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55th Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2004 Croatia CROATIAN RADIO AND TELEVISION SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA NIKŠA BAREZA conductor Bošković Square 7th August 9.30 pm Antonín Dvořák: Leoš Janáček: Carnival, overture, Op. 92 Lachian Dances Old Fashioned Blessed Town Piper Old Fashioned Country Bumpkin’s Dance Handsaw Dance ****** Petar Iljič Čajkovski: Symphony No. 4 in F minor, op. 36 Andante sostenuto-Moderato con anima Andantino in modo di canzone Scherzo (Pizzicato ostinato) Finale (Allegro con fuoco) The Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra began to perform in 1930, only four years after the first radio programmes were broadcasted on the Zagreb Radio. The Zagreb Radio Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1951 and soon acquired good reputation both in the country and abroad under the leadership of its first conductor, Antonio Janigro (followed by Stjepan Šulek and Pavle Dešpalj). The Orchestra gradually grew to the size of a symphony orchestra. In 1957 it began to perform under the name of the Zagreb Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra; in 1975 it was renamed the Zagreb Symphony Orchestra, and in 1991 it got its present name. The Orchestra worked with many distinguished conductors including Pavle Dešpalj, Krešimir Šipuš, Josef Daniel, Oskar Danon, Milan Horvat, Uroš Lajovic, Vladimir Kranjčević, and Nikša Bareza and numerous renowned conductors and soloists such as Lovro von Matačić, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Ernst Bour, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Szeryng, Aldo Ciccolini, Dubravka TomšičSrebotnjak, Ivo Pogorelić, Mstislav Rostropovich, Edita Gruberova, José Carreras, etc. In addition to regular concerts in Zagreb, and the appearances in radio and television programmes, the Orchestra has performed throughout Croatia and abroad (Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Spain, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Serbia). Apart from the classical and contemporary concert repertoire and recordings for the radio and television and record labels, the Orchestra cherishes both the Croatian music heritage and contemporary music. The long-time principal conductor and leader of the Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, Nikša Bareza, studied with Milan Sachs, Hermann Scherchen, and Herbert von Karajan, and later worked with prestigious conductors such as Lovro von Matačić, Ferdinand Leitner, Otmar Suitner, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, as well as with the twentieth century classical composers including Benjamin Britten, Carl Orff, Olivier Messiaen, Luigi Dallapiccola, Goffredo Petrassi, Dmitry Dmitryevich Shostakovich and Luigi Nono. He started his career as a conductor and director of the Zagreb Opera and later became a full-time conductor of the opera houses in Zurich, Petersburg and Graz, where was engaged as leader of the Graz Philharmonic Orchestra. Presently a full-time conductor of the Hamburg Opera and La Scala in Milan, he has directed a series of exceptionally successful operas. He has also been a guest conductor in leading opera houses in Europe (Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Dresden, Leipzig, Prague, Bologna, Florence, Parma, Oslo, etc.). Since 2001 he has been principal conductor of the Robert Schumann Philharmonic at Chemnitz, where, since the previous season, he has been the city’s music director. A returning guest conductor at the most prestigious concert halls worldwide, Nikša Bareza has worked with the leading international orchestras (Salzburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Rotterdam, Milan, etc.) His particular interest in contemporary music encompasses both Croatian recent music and its musical heritage. He has thus conducted the premieres (and radio and television recordings) of many pieces by Blagoje Bersa, Jakov Gotovac, Ivan Brkanović, Milo Cipra, Boris Papandopulo, Stjepan Šulek, Milko Kelemen, Ivo Malec, Stanko Horvat, Ruben Radica, Dubravko Detoni, Marko Ruždjak, Frano Parać and others. His recordings also include Wagner’s The Nibelung’s Ring and opera Il Campiello by Ermanno Wolf-Ferarri (performed by the Verdi Opera Ensemble in Trieste), which earned him the platinum medal in Paris. Worth mentioning is his CD with the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss, performed by the Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra. Bareza has earned the music critics’ acclaim for his serious approach to music, huge experience, refined sense of style, and sophisticated interpretation of the detail. Romantic and lyric features of the musical language of Antonín Dvořák (1841 1904) might have been lost in the mass of his contemporaries, if he had not possessed a rare gift of one of the last European masters of melody. The essence of such genuine and great melodic simplicity might have been recognised for the last time in the unfathomable melodic invention of Mozart or Schubert. Schubert's melodies show influence of the fresh, original, traditional art and so does the melodic of Dvořák that stemmed from the folklore in its entirety. Yet, while Smetana cherishes and employs Slavic folklore almost exclusively, Dvořák is also interested in the folklore of other civilisations. In the process, he almost never employs the folk fragments literally; he first listens to the unknown sounds and then, by the power of his creativity, transforms them into something greater than themselves. At the peak of his creative power, from March 1891 to January 1892, Dvořák composed a programme trilogy of overtures with the subtitle Nature, Life and Love. It consisted of the following pieces: Amid Nature, Op. 91, Carneval, Op. 92 and Othello, Op. 93. As a painful contrast to the stillness of the initial gracious-pastoral idyll of Amid Nature, in which the net of the silver music threads is slowly swinging, whispering about the magnificence of the piece in nature, a turbulent swirl of the Carneval appears, a bundle of mixed colours, sound and movement, one moment as a bizarre disfiguration of the seriousness and the other as a harmless dissoluteness of the naively-cheerful. Such duality is, confronted by the final Othello, which Dvořák describes as the Tragic overture or Love. His original idea for all three pieces to be performed in one concert was realised for the first time in Paris, 1892, at his farewell concert before leaving for America. However, the pieces were later seldom performed together. The main theme, the musical image of the omnipotence and omnipresence of nature, effectively flows through each of the overtures. In addition to Smetana and Dvořák, the most important Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854 – 1928) amalgamated the experience of the more recent WestEuropean search with the great Slavic music tradition in his output. Constantly making more and more intensive efforts to achieve an absolute form and abandon the conventions, Janáček managed to erect a completely personal, recognisable composing system based on the interesting idea of the free and richly elaborated tonality. Janáček's music is often ruled by «a tiny, pregnant motive of a condensed form and strictly organised rhythm. However, it never acquires the meaning of a leitmotiv, or is being elaborated, but repeats often in order to increase certain effect”. Suddenly varied, with unusually altered expression, it eventually allows some other, new motive to replace it. In the words of J. Racek: «One might almost claim that Janáček replaces the theme development by a harsh motive dynamism and fierce agogic, while reinforcing his expression by a rich exchange of sound colours of his bizarre orchestration.” Pavel Křižkovský, the founder of the modern Czech choir music, greatly influenced the young Janáček and his first musical views based on his admiration for Moravian folk songs and dances. Therefore, the music folklore, Janáček drank in as a boy in his native village Hukvaldy, gradually became a powerful source of his later inspiration and the corner stone of his realistic style. Janáček gathered a huge collection of folk songs and dances, founded a Folk Institute in Brno, made many arrangements of folk songs and dances and the music in his two early composing periods strictly depended on folk elements. To quote his words (London, 1926): “Folk song and dance? I have lived with them since my childhood. The entire man hides in the folk music: his body, soul, atmosphere, everything. Only those growing out of the folklore sound become the whole beings. The folk music brings people together and unites mankind in the spirit, happiness and welfare. Lachian Dances, originally composed for a small orchestra from 1888 to 1889, were first performed the following year. Continuing the earlier tradition, they are the crucial point in Janáček’s second composing period. The Dances rely on the folk sound he listened to in his childhood. Their melody is genuinely original and the choreography is (re)created by the experts. When composing the Dances, Janáček was only partially (in the basic guidelines and orchestration) inspired by Dvořák’s Slavonic dances. Unlike the Slavonic dances, Lachian Dances are not symphonised and classically balanced miniatures, but authentic dances erected on the constantly accentuated features of the folk sound, with the sustained changeable rhythmic. This personal and independent piece is Janáček’s first masterful orchestral piece. The six various episodes immediately achieved a great success and have not lost their poetic quality up the present time. The Old Fashioned Dance in C major and 3 / 4 measure consists of three sections, composed from three melodic elements, the most characteristic of which is the first one. The Blessed Dance in B flat major and 2/4 is a one-theme rondo of a moderate tempo. Like in the first movement, there are no trumpets in the orchestra, but the organ is introduced instead. A fierce traditional dance Town Piper (Dumka) in A flat major, swinging in 2/4 metre, is growing more intense when getting closer to the end. It consists of a rondo with three themes and cheerful episodes. The Second Old Fashioned Dance in G major and 3 / 4 metre is composed for a small orchestra with the harp. This movement, more refined than its preceding namesake section, is also a three-theme rondo with a more mobile second episode. The Country Bumpkin’s Dance in A flat major and the quick 3 / 4 measure consists of five variations on a popular dance melody. The effective final, moderate-tempo Handsaw Dance is in D flat major and 2/4 measure. A markedly expressive dance melody is composed in a rondo form, in which both the central part and coda steadily accelerate. Janáček also made simple, but interesting piano arrangements of the last two dances. A19th century composer, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 -1893) is already obsessed by the theme of our time, the theme of human alienation and horrid disability of people to communicate among themselves. The fate of such cognition gives particular strength to his expression and Tchaikovsky is therefore (despite all occasional voids within the music flow) one of the first European, and certainly the first Slavic composer, whose symphonic idiom can be compared with Beethoven’s. The symphony is a music form in which the talent of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky manifests in the most impressive way. His last three symphonies, Nos. 4, 5 and 6 can be considered the most valuable music achievements in the late 19th century. In each of them, Tchaikovsky deals with the human fate and the (un)predictable rules of life. While the last in this opus, Symphony No. 6, admits the defeat at its end and gives in to the «painful contemplation about the hopelessness of the human struggle with destiny», both in the 4th and the 5th symphony the struggle with the forces of destiny - which, according to Tchaikovsky, «hang above the head like the sword of Damocles and constantly and permanently poison the soul» - ends by the triumph of the manwarrior. Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 is the beginning of the supreme symphonic triptych. Dedicated to Tchaikovsky’s “the only and best friend” Nadezhda von Meck, the symphony was completed in 1877 and first performed under the baton of Nicholai Rubinstein on 10 February 1878 in Moscow, without a particular success. Abandoning the proved methods of the classical Viennese manner, Tchaikovsky made the Symphony No. 4 a prototype of the new form, which, owing to its elasticity and unconventionality, enabled him to fully express the power and imagination of his hidden self. Obeying the basic rules of the Greek tragedy, he created a real drama including the introduction, plot and problem solving, reinforcing it all by the logic of the motive unity achieved by varying the basic themes of each movement or of the piece in general. The dramatic pathos of the first movement, its “fatal” motive of the brass winds, is by its inner tension connected with the “pathetic” of the final Symphony No. 6. A refined second movement is a melancholy remembrance, the gentle pondering over the depths of the past. The third movement, an inspired Scherzo, is a collage of the capricious arabesques, the vague and unreal images floating through the artificially released fantasy. The finale is composed on the basis of a Russian folk song “There was a birch-three in the field”. It is a sparkling description of a folk festivity, a bundle of sounds and movement in which Tchaikovsky takes no part, but according to his own words, “still has enough goodness within to be able to appreciate somebody else’s happiness”. D. Detoni