Let the celebration begin! MTT opens NWS’s 30th Anniversary Season with a blockbuster program of Russian masterworks starring piano virtuoso Yuja Wang. One of the world’s greatest talents and Musical America’s 2017 Artist of the Year, Wang takes on two musical giants with her trademark panache. Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Concerto is a worldly kaleidoscope of styles—from New York jazz to Parisian impressionism—while Sergei Prokofiev’s Fifth Concerto is a wildly virtuosic showstopper. Drama and romance leap from Prokofiev’s vivid portrayal of Shakespeare’s classic and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espanol brings the fiery rhythms of flamenco to the orchestra stage.

This concert is sponsored in part by Micky and Madeleine Arison Family Foundation and William Strong.

CITI PRE-CONCERT CHAT FOR SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14: Join NWS Fellows Darren Hicks, Rachel Sandman and Stephen Kehner for a free Pre-Concert Chat in SoundScape Park! These half-hour chats begin one hour prior to the performance. There will not be a pre-concert chat on Sunday, October 15. 

 

Program

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Cappriccio espagnol, Op. 34 (1887)
Approximate duration: 15 minutes

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov rose to prominence among the group of nationalist composers known as the “Russian Five.” In the wake of a successful fantasy for violin and orchestra on Russian themes, he turned to Spain for inspiration in Capriccio espagnol. Between that work and his next published opus, the Arabian-themed Scheherezade, Rimsky-Korsakov established a model for sparkling, evocative orchestration that is still the envy of composers to this day. 

Capriccio espagnol begins with festive wake-up call in the form of an Alborada, the morning equivalent of an evening serenade. 

In the Variations movement that follows, the horns present a sweet and peaceful theme over a steady accompaniment. 

The variations offer a master class in orchestration, reframing the same slow-moving theme in a dazzling array of symphonic colors. 

A slightly modified repeat of the Alborada, transposed to a different key, bookends the Variations movement. 

The most demonstrably “Spanish” music of Capriccio espagnol comes in the dramatic fourth movement labeled Scene and Gypsy Song. Solo cadenzas capture the free-flowing spirit of the cante jondo, or “deep song,” an emotionally charged style of flamenco singing. 

The final movement takes up a Spanish folk dance style, the Fandango. The Gaelic tone of the music is well suited to the remote northern region of Asturias, which was settled by the Celts (who brought a form of bagpipes) and never conquered by the Moors. 

The castanets (and bouncing bow strokes from the strings that imitate the same percussive effect) provide a signature Spanish color. 

 
Additional Resources

PDF score from the IMSLP Petrucci Music Library

Classic orchestration textbook by Rimsky-Korsakov

Online orchestration course developed from the Rimsky-Korsakov textbook

 

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Concerto No. 4 in G minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 40 (1926; revised 1941)
Approximate duration: 24 minutes

Sergei Rachmaninoff established a solid reputation as a composer and conductor in the early years of the 20th century, but it was his virtuosity at the piano that elevated him to international stardom. When the Russian Revolution forced him into exile at the end of 1917, he embraced the lucrative but exhausting business of touring as a virtuoso pianist around the United States and Europe, relegating his composing to the rare breaks in his performing schedule.

The centerpieces of Rachmaninoff’s repertoire were the three piano concertos he had composed in Russia, including a revision of the early First Concerto he undertook in 1917. When he carved out a sabbatical from touring in 1925, he used the time in New York and Dresden to fulfill his long-held desire to add a Fourth Concerto, a work he introduced with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski in 1927.

In a letter to fellow composer (and dedicatee) Nikolai Medtner, Rachmaninoff expressed misgivings about the Concerto’s length, and his concerns were only amplified by poor reviews, like one from a New York critic declaring the work “long-winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry.” Rachmaninoff made cuts that shaved about 10 percent of its length before publishing the score in 1928; still unsatisfied, he trimmed another 10 percent in 1941, creating the authoritative version that he once again presented with the Philadelphia Orchestra, now led by Eugene Ormandy. It was the final compositional project and premiere performance for the 68-year-old Rachmaninoff, who died less than two years later.

The Fourth Piano Concerto stands with one foot in the nostalgic, Romantic past, and the other in the forward-looking climate of 1920s experimentation. The first theme from the piano, presented in grand chords, combines swashbuckling virtuosity with free-ranging harmonies voiced in a stuttering orchestral accompaniment.

Rachmaninoff often seems most at ease when writing in a lyrical vein, and the opening movement’s contrasting theme is no exception, with its liquid textures that recall his old classmate Scriabin infused with hints of jazz and Broadway sentimentality.

Seventh-chords and other jazz staples also arise in the central Largo, another sign of Rachmaninoff’s attentiveness to the music he encountered in New York.

With its mercurial, minor-key charms, the finale bears a family resemblance to Rachmaninoff’s other late masterpiece for piano and orchestra, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini from 1934.

The Dies Irae plainchant makes a subtle appearance during a wistful passage. It rounds out Rachmaninoff’s lifelong obsession with the motive that arises in all three of his symphonies, Isle of the Dead, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and his last completed work before this revised concerto, the Symphonic Dances.

 

Additional Resources

Online score from publisher Boosey and Hawkes (requires free login)

Article on Rachmaninoff’s revisions by pianist Scott Davie

Recording of Rachmaninoff playing the Fourth Piano Concerto in 1941

 

Sergei Prokofiev

Concerto No. 5 in G minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 55 (1931-32)
Approximate duration: 22 minutes

Prokofiev was already an adroit composer by the time he enrolled at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory at the age of 13, thanks in large part to his well-off family having hired the composer Reinhold Glière as a live-in music tutor. When Prokofiev finished his studies a decade later, he could point to the two piano concertos he had premiered himself as early highlights on his growing résumé as a pianist and composer.

After fleeing Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, Prokofiev hoped to establish a career in the mold of Rachmaninoff, who made an excellent living performing his own concertos with orchestras in the United States and beyond. But Prokofiev failed to win over American audiences, even when he wrote a Third Piano Concerto in 1921 specifically for a U.S. tour.

Next he tried restarting in Europe, but again he was out of step with current tastes. He wrote his Fourth Piano Concerto for left hand only, as commissioned by the wealthy Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right hand in World War I; upon receiving Prokofiev’s score in 1931, Wittgenstein replied, “Thank you for the Concerto, but I do not understand a single note in it and I will not play it.” (Prokofiev never got around to rearranging it for two hands as he had intended, and it was not performed during his lifetime.) Prokofiev wrote one last concerto and performed it with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1932, but already the momentum of his career was clear: The only place where he would find the appreciation and compensation he deserved was back in the Soviet Union.

The Piano Concerto No. 5 speaks to the crossroads that Prokofiev faced in his final European years. This unruly Concerto combines five short movements, far enough from the classical mold that Prokofiev planned to title it simply Music for Piano and Orchestra until a colleague talked him out of it. The opening movement forgoes any introductory pleasantries, as if the pianist simply begins playing on a whim and the orchestra must scramble to catch up. It’s a style that plays to the fashions of the day: music as incisive as Stravinsky and as nonchalant as Ravel.

Two fast movements show opposing sides of Prokofiev’s wit. The first is a clean and dashing march, a style aligned with Prokofiev’s long history of flirtatious music for dance and theater, while the fiery Toccata employs a darker, more menacing humor, its mood and musical material echoing the “European” aspects of the first movement.   

The Larghetto is devastatingly beautiful, framing its tranquil outer sections against the heated central climax. Instead of simply rounding out the Concerto with a jovial finale, the closing Vivo veers into a mysterious fantasy that almost fades into oblivion, until an accelerating coda marches it back from the brink.

 

Additional Resources

Video of Sviatoslav Richter’s landmark recording with scrolling score

The Many Faces of Prokofiev as seen through his piano concertos, by pianist Barbara Nissman

 

Sergei Prokofiev

Suite from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64 (1938)
Approximate duration: 26 minutes

Sergei Prokofiev was one of many artists who fled Russia amid the tumult of the 1917 Revolution, but he was the only major figure who repatriated in the Soviet Union. During his time in exile, first in the United States and later in France, Prokofiev found himself increasingly at odds with the musical elites who championed spiky, dissonant modernism. He found an audience more willing to embrace his self-proclaimed “new simplicity” when he embarked on a concert tour of the Soviet Union in 1927, and state-sponsored commissions for film scores and other major projects drew him ever closer to his homeland.

In 1934, Prokofiev negotiated a prestigious commission to create his first full-length ballet for the Kirov Theater in Leningrad (formerly and now once again the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg). He worked with the theater’s director to create a scenario based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but a shakeup in the theater leadership—an early warning sign of Stalin’s “Great Purge”—led the Kirov to drop the ballet. Prokofiev forged ahead and drafted the score in 1935, and he convinced the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow to take over the production, but once again politics and artistic squabbles derailed Romeo and Juliet.

It took until 1940 for a revised version of Romeo and Juliet to reach the stage, including musical changes made by the director over Prokofiev’s objections. During the delay, Prokofiev created several orchestral suites that have become the most common versions of Romeo and Juliet heard in the concert hall. This performance instead features excerpts selected by Michael Tilson Thomas from the first two acts of the full score, preserving their sequence in the dramatic arc of the ballet.

The Introduction to Act I sets the scene at dawn as the city of Verona awakens, until Romeo enters to the sound of bright-eyed plucking. Jumping to the next scene, The Young Juliet prepares for a ball at her family’s house and muses in the mirror. During the ball, the Capulet men present The Dance of the Knights with its brittle, menacing main theme. Prokofiev’s take on the Balcony Scene actually transpires later in the ballroom, with Juliet returning for a lost flower, at which point Romeo emerges from behind a column.

In The Duel from Act II, Tybalt (a Capulet) fights and kills Mercutio (a Montague). In the aftermath, Romeo Decides to Avenge Mercutio, leading to The Death of Tybalt, a sequence featuring some of the ballet’s most spry and ferocious music.

 

Additional Resources

Synopsis from American Ballet Theatre

Video of the complete Romeo and Juliet from Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet

Thoughts on patriarchy in The Dance of the Knights, from The New York Times dance critic Alistair Macaulay

-- Copyright © 2017 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.

Audio clips provided by Naxos of America, Inc.