PROGRAM NOTES by Joseph and Elizabeth Kahn
November 14 and 15, 2009 "Untamed Fury"
Russia, fate and a storm-driven horde of demons
ANTON ARENSKY (1961-1906)
Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky, Op.35a
Anton Stepanovich Arensky was one of that unfortunately large group of prodigiously talented musicians who died young. The son of a physician, who was also an amateur cellist, and a mother who was a pianist, Arensky was already composing songs and piano pieces well before his tenth birthday.
A star composition student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Arensky immediately began teaching at the St. Petersburg Conservatory upon his graduation. He later became a colleague of Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, where he was a teacher of Aleksander Scriabinand Sergey Rachmaninov. In 1895 he became the director of the imperial chapel in St. Petersburg, resigning in 1901 on a significant pension to devote himself to composition, gambling and alcohol.
Arensky’s output is not extensive. He greatly disappointed Rimsky-Korsakov for abandoning the Russian nationalist movement and supporting Tchaikovsky’s more cosmopolitan romanticism. His eclectic approach is clearly evident in the Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky, an arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement from his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 35, composed in 1894 as a memorial to Tchaikovsky, who had died the previous winter.
Arensky’s seven variations and a coda are based on the theme from Tchaikovsky’s song “Legend,” No. 5 from Sixteen Children’s Songs, Op. 54. The variations are extremely lyrical without recourse to any of the dissonance typical of composers of the late nineteenth century. There is no buildup of excitement with increasingly complex or virtuosic variations, so common in the genre; rather, the piece ends with a gentle, almost wistful, coda.
ALEKSANDER SCRIABIN (1872 - 1915)
Piano Concerto in f# minor, Op.20
Short of stature but long on ego, composer and pianist Aleksander Scriabin has been called the bad boy of Russian music. Considered a visionary and musical messiah by some – including himself – to others he was a charlatan, neurotic degenerate and total failure. He started formally studying piano and reading music at the relatively late age of ten, but by fourteen was already composing feverishly. At 16 he entered in the Moscow Conservatory to study piano – his teacher, Nikolay Zverev, discouraged him from composing – pursuing a totally different route from his classmate Sergey Rachmaninov, who bested him in winning a first Gold Medal to Scriabin’s second.
Rachmaninov worked hard to become a respected composer, conductor and pianist, while Scriabin went on to quarrel with everybody, especially his benefactors.
Scriabin’s early models were Chopin and Liszt, but he soon avoided any musical influences to develop his own musical language. His innovative harmonies made his later music instantly identifiable. He experienced an intrinsic association of specific tones with colors and odors, a benign and not uncommon neurological condition known as synesthesia. He also developed an interest in mysticism, adhering to a belief going back to the ancient Greeks that music could transform the human soul.
As his theories became increasingly esoteric, he conceived a project he called Mysterium, an attempt to create music that combines the stimulation of all the senses, including music, speech, color, aroma and touch, creating a grand synthesis of the arts. It was to be presented in a vast Indian temple by thousands of musicians dressed in white. For that purpose in 1914, he bought a plot of land in Darjeeling, India. Unfortunately, this forerunner of today’s multimedia remains only as a series of sketches, Scriabin having succumbed to septicemia from a boil on his lip in a sudden and uncharacteristically ordinary death.
Written in haste just before his marriage in 1897, the Piano Concerto gives no hint of the composer’s future idiosyncratic musical philosophy and language. The work is greatly influenced by Chopin; the structure, harmonies and themes of all three movements are conventional for the 1840s! The Concerto suffered from unsuitable orchestration that the composer attributed to lack of experience, but was probably due to his undue haste to finish it before his wedding. He turned to Russia’s most brilliant orchestrator, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and Anatoly Lyadov for help but in the end changed little. It is also possible that Scriabin’s orchestration difficulties stemmed from imitating Chopin – who had similar problems in his two youthful concertos, abandoning orchestral music completely.
Piano concertos of the nineteenth century frequently featured special relationships between the soloist and one or two orchestral instruments. Scriabin continually singles out the clarinet and the horn, which opens the piece. The first movement, marked Allegro, is particularly “even tempered,” the fully orchestrated climax occurring during the final measures of the movement. The two principal themes are similar, giving the movement an unusual homogeneity.
The second movement is a theme with five variations that allows for a display of elegant runs and arpeggios. Here, the piano frequently plays in dialogue with the clarinet, beginning in the first variation.
The final movement, which one might expect to feature a brilliant technical display, maintains the mood of the preceding movements. A prevailing rhythmic figure is a cross between a polonaise and a mazurka. There are no cadenzas.
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
Symphony No.5 in e minor, Op.64
Throughout his creative career, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s inspiration went through extreme cycles, tied to his frequent bouts of deep depression and self-doubt. In mid-May 1888 he wrote to his brother Modest that he was convinced that he had written himself out and that he now felt neither the impulse nor the inclination to compose. By the end of the month, however, he set about “...getting a symphony out of my dulled brain, with difficulty.” Inspiration must have started to flow, for by the end of August, the massive Fifth Symphony was finished.
As was the case with most of Tchaikovsky’s compositions, the premiere of the Symphony – in St. Petersburg, with the composer conducting – earned mixed reactions. The audience liked it, critics panned it and fellow-composers were envious. Modest believed that the problem with the critics lay with his brother’s lack of confidence as a conductor. Tchaikovsky himself, however, was never at ease with the Symphony, and wrote to his benefactress, Nadeja von Meck: “Having played my symphony twice in St. Petersburg and once in Prague, I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent in it, some exaggerated color, some insincerity of construction, which the public instinctively recognizes. It was clear to me that the applause and ovations were not for this but for other works of mine, and that the Symphony itself will never please the public.” For the rest of his life he felt ambivalent about its merits, although after a concert in Germany, where the musicians were enthusiastic, he felt more positive.
The mood of the entire Symphony is set by the introduction, a somber motto in the clarinets that reappears throughout the work and hints at some hidden extra-musical agenda. Perhaps the motto reflects the melancholy and self-doubt Tchaikovsky experienced when he started composing the Symphony; certainly its mood is maintained throughout most of the work, where it casts a pall over whatever it touches. After the Introduction, the first movement continues Andante con anima with a resolute march theme, almost a grim procession through adversity. A second beautifully orchestrated theme reveals how many ways there are to represent a sigh in music. Even the idyllic ambience of the second movement, Andante cantabile, its main theme one of the repertory's great horn solos, followed by a more animated theme for solo oboe, opens with ponderous introductory measures for the double basses and cellos, playing the underlying harmony of the motto. Later, the movement is interrupted by the sudden recurrence of the motto blasted out by a solo trumpet over the threatening rumble of the timpani.
The third movement, a waltz in 5/4 time based on a street melody the composer had heard in Florence ten years before, also has an undertone of sadness, and towards the end the somber motto is again heard, the mood continuing into the Finale.
The last movement presents the motto as the focal point of a final struggle between darkness and light, symbolized by the vacillation between its original e minor and E major. The stately introduction mirrors the opening of the piece, although in an ambiguous mood and mode. With the Allegro, the key returns decidedly to the minor, but the tempo picks up into a spirited Trepak, a Russian folkdance. Finally, following a grand pause, the key switches definitively to E Major – with great pomp and fanfare – for a majestic coda based on the motto and a final trumpet blast of a version in E major of the first movement march.
2009 www.WordProsMusic.com
