Travel in time with MTT as he covers over 250 years of music in one concert! Begin with J.S. Bach’s masterful Third Brandenburg Concerto, before delving into Slavic sensations. World-renowned violinist Christian Tetzlaff, hailed for being a refined virtuoso with incisive brilliance, is mesmerizing to witness live, especially when performing György Ligeti’s rare Concerto. Antonín Dvořák celebrates all things Czech in his cheerful Eighth Symphony, while Bedřich Smetana’s famed Overture is a humorous romp.

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Program

Johann Sebastian Bach

Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048 (1718)
Approximate duration: 10 minutes

At a time when his job in Cöthen was threatened by his patron’s marriage to a woman uninterested in music, Bach assembled six concerti grossi and sent them off to the Duke of Brandenburg, whom he had met while buying a harpsichord in Berlin. The Duke never even responded to this unsolicited job application, but nonetheless Bach’s collection will forever be known as the Brandenburg Concertos.

Bach’s scores elaborated on the template developed a generation earlier by the Italian composer Archangelo Corelli, who pioneered these “grand concertos” for groups of soloists (usually two violins and cello) working within an accompanying ensemble of strings and basso continuo. Each of Bach’s examples tests a different configuration of soloists, including the radical example of the Third Brandenburg Concerto, in which every instrumental part functions as an indendent solo voice, apart from the shared basso continuo foundation.

The Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 uses three violins, three violas and three cellos, and the first movement sends a three-note motive cascading through all the voices. (The spiritual significance of the number three in Christian theology was surely not lost on Bach, a devout Lutheran.)

Instead of a full slow movement, Bach only notated two linking chords, leaving the performers the option of inserting an improvised cadenza.

The Concerto closes with a barreling finale, its tempo and character matching the reeling gigues that conclude most of Bach’s dance suites. 

 

György Ligeti

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1989-93)
Approximate duration: 28 minutes

György Ligeti began composing in a folk-influenced style indebted to his Hungarian predecessors Bartók and Kodály, but in the 1960s he forged a groundbreaking new technique he dubbed “micropolyphony,” an otherworldly sound that figured prominently in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. After reaching a fantastical extreme in the 1977 opera Le Grand Macabre, Ligeti once again reinvented his style, finding inspiration from sources as diverse as fractal geometry and African polyrhythms.

That final phase of Ligeti’s career saw him reinvigorating traditional forms, including a Horn Trio (1982), a book of Etudes for piano (1985) and a Piano Concerto (1988). The Violin Concerto, composed in several stages between 1989 and 1993, continued that Classical fixation, starting with its movement headings. In the Concerto’s opening Praeludium, the music melts from pure consonance to alien sonorities, colored by ethereal harmonics and a detuned violin and viola in the orchestra.

A fractured melody spikes out from the solo violin’s slurred figurations with percussive reinforcement, and the prelude continues as a dizzy whir of contrapuntal textures.

The second movement references three more historical forms, starting with an Aria that recalls Ligeti’s Hungarian roots. The violin plays a folk-like melody—adapted from his early composition Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet—on its earthy G-string, in a manner that is “songlike, simple but expressive.”

The Latin term Hoquetus in the movement heading refers to the technique known in English as hocketing, a type of rapid, ricocheting counterpoint with roots in Medieval church singing. Plucked chords from the violin snap against a breathy choir of ocarinas, those ancient forerunners of the flute. 

Later, a chorale, led by ocarinas and slide whistles, transforms into a hushed brass hymn. The movement concludes with final elaborations on the folk-like theme from the violin and alto flute.

In the central Intermezzo, ghostly swirls from the subdivided strings recall the dizzying textures of Ligeti’s micropolyphony. Gradually these tumbling bursts overtake the entire orchestra until they reach a sudden breaking point.

The Passacaglia references another historical technique, in which a cycling motive repeats continuously. Passing from instrument to instrument, a chromatic scale rises seamlessly under long, hovering tones from the solo violin.

Rather than naming a form, the finale’s heading describes the music’s Appassionato (“impassioned”) character. The violin enters playing chords “with fear, as if screaming.”

Coming out of a ritualistic climax, the violin returns to a soft, singing lyricism, only to be caught up again in the violent agitation. In one last nod to the Classical concerto tradition, the soloist peels away for a free cadenza.

 

Bedřich Smetana

Overture to The Bartered Bride (1863-66)
Approximate duration: 7 minutes

Bedřich Smetana, born in a small Bohemian castle town, came into his own as a composer at a time when his country was pushing back against Austrian political and cultural dominance. He devoted himself to studying Czech (having grown up speaking and writing mainly in German), and his Czech-language operas helped bolster a new theater scene in Prague.

Smetana composed his second opera, The Bartered Bride, between 1863 and 1866. In the country village where the story takes place, the young Mařenka has fallen in love with Jeník, while her parents have arranged for her to marry a wealthy stranger. Through various schemes and subterfuges (interwoven with comic relief in the form of drinking songs, dances, a traveling circus, a conniving stepmother, and a man in a bear costume), the lovers eventually receive the blessing to wed.

As heard in the Overture, The Bartered Bride uses sounds associated with local folk music, starting with an opening flourish built from a pentatonic scale, that five-note pattern found in many folk traditions around the world.

Perpetual-motion figures in the strings suggest the gaiety of country fiddlers, setting the stage for the lively village fair in the first scene. Even in this rustic tribute to local life, the staggered entrances and amassed harmonies show Smetana’s commitment to traditional Austro-German craftsmanship.

 

Antonín Dvořák

Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88 (1889)
Approximate duration: 36 minutes

Antonín Dvořák came from a small Bohemian village, where his zither-playing father was the local butcher and innkeeper. Over time, Dvořák’s devotion to his Czech musical roots would be seen as a defining virtue, but for years he battled prejudice that he was not an “international” composer—that is to say, one who worked squarely within the traditional Austro-German musical language. In the 1880s he found his strongest champions off the continent in London, where he was viewed as a true heir to Beethoven; he even composed his Seventh Symphony for the same Royal Philharmonic Society that had commissioned Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Proceeds from his London trips and publishing deals allowed Dvořák to fulfill his dream of buying a country house near his in-laws in the Bohemian village of Vysoká, where he spent idyllic summers composing, walking through the woods and tending to his garden and pigeons. He composed his Eighth Symphony there in 1889, filling the G-major composition with sunny tunes, bright fanfares and bird calls.

Dvořák was aghast when his regular publisher, Simrock, offered to buy the Eighth Symphony for only one-sixth of the price paid for the very popular Seventh Symphony. Simrock, at the suggestion of Brahms, had plucked Dvořák from obscurity and near-poverty in 1878, but now the publisher wanted Dvořák to keep producing small and light pieces like the Slavonic Dances. Using his new connections in England, Dvořák instead sold the Eighth Symphony to Novello, which published it in London in 1892, numbered at the time as the Fourth Symphony. 

The Symphony’s home key is G major, and its starting tempo is Allegro con brio (Fast, with vigor), but the deceptive opening gives the impression that the expressive, G-minor theme in the cellos constitutes a slow introduction.

A solo flute responds by rising up the three notes of the G-major arpeggio and then bouncing through a series of bird-like chirps. Its last note seems to sustain indefinitely (thanks to a piccolo that takes over), and the orchestra gathers strength until it becomes clear that we have been in the fast tempo and proper key all along. A brief chorale from the violas and cellos adds another melodic delight, and then another climb leads to a full-throated arrival of the flute’s triad/birdcall theme.

The entire Symphony is characterized by this abundance of melody and freedom of movement. In the slow second movement, an initial string hymn (starting with four rising notes) is juxtaposed with a woodwind-led response (again prefaced by four rising notes), with the flute adding bird-like alternations that recall the first movement. These basic gestures populate the whole movement, creating organic cohesion among the diverse passages. 

Instead of a rowdy scherzo, the Allegretto grazioso third movement begins as a debonair waltz in G minor. The melody enters with the three preparatory notes that rise up an arpeggio, a familiar gesture that underscores the careful connections unifying the separate movements.

The central trio section moves to G major, starting with a transition that seamlessly initiates a new rhythmic pattern. Dvořák recycled the melody shared here by flute and oboe from an earlier comic opera.

The movement ends unexpectedly with a very lively coda that transforms the trio section’s smooth melody into a dancelike pattern of repeated notes first pecked out by a quartet of oboes and bassoons.

As the Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík once said, “In Bohemia the trumpets never call to battle—they always call to the dance!”

After the trumpets’ brilliant announcement to start the finale, the cellos enter with a graceful theme that once again starts with a rising triad. It is another reminder that this Symphony, so relaxed and indubitably Czech, operates beneath the surface with as much rigor and integrity as any Germanic masterpiece.

-- Copyright © 2019 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.