Download Minnesota Orchestra

Primal Paradise: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
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Minnesota Orchestra
Michael Stern, conductor
Simon Trpčeski, piano
Thursday, April 23, 2015, 11 am
Friday, April 24, 2015, 8 pm
Orchestra Hall
Orchestra Hall
Charles Tomlinson Griffes
The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan, Opus 8
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Concerto No. 3 in D minor for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 30
Allegro ma non tanto
Intermezzo: Adagio
Finale: Alla breve
ca. 11’
ca. 44’
[There is no pause before the final movement.]
Simon Trpčeski, piano
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Igor Stravinsky
music up close
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The Rite of Spring [1947 revision]
Part I: The Adoration of the Earth
Part II: The Sacrifice
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ca. 20’
ca. 32’
Concert Preview with Phillip Gainsley and Michael Stern
Thursday, April 23, 10:15 am, Auditorium
Minnesota Orchestra concerts are broadcast live on Friday evenings on stations of Minnesota Public Radio, including KSJN 99.5 FM
in the Twin Cities.
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Artists
Michael Stern, conductor
Michael Stern has conducted many of
the world’s top orchestras, from the
New York Philharmonic to the London
Symphony to Tokyo’s NHK Symphony.
These concerts mark his Minnesota
Orchestra debut.
Posts: Stern is in his ninth season
as music director of the Kansas City
Symphony; together they have drawn
acclaim for creative programming as
well as for recordings and commissions.
He is also the founding artistic director
and principal conductor of the IRIS
Orchestra, and he has held leadership
posts with Germany’s Saarbrücken Radio
Symphony Orchestra and two French
ensembles: the Orchestre National de
Lyon and the Orchestre National de Lille.
Discography: Stern has made four
recordings with the Kansas City
Symphony on the Reference Records
label, including a Grammy-winning disc
of Britten works and, in 2014, an album
of three works by Adam Schoenberg
commissioned by Stern and the Kansas
City Symphony. Their next project is a
disc of Saint-Saëns works.
Of interest: Stern co-edited an edition
of The Grammar of Conducting, a widely
used textbook by Max Rudolf, his former
teacher at the Curtis Institute.
More: colbertartists.com.
Simon Trpčeski, piano
Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski,
now welcomed for his first Minnesota
Orchestra appearances, performs
regularly with the world’s most
prestigious orchestras. He is also active
as a recitalist and chamber musician on
major international stages.
Recent, upcoming: This season he
performs with orchestras including
the London Symphony, London
Philharmonia, Los Angeles Philharmonic,
Netherlands Radio Philharmonic,
Russian National Orchestra and Iceland
Symphony, and he tours Australia and
New Zealand. He also gives recitals
with cellist Daniel Müller-Schott in
Amsterdam, London and Bilbao, Spain.
Recordings: He has made three awardwinning concerto recordings with the
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, including
two all-Rachmaninoff discs and, most
recently, Tchaikovsky’s first two piano
concertos. His five recital albums
have garnered acclaim, including two
Gramophone Awards. Forthcoming is
a disc of his 2014 recital at London’s
Wigmore Hall.
Honors: In 2009 he was awarded
the Presidential Order of Merit for
Macedonia, conferred by that country’s
president; more recently he was the
first to be named National Artist of the
Republic of Macedonia.
More: imgartists.com.
one-minute notes
Griffes: The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan
Griffes’ music, impressionistic and exotic, imagines a sacred river and a sunlit palace in which revelers dance.
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3
This concerto balances moments of song-like simplicity and thunderous virtuosity. The opening Allegro is subtle
and soulful, while the latter movements offer catchy themes, ingenious variations and a feather-light waltz.
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
Of this work—which drew jeers at its 1913 premiere—Stravinsky wrote: it “represents pagan Russia and is unified
by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring.” Vibrant sounds of nature set the
scene for the story, an imagined pagan ritual in which a sacrificial virgin dances herself to death.
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Program Notes
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and then suddenly break off. There is a return to the
original mood suggesting the sacred river and the ‘caves
of ice.’ ”
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes,
English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons,
4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani,
bass drum, cymbals, gong, tambourine,
2 harps, piano, celesta and strings
Charles Tomlinson Griffes
Born: September 17, 1884, Elmira, New York
Died: April 8, 1920, New York City
Excerpted from a program note by Mary Ann Feldman.
c
The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan, Opus 8
harles Tomlinson Griffes, who spent his entire
career teaching in a prep school, has been hailed
as the great American impressionist. No American
work as dream-like, atmospheric and ambiguous as The
Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan had been heard here when
the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered the score in
its original orchestral version in November 1919. Soon
the work was repeated in Chicago and New York, but
the composer did not long outlive his triumph: suffering
from pneumonia, he died at the age of 35. His music was
bordering on atonality; no one knows where he might
have advanced from there.
Like other Americans of his generation, Griffes had begun
his career with studies in Germany, where he worked
for a few months under Wagner’s disciple Engelbert
Humperdinck. When he returned to the U.S., becoming
director of music at the Hackley School in Tarrytown,
New York, he turned away from German romanticism and
absorbed the music of Debussy, Ravel and Scriabin. These
influences, plus the exoticism of the Far East, determined
the nature of The Pleasure-Dome, which took form as a
piano piece in 1912.
The verses of Coleridge prefixed to the score—“In Xanadu
did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree,” etc.—
are less a program than a guide to the atmosphere of the
music, spurring our imaginations as much as the strange
palace aroused the composer.
In the exotic chords of the beginning we hear the piano
used as an orchestral instrument (Griffes was among
the first Americans to do this). The composer himself
has described his imagery. Regarding the tremulous
introduction, he wrote: “The vague, foggy beginning
suggests the sacred river, running ‘through caverns
measureless to man down to a sunless sea.’ ” Next he
suggests “the gardens with fountains and ‘sunny spots of
greenery,’ ” heard in the sinuous lines introduced by flute
and oboe over quiet strings. Then: “From inside come
sounds of dancing revelry, which increase to a wild climax
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Born: April 1, 1873, Semyonovo, district of Starorusky,
Russia
Died: March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills, California
Concerto No. 3 in D minor for Piano and
Orchestra, Opus 30
i
n October 1906 Rachmaninoff moved from Moscow to
Dresden with his wife and their daughter, Irina, aiming
to take himself out of circulation. He was a busy pianist
and conductor—he had just concluded two years as
principal conductor at the Bolshoi Opera—and he longed
for time just to write. But as offers to play and conduct
kept coming in, he decided to accept an invitation to visit
the United States. It was for this tour that he wrote his
Third Piano Concerto, and on November 28, 1909, he
introduced it with Walter Damrosch and the New York
Symphony. Soon after he played it again, and to his much
greater satisfaction, with the New York Philharmonic
under Gustav Mahler, another conductor struggling to
find time to compose.
allegro ma non tanto. Rachmaninoff invented arresting
beginnings for all his works for piano and orchestra. In
the first measure of the Third Concerto we find a quality
we do not usually associate with Rachmaninoff: simplicity.
For two measures, clarinet, bassoon, horn, timpani and
muted strings set up a pulse against which the piano
sings—or is it speaks?—a long and quiet melody, the two
hands in octaves as in a Schubert piano duet. It is a lovely
inspiration, that melody unfolding in subtle variation, just
a few notes being continually redisposed rhythmically.
Once only, to the extent of a single eighth note, does
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Program Notes
melody exceed the range of an octave; most of it stays
within a fifth.
The accompaniment cost Rachmaninoff considerable
trouble. He was thinking, he said, of the piano singing
the melody “as a singer would sing it, and [finding] a
suitable orchestral accompaniment, or rather, one that
would not muffle this singing.” What he found invites, for
precision and delicacy, comparison with the workmanship
in Mozart’s concertos. The accompaniment does indeed
let the singing through, but even while exquisitely tactful
in its recessiveness, it is absolutely specific—a real and
characterful invention, the fragmentary utterances of the
violins now anticipating, now echoing the pianist’s song,
the woodwinds sometimes and with utmost gentleness
reinforcing the bass or joining the piano in a few notes
of its melody. The further progress of the movement
abounds in felicities and ingenuities, sharply imagined
and elegantly executed.
Also, much more is asked of the pianist. The Third
Concerto makes immense demands on stamina, the
orchestral passages that frame the Intermezzo being the
soloist’s only moments of respite. Rachmaninoff sees the
soloist not merely as someone who can sing soulfully and
thunder imposingly, but as an alert, flexible, responsive
musician who knows how to listen, blend and accompany.
And even in this non-prima-donna role the challenge is
greater here than in the Second Concerto.
Instrumentation: solo piano with orchestra
comprising 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets,
2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones,
tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals,
snare drum, suspended cymbal and strings
Program note excerpted from the late Michael Steinberg’s
The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press,
1998), used with permission.
intermezzo: adagio. “Intermezzo” is a curiously shy
designation for a movement as expansive as this, though
we shall discover that it is in fact all upbeat to a still more
expansive Finale. It is a series of variations, broken up by
a feather-light waltz. The clarinet-and-bassoon melody
of the waltz is close cousin to the Concerto’s principal
theme, and the piano’s dizzying figuration, too, is made of
diminutions of the same material.
finale: alla breve. When the Intermezzo yields to the
explosive start of the Finale, we again find ourselves
caught up in a torrent of virtuosity and invention.
Rachmaninoff gives us the surprise of a series of
variations on what pretends to be a new idea but is in
fact an amalgam of the first movement’s second theme
and the beginning of the finale. His evocations of earlier
material are imaginative and structural achievements on
a level far above the naive quotation-mongering of, say,
César Franck or even Dvořák.
Rachmaninoff was anxious to put his best foot forward in
America. His Second Concerto had already been played
in New York, and Rachmaninoff wanted his new work to
convey a clear sense of his growing powers as composer
and pianist. It does have features in common with the
Second: the sparkling, dense, yet always lucid piano
style, a certain melancholy to the song, an extroverted
rhetorical stance, the apotheosized ending, even the final
YUM-pa-ta-TUM cadential formula that is as good as a
signature. But the differences are even more important,
and they are essentially matters of ambition and scope.
The procedures that hold this work together are far
beyond the capabilities of the composer of the Second
Concerto eight years earlier.
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Igor Stravinsky
Born: June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum
Died: April 6, 1971, New York City
The Rite of Spring [1947 version]
i
n the spring of 1910, while completing the
orchestration of The Firebird, Igor Stravinsky had the
most famous dream in the history of music: “I saw in
imagination a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated in
a circle, watching a young girl dancing herself to death.
They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.”
This idea became The Rite of Spring, which Stravinsky
began composing in the summer of 1911, immediately
after the premiere of Petrushka. For help in creating a
scenario that would evoke the spirit of pagan Russia,
Stravinsky turned to the painter-archeologist-geologist
Nicholas Roerich, who summarized the action:
“The first set should transport us to the foot of a sacred
hill, in a lush plain, where Slavonic tribes are gathered
together to celebrate the spring rites. In this scene there
is an old witch who predicts the future, a marriage by
capture, round dances. Then comes the most solemn
moment. The wise elder is brought from the village to
Program Notes
imprint his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth. During
this rite the crowd is seized with a mystic terror.
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This story of violence and nature-worship in pagan
Russia—inspired in part by Stravinsky’s boyhood
memories of the thunderous break-up of the ice on the
Neva River in St. Petersburg each spring—became a ballet
in two parts, The Adoration of the Earth and The Sacrifice.
haunting principal melody, another theme Stravinsky
derived from ancient folk music. Deep string chords
(which in the ballet accompany the male dancers’ lifting
the girls onto their backs) soon build to a cataclysmic
climax full of the sound of tam-tam and trombone
glissandos. The return of the wistful opening melody
rounds this section off quietly, but that calm is annihilated
by the timpani salvos and snarling low brass of Games of
the Rival Cities. The eight horns ring out splendidly here,
and the music rushes ahead to the brief Procession of the
Wise Elder and then to one of the eeriest moments in the
score, Adoration of the Earth. Only four measures long,
this concludes with an unsettling chord for eleven solo
strings, all playing harmonics, as the Wise Elder bends to
kiss the earth. The music explodes, and Dance of the Earth
races to the conclusion of the ballet’s first half.
ancient and modern
the sacrifice
In the music, Stravinsky drew on the distant past and
fused it with the modern. His themes, many adapted
from ancient Lithuanian wedding tunes, are brief, of
narrow compass, and based on the constantly changing
meters of Russian folk music, yet his harmonic language
can be fiercely dissonant and “modern,” particularly in
the famous repeating chord in Dance of the Adolescents,
where he superimposes an E-flat major chord (with added
seventh) on top of an F-flat major chord. Even more
striking is the rhythmic imagination that animates this
score: Stravinsky himself confessed that parts were so
complicated that while he could play them, he could not
write them down.
The second part of the work might be thought of as
a gradual crescendo of excitement. It moves from a
misty beginning (an inspiration to generations of film
composers) to the exultant fury of the concluding
Sacrificial Dance. Along the way come such distinctive
moments as the solo for alto flute in Mysterious Circles of
Young Girls, where the sacrificial maiden will be chosen;
the violently pounding 11/4 measure that thrusts the
music into Glorification of the Chosen One; the nodding,
bobbing bassoons that herald Evocation of the Ancestors
(another folk-derived theme of constricted range yet of
great metric variety);and the shrieking horns of Ritual of
the Ancestors.
And beyond all these, The Rite of Spring is founded on an
incredible orchestral sense: from the eerie sound of the
high solo bassoon at the beginning through its use of a
massive percussion section and such unusual instruments
as alto flute and piccolo trumpet (not to mention the
eight horns, two tubas and quadruple woodwinds), this
score rings with sounds never heard before. The premiere
may have provoked a noisy riot, but at a more civilized
level it had an even greater impact: no music written after
May 29, 1913, would ever be the same.
A solitary bass clarinet plunges us into the Sacrificial
Dance, whose rhythmic complexity has become legendary:
this was the section that Stravinsky could play but at first
not write down, and in 1943 (30 years after composing
this music) he went back and rebarred it in the effort to
make it easier for performers. This music is dauntingly
“black” on the page, with its furious energy, its quite short
(and constantly changing) bar lengths and its gathering
excitement. It dances its way to a delicate violin trill, and
The Rite of Spring concludes with the brutal chord that
marks the climactic moment of sacrifice.
“After this uprush of terrestrial joy, the second scene sets
a celestial mystery before us. Young virgins dance on the
sacred hill amid enchanted rocks; they choose the victim
they intend to honor. In a moment she will dance her
last dance before the ancients clad in bearskins to show
that the bear was man’s ancestor. Then the greybeards
dedicate the victim to the god Yarilo.”
the adoration of the earth
The Introduction is scored almost exclusively for
woodwinds: from the famous opening bassoon solo
through its intricately twisting woodwind figures, the
music suggests the wriggling of insects as they unfold
and come to life in the spring thaw. This is suddenly
interrupted by Dance of the Adolescents, driven along by
stamping, dissonant chords and off-the-beat accents.
The Mock Abduction, full of horn calls and furious
rhythmic energy, rides a quiet trill into Rounds of Spring,
where together the E-flat and bass clarinets outline the
Instrumentation: 3 flutes, alto flute, piccolo
(1 flute doubling piccolo), 4 oboes, English horn
(1 oboe doubling English horn), 3 clarinets, bass clarinet
(1 clarinet doubling bass clarinet), E-flat clarinet,
4 bassoons, contrabassoon (1 bassoon doubling
contrabassoon), 8 horns (2 doubling tenor Wagner
tuben), 4 trumpets, (1 doubling bass trumpet),
piccolo trumpet, 3 trombones, 2 tubas,
antique cymbals in B-flat/A-flat, cymbals, bass drum,
guiro, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle and strings
Program note by Eric Bromberger.
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