The Program
Johannes BRAHMS
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77
In the summer of 1878, the great violinist Joseph Joachim
received a note from his old friend Johannes Brahms, saying "a few
violin passages" would be forthcoming. At the time, it may or may
not have occurred to Joachim that Brahms was apt to be most
flippant when he was most serious. One can imagine Joachim's
surprise, delight, and trepidation when the mail brought him the
solo part of a huge concerto movement in D major, the first of a
planned four movements. It was an invitation for a collaboration,
and Joachim was ready to oblige. He knew, after all, that this
concerto was essentially being written for his violin, his sound,
his style.
Their collaboration was nothing new. Joachim met Brahms when they
were both in their early 20s. Before that, Joachim had been a
stupendous prodigy, enjoying his first triumph at age 12 with the
Beethoven Violin Concerto, which he helped establish in the
repertoire. When Brahms emerged from his hometown of Hamburg in
1853 on a small concert tour, Joachim was one of the first
important musicians he met, and Joachim was one of the first to be
stunned and ravished by the music this youth had written.
Joachim advised Brahms on the scoring of his first major orchestral
work, the D-Minor Piano Concerto. Joachim also stood by Brahms in
the years of emotional chaos that stretched from his discovery by
Robert and Clara Schumann, to Robert's breakdown and Brahms's
passion for Clara, to the denouement of Robert's death and Brahms's
flight from Clara.
Joachim was also an accomplished composer. His Hungarian Concerto
was part of his repertoire and a piece Brahms admired. When they
began working on the new concerto, Joachim was determined to help
his friend fashion the solo part in a more playable and idiomatic
way than Brahms could manage on his own. Brahms, for all his
devotion to craftsmanship, had always been impatient with strings
and bows and other matters of the musical kitchen. He always said
he was never fully comfortable with any instrument outside his
own, the piano. So that, in theory, he was all for the idea of
working on the solo part with Joachim. The practice was another
matter.
They set to work, swatches of music going back and forth—sometimes
in the mail and sometimes in person—Joachim with violin in hand to
try out passages. It was clear that Brahms wanted a solo part much
like the one in the First Piano Concerto—continuous, intense, part
of a basically orchestral dialogue—but this time including more
forthrightly bravura passages. With Brahms's encouragement, Joachim
made extensive suggestions and rewrote pages of virtuoso
figuration, only to find Brahms ignoring the suggestions even as he
demanded more. Often as not, Brahms would draft a passage, Joachim
would revise it, then Brahms would produce a third version,
sometimes again awkward to play. The violinist was exasperated, but
Joachim kept at him with dogged patience.
Joachim was pressing for the piece to be finished for a gala
concert in Leipzig on New Year's Day 1879, when word came from
Brahms that "the middle movements are bust—naturally they were the
best ones [before Joachim's revisions]! I'm writing a wretched adagio instead." (One of the
rejected movements, a massive scherzo, went into the Second Piano
Concerto.)
When the now three-movement piece was nearly done, Brahms paid
Joachim a great compliment: For the single cadenza in the piece, he
asked the violinist to write his own. While the manuscript of the
concerto still has passages in Joachim's hand, the final solo part
was not as idiomatic as he surely had hoped.
Another headache was the problem of balance. Brahms wanted a big,
full-throated orchestral sound, as in the First Piano Concerto. But
a violin cannot make as much noise as a piano. During the
rehearsals for the first performances, Brahms had to spend more
time than usual revising the orchestration, paring away at the
textures to allow the soloist to be heard. Meanwhile the violinist
and composer kept tinkering with the solo part.
The premiere actually did take place in Leipzig on New Year's Day
1879, but Joachim was flummoxed by the last-minute revisions and
Brahms was tense on the podium. The response was chilly. Boston
composer George Whitefield Chadwick, studying in Leipzig at the
time, reported in a letter that, late at night after the
performance, he encountered Brahms and Joachim tumbling out of a
tavern "in an advanced state of merriment." Their laughter
reflected probably more relief than celebration. After revisions,
the Vienna premiere was received with great applause two weeks
later.
© 2012 Jan Swafford
KAIJA SAARIAHO
Laterna magica
Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of the group of Finnish
composers and performers who are now, at the height of their
careers, making a worldwide impact. Born in Helsinki, she studied
at the Sibelius Academy there with the pioneering modernist Paavo
Heininen, and was one of the founders of the progressive Ears Open
group, alongside (among others) Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka
Salonen. She continued her studies in Freiburg with the
avant-gardists Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber, at the Darmstadt
summer courses, and, beginning in 1982, at the IRCAM research
institute in Paris-the city where she has since made her
home.
At IRCAM, Saariaho developed techniques of computer-assisted
composition and acquired fluency in working on tape and with live
electronics. Another important French influence was that of the
"spectralist" school of composers, whose compositional techniques
are based on computer analysis of the sound-spectrum of individual
notes on different instruments. In more recent years, the demands
of writing for voices-notably in a highly successful series of
operas-have led her to explore a new vein of simpler, modally
oriented melody, often accompanied by regular repeating patterns.
But she has never abandoned her habitual precision of detail and
intense expressivity.
The title Laterna magica is that of the autobiography
of the great Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, which Saariaho
says "caught my eye after many years when I was tidying my
bookcases in autumn 2007" (which, in fact, was shortly after
Bergman's death). The "magic lantern," she explains, was "the first
machine to create the illusion of a moving image—as the handle
turns faster and faster, the individual images disappear and
instead the eye sees continuous movement." This suggested the idea
of a piece based on "the variation of musical motifs at different
tempos." In particular, there are obvious musical allusions to the
magic lantern in passages in which very fast-moving figuration
forms itself into nearly static, slowly changing ribbons of
texture.
There is also a musical reference to one specific film by Bergman,
the tautly dramatic 1972 Cries and Whispers. That film
uses a good deal of saturated red color, for example at changes of
scene. Saariaho's score is similarly "colored" by the use of the
horn section, playing in six-part harmony, as a kind of recurring
refrain.
Saariaho also drew on Bergman's book itself for a description of
the different kinds of light that his favorite cinematographer,
Sven Nykvist, was able to capture: "gentle, dangerous, dream-like,
living, dead, clear, hazy, hot, strong, naked, sudden, dark,
spring-like, penetrating, pressing, direct, oblique, sensuous,
overpowering, restricting, poisonous, pacifying, bright light."
These words are included in Saariaho's score, in German, either
spoken into woodwind instruments fingered at a specific pitch or
more often whispered clearly by whole sections (you'll hear the
recurring word Licht, or "light").
It's significant, though, that the whispered words disappear after
those first 10 minutes or so, leaving half the piece without verbal
intervention-as if music alone is being allowed to take over to
express the strong human emotions of Bergman's films. Different
characters are allowed greater room for expansion and are sometimes
combined.
© 2012 Anthony Burton
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 54
Shostakovich began composing his Symphony No. 6 shortly after the
triumphant premiere of his Fifth Symphony. The appearance of that
work, in the autumn of 1937, had marked a critical juncture in
Shostakovich's difficult career as a Soviet artist. During the late
1920s and early '30s, Shostakovich had established himself as one
of his nation's most imaginative and resourceful composers, and
also, it seemed, an exemplary "socialist" musician. Apparently a
sincere supporter of the Soviet regime, Shostakovich had no
objection to composing large-scale hymns to the Revolution, and he
did just that in his Second and Third symphonies (to give two
notable examples), respectively titled "To October" and "May
Day."
But with Stalin's consolidation of power in the 1930s, the liberal
artistic climate that had prevailed during the first decade or so
of Soviet rule gave way to a new conservatism that demanded
optimistic and easily accessible art. Modernist complexity in music
was especially frowned upon, even when this was ventured by one of
the brightest stars in the Soviet Union's artistic firmament.
For Shostakovich, matters reached a crisis in 1936. In February of
that year, the official Communist Party newspaper, Pravda,
denounced his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,
which had enjoyed tremendous enthusiasm with audiences, as "a
confused stream of sounds," "cacophony," and "musical chaos." One
week later, a second Pravda review attacked his ballet
The Limpid Stream.
The effect of this critical about-face on Shostakovich's status was
dramatic. Within days, the composer fell from his position as one
of Soviet Russia's most esteemed young artists to that of cultural
pariah. In the face of such criticism, Shostakovich withdrew his
Fourth Symphony, then in rehearsal, and retreated to the privacy of
his study. Nearly two years passed before he again brought a major
work before the public.
When he did, it was with a work—the Fifth Symphony—that used an
accessible style and presented an apparently optimistic tone to
gladden the hearts of Party officials. Whether that style and tone
were meant ironically, and whether or not the symphony embodied
serious artistic compromises, have been widely and heatedly
debated. In any event, the Fifth Symphony's triumphant first
performance in November 1937 saved Shostakovich's career.
The composer then announced that his next symphony would be an epic
tribute to Lenin, complete with soloists and large chorus. Although
Shostakovich had publicly supported the Revolution and had
previously composed works to honor it, the
Pravda attacks of the preceding year had proven that
he could not take his safety for granted. Announcing his intention
to write another patriotic composition helped deflect any lingering
suspicion on the part of the Party's cultural guardians.
As it happened, however, Shostakovich never finished his "Lenin"
Symphony. Instead, he produced a very personal work, one in which
political or representative elements are entirely absent. Because
it was so different from what the composer had originally
announced, this Sixth Symphony was accorded a cool critical
reception when it appeared in 1939 (and this despite an
enthusiastic audience response at the work's premiere in Leningrad
that November-the listeners even demanding an encore of the final
movement). Nevertheless, it has been almost universally accepted as
a strong musical statement and a worthy companion to Shostakovich's
other symphonies.
© 2012 Paul Schiavo