Zuill Bailey Returns - with the Shostakovich 1st Cello Concerto

Zuill Bailey

Who: The Harrisburg Symphony with Stuart Malina
What: Masterworks Concert with guest cellist, Zuill Bailey - with Beethoven's 2nd Symphony (which you can read about, here), Shostakovich's 1st Cello Concerto, and Nicolas Bacri's Symphony No. 4 (which you can read about, here)
When: Saturday, March 19th at 8pm, Sunday, March 20th at 3pm (a pre-concert talk an hour before each performance)
Where: The Forum, behind the State Capitol, at 5th & Walnut Streets, Harrisburg PA

Why: Because Zuill Bailey returns to Harrisburg for the 1st Cello Concerto by Dmitri Shostakovich, a work he recorded for his debut on the Telarc label, a program of “Russian Masterpieces” which included Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme. Already familiar from appearances with Market Square Concerts and the Next Generation Festival which began in 1997, he played the Dvořák Concerto the last time he was on stage at the Forum a couple seasons ago.

He plays a cello made by Matteo Gofriller in 1693, previously owned by the cellist of the legendary Budapest String Quartet. Here, Zuill plays the Prelude from Bach's 2nd Suite for Solo Cello, one of six suites Bach composed around the time Zuill's cello was 27 years old:
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The Shostakovich Concerto is a more recent piece, composed in 1959, in the years following Stalin's death, a time when the composer was feeling rejuvenated creatively after years of not just artistic repression during Stalin's regime. It was composed for his friend, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and the idea for it probably came to him when the two had toured with his Cello Sonata in the mid-1950s and which they recorded (it was released in 1957). As Rostropovich related the story in Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, ever since 1946, the young cellist had wanted to gather up the nerve to ask Shostakovich to write a piece for him but the composer's wife, Irina, explained, if he really wanted that, the best thing was not to ask him directly and never talk to him about it.

It took thirteen years – but one day, Rostropovich was reading an interview with Shostakovich in the newspaper saying he was working on a cello concerto, and completed it the next month. About two weeks later, Rostropovich shows up at Shostakovich's dacha outside Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and is given the score, and asked to play through it four days later.

On a hot August day, the cellist and his pianist showed up at the arranged time and while Shostakovich was rummaging around to find the music stand, Rostropovich said he wouldn't need that.

“What do you mean, you don't need a music stand?”

“You know, I'll play it from memory.”

“Impossible, impossible,” Shostakovich muttered. And then he listened to his new concerto played through – from memory. The cellist had learned the entire piece and memorized it, too, all in four days.

After they'd played the piece through and worked on a few spots, they sat around having some drinks with a few friends when Shostakovich remembered he hadn't written the dedication in the score, writing Rostropovich's name on the title page. Not only did the cellist finally have a work written for him by the great Shostakovich, it was even dedicated to him.

On October 4th, 1959, Rostropovich premiered the work with Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic. This performance, with Charles Groves conducting the London Symphony, was recorded two years after the world premiere:
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Scored for a “reduced” orchestra – to better balance the cello – with only double woodwinds, one horn and no trumpets or low brass, the concerto is regarded as one of the more challenging in the repertoire, along with Prokofiev's Symphony-Concertante for Cello and Orchestra which Rostropovich had frequently performed and which Shostakovich loved.

As Rostropovich recalled, “there are a host of connections [between the two works]... Not only are many details of the Symphony-Concertante reflected in the First Concerto, but indeed, whole sections of the piece (admittedly much transformed) found their way into Shostakovich's work.” One such connection was the use of “rhetorical bangs on the timpani.”

For instance, “At the end of the finale [of the Prokofiev], the cello ascends the heights as if spiraling up to the very summit of a domed roof; on reaching the highest note it is silenced by one bang of the timpani which puts an end to the frenzied madness.”

Now listen to the end of the first movement of Shostakovich's cello concerto, from 6:00-6:24, where the lone timpani strike seems to tell the soloist, “okay, enough.”

Shostakovich, Rostropovich & Rozhdestvensky rehearsing

Much has been made of “secret programs” or “hidden themes” in many of Shostakovich's works – the famous ending of the 5th Symphony, for one; various quotations of song fragments in the 10th Symphony; not to mention the psychological implications in his use of his own “signature tune” based on the notes D-S-C-H (D, E-flat, C, B in German, from his initials, ДШ or D.Sh, turned into D.SCH in German) – and many dismiss these as mere conjecture since the composer never admitted as such (but then, he notoriously said little about his music or himself).

However, in this instance, we have Rostropovich's recollection of one such admission: in the final movement, shortly after the long solo cadenza ends with the return of strings and winds in a rough, almost rude take-off on what sounds like a folk-song.

In the above video, at 22:49 there begins an exchange between strings in one bar, answered by winds (complete with “rhetorical bangs on the timpani”) that Shostakovich pointed out to the cellist.

“The first time [he] hummed this passage through to me, he laughed and said, 'Slava, have you noticed?' [Shostakovich referred to him by the nickname for Mstislav.]

“I hadn't noticed anything.

“'Where is my dear Suliko, Suliko?...'

“I doubt I would have detected this quote if Dmitri Dmitriyevich [the composer] hadn't pointed it out to me.”

It also recurs later in the finale (at 26:55 to the end, along with the opening motive). Wilson's biography includes pages of the score where Rostropovich circled references to the tune (see pp.538-540).

So, what is the importance of “Suliko”?

It was Stalin's favorite song and Shostakovich had parodied it once before in a satirical work called Rayók which means literally “peep show” or “little paradise,” a parody of the Stalinist days probably written in 1957 but only intended for private performance and not for publication (still a concern even after Stalin died).

“These allusions,” the cellist recalls, “are undoubtedly not accidental, but they are camouflaged so craftily that even I didn't notice them to begin with.” [Quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, p.365.]

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Holy Fool (by Surikov, 1885)

In Russian culture, there is this character of the “Holy Fool,” the religious mad-men who were viewed not as “village idiots” as we might in the West but as divinely inspired and therefore closer to God and therefore able to say truths which others normally could not get away with.” The most famous of these iurodiviy is probably St. Basil (the one for whom that most famous of Russian cathedrals is named in Moscow's Red Square) who once rebuked no less than Ivan the Terrible but was not taken off and executed as a Western autocrat might have ordered. In Mussorgsky's opera, Boris Godunov there is a scene between the “Simpleton” (a.k.a. Holy Fool) and Boris when the poor man accuses the tsar of having murdered Ivan the Terrible's son in order to succeed to the throne himself. Instead of ordering his arrest, Boris asks the fool to pray for him.

Dostoievsky novels are full of such characters (the main character of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, for one, so innocent yet someone who makes others uncomfortable by his innocence). Pasternak, a friend of Shostakovich's, viewed himself as a kind of iurodiviy where the role became an ambiguous form of protest in the subtlety of its sub-text, “by deliberately communicating banalities on the surface level. This concept shaped Russian cultural consciousness during the years of totalitarian rule” [E. Wilson, p.484].

Shostakovich, in rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar's often with an open sense of cynicism, turned his back on much of the reality of his world, the better to avoid open conflict which was not part of his nature. When asked to deliver a speech on Beethoven, government officials “corrected” it, being experts on such things as “Beethoven and Revolution,” but the friend who'd helped him with the original speech described listening to Shostakovich read the speech. “How alien and artificial seemed the text he was pronouncing. Banal, journalistic phrases, textbook quotations, cumbersome and wordy statements. And the way he read this all out! In a quick patter, omitting all punctuation marks and with an intonation that seemed intentionally lacking in sense. It was as if he was poking fun at himself in the role of official orator” [Daniil Zhitomirksy, quoted in E. Wilson's Shostakovich, p.370-371].

Now, consider the opening four-note motive in the solo cello. G – E – B (or -H) – B-flat (or -B)? It doesn't really seem to spell out anything – if Shostakovich used D-S-C-H to represent himself as he already had done in the 10th Symphony (his first post-Stalin symphony) and would clearly do again in his 8th String Quartet written the following year, does this motive have any significance here? It permeates the entire work, after all. Is it a “variation” on D-S-C-H? Or... just a coincidence?

Or is there a bit of Rayók (a work that could only have been written by a “holy fool”) smiling out from behind all the manic energy of the first movement, set aside during the long, introspective, indeed tragic slow movement that builds up through the increasingly manic cadenza to erupt into one more nose-thumbing dance of the Holy Fool?

Or you could just say it makes for a smashing ending.

- Dick Strawser

Introducing March Masterworks: A Classical Symphony by Nicolas Bacri

Nicolas Bacri

Who: The Harrisburg Symphony with Stuart Malina
What: The March Masterworks Concert with cellist Zuill Bailey - Nicolas Bacri's Symphony No. 4, Shostakovich's 1st Cello Concerto (which you can read about, here), and Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 in D Major (which you can read about, here)
When: Saturday March 19th, at 8pm; Sunday March 20th, at 3pm (with a pre-concert talk an hour before each performance)
Where: The Forum, behind the State Capitol, at 5th & Walnut Streets, Harrisburg PA

Call it March Madness or that unsettled time of year when Winter is reluctant to give way to Spring, but this weekend's Masterworks Concert, as Stuart Malina says, is for those who like their music dramatic:


March Masterworks from Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra on Vimeo.

That said, the first work on the program, by a composer probably unfamiliar to most concert-goers in Harrisburg, might inspire anxiety at the unexpected. Even though Nicolas Bacri's Symphony No. 4 is subtitled “Classical Sturm und Drang” – and that refers to the “storm and stress” style that was popular during the 1770s (Mozart's highly dramatic Symphony No. 25, the “Little” G Minor, is such a piece) – I think the composer may be having a little fun at the expense of those who may be experiencing a little “storm and stress” with another new piece of music.

Considering we think of Romanticism as being super-emotional, this was how the Classical composers of France and Germany dealt with “emotion” in an age pre-occupied with form and content – and it was considered by many of their contemporaries as “modern music” in the way too many people today still fear “modern music.” The Prussian king, Frederick the Great (himself a flutist and composer), loathed this music, calling it noise, but then he had little good to say about either Haydn or Mozart in general.

Perhaps with a nod to the 1st Symphony of Sergei Prokofiev from 1917, his “Classical Symphony,” Bacri's little chamber symphony, composed in 1995, is in four brief, neo-classical movements, each one an homage to some great composer from the other end of the 20th Century: Richard Strauss at his post-Rosenkavalier most classical; Stravinsky in his middle-period style (itself an imitation of classical and baroque styles rather than the more familiar style of Petrushka or the Rite of Spring); Schoenberg in, ironically, the most old-fashioned movement, a minuet that is a little spikier than what most neo-classicists would have been delving into in the 1920s (it reminds me more of something between his Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, nominally in E Major and still very Straussian, and the Minuet from his serial Suite, Op. 25, rather than anything he's more infamous for); and finally, Kurt Weill but not the composer of “Mack the Knife” as much as his 2nd Symphony which, still, is a very classical work but with the edge we'd expect from the composer of The Three-Penny Opera.

The symphony is available in two versions: one, for standard but Classically-sized chamber orchestra, which the Harrisburg Symphony will be performing; and the other, for piano, clarinet, horn and string trio. The only recording I can find on-line to sample for you is this second sextet version, but here's the second movement, the Arietta a la Stravinksy, as an example of what to expect:
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As one writer has noted, quoting from the composer's website, “Nicolas Bacri is an artistically restless composer driven to continuously question the goals of his art and his compositions habits, an attitude that has resulted in aesthetic choices that are consequences of carefully weighed musical reflection and practice (as opposed to the outcome of ideological presuppositions). This is particularly noticeable in his quartet production, which has yielded starkly contrasting works.”

Born in Paris in 1961, Bacri has written a surprisingly large amount of works including seven symphonies, nine string quartets, four violin concertos, cantatas and sonatas and a number of other large scale works. His most recent work is his serenade, “Homage to Fujita,” for flute and string trio, Op.141. That's a very high number for any composer, these days, and he's only 54 years old.

Though I've only heard a little of his music and out of some 140 published works would not know what is to be considered “typical” of his style, I would, however, recommend for anyone interested in other works by him checking out the concluding section of his “Prayer” for violin and orchestra of the mid '90s or his brief Symphony No. 6 of 1998.

You can read about Zuill Bailey and the Shostakovich Cello Concerto, here and about Beethoven's 2nd Symphony, here.

- Dick Strawser

February Masterworks: "You Made Me Want to Get Up and Dance"

Since some of you were asking, the Patriot-News is no longer publishing reviews and there's no longer a Sunday Edition of the Carlisle Sentinel to publish one in, so Dick Strawser has offered his own thoughts on Saturday night's concert with something he calls "in lieu of a review."

This is where we'd put a link to the outside source of a review, so read it, posted at Strawser's blog, Thoughts on a Train, here.

Without a soloist on the program to play a concerto, this concert contains numerous solo parts within the orchestra in each piece: all of them working together "with other players not so highlighted (even briefly) whose playing makes you forget what a solid support they create in turning almost 90 players into a cohesive brilliant whole, making these very difficult string parts and wind and percussion ensembles seem like something you do every day."

And if you missed Saturday night's performance, don't forget Sunday afternoon's at 3pm at the Forum - Truman Bullard offers his pre-concert talk in the hall, starting at 2:00.

Don't forget, too, the Youth Orchestra takes over the Forum stage Monday night at 7:00 with the Junior Strings for their Mid-Winter Concert conducted by Greg Woodbridge which includes the Overture to Ralph Vaughan Williams' "The Wasps," the Suite from Faure's Pelleas & Melisande, and Smetana's beloved portrait of a river, "The Moldau."

February Masterworks: Love Among the Puppets

Stravinsky & Nijinsky (as Petrushka) in 1911

This weekend's concerts bring three orchestral showcases to the Forum – the lively Mid-Winter Fair of Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka, Ravel's evocation of a sultry summer night in Spain, his Rapsodie espagnole which ends with another festival, and the celebration of love's joy (and love's pain) in the Suite from Richard Strauss' complicated comedy, Der Rosenkavalier, “The Knight of the Rose” (which you can read more about in this earlier post, here).

Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony in two performances – Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm – each one preceded an hour earlier by a pre-concert talk.

(In case you missed the news on Monday with all the fuss about who won Grammy Awards and all, Augustin Hadelich, who's appeared as soloist with the HSO on three separate occasions, won a Grammy for "Best Classical Instrumental Solo" for his new recording of the Violin Concerto by Henri Dutilleux. You can read about it, here!)

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With all the folk-pageantry swirling around in the two outer scenes, it's sometimes easy to overlook the core of the story which takes place in the middle two scenes.

Basically, Petrushka is one of those “boy-loves-girl / girl-loves-exotic-stranger / exotic-stranger-kills-boy” stories where Petrushka, a “sad-sack” of an introvert, loves the Ballerina who only has eyes for the dashing Moor.

Oh – and they're all puppets.

V.E. Makovsky's "Village Puppet Show" (1908)

Puppets have been part of our theatrical imagination for centuries – especially Punch & Judy in England, Pulcinella in Italy – and the idea of a puppet who could have the soul of a human isn't lost on someone who grew up watching Walt Disney's Pinocchio.

Here is Igor Stravinsky's version of the story, from a Mosfilm DVD (I believe 1992) recreating the original 1911 sets and costumes and, I presume, most of Fokine's original choreography. While I can find little information about the dancers on-line, Andris Liepa is Petrushka and also the director of this film version (staged for the film, not a filmed stage performance) with the Bolshoi Ballet Company, Andrey Chistiakov conducting the Bolshoi State Academic Theatre Orchestra.

Tableau #1 – Shrovetide Fair


It is the Russian version of Carnival or Madri Gras, the mid-winter Shrovetide Fair (Maslyenitsa), in which people from towns around come and partake of the festivities. In addition to drunken revelers (it is, after all, Mardi Gras) and a barker touting the wonders to be seen inside his booth, two rival buskers begin to dance at 1:57, one to a Russian folksong (“Toward evening, in rainy Autumn”) while playing a triangle (in the score, Stravinsky writes the organ-grinder's part into the flutes and clarinets) and the other to a bawdy French dance-hall song (“A woman with a wooden leg”). The activity of the fair erupts around them, sweeping them aside, until (at 4:50) drummers draw everyone's attention to the puppet theater where (at 5:00) we first see “The Charlatan” who, it turns out (at 5:30) plays a mean flute!

Then he presents his puppets, all hanging on hooks in their respective boxes: from left to right, the fearsome and exotic Moor, a beautiful Ballerina, and, finally, a poor, awkward, sad-faced clown named Petrushka.

At 6:51, he's brought them to life and they begin the “Russian Dance,” based on two more Russian folksongs (“A Linden Tree in the field” and “St. John's Eve”).

More drums mark the transition to the second scene.

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Tableau #2


Petrushka is tossed back into his box. We see it from his perspective as a kind of cell where he lives, the original scenery by Benois including an image of the All-Powerful Charlatan like a religious icon overseeing his every moment.

Nijinsky as Petrushka, 1911

At 0:16, we hear the “signature sound” associated with Petrushka played on two clarinets – this became so famous it's actually known as “The Petrushka Chord,” a C Major chord superimposed with an F-sharp Major chord, two chords that in traditional classical music are about as far away harmonically as two chords could be! You'll hear it throughout the ballet, always in reference to Petrushka himself.

At 1:01, Petrushka gestures wildly at the – what, injustice of his being cooped up in a box? At being only a puppet and not a real boy with real human emotions?

Also, speaking of sound, note the prominent piano part through this scene. Stravinsky originally considered using this story as a work for piano and orchestra, a “concert piece” – but when he played his sketches for his friend Diaghilev (who'd just presented his first ballet, The Firebird and who was looking forward to a second ballet, the impresario urged him to turn it into a full ballet.

Petrushka is full of self-pity and the music allows us into his thoughts, apparently: from dainty ballet-like music, thinking of the Ballerina, we move on (at 1:57) to the exotic music of the Charlatan.

Petrushka hardly seems a great role for a dashing ballet dancer like the great Vaclav Nijinsky or the more recent Rudolf Nureyev, but the physical control of maintaining the loose body and limp arms of a puppet full of sawdust is a physical challenge all its own.

Then, at 2:40, the Ballerina slips into Petrushka's cell. He then protests his love and tries to impress her with his dancing. But, by 3:10, she has been so frightened by his excitement, she dashes from the room, leaving him to his dejection and rage. The sudden “carnival music” at 3:58 means he must catch a glimpse of the outside world just as, once again, we hear the drums, drawing our attention to the next scene.

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Tableau #3 & the beginning of Tableau #4


Here, we find ourselves in the more luxurious box where the Moor lives. Unlike Petrushka, he seems quite self-satisfied though the appearance of a coconut confuses him. Eventually, he decides if he can't figure out what it's for, he must bow down and (at 2:20) worship it.

At 2:40, the Ballerina pays him a visit, dancing while playing a wicked trumpet solo. At 3:27, they dance together (Petrushka apparently listening from the box-next-door). Notice how her dance theme in the trumpet and flute contrasts with the Oriental-sounding, low-register melody in a seemingly independent tempo in the English horn and cymbals, beginning at 4:12 and again at 5:02.

At 5:33, we hear Petrushka's chord again and he breaks into the Moor's box, intent on rescuing the Ballerina. A chase ensues (at 5:50) but the Moor proves to be too strong for Petrushka as he chases the clown out of the box. (At least that's the original stage direction which has some importance for the ending of the next scene: for some reason, here, the Moor tosses Petrushka out the door and sits back to enjoy some us-time with the Ballerina. I prefer, dramatically, the Moor, scimitar raised, chasing Petrushka out into the fair. You'll see why when it comes to the next scene...)

The drums once again mark the transition to the next and final scene which, due to some bad editing, continues in this clip.

Once again, at 6:38, we are back at the Fair (outside the puppets' boxes), and we see drunken coachmen and several nursemaids (the young ladies in pastel-colored coats) and at 7:44 we hear another Russian folksong in the oboe, “Down the Petersky Road.” Like most folksongs, it defies what Europeans call “development.” Stravinsky shows what a Russian composer can do to get some mileage out of a such a tune: you repeat it over and over but each time change the accompaniment and add even more brilliant colors in the orchestration.

At 9:45, the coachmen and the nursemaids are interrupted by... well, wait for the next clip, but while you're in between clips, listen to this recording of that folksong, “Down the Petersky Road,” sung here by the great Russian bass, Fyodor Chaliapin. He was a friend of Stravinsky's father, a leading bass at the Mariinsky Opera – one can imagine Stravinsky as a boy perhaps hearing these guys sing this popular folksong about a drunken coachman. Anyway, this recording was made in 1910, the year Stravinsky began composing Petrushka. What's that, like two degrees of separation?



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Tableau #4 – Evening at the Shrovetide Fair (continuing with the Entrance of... the Bear)


Yes, that's right, the dancers are interrupted by a bear, the typical “dancing bear” of Russian folk festivals, lumbering in with his handler – the bear is represented by the tuba solo at 0:15-0:45. (There's a story from a rehearsal – I forget which orchestra – when Stravinsky was conducting and stopped the tuba player after this brief solo and asked him to play it again; then, without comment asked him to play it again. Finally, the tuba player stopped and asked, “Maestro, could you please tell me what I'm doing wrong?” Stravinsky told him “Nothing – I've just never heard it played so beautifully.” True or not, it's a nice story.) 

The bear lumbers off and by 0:52 the bustle of the crowd returns as more revelers join the scene with a return to the Peterskaya Road song with coachmen (here in blue or red coats) and the grooms (in white shirts and brown vests) with the nursemaids. While the music reaches a joyous climax, everything is once again interrupted, this time (at 4:20) by mummers and a nasty-looking demon (at 4:35), no doubt, reminding everyone that Lent begins the next day. At 5:20, the rowdiness resumes.

But then something happens at 5:50 – a long trumpet tone alerts us to some activity back at the Charlatan's puppet theater. At 6:03, Petrushka erupts from the tent, chased by the scimitar-wielding Moor pursued by the distraught Ballerina. (This means that the earlier part of this scene was happening simultaneously with the events of the scene in the Moor's room, since the chase that ended Scene III continues now at the end of Scene IV.)

At 6:25, the Moor fells the poor clown with a single blow (the Petrushka Chord practically strangled in the clarinets). As Petrushka breathes his last, the crowd (and the police) gather round as the Charlatan comes out to see what's going on. At 8:05, after some incantations, he picks up the body but it is only a rag-doll puppet stuffed with sawdust which he tosses around to reassure the crowd (and the police).

The people disperse, enough excitement for one night, and the Charlatan drags the puppet back to his tent. But at 8:49, he hears the trumpet call associated with Petrushka and looks around, then sees Petrushka – or his ghost? – on top of the little theater, making wild, angry gestures (shaking his fists, thumbing his nose) at the futility of it all. The Charlatan runs away, not sure what he has seen is real or not.

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Though Stravinsky crafted a suite from his first ballet, The Firebird, he did not bother with Petrushka which is often played in the concert hall intact (or nearly intact with a few cuts in the final moments). But in 1947, largely for copyright reasons, he revised the score, reducing the instrumentation (one less woodwind, each; deleted the two cornets but had three instead of two trumpets; reworked the percussion section a little; deleted one of two harps), giving the piano a bit more to do, and simplifying a few of the metric details.

The film above uses the original scoring (though with some adaptations), but if you'd rather hear the 1947 version, here's a concert video. The Harrisburg Symphony will play this version at this weekend's concerts.

Here, Andris Nelsons, before having taken on his new position at the Boston Symphony, conducts the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 2011. (The performance ends at 34:39.)



There was another "version" of Petrushka Stravinsky made in 1921. Remember it had originally been conceived as a piece for piano and orchestra? Well, the composer took three “excerpts” from the complete ballet and turned them into a solo piano piece for Artur Rubinstein, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century. He used the Russian Dance from the end of Scene I, material from the 2nd Scene with Petrushka alone in his cell, and then chunks of the final scene to conclude, including an all-out transcription of the Dance of the Coachmen and the Nursemaids written on not two but four staves – along with a skin-ripping glissando to conclude.

Here is Artur Rubinstein in this live recording made at a concert in Carnegie Hall in 1961.



I saw Rubinstein play an all-Chopin program in the mid-'70s when he was in his late-80s (and using Villa-Lobos' Polichinelle as an encore). In the late-'70s, I was brash enough to work on these “Three Movements from Petrushka” though I balked at performing them in public because I didn't have the stamina to get through the final 90 seconds... I know Rubinstein had played the piece but had never recorded it. So it was a delight to discover on YouTube a recording from this Carnegie Hall concert I'd never heard before.

And there's another two degrees of separation. 

- Dick Strawser

HSO Soloist Augustin Hadelich Wins a Grammy Award

Move over, Kanye West.

Augustin Hadelich

There are Grammy Awards for Classical Music, too, and a violinist who has appeared as a soloist with the HSO on three separate occasions has won the 2016 Grammy for "Best Classical Instrumental Solo" [sic] in his recording of Henri Dutilleux's violin concerto, L'Arbre des songes or "The Tree of Dreams," with Ludovic Morlot conducting the Seattle Symphony on their own media label distributed by Naxos.

Congratulations, Augustin Hadelich!

He appeared here most recently last February - remember the snowstorm that weekend? - when he played Eduard Lalo's Symphonie espagnole. You may have been one of the many people who missed that concert.

In previous appearances in Harrisburg, he played the Beethoven Violin Concerto in January, 2010 and before that, Mozart's 5th Violin Concerto, the one known as "The Turkish."



He has previously recorded the Sibelius Violin Concerto which he paired with a more recent concerto by the English composer, Thomas Adès, subtitled Concentric Paths, which created a good deal of buzz when it was released. Hannu Lintu conducted the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic on this Avie recording. You can hear the gorgeous opening movement of the Adès here; the striking slow movement, a chaconne, here; and the dance-like finale, here.

Both the Adès and this Grammy-winning recording of the Dutilleux, both favorites of mine, are the best performances of the work I've heard (and I have three other recordings of the Dutilleux). So I highly recommend listening to these.









It is available for purchase on-line through Amazon, here. or through the Naxos Direct website, here.

The award is especially fitting in this year celebrating the Centennial Anniversary of the birth of French composer Henri Dutilleux. 

So, our congratulations to Augustin Hadelich on winning his first Grammy! And we look forward to hearing him again, soon, and to more Grammys in the future!

- Dick Strawser

February Masterworks: The Knight of the Rose

It WILL be warmer this weekend – and presumably snow- and ice-free – even though the sound-spectacular the orchestra has planned for you should warm up the coldest winter. Fittingly, following one of the coldest Valentine's Days in recent memory, two of the three works are love stories and in the middle, a romantic get-away to a festive night in Spain.

Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony in the ballet Petrushka by Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole, and an instrumental concert suite from one of the great operas by Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier.

The performances are this Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm at the Forum. There's a pre-concert talk an hour before each concert.

Incidentally, Stravinsky's ballet (you can read about it here and see a complete performance of the ballet) was premiered in 1911 in Paris, though he'd started work on it the year before.

Ravel wrote his rhapsody between 1907 and 1908 when it was premiered in Paris.

Strauss began working on his opera in 1909 and finished it in 1911 in time for its premiere in Dresden.

Stravinsky's ballet depicts a moment-in-time in the lives of three puppets during a mid-winter fair in Old Russia, the equivalent of a Carnaval celebration (think Mardi Gras with snow).

Ravel expanded a piano piece based on a Spanish dance he'd composed in 1895 to create his orchestral rhapsody in four movements, ending with the celebration of a fair.

Strauss's comic opera - the title, btw, means literally The Knight of the Rose - is set in the world of 18th Century Viennese aristocratic splendor back in the days of Mozart's childhood when Maria Therese was Empress) and celebrates the impending marriage of a young woman named Sophie to the lecherous old Baron Ochs – but wait, there's more!

In this post, let's begin with the last piece on the program.

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(The Mahler Youth Orchestra conducted by Danielle Gatti, recorded at the BBC Proms in 2012)

It's not uncommon for composers to craft “suites” of excerpts from their operas and there might be several reasons for them to do so.

Mozart, arranging wind octet suites from his operas, wanted to make sure he did it himself before someone else got to it in the centuries before there were copyright laws, otherwise he'd lose out on any money that could be gained from having it published.

Others did it so their music could be heard in a variety of “formats” – both in the concert hall as well as the opera house. In many cases, it was a kind of marketing ploy that, hearing it in a concert, might entice a listener to buy a ticket to see the opera.

Franz Liszt wrote and improvised variations and “paraphrases” for solo piano of some of the current operatic hits because his audiences would recognize the tunes.

Richard Strauss, 1910

For Strauss, it was primarily about the money, at least in this case. In 1925, years after Rosenkavalier had become an international hit, he was asked to “be involved in” creating a suite to accompany a silent film of the opera (there's an interesting concept, in itself). They paid him $10,000 – think about it in 1920s terms, not today's monetary values – even though he felt a certain trepidation about the venture's success which turned out to be very real.

Later, in 1944, conductor Artur Rodzinski, then conductor of the New York Philharmonic, “presumably” arranged a suite which, because of the war, didn't have to pay Strauss anything – with World War II curtailing any income from his foreign publications and performances, Strauss was in a financial bind and, after the war ended, sanctioned the publication of the suite to bring in much needed money.

While much of the music will be familiar to fans of the original opera, following the story-line is kind of pointless, especially in the middle of the suite where things tend to jump around between the three acts. But it helps, I think, to know the gist of the plot. Hang on to your powdered wig...

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The curtain rises on the palace of a powerful Field Marshal – to be more accurate, it rises on the bedroom of his wife, known by her title as the Marschallin. To be even more accurate, it rises on the Marschallin's bedroom after she has awakened from a night of love-making with someone who is not the Field Marshal. The young man in question is the 17-year-old Count Octavian. The Marschallin is a woman in her late-40s.

To make it more confusing, as was common in the previous centuries, in order for a young male character to sound like a young man and not a more mature one, women often took these roles which were called “pants roles.” Another horny teen-ager, Cherubino, in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro is one famous example. Octavian is probably the most substantial of these roles. Now, yes, a 17-year-old boy's voice would certainly have changed, but a mezzo is more believable in sound than a full-grown tenor. So bear with it – it has some interesting consequences, too, which I think were all part of the comedic plan.

When the Marschallin's relative, Baron Ochs von Lerchenau, arrives unexpectedly, she was afraid it was her husband; Octavian hides himself, then returns disguised as a maid called Mariandel (get it? – a woman singing the role of a young boy now disguised as a woman?). It seems the Baron, a pompous old bore who takes the opportunity to flirt with Mariandel, is getting engaged to Sophie von Faninal, a young woman of a wealthy merchant family. The Baron needs someone to present his symbolic silver rose to his bride-to-be. The Marschallin has just the candidate – her young friend, Count Octavian.

They are in turn interrupted by the traditional “morning levée” in which various elements of the day are planned, from menus to auditioning an Italian singer for the evening's entertainment, while Ochs works out details with the Marschallin's lawyer. Among the suppliants, looking for a financial donation, are two Italian scandal-mongers, Valzacchi and Annina who then latch onto Ochs. And, last but not least, her hairdresser. When everybody leaves, the Marschallin is looking in her mirror and, thinking about her own early marriage and Ochs marrying the young Sophie, realizes that, as she gets older, it won't be long before her lover Octavian will leave for somebody younger.

Octavian, now in his own clothes, returns but leaves without her giving him the silver rose: the Marschallin sends her page, Mohammet (a young African boy), after him.

Act II - Presentation of the Rose

In the second act, we are in the magnificent main hall of Sophie's father's splendid new home, suitably ostentatious for a successful merchant who's just been elevated to the nobility. There is a great deal of excitement because Sophie's husband-to-be is sending over a silver rose to formalize their engagement. Octavian, dressed all in silver, arrives to present the rose and the two young people immediately fall in love. The Baron arrives in conversation with Herr von Faninal, discussing terms of the engagement, when the old man, overweight and smug, examines his future bride as if he were buying a prize cow.

Octavian is incensed, the scene becomes more chaotic (the Baron's servants chasing after the Faninal maids), and when the Baron accuses Octavian's family of having an illegitimate child (he's noted the family resemblance between Octavian and Mariandel), Octavian threatens the blustering old fool to a duel. Receiving a very slight wound on his arm, the Baron cries bloody murder and collapses onto the sofa as Octavian is thrown out of the house.

Left alone, Ochs meditates on his wound, finds Faninal's port of excellent quality which revives him sufficiently when the Italian schemers arrive – Valzacchi and Annina – with a letter that “Mariandel” has agreed to meet the Baron for dinner. Now fully revived, Ochs dances a lively waltz – but forgets to tip Annina for her efforts.

In the third act, we are in a seedy hotel where Valzacchi and Annina have arranged the Baron's tryst. Only by now they've switched sides, out for revenge on the odious Ochs who shortly arrives with “Mariandel” on his arm. Annina, disguised, rushes in with a barrage of children, claiming Ochs is her husband and the father of her children. When the police arrive, Ochs, to avoid a scandal, introduces “Mariandel” as his fiance, Sophie, when, of course, Faninal and Sophie arrive, shortly followed by the Marschallin. The engagement is broken off and Ochs, trying to save face, escapes pursued by a bevy of bill collectors.

This leaves Sophie, Octavian (now changed back into his own clothes) and the Marschallin alone. The day has come, the one the Marschallin has feared, as she realizes Octavian's true love is for Sophie.

Sophie, Octavian & the Marschallin in Act III's seedy hotel

This is the emotional climax (especially from 1:00-1:45) of the entire 3½-hour opera (not counting two intermissions), as depicted in the 20-minute orchestral suite:

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(the Berlin Philharmonic with Andris Nelsons, the new music director of the Boston Symphony, not known for his introverted style of conducting)
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Releasing Octavian so he can follow his heart, the Marschallin leaves with Faninal, leaving the two young lovers to sing another glorious moment, the final duet, “Is this a dream?” As they leave arm-in-arm and you think “what a gorgeous ending!”, little Mohammet rushes in, sent to retrieve the handkerchief Sophie dropped during the duet, and, waving it aloft, prances out to a decidedly spritely conclusion.

That's not quite how the Suite ends, though – and since Strauss had nothing to do with arranging it, one could assume it was a conductor with an eye to a concert's satisfying conclusion – the old adage, to generate more applause, a concert should end with music that is “faster and louder.” So, after a nod at the final duet, we find ourselves swirling away in one of the great waltz tunes from earlier in Act III.

But, wait - there's more!

- Dick Strawser

Glazunov in Harrisburg: His Violin Concerto

Peter Sirotin, concertmaster of the Harrisburg Symphony, chose the Violin Concerto by Alexander Glazunov for his official debut this weekend as concert soloist with his colleagues. You can read earlier posts about the Mozart “Prague” Symphony and Elgar's Enigma Variations, also on the program, and an interview with Peter Sirotin – but this post is about a composer not that well known to Harrisburg audiences.

Here is a video with Hilary Hahn playing Glazunov's Violin Concerto with Semyon Bychkov conducting the West German Broadcasting Orchestra of Cologne, complete in one clip:
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If you're listening to this for the first time, you might think it was a “contemporary” of concertos by Mendelssohn (1845) and Bruch (1866), yet technically it's a 20th Century work, composed in 1904.

Glazunov, 1899

And while it's often described as a concerto “in one movement” – the Mendelssohn has been called that, too, but there are three distinct movements which just happen to be played without pause – Glazunov's is really a three-movement work except the slow 2nd movement interrupts the 1st movement! We hear the exposition of the first movement which then, by 5:11 in the above clip, becomes this lyrical slow movement. But when that's finished, at 7:48, the first movement resumes with what seems like a fairly academic development section, until the expected recapitulation begins at 10:35 and leads to the expected cadenza at 11:44 after which we'd expect to conclude the first movement with a flourish. However, when the soloist's cadenza ends at 14:18, it turns into a transition to... the finale, a whole new movement at 14:44, full of joyous fanfares and dances that is, essentially, an old-fashioned (kind of) rondo.

It's true this would have confused conservative music-lovers of the day (and considering what used to annoy people even in Bach and Mozart's days), but for 1904, it was certainly a very old-fashioned “sound-world” considering what was brewing in Paris or Vienna. However, as Peter Sirotin reminded me in our conversation when someone described Glazunov as a “conservative composer” - “great music is not always a matter of innovation.” (That would have been true of Bach if you were comparing him to the music his sons were writing.)

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Erika Morini

While I don't have records of everything that's been played by the Harrisburg Symphony since 2004, it's safe to say that between 1946 and 2004, a period of 58 years, the Harrisburg Symphony or any of its guest orchestras have not performed any works by this Russian composer, compared to the frequency of such an audience favorite as Tchaikovsky.

The simple reason may be that Glazunov is not Tchaikovsky nor does he have the brilliance and tunefulness of Tchaikovsky: the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto has been performed at least nine or ten times, the Glazunov (as far as I can tell) only once when Erika Morini played it with George King Raudenbush in December of 1935, when, incidentally, Glazunov was still a "living composer."

In fact, all of Glazunov's music heard in Harrisburg before 2004 was conducted by George King Raudenbush, the orchestra's first conductor who retired at the end of the 1949-50 Season: even during the series of “rehearsals” (more like reading sessions) during which the orchestra played through various repertoire before that first public concert in March of 1931, they played “Autumn” and “Winter” from his ballet, The Seasons. 

Curiously, Raudenbush programmed Glazunov's 5th Symphony (with its great bear-dance of a finale) twice – in 1943 and again in 1946. But other than his elegant Concert Waltz, Op. 47, so evocative of the great Imperial Age at the end of the 19th Century, also scheduled twice, in 1936 and 1945), nothing else of Glazunov's has been heard in Harrisburg at the symphony.

It is entirely possible, not having access to lists of works performed in the last ten years, something may have been slipped through. I don't recall hearing the concerto but certainly none of the symphonies or tone poems – but then, frankly, they may simply no longer be that interesting to concert audiences because I'm sure Glazunov's ratings, across the US, are probably not that much better than they are here.

Except for the Violin Concerto which is ranked by violinists among the Top 5 or 6 best violin concertos.

Glazunov also survives among saxophonists' repertoires because he wrote the (presumably) first Saxophone Quartet in 1932 and followed it two years later with a Concerto for Alto Saxophone.

Over at Market Square Concerts, Harrisburg had a chance to hear some of his chamber music in recent years, thanks to Peter Sirotin, Artistic Director: the Cypress Quartet played two or three of his Novelettes (and also in Lancaster). The last Summermusic concert of 2013 ended with the String Quintet in A Major.

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When Alexander Glazunov died outside Paris in 1936 at the age of 70, most people were probably shocked: they had no idea he was still alive!

Most would have associated his music so strongly with the previous century and a tradition – as well as a culture – that had disappeared almost 20 years earlier when the 1917 Revolutions swept away the Russian Empire.

While others left – like Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, eventually Prokofiev (who would later return) – Glazunov who considered himself fairly apolitical stayed behind to re-organize the Conservatory he'd been director of since 1905 when his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov had been forced out of the position (during more political turmoil). He had established a good working relationship with the new Bolshevik regime but found increasing deprivations during the ensuing Civil War and tensions with both faculty and students tiresome. He took advantage of the chance to tour Europe during the Schubert Year in 1928 and ended up staying in Paris. After a visit to the United States, he chose to return to Paris, one of the larger gathering-places for Russian expatriates, where he remained, composing only occasionally, until his death.

Glazunov had the misfortune of being born in that “second generation” of Russian composers between Tchaikovsky and his mentors The Russian Five (with his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov treating him more as a junior associate than a student) and those only slightly younger than himself, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin – and eventually those who were his own students, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Among this “lost generation” of composers are Anatol Lyadov, Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev, to name just three more who are rarely heard in America. We sometimes reduce a whole era to just two or three famous names – how many average concert-goers could say they've heard many of the contemporaries of Mozart and Haydn or Beethoven and Schubert, covering the years from 1750 to 1828? It would be difficult to name any current Russian composer since Shostakovich died in 1975 who is heard with any comparable frequency in this country.

Rimsky-Korsakov & Glazunov

Glazunov had everything going for him – he was, like Mendelssohn, born into a wealthy family, his father a respected and cultured book publisher. A prodigy whose 1st Symphony created something of a scandal at its premiere because the audience refused to believe this music had been composed by the 16-year-old wearing a school uniform who'd come out to take his bow (some accused the parents of paying Rimsky-Korsakov to write the piece and pass it off as their son's). Fame came easily to him – when Tchaikovsky wrote to Balakirev, leader of the Handful, how much help young Glazunov had with this symphony, Balakirev said “he didn't need any help.” Later, Tchaikovsky bought the score of Glazunov's first string quartet and wrote to a friend, “Glazunov's talent is undeniable.”

Still in his teens, Glazunov met Franz Liszt who thought highly of his music. His new works began to find their way around the Continent (as Russians and the English referred to the rest of Europe) almost at the same time as his mentors' did, when another supporter, the wealthy music publisher Belyayev, opened a branch in Leipzig.

The young man soon found himself the “junior member” of the Mighty Handful, who, with his prodigious memory, was able to assist his teacher in assembling the disorganized pages of sketches left behind by Alexander Borodin when he died suddenly in 1887, leaving unfinished a third symphony and the massive opera, Prince Igor: the story goes that Glazunov, having heard Borodin play through the Overture at the piano before he'd written anything down, was able to reconstruct it from memory.

One thing that happened was the passing of an era comparable to what Americans recall (for those who admit to remembering it) as “The '60s and '70s” – in this case the 1960s and '70s. In Russia, the 1860s and '70s were a similar kind of age, full of renewed national awareness with political and philosophical agitation among the people. The new Russian tsar, Alexander II, liberated the serfs in 1861 (before Lincoln freed the slaves in our own Civil War) and promised numerous political and social reforms. There were those who, as in earlier centuries, saw Russia as an Asiatic-based heritage (the days of the boyars before Peter I, known in the West as “the Great,” in the late-1600s) inspired by “the people,” particularly through the folk-based music of Rimsky-Korsakov and the “Mighty Handful,” as opposed to the cosmopolitan pro-Western view which continued the aristocratic European-based lifestyle and which we associate with Tchaikovsky.

Glazunov (by Repin) 1887

But by the late-1880s, these arguments – particularly the nihilists one reads about in Dostoievsky's novels – swung from the anarchic precipice with the assassination of the reform-minded Alexander II to the stern reactionary world of his son, Alexander III, which resulted in stronger political controls, police surveillance, and imperial autocracy. (That, in a nutshell, something which would take hundreds of pages to describe accurately...)

So the age when Glazunov was at his peak was not the world we associate with his mentors: the pendulum swung quickly and sharply back from the days of the liberal-nationalists. Dostoievsky was dead, and Tolstoy's greatest works had already been published. Even though Rimsky-Korsakov continued to create great works inspired by the Russian folk culture (like his opera, The Golden Cockerel, in reality a political satire), the culture of the times took on that “end-of-the-century” elegance we associate with the imperial ballets of Tchaikovsky. The intellectual life of the 1890s in Russia reminds me, in a way, of American student life after the Viet-Nam War when it seemed there was nothing left to protest. And whatever your political colors may reveal, things in the United States had changed radically from the 1950s into the '60s and '70s and again in the 1980s. Something similar affected Glazunov and his generation as well.

He went from being the promising student of Rimsky-Korsakov in the 1880s to become a successful teacher with an international reputation at the peak of his powers around 1900. But then, with the advent of the political turmoil of 1905 (which momentarily closed down the St. Petersburg Conservatory where he taught and which he would eventually run, once Rimsky-Korsakov had been forced out for being too pro-student) – you might call this the beginning of the long, slow up-beat to the Bolshevik Revolution – Glazunov's world slowly fell apart.

Today, he is perhaps primarily remembered for having ruined Rachmaninoff's 1st Symphony, when he was apparently too drunk to conduct it at its premiere in 1897, whether he understood the piece or not. Glazunov, like Mussorgsky, was one of Russian music's more notorious drinkers: there is the probably true story told by Shostakovich how, in his lessons, Glazunov would sip his booze through a tube hidden in his coat connected to a flask hidden in a desk drawer.

Shostakovich, Student

And as he was known as Rimsky's student during his lifetime, he became known as Shostakovich's teacher to the next century: he perhaps saw in this precocious young student – who began at the Conservatory when he was 13 – a reflection of himself. He followed his development, helped him with scholarships and arranged for the premiere of his 1st Symphony in 1926 in the same hall where his own 1st Symphony had been premiered to much surprise 44 years earlier. And it was, after all, the starting point for what would become the international career of the future leading composer of the Soviet Union, then a mere 19-year-old student wearing thick, round glasses and gawking back at that audience with as much curiosity as they looked at him when he'd come out to take his awkward bow.

(By the way, you can hear Shostakovich's 1st Symphony at the May Masterworks concert with the Harrisburg Symphony & Stuart Malina.)

In the game of “what if,” one can ask “what if Glazunov didn't have to deal with the chaos that followed the 1917 Revolution?” What if he didn't have to worry about composing because his supply of manuscript paper was about to run out and wouldn't likely be replenished, given the rationings during the Civil War? What if he had left for Paris in 1917 when so many others left their vanishing culture behind? (Leaving Russia didn't help Rachmaninoff much: he hardly ever composed again after he emigrated to the West.) But what would have happened to Shostakovich if Glazunov hadn't been there to mentor him?

So, in many ways, Glazunov's Violin Concerto is a reflection of a soon-to-be-lost age – not just Russia's but also the composer's. Following 1905, most of his energies would be taken up as a teacher and administrator. And with his society in free-fall, what was there for an artist to grab onto to present any kind of artistic vision? He was hardly the man to suddenly start producing proletarian music!

Whatever others might have been able to do, it was not within Glazunov's talent to find an answer, as he himself might probably have been the first to admit. Everything had come easily to him: his “creative crisis” of 1890 was the first sign he was out-growing his role as a prodigy; another one, following 1905, when he was now 40, might have been a mid-life crisis in the best of times. It's not that he stopped composing, but, with few exceptions, he was unable to produce much that was comparable to the quality of what he'd written before.

It is not surprising his last string quartet, written in Paris in 1930, was subtitled “Homage to the Past.”

Dick Strawser