NWS Fellows offer an electrifying evening in this season’s final performance at the Adrienne Arsht Center. Cristian Măcelaru, a University of Miami Frost School of Music graduate and new Chief Conductor of Cologne’s WDR Symphony Orchestra, commands the podium in Richard Strauss’ Don Juan. Brimming with passion, this heroic tone poem reframes the famed heartbreaker’s pursuits. Performing together for over four decades, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio combines three acclaimed solo artists into one dynamite performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. The thrilling frenzy of George Enescu’s virtuosic First Romanian Rhapsody is grounded in the folk and gypsy traditions of his homeland, while J.S. Bach’s celebrated Ricercar undergoes an inventive reimagining in Anton Webern’s arrangement for chamber orchestra.

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Program

Johann Sebastian Bach

Ricercar No. 2 from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079 (1747)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes

King Frederick II of Prussia, a.k.a. “Frederick the Great,” was a committed patron of the arts and a talented flutist and composer himself. He hired Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to be his court’s main keyboard player (and his go-to chamber music partner), and he equipped him with the finest new instruments, including a fortepiano built by Gottfried Silbermann. When Bach’s father Johann Sebastian came to visit Potsdam in 1747, he tested out that cutting-edge keyboard instrument at a concert, improvising a fugue on the spot after the king presented him with an original theme.

J. S. Bach took that “royal theme” back home to Leipzig and used it to generate a collection of canons, fugues and other movements grouped together as The Musical Offering, which he dedicated to Frederick. Besides the three-part fugue born out of the improvisation, Bach wrote another contrapuntal treatment for six voices, labeling both selections “Ricercar.” (From the Italian “to seek out,” the term first applied to the early Baroque polyphony that preceded fugues.) Bach wrote this Ricercar with each part on its own staff, but he did not specify the instrumentation.

Nearly 200 years later, a publisher commissioned an arrangement of the six-voice Ricercar from Anton Webern, a protégé of Schoenberg who distilled his teacher’s atonal techniques to their utmost concentration and clarity. Just as in his own compositions, Webern deconstructed Bach’s fugue through the process known as Klangfarbenmelodie (“tone-color-melody”), in which a continuous musical line breaks into small fragments with distinctive tone colors. The first statement of the fugue’s subject, for instance, passes the single line among muted trombone, horn and trumpet, reinforced with a few flecks of harp. Even amid the most tangled counterpoint, the surgical precision of Webern’s orchestration magnifies the wonder of Bach’s fugue and the endless possibilities he found in the king’s serpentine theme.

Richard Strauss

Don Juan, Op. 20 (1888)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes

Richard Strauss began his musical life with conservative tastes, taking after his father (the great horn player Franz Strauss) in a preference for the Classical style of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. It was only once Strauss left home that his ears opened up to the “music of the future,” to quote a phrase associated with his new musical idol, Richard Wagner. In time, Strauss would inherit Wagner’s mantle as the king of forward-thinking opera, thanks to works like Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). But first he followed another progressive icon, Franz Liszt, into the realm of the symphonic poem, an orchestral genre of musical storytelling. Strauss’ first true “tone poem, ” to use his preferred label, was Macbeth (1888), but it was the subsequent tone poem, Don Juan, that earned the 25-year-old Strauss a permanent place in the highest echelon of German composers.

Strauss came to know the story of Don Juan—or Don Giovanni in Italian—through Mozart’s opera. The Spanish writer Tirso de Molina published the first known version around 1630 under the title El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest), but the story had been in oral circulation for some time before that printed edition. Strauss modeled his tone poem on a particular version of the legend concocted by the Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850).

Strauss did not spell out exactly how the tone poem lines up with the story, but the music itself is quite demonstrative. The dashing passage at the beginning surely marks the appearance of Don Juan, the insatiable seducer, while the coy phrases that come in response must be his conquests. The amorous episodes, interspersed with pangs of self-doubt and regret, build to the central romance of the work, a vulnerable love song first offered by a solo oboe. (Strauss wrote Don Juan during his courtship of the soprano Pauline de Ahna, and the tender feelings he conjured in this episode might offer a window into his own affections for his future wife.) A vigorous horn motive brings back the rakish aspect of Don Juan, and the ensuing storminess rushes him to judgment.

In Lenau’s version of the story, Don Juan dies when he drops his defenses in a duel with the father of a woman he seduced. The music representing this scene reaches a tense silence, and then an eerie coda leads to a final state of unsettled, trembling quietude.

George Enescu

Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 in A major, Op. 11 (1901)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

George Enescu was a child prodigy who began playing violin at age four and composing at five. He left his native Romania at seven, studying first in Vienna and then at the illustrious Paris Conservatory, where he trained under Massenet and Fauré. Not long after he graduated, Enescu composed two Romanian Rhapsodies, following the model of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. The First Rhapsody in particular became a crowd favorite, and this festive music written before his 20th birthday shaped the public’s perception of Enescu for the rest of his career (much to his chagrin). Few can resist the work’s youthful charm and vigor, from its first playful quotations of a Romanian drinking song to its saucy finish.

-- © 2020 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Concerto in C major for Piano, Violin, Cello and Orchestra, Op. 56, "Triple Concerto" (1803)
Approximate duration: 33 minutes

History has been unkind to Beethoven’s “Triple” Concerto, a work created in the most heroic phase of the orchestral world’s favorite composer. Coming on the heels of the “Eroica” Symphony No. 3, the unprecedented Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano was a product of Beethoven’s groundbreaking “middle” period. It was a time when encroaching deafness reoriented this keyboard virtuoso’s relationship to composing and performing, and when his style advanced past the tidy aesthetic he inherited from Haydn and Mozart to the bold and elemental approach that ushered in music’s Romantic age.

The “Triple” Concerto was Beethoven’s take on the Sinfonia concertante—a concerto for multiple soloists that had been popular since the 1770s, updating the Baroque trend of the concerto grosso that embedded a group of soloists within a larger ensemble. Beethoven may have been the first composer to craft a Sinfonia concertante for violin, cello and piano, but it was a chamber music configuration he knew well, having released a set of three trios for the same instrumentation as his Opus 1.

Beethoven’s former student and early biographer, Anton Schindler, was responsible for advancing the story that the “Triple” Concerto was designed to feature the Archduke Rudolph, the Emperor’s teenaged brother who began taking piano lessons from Beethoven around 1803. Subsequent research has determined that Beethoven himself played the piano part at an initial private reading in 1804, hosted and paid for by his patron Prince Lobkowitz. Beethoven published the “Triple” Concerto in 1807 with a dedication to the prince, and the first public performance appears to have occurred in 1808, possibly featuring Marie Bigot, a French pianist in Vienna who was much admired by Haydn and Beethoven and who later taught young Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.

The apparently false story tying the “Triple” Concerto to Archduke Rudolf has left an unfortunate residue: It comes with the implication that the piano part was intentionally simplistic, so as not to overtax an amateur. What we can hear for ourselves is that the piano is one part of a whole, perfectly positioned to support and not overwhelm its fellow soloists. From the proud Allegro that opens the Concerto, through the hushed Largo, and on to the dance-inspired Rondo alla polacca, the convivial interplay among three equals provides a charming counterpoint to the weightier themes that dominated Beethoven’s life and music circa 1804, a time of profound struggle and isolation.

Adrienne Arsht Center - Knight Concert Hall Seat Map

Welcome to Keynotes, NWS's new program-based podcast! NWS audiences can now soak up musical clips and commentary for an upcoming performance while on the road, in the kitchen or at work -- wherever life takes you! Keynotes will be available for select concerts throughout the season. Let us set the stage for your concert experience by sharing noteworthy moments guided by NWS’s program note annotator Aaron Grad. Audio clips provided by Naxos of America, Inc. 

For Aaron's full program notes, click here.