A Musical Kaleidoscope: Program Notes

Larsen
Schumann
Tchaikovsky

ANNA LARSEN
Symphony No. 1
For Anna's bio, click here.

Anna Larsen’s Symphony no. 1 was composed in 2010, and this performance is its world premiere. The piece was composed first as a piano sonata and later orchestrated into a work for full orchestra. The symphony has three movements and is eleven minutes in total; the first and third movements are in E flat Major, while the second movement is in C minor.

In the beginning of the first movement, you will hear a clear melody in the violins/flutes, and if you listen carefully, it is interesting to listen to the underlying theme in the bassoons and cellos; this theme will become very important later in the piece. In fact, a few measures later, this same melody will reappear in the flutes. After the brief first theme, there’s a bridging section that leads to a very upbeat and cheerful second theme, where the violins/trumpets have the melody (this theme is soon repeated in the winds and brass). Now, there is a closing theme, which contains a huge crescendo leading to the A flat Major chord marking the end of the exposition. In the development, listen for repetitions of the various themes introduced in the first section of the piece; you will also experience lots of modulations during the journey through the development. About halfway through the middle section, a new fun and humorous theme is introduced in the bassoons, celli, clarinets and trumpets. Next there is a series of sequences followed by a long and suspenseful lead-in to the recapitulation.

The second movement begins with a lyrical, despairing melody first introduced in the violins. Next is a section where the bassoons and celli start out with the melody, which soon gets traded off to other instruments. After this short section, there is a long sequence that modulates from the current key of A flat minor back to C minor, where there is a re-statement of the first theme, this time played in the horns and later the winds. The theme comes to a close and is followed by the introduction of a new theme in the key of E flat minor. This place is interesting to listen to because there are two melodies playing at once. One melody is in the flutes and clarinets, while the other plays in the violins (both of these melodies are of equal importance). The last two sections of the movement are very contrasting from each other. There is a shift in mood during the first portion when the feeling is no longer mournful but beautiful and hopeful. However, towards the end, the original mood returns once more during the closing theme of the movement.
            
The third and final movement is a rondo form; it’s definitely the most cheerful movement in the symphony and perhaps the most virtuosic as well! The movement starts off with a humorous syncopated theme in the violins and flutes. Following the first theme, there is a section in C minor that carries a similar syncopated pulse. Although this theme is in a minor key, it still possesses a playful character and sounds like a dance. After another appearance of the first theme in the home key, you will be introduced to a new joyful theme taking place in A flat Major. This section is played mainly in the wind instruments, but later on, the strings get to play it as well. Next, the first and second themes of the piece are repeated. However this time, instead of being played in the keys of E flat Major and C minor, they are played in D flat Major and B flat minor. Now is the one of the most fun places in the movement! First the violins play a new melody in C Major. The winds join soon after, repeating the theme the strings played earlier in D flat Major. The role of playing the new theme continues to shift throughout the different instruments in the orchestra, all the time chromatically rising upwards in key, until it reaches the trumpets (who play in E Major). After the trumpets play their solo, all of the orchestra plays the theme one last time. After the middle section finishes, there are a few restatements of the themes introduced earlier in the piece that modulate until they finally reach E flat Major. The first theme plays once more in the home key, and the piece finishes with a dramatic flourish including all the instruments.

© Anna Larsen

ROBERT SCHUMANN
Cello Concerto in A minor, Opus 129
Robert Alexander Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, on June 8, 1810, and died in Endenich, a suburb of Bonn, on July 29, 1856. Schumann composed his Cello Concerto between October 10-24, 1850, but the first performance was posthumous, given by Ludwig Ebert at the Leipzig Conservatory on June 9,1860, in honor of the composer’s fiftieth birthday. In addition to the solo cello, the score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 25 minutes.
At the beginning of September 1850, Robert Schumann, with his wife Clara and their six children, moved to Düsseldorf, where Robert was due to take up the directorship of the Düsseldorf Music Society. He had been so eager to leave Dresden, where the family had spent eight dreary years, that he did not ponder Düsseldorf’s bad reputation as a town that destroyed conductors. Schumann wanted an orchestra of his own, and he would get one in Düsseldorf. The appointment began very successfully with a welcoming serenade followed by a concert, supper, and ball, presented by the local musicians. Clara, always utterly proper, found social standards lax; she referred to “the breezy, unconstrained conduct of the women, who at times surely transgress the barriers of femininity and decency....Marital life is more in the easygoing French style.” But the welcoming party made them hope for the best. That warm feeling did not last long. Two years later, Robert was asked to resign. Already, perhaps, his mental condition made him fragile, and about a year later he attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Rhine, and was committed to a mental hospital until his death in 1856.

But at the beginning of the Düsseldorf stay, those unhappy events were all in the unanticipated future. Schumann in fact seemed emboldened to a new creative outburst by the forces he now had at his disposal. The first fruit of this mood was the Cello Concerto, composed in only fifteen days that October, and soon after he wrote the Rhenish Symphony and revised his D minor symphony into what he considered its definitive form (Symphony No. 4). To those large works can be added two violin sonatas, the Märchenbilder for viola and piano, two cantatas, and a number of overtures

Clara Schumann, always her husband’s first confidant and critic, was delighted by the cello concerto. “It pleases me very much and seems to me to be written in true violoncello style,” she noted in her diary on November 16, 1850. The following October she wrote: “I have played Robert’s Violoncello Concerto through again [on the piano], this time giving myself a truly musical and happy hour. The romantic quality, the vivacity, the freshness and humor, also the highly interesting interweaving of violoncello and orchestra are indeed wholly ravishing, and what euphony and deep feeling one finds in all the melodic passages!” But Robert himself must not have been so sure; he held onto the score for two more years.

The Cello Concerto has never been as popular as the brilliant piano concerto of a decade earlier. Some commentators have tried to find evidence of Schumann’s forthcoming mental breakdown to explain this fact, but it is easier (and, I think, more accurate) to consider this work a product of the experimental side of Schumann. Throughout the work he compresses his ideas and invents new ways to connect the parts of a multi-movement composition. The very opening—the woodwinds chords over pizzicato strings and the wonderful cello melody that follows have long-range importance. The idea of the chords pervades the slow movement. And, as if the concerto were an opera with the cellist as diva, the cello theme becomes a recitative, a poignant conversation shared between soloist and orchestra, and this becomes the bridge to the finale. Each movement is linked to the next (a trick Schumann might have learned from Mendelssohn, who disliked having the music stop at the end of each movement, because that invited audience applause, which he found intrusive). If Schumann learned something from Mendelssohn, Brahms clearly learned from Schumann the trick of shifting meter (to 6/8 here) in the later part of the finale. The cadenza that appears just before the metric shift was surely an inspiration to Elgar, a great admirer of Schumann, for his cello concerto, which has the same kind of overall mood of being “internalized”—a remarkable feat for a piece in a genre as exuberant as the concerto normally is.

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Opus 13, Winter Dreams
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Kamsko‑Votkinsk, Vyatka province, Russia, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He composed the First Symphony between March 1866 and early 1867. Individual movements were performed in December 1866 and February 1867. It took another year for the entire symphony to reach performance—on February 15, 1868, with the Nikolay Rubinstein conducting the orchestra of the Royal Musical Society in Moscow. Tchaikovsky revised the work slightly for publication in 1874. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings in the first three movements, adding three trombones and tuba, cymbals, and bass drum for the finale. Duration is about 44 minutes.
Tchaikovsky’s first years out of the conservatory were financially difficult ones for him. This is probably true of most composers, but for Tchaikovsky in the mid‑1860s it was especially so, since Russia’s musical life could hardly yet be said to exist. Fortunately, when he finished his course with Anton Rubinstein at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg in late 1865, he already had an offer from Rubinstein’s brother Nikolay, who had organized a Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society, and hired Tchaikovsky to teach music theory. The salary was a pittance, but it kept him in music and out of the civil service.
At first Tchaikovsky was lonely in Moscow, far from friends and family, and nervous about facing a class of students, but he soon began to feel much more at home. He came to enjoy his students, discovered Dickens (The Pickwick Papers had him laughing out loud), and met musicians who were to be close friends for the rest of his life and to play a large part in his career, among them his future publisher Jurgenson, and especially Nikolay Rubinstein, who offered support, friendship, lodging, and social advice.

His increased sense of well‑being was reflected in composition: in March 1866 he began his First Symphony, the work that was to dominate his attention for the rest of the year. Though started with enthusiasm, the symphony soon became a trial to his energies and health. He became nervous and edgy, and he began to fear that death might prevent him from finishing even this one symphony. A successful performance in May of an overture he had written as a student must have meant a great deal to his creative energies, because by the middle of June he could report that he was already scoring his new symphony.  In his eagerness to finish, he worked day and night, and the strain told on his health.

During a long summer visit to his sister and her husband, he suffered numbness of his bodily extremities and hallucinations. The doctor considered him “one step away from insanity.” The experience was so frightening that he ceased composing at night for the rest of his life.  His former teachers Rubinstein and Zaremba criticized the piece severely and refused to consider performing it. After further work, he tried again; this time his teachers approved of the second and third movements only. After performances of the second and third movements, the symphony was finally performed complete in Moscow, where it was highly successful—and yet not performed again anywhere for fifteen years!
The nickname “Winter Dreams” was given by the composer himself. He also wrote headings for the first movement (“Reveries of a winter journey”) and the second (“Land of desolation, land of mists”), but neither adds anything to our understanding of the music, and a listener totally ignorant of them has not lost much.

Tchaikovsky was always overly modest about his abilities as a symphonist. To be sure, he never thought in the architectural terms—involving carefully judged proportions of harmonic elements and their elaboration in thematic material—that the greatest symphonists seem to have felt inside them. He shared with many other romantic composers an approach that began by conceiving complete, self-sufficient melodies; these could not be developed without being changed out of all recognition. Still, Tchaikovsky had a refined technique, a dramatic flair, a sense of color, and a melodic grace that were far in advance of most composers of his day, and if he was willing and able to recognize his own shortcomings, he was also willing to work hard to overcome them—as he did in his greatest symphonies.

The opening of the first movement shows at once a symphonic imagination at work. There is a hushed tremolo in the violins presenting the minimum of harmonic content—the two notes G and B-flat in the middle of the orchestral range. Over and under this, the flute and bassoon sing in unison, though two octaves apart, a tune of markedly Russian stamp (characterized by its many intervals of the fourth, its way of growing by repeating segments of itself). When this tune is repeated in the violas, flutes insert a little rhythmic connecting figure, a chromatic motive that will grow in significance. All of this is very atmospheric and effective; at the same time it allows for various ways of development both melodic and harmonic. It is, in short, a splendid way to open a symphony. Still there are moments where “the seams show,” as Tchaikovsky often lamented. Yet, despite some occasional weakness, this is an extraordinary symphonic movement for a young composer of twenty-three fresh out of the conservatory.
Tchaikovsky called the second movement “Land of desolation, land of mists,” yet he began it by quoting eight measures of music that he had already used in his overture The Storm where they were intended to convey “Katerina’s yearnings for true happiness and love.” So much for the usefulness of titles. The expressive and lyrical melody that lies at the heart of the movement is pure Tchaikovsky, foreshadowing the composer we know better from the ballets and the late symphonies.

The Scherzo was the first movement written for this symphony. Tchaikovsky saved it from a Piano Sonata in C-sharp minor that he had written the year before, transposing it down a half-step and orchestrating it almost as it had appeared in the sonata. The Trio, though, is new; it is the first of many wonderful examples of the orchestral waltz, a genre which Tchaikovsky made very much his own.

The Finale is in many respects the weakest movement of the symphony—though that should not be a surprise. The “finale problem” faced every composer after Beethoven, who had redefined the notion of the symphony to make the finale the dramatic climax of the entire cycle of movements. Many composers in attempting to follow that pattern fell into vacuous and empty rhetoric. No wonder a first-time symphonist has trouble with a universal problem that plagued all nineteenth-century composers. The movement begins with an introduction drawn from the Russian folksong that later becomes the second theme. The development gets bogged down in an attempt at fugal writing, never Tchaikovsky’s strongest point, and the symphony ends with an extremely noisy coda, filled with energy but little real excitement. Nonetheless, in spite of the slight let‑down of the finale, Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony remains a splendid achievement for a young composer, and it firmly established one branch of the path that he was to follow.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

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