CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 2:00 PM

“The Bavarian musicians played their hearts out …with unbending intensity.”—New York Times

Commissioned by the Bavarian RSO to honor the legacy of Ludwig van Beethoven, Shchedrin’s new concerto draws inspiration from the Viennese master’s eloquent written testimony to advancing deafness and subsequent reclusion from the world. Early critics sometimes called Brahms’s First Symphony “Beethoven’s 10th” in acknowledgment of its heroic quality similar to its predecessors. The New York Times hailed Gil Shaham’s Prokofiev at Carnegie Hall in 2004 as “technically brilliant … brutally intense music.”

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Mariss Jansons, Chief Conductor
Gil Shaham, Violin

SHCHEDRIN Beethoven's Heiligenstädter Testament (US Premiere)
PROKOFIEV Violin Concerto No. 1

BRAHMS Symphony No. 1

Encores:
BRAHMS Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G Minor
JOSEF STRAUSS "Ohne Sorgen!" (Without Cares): Polka, Op. 271

Program Notes:

RODION SHCHEDRIN (b. 1932)
Beethoven’s Heiligenstädter Testament (US Premiere)
Moscow-born pianist and composer Rodion Shchedrin studied and taught at the Moscow Conservatory before succeeding Shostakovich as head of the Composers’ Union of the Russian Federation and devoting himself to composition. He and his music have been celebrated by the state, winning the major prizes from the USSR (including the Lenin Prize under Gorbachev in 1984) and Russia (the Russian State Prize under Boris Yeltsin in 1992). Steeped in Russian musical and cultural traditions, Shchedrin has written ballets on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Chekov’s The Seagull as well as operas on Gogol’s Dead Souls and Nabokov’s Lolita.

With his recent concert overture Beethoven’s Heiligenstädter Testament, Shcherdrin takes up a founding document of the Beethoven myth, which posits the composer as tortured genius, committed to his art above all and willing to suffer for it. The “Heilgenstadt Testament,” so named for the town outside Vienna where Beethoven spent the summer of 1802, is a deeply personal expression of despair as Beethoven grappled with his growing deafness. Dated October 6–10, 1802, the text is at once private (addressed to his brothers, it was discovered among the composer’s effects only after his death) and public, crying out to the crowd in its first words, “Oh, you people.” Beethoven refers to suicide but swears to endure. “The only thing that held me back” from self-harm, he asserts, “was my art.” Musicologist and Beethoven expert K. M. Knittel reminds us that this lofty statement of artistic purpose should not be read to redeem his very human suffering nor justify any personal failings.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)
Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 19
In 1917, when Petrograd (St. Petersburg) was enduring the Russian Revolution, Sergei Prokofiev was consumed by composition. He enjoyed an enormously productive year that yielded the violin concerto as well as the First Symphony (the “Classical”), the Third and Fourth piano sonatas, and Visions fugitives for piano. One other year rivals 1917–1918 in terms of creativity: in 1935–36, just before and after his relocation to the Soviet Union in May 1936, Prokofiev composed the ballet Romeo and Juliet at a Mozartian clip along with incidental music for Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin, the orchestral fantasy Peter and the Wolf, the film score The Queen of Spades, and the Second Violin Concerto.
Although his melodic gifts would be fully realized only in this second spate of works, the music from the tumultuous year of the Russian Revolution exudes a summery charm and limpid lyricism as well as a generous dash of youthful bravado, especially in its rhythmic energy and drive. A pianist who generally composed at his instrument, Prokofiev nevertheless carried the sound of the full orchestra in his head and wrote brilliantly for each member of the ensemble. To learn to write idiomatically for the violin and take advantage its true potential, he called upon a professor at the Petrograd Conservatory, the violinist Pawel Kokhañski, to show him what was possible. Thus the concerto showcases a range of techniques: pizzicato (plucked strings), harmonics (ghostly traces of pitches rather than fleshy sounds), spiccato (sharply punctuated bowing), and sul ponticello (bowing at the violin’s bridge rather than the normal position closer to the neck). Just as Prokofiev plays with the possibilities of the Classical orchestra in his First Symphony (a cheeky demonstration to his teachers that he could, in fact, compose like Haydn), so too he eagerly explores and exploits the resources of the violin. A precocious, inquisitive, and rather audacious young composer, Prokofiev sought to make his mark on these time-honored genres.

The first movement of the concerto is an episodic fantasy that moves shockingly yet effortlessly through discrete realms at an utter remove. The violin begins by presenting a delicate, fragile line above a shuddering backdrop of strings; the soloist is shadowed by various accompanying instruments that peek out of the ensemble only to dart back into the orchestral thicket. Even as the music grows more animated, the violin retains its dominant role, the concerto dialogue in this instance being less of an exchange of equals than a discussion between speaker and audience. The driving rhythms and crunchy chords in the climactic episode epitomize the motoric, mechanistic style that earned Prokofiev the reputation of an enfant terrible while a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

The second scherzo movement is a tour-de-force that packs in an astounding amount of music into just four minutes. Flute and violin partner at the outset, their fast runs dovetailing, but the violin holds the stage to show off a host of special effects. The icy timbres and swirling flurries of notes lend the music an air of the grotesque.

In the finale, the violin seeks to reclaim the lost lyricism of the opening, but the orchestra resists, marking time (“tick-tock, tick-tock”) and pacing nervously. After a brief orchestral climax, roles reverse: The violin chops up a melody that the winds would wish to fashion. The music eventually warms, growing more passionate and expansive as the first theme of the first movement returns in the violins. At the conclusion, the soloist moves through a series of rising trills and ascends into the stratosphere, born by the circling winds and strings. The music dematerializes, and the concerto takes leave of terra firma.

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–97)
Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68
In 1862, Brahms began what would eventually, after much struggle, become the first movement of his First Symphony, completed in the summer of 1876 and revised the following May. He set the movement aside presumptively, however, and abandoned orchestral composition altogether for a decade, returning to the genre only in 1873 with the Variations on a Theme of Haydn, Op. 56. When his First Symphony appeared, he seemed to have finally fulfilled the hopes (or rather, the obligation) that composer Robert Schumann had bestowed on him in a famous essay of 1853, “Neue Bahnen” (“New Paths”). When Schumann declared him a veritable musical Messiah, “called to articulate in an ideal way the highest expression of the time,” Brahms was but 20 years old. “This is the chosen one,” Schumann asserted, urging the young pianist to turn his attention to orchestral composition.

In deference to his mentor, Brahms tried to forge a symphony from a sonata but ended up composing a concerto: The first movement of the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Minor (1854) became the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15 (1857). He tried again with the Serenade, Op. 11 (1859), but the work never blossomed into a symphony. Only after composing the Haydn Variations, in which Brahms refined his orchestral style, and the String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 51, No. 1 (1873), which displays a fully mature handling of form, did he look the symphony in the eye—knowing he would see Beethoven—without blinking.

Brahms’s First Symphony takes as models both Beethoven’s Fifth (not coincidentally in the same key of C minor) and Ninth symphonies. Like the former, Brahms’s symphony moves from minor to major keys over the course of four movements linked by a recurring motive, perhaps less audible than the catchy “knock at the door” of the Fifth but still operable. From the Ninth, Brahms borrowed the idea of beginning the first and last movements with slow introductions. Also from the Ninth comes the notion of starting the finale with a collection of themes briefly recalled only to be discarded in preparation for a choral apotheosis. In Brahms’s symphony, however, the chorale melody is not literally sung but possesses an unmistakably vocal impetus.

Brahms’s symphony begins with a dissonant outburst that echoes the fortissimo shrieks from the finale of the Ninth. After a portentous introduction featuring ominous triple-strokes on the timpani, the Allegro exposition begins with a rising rocket figure that is less thematic than motivic. (Brahms saves his best melody for the finale, so earlier musical ideas never quite gel into full-fledged themes.) Also significant as a recurring and unifying motivic idea is the rising three-note figure that slithers up the chromatic scale. The movement follows the outlines of the Classical sonata form: The first, energetic theme contrasts with a second, more lyrical musical idea presented by the solo oboe. The development of musical material is not confined to the development section proper (the second of the three in a sonata-allegro), and the recapitulation takes a surprising—but unconvincing—turn to the major in the closing measures. There is much more work to do before tragedy turns to triumph.

The middle movements are lighter and slighter, and so the finale must complete the journey. Although most critics describe the course of the symphony as a quest ad astra (“to the stars”), what comes is less stellar than it is earthy and profoundly human. The slow introduction recalls the atmosphere of the very opening—stormy and ominous strings, tympani strokes and all—but a warm, fresh breeze blows through the score. As the strings shimmer in breathless anticipation, a horn melody emerges and moves from minor to major, promising better things to come. The flutes take up the sonorous song before the trombones emerge with a glorious Alpine call. These are but fanfares heralding the arrival of something wholly new. The music hangs suspended for a poignant moment, poised for the arrival of the chorale that owes obvious inspiration to the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth. “Any ass can see that,” the composer spat when the resemblance was observed.