I wonder if you d like to do a little ballet with me, a polka perhaps? For whom? For some elephants.

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1 Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Programme Notes Online Classic FM Series White Nights Thursday 22 & Friday 23 June pm IGOR STRAVINSKY ( ) Circus Polka I wonder if you d like to do a little ballet with me, a polka perhaps? For whom? For some elephants. Igor Stravinsky had some interesting phone-calls from the choreographer George Balanchine over the years, but this one in January 1942 took the biscuit. Still, Stravinsky made it his business to be unflappable. He had only one question: How old? Very young. All right. If they are very young elephants, I will do it. And the deal was done. Balanchine hadn t been completely frank. These weren t just some elephants ; these were the 50-strong corps of dancing elephants belonging to the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus. And they weren t particularly young either; Old Modoc, the première ballerina was a 42-year-old fullgrown Asian cow elephant. No matter; Stravinsky promptly negotiated an off-the-scale fee and within the month had completed this brilliantly deadpan Polka. Beginning with an almighty elephantine trumpet, it s not exactly fast or rhythmically complex there s a limit to just how quickly

2 even the most nimble pachyderms can hoof it. But it s vintage Stravinsky, full of sly jokes and cheeky twists, including a final, blaringly off-key reference to Schubert s dainty Marche Militaire. By all accounts, this was lost on the elephants who, according to their trainer, preferred waltz tunes and soft, dreamy music (he was initially worried that Stravinsky s abrasive harmonies might trigger a stampede). But Balanchine did the choreography, his wife the ballerina Vera Zorina co-starred, and when the show opened at Madison Square Garden, New York on 9 April 1942, the New York Times reported that Modoc the Elephant danced with amazing grace, and in time to the tune, closing in perfect cadence with the crashing finale. The show ran for 425 performances making this probably Stravinsky and Balanchine s single most successful ballet. Richard Bratby 2017 PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY ( ) Violin Concerto in D, Op.35 Allegro moderato / Moderately fast Canzonetta: andante / Canzonetta: at a walking pace Finale: allegro vivacissimo / Finale: fast and very lively To put the aftermath of his catastrophic marriage in 1877 behind him, Tchaikovsky spent several months travelling in Western Europe. On the way home from Italy he stayed for a month in Clarens, Switzerland, where he was joined by his brother Modest and Yosif Kotek, a young violinist who had attended his theory classes at the Moscow Conservatoire, and to whom he felt strongly attracted. Among the music Kotek had with him, and which he and Tchaikovsky played through together, was Symphonie espagnole, for violin and orchestra, by the French composer Edouard Lalo. Tchaikovsky was immediately taken with it and this

3 seems to have been the stimulus for writing a concerto of his own, which he sketched in just over two weeks. Tchaikovsky offered both the dedication and the first performance to the great violinist and teacher Leopold Auer, who turned it down, on the grounds that the solo part was unplayable (though he later changed his mind). Instead, another great violinist of the day, Adolf Brodsky, gave the premiere in Vienna, in December It provoked a sharply divided reaction from the audience, and from the leading Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick one of the most scathing press notices Tchaikovsky ever received: For a while it moves along well enough, musical and not lacking spirit, but soon roughness gets the upper hand and remains in charge until the end of the movement. It is no longer a question of the violin being played, but of it being yanked about and torn to tatters. In the finale he could hear only the brutish, grim jollity of a Russian church festival. In our mind's eye we see nothing but common, ravaged faces, hear rough oaths and smell cheap liquor. He finally condemned the concerto as music which audibly stinks. To the end of his life Tchaikovsky was able to recite by heart every word of Hanslick s review. First movement The first movement begins with an introduction which is not heard again, but which contains strong hints of the main theme which the solo violin plays in full on its first entry. This then moves seamlessly into the buoyant and springy second theme, and it is the continuity, rather than contrast between the two themes which helps to establish the music s genial character. Second movement Tchaikovsky wrote the introspective Canzonetta as a substitute for the original slow movement, about which he, Modest and Kotek all had reservations. His patroness Nadezhda von Meck found the replacement...so full of poetic dreaming, secret desires, and deep sadness... The gentle woodwind passage which opens the movement returns to close it, sinking deeper into a reverie, until the finale jolts us awake.

4 Third movement After a brief cadenza-like passage the soloist launches into the vigorous dance-like main theme. The second theme, with its drone bass, has a strong rustic flavour (Hanslick was right about that, at least), which takes on a more delicate quality when it is later played by solo winds. But it is the first theme s carefree earthiness which brings the concerto to its exhilarating close. Mike Wheeler 2017 IGOR STRAVINSKY Petrushka (1911) 34 First Tableau: The Shrovetide Fair Second Tableau: Petrushka s Room Third Tableau: The Moor s Room Fourth Tableau: The Shrovetide Fair (Towards Evening) But for the intervention of Sergei Diaghilev, Stravinsky s Petrushka one of the most successful works of its kind might never have become a ballet score at all. After completing The Firebird and seeing it through its first performance in Paris in 1910, Stravinsky settled in France for a while and instead of getting on with his next ballet for Diaghilev (which was to have been The Rite of Spring) he began a piece for piano and orchestra: In composing the music, he said, I had in mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios. The orchestra retaliates with menacing trumpet-blasts. The outcome is a terrific noise which reaches its climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous collapse of the poor puppet. Stravinsky had already selected the title for the piece Petrushka being the Russian equivalent of Pierrot, the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries when Diaghilev called on him in Lausanne to see how The Rite of Spring was

5 progressing. To his credit, on hearing the first two movements of the new piece, Petrushka s Cry and Russian Dance, Diaghilev immediately saw the ballet potential in them. The composer and the impresario agreed on the setting and the basis of the action: the Shrovetide Fair in St Petersburg with its crowds, its booths, the little traditional theatre, the character of the magician, with all his tricks; and the coming to the life of the dolls Petrushka, his rival, and the dancer and their love tragedy, which ends with Petrushka s death. Alexandre Benois, an expert on Russian puppet theatre, was called in to work out the details of the scenario and, in spite of being struck down by nicotine poisoning in the middle of his work on it, Stravinsky completed the score in May Petrushka was first performed by the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 13 June 1911 with choreography by Fokine, sets and costumes by Benois, and with Nijinski as Petrushka and Karsavina as the Ballerina. Pierre Monteux conducted an orchestra of proportions characteristic of those opulent times. In the postwar austerity of 1947 Stravinsky published a more economical version, reducing the instrumentation, simplifying and recolouring the scoring, and revising the barring and tempo indications in several instances. It is the more richly scored original version that is performed in these concerts. Melodically, Petrushka is not the most original of Stravinsky s works, since it draws heavily though, in these fairground circumstances, quite appropriately on traditional Russian sources. As far as colour, atmosphere and characterisation are concerned, however, nothing like it had been heard before. A simple but important and recurrent element in suggesting the bustle of the fair is the accordion motif (alternating fifths and thirds) which can be heard on clarinets and horns under the jubilant flute tune in the opening bars. Activity subsides from time to time for side-shows like the hurdy-gurdy man (clarinets), his persistent competitor with a musical box (celesta and harp) and,

6 after a loud drum roll, the sinister showman who brings his puppets to life with a few empty phrases on his flute. The frantically energetic music to which Petrushka, the Ballerina and the Moor are conjured to dance is derived from the second movement, Russian Dance, of the original piece for piano and orchestra. The scene in Petrushka s room, which follows after another drum roll, is derived from the first movement of the concert piece. Petrushka s cry is a bitterly dissonant arpeggio figure introduced by two clarinets. Its bitonal harmonies affect first the piano and then the whole orchestra as Petrushka s anger at his dependence on the Showman mounts. The entry of the Ballerina, signalled by an expressive little tune on flute and piano, promises some diversion but Petrushka s grotesque leaps do not so much impress as alarm her and she runs away to take refuge in the Moor s room which is where, after yet another drum roll, the next scene takes place. Not the most elegant of exotic dancers, as the clarinet and bass clarinet in lugubrious octaves unmistakably indicate, the Blackamoor is nevertheless more successful with the Ballerina than Petrushka was. After making her entry to the accompaniment of her own toy trumpet and drum, she performs two waltzes for him and the Blackamoor joins her in clumsy duple time. The tender scene is interrupted by Petrushka, his intrusive cry now on trombone and trumpets, and he is thrown out. A last drum roll leads into the final scene, which is devoted largely to the fun of the Shrove-Tide Fair. Nursemaids dance to Down the Petersky on oboe and then on horns; the crowd falls back as a performing bear takes the stage, a tuba clumsily imitating his peasant-owner s piping on high clarinets; gypsy girls amuse themselves with a rich merchant to an emphatically articulated tune on unison strings; heavy-footed coachmen brandishing trombones and trumpets are eventually joined by the

7 nursemaids; a party of masqueraders present a series of caricature dances. In the official concert version that is where the work ends. Today s performance, however, includes the four very short episodes that follow in the complete ballet score the violent Scuffle between the Moor and Petrushka, the Death of Petrushka with its pathetic woodwind utterances, Police and the Juggler, in which the showman demonstrates that the victim is no more than a sawdust doll, and the closing Apparition of Petrushka s Ghost on two muted trumpets. Gerald Larner 2017