JANUARY 2016 PROGRAM NOTES
by Steven Ledbetter
AN-LUN HUANG (b. 1949)
Saibei Dance, from Saibei Suite No. 2 for Orchestra, Opus 21
An-Lun Huang was born in China in 1949. He composed the Saibei Dance, a movement from the suite of the same name, in 1975. It is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, bass drum, and strings. Approximate performance time is 4 minutes.
Like many composers of his generation, An-lun Huang had to contend with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which educated persons of every type were disgraced and sent to do manual labor, often far from their original place of residence. His father, Huang Fei, was a conductor of music in the Western tradition who had studied with Paul Hindemith at Yale. As a boy An-Lun Huang began piano lessons at the age of 5, but his formal studies ended in the 1960s. He persevered during this difficult period, and in 1976, at twenty-seven, he was named resident composer and assistant conductor at the Central Opera House in Beijing.
The previous year he had already composed the Saibei Suite No. 2, from which the Saibei Dance is taken. He emigrated to Canada in 1980; later he studied at the Trinity College of Music in London in 1983. He took his master’s degree at Yale, his father’s old school, and settled in Ontario, becoming a leading figure in Chinese-Canadian musical life. His voluminous output includes some 20 symphonies and 11 operas in which, like many Chinese composers who came to the Western hemisphere after the Cultural Revolution, he fuses both Chinese and Western musical elements.
The Saibei Suite evokes a particular region north of the Great Wall of China where the character of the folk music is often marked by large melodic leaps. The Saibei Dance, extracted from the full suite, is one of the most popular sections of one of his most successful works. It is a lively, festive dance evoking the vigorous way in which the farmers of the Saibei region celebrate the harvest. The dance features winds and percussion to evoke the musical style of northwest China.
PIotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 35
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born at Votkinsk, in the district of Vyatka, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He composed the Violin Concerto at Clarens, Switzerland, in March 1878, completing it on April 11. A few days later he replaced the original Andante with the present Canzonetta. The first performance was given by Adolf Brodsky at a Vienna Philharmonic concert conducted by Hans Richter on December 4, 1881. In addition to the solo violin, the concerto calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 33 minutes.
Twice Tchaikovsky suffered the indignity of having one of his major concertos rejected by the musicians for whom they were intended. With both of his most famous and popular concertos—the Piano Concerto No. 1 in B‑flat minor, and the Violin Concerto in D—he found a different musician to perform them and start their paths to worldwide renown. In 1875 the composer’s close friend Nikolai Rubinstein, the intended dedicatee of the piano concerto, sadly assured Tchaikovsky that the piece disgusted him from beginning to end. Three years later a similar scene occurred when Tchaikovsky brought the completed Violin Concerto—hot off the presses—to the great violinist and teacher Leopold Auer.
Auer regretted that Tchaikovsky had not shown him the work before committing it to print, for he found places where, for technical reasons, the solo part needed adjustment, and he had his doubts over its worth as a whole. The composer finally brought out a new edition dedicated to the young violinist Adolph Brodsky, who gave the premiere performance. (It is worth adding that both Rubinstein and Auer later made amends to Tchaikovsky for their first impressions, playing his concertos frequently and brilliantly. Auer, in particular, helped make Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto one of the most popular works of its kind in the world by teaching it to his students, including Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, and others.)
The response to the world premiere in Vienna, despite Brodsky’s valiant sponsorship of the work, was not at all that Tchaikovsky might have wished. The under-rehearsed orchestra, out of sheer timidity, played everything pianissimo. And the conservative dean of Viennese music critics, Eduard Hanslick, found little to like in the piece. He claimed that Tchaikovsky was “obsessed with posturing as a genius, lacking discrimination and taste,” and that in his new concerto, the violin is “tugged about, torn, beaten black and blue.” Worst of all was the finale, which “transports us to the brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian church festival. We see a host of savage, vulgar faces, we hear crude curses, and smell the booze....[T]here may be compositions whose stink one can hear.”
A century later we can be amused and astonished by Hanslick’s animadversions. For the Tchaikovsky concerto quickly entered the international repertory, ranking in popularity with the violin concertos of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms. As in his First Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky opens with a winning melody we’ll never hear again. This gracious beginning turns suspenseful, in preparation for the soloist’s first entrance. The violin part does indeed have technical fireworks—of the kind that evidently frightened Hanslick—but there is also plenty of opportunity for lyrical, singing themes.
The slow movement is a second thought, composed after Tchaikovsky and a violinist friend had played through the concerto for the first time (with a different second movement) in April 1878. In the present Canzonetta, the solo violin is a gem providing lovely melodies for which the accompaniment is the beautifully detailed setting. Tchaikovsky links his slow movement directly to the finale (quite possibly recalling Beethoven’s concerto in this matter). Here Tchaikovsky indulges cheerfully in nationalistic themes, hinting at (if not actually quoting) folk melodies. The energy and verve are utterly winning. By now, we are entirely used to composers like Bartók, who exploit folk material far more “authentically” than Tchaikovsky; from the distance of a century, his musical folklore even seems perhaps a little sanitized, though the urbane and “civilized” Hanslick clearly didn’t find it so. For us, though, it provides a close that is hearty, vigorous and inspiriting.
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)
Symphony No. 8 in G major, Opus 88
Antonín Dvořák was born at Mühlhausen (Nelahozeves), Bohemia, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He wrote his Symphony No. 8 between August 26 and November 8, 1889, and conducted the first performance in Prague, on February 2, 1890. The symphony is scored for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 34 minutes.
Antonín Dvořák was the warm-hearted, deeply religious son of a humble butcher who rose to international celebrity on the strength of his musical gift without ever losing touch with his roots. He had picked up the rudiments of music in his father's establishment (a combination of butcher shop and pub), learned to play the fiddle at village weddings, and became a professional violist, sitting for years in the orchestra pit of the opera house in Prague. (This experience, playing the instrument that frequently has the least interesting part in an orchestral texture, may well have influenced Dvořák's treatment of the orchestra; he is noted for passing the goodies around, for giving every instrument and section some special part to play, and that is certainly one of the reasons why musicians so much love to perform his music.)
As his fame developed, Dvořák grew increasingly upset with his publisher Simrock, who was not much interested in large orchestral works, but longed for a steady stream of small, popular nationalistic pieces like the phenomenally successful Slavonic Dances. Simrock claimed that symphonies did not sell as well as the Slavonic Dances, which is only natural. Dvořák said that he had a lot of ideas for big pieces in his head, and that if no ideas for small ones should appear, "I shall simply do what God tells me to do." The success and publication of his Stabat Mater by the English firm of Novello had put him in a very strong position for such a discussion. Dvořák could be reasonably sure that some English publisher would be happy to accept his new work.
Thus bolstered by confidence, Dvořák set quickly to work, starting the Eighth Symphony on August 26, 1889. He completed a detailed sketch in just two and a half weeks (September 6 to 23) and the full score in Prague on November 8. The work was indeed published by Novello. Dvořák conducted the first performance in Prague, on February 2, 1890; he introduced it to London less than three months later, and in June 15, 1891, he led a performance in Cambridge the day before he received an honorary doctorate from the university.
As the ease with which he composed it might indicate, the Eighth is a relaxed, cheerful composition, the most Czech of all Dvořák's symphonies in its suggestion of daily life, hints of folk song and dance; it is a lovable work, filled with sunshine, despite the frequent, but passing, shadows.
The first movement overflows with a wealth of thematic ideas. It opens with a darkly mellow theme intoned by the cellos and clarinets in G minor, which prepares for the sun-bright entrance of the solo flute with a theme of astonishing simplicity that proves capable of extensive development. Dvořák's flow of ideas lavishly combines reworking of material from the introduction and the principal theme with anticipations of themes that will blossom into new expressive worlds. The introductory theme had been an afterthought with Dvořák, but he found ways to work it into the heart of the movement by beginning the development section and recapitulation with renewed statements. The development starts almost exactly like the opening of the symphony but quickly moves to new keys and inventive reworking of the ideas already presented. At the climax, the introductory theme blares forth in the trumpets over stormy string passages that gradually die away to bring back the sunshine of G major and the recapitulation.
No movement of the symphony more fully captures its quality of sunlight-and-shadows than the second, which moves freely between C minor and its real home of C major, poignant song (with a smile through tears) and cheerful contentment thoroughly intertwined.
The third movement is dominated by the waltz, but—like the great Viennese masters of the genre—Dvořák infuses all sorts of moods into its graceful measures. The most captivating of all the waltz themes occurs in the middle section, where he quotes from his 1874 comic opera The Stubborn Lovers, where the tune was used to set the words, “So young the maiden, so old the man.” The same melody is transformed in the movement's lively 2/4 coda.
The last movement is the most Czech of all, filled with materials of folk origin. Formally it is cast as a kind of freewheeling variation form anticipated by a trumpet fanfare, then presented in varying colorful guises, including curious intimations of eastern Slavic folk music, showpieces for different solo instruments, and brilliant outbursts for the full orchestra, like the one that brings the symphony to its end.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)