SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT Fabien Gabel, conductor April 1-2, 2017 CLAUDE DEBUSSY Printemps Très modéré Modéré IGOR STRAVINSKY Violin Concerto in D Major Toccata Aria I Aria II Capriccio Jeff Thayer, violin INTERMISSION DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 70 Allegro Moderato Presto Largo Allegretto MAURICE RAVEL Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloé Printemps CLAUDE DEBUSSY Born March 25, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye Died March 25, 1918, Paris Printemps, the first orchestral work by Debussy to find a place in the repertory, has an extremely curious history. In 1884 Debussy won first place in the Prix de Rome competition. That award, the highest possible honor for a French composition student, involved several years of study in Rome. But Debussy, 22 years old and a very difficult young man, hated Rome and resented the time he had to spend away from Paris–he spent the minimal possible amount of time in residence at the Villa Medici in the years 1885-86. One of the requirements of the Prix de Rome was that the winners had to send back to the French Academy a series of envois, works composed in Rome that showed their progress. Debussy, never one to put up with rules, made life difficult for the Academy. He wrote three works for chorus and orchestra, and two of these mysteriously vanished: the score to Printemps (for wordless chorus and orchestra) was burned “accidentally” in a fire at the printer’s shop, while the score to Zuleima was “lost”; only the score to The Blessed Damoiselle survived. Some feel that the young composer, dissatisfied with his own work and reluctant to have it seen, destroyed the scores himself. But Debussy continued to feel some affection for Printemps, and in 1904 he published a version of it for piano four-hands and wordless chorus. Then in 1912 Debussy’s friend Henri Büsser, working under the composer’s supervision, prepared an orchestral version that eliminated the chorus but retained the piano four-hands as part of the orchestration. This final version was first performed in Paris on December 7, 1913, nearly 30 years after the music was originally composed. While he was at work on Printemps in 1886, Debussy wrote to a friend, describing his intentions: “I should like to express the slow and miserable birth of beings and things in nature, their gradual blossoming, and finally the joy of being born into some new life. All this is without a program, for I despise all music that has to follow some literary text that one happens to have got hold of.” The idea of life gradually springing into being is a fertile one, and it has inspired music as different as the first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony and Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. Though it lacks the savage power of those two scores, Debussy’s Printemps makes the same transition from primal beginnings to joyous rebirth. The inspiration for this music appears to have been not a “literary text” but a painting: Botticelli’s Primavera, in which dancers celebrate the coming of spring by dancing on the grass as flowers bloom in the trees over their heads. This painting would later inspire another piece of music, the first movement of Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano, but, unlike Respighi, Debussy does not write “pictorial’ music – his Printemps is a more abstract evocation of the idea of rebirth in the spring. Printemps is in two movements, both built on the same thematic material. The first movement, marked simply Très modéré, begins with the main idea announced simply by solo flute and piano. (Does this flute solo anticipate the beginning of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, still eight years in the future?) The falling-and-rising shape of this opening theme then evolves through a series of variants in different tempos and meters. The second movement, of somewhat livelier character but still marked only Modéré, continues this evolution: the original theme-shape is eventually transformed into a rhythmic dance and finally builds to a great climax, full of energy and bright color that mark the rebirth of life in the spring. Violin Concerto in D Major IGOR STRAVINSKY Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum Died April 6, 1971, New York City Stravinsky had no interest in virtuosity for its own sake. Of his more than 100 compositions, only one is a concerto for solo instrument and full symphony orchestra, and he was at first reluctant even to write this one. In the fall of 1930, shortly after completing his Symphony of Psalms, Stravinsky visited his friend and publisher Willy Strecker in Wiesbaden. Strecker wanted Stravinsky to compose a concerto for the young violinist Samuel Dushkin, but Stravinsky was wary: “I hesitated because I am not a violinist and I was afraid that my slight knowledge of that instrument would not be sufficient to enable me to solve the many problems which would necessarily arise in the course of a major work especially composed for it.” But Stravinsky was so impressed by Dushkin’s skill and general culture that he took on the commission and consulted frequently with the violinist in the course of composition. Some years later, Dushkin left a reminiscence of working with Stravinsky, and it included an account of a seminal moment in the composition of this concerto: During the winter I saw Stravinsky in Paris quite often. One day when we were lunching in a restaurant, Stravinsky took out a piece of paper and wrote down [a] chord and asked me if it could be played. I had never seen a chord with such an enormous stretch, from the E to the top A, and I said “No.” Stravinsky said sadly “Quel dommage.” [“What a pity”] After I got home, I tried it, and to my astonishment, I found that in that register, the stretch of the eleventh was relatively easy to play, and the sound fascinated me. I telephoned Stravinsky at once to tell him that it could be done. When the Concerto was finished, more than six months later, I understood his disappointment when I first said “No.” This chord, in a different dress, begins each of the four movements. Stravinsky himself calls it his “passport” to that Concerto. Stravinsky wrote the first two movements during the spring of 1931 in Nice and completed the concerto that September at a summer estate in Isère. The first performance took place the following month, on October 23, 1931; Dushkin was soloist, and Stravinsky conducted the Berlin Radio Orchestra. Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto has become virtually a locus classicus of his neo-classical style: its movement titles come right out of a Bach suite, and the spirit of that composer’s violin music hovers over much of this concerto. Stravinsky himself was aware of this, and 30 years after composing the concerto he offered his perspective on this: “The subtitles of my Concerto – Toccata, Aria, Capriccio – may suggest Bach, and so, in a superficial way, might the musical substance. I am very fond of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins, as the duet of the soloist with a violin from the orchestra in the last movement of my own Concerto may show. But my Concerto employs other duet combinations too, and the texture is almost always more characteristic of chamber music than of orchestral music.” The title of the first movement – Toccata – originally denoted brilliant keyboard music (it means “touched” in Italian), and so its use with violin music may seem anomalous. Here it points to a brilliance in the writing for both violin and orchestra. The concerto opens with the “passport” chord, its bright, stinging sound forming a brisk call to order. A profusion of thematic ideas follows, and Stravinsky quickly combines some of these in some very impressive (and graceful) contrapuntal writing. An absolutely literal recapitulation leads to a brief coda and the firm close. Both middle movements are titled Aria, though they are quite different in character. In Aria I, the “passport” chord leads to some subdued two-part writing for solo violin and the entire cello section; the central episode presses ahead energetically before the opening material returns and the movement evaporates in a wisp of sound. Aria II brings the most “Bachian” moments in this concerto: the “passport” chord introduces some writing for the violin that sounds as if it might have come almost verbatim from the opening movement of Bach’s sonatas for unaccompanied violin. This was clearly special music for Stravinsky, who takes care to remind the soloist repeatedly to play cantabile, even stressing at one point that the music should be dolce (an unusual marking from a composer who was characteristically reserved in his performance markings). The Capriccio bursts to life with the sound of the familiar chord, then races ahead on spirited writing for the soloist. This movement is episodic, almost mercurial in its quick leaps between moods and themes. Near the end come several remarkable passages. The first is the extended duet between soloist and concertmaster that Stravinsky felt had been inspired by the Bach Double Concerto. A one-measure grand pause introduces the coda, whose surging, sputtering rhythms and rapid alternation of bowed and pizzicato notes looks ahead 14 years to the first movement of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Stravinsky may have had no use for conventional virtuosity (this concerto significantly has no cadenza), and he may have referred to the technical demands here as “relatively tame,” but no violinist who has ever attempted to play this music would agree with him.