Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 Moderato Allegretto Largo Allegro non troppo Allegretto PROGRAM

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1 PROGRAM EIGHTY-SIXTH SEASON Symphony Center Presents Sunday, March 5, 2017, at 7:00 Orchestra Series ST. PETERSBURG PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Yuri Temirkanov Conductor Nikolai Lugansky Piano Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15 Maestoso Adagio Rondo: Allegro non troppo NIKOLAI LUGANSKY INTERMISSION Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 Moderato Allegretto Largo Allegro non troppo Allegretto Symphony Center Presents is grateful to WFMT 98.7 FM for its generous support as media sponsor of the Orchestra series. Rosneft is the title partner of the D.D. St. Petersburg Academic Philharmonia.

2 COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher Johannes Brahms Born May 7, 1833; Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897; Vienna, Austria Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15 When Johannes Brahms was twenty years old, he summoned the courage to present himself at the home of Robert and Clara Schumann, the first couple of music. To his relief, the Schumanns were the perfect hosts, and Robert was genuinely overwhelmed once this odd young man shy, boyish, and nearsighted sat down at their piano to play his own music. Schumann was so deeply moved that he came out of retirement as a critic to introduce Brahms to the music world. Even outwardly, Schumann wrote of that afternoon in September 1853, he bore the marks proclaiming: This is a chosen one. Clara also was impressed, although perhaps it was something else about this tall, delicate man with the flowing blond hair and poetic eyes that caught her attention. Within months, she and Brahms would play duets at that same keyboard, cautiously launching, then more deeply cementing, a relationship that sometimes dared to be more than friendship. In 1853, Robert and Clara were happily married, the proud parents of six young children (a seventh would arrive the following year), and celebrated musicians. Robert was one of the leading composers of the day, although he was destined to write no more important music. Clara somehow found time to maintain her reputation as a profound and thoughtful pianist while raising the children, and despite social convention, to compose as well. But in February 1854, Robert suddenly began to suffer miserably from syphilis. Pain alternated with delirium, and he frequently experienced auditory and visual hallucinations. On February 27, while Clara was out running errands, he left the house and threw himself off a bridge into the Rhine. He was rescued by fishermen and taken home, but within the week, he was admitted to the asylum in nearby Endenich, where he would die two and a half years later. This would have been an even more difficult time for Clara if Brahms hadn t returned to Düsseldorf to be with her. We don t know for certain what transpired over these months. Brahms went to visit Robert in the asylum periodically, but Clara was not allowed to see him. On Robert s birthday in 1856, Brahms found him making alphabetical lists of towns and countries. Finally, on July 27, Clara went along with Brahms, and for the first time in more than two years, saw the sad spectacle of her husband. Two days later, Robert Schumann died. What all this had to do with Brahms s music was not clear at first. In 1853, when he visited the Schumanns, he had nothing but chamber music and piano pieces to his credit, and during the next four years, he didn t venture into other genres. But Brahms was struggling with the urge to say something grand and important, and he secretly was itching to command the rich resources of a full orchestra. In March 1854, Brahms heard Beethoven s Ninth Symphony for the first time, and the impact of that still revolutionary-sounding music threw him off track. It would be twenty-two years before he would complete a symphony of his own, although more and more that was what he most wanted to do. COMPOSED FIRST PERFORMANCE January 22, 1859; Hanover, Germany INSTRUMENTATION solo piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 48 minutes 2

3 One of the pieces that Brahms and Clara played together during these months of uncertainty was a big sonata for two pianos that he had begun as early as the spring of 1854, shortly after Robert was institutionalized. This music would take nearly four years to find its ideal form; at times Brahms believed his sonata was becoming a symphony, despite the intimidating shadow of Beethoven, and at others, a concerto in Beethoven s key of D minor. By now, as he admitted to Clara and wrote to his friend, the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim, he realized that he needed more than two pianos to satisfy his musical impulses. Brahms continued to struggle with his sonata parts of it were scored for full orchestra and sent to Joachim for his verdict. One movement was eventually discarded and ended up, considerably reworked, in the German Requiem. In 1857, he wrote to Joachim, I have no judgment about this piece anymore, nor any control over it. What finally emerged from the doubt and difficulty was a big piano concerto in D minor, Brahms s first major orchestral work. (The two serenades, which date from the same time, are sketches in comparison.) The Hanover premiere, on January 22, 1859, with the composer at the piano, was well received, but the performance in Leipzig a few days later was a disaster. Brahms took it in stride: I think it s the best thing that could happen to one it forces you to collect your thoughts, and it raises your courage. After all, I m still trying and groping. The concerto, however, was a mature and fully finished work even then, and although Brahms talked about reworking its structure, in the end he only touched up some details. It is a powerful and dramatic score, and it bears the imprint of Brahms s grief over Robert Schumann s breakdown and death, as well as the conflict and the passion of his growing relationship with Clara. Brahms begins with a menacing timpani roll and a fierce unison theme. There is not only drama in this opening, but also ambiguity, for over the first low D, the strings suggest not D minor, but B-flat major. It will take several pages before Brahms (already a master of long-range planning) unequivocally establishes D minor as the concerto s presiding tonality. He marks each of the crucial moments in the sonata-form design with something unexpected, so that we not only take notice, but also stop and think. For example, the soloist does not begin with the powerful first theme, but instead enters alone, commanding our attention with quiet and eloquent new music. (It is, in fact, not new, but a transformation of the immediately preceding orchestral music.) And when the pianist arrives at F major the movement s primary harmonic destination Brahms introduces a majestic, very expansive, truly new theme that he has been saving just for the occasion. (Joachim, who once suggested that Brahms compose a theme that was appropriately magnificent... commensurately elevated and beautiful at this point, must have been particularly pleased.) The biggest surprise comes at the most dramatic moment in any sonata-form movement, the start of the recapitulation, when the opening music and the main key are reunited. Here Brahms disrupts our expectations by following the fierce timpani roll on D with the piano entering emphatically in E major, as if the soloist s hands simply landed on the wrong keys. Although this large movement was often shaped by the rhetoric and demeanor of Beethoven s Ninth Symphony, each masterstroke here is entirely Brahms s own. The glorious, rapt Adagio has been interpreted as either a homage to Robert or an ode to Clara, but in some sense, it is both, with music being every bit as complicated as life. The piano line, by turns meditative, rhapsodic, impassioned, and even aggressive, never resorts to sheer display. (As American pianist William Mason commented after watching Brahms perform, It was the playing of a composer, not that of a virtuoso. ) The brief cadenza is all the more captivating for being soft and slow. Joachim enjoyed the pithy, bold spirit of the first theme of the finale and admired the subsequent intimate and soft B-flat major passage. The entire rondo is carried by the immense energy of its main theme, although near the end, Brahms makes room for more than one cadenza, followed by what Joachim called the solemn reawakening toward a majestic close. 3

4 Dmitri Born September 25, 1906; St. Petersburg, Russia Died August 9, 1975; Moscow, Russia Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 Dmitri first came to the United States in March Before a crowd of 30,000 people in New York s Madison Square Garden, he sat at a piano and played the scherzo from his Fifth Symphony. He arrived here as an official participant in the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, and he came, against his better judgment, because Stalin had telephoned him and asked him to come. It is a disturbing and symbolic image: this great man, so shy and unassuming behind his thick glasses, being trotted out to perform his best-known symphonic music on a piano in a sports arena. This was but one of many battles fought in his war between the public platform and his private thoughts. A photograph taken at the time shows, his eyes avoiding the camera, standing uneasily between Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller. s Fifth Symphony is perhaps the best-known work of art born from the marriage of politics and music. In 1949, when the Soviet composer came to America, the circumstances of its creation were as famous as the music itself. The facts are few, but telling. On January 28, 1936, while was working on his Fourth Symphony, Pravda denounced his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in an article called Muddle Instead of Music. Although the opera had been triumphantly received in both Moscow and Leningrad during the previous two years and in more than 175 performances it was suddenly and decisively attacked as fidgety, screaming, neurotic, coarse, primitive, and vulgar. Although himself was not the recipient of such well-chosen adjectives, there was no question of where he now stood in the eyes of Soviet authorities. He went ahead and finished his Fourth Symphony a vast, exploratory, tragic work but when it came time to unveil it in public, he had second thoughts and withdrew the score. (It waited twenty-five years to be performed.) Then, after a long silence, came his official response, written in just three months. now issued the creative reply of a Soviet artist to justified criticism, the astonishing phrase that is forever linked with the work s official title, Symphony no. 5. Sorting fact from fiction is no mere pastime in discussing Soviet music. On such distinctions hangs our understanding of important musical impulses. Many a listener, as well as political historian, has pondered the justification for the Soviet criticism and the motivation for the reply. For the record, we can consider the composer s own words, written at the time, although they are less than enlightening: The theme of my Fifth Symphony is the making of a man. I saw man with all his experiences in the center of the composition, which is lyrical in form from beginning to end. In the finale, the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements are resolved in optimism and joy of living. There is, of course, some incontrovertible evidence, like the wild success of the Fifth Symphony when it was introduced on November 21, 1937, in Leningrad COMPOSED 1937 FIRST PERFORMANCE November 21, 1937; Leningrad, Russia 4 INSTRUMENTATION two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and E-flat clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, bells, xylophone, celesta, piano, two harps, strings APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 46 minutes

5 under the baton of Yevgeny Mravinsky, and the subsequent official embrace of, speedily returned to favor. In the end, the music must speak for itself. In place of the screaming, primitive music that got him into trouble, now gives us clarity and brilliance. Despite intermittent tensions, we have a happy ending. Like Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler before him, has written a The composer with a portrait of Beethoven behind him. had a strong sense of identification social, historical, and creative with the great German symphonist. fifth symphony that sets out to triumph over adversity, with the major key supplanting the minor in the final movement. The power of this music is undeniable, although not everyone was satisfied that its deeper content was really politically correct; after hearing s new symphony for the first time, the great novelist Boris Pasternak wrote, He went and said everything, and no one did anything to him for it. Clarity of form and texture is the hallmark of the large and not uncomplicated first movement. From the jagged, Grosse Fuge like opening theme to the climatic, grotesque march over a relentless snare-drum rhythm, takes pains not to lose us in intricate lines of counterpoint or disorienting harmonies. For every page of the score that calls on the full resources of the orchestra, there are countless others on which few notes are written. The second theme, for example, is a serene, soaring violin melody of wide leaps we are never quite certain where it will land next over simple chords that slowly change colors as they repeat their tum ta-ta pattern. The Allegretto that follows (a traditional scherzo and trio form) is as merry and good-natured as any music that came from s pen. If this were the only music of his that we knew, we might not be so quick to read a note of irony into the solo violin s teasing melody in the trio. But this is music in a singularly untroubled vein, and that is precisely what the Madison Square Garden crowd was meant to hear. claimed he wrote the Largo at white heat in three days information that is hard to digest once one hears this calm and controlled music, moving slowly over vast, wideopen spaces. The lucid, thin textures occasionally turn spartan a solo oboe melody against a single sustained violin note, a flute duet accompanied by a quiet harp but every phrase carries meaning, and we hang on each note. If darkness blankets the eloquent Largo, the finale erupts with power and brilliance. A triumphant conclusion was mandatory particularly after the troubled thoughts of the preceding slow movement. When the D minor struggles finally shift into an affirmative D major blast, it is only our hindsight our knowledge of the undeniable sorrow and despair of s last works that suggests this happy ending is somehow forced. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Chicago Symphony Orchestra 5