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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