Program Notes for The Glory of Russia
Program features |
Sergei Prokofiev Dmitri Shostakovich Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky |
Visions fugitives, Op. 22
by Sergei Prokofiev,
arr. Rudolf Barshai
The Russian title of these twenty intriguing miniatures is Mimolyotnosti, which literally translates as “things flying by.” Prokofiev took the word from Russian symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942), with whom he would later be on friendly terms in Paris, and who had written in one of his poems:
In every fugitive vision
I see whole worlds;
They change endlessly,
Flashing in playful rainbow colors.
Although they are early works, these “visions” already give ample evidence of Prokofiev’s peculiar double nature—the composer was trying to be an avant-gardist and a classicist at the same time, and was given both to grotesque humor and emotional introspection. In his early to mid-twenties, the St. Petersburg Conservatory graduate was raising eyebrows as the next enfant terrible of Russian music after Igor Stravinsky (who by this time was living in the West). A formidable pianist as well as a composer, he was heading for a major career in his native country. The 1917 revolution was going to change all that.
Striking harmonic experiments and unusual rhythmic games abound in these cryptic compositions, though formally most of them contain literal, almost textbook-like recapitulations. Many of the pieces are based on ostinatos (“stubbornly” recurring figures), yet they differ greatly in character and technical vocabulary. In his autobiography, Prokofiev claimed that the highly agitated and turbulent 19th movement was his response to the February Revolution in 1917, which ended the reign of the Czars. But in a way, the entire cycle proclaims a revolution of musical ideas and the arrival of a young iconoclast who was ready to turn the style of his elders completely upside down.
This arrangement was prepared by Anne-Marie McDermott and Richard Tognetti of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, combining the original piano solo with a string orchestra arrangement by Rudolf Barshai.
Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 35
by Dmitri Shostakovich
Like several great 20th-century composers—Béla Bartók, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Sergei Prokofiev among them—Shostakovich was an excellent concert pianist, as long as his health permitted him to perform. He wrote prolifically for his own instrument, producing two concertos, two sonatas, two large collections of solo pieces (the 24 Preludes, Op. 34, and the 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87), two piano trios, a piano quintet, and numerous smaller works.
The first concerto—Concerto for Piano with the Accompaniment of String Orchestra and Trumpet—shows a youthful Shostakovich, full of wit and energy but also displaying a rich lyrical vein. The early 1930s were happy times for the composer who was the darling of the Leningrad musical scene. His music was everywhere: in the concert hall, at the theatre and in films. He had just completed his most ambitious work to date, the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and the disastrous Pravda editorial of January 1936, which was going to change Shostakovich’s life forever, could in no way be anticipated in 1933.
The young Shostakovich was naturally drawn to “irony, satire, parody and the grotesque” (to quote the title of an excellent study exploring all of these concepts in Shostakovich’s music, by Esti Sheinberg). The composer was profoundly influenced by such writers as Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Zoshchenko, all of whom–in different ways—used the above-named forms of humor in the service of their social critique. Shostakovich followed this tradition in his first opera, The Nose (1928), based on a Gogol story, and in his incidental music to Mayakovsky’s Bedbug (1929). In his non-theatrical works, too, the humor carries special meaning. As we shall see, Shostakovich mixes the most diverse styles in his Piano Concerto—and there was a whole school of literary thought that emphasized such multiplicity of voices as an important means of artistic expression. Shostakovich was well acquainted with these intellectual trends through his best friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky.
The Piano Concerto is, indeed, all about clashing musical styles, and about blurring the boundaries between joke and serious matter—with the evident goal of delighting, but also confusing, the listener. The opening, after a mini-flourish on the piano and a mini-fanfare on the trumpet, is lyrical and expressive but the melodic line keeps veering off in unexpected directions. The second theme, in a faster tempo, is more openly parodistic, and it is not long before we enter what Shostakovich specialist Ian MacDonald described as “a circus-world of comic turns and raspberries ringmastered by the trumpet.” Yet the movement ends introspectively, with a quiet recall of the opening theme dying away in a peaceful duo of the piano and the trumpet.
The second movement is a sentimental and melancholy waltz, with “allusions to the world of cinema,” in the words of another noted Shostakovich authority, Elizabeth Wilson, who calls the movement “quasi-sentimental.” Its main melody is introduced by the muted string orchestra and continued by the piano in the best Romantic tradition. After a stormy but brief più mosso interlude, the waltz theme returns, now played by the trumpet. However, it is left to the piano to bring the movement to its ethereally soft conclusion.
The third movement, just under two minutes, is little more than a prelude to the finale. The unaccompanied piano music with which it opens could in fact come from one of Shostakovich’s piano preludes, with the strings adding an expressive melodic strain of their own. But Shostakovich doesn’t allow much more time for sentimentality, and launches into the wickedly funny “Allegro con brio” instead.
Here the musical references multiply: one recognizes a quote from Beethoven’s Rondo a capriccio, Op.129 (“Rage over a Lost Penny”), as well as allusions to Haydn, Mahler, a Jewish street song from Odessa, and more. Shostakovich ties all these disparate elements together with inimitable elegance. The “circus-world” evoked in the first movement returns with a vengeance as Shostakovich, according to Elizabeth Wilson, “manifests the daring and high spirits of youth” for the last time.
Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70
by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky loved Italy and especially Florence, where he spent extended periods of time on several occasions. No doubt, his “souvenirs” from that beautiful city were not necessarily all musical ones; therefore this work is far from being a medley of Italian melodies like the Capriccio italien, written in Rome in 1880. Florence was the place of his major infatuation with a young man named Vittorio, who sang many Italian songs for him in 1877. It was also the place where he stayed just down the street from his patron Nadezhda von Meck with whom he had made a pact never to meet in person, though one day he accidentally ran into her in the street, for which he apologized profusely in a letter written the next day. Finally, Florence was a place with which he became suddenly, and unaccountably, tired after finishing his opera The Queen of Spades there in the spring of 1890. He composed the string sextet Souvenir de Florence in the summer of that same year, back home in Russia. (He would never set foot on the banks of the Arno again.)
The memories invoked in the work are, therefore, of a highly complex nature. Some dark passions lurk behind the ingratiating tunefulness of the music. The first movement opens in the traditionally tragic key of D minor with a dramatic diminished harmony, and it is “storm and stress” all the way through, in spite of the presence of a lyrical second theme (itself made more complex by its constant two-against-three cross-rhythms).
The second movement, in D major, is a beguiling love duet for the first violin and the first cello (switching their parts in the recapitulation), accompanied mostly in pizzicato (plucked strings) by the other instruments. Yet here, too, we hear some emotional outbursts in triple fortissimo; there is also a brief and mysterious middle section with sudden dynamic changes and a strong rhythmic profile, played by all six instruments in strict homophony (perfect vertical alignment).
Next comes a graceful intermezzo in A minor that, once again, builds up considerable momentum as its theme is developed. The middle section seems to anticipate the famous “Trepak” from The Nutcracker, written just after the sextet.
By now it is clear that Souvenir de Florence might just as easily be called “A Russian in Florence.” The main theme of the finale has the rhythmic shape of a Russian folk dance. It is elaborated quite masterfully, with extensive fugal counterpoint. For the most part, the music remains in the “dark” D minor tonality, with the turn to the major delayed until the last quarter of the movement.
Program notes by Peter Laki, professor of music at Bard College, who has been a program annotator for many years of the Cleveland Orchestra.