Download PROGRAM NOTES by Daniel Maki Concerto No. 2 in Bb Major for

PROGRAM NOTES
by Daniel Maki
Concerto No. 2 in Bb Major for Piano and Orchestra, op. 83
by Johannes Brahms (1833- 1897)
Duration: Approximately 46 minutes
First Performance: November 9, 1881 in Budapest, Hungary
Last ESO Performance: April, 1988; James Tocco, piano; Robert Hanson, conductor
Despite his well earned reputation for gravitas as an artist, humor was an important
component of Brahms’ complex character. The humor was sometimes self-deprecating,
often sarcastic, and seemed to function, sometimes almost too well, as an effective
defense mechanism. In July of 1881 he wrote to a friend that he had written “a tiny little
piano concerto with a tiny little wisp of a scherzo.” When he sent the completed score to
another friend he referred to “a bunch of little piano pieces.” The piano music in
question was none other than the composer’s hugely proportioned Second Piano
Concerto, today considered a kind of heavy-weight champion of piano concertos, easily
one of the noblest and most majestic specimens in the entire repertoire.
Brahms had begun the concerto in 1878 after the first of what would be a number
of trips to Italy. He then then put it aside, but took it up again in 1881 after yet another
refreshing Italian journey and quickly finished it. Though the concerto is as German as
music can be, it is perhaps not far-fetched to suggest that there are hints of sunny Italy
sprinkled throughout. Although he had already tapered off his career as a pianist, it was
Brahms himself who appeared as soloist in the premiere in Budapest in November of
1881. Unlike his First Piano Concerto, which was written twenty years earlier and had
been poorly received, the new work was an immediate success .
If many nineteenth century concertos treated the soloist rather like a circus performer,
it should not be surprising that a composer of Brahms’ temperament would take a
different approach. As the leading representative of so-called “absolute music”,
theatricality for its own sake was foreign to his nature, and indeed Brahms the crusty
bachelor was known to joke that he would sooner marry than write an opera. (He, of
course, did neither.) The result of his philosophy of absolute musical values and
dedication to classical forms is a concerto that has sometimes been called a kind of
symphony with piano obbligato, the solo part being carefully integrated into the overall
design. That said, the work nevertheless bristles with technical difficulties and stands as
one of the supreme tests for any pianist both in terms of digital control as well as maturity
of musicianship.
The opening movement begins serenely and poetically with a horn solo which
elicits an immediate response from the soloist. After a few further comments by
woodwinds, the soloist launches into a dramatic cadenza that silences the orchestra as did
a similar passage at the beginning of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. The cadenza then
propels us into the grand entrance of the full orchestra, which now states the original
theme in majestic march style, launching the main body of the movement. Although there
are a number of other themes and motives which are greatly enriching, it is this simple
theme, beginning with the first three notes of a scale (do-re-mi), that dominates the entire
movement. Its quiet restatement by horn will recur at important structural points,
including the beginning of the development section (in minor key, this time), the
beginning of the recapitulation, as well as the coda, or concluding section.
Since its standardization in Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century by
composers such as Vivaldi, the form of the concerto had been a three movement (fastslow-fast) structure. The addition of an extra movement is thus a striking innovation,
something which Brahms had first considered for his violin concerto, premiered just two
years earlier. Having decided against it and not being one to waste good material, Brahms
rewrote the proposed movement for piano, producing the so-called “tiny, little wisp of a
scherzo.” (Scherzo is the Italian word for “joke”.) This particular scherzo is, of course,
anything but tiny and is certainly no joke, being a stormy adventure in the dark key of D
minor. Scherzos traditionally have a contrasting middle section confusingly known as a
“trio”, and Brahms honors that tradition here with a majestic D major section for full
orchestra before returning to the dark D minor that began this almost tragic movement.
After two movements filled with turbulence, a bit of calm is in order and Brahms
presents us with one of his most sublimely lyrical moments. The third movement begins
with an eloquent cello solo, a melody that the composer liked so well that he rewrote it
some years later as a song. The piano plays its own part in this movement but often as
commentator on material already presented. Storminess returns for a spell in the middle
of the movement but we know that all is well when the cello solo returns, albeit in the
wrong key of F# major. Final resolution is achieved as the music returns to the tonic key
of Bb and the movement ends peacefully.
From the time of Mozart on, the final movement has been the lightest in character
in concertos and Brahms is no exception here. As is the case in many of Mozart’s finales,
the form is a kind of rondo, i.e., a movement with a recurring theme that acts as a refrain.
Brahms’ main theme is playful and coquettish and alternates with several others. Perhaps
the most memorable one is in minor key and might remind some listeners of Richard
Rogers’ well known tune, “The Sweetest Sounds I’ve Ever Heard” form the 1962
Broadway musical No Strings. This tune suggests the Roma (Gypsy) style which Brahms
dearly loved and used often, even in some of his serious works. And so this “tiny little
piano concerto,” which is filled at times with barely contained fury, and at others with
sublime lyricism, comes to a close with this delightful finale, showing the playful and
even child-like side of a great artist.
* * *
Symphony No. 2
by Charles Ives (1874 – 1954)
Duration: Approximately 37 minutes
First Performance: February 22, 1951 in New York
Last ESO Performance: These are the first ESO performances of the work
According to the biblical maxim, prophets are without honor in their own
country, a statement that did accurately describe much of Charles Ives’s musical career.
Honor did come eventually, but it was gratification greatly delayed, as the history of his
Second Symphony demonstrates. Most of the work on the symphony was done in 1901
and 1902, when the composer was in his late twenties. It would be half a century before
he would have the pleasure of hearing this work performed, when Leonard Bernstein
programed it with the New York Philharmonic in 1951. With his usual acute sense of
theater, Bernstein scheduled the premiere for Washington’s birthday, February 22,
presumably as a symbolic reference to his often quoted description of Ives as “our
Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson of music.”
Despite warm invitations to attend the premiere in Carnegie Hall, the composer
declined, being in poor health and in his usual panic stricken state at performances of his
music. Mrs. Ives was present in New York while her husband listened on the radio at a
neighbor’s house in Connecticut. According to his biographer Jan Swafford, Ives listened
quietly and when he heard the cheers break out from the audience, producing the warmest
reception that any of his music had ever received, he “got up, spat in the fireplace, and
walked into the kitchen without a word.” No one could tell whether he was disgusted at
the sound of what he called one of his soft pieces (he had moved on to write far more
dissonant works), or whether he was too moved to speak. It was presumably the latter.
In a certain sense, the decades - long neglect of Ives’s music had been at least
partially of his own making. After graduation from Yale, he had begun what had seemed
like a promising career as a professional musician. Suddenly, for reasons that are not
clear but which have been endlessly speculated upon, he did an about-face and did what
most red-blooded American males of the period were expected to do: he became a
business man. While earning a substantial fortune and becoming one of the shapers of
the modern insurance industry, he wrote music in his spare time. Such an existence
necessarily cut him off from many of the professional associations which would have
promoted his musical career. All too soon, his health began to fail as diabetes and heart
disease, probably complicated by the work load of his double life, became serious
problems. By early middle age he had written a substantial amount of music but would
produce little more, spending the rest of his life revising and collecting his output. He had
the opportunity to hear very little of his music performed as many organizations
considered it too difficult to play and too unusual for listeners to understand. Only
gradually did the word get out to important musicians and he began to gain the reputation
of an “American original,” a pioneer who had foreseen many of the most advanced new
techniques of twentieth century music. As someone who despised “pretty music,” he
would experiment with procedures such as polytonality, polyrhythms, quarter tones, and
“chance” music. His most famous utterance was: “Don’t be a sissy. Stand up and take
your dissonance like a man!”
Ives’s First Symphony was written while he was a student at Yale under the
supervision of his professor Horatio Parker, one of this country’s most distinguished
musicians of the time. Trained in Europe, Parker was, according to one historian, “the
great white hope of American music,” writing well-crafted music in a style based on
Central European principles. While the First Symphony proved that he was capable of
writing a traditional late Romantic symphony in a style reminiscent of composers such as
Dvořák and Tchaikovsky, Ives the unruly student seems to have arm wrestled with his
teacher over such matters as unusual changes of key and his desire to inject gospel tunes
into the slow movement. As usual, the professor won out, and although Ives respected
him and even seems to have thought of him as a role model for a time, he would later say
of Parker that “he was governed too much by the German rule.”
In the Second Symphony Ives would become his own man. Admittedly, as the
above mentioned anecdote suggests, it is not the composer at his most adventurous and
he could be intensely critical of his own work that he considered “soft”. (Listeners who
are interested in Ives at his most dissonant might explore works such as the Fourth
Symphony.) What the Second Symphony does beautifully illustrate, however, is that
important part of Ives’s musical personality that might be called “Ives the populist”, or
“Ives the nostalgist”. As Ives scholar J. Peter Burkholder has expressed it, Ives’s goal in
the work was “to create a symphony in the European Romantic tradition that is suffused
with the character of American melody, wedding the two traditions in a single work.”
Many of the ideas of the symphony come from earlier works, some written in the
composer’s teens. The third movement Adagio cantabile, which forms the center of
gravity of the work, draws heavily on ideas that Parker had rejected in the First
Symphony. Ives’s life-long habit of musical quotation is much in evidence and can be
divided into two categories. Quotations from European sources include echoes of
composers such as Bach, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky.
Materials from the American songbook of the time that was so dear to Ives include,
among many others, such tunes as Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, America the
beautiful, Turkey in the Straw, Pig Town Fling, Bringing in the Sheaves, Where O Where
are the Pea-Green Freshmen ?, and several Stephen Foster tunes , including Massa’s in
de Cold, Cold Ground.
The symphony is in five movements that form a kind of arch, with the abovementioned Adagio as the centerpiece. On either side is a pair of slow-fast movements,
with the slow movements functioning as preludes to the quick ones. The opening
movement is scored primarily for strings and contains Columbia, the gem of the Ocean,
which will figure prominently later. The movement ends on an incomplete cadence which
leads directly into a fast movement in traditional sonata form. Though using European
procedures, this is a movement filled with Americana, including the tune Bringing in the
Sheaves.
The third movement is beautifully melodic in a hymn-like way and contains an actual
hymn tune called Missionary Chant, whose rhythm is similar to the famous 4-note motto
of Beethoven’s Fifth symphony. The movement ends with a quote of America the
Beautiful.
The brief fourth movement begins with solo horns and reintroduces ideas from the
opening movement, including a restatement of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. The
movement proceeds without pause into the finale, which is a potpourri of tunes, some
previously heard, such as Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, and some new ones,
including Camptown Races and Turkey in the Straw. In an ending that Ives wrote 40
years after the symphony had been finished, he adds a final raucous statement of
Columbia, and, in place of the traditional three note F major chord, writes an 11 note
“blat”. Ives said that it was meant to finish the piece “like a traditional evening of square
dances, with a resounding discord.” Elgin Symphony audiences will no doubt take such
dissonance without flinching, as “our Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson of music”
admonished us.
* * *