UMS PRESENTS ST. PETERSBURG PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Yuri Temirkanov Artistic Director and Principal Conductor Denis Kozhukhin, Piano Saturday Evening, February 22, 2014 at 8:00 Hill Auditorium • Ann Arbor 57th Performance of the 135th Annual Season 135th Annual Choral Union Series Photo: The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood is reflected in melting ice on Arts Square in central St. Petersburg; photographer: Alexander Demianchuk. 29 UMS PROGRAM Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Arr. Maximilian Steinberg Suite from Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya Cortege nuptial. L’invasion des Tartares La bataille de Kerjenetz Prelude — Hymne a la Nature Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in b-flat minor, Op. 23 Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso Andantino semplice Allegro con fuoco Mr. Kozhukhin, Piano Intermission Giya Kancheli …al niente WINTER 2014 dedicated to Yuri Temirkanov This evening’s performance is hosted by MC3, Nancy and James Stanley, and Jay Zelenock and Family. Additional support provided by the Medical Community Endowment Fund. Media partnership is provided by WGTE 91.3 FM and Detroit Jewish News. hestra Special thanks to Steven Whiting, professor of music and associate dean, U-M School of Music, Theatre & C R Dance, for speaking at this evening’s Prelude Dinner. C O Special thanks to Mark Clague, associate professor of music, U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance, for speaking at this evening’s Medical Community Dinner. Special thanks to Tom Thompson of Tom Thompson Flowers, Ann Arbor, for his generous contribution of lobby floral art for this evening’s performance. HILHARMONI P Special thanks to Kipp Cortez for coordinating the pre-concert music on the Charles Baird Carillon. The current tour of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra is supported by Title Partner Gazprom-Neft. urg B St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra and Mr. Kozhukhin appear by arrangement with Opus 3 Artists, New York, NY. ETERS . P T S 30 BE PRESENT Now that YOU’RE IN YOUR seat… As young men, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Piotr Tchaikovsky (born four years apart) represented opposite tendencies in Russian music. The former started his professional life as a naval officer, largely self-taught in music who, together with his colleagues in the Mighty Handful (also known as the “Russian Five”), regarded with a great deal of suspicion the newly-founded St. Petersburg Conservatory which they perceived as having an overly Western orientation. Piotr Tchaikovsky, one of the first graduates of the Conservatory, was steeped in the European classics and therefore seen by the “Five” as lacking authenticity as a Russian composer. This was in the 1860s. Thirty years later, the situation was quite different: of the members of “Five,” Mussorgsky and Borodin had died, Balakirev had largely withdrawn from the musical scene, and Cui, never an important composer to begin with, was increasingly marginalized. Rimsky-Korsakov alone made the transition from talented amateur to consummate professional, and became the leading professor of composition at the very conservatory which he and his friends had previously disparaged. In the 1880s and ’90s, he and Tchaikovsky entertained cordial relations, even though not untouched by professional jealousy. After Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893, Rimsky- Korsakov, now the undisputed dean of Russian composers, always cherished his colleague’s memory. By that time, whatever aesthetic differences had existed before between these two masters had receded into the past. Together, they represent a classical tradition which is an inalienable part of the WINTER 2014 background of subsequent generations of composers from what used to be the Soviet Union — no matter how much those generations may have departed from the tradition or even rebelled against it. Suite from Legend of the When it first became known in the West Invisible City of Kitezh and the (which was not that long ago), Rimsky- Maiden Fevroniya (1903–05) Korsakov’s penultimate opera, Legend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Born March 18, 1844 in Tikhvin, Russia Maiden Fevroniya, was dubbed “the Died June 21, 1908 in Lyubensk Russian Parsifal,” perhaps to give an indication of the importance of this UMS premiere: Music from Rimsky-Korsakov’s long-neglected operatic gem. True, the The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh opera has many Wagnerian parallels, and was first performed on a UMS concert in a not only with Parsifal: the opening, for transcription made for the Osipov Balalaika instance, is unmistakably modelled on Orchestra in 1972. the “Forest Murmurs” from Siegfried. The entire opera combines nature images, Snapshots OF HistorY…IN 1905: • The First Russian Revolution; War between Russia religion, and, in particular, the motif and Japan of redemption in a way that inevitably • Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis with five evokes associations with Wagner. Yet publications that revolutionized physics • Debussy’s La Mer and Strauss’s Salomé first performed there is also a strong Russian and Oriental • Edith Wharton publishes The House of Mirth folk element present, and the style on the • Henri Rousseau paints The Hungry Lion Throws whole can hardly be called Wagnerian. Himself on the Antelope 31 UMS Through the marriage of the holy maiden Concerto for Piano and Orchestra Fevroniya, a child of nature, to Prince No. 1 in b-flat minor, Op. 23 Vsevolod, the son of a ruler embattled (1874–75, rev. 1879, 1888) by the invading Tartars, an unspoiled Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky world of legends meets human society. Born May 7, 1840 in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia The central event of the opera is when Died November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg Fevroniya, by the power of her prayers, makes the city of Kitezh invisible so that UMS premiere: Arguably the most famous the Tartars cannot find it. In the end, the 19th-century piano concerto — Tchaikovsky’s two protagonists find safe haven in this b-flat minor — was first performed on a UMS invisible city, a place no longer of this concert roughly 25 years after it was composed. earth, where they can reign in heavenly The pianist was Mr. Albert Lockwood performing with the Boston Festival Orchestra peace forever after. at the 1901 May Festival in University Hall. The suite drawn from Kitezh touches upon all the different realms the opera Snapshots OF HistorY…IN 1874–75: inhabits. It opens with Fevroniya’s • Bizet’s Carmen first performed (1875) magical forest, complete with birdsong • The Civil Rights Act is signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant, guaranteeing certain rights for and a simple Russian melody to represent African-Americans (the law was, however, declared the idyll. With the colorfully orchestrated unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883) Bridal Procession, we meet Prince • Pierre-Auguste Renoir paints his Rowers’ Lunch (1875) Vsevolod’s people; but the festivities are • Mussorgsky composes Pictures at an Exhibition soon, and very audibly, interrupted by • Brahms completes his Piano Quartet in c minor, Op. 60 the attack of the Tartars. The agitated • Russia’s First Great Piano Concerto section that follows depicts the Battle of Kershenetz, in which the Russians defeat With Tchaikovsky’s arrival on the WINTER 2014 their enemy amidst glorious military musical scene, Russia had finally fanfares. A moment of introspection produced a composer who had it all: follows the victory, before we take the brilliant technique, outstanding final step into the otherworldly realm. The melodic gifts, and a strong Russian “forest murmurs” of the opening section national identity. Before Tchaikovsky, return; the sounds of the vibraphone and the history of the Russian concerto celesta, together with a beguiling oboe consisted largely of four concertos solo, introduce the heavenly city where by his teacher Anton Rubinstein (he Fevroniya ascends with her prince. Gentle added a fifth in 1874–75, concurrently hestra with his former student’s First) — plus C and lyrical at first, the music gradually R becomes more ecstatic as we move two unfinished works by Balakirev C O from “Forest Murmurs” to a section that (the second of which was completed recalls the Magic Fire music from the by Sergei Liapunov many years later). closing scene of Die Walküre. The ending, It was left to the young Tchaikovsky to however, is solemn and grandiose — a true turn the form of the concerto, which HILHARMONI had been perceived as German in P “apotheosis,” or elevation to a divine state. both style and origin, into something urg B authentically Russian. Rubinstein’s combination of muscular technique ETERS and effusive lyricism was a great . P T influence on the young composer, S but Tchaikovsky had to find his own 32 BE PRESENT solution to the problem of form. In his the end. Again silence. I got up and asked, monumental Tchaikovsky biography, “Well?” It was then that there began musicologist David Brown noted: to flow from Nikolay Grigoryevich’s “Thematic development, which came mouth a stream of words, quiet at first, so readily to the German symphonic but subsequently assuming more and more the tone of Jove the Thunderer. It composer, was thoroughly alien to appeared that my concerto was worthless, Russian creative thought.” Brown that it was unplayable, that passages describes that thought as “reflective were trite, awkward, and so clumsy that rather than evolutionary.” This means, it was impossible to put them right, that musically speaking, that the Russian as composition it was bad and tawdry, that composer can “conceive self-contained I had filched this bit from here and that [and] often magnificently broad bit from there, that there were only two themes,” but encounters “problems or three pages that could be retained, and when he wishes to evolve to the next that the rest would have to be scrapped stage of the piece.” or completely revised.