One Hundred Twentieth Season New York Philharmonic 1961 - 1962 Leonard Bernstein, music director Carnegie Hall Saturday Evening, April 14, 1962, at 8:30 6439th, 6440th Concerts Sunday Afternoon, April 15, 1962, at 3:00 LEONARD BERNSTEIN, Conductor ISAAC STERN, Violinist THE MIDDLE-EUROPE TRADITION—PROGRAM III MOZART Adagio and Rondo from Serenade No. 10, for Thirteen Woodwinds, B-flat major, K. 361 MOZART Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra, B-f)at major, K. 207 Allegro moderato Adagio Presto ISAAC STERN BARTOK Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra Moderato — Allegro moderato ISAAC STERN INTERMISSION DVORAK Symphony No. 5, "From the New World," E minor, Opus 95 Adagio — Allegro molto Largo Scherzo: Molto vivace Allegro con fuoco Steinway Piano Columbia Records NOTES ON THE PROGRAMS By EDWARD DOWNES Notes on the programs may not be printed in their entirety without the written consent of the Philharmonic; excerpts from the notes may be quoted if due acknowledg­ ment is given to the author and to the Philharmonic. Adagio and Rondo from Serenade No. 10, for Thirteen Woodwinds, B-flat major, K. 361 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg; died December 5, 1791, Vienna) Mozart confessed to his father that both he and his bride, Constanze, wept at the ceremony in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, on August 4, 1782, and that the witnesses and even the priest were so moved that they all wept too. Afterwards they were merry at the wedding breakfast or rather souper, as Mozart called it, given them by the Baroness von Wald- stadten. According to Mozart, this Hachzeitsfestin was "more princely than baronial" and the B-flat Serenade seems to have been a part of the festivities. No wonder Mozart chose this Serenade to be performed at his own wedding party! At least, this is the work to which the evidence assembled by Mozart’s greatest biographer, Hermann Abert, points. And the magical Adagia, one of the most profound and at the same time most ravishingly beautiful movements he ever wrote, certainly tends to strengthen the case. No man could write such a movement without realizing that it embodies a felicity so sharp, so intense that it is very close to pain, perhaps to tears. Alfred Einstein called it "a Notturno ... a scene from Romeo under starry skies, a scene in which longing, grief, and love are wrung like a distillation from the beating hearts of the lovers.” One does not have to be unduly sentimental to find the mixed moods of this serenade ideally suited to a wedding celebration: from the heart­ piercing beauty of the Adagio to the gay humor and infectious abandon of the concluding Rondo, with its recurrent refrain: Mozart had begun the composition of the Serenade in Munich early in 1781 at the time of the production of his opera, Idomeneo, at the Bavarian Court Theatre. (The theatre, recently restored and re-named Cuvilliestheater after its architect, is one of the gems of eighteenth century Rococo architecture, and perhaps the most beautiful theatre anywhere.) The Serenade was completed in Vienna in the summer of 1781, during the height of Mozart’s struggle to escape from the "slavery” as he called it, of his service to the Archbishop of Salzburg. The score may well have been intended for the highly skilled players of the Munich orchestra (formerly the famous Mannheim orchestra, which had moved to Munich with the Mannheim court at the time the Elector Palatine inherited the Dukedom of Bavaria). Very likely too it was written in the hope of winning an appoint­ ment to the Bavarian court, which never materialized. 2 Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra, B-flat major, K. 207 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Mozart must have been an incredibly gifted violinist. He learned to play the instrument literally without teaching, at the age of seven, after some­ one in Vienna made him a present of a small sized violin during one of his tours as a child prodigy. Back home in Salzburg he soon surprised his father by asking to be allowed to play second violin in some new trios which a friend had brought to try out. When his father objected that little Wolf­ gang had had no lessons, the child pleaded that lessons really weren’t neces­ sary to know how to play second violin. To humor him he was allowed to try and he read through six trios at sight. Later that year, when the Mozart family again went on tour, Wolfgang was already appearing in public as violin soloist. Everywhere he went he listened and learned. In Italy he learned more violin technique, in France brilliance of style. In Vienna he heard the Austrian melodies, whose char­ acter echoes through all five of the violin concertos Mozart wrote when he was nineteen years old. When he grew still older Mozart lost interest in playing the violin, which seems a tragedy for us because it may have deprived us of many more wonderful violin concertos. His father thought Wolfgang neglected the violin because he had no real confidence in his own ability as a performer. "You have no idea how well you play the violin," he wrote his son in October 1777, "if only you will do yourself justice and play with assurance, spirit, and fire, yes, as if you were the greatest violinist in Europe.” The B-flat Violin Concerto is the first of the group of five he com­ posed in 1775. I. Allegro moderato. After the briefest of orchestral introductions, fea­ turing the principal theme of the movement, the solo violin enters with the same theme, over a featherlight accompaniment of violins and violas: The movement has few surprises, but much charm. There is the usual pause for a solo cadenza shortly before the close. II. Adagio. The songful slow movement is written in one of Mozart’s favorite keys for the expression of warm sentiment: E-flat major. It is restrained in its length and in the embellishment of the melodic line in the solo part. III. Presto. The lightness and delicacy of scoring of this joyous finale suggest some of Mozart’s more charming serenade music. Like the middle movement, it is characterized by an exquisite restraint. Cadenza by Maxim Jacobsen, revised by Isaac Stern. Rhapsody No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra BELA BARTÓK (Born March 25, 1881, Nagy Szent Miklos, Transylvania; died New York, September 26, 1945) Although Bartok’s Second Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra was not written until 1928, the primary impulse behind it goes back to the beginning of the century, when Bart6k, still a student in Budapest, was first caught up in the great current of enthusiasm for ancient Hungarian cultural tradi­ tions that was sweeping his country. It was the same current of Romantic nationalism that gave such color and vitality to the music of Dvorak and Smetana in Bohemia, to Moussorgsky, Borodine, and the rest of "the mighty five” in Russia, to Sibelius in Finland, to say nothing of the poetry, drama, and of course the politics of many resurgent nationalities. The passion for folk music, first of his native Hungary, then of neigh­ boring lands accompanied most of Bartok’s mature life. It bore fruit in his enormous activity as one of the most skilled and perceptive collectors of folk music in the entire first half of our century. More significant for the average music lover is the influence which Bartok’s love of folk music had in shaping his musical character and style. This influence ranged from the subtlest details of musical phraseology and rhythmic inflection to such obvious traits as the form of this Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra. Like the First Rhapsody, it is subtitled Folk Dances. Its two-movement form, slow-fast, reflects the sequence of dances, the slow lassu and the fast friss or friska, characteristic of such traditional Hungarian dances as the czardas ana the verbunkos. The Second Rhapsody is dedicated to Zoltán Szekely and is scored for small orchestra with wood­ winds in pairs, two horns, two trumpets, one trombone, one tuba, harp, celesta, piano, and strings. I. Moderato. The first movement, a languorous lassu, is in rondo form. The refrain is a melancholy, rhapsodic melody, heavily embellished with grace notes and trills. It is characterized also by the frequent use of the augmented second typical of much gypsy music Dut rather rare in Bartok’s works. II. Allegro moderato. The second movement, which follows without pause, bears the subtitle friss. It opens with an intentionally crude-sounding, heavily-rhythmed theme for the solo violin. Here, as in the first movement, there is much contrast of tempo and freely fluctuating rubato. As the move­ ment gathers momentum, the intentionally primitive devices, including ostenato, static harmony, and tone cluster effects are multiplied. The con­ clusion comes with a brilliant series of trills rising through three octaves for the solo instrument. Symphony No. 5, "From the New World/' E minor, Opus 95 ANTONIN DVORAK (Born September 8, 1841, Muhlhausen; died May 1, 1904, Prague) From time immemorial, the Czechs, or the Bohemians as they used to be called, have been famous as musicians as far as European music was made. In dusty chronicles from the Middle Ages, we find their names in­ scribed as pipers and fiddlers to the great dukes and kings of France and Germany. In the eighteenth century, Bohemian composers settled in France, Italy, Austria and Germany, contributing richly to the new symphonic style, many years before Haydn was given his misleading title of "father of the symphony.” Dvorak was following a tradition more ancient than he perhaps knew, when he accepted an important musical position in a far-off land and came 4 to teach at the National Conservatory of Music in New York.