Madison Symphony Orchestra
Program Notes
October 18-19-20, 2019
94th Season / Subscription Concert No.2
Michael Allsen
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This program brings together music by the three greatest composers of the old Soviet Union, beginning with Prokofiev’s tongue-in-cheek music from the film Lieutenant Kijé. The sensational violinist Rachel Barton Pine makes her first appearance with the Madison Symphony Orchestra playing Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto, a work deeply influenced by the music of Armenia, the composer’s homeland. We end with Shostakovich’s ninth symphony, a sometimes sarcastic work written at the end of the Great Patriotic War…and one that got Shostakovich in trouble with Stalin’s artistic bureaucracy.
Sergei Prokofiev
(1891-1953)
Suite
from Lieutenant Kijé,
Op.60
Prokofiev composed his film score to Lieutenant
Kijé in 1933, and
extracted the suite heard here in
1934. The composer conducted the Moscow Radio Orchestra in the
suite’s premiere
on December 21, 1934. This is the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s
first
performance of the complete suite. Duration 20:00.
In the early 1930s, Prokofiev was living in
Paris, making a
fine living as both a composer and a pianist. Though he had fled
from Russia in
the aftermath of the 1917 revolution, he was homesick, and this
was a period of
increasingly frequent visits to the Soviet Union, and works
written for Soviet
organizations—he would return permanently to Russia in 1936. In
1933, he was
commissioned to write music for Alexander Feinzimmer’s film Lieutenant Kijé.
Prokofiev would later
have great success as a film composer, most notably with his
monumental scores
for Alexander Nevsky
(1938) and Ivan the
Terrible (1944). While the film
Lieutenant Kijé was
successful when
it opened in Russia in March 1934, Prokofiev was less than
satisfied with his
innovative first attempt writing a film score. However, at the
invitation of the
Moscow Radio Orchestra, he began to assemble all of the short
fragmentary musical
cues from the Kijé
film score into a more
coherent five-movement suite. Though Feinzimmer’s film is
largely forgotten
today, Prokofiev’s Suite
from “Lieutenant
Kijé” remains one of his most popular pieces of concert
music.
Lieutenant
Kijé,
based on a satirical novel by Yuri
Tynyanov, tells
the story of a soldier whose very existence was invented to
keep his superiors
out of trouble. The novel is set during the reign of Czar Paul
I (r.
1796-1801), who was notorious for his nitpicking devotion to
military protocol
and bureaucracy. When he was read a dispatch by one of his
officers, the Czar
mistakenly understood the words Poruchiki
zhe… (The lieutenant, however…) as Poruchik
Kizhe (Lieutenant Kijé). The Czar takes an interest in
this “Kijé,” and his
officers find it safer to play along than to correct their
Czar. They construct
a detailed life story for Kijé, eventually giving him a
romance and a wedding. Their
invention succeeds too well, however, and the Czar finally
expresses a desire
to meet this gallant young soldier. The officers safely kill
off Kijé before
the Czar suspects that he has been hoodwinked.
Prokofiev’s suite contains some delightfully
wry and witty
music. One interesting bit of orchestration is his prominent use
of a tenor
saxophone, which replaces the baritone singer of the film score.
The first
movement, Birth of Kijé,
introduces
the oboe theme that represents Kijé himself. Most of the
movement is a flashy
and satirical military march, with a moment of mock-seriousness
at the end. Romance
portrays Kijé’s rather ponderous
love affair, with a long solo for the saxophone and highly
melodramatic pauses.
The Wedding of Kijé
opens with a kind
of wedding-toast fanfare from the trombones, followed a sardonic
polka-style
wedding dance from the solo trumpet. After an opening
drinking-song, the Troika
depicts a rather frenzied ride in
a traditional Russian three-horse sleigh. The closing lament, The Burial of Kije,
opens with Kijé’s
oboe theme, and continues with a suitably morose funeral march.
Prokofiev mixes
together several reminiscences of music from episodes in Kijé’s
“life,” before
ending with a final melancholy statement of his theme.
Aram Khachaturian
(1903-1976)
Violin
Concerto
Khachaturian composed his Violin Concerto in 1940 for violinist David Oistrakh, who played its
premiere in
Moscow on September 16, 1940. This is the first performance of
the concerto at
these concerts. Duration 33:00.
Of the three great Soviet composers included
on this program,
Armenian-born Aram Khachaturian was the one who moved most
comfortably in the artistic
atmosphere imposed in the era of Stalin—one biographer has
characterized his
music as “Socialist Realism at its best.” Khachaturian was an
enthusiastic participant
in the State’s musical authority: joining the Union of Soviet
Composers, and
eventually serving as President of the Union’s National
Organizing Committee. Soviet
doctrine was that music should be optimistic and uplifting, and
should further
the goals of the State, but all too often it became a means of
censure and punishment
of composers whose work was found to contain “formalist”
elements: dissonance,
intellectualized forms, modernist ideas, and characteristics
generally considered
bourgeois. While
Prokofiev and
Shostakovich pushed the boundaries throughout their careers,
Khachaturian seems
to have worked comfortably within Soviet expectations—his
natural style was
straightforward and had an immediate mass appeal. (However, even
Khachaturian was
censured for a few years in the repressive years between the end
of World War
II and Stalin’s death in 1953.) His musical style is generally
Romantic,
drawing on the music of Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin, but
he also
absorbed the melodic style and rhythmic vitality of Armenian
music.
The decade following the composition of his Piano Concerto in 1936
saw the creation
of some of Khachaturian’s finest music: his incidental music for
Masquerade (1939), the
ballet Gayane (1942),
his second symphony (1943),
and his Cello Concerto
(1946). The Violin
Concerto was also composed during
this fertile period. Khachaturian wrote much of it during the
summer of 1940, while
living in a “composer’s cottage” at a remote estate managed by
the Union of
Soviet Composers. He was inspired by the artistry of his friend
David Oistrakh,
the Soviet Union’s leading violin virtuoso, who advised
Khachaturian throughout
his composition of the concerto. The composer later wrote “I worked without effort…
Sometimes my thoughts
and imagination outraced the hand that was covering the staff
with notes. The
themes came to me in such abundance that I had a hard time
putting them in some
order.” The
concerto was wildly
successful when Oistrakh played the premiere that
fall, but with Khachaturian’s
permission, Oistrakh substituted his own solo cadenzas. The
concerto is usually
performed with Oistrakh’s cadenzas today.
The first movement (Allegro con fermezza), set in traditional
sonata form, begins
with a bold statement from the orchestra, and a short motive
from the solo
violin that soon grows into a lively Armenian dance that
serves as the main theme.
A languorous second theme emerges above a background of flutes
and pizzicato strings.
This ends with a short solo passage, before an orchestral
outburst opens the extensive
development section, which explores and combines both main
themes—culminating
in a pair of sinuous duets with the clarinet and orchestral
solo violin, and a
long solo cadenza. The movement closes with a shortened and
varied
recapitulation of the main themes and an energetic coda. The
slow movement (Andante
sostenuto) begins with a solemn solos by bassoon and
clarinet. According to
biographer Grigory Shneerson, Khachaturian’s
inspiration was the improvised
melodies created by Armenian traditional bards, as they sang
folk epics. The
violin sings the movement’s unhurried and melancholy main theme,
filled with
Armenian color. There are a few slightly contrasting episodes,
but the overall
mood of the movement remains wistful and quiet until a grand
orchestral statement
of the theme near the end—the mood soon calms, and it ends in
hushed serenity. The
wild finale (Allegro
vivace) presents a series of
folklike dance themes that serve as springboards for brilliant
solo passages. There
is a more reserved reminiscence of material from the first two
movements,
before the opening character returns for a fierce ending.
Dmitri Shostakovich
(1906-1975)
Symphony
No.9 in
E-flat Major, Op.70
Shostakovich’s ninth symphony was completed in August
of 1945. The
premiere took place in Leningrad, on November 3, 1945, with
the Leningrad
Philharmonic under the direction of Eugene Mravinsky. Previous
performances by
the Madison Symphony Orchestra were in 1998 and 2008. Duration
27:00.
“It
is a merry
little piece. Musicians will love playing it
-
Dmitri
Shostakovich
For Shostakovich—as for all artists working
in Joseph Stalin’s
Soviet Union—art was inexorably tied to politics. Composers like
Prokofiev,
Khachaturian, and Shostakovich
were employees of the State, and it was expected that their
music would be
created in the service of the Communism. An article published by
the Union of
Soviet Composers directs that composers turn their thoughts
“towards the
victorious progressive principles of reality, towards all that
is heroic,
bright, and beautiful. This distinguishes the spiritual world of
Soviet man,
and must be embodied in musical images full of beauty and
strength.” Musical
commissars and even Stalin himself took an intense interest in
the works of
Soviet composers, and scrutinized every measure to make sure
that they adhered
to the Party line. The consequences for delinquency were
immediate and severe: at
best, censure and unemployment—at the worst, a one-way trip to
the Gulag
Archipelago.
Shostakovich’s career in the 1930s and 1940s
seems to be a
recurring pattern of official censure and rehabilitation—he
never dropped into
the abyss, but often came uncomfortably close to the edge. At
the height of
Stalinist purges in the late 1930s, Shostakovich kept a small
suitcase packed
and by the door at all times, so that he would be ready if the
police arrived
to take him away. One
of the first times
he suffered official censure was in 1936, when Stalin published
a critical
review of one of Shostakovich’s operas. Only after a public
apology and the
performance of his Symphony
No.5 did
he regain some sort of security.
The composition of his ninth symphony marks
another occasion
where Shostakovich suffered Stalin’s displeasure. His seventh
and eighth
symphonies were enormous, powerful works—each lasts well over an
hour—that take
their cues from events in what Russians call the Great Patriotic
War. Shostakovich
had dropped hints that he would
round out a trilogy with a symphony celebrating Soviet victory,
but at the war’s
end in 1945, he found that he had little desire to create yet
another glorification
of Stalin. The Symphony
No.9,
composed relatively quickly during the summer of that year, is a
miniature in
comparison to the wartime works: it is under half the length of
either the
seventh or the eighth, and is scored for a standard-sized
orchestra. The work
is cheerful and ironic throughout—certainly not the ecstatic and
victorious patriotic
piece that Soviet authorities expected. Years later, when Stalin
was safely
dead, Shostakovich remembered that “When my ninth was performed,
Stalin was
incensed. He was deeply offended, because there was no chorus,
no soloists—and
no apotheosis. There wasn’t even a paltry dedication. It was
just music, which
Stalin didn’t understand very well, and which was of dubious
content.” The
piece received a cool reception from the critics and
Shostakovich again found
himself on the wrong side of Soviet musical authorities. It was
not until after
Stalin’s death in 1953 that he was rehabilitated again.
The opening movement (Allegro)
is set in traditional sonata form. The bright and cheery mood is
set in the
opening bars with a lively string theme. The second theme
features an almost
hilarious combination of piccolo and trombone: the piccolo
playing a happy
little tune in alternation with dour two-note fanfares from the
trombone. Only
near the end of the development does the music become dark and
troubled, but it
is only for a moment; the original material soon returns to
rescue the mood. Underlying
much of the movement is a vaguely military feel, clearly
satirical in intent.
The sparsely-scored second movement (Moderato) begins with a plaintive clarinet solo.
This becomes a
duet with the addition of a second clarinet, then a trio with
the flute, and
finally a woodwind ensemble. This texture gradually thins out
and there is a
lengthy central passage for muted strings that becomes gradually
more sinister.
The opening material returns at the end, now introduced by a
solo flute.
The final three movements are played without
pauses. The
brief Presto begins
with woodwinds
playing at breakneck speed, introducing a scherzo-style theme.
There are two
contrasting episodes placed between repeats of this music: first
a passage
dominated by the strings, and then a march-style theme for solo
trumpet and
trombones. The final statement of the scherzo fades away and the
mood darkens,
setting up a bridge to the next movement. The Largo opens with an ominous statements by
trombones and tuba. This
idea alternates with a bassoon recitative. The bassoon’s second
recitative
suddenly changes character, and becomes the main theme of the
final movement (Allegretto)—a
grotesque tune that is
soon picked up by the strings, and then by string and woodwinds.
Like the first
movement, the finale is set in sonata form, and here the
contrasting idea is a
limping string theme. The development section is a gradual
crescendo towards
the climactic moment: a return of the bassoon’s main theme, now
shouted out by
the brass. The trumpet plays a military-style fanfare through
much of the brief
recapitulation. The tempo suddenly quickens, and the movement
ends with a brisk
coda.
________
program
notes ©2019 by J.
Michael Allsen