Events

• Ingrid Fliter, piano

• April 9-10, 2010 8:00 PM
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• where: Michael & Susan Dell Hall directions
• conductor: Peter Bay

Frédéric Chopin
b. 1 March 1810 in Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, Poland; d. 17 October 1849 in Paris.

Marcia funebre from Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35. Composed 1837, age 27.
Orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar in 1932.
b. 2 June 1857 in Broadheath, near Worcester, England; d. 23 February 1934 in Worcester.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1930, its first conductor the gifted Adrian Boult. Soon someone at EMI (Electrical Musical Industries Ltd., the corporate descendant of the Gramophone Company Ltd.) suggested that the new orchestra should be contracted to record for EMI. A related idea was for them to record a new, specially commissioned orchestration of Chopin’s famous “Funeral March.” Never mind that the people in charge chose to record a newly established orchestra playing a funeral march.

EMI’s lead producer, Fred Gaisberg, born in the United States, had come to England around the turn of the 20th century when the recording industry was in its infancy. His energy and sensitivity for recording projects with both commercial and artistic virtues had been crucial in making the Gramophone Company the leading recording company in Europe from early on. He produced almost every important recording issued by the Gramophone Company well into the 1930s.

Elgar biographer Jerrold Northrop Moore in his supplemental volume Elgar on Record comments that Gaisberg had a practice of coming up with ideas, then passing the credit—and the ensuing responsibility—for them on to others. Gaisberg appears to give Boult credit, at least in his correspondence with Elgar, for the Funeral March idea, though the newly commissioned orchestration, considered in the context of all of the surviving correspondence, was probably Gaisberg’s own idea. Elgar’s score was mailed with a cover note to Gaisberg on 31 March 1932; the BBC Symphony with Boult conducting recorded it at EMI’s almost-new recording studios in Abbey Road, London, on 30 May 1932.

Maestro Bay and ASO Librarian Craig Hahn after a number of inquiries located the performing material with the BBC Symphony in London. The photocopied score and parts that they received were hard to read and manifestly inaccurate in numerous details. An entirely new score and set of parts were prepared and are being used for the first time for these concerts.

Grande Valse brillante in E-flat, Op. 18. Composed 1830-31, age 20-21.
Orchestrated by Igor Fyodorevich Stravinsky in 1909.
b. 5/17 June 1882 near St. Petersburg; d. 6 April 1971 in New York.

The amazing and epochally influential Paris career of Serge Diaghilev (a native of Russia, Sergey Pavlovich Diagilev, 1872-1929) began in 1907 with a series of concerts at the Paris Opera. In the 1908 season, a production of Boris Godunov with Fyodor Chaliapin as Boris, the singer’s first appearances in the West, was sensational. For 1909, Diaghilev wanted to present a season of Russian opera, each production featuring Chaliapin, but crucial financing fell through. Diaghilev thought of mixing some ballet with single acts of operas, and thus was born the Ballets Russes. One program presented three ballets, all choreographed by Michel Fokine (born Mikhail Mikhailovich Fokin) and featuring an astounding teenager named Vaslav Nijinsky.

One of these three ballets was Les sylphides, now considered a monument of classic ballet. The music began in 1892 as a suite of four orchestrations by Alexander Glazunov of piano works by Chopin titled Chopiniana (by which title Fokine’s ballet is still known in Russia). As detailed by Richard Taruskin in his huge “musical biography” of Stravinsky, Fokine choreographed Glazunov’s suite in 1907 for a charity performance at St. Petersburg’s Mariyinsky Theater, asking Glazunov to orchestrate an additional movement. Shortly afterward, there was a second production at the Imperial Theater School for which Fokine kept only the last-prepared of Glazunov’s orchestrations and had other new movements orchestrated by Maurice Keller, a répétiteur at the Mariyinsky.

For Paris, Diaghilev kept that fifth piece orchestrated by Glazunov (Chopin’s Valse in C-sharp minor, Op. 64 no. 2) and commissioned new orchestrations of the other pieces from a kind of committee comprised of Anatoly Lyadov, Alexander Taneyev, Nikolay Cherepnin (Alexander’s father), and a promising youngster named Igor Stravinsky, who had scored a success the preceding January with his Fireworks, Op. 4. Taruskin notes the kind of faith Diaghilev must have had in Stravinsky to have assigned Stravinsky the first and last movements of the ballet. The performing materials for Stravinsky’s two orchestrations became available for concert use only very recently, which means that for at least those two pieces ballet companies have been using a long succession of replacement orchestrations by others. An interesting footnote to this is that Stravinsky’s manuscript is owned by the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas.

The finale of Les sylphides is Chopin’s first published valse, a work of such breadth and brilliance that (for one example) Dinu Lipatti, when he performed all of Chopin’s waltzes as a group, used Opus 18 for the finale. Structurally it is similar to Weber’s Invitation to the Dance: a main waltz serves as the frame to a sequence of smaller-scaled waltzes.

Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21. Premiered 17 March 1830 in Warsaw, age 20.

Chopin wrote six compositions for piano and orchestra, five of which were completed (and likely performed) before Chopin left Poland in November 1830 to make his way in the world. (The sixth, the Grande Polonaise brillante, op. 22, was composed 1830-1835.) Despite the fact that he had been a prodigy, with his first composition published when he was seven, these five works, composed 1827-1830, are really “early” compositions.

During these years Chopin was pursuing or preparing to pursue the career path of a virtuoso pianist and composer. Mozart and Beethoven had done it; Brahms and Liszt did it. Robert Schumann would have done it if he hadn’t wrecked his right hand; his wife Clara out of devotion to Robert’s compositions became known primarily as a performer of his music, while her own compositions were largely suppressed.

Chopin disliked the hoopla and artistic compromises involved in sustaining a public career and wanted very much to follow a different path. Arriving in Paris in autumn 1831 after eight months in Vienna, a month in Munich, and two weeks in Stuttgart, Chopin was pleased and relieved to find a large community of Polish émigrés. Unlike the German-speaking cities, Paris quickly began to feel to Chopin like home. Before long he found his true vocation performing in salons around Paris, giving lessons at premium prices to selected students, and composing music almost exclusively for solo piano.

While it was officially titled Piano Concerto No. 2 because it was published second, in 1836, it was the earlier of Chopin’s two piano concertos to be composed. The concertos were probably composed within a year of each other and were performed in Warsaw on 17 March 1830 (the Second) and on the following 11 October (the First), but listening to them side by side in order of composition reveals the speed with which Chopin was developing and finding his own voice as a composer.

The first movement of Chopin’s Second Concerto is structurally a conventional sonata form. The orchestral introduction is a first exposition, here beginning in F minor and moving to the relative major, A-flat, which was the expected second key in a minor-key sonata form. The piano enters for the second exposition, starting again in F minor and moving to A-flat major but coming to rest eventually in C minor. The development and recapitulation follow according to pattern, though the soloist gets no formal cadenza either in this movement or the last two.

The second movement is structurally simple, with a first body of material in A-flat major, a central episode in A-flat minor, then returning to the first theme. Within this framework the soloist enjoys one of Chopin’s early lyrical outpourings. The finale is close to a rondo form, with simple phrase structures and dramatic contrasts of mood, including a delightful episode in a dance rhythm with the strings providing some percussion. Very much in the early romantic concerto style, the work ends as a brilliant showpiece.

Robert Schumann
b. 8 June 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony, Germany; d. 29 July 1856 in Endenich, near Bonn, Germany.

Symphony No. 1 in B-flat, Op. 38 (Spring). Premiered 31 March 1841 in Leipzig, age 30.

During 1839-40 Schumann was thoroughly tied up in his legal battle with Friedrich Wieck over Schumann’s legal right to marry Clara, Friedrich’s daughter and ten years Robert’s junior. The court in Leipzig granted Robert permission to marry Clara on 18 July 1840; the banns were posted on 16 and 30 August; and the marriage took place on 12 September. Where 1840 had been, in Robert’s own description, a Liederjahr (during which Schumann composed about half of his considerable song output), 1841 proved to be a distinctly symphonic year.

The science of mental health was so young during Schumann’s lifetime that there is little about his case that is clear. It’s certain that he was bipolar, and during manic phases he would work for days without a break or rest. From 23 to 26 January 1841, with probably little or no sleep meanwhile, Schumann wrote out a “continuity draft” (melody and bass line on two staves) of what would become his Symphony No. 1. The score was completely finished by 20 February, an instance of bizarre and what we can understand as pathological productivity. Biographer Peter Ostwald quotes Robert’s diary, “After many sleepless nights comes prostration. I feel like a woman who has just given birth—so relieved and happy, but also sick and sore.” Furthermore, Robert’s and Clara’s diaries both provide clear indications of Robert’s depression after completing the score: drinking, hangover, and a week or so of “always melancholy.”

Not a bit of this melancholy is evident in the music itself. The First Symphony persuasively demonstrates one of the most appealing qualities of Schumann’s music, infectious exuberance. The brass, followed by the full orchestra, proclaim a motive—a motto really—that is an instrumental setting of a line by the poet Adolf Böttger, “Im Thale blüht der Frühling auf!”—In the valley, spring blooms forth. The introduction gathers momentum, launching us into the main movement, whose first theme starts with a sped-up statement of the motto. The sonata form, dominated by this tune, culminates in a joyful coda.

The second movement is tender and peaceful, providing an exquisite contrast to the first movement’s constant energy. A transition links this movement to the third movement, a scherzo with two substantial trios. While the movement as a whole is in G minor, this is a light-hearted minor mood with just a hint of a rustic dance in the rhythm. An unusual touch is the movement’s coda, in which the tempo seems to wind down, bringing in allusions to the first trio. The symphony’s finale, a sonata form, returns to the first movement’s mood, tempered with a little introspection. A special delight is the cadenza for the horns and flute leading into the recapitulation. An accelerating coda concludes the celebration of the coming of spring with the festivities at their peak.

©2010 – David Mead

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