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Monterey Symphony Program Notes Concert Four

February 20, 2010 (3 pm Final Rehearsal & 8 pm Concert) - Sherwood Hall, Salinas
February 21 (3 pm) & February 22, 2010 (8 pm) - Sunset Theater, Carmel
Dmitry Yablonsky, guest conductor 

Valse-Fantaisie
Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857)
Composed 1838

Considered the father of Russian national music, Mikhail Glinka was born to a wealthy family in Novospasskoi, Smolensk, Russia on June 1, 1804. Glinka traveled to western Europe in 1830 which influenced his artistic development greatly. His attendance at Italian opera productions and his study of the Italian compositional style affected all of his later compositions. In 1833, he went to Berlin to study counterpoint. With the death of his father in 1834, he returned to Russian to take care of family affairs. Once back, he expressed his desire to create a truly “Russian” school of music. He eagerly began collecting folk music and incorporating it into his compositions.

On May 8, 1835, Glinka married Maria Petrovna Ivanova. It was not a success. Their personalities were incompatible. Glinka’s introverted personality was inharmonious with her coquettishness. His miserable home life, however, did not prevent him from composing. The couple separated and were divorced n 1846.

His first opera, A Life for the Tsar, received its premiere on December 9, 1836 in St. Petersburg to great acclaim. It is steeped with a nationalistic spirit and was an attempt to create a thoroughly Russian opera. It has remained a staple of Russian opera houses. His second opera, Ruslan and Ludmila, is based on a fairy tale poem by Pushkin and its first performance was December 9, 1842.

Whereas “A Life for the Tsar” is based on historical characters and uses folk melodies and liturgical themes throughout its five acts, Ruslan and Ludmila presented a different style of music. It brought an exotic flavor–an “orientalism”–into Russian music truly capturing the spirit and rhythms of Centra Asia. Both operas made Glinka a popular composer. He frequently traveled back to Europe for extensive periods.

Unfortunately, Mikhail Glinka’s life was cut short, at the age of 52 when he suffered a stroke while he was in Berlin studying Western church music. He was buried there, but later his body was moved to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg.

The Valse-Fantaisie dates from 1839 and is among several well-crafted shorter concert works Glinka composed which are still in the repertoire. Although modeled after a French waltz, it is unmistakably Russian in character. Its elegiac main theme has resulted in this work commonly being referred to as the Melancholic Waltz.


Jazz Suite No.2 (Suite No.1 for Variety Stage Orchestra)
Tahiti Trot
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Composed in 1938 and 1928

Several notable music critics predicted Dmitry Shostakovich’s music would fade from concert halls after his death, which took place in 1975. They were wrong. The opposite has happened. Shostakovich’s music has been accepted as standard orchestral repertoire and his popularity has never been greater. Shostakovich, along with Vaughan Williams and Howard Hanson, have become major symphonists of the 20th century. Rarely does a season at a symphony orchestra go by without an appearance of either his Festive Overture or his First, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, Fourteenth or Fifteenth Symphonies; his two piano concertos and violin concerto; or his ballet suite from The Age of Gold. His opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is occasionally revived. His chamber music and solo piano music regularly appear on recital programs. In addition, new attention is being paid to the lighter side of Shostakovich’s vast output such as the works on this program.

Shostakovich first garnered international acclaim at the incredible age of 19 by publishing his First Symphony. Its steely tones and agitated rhythms fit the industrial age demanded by the Russian Revolution. His Second Symphony “To the October Revolution” and Third Symphony “May Day” include chorus and were composed to salute the Revolution. His was the new music for a new age. As the Soviet Union descended into totalitarianism, however, artists who so greatly supported the reasons for the Revolution became disaffected and then endangered. Stalin did not share their desire for creative expression. His taste in music was pedantic and conservative. The enforcement of his personal beliefs was brutal which Shostakovich learned frighteningly upon the presentation of his radically expressive opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

Having received a public belittling from the communist party bosses, Shostakovich quietly pulled his provocative Fourth Symphony—a magnificent and monumental work saluting his vivid imagination from performance during rehearsal fearing further governmental scorn. His Fifth Symphony was produced to show officials he had learned the errors of his ways.
It was a cynical time and Shostakovich always feared further attack, but he never stopped composing. He wrote four symphonies during the war and then concentrated on scores for Soviet propaganda films. After Stalin died in 1953, Shostakovich returned to composing symphonies. Six more were produced during the Cold War’s various freezes and thaws bringing his final output to 15 works in this great genre alone.

The Jazz Suite No.2 was written for Victor Knusnevitsky and his State Orchestra for Jazz in 1938. The score was lost during World War Two and only resurfaced in 2000 in a piano arrangement. Gerard McBurney, a British composer and musicologist, used this score to prepare three movements for performance at the Proms in London. Since that time, material for the remainder of movements has emerged. The work is a compilation of music extracted from several scores for theater, ballet, and “promenade” orchestras, newly assembled under the title, Suite No.1 for Variety Stage Orchestra. It is scored for standard symphony orchestra plus accordion, saxophone, extra percussion, piano and guitar. The First Dance was used again by Shostakovich as the Public Holiday melody in his film score, The Gadfly. Most recently, film director Stanley Kubrick paired the Second Waltz with his title credits for his last film, Eyes Wide Shut.

Nikolay Malko, the conductor who premiered the First Symphony, posed a compositional challenge to Shostakovich in 1926. Malko gave Shostakovich one hour to orchestrate Tea for Two from Vincent Youman’s popular musical No, No, Nanette. The result is alternately comical and sublime. It was first heard in 1928 when Malko performed it under the title Tahiti Trot. It quickly became a dance band favorite. Wisely, Shostakovich included it in his ballet The Age of Gold. It disappeared as Stalin continued to assert his dictatorial prowess over musical artists and did not reappear until after the composer’s death. Shostakovich, by the way, won the bet. It only took him 40 minutes to complete this piece.


Symphony No.2 in C minor, Op.29
Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)
composed in 1902

Alexander Nikolayevitch Scriabin received his initial musical education from his aunt. His mother had died when he was a child and his father remarried. Scriabin entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1888 to study piano. He worked hard but never became the virtuoso his contemporary Sergei Rachmaninoff was. He failed to pass his composition examination and left the Conservatory without a diploma. He had written several works for solo piano, all greatly influenced by the music of Chopin which were enthusiastically received. A publisher became interested in his music and funded a successful recital of Scriabin performing Scriabin in Paris. Upon his return, he produced his first major work, a piano concerto and gave its first performance in 1897 in Odessa.

In the same year, he married a fellow pianist Vera Isakovitch. They toured Europe briefly and performed his piano works together. Scriabin became a piano instructor at the Moscow Conservatory and continued composing. His teacher at the Conservatory, V. I. Safonov, conducted the premiere of his First Symphony in March 1901 and the composer Anatol Liadov introduced St. Petersburg to the Second Symphony, heard at these concerts, on January 25, 1902.

Mikhail Morozov, a wealthy Moscow merchant and arts patron granted Scriabin an ample allowance and the composer and his wife settled in Switzerland where he began work on his Third Symphony, the Divine Poem. It was introduced by one of the leading conductors of the period Arthur Nikitsch and Scriabin became the new face of Russian music. It was at this time, Scriabin and his wife separated. The composer quickly set up house with Tatiana Schoezer, the daughter of a music critic. Scriabin and Schoezer traveled to America for concerts and recitals of his works in New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and many other cities. They left the United States abruptly when charges of moral turpitude were bandied about, as Scriabin was still technically married to Vera but living with Tatiana.

Scriabin’s Fourth Symphony, the Poem of Ecstacy, was premiered in 1907 in New York City and two months later in St. Petersburg. The following year he met Serge Koussevitzky, a professional doublebass player, aspiring conductor, and a music publisher who became a greater admirer of Scriabin’s music. (Koussevitzky would become the long-time music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.) It was for Koussevitzky that Scriabin composed his most ambitious work, Symphony No.5, Prometheus or the Poem of Fire. This work called for a color organ which projected specific colors that Scriabin associated with musical notes. Eventually, Koussevitzky and Scriabin had a falling out over financial and personal differences and Scriabin signed on with a competing publishing firm.

The vast majority of Scriabin’s output was for solo piano including 10 sonatas, 79 preludes in 15 sets, and many other impromptus, nocturnes, mazurkas, and morceaux. He never composed any chamber music, songs, or choral works–excepting the Poem of Fire. He was a genuine innovator in harmony and lead the way for many others in atonality, polytonalty, and other experimental methods of the twentieth century. According to Baker’s Dictionary of Musicians, “These harmonic extensions were associated in Scriabin’s mind with theosophic doctrines; he aspired to a universal art in which the impressions of the senses were to unite with religious experience.”

On April 15, 1915, Scriabin performed his last public recital. He had developed a carbuncle on his lip which got infected and he died of blood poisoning three days later.

The Second Symphony contains five movements, performed in three parts. The first and second are performed without pause; as are the fourth and fifth. Thus creating a framework for the long slow movement in between. The main theme is presented in the opening measures by the clarinet. It develops slightly but then disappears in the second movement. It reappears in the middle of the third movement, but comes into its own as a brilliant march in the finale.
Although Scriabin provided no commentary on the Second Symphony, its combined sensualness and brooding character coincided with Scriabin’s increasing fascination with mysticism and the occult. His extreme obsession with extolling the individual ego and inflaming the senses completely disregarded conventional morality, religious dogma, political opinion, historical precedent and societal obligations.