The Program
SOFIA GUBAIDULINA
In tempus praesens
Half-Russian, half-Tatar composer Sofia Gubaidulina's career is a
fascinating study in artistic confidence, conviction, and
achievement despite working in some of music history's most
confused and volatile eras and environments. She is one of the few
living links in a pedagogical chain that stretches back in time
through Russia and the Soviet Union to the Vienna of Anton Webern,
one of her chief inspirations, and, by extension, to 17th- and
18th-century Germany, where Bach wrote the music that she reveres
most of all.
If just one word could describe Gubaidulina as a composer, it would
perhaps be "uncompromising." She is not afraid to be different:
Over her long career, she has rebelled against governmental censure
in the USSR, against the fetish of newness and impenetrability in
avant-garde music, and against over-simplicity in music that
aspires only to please the ear. Gubaidulina's own music, which has
gained traction in the West since her move to Hamburg after the
fall of the Soviet Union, is brilliant and complex, displaying a
love for mathematics, philosophy, and theology through musical
symbolism and the integration of set and number theory. The
Fibonacci sequence, Lucas numbers, and what she calls the "Bach
sequence"—a numerical pattern she discovered through her own
analysis of that composer's music—are frequently used as elements
of her musical structures. But her work is also fascinating and
profoundly moving in a purely aural sense. It crackles with tension
and displays the deft touch of a master in its exploration of
instrumental timbre and subtly nuanced harmonic shading. The
important thing to Gubaidulina, in music and in all the arts, is
the combination of the cerebral and the spontaneous—the creation of
work that, like Bach's music, contains both "mathematical
principles and the fiery current of intuition."
In tempus praesens (For the present time) is
Gubaidulina's second violin concerto, following its predecessor,
Offertorium—the work that first brought the composer
attention from beyond the Iron Curtain—by 27 years. An important
subtext in the work is the name "Sophia," which—in addition to
being shared by the composer and its dedicatee, violinist
Anne-Sophie Mutter—refers to a concept in Eastern Orthodoxy of the
vocalization/ personification of God's wisdom. The violin is the
bright voice of this wisdom, while the orchestra, dimmed by the
absence of its own violins, represents the opposing darkness.
Lengthy and serious, layered with musical and symbolic meaning, and
viscerally gripping throughout, this is a powerful and undeniably
major work.
In the Composer's Own Words
Just like many 20th-century creators, the problem of time concerns
me to the greatest extent possible. I am concerned with how time
changes in connection with the changing psychological conditions of
man, how it elapses in nature, in the world, in society, in dreams,
in art.
Art is always situated between sleep and reality, between wisdom
and folly, between the statics and dynamics of everything that
exists. In ordinary life, we never have present time, only the
perpetual transition from the past to the future. And only in
sleep, in the religious experience, and in art are we able to
experience lasting present time.
I think that musical form serves this very function: During its
course it undergoes many events. A few of these turn out to be most
important. (I call these architectonic nodes of form.) And they can
make a kind of generalized shape, the shape of a pyramid, for
example. (The episode of ritual sacrifice stands at the pinnacle of
the pyramid of In tempus praesens.) The integral
experiencing of this pyramidal form produces lasting present
time.
—Jay Goodwin
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73, "Emperor"
By the time Beethoven wrote his Piano Concerto No. 5 in 1809, the
great German-born composer had lived in Vienna for almost 20 years
and was recognized as something of an Austrian national treasure.
So when the music-loving gentry got wind early that year that
Beethoven had been offered and was planning to accept a lucrative
appointment as court composer for Jérôme Bonaparte in Kassel—a city
in Westphalia, a province recently conquered by the French and made
a vassal state of Napoleon's empire—three wealthy individuals took
action to avoid losing their maestro. On March 1, 1809, Prince
Lobkowitz, Prince Kinsky, and the young Archduke Rudolph signed an
agreement guaranteeing Beethoven a stipend of 4,000 florins
annually for as long as he remained in Vienna. This arrangement, in
theory, would free the composer from the financial difficulties of
depending on inconsistent income from commissions and concert
revenue from the fickle public. Though the contract ultimately
proved disappointing in its execution—Kinsky died shortly after
signing it and Lobkowitz halted payments in 1811—Beethoven's
livelihood was more secure than ever before.
But all this must have been small consolation for the composer
when, barely a month after the ink had dried on his new financial
agreement, Austria went to war with France for the fourth time in
two decades. By May, Napoleon's artillery was shelling Vienna, and
Beethoven was forced to seek shelter in his brother's basement. It
was under these conditions during the summer of 1809—which
Beethoven described as "nothing but drums, cannons, and human
misery of every sort!"—that the composer wrote his Fifth Piano
Concerto. Given the circumstances of its origin and Beethoven's
well-chronicled feelings about Napoleon and emperors in general,
imagine the composer's "profound if posthumous disgust," as critic,
musicologist, and infamous wit Donald Francis Tovey once wrote,
that this work has come to be called, for reasons unknown, the
"Emperor" Concerto.
The Piano Concerto No. 5 is dedicated to Archduke Rudolph and was
one of the final works of the composer's so-called heroic period,
the second of the three major artistic phases of his career. It
displays the combination of expressive grandeur and musical
ingenuity that are the hallmarks of the style, and it begins, as so
often in Beethoven, with a surprise: The orchestra has barely put
bow to string before the piano announces its presence with three
grand, cadenza-like flourishes, each fiercely punctuated by
timpani. Only after these have subsided does the orchestra get on
with introducing the main themes of this massive Allegro, the
longest single movement Beethoven ever wrote. Particularly
interesting here is the use of wide-ranging harmony, including a
second theme in B minor-about as far from the home key of E-flat
major as you can get.
The slow middle movement, in B major, is based on a gentle chorale
and contains some of Beethoven's most tender music. The piano here
is all innocent sweetness and sighs, singing quietly above and
alongside the orchestra. The transition from this lyrical serenity
to the raucous Allegro that follows is a moment of pure magic, as a
soft sustained B-natural in the bassoons slips to B-flat, and the
piano tentatively taps out a melodic fragment. Suddenly, the
soloist lurches forward, hammering out the melody in full, and all
at once we have arrived in the finale proper and back in E-flat
major. The rest of the third movement, a seven-part rondo, flashes
onward with syncopated rhythms and whirling energy. Just when it
seems like it might end with the ominous, martial sound of far-off
drums, the soloist brings the work to a close with a brief,
spirited coda.
—Jay Goodwin
IGOR STRAVINSKY
The Firebird Suite
In 1910, Stravinsky was a relatively unknown 28-year-old with only
a couple of modestly successful orchestral pieces
(Fireworks and Scherzo fantastique) to
distinguish himself from myriad other young Russian composers. So
when Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of Paris's Ballets Russes, needed
music for his new ballet, The Firebird, based on a Russian
folk story, he had planned to commission a much more experienced
composer. However, since Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev's first choice
and Stravinsky's teacher, had died the year before, and Lyadov, an
older ex-pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, couldn't meet the timetable,
Diaghilev took a chance on the promising and expeditious
Stravinsky-a portentous decision that would change both music and
dance forever.
The ballet tells the story of Prince Ivan, who, in pursuit of the
Firebird (a magical creature, half-woman, half-bird), finds himself
in the kingdom of Kashchei, an evil sorcerer who keeps 13 beautiful
princesses captive and turns trespassers to stone. After Ivan
catches the Firebird, he grants her freedom in exchange for one of
her magic feathers and a promise of help in a time of need. Having
seen the princesses and fallen in love with the most beautiful one,
Ivan confronts Kashchei and asks for permission to marry her.
Kashchei becomes angry and sends his magical creatures after Ivan,
who in desperation calls on the Firebird. With her magical song,
the Firebird causes Kashchei to dance wildly and then fall asleep.
While he slumbers, she tells Ivan the secret of ending Kashchei's
immortality: Ivan must find and destroy Kashchei's soul, hidden
safely away in a secret chest. Having done so, Ivan sets the
princesses and magical creatures free, and they all have a final,
celebratory dance.
The score, completed in 1910, is remarkable in its craftsmanship
and effectiveness even if not always in its content. Later in his
career, Stravinsky often spoke disparagingly about The
Firebird and its lack of originality—he notably called it
"that audience lollipop"—but it is difficult not to see this as a
revolutionary composer looking back and unfairly comparing a piece
composed when he was young and following mostly in his predecessor
Rimsky-Korsakov's footsteps with his more mature work. There is
also a Tchaikovskyan atmosphere about the The Princesses' Khorovod
and the Final Hymn, as well as in the sense of dramatic flow
throughout the ballet. But The Firebird could never
be confused with the work of either of these earlier composers, and
the germs of groundbreaking ideas that came to fruition in
Stravinsky's later work are already present here. The cascading
violin and viola harmonics in the Introduction, for example, point
to a proclivity toward eliciting unusual sounds from familiar
instruments that would permeate Stravinsky's music throughout his
long career, and the rhythmic fluctuation in the 7/4 Final Hymn
foreshadows the composer's extraordinary innovation in The Rite
of Spring. The entire piece is full of these unmistakable
snippets of Stravinskyan ingenuity.
Over the years, Stravinsky arranged music from The
Firebird into three separate concert suites, which are
now commonly identified by their years of completion: 1911, 1919,
and 1945. Though the 1919 version is by far the most frequently
encountered, the 1945 version performed this afternoon retains the
most material from the ballet. Otherwise, there are few audible
changes from the 1919 suite, which shares with the present version
a reduced orchestration, compared to the tremendous forces required
by the original ballet.
—Jay Goodwin