Heroic Beethoven: Starting a New Season

The Harrisburg Symphony's new 2014-2015 Season begins soon with a program called "Heroic Beethoven" and features Stuart Malina conducting the orchestra in two works by - no surprise - Beethoven.

Pianist Alon Goldstein will be the soloist for the 4th Piano Concerto and the second half of the program is the Eroica Symphony, the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat.

The concert will open the newly renovated Forum on Saturday, October 18th at 8pm and Sunday, October 19th at 3pm. Truman Bullard offers the pre-concert talks an hour before each program.

And you can come to walk around the newly renovated Forum - it's "Opening Night" in more ways than one - and look at the newly cleaned and refurbished maps that line the back wall of the promenade, paying special attention to those maps detailing the Napoleonic Era, when Beethoven composed this music.

Here is Alon Goldstein playing the slow movement of Mozart's A Major Piano Concerto, K.488, with the Bucharest Philharmponic conducted by Christian Mandeal:
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Some years ago, I heard a radio announcer (no one I knew) say, “Beethoven is one of the few composers you could make an All-Beethoven program with” – and while that may seem obvious, I think what he meant was that there's enough variety in Beethoven's music, you can create an interesting, varied program of great music all by just one composer. And that's not something you can do with every composer.

Though it's easy to be overwhelmed by it, too – too much of a good (or great) thing, perhaps. So usually programmers balance their concerts by selecting from the three basic food-groups: Early-, Middle- and Late-Beethoven.

Stylistically, you've got the very “classical lines” and leaner textures of Early Beethoven, still emerging from the shadow of his teacher, Haydn; the larger emotions and epic proportions of Middle Beethoven, the “Romantic Beethoven,” say; or the more internal, more spiritual explorations of Late Beethoven, particularly in the late Sonatas and Quartets, which never seem to have been duplicated since.

And then there's “Heroic Beethoven,” the hero striding across the landscape of history, larger than life, with an intensity that can be shattering to us mere mortals, the Beethoven of myth and magic – in short, a composer comparable to today's comic book action heroes out to save the universe from evil.

And yet this music – and the myths we associate with it – came from somewhere more normal. The fact that it transcends normality is what gave birth to the myths that surround it – (insert deep and deeply awed announcer's voice, here) – the suffering, misunderstood artist, the loner, the genius – the composer who went deaf. The one who must be approached with reverence and... well, awe.

What is it about Beethoven – more to the point, his music – that affects us like this over 200 years later? And for over 200 years, that's something people have been asking, something every composer since then has been dealing with (or ignoring). It's that idea of a “giant treading behind you,” the way Brahms felt his legacy.

I'm not sure the Harrisburg Symphony's opening concert of the new season will answer that and that's only because there is no answer, at least one that would satisfy the whole audience. It's the same thing, for many people, one can feel after an exceptional performance of Shakespeare: how could any man create something like that? And why has it rarely, if ever, been equaled since...?

Beethoven's 3rd Symphony has always been known as “The Eroica” and it would seem obvious once you've heard it. The Hero – Napoleon Bonaparte, specifically – that inspired the music may be less important to it than the idea of a hero.

Certainly, Beethoven's Eroica is a ground-breaking work of immense proportions, compared to what people were expecting when he wrote it in 1803, but it is more than a depiction of a historically significant person (and a perception that radically changed from the time Beethoven began it to the time the audience first heard it two years later). And part of the impact of this piece (calling it a “piece” sounds so trivial...) can be heard in the 4th Piano Concerto that opens the concert – and which he began not long after he'd completed the Eroica.

Music, somehow, was going to be different, now.

The soloist in this video – courtesy of last year's BBC Proms and the YouBiquitous YouTube – perhaps will give you an idea of the artist's responsibility in dealing with a work like this, what it “means” to play it, interpret it, take it from the written page to the sounds you hear. It is not a challenge to be taken lightly, tossed off to dazzle the audience with your virtuosity. In fact, if anything, this is about as “un-virtuosic” a piece as there is in the concerto repertoire – in terms of its show-casing a player's technique – but that doesn't mean it's easy to play.

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Mitsuko Uchida, pianist, with Mariss Jansons & the Bavarian Radio Symphony (BBC Proms, 2013)

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Basically, the concept of this concerto grew out of the tradition of those Viennese concertos which Mozart composed in the 1780s – Beethoven played a number of this, particularly the D Minor concerto, K.466, which Stuart Malina will perform with the orchestra here in January – but it has little to do with the concertos that were being written in Vienna after 1800, most of which we never hear any more. And the 19th Century concerto which primarily became vehicles for virtuosic display (think Liszt or Chopin if you're not familiar with those by Hummel, who studied with Mozart, or Kalkbrenner and Moscheles).

It's interesting to realize, also, that for all we think about The Great Beethoven, this concerto was not well-received at its premiere (the length of the concert – 4 hours! – the fact it had been under-rehearsed and not to mention the concert hall was under-heated as well all may have had something to do with the audience's reaction) and fell into oblivion until it was brought into the repertoire by a young pianist named Felix Mendlessohn in 1836, nine years after Beethoven died.

But it varies little from its models, a tradition Beethoven inherited not from his teacher, Haydn, who never quite produced concertos comparable to those symphonies, but from his idol, Mozart. However, it was more subtle than flashy (even by contemporary standards) and more lyrical than dramatic (even with the brief slow movement's dialogue which later critics likened to Orpheus taming the wild beasts). While it's not necessarily more symphonic in the role of soloist and orchestra, it was a direct model for Brahms, especially in his 2nd Piano Concerto, who spent most of his life listening to the tramp of this giant behind him.

Beethoven had his fans and he certainly had his detractors. Most of the audience, then, supporters and otherwise, probably didn't "get" what it is we feel about Beethoven today. It's not like Beethoven wrote a new piece and every other composer went and did likewise. It took a while for his innovations to become part of the musical landscape. It's just that we don't know much about all the other composers who lived and worked during Beethoven's lifetime or even the generation that followed his death. Except for the last few years of Schubert's life, the Marvel Comics version of Classical Music tends to jump right from Mozart (who died in 1791) and Haydn (whose last symphonies were written in 1795) to Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Wagner and Brahms, whose careers all began between the 1830s and the 1850s.

It's a bit sobering to think that, while Mendelssohn was 16 when he composed his Octet in 1825, two years before Beethoven died, Brahms' 1st Symphony (dubbed "Beethoven's 10th") wasn't finished until 1876.

So it's interesting to follow the 4th Piano Concerto with something considered one of the greatest symphonies of all times – different enough to create its own variety despite the fact Beethoven composed the concerto in 1805 after completing this symphony the year before. Even the opus numbers – indicating when the works were published, not necessarily when they were composed – are close: preceded by the Waldstein Sonata, the Eroica Symphony is Op. 55, the Concerto, Op. 58. In between come the “Triple Concerto” (for piano trio and orchestra) and the Appassionata Sonata, followed by the three Razumovsky Quartets, the 4th Symphony and the Violin Concerto, all composed between 1803 and 1806.

I'll get more into the question “Where did that come from?” in the next post, but here's a performance also from the BBC Proms (2012, here) with an orchestra created by Daniel Barenboim with young musicians from the Middle East including Israel, Egypt, Palestine and Iran, among others. I chose this particular clip as much for the performance (even the context of the performers) as for the interview segment that precedes it.

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The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim (BBC Proms, 2012) (with interviews beforehand)

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If you're interested in finding out more about the world behind this music, check back for subsequent posts, including one featuring yet another BBC effort, a 2003 film called Eroica which is about the day Beethoven's new symphony was first heard.

Though I can't embed it here, you can also check out Michael Tilson Thomas' highly recommended “Keeping Score” episode from PBS with Beethoven's Third Symphony, here.

Here's a promo:


As they say, “stay tuned”...

- Dick Strawser

Pulling Out All the Stops: The New Season Begins!

The New Season begins! The first concert of the Harrisburg Symphony's Masterworks Series is this weekend at the Forum – Saturday (Oct. 2nd) at 8pm and Sunday (Oct. 3rd) at 3pm. Stuart Malina conducts a program that includes four works – beginning with Stokowski's orchestration of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor, originally for organ, two works for piano and orchestra – the Andante Spianato & Grande Polonaise by Frederic Chopin and the Piano Concerto by Keith Emerson, both with pianist Jeffrey Biegel (left) – and the Symphony No. 3 by Camille Saint-Saëns, known as "The Organ Symphony." Small wonder, given the keyboard connections, the entire concert is called "Pulling Out All the Stops."

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One of the most famous organ pieces of all time is Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor. When audiences couldn't hear the great works of Bach in most concert halls – for lack of suitable instruments in those days – this music was fair game for arrangers to adapt them for the orchestra. And one of the most famous of these was the one made by the conductor Leopold Stokowski. It was this work, with Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, that opened Walt Disney's 1940 film classic, Fantasia.

The Disney animators took classical music and "accompanied" them with animations, long before the days of MTV and pop song videos. In some cases, the music "told a story," so the film interpreted that story. But in Bach's case, there was no "story," the music isn't "about" something – it's just abstract music about music. And so Disney used it as a light show to showcase the conductor and the orchestra as well as using geometric shapes (often inspired by the instruments playing at the moment) and abstract designs that might make you wonder what these guys were smoking in the animation room.

Here's a clip from the opening of Fantasia with Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor.
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(Unfortunately, the famous moment when Bugs Bunny dashes up to the podium, tugging on the maestro's coattails ("Mr. Stokowski! Mr. Stokowski!") is not included in this clip...)

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There are two works on the program, featuring guest artist Jeffrey Biegel (left) who's played Rachmaninoff's 3rd Concerto as well as Billy Joel's Piano Concerto in past seasons. On this visit, he'll play works by Chopin and Emerson.

This year marks the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Frederic Chopin, the great Polish-born composer and pianist who wrote almost exclusively for the piano. After trying to play back tunes he'd hear his mother play on the piano, then making up a few of his own, he finally was given his first lessons when he was 6 years old and gave his first concert the following year, when he wrote his first "official" compositions, two polonaises.

By the time he was 20. he had written two piano concertos but, after settling in Paris, decided he was not cut out for the life of a traveling virtuoso like his friend Franz Liszt. In fact, his nerves could barely stand performing in public at all, and most of his concerts were held in intimate salons.

The short work included on this concert is really a combination of two works. The Grande Polonaise was written first, almost immediately after the concertos as he was setting out on a career, having left Poland following Poland's failed 1830 uprising against Russian rule. Now in Paris – his father had been a French soldier who stayed behind in Poland during the Napoleonic era – Chopin was frequently homesick. The polonaise is a stately dance from Poland and spoke of a by-gone age to the many emigres who'd left their country (or what was left of it) behind.

A few years later, Chopin composed one of his long-lined nocturne-like piano solos which he called "Andante spianato" (spianato means smooth, perhaps in the sense of the unruffled surface of a lake though "spinning" would work here as well, intended or not). He decided to preface the Grande Polonaise, which he felt started too abruptly, with this calmer andante, joining the two with a fanfare in the horns. Later, he also arranged the Polonaise for piano quartet (so it could be played by an amateur pianist with a few string players in the parlor – the 19th Century amateur market for household concerts like this was a major staple for composers' incomes – and eventually for solo piano as well.

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Keith Emerson was a prodigy as well, starting to play the piano at 4 but only taking a few years of lessons when he was 8. He's best known as the pianist for the English 1970s rock band, Emerson Lake & Palmer.

His Piano Concerto No. 1 was written in 1977 for the groups' "return" album following a short hiatus, and Emerson recorded it with the London Philharmonic conducted by John Mayr (who helped him with the orchestration). Emerson wrote it "was born out of a series of variations inspired by the English countryside, paricularly the home I had at that time, which was grand early Tudor and formerly owned by Sir James Barrie (author of Peter Pan). An annex to the main house presented a huge barn studio, where my nine-foot Steinway concert grand awaited, always demanding attention I could not resist. The piano's sonorities would ring out, inspiring me while attracting wild birds to nest in the beams. I incorporated many techniques into the Concerto, such as a twelve-tone scale with Baroque ideas in fugal style. Presented in traditional form, the work tells a story of nature's cycle – its joy, its destruction and, in the block chords of the third movement, its optimistic triumph."

Jeffrey Biegel, who played a concerto arranged from some of the short pieces "in classical style" by Billy Joel a few seasons ago with the Harrisburg Symphony, returns with this bona fide concerto by Keith Emerson which he'd heard on that initial 1977 recording and which wasn't getting any performances. He contacted the composer and worked with him to bring it back to the public's awareness.

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update: be sure to read Jeffrey's comment, posted below!
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By the way, this is not the first time music from Emerson Lake & Palmer appeared on a Harrisburg Symphony program: a few seasons ago, a new trombone concerto by Scott McAllister called "Tarkus" was given its world premiere by HSO principal trombonist Brent Phillips. The concerto was inspired by ELP's half-tank/half-armadillo creation, Tarkus.

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Camille Saint-Saëns began taking piano lessons when he was 2 years old, after it was discovered he had perfect pitch. (I guess that would classify him as a child prodigy.) He wrote his first composition when he was 3 and he was still composing when he died at the age of 86. So that means he had an 83-year-long career as a composer.

Like most composers, Saint-Saëns earned a living (and quite a reputation) as an organist as well as a concert pianist. For 20 years, he was the organist at the Madeleine Church in Paris where, in 1866, Franz Liszt heard him improvise and pronounced him "the greatest organist in the world." 20 Years later, Franz Liszt died and Saint-Saëns dedicated his newly completed 3rd Symphony to his memory.

The Symphony No. 3 in C Minor is usually called simply "The Organ Symphony" though the composer's original title "Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, "with Organ" is more realistic. It's not a concerto though it's got a very prominent part to play. It's heard only in the slow movement and the finale, but it does tend to be memorable when it stands out.

Technically, the organ is only part of the orchestra. But the orchestra for this symphony also calls for two pianists at one piano (a four-hand piano duet) which has by comparison a lesser role to play. It is also scored for "triple woodwinds" which means, usually, 2 Flutes & 1 Piccolo, 2 Oboes & 1 English Horn, 2 Clarinets & 1 Bass Clarinet, and 2 Bassoons and 1 Contrabassoon, including the usual 4 horns, 3 trumpets and 3 trombones. (If you want to see a really full stage, come to hear Mahler's 3rd Symphony next April which uses quadruple winds (actually, 5 clarinet players) and brass (with 8 horns).

Even though Saint-Saëns said this symphony was in two movements – with an actual break only in the middle – each half breaks into two parts itself, all of which corresponds to the traditional four-movement symphonic plan. The first half consists of a dramatic fast opening movement (after a mysterious, slow introduction), followed by a lyrical slow movement; the scherzo and finale are connected for the second half.

The organist for this weekend's performance with the Harrisburg Symphony will feature Eric Riley, organist at Harrisburg's Market Square Presbyterian Church. Eric frequently joins the orchestra as a member of the orchestra - this time, he gets the Saint-Saëns Spotlight.

Here's a series of video clips from YouTube with the complete Saint-Saëns' Third Symphony performed at a BBC Proms Concert with the Radio France Philharmonic conducted by Myung-Whun Chung. The organist in this performance is Olivier Latry.

Part 1: "1st Movement" Adagio; Allegro moderato
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Part 1: "2nd Movement" Poco Adagio
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Part 2: "3rd Movement" Scherzo
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Part 2: "4th Movement" Finale
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I remember the first performance of the then new Forum Organ with the Harrisburg Symphony. Edwin McArthur conducted and Paul Calloway, the organist of the National Cathedral, played Samuel Barber's Toccata Festiva. Now, my archive of concerts and repertoire is out on loan at the moment, so I can't check the date or what the other piece was on the program – I suspect it was the Saint-Saëns "Organ" Symphony, what else? – but it was an exciting concert and Harrisburg was very happy to have the instrument.

The console (the keyboard and casing of the instrument which the organist plays) was actually housed in the Forum's pit – back in the days when there was a pit. This was later covered over to expand the stage not just to accommodate a larger orchestra but to improve the acoustics by getting the strings out from under the proscenium arch. So the organ was then moved into a special "cave" built behind the stage which had been used to store stands and chairs and things (mostly "things") and unfortunately, over the years, the instrument was not used very often and began to deteriorate.

As orchestra manager for the symphony in the '80s, I remember dealing with renovations to the instrument and using it for several performances, including the Saint-Saëns as well as less conspicuous parts in works like Richard Strauss' "Also sprach Zarathustra" and Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony. The organ console would be rolled out from it's cave, the long umbelical cord (the hose for the instrument's air-supply and wiring) snaking across the stage under chairs and risers. Each time, I needed to admonish the musicians not to step, trip or fall on this hose because even the slightest puncture could render the instrument breathless, not something that could be easily fixed. The other problem was tuning the instrument which is quite an undertaking, needing to check and adjust each of the pipes – and there are 3,481 of them! Being in tune with itself is a problem for an instrument that was not kept under regular care, but one time when the organ was scheduled to be played in a concert, it was found its intonation was too low for the orchestra to adjust to and there was no time to have the organ properly tuned (an electric instrument was brought in, instead).

But now it has been refurbished again and it's ready to roll!

"Pulling Out All the Stops," indeed!

A Tale of Two Cities: Vaughan Williams' London

How will the future look back on the events we're living through at this very moment in time? Will it earn a phrase so wonderfully memorable as the one Charles Dickens used to open his story set around the French Revolution, a novel he wrote in 1859 – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...”?

This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony takes its audience on a musical trip – without ever having to leave the Forum, Saturday night at 8pm or Sunday afternoon at 3pm. (Come an hour early and catch Truman Bullard's pre-concert talk.)

Welcome to “A Tale of Two Cities.”

Now, Dickens' novel evokes London and Paris – but this concert offers you musical depictions of Rome (by way of Paris) and London (with a Symphony by a Londoner) plus in between a side-trip to Biedermeier Germany in the 1840s for Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto.

The program begins in Rome with an overture by French composer Hector Berlioz who'd won the prestigious Prix de Rome, spending some time there working on his Symphonie fantastique and finding several inspirations for later works – Harold in Italy, for one, but also a huge opera based on the life of the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. It is an interlude from the Cellini opera, describing the Carnival Season in Rome, that has become famous in the concert hall as “The Roman Carnival Overture.”

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Ralph Vaughan Williams may not be a name that well known to many American audiences – his first name should be pronounced “Rafe” and his last name is a double-barreled non-hyphenated name that is also frequently misspelled 'Vaughn' – but Harrisburg has heard two of his works in the past decade – the very familiar “Fantasy on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” for string orchestra and a less well-known major choral work, the “Dona nobis pacem” combining biblical texts and poetry by Walt Whitman written in 1936 during the very unsettled decade before World War II.

In past seasons, the Lancaster Symphony had also performed his first symphony, an all-choral setting of Walt Whitman's poetry and one of Vaughan Williams' more performed large scale works, “A Sea Symphony.” Then, more recently, the Reading Symphony played his 6th Symphony, an intense score that many saw as commentary on the aftermath of World War II or a much-feared future nuclear war.

The Tallis Fantasia and the rapturous “A Lark Ascending” (not to mention a Christmas chestnut like his Fantasia on Greensleeves) are often tops on lists of radio listener favorites, both here and in England.

This weekend, Stuart Malina has chosen to end the current season with Vaughan Williams' 2nd Symphony which is officially “A London Symphony,” not “THE London Symphony” perhaps in part to distinguish it from Haydn's last symphonic work, one of a set of twelve written for London in the 1790s – but also in part because Vaughan Williams thought of it more as “A Symphony by a Londoner.” Rather than being about London, it's more like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony – “impressions of a Londoner upon walking around the city."

Vaughan Williams (see photograph, left, taken in 1920) was not a Londoner by birth. He was born in the Cotswald village of Down Ampney and grew up in Surrey, south of London – Dorking, primarily, and the family home at Leith Hill. He joked he had been born “with a very small silver spoon in my mouth,” a member of a privileged upper-class family where Charles Darwin was a great-uncle and his mother was descended from the great potter, Josiah Wedgwood. His first wife, Adeline Fisher, was a cousin of Virginia Woolf.

He moved to London after they got married in 1896, living primarily in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, after 1905. Unfortunately, his wife's illness – she suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis – eventually required them to move back to Dorking, but that was years after he composed his symphonic tribute to the city he considered a vital part of his life. After his wife died in 1951, he remarried and quickly moved back to London.



Michael Kennedy, author of one of the better biographies of the composer's life and works – wrote that “[s]ome tentative attempts at a symphonic poem about London were resurrected and 'thrown' into symphony form.” It was his friend and fellow composer George Butterworth who'd suggested he turn these sketches into an all-orchestral symphony following his success with a choral one.

Vaughan Williams had just received his 'big break' with two pieces composed in 1910, works we don't think of being “surprising” or “original” today.

The justly famous Tallis Fantasia was an early example of modern composers basing their 'new music' on something very old – in this case, an English composer from the late 16th Century: when French and Italian composers would make this “grave-robbing school” all the rage after World War I, they would go back to the early 1700s for their material.

The “Sea” Symphony is a choral symphony but unlike most choral symphonies who, following Beethoven's example, reserve the choir for the last movement, Vaughan Williams uses it throughout. People may argue it's more a four-movement cantata than an actual symphony, but then Gustav Mahler wrote his 8th Symphony in 1906, the so-called “Symphony of a Thousand” though several hundred would be more accurate. But it wasn't premiered until September 12th, 1910, exactly one month before Vaughan Williams' “Sea Symphony” was first heard.

These two works made Vaughan Williams “famous” or at least gave him his first recognition. The symphony was premiered on his 38th birthday. Keep in mind his very first published work was a song, “Linden Lea,” which didn't see its way into print until he was 30, making him something of a late-bloomer when you compare him to the likes of Mozart and Mendelssohn. Considering Schubert died at 31 and Mozart at 35, had Vaughan Williams had such a short life, we wouldn't know anything about him.

Fortunately, he was still composing when he died at the age of 86, leaving a cello concerto and a new opera incomplete on his desk just as he was preparing for the recording of his 9th Symphony. In fact, he composed his last four symphonies after one he completed when he was 70: most people considered the radiant 5th Symphony, premiered in the midst of the London Blitz, his swan-song.

His “London Symphony” is usually listed as having been composed in 1913, though he had already played through the first two movements for a friend the year before, when he'd turned 40. Though Vaughan Williams revised the symphony periodically – even in the early 1950s when Barbirolli was recording all six of the symphonies he'd composed so far and the composer was turning 80 – he told the conductor “the London Symphony is past mending – though indeed with all its faults I love it still – indeed it is my favourite of my family of six.” (Three more were written in the last six years of his life.) It was the 1920 revision where Vaughan Williams dedicated it to the memory of George Butterworth who died in a battle on the Somme in 1916 at the age of 31.

Like other travelogue symphonies, there seems to be an elaborate “program” behind the music – musical snapshots of the location or themes inspired by scenery or a mood or perhaps a snatch of a song overheard there.

Perhaps the most famous early example of this would be Beethoven's Pastoral, inspired by visits to the countryside outside Vienna, many of which, in the years of urban development since 1806, are now within the city limits. But even Haydn paid tribute to London in the last of his “London Symphonies,” basing a theme on a street peddler's cry which audiences in 1795 London would have been likely to recognize (call it a pop culture reference, if you want).

Mendelssohn wrote symphonies following visits to Scotland and Italy, incorporating actual melodies (or at least “actual-like”) in the course of the works. Even Berlioz, in his symphony-concerto-symphonic poem, “Harold in Italy,” borrowed a song sung by an Abruzzi mountaineer to his sweetheart for his third movement, also incorporating the sound of the pifferari, the shepherds who played wind instruments in a style that became a special Italian Christmas tradition in all those Christmas-related works written by 18th Century Italian composers.

If a 21st American listeners hears nothing more than Big Ben's Westminster Chimes near the opening and closing moments of the symphony, that is enough to evoke an aural image of London. But in the second movement, he quotes the song of another street vendor, this one less riotous than Haydn's and one more attuned to a reader of Dickens' novels. The viola solo near the middle was purportedly sung by a seller of lavender, and its inclusion should be nothing surprising for a composer who'd already spent many a day tramping around the country-side listening to and jotting down folk songs sung by the countryfolk which may bring to mind the importance Bela Bartok placed on the role of folk song. Vaughan Williams was already doing this in 1904 when Bartok heard his first truly authentic Hungarian folk-song which sparked his life-long interest in the folk cultures of Eastern Europe.

“A London Symphony” – incidentally, the composer did not refer to it as his Symphony No. 2 – is in the four basic movements – a slow introduction preceding a rousing main theme and contrasting second theme; a slow movement; a scherzo; a finale that, at the end, returns to the material first heard in the introduction.

For a 1920 performance, Vaughan Williams allowed the conductor Albert Coates to supply descriptions for the program notes, though the composer's own comments are sufficient to give an idea behind the music's inspirations. Though many of his later symphonies – most notably the 6th – would seem to have possible programs, the composer steadfastly refused to make any comments on the matter then.

1st Movement: Lento – Allegro risoluto The symphony opens quietly as if at night, London perceived through the fog along the Thames (not far from Vaughan Williams' home at the time). The Westminster Chimes are heard, played on the harp. Then, after a short pause, the main section begins, vigorous and often quite loud before leading to a second theme, dominated by the wind and brass, that composer said evoked “Hampstead Heath on an August bank holiday" (a famous park dating back to the 10th Century, the Heath was a popular destination for Londoners taking in the fresh air, comparable, perhaps, to New Yorkers and Central Park).



2nd Movement: Lento Vaughan Williams described this as an evocation of one of London's famous garden parks, “Bloomsbury Square [see above] on a November afternoon." Quiet themes played by the English horn and a solo viola (with its lavender-seller's song) contrast with an impassioned climax before the movement gradually returns to its original quiet opening mood.

3rd Movement: Scherzo (Nocturne) As Vaughan Williams wrote, "If the listener will imagine himself standing on Westminster Embankment at night, surrounded by the distant sounds of The Strand, with its great hotels on one side and the 'New Cut' on the other, with its crowded streets and flaring lights, it may serve as a mood in which to listen to this movement."

4th Movement Finale  – Andante con moto  – Maestoso alla marcia  – Allegro  – Lento  – Epilogue The last movement opens with a grim march which Vaughan Williams described as 'The March of the Down-and-Outers.” This is contrasted with a lighter fast section after which the march returns. Then the main theme from the first movement returns us to the embankment along the Thames as the Westminster Chimes strike once again. The symphony concludes with a quiet Epilogue, which the composer said was inspired by the last chapter of H. G. Wells' novel Tono-Bungay:

"Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass – pass. The river passes – London passes, England passes...."

Here is a student orchestra (listed in the video feed only as GMEA All State, so I'm assuming Georgia?) conducted by Randall Swiggum of the last movement of Vaughan Williams' “A London Symphony.”
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continues...
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You can read my personal reminiscences about Vaughan Williams and his "A London Symphony" here.

- Dick Strawser

Dvořák's New World: The Video

The Harrisburg Symphony will be performing Dvořák's New World Symphony at the opening concert of the season - along with Rossini's Semiramide Overture and, joined by violinist Alexander Kerr, a violin concerto by Astor Piazzolla, "The Four Seasons in Buenos Aires." Performances are Saturday, October 3rd, 8pm, and Sunday, October 4th, 3pm, at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg.

You can read more about Dvořák's Symphony in one of my "up close & personal" posts here - with more information about Dvořák's time spent in the United States, here.

Here are videos (posted at YouTube) with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the Symphony No. 9 in E Minor "From the New World," by Antonin Dvořák, recorded in 1985. (Because of time limits to video-posts of 10 minutes or so, the 2nd & 4th Movements are broken into two parts.)

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The 1st Movement begins hesitantly with a slow introduction with fits and starts, including some fragments (motives) that will become important once the main part of the movement begins at 2:01 with its horn-call theme. A secondary theme begins at 3:10, contrasting in its narrower range but leads to the "real" second theme which begins with the flute solo at 4:16, a theme that might remind you of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." It's not that much of a contrast to the main theme: the rhythms are very similar and both are built on triadic motion rather than something more linear. At 5:01, the solo horn begins developing these ideas with fragments tossed around from each of these three musical ideas, becoming increasingly more unstable, harmonically and dramatically until - at 6:32 - the opening main theme returns quietly in the horn. The narrow secondary theme returns at 7:14 and the real second theme at 8:19 (both in the flute).

At 8:48, the composer brings back a fanfare-like version of the 2nd Theme but combines it with the opening of the main theme at 8:56, bringing this first movement to well-rounded if dramatic close. We'll hear more from these musical ideas - even if just suggestions of them - in other movements of the symphony, as well.
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2nd Movement (Part 1) - after mysterious chords begin the slow movement, the English Horn enters at 0:50 with the famous "Largo Theme" which later became a popular arrangement called "Goin' Home," inspired by the similarity of Dvořák's tune to what sounded like a Negro Spiritual. At 4:52, a contrasting section begins, followed at 8:24 by a new, lighter dance-like interruption that ends the first clip but continues in the next one.

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2nd Movement (Part 2) - begins with the 'dance interruption' that builds to the return of the main theme of the first movement combined with the first phrase of the English horn theme, which then returns at 0:57. At 1:26, Dvořák gives the last part of the theme to the concertmaster: one of those great smaller moments is that "catch-in-the-breath" at 1:42 as if we're saying good-bye to an old friend.

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The 3rd Movement - Scherzo - is a dance movement that Dvořák says was inspired by a scene in Longfellow's Hiawatha, where the guests at the feast begin to dance. Today, it might sound more like Bohemian peasants to us. At 1:49, a contrasting lyrical theme is introduced by the winds but at 2:34, the initial rhythmic dance-theme returns. Another contrasting dance, more typical of Czech folk-dances, begins at 3:38. Then at 5:38, we start going back to the opening section again, the first contrasting theme, after a switch from the minor key to the major key (note the 'raised eyebrow' at 6:38) returning at 6:39 to round off the dance with reminiscences from the 1st Movement starting at 8:01.


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The 4th Movement begins with a series of chords before stating its main theme - at 0:16 - that has the flavor of a folk song: in the key of E Minor, it should have a D-sharp in it, according to the traditional "rules" of classical music, but like many folk songs, it has a D-natural instead. At 1:15, there's a new idea, "skipping" along with a lot of D-naturals as well. At 1:53. a new contrasting lyrical theme is announced in the clarinet. Then, at 2:44, he introduces another idea in the violins (usually overshadowed by the fanfare in the trumpets). Then at 3:14, there's yet another fragment introduced which nobody ever suggested should be a quote from "Three Blind Mice," but hey... With that, he ends the opening "Exposition" of the movement, and begins tearing all of them apart and remixing them in the "Development" which begins at 3:45 - note the reappearance of the first theme, menacingly in the horns at 3:52. Hear how he takes the opening of that first theme at 4:13, then answers it with a fragment of the "skipping" theme two seconds later. That's how he builds unity out of the material but keeps pushing your forward, expanding the material into further directions.

But what's going on at 4:34 in the woodwinds? Isn't that the theme from the 2nd Movement, now played in a faster tempo? Underneath that, the strings are quietly playing a variation on the stately opening theme that now almost bounces along like "Yankee Doodle"! He's bringing back ideas from the other movements to tie the whole symphony together in the finale.


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Moving on to the second clip from the Finale - it starts off with Dvořák sneaking in a re-statement of the main theme of the first movement in the basses just before reaching a climax with the finale's main theme in the brass at 0:14 and again at 0:31. After that, it breaks down to a more subdued, lyrical passage. At 1:16 the strings play the finale's 2nd theme (see 1:55 from the first clip) but reverses the roles: originally, it was in the clarinet with a sprightly answer in the cellos; now the theme is mostly in the cellos, with the sprightly response in the woodwinds. At 2:07, the Largo theme returns in a nostalgic mood, capped by the horn theme from the first movement in the horns at 2:48. One dramatic outburst at 3:07 leads to those chords at 3:49 - trying to ignore the timpani, have you heard them before? They're the chords that mysteriously opened and closed the 2nd Movement - but what a difference a finale makes! Winding down again, the Largo theme floats almost like a memory at 4:15. Oh, and do you recognize the little woodwind blips at 4:18? That's from the main theme of the third movement, the scherzo! Two more climactic statements of the finale's main theme occur at 4:51 - lots of pulling around that D-natural or should it be D-sharp - and again at 5:08, this time supported by the first movement's main theme in the horns, bringing the symphony to a dramatic close - and a unified one - in E Minor, rather than switching over to the brighter Major key as most minor-key symphonies would normally do for a triumphant conclusion.
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By the way, if you wonder what conductors bring to performances of the same work over different performances across the years, here is a clip of the New World Finale which von Karajan conducted with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1966, about nineteen years earlier!
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No matter where it was written, no matter what may have inspired Dvořák to write it, it still basically sounds like a Czech symphony full of Bohemian folk elements which shouldn't be so surprising, after all. Wherever Dvořák may have been living at the time, his roots were still in his native Bohemia. Call it cross-pollination, if you want, but the stimulus of living in New York in 1893 no doubt helped it become what it is - one of Dvořák's greatest works and one of the most popular symphonies in the repertoire today.

- Dr. Dick