SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT David Danzmayr, conductor December 1 and 2, 2017 GRAŻYNA BACEWICZ Overture FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11 Allegro maestoso Romanze: Larghetto Rondo: Vivace George Li, piano INTERMISSION ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Op. 88 Allegro con brio Adagio Allegretto grazioso Allegro ma non troppo
Overture GRAŻYNA BACEWICZ Born February 5, 1909, Lódź Died January 17, 1969, Warsaw Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz studied violin, piano and composition at the Warsaw Conservatory, then went on to Paris, where she studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and violin with Carl Flesch. Bacewicz developed into an outstanding violinist: she gave concerts throughout Europe, was a prize-winner at the 1935 Wieniawski Competition and served for three years in the 1930s as concertmaster of the Polish Radio Orchestra. She spent the war years in Warsaw, though she had to flee the city after the uprising in the summer of 1944. In 1954 Bacewicz was so seriously injured in an automobile accident that she had to give up performing. She devoted the rest of her career to composing and to teaching in Warsaw. She died in that city just a few weeks before her sixtieth birthday. As a composer Bacewicz was extremely prolific. She wrote seven violin concertos, two cello concertos, as well as concertos for piano and for viola, plus four symphonies, seven string quartets, five violin sonatas and a vast amount of chamber music, piano music (Bacewicz was also a superb pianist), vocal music and two ballets. She would sometimes write in unusual forms: among her works are a quartet for four cellos, a quartet for four violins, several unaccompanied violin sonatas and a trio for oboe, harp and percussion. As might be expected of a student of Boulanger, Bacewicz wrote with clarity of texture and form, and she has inevitably been classified as a neoclassical composer, though she disliked that term. After the cultural thaw of 1956 brought more freedom to Polish music life, Bacewicz experimented with serial music and avant garde techniques, but unlike Lutosławski, Górecki, and Penderecki she did not evolve far from her pre-war idiom. Her music is only now, 50 years after her death, being discovered in this country. Bacewicz wrote the present overture while living in Warsaw during the war; its original title Overture 1943 is an indication of its date rather than the suggestion that it is in any way a reflection of the war. The compact overture (only six minutes long) is in a curious form. It gets off to a blistering start, marked Allegro, that races along via some busy perpetual-motion writing for strings, soon punctuated by bold declarations from the brass. The tempo slows for the second theme-group, which arrives as an interlude, a moment of calm after the breathless rush of the
beginning. This Andante is introduced by the woodwinds, and Bacewicz achieves some nice instrumental color here, with unusual combinations of instruments and the delicate sound of bells. With these two sharply-contrasted themes, we seem set for a sonata-form movement, but the music plunges back into the energy of the opening, and the second theme vanishes, never to return. Instead, Bacewicz steadily builds the non-stop energy of the opening Allegro into a rush to the powerful concluding chord. Written during the German occupation, Overture 1943 had to wait until after Poland s liberation for its premiere. It was first performed on September 1, 1945, at the Krakow Festival of Contemporary Music with Mieczyslaw Mierzejewski leading the Krakow Philharmonic. Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN Born February 22, 1810, Zelazowa Wola Died October 17, 1849, Paris Chopin s extraordinary musical gifts were evident early, and as a young man he wished to perform in public. Because the solo piano recital had not yet been invented, that meant playing as a soloist with an orchestra, and as a teenager Chopin began to compose short works for piano and orchestra for his own use. At 19, he was ready to try the most challenging of these forms, and he composed his Piano Concerto in F minor in 1829-30. (Though the first to be composed, this would be published later as his Piano Concerto No. 2). Chopin was so pleased with this success that he immediately began another. Composed between April and August 1830, the Piano Concerto in E minor was published as his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1833. Chopin was the soloist at the premiere in Warsaw on October 11, 1830, and 23 days later he left Warsaw (and Poland), never to return. He played the Concerto in E minor in Munich and several times in his first years in Paris after taking up residence there. And then he never played either concerto again. Chopin was uncomfortable with the role of the virtuoso who played in front of huge audiences, a role being created quite successfully at this time by his friend Franz Liszt. Despite his phenomenal talent, Chopin chose to make his living as a teacher and a composer, and he performed on those few occasion when he did only in private homes. But there was a further reason for Chopin s lack of interest in the piano concerto. That form involved certain musical
elements that he found uncomfortable: sonata form and virtuosity for its own sake. His two concertos, products of his extreme youth, offer attractive music and have become very popular, but they represent a musical direction Chopin chose not to pursue. The Concerto in E minor is in conventional concerto form (a sonata-form first movement, a lyric slow movement and a brilliant rondo-finale), full of wonderful melodies and tremendous writing for the piano. Yet Chopin carefully avoids the contrasts that lie at the heart of the concerto (and sonata form): contrasts between soloist and orchestra, between themes within movements and between different tonalities. In the piano concerto Mozart had found a nearly ideal form for his best music, one that allowed him to fuse his own piano-playing with the musical argument at the heart of sonata form and to create a form that allowed a rich interplay of soloist and orchestra, of theme and of tonality. However much he may have admired Mozart, the young Chopin was not interested in writing that kind of concerto. In both his concertos, the musical interest is in the piano, while the orchestra functions as discrete accompanist, useful to introduce themes and to make an occasional grand sound, but subordinate musically. (Significantly, Chopin made and performed an arrangement of this concerto for solo piano, eliminating the orchestra altogether). Chopin s First Piano Concerto has an imposing beginning. He uses a large orchestra, one that includes four horns and a trombone (a relative newcomer to the orchestra), and we feel this heft at the very beginning, which Chopin marks risoluto. The orchestra more specifically, the first violin section lays out all three main themes before the pianist makes his dramatic entrance, but thereafter the pianist dominates the musical enterprise. Chopin may avoid the notion of conflict basic to sonata-form structures, but this does not mean that the music is without variety. There is plenty of fire (passages are marked con forza, appassionato, con fuoco and agitato), and these alternate with moments marked espressivo, dolce, legatissimo and tranquillo. It is an indication of Chopin s lack of interest in purely virtuoso writing that there is no cadenza in this concerto: the piano writing can be brilliant and quite difficult, but it stands at the service of the music rather than being an end in itself. Chopin marks the slow movement Romanze, a term without precise formal meaning. Instead, it simply suggests music of an expressive character. In a letter to a friend Chopin described this music in a way that makes this abundantly clear: I have not tried to display power in this movement; it is a quiet and melancholy romance. Its effect is meant to be like that of
gently gazing upon a place that awakens a thousand sweet memories, like a reverie in a beautiful moonlit night in spring. That is also why the accompaniment is to be played with mutes. This leads without pause into the final movement, a rondo marked Vivace. Mutes come off here for the orchestra s abrupt beginning, and the piano quickly makes its entrance with the jaunty rondo tune. Chopin casts this movement in the form of a krakowiak, an old Polish dance that came as its name suggests from the region of Krakow. The original dance was in duple time and based on syncopated rhythms; here Chopin transforms a native dance into an animated and very pleasing conclusion to his concerto. Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Op. 88 ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK Born September 8, 1841. Muhlhausen, Bohemia Died May 1, 1904, Prague The summer of 1889 was an unusually happy and productive time for Dvořák. At age 48, he found himself a successful composer with a large and devoted family. Earlier that year, his opera The Jacobin had been premiered, and now he took his family to their summer retreat at Vysoká in the countryside south of Prague. There, amid the rolling fields and forests of his homeland, Dvořák could escape the pressures of the concert season, enjoy the company of his wife and children, and indulge one of his favorite pastimes raising pigeons. Dvořák also composed a great deal that summer. He completed his Piano Quartet in E-flat Major on August 10, writing to a friend that melodies pour out of me and lamenting If only one could write them down straight away! But there I must go slowly, only keep pace with my hand, and may God give the rest. A few weeks later, on August 25, he made the first sketches for a new symphony, and once again the melodies poured out of him: he began the actual composition on September 6, and on the 13 th the first movement was done. The second took three days, the third one day, and the entire symphony had been sketched by September 23. The orchestration was completed on November 8, and Dvořák himself led the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in Prague on February 2, 1890. From the time Dvořák had sat down before a sheet of blank paper to the completion of the full score, only 75 days had passed. From the moment of the premiere, audiences have loved this symphony. (This includes one very unusual audience: Dvořák conducted this symphony before 30,000 spectators on an
all-czech program at the World s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893!) Surprisingly, the Eighth Symphony has come in for a tough time from certain critics, who find much to complain about. One finds the music plain and claims to hear signs of haste in its composition, another criticizes the music s harmonic sequences, while yet another calls the finale a not altogether satisfactory design. All seem baffled by the structure of the movements. Listening to these charges, one might conclude that Dvořák s Eighth Symphony is a disaster. Actually, this is one of the loveliest pieces of music ever written. It is quite true that Dvořák went his own way in writing this symphony rather than attempting to compose a correct symphony, and that may be what bothered those critics. Dvořák s biographer Otakar Šourek noted that the composer himself felt that in this music he was trying to write a work different from his other symphonies, with individual thoughts worked out in a new way. One can love the Eighth Symphony without knowing any of this, but there is a fierce pleasure in watching Dvořák go his own way. We feel this from the first instant. Symphony in G Major, says the title page, but the beginning is firmly in the wrong key of G minor, and this will be only the first of many harmonic surprises. It is also a gorgeous beginning, with the cellos singing their long wistful melody. But another surprise: this theme will have little to do with the actual progress of the first movement. We soon arrive at what appears to be the true first subject, a flute theme of an almost pastoral innocence (commentators appear unable to resist describing this theme as birdlike ), and suddenly we have slipped into G Major. There follows a wealth of themes someone counted six separate ideas in the opening minutes of this symphony. Dvořák develops these across the span of the opening movement, and the cellos somber opening melody returns at key moments: quietly to begin the development and then blazed out triumphantly by the trumpets at the stirring climax. The two middle movements are just as free. The Adagio is apparently in C minor, but it begins in E-flat Major with dark and halting string phrases; the middle section flows easily on a relaxed woodwind tune in C Major in which some have heard the sound of cimbalom and a village band. A violin solo leads to a surprisingly violent climax before the movement falls away to its quiet close. The Allegretto grazioso opens with a soaring waltz in G minor that dances nimbly along its 3/8 meter; the charming center section also dances in 3/8 time, but its dotted rhythms produce a distinctive lilt here. The movement concludes with some nice surprises: a
blistering coda (Molto vivace) whips along a variant of the lilting center section tune, but Dvořák has now transformed its triple meter into a propulsive 2/4. The movement rushes on chattering woodwinds right up to its close, where it concludes suddenly with a hushed string chord. The finale is a variation movement sort of. It opens with a stinging trumpet fanfare, but this fanfare was an afterthought on Dvořák s part, added after the rest of the movement was complete. Cellos announce the noble central theme (itself derived from the flute theme of the first movement), and a series of variations follow, including a spirited episode for solo flute. But suddenly the variations vanish: Dvořák throws in an exotic Turkish march full of rhythmic energy, a completely separate episode that rises to a great climax based on the ringing trumpet fanfare from the opening. Gradually things calm down, and the variations resume as if this turbulent storm had never blown through. Near the end comes some lovely writing for strings, and a raucous, joyous coda itself one final variation of the main theme propels this symphony to a rousing close. Are the critics charges about this symphony true? For the most part, probably yes. Do they matter? No. In this music, Dvořák followed his own instincts with individual thoughts worked out in a new way and audiences find the Eighth Symphony as lovely and exciting today as they did when it was premiered over a century ago. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger WHY THIS PROGRAM? by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist The Bacewicz Overture is being played for the first time at these concerts. Tamas Vasary introduced the Chopin First Piano Concerto to San Diego Symphony audiences during the 1968-69 season. Zoltan Rozsnyai conducted. It has been repeated at these concerts 11 times, most recently when Garrick Ohlsson played it here under Jahja Ling's baton, during the 2009-10 season. The justifiably popular, melodic and folksy G Major Symphony by Dvořák was introduced to these concerts when Donald Johanos led it during the 1971-72 season. It has been given here seven times since then, most recently when Jahja Ling conducted it during the 2013-14 season.