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Dvorák: Silent Woods |
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Waldesruhe ("Silent Woods"), Op. 68, No. 5 Antonin Dvorák was born in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. Dvorák first wrote Silent Woods (the original Czech title is Klid) as a piano duet in 1884, transcribing it for cello and piano in 1891 and for cello and orchestra in 1893. This work runs about 5 minutes in performance, and calls for an orchestra of flute, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, horn, and strings, plus solo cello. Stephen Geber and The Cleveland Orchestra previously performed Silent Woods at a Friday morning matinee concert in November 1990, led by Jahja Ling.
The original Czech title, Klid ("Tranquillity"), and the German, Waldesruhe ("Tranquillity in the Forest"), which appear on the title page of the first edition of Silent Woods, show the inspiration of the German Romantic notion of the forest as a place of serene solitude, introspection, and inner peace. The woods are "silent" not because there is no noise to be heard, but because the soul finds its desired rest and tranquillity there. (These sentiments found their most beautiful expression in the short poem "Wanderer's Night Song" by Goethe.) The piece is in a simple A-B-A form: a tender, song-like melody followed by a livelier middle section after, which the first melody returns. -Peter Laki © 2003 |
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Piano
Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18 Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was born in Semyonovo, Russia, on
April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943.
Rachmaninoff composed his Second Piano Concerto in 1900-01. He completed
the second and third movements first, and performed them in Moscow on
December 15, 1900; his cousin Alexander Siloti conducted the orchestra.
The first complete performance took place in Moscow on November 9, 1901,
again with Rachmaninoff as soloist and Siloti as conductor. The first
American performance was probably the one played by Raoul Pugno and the
Russian Symphony Society of New York on November 18, 1905. This concerto runs about 35 minutes in performance. Rachmaninoff scored
it for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets,
2 trombones, timpani, strings, and solo piano. The Cleveland Orchestra first performed Rachmaninoff's Second Piano
Concerto in February 1921, with pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch and conductor
Nikolai Sokoloff. The most recent performances took place in November
2000, with Krystian Zimerman under Jahja Ling's direction. The Cleveland Orchestra and Jean-Yves Thibaudet recorded all of Rachmaninoff's piano concertos under the direction of Vladimir Ashkenazy for Decca/London Records in 1993.
During his life, there were indeed periods when he had to give up one
of these activities for another. But his gifts as a creative artist and
a performer were really only different aspects of the same musical personality.
He was surpassed by few pianists in the first half of the 20th century,
but his repertoire was comparatively small and he was at his best when
he played his own music. Conversely, he wrote most of his works with himself
as a performer in mind. A piano work by Rachmaninoff is therefore a personal communication coming
from an artist who summed up his artistic creed in the words: "A
composer's music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs,
his religion, the books that have influenced him, the pictures he loves.
It should be the sum total of his experiences." Rachmaninoff wrote his Second Piano Concerto in 1900-01, shortly after
what seemed to be the greatest trauma in his life. Three years earlier,
he had composed a symphony that met with a disastrous reception at the
St. Petersburg premiere. The fiasco was caused largely by the poor performance
and the prejudices prevalent in St. Petersburg towards young people from
Moscow like Rachmaninoff, and was therefore in no way the composer's fault.
Yet Rachmaninoff fell prey to a state of mental depression and became
totally unable to write music. In his despair, he turned to a psychiatrist
by the name of Dr. Dahl, who used a technique of hypnosis to restore Rachmaninoff's
faith in his creative powers. When Rachmaninoff was finally cured and
able to finish the concerto he had long been trying to write, he expressed
his gratitude by dedicating the score to Dr. Dahl. As so often with Rachmaninoff, the principal vehicle to convey his "personal
communication" is his own highly individual melodic writing. Rachmaninoff
makes the piano "sing" with the passion of an operatic hero,
though at the same time he also has it perform the most dazzling musical
acrobatics with fiendish arpeggios (broken chords) and other types
of virtuoso passagework. The piano is the protagonist throughout, but
the orchestra is equally important and there are many prominent solos.
There are times when the pianistic fireworks merely serve as accompaniment
to the melody that is presented by the orchestra. Each of the concerto's three movements contains numerous tempo changes in accordance with the evolution of the musical characters. But the unity of the work is ensured by the thematic recapitulations prescribed by Classical rules. Rachmaninoff counterbalanced his effusive, hyper-Romantic melodic writing by an almost academic adherence to traditional musical craft with regard to matters of form. He scored the second-movement "Adagio sostenuto" in E major, a tonality far removed from C minor, the concerto's home key; but he bridged the gap between these two keys by modulating passages that open both the first and the second movements. Both Beethoven in his Third Piano Concerto and Brahms in his First Symphony used this C-minor/E-major relationship between the first and second movements; but in both cases, one may hear the jump between the two unrelated tonalities. Not so in Rachmaninoff. His "bridges" between movements exemplify something he strove to do throughout the concerto, namely to eliminate all "rough edges" and create a flow of great melodies unimpeded by breaks or jolts in the continuous unfolding of events. -Peter Laki |
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Act II of The Nutcracker,
Op. 71 Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia, on May
7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. Tchaikovsky composed the two-act ballet Shchelkunchik ("The
Nutcracker") between February 1891 and April 4, 1892, to a scenario
by Marius Petipa after Alexander Dumas Sr.'s version of E.T.A. Hoffmann's
story "Nutcracker and Mouse King." The first performance was
given at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg on December 18, 1892,
with choreography by Lev Ivanov; it was the conclusion of a double bill
that opened with Tchaikovsky's short opera Yolanta. Act II of The Nutcracker, being heard at tonight's concert,
runs about 40 minutes in performance. Tchaikovsky scored the ballet for
3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, english horn, 2 clarinets,
bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani,
percussion (triangle, bass drum, cymbals, tambourine, castanets, glockenspiel),
2 harps, celesta, and strings. The Cleveland Orchestra has frequently played excerpts from The Nutcracker since the 1920s - either single movements or the suite Tchaikovsky had drawn from the ballet score. The entire ballet was given at special Twilight Concerts in December 1958 and December 1959. Both times, the conductor was Louis Lane; Orchestra manager A. Beverly Barksdale narrated, with women from the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus assisting. Vladimir Ashkenazy led performances of Act II at Severance Hall in November 1991. Most recently, selected excerpts were played at education concerts in February 2001, with Jahja Ling or Steven Smith conducting. At Blossom, music from The Nutcracker was last heard in July 1984, under the direction of Franz Allers. ONE OF THE LEADING FIGURES of German literary Romanticism (and also a
composer and an important music critic), E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote his story
"Nutcracker and Mouse King" in 1816-17, and published it with
his own illustrations. It is a tale of some complexity, one that children
may enjoy but only adults can fully appreciate. It contains a story within
a story, and it is told with a subtle irony that was lost in subsequent
arrangements. The Nutcracker reached the ballet stage via a somewhat watered-down
literary adaptation by Alexandre Dumas Sr., which in turn was adapted
by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg,
and Marius Petipa, the famous French-born balletmaster of the Imperial
Opera. Asked to write the music for the new ballet in 1890, Tchaikovsky
was less than enthusiastic at first, and warmed to the project only gradually.
He had some misgivings about the scenario; also, his trip to the United
States in the spring of 1891 kept him from doing serious work on the ballet
until later in the year. The premiere, on December 18, 1892, was far from
being an unqualified success. The reviewers deplored the lack of dramatic
action. The protagonists of the story, who are children, were played by
student dancers whose technical limitations placed evident restrictions
on the choreography. Worst of all, the one adult ballerina with an important
role, Antonietta Dell'Era (who danced the Sugar Plum Fairy), was described
as "heavy, large, unpretty, [and] ungraceful," her only attraction
apparently being her foreign name. The only thing critics liked about the piece from the beginning was the
music. And that is what has ensured The Nutcracker's place in the
repertoire for 111 years, and is likely to keep it there as long as there
is danced theater in the world. For who cares if the story is meager and
has no drama in it, as long as we have the Dance of the Snowflakes, Waltz
of the Flowers, and the great pas de deux? In fact, the appeal
of the music is such that it has often been performed in concert, not
only as the suite Tchaikovsky drew from the ballet, but also in its entirety. At the present concert we shall hear the second and last act of The
Nutcracker, a dream of a Fairyland all made up of sugar and candy.
Whatever action there is in the ballet has taken place in Act I; it was
there that we made the acquaintance of the Silberhaus family who were
getting ready to celebrate Christmas. Among the guests, there was a mysterious
figure named Drosselmeyer, the godfather of the Silberhaus children, Clara
and Fritz. Drosselmeyer gave the children some elaborate mechanical toys
that they were not allowed to play with, but he also brought a nutcracker
doll that Clara immediately took under her wing. At night, an army of
mice, led by the ferocious Mouse King, attacked the Nutcracker and the
other toys. In the last minute Clara threw her slipper at the Mouse King,
and in so doing not only saved her friend the Nutcracker but also broke
the evil spell he had been under and turned him back into the handsome
Prince he really was. In Act II, the grateful Prince takes Clara with him to "Confiturenburg,"
the Land of Candy and Sweets and Everything Good. The whole act is a single
hymn in celebration of happiness and beauty as we hear one unforgettable
melody after the other in the successive dance numbers. In the next scene, the Prince recounts how Clara saved his life, and
the Fairy gives orders for a great dance to entertain the young couple.
(The flutes use the technique known as "fluttertongue," another
new instrumental effect.) All the different kinds of candy and sweets
(and everything good) begin to dance. The Spanish Dance of the Chocolate
comes first; chocolate being of South American origin, its melody (played
by the solo trumpet) is accompanied by the castanets. The dance of the
Coffee is Arabian (based, actually, on a Georgian folk song), that of
the Tea Chinese, with a high-pitched flute solo accompanied by plucked
strings, and bassoons in their extreme low register. A lively Russian trepak for full orchestra follows, whose melody
is reminiscent of the finale of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto of 1878.
Then we hear a graceful Dance of the Flutes, originally called "Dance
of the Mirlitons" (toy flutes or reed pipes). This movement is dominated
by a trio of flutes interrupted by a brief bass theme in the middle. The
international divertissement (entertainment) is rounded out by "La
Mère Gigogne," that is, The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe
and her children - a section based on two well-known French folksongs.
(Incidentally, the Old Woman was danced by a man, Vladimir Yakovlev, in
the first performance.) Now the Fairy's attendants pay tribute to Clara in the popular "Waltz
of the Flowers," which contains some of the most magnificent melodies
Tchaikovsky ever wrote. The celebrated pas de deux follows, in which the
Prince is joined by the Sugar Plum Fairy, since the student who danced
the role of Clara was too young and inexperienced to assume this exacting
task. The pas de deux is in four sections. The Prince and the Fairy
dance the opening section together, then each has a brief solo - a tarantella
for the Prince, and a movement simply titled "Dance of the Sugar
Plum Fairy" for the female dancer. This section contains a famous
celesta part that is as sweet as anything in the kingdom. Finally, the
two dancers join for a brilliant coda. It is now time for the entire corps de ballet to bring the celebration
to its high point with the Final Waltz. The concluding "Apotheosis"
(elevation to a state of divine bliss) is expressed by a solemn recall
of the magic-palace music that opened the act. Can one hope for a more
perfect musical expression of "happily ever after?" -Peter Laki © 2003 |
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