Program Notes for September concerts

I'm afraid that we at the RCO have fallen prey to the most common problem with blogs -- keeping them active and up-to-date! It's been an active last few months at the RCO as we have been preparing for the 2007-2008 season, which gets started this coming weekend with concerts Saturday night at 8:00 p.m., and Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. at Nightingale Concert Hall. Tickets are still available for these performances, which will feature Theodore Kuchar, the RCO, and guest violinist Martin Chalifour, already a great local favorite through his appearances at the Nevada Chamber Music Festival. Call (775) 348-9413 if you need tickets or more information.

We'd be remiss if we didn't mention our special pricing programs. Like last year, brand new RCO subscribers can receive 50% off the regular price of their season tickets. And, in a new initiative, we are offering free tickets to our concerts for anyone 18 years old or younger! We're serious about doing what we can to instill a love for classical music in our young people, and we're very much hoping to see more youth at our concerts.

Since it has been a while since our last posting here, we thought it might be worthwhile to give you plenty to read! We've received several requests to make our program notes available prior to the performances (for a variety of reasons they can be difficult to read at the concerts themselves). So here they are! I hope they'll enhance your experience at the concerts, and get you even more excited about hearing this great music.

Einojuhani Rautavaara (photo by Maarit Kytöharju/Fimic)

b. October 9, 1928, Helsinki, Finland

While younger Finnish composers like Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho have achieved international fame in recent years, the nearly eighty-year-old Einojuhani Rautavaara remains the most significant Finnish composer since Sibelius. After beginning his studies in Helsinki, Rautavaara traveled to the United States to work with Aaron Copland, Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions. He later served as composition professor at the Sibelius Academy for fifteen years before dedicating himself entirely to composing. Some of Rautavaara’s early works employed modernist techniques, such as the twelve-tone elements of his Third and Fourth Symphonies. But he became famous with more Romantic-sounding, accessible works – which he characterized as “a new homage to beauty” – like his international breakthrough, the Symphony No. 7, “Angel of Light” (1994). Rautavaara has written in all the major genres, including a series of operas based on historical themes, such as Vincent (1987, inspired by the life of van Gogh) and Rasputin (2003).

Cantus Arcticus, Op. 61

Composed: 1972
Duration: 18 minutes

In 1972, Rautavaara was commissioned by Finland’s University of Oulu to write a piece for its first doctoral degree ceremony. Tradition would have him create a ceremonial festive cantata, but Rautavaara responded instead with the Cantus Arcticus, often referred to as a Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, in which taped bird songs interact with the orchestra. Some of the bird songs were recorded in the vicinity of Oulu, which is nearly 400 miles north of Helsinki on the eastern edge of the Gulf of Bothnia, while others originated around the Arctic Circle and the marshlands of Liminka.

The first movement, "Suo" ("The Marsh" or “The Bog”), opens with an impressionistic swirl of a melody for two solo flutes, later joined by other woodwinds and a recording of bog birds. “Think of autumn and Tchaikovsky,” Rautavaara wrote of this passage. A slow, rich melody in the strings is superimposed over the winds and bird songs as the mood mellows, and the movement dies out with a reminiscence of the opening flute melody. The shore lark’s song, lowered by two octaves to turn it into what Rautavaara called a "ghost bird," opens the second movement, "Melankolia" ("Melancholy"). A quiet and haunting melody in the strings enters tentatively, gaining in intensity as it evolves. The movement ends as it began, with the shore lark. The final movement, "Joutsenet muuttavat" ("Swans Migrating"), opens with the chaotic sound of a large group of swans, combined with string tremolos and bird imitations in the woodwinds. Rautavaara described this complex texture: "I imagined they [the swans] fly straight to the burning sun." As in the first movement, a slow, chorale-like melody in the strings emerges. The swan sounds increase in volume, and after a climactic cymbal crash and brass calls, the music and the swans' songs fade into the distance amid the gentle sounds of harp and percussion.


Antonio Vivaldi

b. March 4, 1678, Venice, Italy
d. July 28, 1741, Vienna, Austria

Antonio Vivaldi is remembered as one of the fathers of instrumental music and the master of the concerto for soloist(s) and orchestra – of which he wrote over 550, including some 240 for the violin. Colorful and tuneful works like “The Four Seasons” are among the most popular in all of classical music. His operas and religious works also brought him fame during his lifetime. Ordained as a priest in 1703, the redheaded Vivaldi came to be known as “il prete rosso” (“the red priest”). He decided to pursue musical rather than ecclesiastical duties, and became a teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage and school for girls famous for its excellent choir and orchestra, where he worked in several capacities over the ensuing three-plus decades. Meanwhile his concertos and other instrumental works were being published to great acclaim, attracting the admiring attention of famous musicians such as Johann Sebastian Bach. In his later years Vivaldi fell on hard times, and on his death he was buried (as was Mozart five decades later) in a pauper’s grave in Vienna.

Violin Concerto in C major, RV 190

Composed: circa 1735
Duration: 12 minutes

Violin Concerto in D major, RV 222

Composed: circa 1737
Duration: 11 minutes

Vivaldi, a great musician and a canny businessman, attained his fame and fortune to a large extent through the publications of his concertos, trio sonatas, and other works. These printings, often with fanciful titles like “Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (“The contest between harmony and invention,” 1725), were bestsellers all over Europe. Later in his life, though, Vivaldi turned away from such large-scale publications, preferring to offer his manuscripts to individual patrons. Because these works of the 1730s didn’t receive the wide distribution his earlier compositions did, they remain relatively unknown to the music-loving public.

Such is the case with the two concertos featured in this concert, which will seem both familiar and surprising to those who have heard “The Four Seasons” and other Vivaldi works. Many of the qualities of Vivaldi’s better-known compositions are still in evidence: memorable tunes, lively dance rhythms, colorful textures, virtuoso display from the soloist, warm and heartfelt slow movements. But there is a newfound complexity and introversion in these later concertos. Transitions are abrupt, harmonies are more wide-ranging, and the moods more mercurial and harder to characterize.

The C major Concerto, RV 190, seems to be related to the opera Griselda, and is therefore tentatively dated to the year that opera was first produced, 1735. The diversity of Vivaldi’s late style can be heard in the first movement: opening with the pomp and dotted rhythms of the French overture, the music quickly moves to a hint of sentiment before the fiery entrance of the violin soloist. In the second movement, the orchestra and continuo outline the basic harmonies before the soloist enters with its lovely song. Once again the soloist is at the forefront in the restless, impulsive third movement. The D major Concerto, RV 222, is dated to around 1737. A playful first movement, with some surprising detours into the minor mode, is followed by a flowing, melancholy slow movement with lovely decorative lines from the violin soloist. The final movement contrasts a sprightly opening idea with a more laid-back second theme.


Pablo de Sarasate

b. March 10, 1844, Pamplona, Spain
d. September 20, 1908, Biarritz, France

Pablo Martín Melitón Sarasate y Navascuez, or Pablo de Sarasate, was one of the greatest violinists of the second half of the nineteenth century. His three decades of concertizing brought him acclaim from Europe to North and South America, and his virtuosity inspired compositions written for him by the likes of Max Bruch, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Eduoard Lalo. Beginning his violin studies at age five, Sarasate made his debut at eight and created a sensation at the court of Queen Isabella II (who gave Sarasate the Stradivarius he played throughout his career). He subsequently attended the Paris Conservatoire, winning its annual first prize, and soon thereafter began his concert career. Praised by George Bernard Shaw as having “left criticism gasping miles behind him,” Sarasate was known as much for his own compositions as for his mastery of the standard repertoire. Though he had largely retired from performing by 1890, he made a handful of recordings in 1904 that attest to his still-formidable technique.

Zigeunerweisen, Op. 20

Composed: 1878
Duration: 9 minutes

The legendary violinist and teacher Leopold Auer wrote of Sarasate’s “ease and tonal charm which were peculiar to him, standing like a marble statue, his entire vitality seemingly concentrated in his eyes, often lowered to his fingers, which moved with astonishing dexterity.” While he was known for his brilliant technique and sensuous tone, Sarasate had relatively small hands that made long stretches difficult for him and limited his repertoire (he never played the Brahms Concerto or anything by Paganini, for instance). The many works he wrote for himself, however, took advantage of his particular talents.

Perhaps the best known of Sarasate’s sixty or so compositions is Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs), a short fantasy based on gypsy melodies. The opening slow music, which comprises more than two-thirds of the length of the composition, would have been a perfect vehicle for Sarasate’s renowned silvery tone. Beginning with a grand gesture, this music blends sentiment and passion, with a decorative, almost improvisational line from the soloist employing double stops, fast scales, and other virtuoso techniques. The soloist really takes flight, however – with further double stops, harmonics, left hand pizzicati, and more – in the flashy Allegro molto vivace that closes the work.

Ludwig van Beethoven

b. December 16, 1770, Bonn
d. March 26, 1827, Vienna

One short biographical sketch on Beethoven begins “The events of Beethoven’s life are the stuff of Romantic legend, evoking images of the solitary creator shaking his fist at Fate and finally overcoming it through a supreme effort of creative will.” Those biographical details, however, such as the deafness that plagued his last three decades of life, his stormy love affairs and his famous ill temper, are dwarfed by his artistic output, which is one of the monuments of music history. He literally mastered and transformed all the musical forms of his day, and extended the range and depth of expression available to composers. Beethoven was no Mozart-like prodigy, although even in his teens he was composing and playing in orchestras. But by his twenties – after studies with the likes of Franz Josef Haydn and Mozart’s legendary nemesis Antonio Salieri – both his compositions and piano playing had garnered considerable attention. It was around the age of 30 that Beethoven first noticed his encroaching deafness, but soon thereafter began the second, or “middle,” of his creative periods, which included groundbreaking works like the “Eroica” Symphony, the “Appassionata” and “Waldstein” piano sonatas, and the opera “Fidelio.” After a period of relative musical inactivity in the late 1810s, he entered his so-called “late” period, highlighted by the Ninth Symphony and the late string quartets and piano sonatas, in which his music gained a new, very personal depth and freedom.

Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92
Composed: 1812
Duration: 40 minutes

The concert at which Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 was first heard, on December 8, 1813 at the auditorium of the University of Vienna, was perhaps the composer’s greatest public success – but not because of the symphony. That concert, a benefit for wounded Austrian and Bavarian soldiers conducted by Beethoven himself, also featured the premiere of his “Wellington’s Victory,” or “Battle Symphony.” Originally written for a mechanical instrument called the panharmonicon (invented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, later the inventor of the metronome, the panharmonicon used a complex series of bellows and cylinders to imitate the sound of a brass band), Beethoven’s musico-patriotic spectacle – with its fanfares and battle music – depicted the triumph of Wellington’s troops over the French in the Battle of Vitoria in 1813. As performed by an ensemble featuring some of the most renowned musicians in Vienna – including Antonio Salieri, Louis Spohr, Mauro Giuliani, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel – “Wellington’s Victory” was a rousing success, and by popular demand that concert was repeated three times in the next two months.

“Wellington’s Victory” is held in little esteem nowadays, but the Symphony No. 7 is one of Beethoven’s best-loved works. It too was very well received back in those 1813-14 performances; in fact, according to Spohr, the famous second movement had to be repeated every time. In the nearly two centuries since then, it is remarkable to note how often commentators on the Symphony No. 7 have found some sort of extra-musical meaning in it. Writers have claimed to recognize political revolutions, knights and warriors, drunks and libertines, peasants, weddings, reverent processions, forests, orgies, churches, and so on. A fairly consistent underlying theme is the notion of a festival or carnival – one thinks of Richard Wagner’s famous summation of this symphony as “the apotheosis of the dance.”

Beethoven starts the first movement with the longest slow introduction yet heard in a symphony. Through its flute and oboe solos and seeming meandering, one senses that momentum and tension are building. When the fast Vivace music finally emerges from a series of repeated notes, the subtlety of the transition almost surprises the listener. But the exuberant dance rhythms are already there, and the main theme of the movement quickly bursts forth in all its glory. The energy seldom flags as the movement works its way to a lengthy coda and concluding crescendo.

Beethoven had toyed with the idea of using the tempo designation Andante for the second movement, but ultimately opted for the faster Allegretto; in fact, neither his Seventh nor Eighth Symphonies has a proper slow movement. Opening with an off-kilter A minor chord with an E in the bass, the lower strings introduce a bare-bones version of what becomes the main theme. In a set of variations, this memorable theme becomes more elaborate and builds in strength. A new idea in the major is introduced, followed by a contrapuntal version of the opening idea. The major mode theme returns, followed by a last variation on the main theme. This movement was such a sensation in its early performances that numerous arrangements of it quickly appeared, scored for everything from solo piano to string quintet to wind band.

The third movement is a lively and witty Scherzo, full of life and rhythm and abrupt contrasts. The movement’s two slower contrasting interludes are colorfully scored, with winds predominating. As energetic as this music is, Beethoven does it one better with the whirlwind that is the Finale, one of his most exciting creations. Its “wild and swirling motion,” as one commentator described it, seldom flags and brings the symphony to a celebratory conclusion.

Notes by Chris Morrison