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Primal Paradise: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring apr 23, 24 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 I Igor Stravinsky music up close N T E R M I S S I The Rite of Spring [1947 revision] Part I: The Adoration of the Earth Part II: The Sacrifice O N 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. M ARCH / APRI L 2015 M I NNES O TA O RCHEST R A 49 apr 23, 24 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. 50 MINN E S O T A O R CH ESTRA SHOWC A SE Program Notes apr 23, 24 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 M ARCH / APRI L 2015 M I NNES O TA O RCHEST R A 51 apr 23, 24 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. 52 M INN E S O T A O R CH EST RA SHOWC A SE 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. apr 23, 24 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. M ARCH / APRI L 2015 M I NNES O TA O RCHEST R A 53