UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY DETROIT SYMPHONY Neeme Jarvi Music Director and Conductor Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Violinist Marilyn Mason, Organist Sunday Afternoon, February 10, 1991, at 4:00 Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan PROGRAM Sinfonia Antiqua Lawrence Rapchak Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1 in A minor, Op. 77 . Shostakovich Moderate Scherzo: allegro Passacaglia: andante, cadenza Burlesque: allegro con brio, presto Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg INTERMISSION Symphony No. 3 in C minor ("Organ") Saint-Saens Adagio, allegro moderato, poco adagio Allegro moderato, presto, maestoso Marilyn Mason The piano heard in this concert is a Steinway available from Hammell Music, Inc., Livonia. Activities of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are supported by the City of Detroit Council of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Michigan Council for the Arts. London, RCA, and Mercury Records. For the convenience of our patrons, the box office in the outer lobby is open during intermission for purchase of tickets to upcoming Musical Society concerts. Twenty-first Concert of the 112th Season 112th Annual Choral Union Series Program Notes Sinfonia Antiqua LAWRENCE RAPCHAK (b. 1951) hese are the first performances (this one in Ann Arbor and three in Detroit) of Lawrence Rapchak's Sinfonia Antiqua. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, threeT oboes, English horn, clarinet, two bass clarinets, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four offstage horns, three trumpets, three trom­ bones, tuba, timpani, a large percussion bat­ tery managed by four players, harp, celesta, and strings. Lawrence Rapchak was born in Ham- mond, Indiana, and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music. His composition teachers include Donald Erb, Marcel Dick, and Leonardo Balada; he has also studied conduct­ ing with James Levine. Four of his early orchestral works were premiered by local ensembles during his high school years, and numerous works orches­ tral, chamber, and vocal were played at Lawrence Rapchak the Cleveland Institute. He served as com- poser-in-residence with the Northern Indiana Arts Association in 1978-79. Concertante di Chicago with J. Lawrie Bloom Among the commissions he has re­ of the Chicago Symphony as soloist. ceived are those from members of The Cleve­ The composer has provided the follow­ land Orchestra, the Northwest Indiana ing note for his Sinfonia Antiqua: Symphony, and the Bel Canto Woodwind "The Sinfonia Antujua is modeled on Trio. He has also produced arrangements for two archaic forms, the Italian overture-sinfo- The Cleveland Orchestra. His choral work nia (as found in Mozart's K. 318) and the The Magic Voyage was awarded first prize in minuet-finale symphony (Haydn's Sympho­ the Phi Mu Epsilon National Choral Compe­ nies Nos. 18, 26, and 30). Both of these forms tition in Pittsburgh in 1978. feature a basic fast slow fast structural pat­ In 1987, Rapchak's Mystic Promenade tern. The general character and texture also was selected by the American Symphony reflect the older forms: the continually active Orchestra League for reading by Leonard accompaniments, the tendency to divide the Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony. In orchestra into choirs, the use of various ritor- 1989, his Chasing the Sunset had a reading by nello figures, the clusters of oboes sparked by the National Orchestral Association in New the light percussion. York and a subsequent premiere by the Man­ "The opening Allegro is built entirely hattan Philharmonic, conducted by David on a lengthy two-part theme. The slow mid­ Gilbert. dle section of the work is based on an Rapchak's opera, The Lifework of Juan inversion of this theme. Just before the return Diaz, a collaboration with author Ray Brad­ of the Allegro, there appears a new version of bury, was commissioned by Chamber Opera the theme (now combined with its inver­ Chicago. The work was premiered to critical sion), stately, austere, yet gentle. acclaim in Chicago in the spring of 1990 and "As the restatement of the Allegro pro­ subsequently broadcast over Chicago's fine- gresses, the new, combined tune continually arts radio station WFMT. In March 1991, his attempts to assert itself, and finally does so. II Concerto Vetrina for bass clarinet and or­ The orchestra regroups, as it were, into three chestra will receive its world premiere by the massed choirs: strings, woodwinds, and brass, with a new percussion contingent of cymbals, condemned the "formalistic perversions and Chinese cymbals and tam-tams, and harp, anti-democratic tendencies" of Shostakovich celesta, and glockenspiel adding to the clangor. and some of his contemporaries. Henceforth, "The new theme emerges in its finished those who wished to enjoy official favor would form, that of a minuet, slightly out of phase have to renounce the "cult of atonality, at first, then suddenly shifting into rhythmic dissonance, and discord . infatuation with focus. This harmonious paean quickly fades, confused, neurotic combinations which echoed by distant horns and bells. The Sin- transform music into cacaphony." fonia Antiqua may be viewed as the composer's Prokofiev, in failing health, managed fond and rather sentimental tribute to past to muddle through his last five years with musical glories." token words of apology; Miaskovsky would die two years later, never to see the thaw that Concerto for Violin and Orchestra took place after Stalin's death. Shostakovich, No. 1 in A minor, Op. 77 then, bore the brunt of the attack, to which DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975) he replied with some weasel words. Without going so far as to recant his "modernistic" tendencies, he offered a speech in which he hostakovich composed his first Vi­ said that he had "always heeded criticism olin Concerto in 1947-48. The first against me and tried in every way to work performance took place on Octo­ better and harder. Now, too, I am paying ber 29, 1955, with David Oistrakh heed to criticism and shall continue to do so as soloist and Yevgeny Mravinsky in the future." conductingS the Leningrad Philharmonic Or­ What this meant was obvious on the chestra. The score calls for three flutes (one surface. Over the next few years, doubling piccolo), three oboes (one doubling Shostakovich cranked out more than his English horn), three clarinets (one doubling share of patriotic potboilers: a film score for bass clarinet), two bassoons, contrabassoon, The Fall of Berlin, a setting of ten revolution­ four horns, tuba, timpani, tam-tam, xylo­ ary poems for a cappella chorus, and most phone, celesta, harp, strings, and solo violin. disingenuous of all, a direct tribute to Stalin Twice in Shostakovich's lifetime, pol­ in the score for The Unforgettable Year 1919, itics cut across the composer's career. The first which paid tribute to some of the fictional time, in 1936, his opera Lady Macbeth of military exploits of the Soviet "leader and Mtsensk drew official fire for its racy subject teacher." matter and dissonant musical style ("muddle At the same time, he voiced his real instead of music," read the headline in feelings in a number of works that could not Pravda). Lady Macbeth, in the middle of a be brought to public performance until the successful run, was stopped in its tracks, and thaw that took place under the Khrushchev the hard-edged Fourth Symphony was with­ regime: the Fourth String Quartet, the Violin drawn before its public premiere. The next Concerto, the song cycle From Jewish Folk year, Shostakovich issued his Fifth Sym­ Poetry. "Not one of these works could be phony, "a Soviet artist's reply to just criti­ performed then," he told Solomon Volkov in cism," as it was called. Just how genuine his his purported memoirs, published posthu­ contrition was, we may wonder, but for the mously under the title Testimony. "They were moment, Shostakovich was restored to offi­ heard only after Stalin's death. I still can't cial favor, being awarded the Lenin Prize in get used to it." 1940 for his Piano Quintet. The first signs of a change in official The second onslaught was less personal attitudes came with the Tenth Symphony, but no less destructive. In 1948, there began which had its first performance late in 1953. an official move against the purveyors of That work was vigorously debated in musical "formalism" in music, among them, circles, but no move was made to suppress it. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Miaskovsky. The way was clear for the "hidden" works There had been rumblings of official discon­ from the late 1940s to be brought to perfor­ tent with contemporary musical trends as mance, and with the advocacy of David early as 1946, but with the appointment of Oistrakh, the Violin Concerto was first heard Andrei Zhdanov as head of the Composers' in Leningrad in 1955. The violinist, who had Union two years later, the party line stiff­ taken an active role in shaping the solo violin ened. In a decree in February of that year, he part, wrote an encomium of the concerto for "formalist" musical schemes were looked on the music journal Sovetskaya Musyka. From with particular disfavor during the Zhdanov here on, the ice was broken: for his fiftieth era. Shostakovich had been much occupied birthday, in 1956, Shostakovich was again with Baroque forms when he composed the awarded the Lenin Prize, and that same year, concerto, having written 24 preludes and plans were made for a revival of Lady Macbeth. fugues a la Bach, for the piano. Within the For the Violin Concerto, his first for a confines of the archaic passacaglia structure stringed instrument, Shostakovich settled on, an endlessly repeating bass he is free to not the usual three movements, but a four- muse, to ponder, occasionally to recall mate­ movement scheme. As in the Eighth Sym­ rial from earlier movements.