Concert Program for October 7 and 8, 2006

Itzhak Perlman, violin and conductor

MOZART	Adagio in E major, K. 261 (1776)
(1756-1791)	Rondo in C major, K. 373 (1781) Itzhak Perlman, violin and conductor
SCHUBERT	Symphony No. 3 in D major, D. 200 (1815)
(1797-1828)	Adagio maestoso; Allegro con brio Allegretto Menuetto: Vivace Presto vivace
	INTERMISSION
TCHAIKOVSKY	Symphony No. 5 in E minor, op. 64 (1888)
(1840-1893)	Andante; Allegro con anima Andante cantabile con alcuna licenza; Moderato con anima Valse: Allegro moderato Finale: Andante maestoso; Allegro vivace

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Profiles 

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Classical Serenity, Romantic Drama
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

Music presents us with artistic tendencies of opposing character. It is sometimes rigorously cerebral--as we find in the intricate counterpoint of Bach, Mozart, and the great masters of Renaissance and Medieval polyphony--and sometimes almost purely sentimental. It can be tranquil or violent, contemplative or viscerally exciting. It is by turn classical or romantic in the broadest sense of those words, which themselves connote constellations of disparate attributes. The tension between these and other dichotomies, which music evinces as perhaps no other human activity can, is one reason why music seems so rich, why it seems to reflect or resonate something deep and essential about the complexities of our thoughts, our feelings, our lives, which also are pushed and pulled by polarities of experience and expression.

The compositions that comprise our program embody some of the diverse possibilities for musical experience offered by the great treasury that is the orchestral literature. They form a study in contrasts. The first half of our concert presents works that represent the Austrian Classical school of the late-18th and early-19th centuries, and more particularly the sense of elegance and emotional equanimity that attends much of the music of that school. After intermission, we have high symphonic drama in a work by a composer whose penchant for conveying unbridled emotion was one of the defining traits of 19th-century Romanticism.

Like most great composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a complex artist, capable of a wide range of expression in his music. In different works we find Mozart giving voice to humor, pathos, passion, and more. The dark and turbulent side of Mozart’s genius should not be underestimated, as it frequently is by listeners with only a glancing familiarity with his output. But this does not deny that many of this composer’s pieces are distinguished by a suave elegance, such as we find in the two short works for solo violin and orchestra that begin our concert.

Both pieces are connected with Antonio Brunetti, an Italian‑born violinist who held the post of concertmaster in the orchestra of Mozart’s native city, Salzburg. The letters of Mozart and his father contain a number of unflattering references to this performer’s character, and occasionally seem to question the depth of the violinist’s devotion to music. But Brunetti’s most egregious fault, at least in the eyes of posterity, was his failure to apprehend Mozart’s genius--in particular, his rejection of the slow movement to the composer’s Violin Concerto in A major, K. 219.

Mozart wrote that work in December 1775. Shortly thereafter, he presented the music to Brunetti, who, as we know from one of Leopold Mozart’s letters, found its second movement “too studied.” The composer, with what feelings of resentment or frustration we can only imagine, promptly fashioned a new piece to replace it. Musicologists have long since restored the original slow movement to its proper place in the A-major Concerto, and the one written as a replacement now leads an independent life as the Adagio in E major, K. 261, which opens our program.  

This is not the only work by Mozart we owe to Signor Brunetti. In the spring of 1781, Hieronymus Collorerdo, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, paid a visit to Vienna, bringing with him an entourage that included his best court musicians. Apparently eager to impress his Viennese counterparts, the Archbishop hosted a number of musical gatherings. These events kept Mozart busy. On April 8, 1781, he wrote to his father: “Today… we had a concert, where three of my compositions were performed--new ones of course; [among them was] a rondo for a concerto for Brunetti.”

The concerto rondo, to which Mozart referred in this letter, does not belong to any of his five extant violin concertos but is a stand-alone piece. Perhaps the composer conceived it as a movement for a new concerto he was planning to write but never completed. In any event, this Rondo in C major, K. 373, fits the form and style of a finale to a violin concerto while fulfilling Brunetti’s requirement for a simple and natural flow of melody. Its recurring principal theme is song‑like and in no way “studied,” whereas the intervening episodes avoid overly ornate figuration. Hearing the Adagio and Rondo together, one realizes how closely related are their characters, the salient quality of each being a relaxed, pleasing, song-like expression. Mozart created more brilliant and important compositions, and ones probably closer to his own ideals, in his violin concertos, especially the last two. But even when constrained by the limits of a lesser artist like Brunetti, he could find something worthwhile and beautiful to say.

Franz Schubert bears comparison with Mozart on several counts. Like his older colleague, Schubert developed his compositional skill early, producing an extraordinary quantity of music at a young age. Like Mozart also, Schubert would die at a tragically early age, making his musical legacy seem especially precious and poignant. Finally, Schubert also was a composer whose work encompasses a wide range of expression, from contentment to harrowing tragedy.

Schubert was still an adolescent when, in the summer of 1815, he composed his Symphony No. 3 in D major. The accomplished handling of symphonic form, the knowing use of the orchestra and, above all, the graceful flow of harmony and melodic line that runs through its pages might have been the envy of composers well beyond Schubert’s years. Yet for all this, the piece is the work of an impressionable, albeit extremely talented, youngster still searching for his own musical voice. In general, the Third Symphony looks back to the symphonic style of the late-18th century rather than forward to Schubert’s own maturity. There are, to be sure, occasional turns of melody or characteristic harmonies that foreshadow the “Unfinished” or “Great” C-major Symphonies of the composer’s last years. But at this early stage in his career it was enough for Schubert to write works whose virtues are concise, with balanced form and pleasing melodic development.

The slow introduction that prefaces the first movement is in itself a small masterpiece, with sudden shifts between major and minor harmonies creating a dramatic tension remarkable for a composer at 18. Solo woodwinds play a prominent role in the Allegro that follows. The two principal themes of this movement are presented by the clarinet and oboe respectively, and the winds offer important counterpoints to the statements of the strings throughout the central development episode.

In place of the customary slow movement, Schubert gives us a more moderately paced Allegretto that has much of the spirit of an earlier composer of the Austrian Classical School, Franz Joseph Haydn. Although Schubert calls his third movement a minuet, its boisterous character and strong off‑beat accents seem more like those of a scherzo. The finale is lively, its music leavened by unexpected turns of harmony and a general feeling of gaiety.

 The composition that provides the second half of our concert gives us music of entirely different purpose and demeanor. Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conceived his mature symphonies, at least in part, as enactments of his own psychic conflicts. Each of his last three works in this genre were written to express a highly subjective program, a drama born of his struggle for happiness, or at least some emotional equilibrium, in the face of difficult personal circumstances. But Tchaikovsky grew increasingly reticent about the details of these programs as the years went by. Although he described at length the conflict between tender longings and harsh reality embodied in his Fourth Symphony, by the time he composed his Sixth Symphony, he declared that the specific “meaning” of that work would remain his secret. With regard to his Symphony No. 5 in E minor, he revealed only a short scenario concerning its first movement.

Tchaikovsky wrote this symphony during the summer of 1888. Chronically melancholic, hypersensitive, and self‑critical, the composer also had wrestled for years with his homosexuality and loneliness. But at age 48 he was now more relaxed and confident than at any previous period of his life. His brief and disastrous marriage, in 1877, to a young conservatory student had forced him finally to accept that union with a woman and a conventional sort of domestic happiness would never be his; and though painful, this admission seems to have relieved the composer of a considerable burden, allowing him to immerse himself in his work. Moreover, he was now an artist of international stature, his music having been acclaimed both in his native Russia and abroad. He had recently taken up residence in a country house outside Moscow, where the bucolic surroundings buoyed his spirits. “I cannot tell you what a pleasure it has been to watch my flowers grow and see daily, even hourly, new blossoms coming out,” he wrote to his patroness, the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. “Meanwhile I have been working with good results, for half of the symphony is orchestrated.”

In view of all this, it is not surprising that while the Fifth Symphony addresses programmatically the same issues of destiny and the quest for happiness that informed the Fourth Symphony, its tone is entirely more optimistic than that of the earlier composition--or, for that matter, that of the despairing Sixth Symphony. Indeed, over the course of its four movements, the music conveys clearly a progression from crisis to triumph, a “plot” that has a venerable tradition in the symphonic literature. Tchaikovsky set forth the dramatic premise for the symphony in a brief note on the opening movement, written shortly before he began composing the work:

            Introduction: complete resignation before Fate or, which is the same thing, the unfathomable   workings of Providence. Allegro: (I) Murmurs, doubts, pleas, reproaches . . . (II) Shall I          throw myself in the embraces of faith?

Although this is certainly vague and incomplete, there is little need for further programmatic details. Indeed, Tchaikovsky warned against too literal a reading of the extra‑musical content of his works, of the impossibility of translating music precisely into words. It is doubtful that any additional intelligence would heighten the impact of the drama inherent in the score, a drama already quite evident in purely musical terms. Moreover, the Fifth Symphony stands easily on its compositional merits alone. Its themes are memorable, as we should expect from so inspired a melodist as Tchaikovsky. Equally important, the development of those themes is as satisfying, the handling of form as convincing, the counterpoint and orchestration as successful as in any of the composer’s works.

The first movement opens with a somber introduction whose tone is well suited to Tchaikovsky’s description of “complete resignation.” Its melody, announced by clarinets in their low register, is a “motto” theme, one that will recur in each of the symphony’s four movements. (Nearly all commentators refer to it as the “Fate” or “Providence” theme.) The main body of the movement begins with a sturdy march subject introduced also by the clarinets but quickly taken up by other instruments. Tchaikovsky counters this idea with several others of more genial character, the tension between them and the dynamic, martial first theme accounting for much of the movement’s drama.

The ensuing Andante cantabile unfolds under the spell of a handsome melody presented as a horn solo in its opening moments. Its mood of enchantment twice is broken, however, by the return of the motto figure, now more menacing in tone. The third movement offers waltz melodies that seem to belong to one of Tchaikovsky’s fairy‑tale ballets. Once again, near the close, the theme from the introduction is heard, but it seems tame and powerless in the ideally elegant world suggested by this music.

In the finale, Tchaikovsky comes to grips with the persistent motto theme. Here he transforms the melody that opened the symphony into a triumphal march, the furious outbursts midway through the movement only serving to make its final apotheosis more impressive. There is also a brief remembrance of the march subject from the first movement during the closing moments.

The metamorphosis over the course of the symphony of a single motif--in this case, the motto theme--from an expression of pathos to one of exultation has its original precedent in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Whether Tchaikovsky managed to make his finale as convincing as Beethoven’s has been widely debated, with some critics finding his victorious sentiments somewhat forced and hollow. It is a matter that listeners have repeated opportunity to judge for themselves, for the symphony’s perennial popularity has assured its place in the orchestral literature.

Program notes © 2006 by Paul Schiavo