and of Scriabin and Rimsky. The fact is that more of Rubinstein’s Gnesin and Krein, at the time they wrote music deserves to be played, as this con- the works on this program, were Russ- certo for cello and orchestra makes clear. ian cosmopolitan advocates of an avant- Rubinstein’s musical output was enor- garde first and Jewish culture second. mous. Much of the best music was dra- matic music written for the stage. A vast The last work on the program is by a number of dramatic works with a “Jew- rival and contemporary of Stravinsky’s, ish” connection appear in Rubinstein’s Shostakovich’s teacher Maximilian catalogue, including an opera on the Steinberg. One of the ironies of history Maccabees, works on the Tower of is that Steinberg’s ballet Metamorpho- Babel and Moses, all alongside works sen was scheduled for the same 1913 explicitly on Christian subjects (most season as the Rite of Spring, and notably a setting of Paradise Lost). In Stravinsky, who was jealous that Rimsky the late 19th-century debate on what favored Steinberg and that Steinberg ought to be truly “Russian” music, married Rimsky’s daughter, did every- Rubinstein was unfairly derided as a thing he could to thwart Steinberg’s second-rate purveyor of German musi- competing work. cal traditions. Steinberg was the son of a major Two of the Russian Jewish composers Hebrew scholar. Despite his extensive on this program are represented with background in Jewish history and cul- works written when they were young. ture, unlike Krein and Gnesin, but Both Krein and Gnesin became prominent rather more as a latter day Rubinstein, Steinberg did not privilege his Jewish Together these four Russian composers, identity in his work and chose a quite whose lives and careers span the second eclectic array of inspirations for his half of the 19th century and the first music—from Uzbek folk material to the half of the 20th—arguably the heyday legend of Till Eulenspeigel. As Steinberg’s of classical musical culture—reveal the early symphonies—and the 1913 ballet extent of acculturation, integration, score—suggest, the talent and facility of and participation in Russian intellec- the young composer were extraordi- tual and artistic life by Jews. We have nary, as was his familiarity with the the unfortunate tendency to reduce the compositional traditions of Western complexity of the past to stereotypes. Europe and Russia. The Jews of Russia evoke—legitimately— the image of mass poverty, the shtetl, Steinberg is most often remembered not sardonic humor, klezmer, and Yiddish for his music but indirectly, first on eloquence: a distinctly Jewish culture account of his place in Stravinsky’s life, born out of the unique experience of and second because of his connection to the Pale Settlement. It is to those roots Shostakovich. He deserves more. None - that Krein and Gnesin—much like the theless, perhaps the most admirable young painter Marc Chagall—eventually indirect consequence of Steinberg’s turned in search of a unique source for career derives from the Shostakovich a modern art and culture of their own. connection, not the link to Stravinsky. By so doing they were following a par- Shostakovich was rather the exception allel pattern of discovery that would among Russian composers in his com- become audible in the music of Bartók plete lack of anti-Semitism. Indeed and Stravinsky. Shostakovich identified with the plight of the Jews. He showed rare courage in This concert reminds us that in litera- his support of the family of Solomon ture, science, art, and above all, music, Mikhoels, the great Yiddish actor who there was a Russian Jewish elite, fully was killed by Stalin in 1948, and his pro- conversant with Russian and European tective advocacy of and friendship with traditions that made seminal contribu- the Polish Jewish composer Mieczysław tions to the mainstream of culture and Weinberg, who settled in Russia after art without foregrounding or even ref- 1945. Perhaps it was Shostakovich’s erencing their status as Jews. That admiration and affection for his teacher remarkable achievement by an extraor- that sustained his decency and courage dinary elite is highlighted on today’s on this issue. concert program. THE Program by Peter Laki Aleksandr Krein Born October 20, 1883, in Nizhniy-Novgorod, Russia Died April 21, 1951, in Staraya Ruza, Russia The Rose and the Cross (“Symphonic Fragments after Aleksandr Blok”), Op. 26 Composed in 1917–21 Performance Time: Approximately 20 minutes Instruments for this performance: 2 flutes, 1 piccolo, 2 oboes, 1 English horn, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 1 contrabassoon, 5 French horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba, timpani, percussion (cymbals, tam-tam), 2 harps, 22 violins, 8 violas, 8 cellos, and 6 double basses Aleksandr Blok, perhaps the greatest and a song contest in a flowering Russian symbolist poet, died in 1921, dale.