SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A Jacobs Masterworks Concert Charles Dutoit, conductor. May 19, 20 and 21, 2017

Transcription

1 SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A Jacobs Masterworks Concert Charles Dutoit, conductor May 19, 20 and 21, 2017 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43 W.A. MOZART Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, K.216: Strassburg Allegro Adagio Rondeau: Allegro Simone Porter, violin INTERMISSION IGOR STRAVINSKY Petrushka (Original version, 1911) The Shrove-Tide Fair Petrushka s Cell The Moor s Cell The Shrove-Tide Fair (Towards Evening) MAURICE RAVEL La valse, poème chorégraphique

2 Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna Beethoven had many reasons to accept, in 1800, a commission for a ballet score based on the Prometheus myth: he had long wanted to write a work for the stage, the ballet would be created by the distinguished ballet-master Salvatore Vigano, and frequent performances would mean increased income for the composer. Doubtless the Prometheus story itself, with its tale of a hero bringing enlightenment to mankind, appealed to the young composer. He began work on the score during the second half of 1800, shortly after the premiere of the First Symphony and at the same time he was writing the Spring Sonata. The Creatures of Prometheus had its first performance at the Burgtheater on March 28, 1801, and despite some critical carping about the suitability of Beethoven s music for dancing the ballet had a reasonable success: it was performed over 20 times during the next two seasons. Beethoven published the overture in 1804, and it quickly became one of his most frequently performed works, but the score to the rest of the ballet, which consists of 16 separate numbers, was not published until long after his death. The Prometheus Overture is extremely concise (it lasts barely five minutes) and powerful; it is easy to understand why this music was performed so frequently. Massive chords open the slow introduction, which leads without pause into the Allegro molto con brio. As that marking suggests, this goes at a blistering pace, introduced quietly by a moto perpetuo theme in the first violins. Woodwinds in pairs announce the bubbling second subject, by turns staccato and syncopated. Part of the reason for the conciseness of this overture is the fact that it has no development section: Beethoven simply introduces his ideas, recapitulates them, and then the Prometheus Overture hurtles to its close. Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, K.216: Strassburg WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg Died December 5, 1791, Vienna Mozart s 27 piano concertos span his career, but he wrote only five violin concertos, and all of these come from the year 1775, when he was 19. The absence of more concertos for violin is surprising, given the fact that Mozart was admired nearly as much for his violin playing as his piano playing. He completed the Third Violin Concerto on September 12, 1775, a few months after the premiere of his music-drama Il re pastore. One of the most striking features of this very

3 agreeable concerto is its wealth of themes: Mozart seems to be continually slipping in new ideas, and this music offers an almost luxurious abundance of singable tunes. The emphasis on lyricism is apparent from the first instant, for the Allegro opens with a theme taken directly from the shepherd-king Aminta s aria Aer tranquillo from the first act of Il re pastore. The opening words of this aria might characterize the spirit of the entire concerto: Tranquil air and serene days Fresh springs and green fields The orchestra presents the expected second theme as part of its exposition, but when the violin enters, it does so with entirely new material and then proceeds to introduce two further theme-groups. The movement features athletic writing for the solo violin, rapid exchanges between soloist and orchestra and some of Mozart s sunniest writing. The Adagio stands in complete contrast to the first movement. Where before everything had been energy and extroverted lyricism, now Mozart mutes the strings (both solo violin and orchestral strings) and spins long melodic lines of an almost baroque elegance. Beneath the solo violin, orchestral strings offer a nearly non-stop murmur of quiet triplets. The finale returns to the manner of the first movement: a rondo, it too brings a wealth of themes. The movement starts normally enough violin and orchestra lay out the beginning of what appears to be a standard rondo but along the way Mozart breaks in with two completely foreign interludes. The first, marked Andante, gives the violin a tightly-trilled and dotted melody over pizzicato accompaniment. This leads directly to the second episode, marked Allegretto; here the solo violin accompanies its own melody with the drone of its open D-string. Both these episodes are over quickly, and the rondo resumes as if nothing had happened. The very ending brings a masterstroke: the solo violin rejoins the orchestral tutti, and the movement seems to vanish in mid-air on a fragment of the opening rondo theme. Petrushka (Original version, 1911) IGOR STRAVINSKY Born June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum Died April 6, 1971, New York City Petrushka, Stravinsky s ballet about three puppets at a Russian Shrovetide carnival, actually began life as a sort of piano concerto. In the summer of 1910, shortly after the successful premiere of The Firebird, Stravinsky started work on a ballet about a pagan ritual sacrifice in ancient Russia. But he set the manuscript to The Rite of Spring aside when he was consumed by a new idea: I had in my mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life,

4 exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggi. The orchestra in turn 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. When impresario Serge Diaghilev visited Stravinsky that summer in Switzerland to see how the pagan-sacrifice ballet was progressing, he was at first horrified to learn that Stravinsky was doing nothing with it. But when Stravinsky played some of his new music, Diaghilev was charmed and saw possibilities for a ballet. With Alexander Benois, they created a story-line around the Russian puppet theater, specifically the tale of Petrushka, the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries. Stravinsky composed the score to what was now a ballet between August 1910 and May 1911, and Petrushka was first performed in Paris on June 13, 1911, with Nijinsky in the title role. From the moment of that premiere, Petrushka has remained one of Stravinsky s most popular scores, and the source of its success is no mystery: Petrushka combines an appealing tale of three puppets, authentic Russian folktunes and street songs, and brilliant writing for orchestra. The music is remarkable for Stravinsky s sudden development beyond the Rimsky-inspired Firebird, particularly in matters of rhythm and orchestral sound. One of those most impressed by Petrushka was Claude Debussy, who spoke with wonder of this music s sonorous magic. A brief summary of the music and action, which divides into four tableaux separated by drum rolls: First Tableau: The Shrove-Tide Fair To swirling music, the curtain comes up to reveal a carnival scene in 1830 St. Petersburg. The crowd mills about, full of organ grinders, dancers and drunkards. An aged Magician appears and like a snake charmer spins a spell with a flute solo. He brings up the curtain in his small booth to reveal three puppets: Petrushka, the Moor, and the Ballerina. At a delicate touch of his wand, all three spring to life and dance before the astonished crowd to the powerful Russian Dance. A drum roll leads to the Second Tableau: Petrushka s Cell This opens with the Petrushka being kicked into his room and locked up. The pathetic puppet tries desperately to escape and despairs when he cannot. Stravinsky depicts his anguish with two clarinets, one in C Major and the other in F-sharp Major: their bi-tonal clash has become famous as the Petrushka sound. The trapped puppet rails furiously but is distracted by the appearance of the Ballerina, who enters to a tinkly little tune. Petrushka is drawn to her, but she scorns him and leaves. Third Tableau: The Moor s Cell Brutal chords take us into the Moor s opulent room. The Ballerina enters and dances for the Moor to the accompaniment of cornet and snare drum. He is charmed, and the two waltz together. Suddenly Petrushka enters (his coming is heralded by

5 variations on his pathetic clarinet tune), and he and the Moor fight over the Ballerina. At the end, the Moor chases him out. Fourth Tableau: The Shrove-Tide Fair (Towards Evening) At the scene of the opening tableau, a festive crowd swirls past. There are a number of ballet set-pieces here: the Dance of the Nurse-Maids, The Peasant and the Bear (depicted respectively by squealing clarinet and stumbling tuba), Dance of the Gypsy Women, Dance of the Coachmen and Grooms (who stamp powerfully) and Masqueraders. At the very end, poor Petrushka rushes into the square, pursued by the Moor, who kills him with a slash of his scimitar. As a horrified crowd gathers, the Magician appears and reassures all that it is make-believe by holding up Petrushka s body to show it dripping sawdust. As he drags the slashed body away, the ghost of Petrushka appears above the rooftops, railing defiantly at the terrified Magician, who flees. Petrushka s defiance is depicted musically by the triplet figure associated with him throughout. The strings quiet pizzicato strokes, taken from both the C Major and F-sharp Major scale, bring the ballet to an end that is dramatically and harmonically ambiguous. A NOTE ON THE TEXT: Stravinsky published his original version the year after the premiere, but in 1947 he returned to the score and revised it. These revisions had several purposes: to reduce the size of the orchestra, to simplify some of the metric complexities and to give greater importance to the piano, which had been the music s original inspiration but had faded from view in the ballet version. Each version has its proponents, some preferring the greater clarity of the revision, others the opulence of the original. At these concerts, Maestro Dutoit will perform Stravinsky s original 1911 score. La valse, poème chorégraphique MAURICE RAVEL Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses-Pyrennes Died December 28, 1937, Paris Though Ravel, like many French composers, was profoundly wary of German music, there was one German form for which he felt undiluted affection: the waltz. As a young piano student in Paris, Ravel fell under the spell of Schubert s waltzes for piano, and this led him in 1911 to compose his own Valses nobles et sentimentales, a set of charming waltzes modeled on the Schubert dances he loved so much. Somewhat earlier in 1906 Ravel had planned a great waltz for orchestra. His working title for this orchestral waltz was Wien (Vienna), but the piece was delayed and Ravel did not return to it until the fall of This was the year after the conclusion of World War I (Ravel had served as an ambulance driver in the French army during

6 the war), and the French vision of the Germanic world was quite different now than it had been when Ravel originally conceived the piece. Nevertheless, he still felt the appeal of the project, and by December he was madly at work. To a friend he wrote: I m working again on Wien. It s going great guns. I was able to take off at last, and in high gear. The orchestration was completed the following March, and the first performance took place in Paris on December 12, By this time, perhaps wary of wartime associations, Ravel had renamed the piece La valse. If La valse is one of Ravel s most opulent and exciting scores, it is also one of his most troubling. Certainly the original conception was clear enough, and the composer left an exact description of what he was getting at: Whirling clouds give glimpses, through rifts, of couples waltzing. The clouds scatter little by little. One sees an immense hall peopled with a twirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of chandeliers bursts forth fortissimo. An Imperial Court, about The music gives us this scene exactly: out of the murky, misty beginning we hear bits of waltz rhythms; gradually these come together and plunge into an animated waltz in D Major. La valse offers dazzling writing for orchestra. Some of this is the result of the music s rhythmic energy, some the result of Ravel s keen ear for instrumental color; the waltzes can glide amidst the most delicate writing for solo strings, then suddenly rocket ahead on important solo parts for such unlikely instruments as trumpet and tuba. If La valse concluded with all this elegant vitality, our sense of the music might be clear, but instead it drives to an ending full of frenzied violence; we come away not so much exhilarated as shaken. Ravel made a telling comment about this conclusion: I had intended this work to be a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, with which was associated in my imagination an impression of a fantastic and fatal sort of dervish s dance. Is this music a celebration of the waltz or is it an exploration of the darker spirit behind the culture that created it? Many have opted for the latter explanation, hearing in La valse not a Rosenkavalier-like evocation of a more graceful era, but the snarling menace behind that elegance. Ravel himself was evasive about the ending. He was aware of the implications of the violent close, but in a letter to a friend he framed them quite differently: Some people have seen in this piece the expression of a tragic affair; some have said that it represented the end of the Second Empire, others that it was postwar Vienna. They are wrong. Certainly, La valse is tragic, but in the Greek sense: it is a fatal spinning around, the expression of vertigo and the voluptuousness of the dance to the point of paroxysm. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger

7 PERFORMANCE HISTORY by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist The spritely (an adjective not often applied to Beethoven's works) curtain-raiser to the ballet The Creatures of Prometheus was introduced to San Diego Symphony audiences in the season under the baton of Arthur Bennett Lipkin. It was repeated through several seasons until the performance under David Atherton in the season, but was not heard again until its most recent performance under Jahja Ling in the season. Mozart s Third Violin Concerto was first played in San Diego by Erick Friedman, under Peter Erös, during the season. Other performances followed by Andres Cardenes, Jaime Laredo, Pinchas Zukerman and, last, in the season by Rachel Barton, under Yoav Talmi. Stravinsky's original 1911 score to the ballet Petroushka was first played by the SDSO under Zoltán Rozsnyai in the season. The 1947 orchestral revision of the score by Stravinsky was first heard here in the season when Earl Bernard Murray conducted, and given again four times through the season when Jahja Ling conducted. The current performances are the first return here of the original 1911 score since Rozsnyai s concerts. Always an audience favorite, Ravel's La valse has been featured on eight San Diego Symphony programs since Earl Bernard Murray introduced it to these audiences during the season. Most recently, it has been heard under Jahja Ling's direction in the season.