Events

• Emanuel Ax, piano

• January 13-14, 2012 8:00 PM
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• where: Dell Hall directions
• conductor: Peter Bay

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
b. 27 January 1756 in Salzburg, Austria; d. 5 December 1791 in Vienna, Austria.

Overture to Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario), K. 486. Premiered on 7 February 1786, in the Orangerie at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna to entertain visiting nobles from the Netherlands.

Mozart wrote the Overture in 1786 as the opening movement of the one-act comic opera, Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario). The opera is in the German Singspiel tradition (comedy with music, performed in German with spoken dialogue), with close relationships to The Abduction from the Seraglio, K. 384. At 30, Mozart was still struggling to establish a career in Vienna, having been fired by his Salzburg employer, Cardinal Leandro Colloredo. To stretch his income, Mozart eked out his living by teaching, giving concerts, and composing music for specific functions, and was especially interested in being a successful composer of opera.

This commission was extremely welcome as it would enhance both his reputation and his pocketbook. Written as an entry to a competition established by Austrian Emperor Joseph II in an attempt to prove the viability of the German Singspiel against the more popular Italian opera buffa, Mozart was up against his rival Salieri, who wrote the buffa, Prima la musica e poi le parole. The composers were supposed to deal with the same subject: the creation of an opera and the establishment of an opera company. To the disappointment of the Emperor, Salieri was the winner, more perhaps thanks to a superior libretto than the quality of the music. To his defense, Mozart hadn’t really spent that much time on the competition, focusing mostly on his next opera, The Marriage of Figaro.

Although a fully completed work, Der Schauspieldirektor contains only a small amount of music (an overture and four numbers) and is a burlesque form of an “audition” held by a theatre director, with participants of two sopranos and a tenor. The plot features jealousies, rivalries, tantrums, falsity, and humor, yet the opera is not one of Mozart’s most famous, perhaps because the humor is uneven and there is little singing.

The Overture is a small masterpiece, built around a vigorous fugue, and, like the contemporaneous overture to Figaro, mixes trivial lightness with lyrical themes. Spirited and filled with vitality, the Overture is frequently performed in the concert hall. In a happy key of C Major, and typical of Mozart, it is built around a vigorous fugue, mixing a highly rhythmic first theme with a beautifully expressive second.

Ludwig van Beethoven
b. 17 December 1770 in Bonn, Germany. d. 26 March 1827 in Vienna, Austria.

Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19. Premiered 29 March 1795, at Vienna’s Burgtheater with Beethoven as soloist, in a concert marking his public debut.

The B-flat Major Piano Concerto was composed primarily between 1787 and 1789 but was in fact written before its C Major companion, and was thus Beethoven’s first major orchestral work. Used by the composer as an important display piece for his own debut as a young virtuoso, Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto was premiered at the annual charity concert for Widows and Orphans of the Society of Musicians, yet with the solo part not fully written out. His scoring was completed a mere two days before the performance. Suffering from colic and prescribed with painkillers, Beethoven frantically wrote out the score. This situation is one that would be repeated with other compositions in future years.

While the piece as a whole is very much in the classical concerto style, there is a sense of drama and contrast that is present in many of Beethoven’s later works with the spirit of Mozart hovering near by. Beethoven revised the concerto repeatedly until its publication in 1801, and wrote a splendid cadenza for the first movement in 1809. He also had written a different finale at first, which is now known as the Rondo in B-flat Major for Piano and Orchestra. The present finale, modeled after themes of Haydn, is a rare display Beethoven’s good-humored side.

The first movement begins with a triumphant orchestral opening, maintaining the playfulness in chromatic passages to show off the soloist’s tantalizing technique. A full-length exposition provides a wealth of material and thematic elements, which Beethoven manipulates with an infallible sense of control. Witty and tightly organized, the concise orchestral introduction closely follows Mozart’s practice: an exposition with a full cadence leading to the solo entrance; the first entry of the soloist presents a new, charming theme; after much virtuosic display, the orchestra leads to a pause before the cadenza. There is a rather difficult cadenza composed by Beethoven himself, which is stylistically very different from the concerto. Here he applies the first opening theme in several different ways, changing its character each time and displaying the innumerable ways that a musical theme can be repeated and developed.

The Adagio is characteristically serene and peaceful, offering a pensive, expansive theme, elaborated and embellished throughout the movement. One of the great slow movements in early Beethoven, it is conceived on a broad scale, with a profound and moving dialogue between the piano and the orchestra in a highly ornate, technically demanding, proto-Romantic piano writing. The last bars of the movement, in which the music drifts dreamily to a close, are superb. The pianist’s right hand plays a sort of recitative, below which Beethoven puts one of his rare pedal markings, “con gran espressione,” where the soloist plays a rhythmically decorated series of arpeggios, intermittently broken by fragments of the main theme by the strings.

The concerto concludes with a bouncing, light, optimistic, witty Rondo that brings back the youthful playfulness heard in the opening movement. This rambunctious finale, on a theme that Haydn must have relished, includes a new theme that is no more than a mere “episode,” first announced by the piano in F Major, but later to reappear in the tonic key, thus giving the finale the character not only of a rondo, but also of something nearer to a symphonic first movement. There is a constant angular feel within the 6/8 melody that Beethoven plays on with each return of the rondo theme. It seems poised to fade away, with a few chipper grace notes, a long, shimmering trill in thirds, and some quiet chords in the piano part, but the orchestra appends a few final bars with raucous laughter.

It may be argued that with the relatively infrequent appearance in the concert repertoire the B-flat Concerto is unjustly neglected, for the score reveals a remarkably sure hand in the development of inspired phrases and themes which belies the youthfulness of its composer. Vibrant and contrasting, forceful and pliant, staccato and legato, all in a spirit of elegance and sophistication, the Second Piano Concerto remains a mainstay in the repertoire.

Stanislaw Moniuszko
b. 5 May 1819 in Ubiel, near Minsk, Russia. d. 4 June 1872 in Warsaw, Poland.

Bajka (A Fairy Tale), Fantastic Overture. Premiered 1 May 1848 in Vilnius. Dedicated to the Russian composer and supporter of Moniuszko, Alexander Dargomyzhsky.

A Polish composer, conductor and teacher, Stanislaw Moniuszko’s output includes many songs, operas and a few instrumental works. Generally referred to as the father of Polish national opera, (characterized by elements of Italian opera), his musical style is filled with patriotic themes of the peoples of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, rhythms of Polish dances, and folklore. In more than 300 songs he referred to the Polish preromantyczne, where he developed an especially vocal ballad form, giving it a powerful and rich musical character. Recognized as an important national composer during his lifetime, it was after his death that he became revered. In statues, museums, parks, music competitions, institutions, the name Moniuszko constantly comes up in Polish society. He has also been featured on postage stamps, bank notes and other official documents in Poland. The home of the Polish National Opera, Teatr Wielki, is also named after him.

As a representative of Polish Romantic orchestral music, Moniuszko’s Bajka became one of the most popular and widespread short concert works from a Polish composer of his era. Despite its title, Moniuszko attached no literary program to the music, and the work is best appreciated as a freely elaborated concert overture, brimming with lyrical themes. The composer has indicated only for the mood and character to describe musical events, from the lyrical drama full of humor, to the disturbing and mysterious. Dynamic musical narration, colorful orchestration, numerous contrasts of expression and beautiful, melodic themes, allow you to easily imagine a hypothetical story, beginning with the words: “Once upon a time….”

Karol Szymanowski
b. 3 October 1882 in Tymoszówka, Russian Empire. d. 28 March 1937 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Symphony No. 4, Op. 60, “Symphonie Concertante” for Piano and Orchestra. Premiered 9 October 1932 with Szymanowski as the soloist and the Poznañ City Orchestra under the direction of Grzegorz Fitelberg. It was a huge success and is dedicated “à mon ami Arthur Rubinstein.”

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski was born in the Ukraine, once part of Poland, and studied in Warsaw. He was influenced by Chopin and also Wagner, Richard Strauss, Brahms and Stravinsky, as well as the entire host of early twentieth-century “isms”: Impressionism, Expressionism, Oriental-ism, Symbolism, and even Folklore-ism. From a well-to-do and sophisticated family of long-standing, patriotic, and highly refined Polish stock, the breadth of his cultural knowledge is reflected in his music and in particular in his settings of a variety of Polish literary texts. Szymanowski’s purely orchestral works include two violin concertos and four symphonies, the last in the form of a symphonie concertante for piano and orchestra.

A brilliant pianist, Szymanowski included a substantial role for the piano in his Symphony No. 4. Intending to play the first performances himself, he ensured that the level of technical difficulty of the solo part, while extremely impressive, lacked the complicated virtuosity normally found in a concerto. Rather, Szymanowski developed the orchestration, making the work vivid and brilliant, shifting the emphasis from the soloist to the orchestra. Thus the title symphonie concertante rather than piano concerto, where the solo instrument, despite its concerto-like domination, often blends into the sound of the expansively treated orchestra and becomes one of the elements of the symphonic structure.

Supporting the classification as a traditional concerto, the piece is cast in three movements, the last two played without pause. The unusually extended orchestral writing that brings a wealth of sound and expression of ideas in turn reveals its symphonic nature. The overall mood is cheerful and merry, as well as lyrical in the first movement, reflective and nocturnal in the second, and lively and spirited in the third.

The opening is magnificently beautiful; an exotic theme introduced by the piano, followed by a vigorous and agitated second subject, bringing a change of mood with the music darkening and remaining stormy even through the cadenza. It is among Szymanowski’s most descriptive melodies, combining the features of typically Slavic romanticism with the nostalgic atmosphere of a tango. Heaving with tension, the closing passage is quite the opposite of the tender opening and the movement concludes with a brief and boisterous coda that ends with a cry resembling the work of Richard Strauss.

The Andante molto sostenuto emanates a melodious peacefulness, building from its initial nocturnal eeriness to a soaring climax. Marked by a tortured version of the principal theme from the first movement, it recedes again into delicate quietude. The flute introduces an ethereal melody against a running piano accompaniment. A soothing solo violin soon takes up the theme, tension mounts in the middle section, but peace prevails with a return of the flute, now joined by the piano. This middle movement delights with its beautiful, subtle, impressionistic colors a la Bartók, famous for his delicate and mysterious “night music.”

A quiet bridge passage on the piano segues to the stormy finale, marked Allegro non troppo, a rondo with rhythmic swagger. Inspired by folk music, it is styled as an oberek, a traditional Polish round-dance with an emphasis on rhythm, energy and momentum. The music has a driving gusto but may strike some as being more thematically threadbare than it actually is. The latter half of the movement has a Bartók-like character in its sense of motoric drive and percussive rhythms, providing a brilliant close and an exciting and vigorous conclusion.

Listeners encountering Szymanowski in the concert hall today, which they are not likely to do very often, may well be astonished that music of such quality could have fallen into near-oblivion. The variegated nature of Szymanowski’s output is partly to blame yet at his death, he ranked as the most internationally celebrated Polish composer since Chopin.

© Jeanne Rogers

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