Fresh off his latest Grammy Award win for Best Classical Instrumental Solo, violinist James Ehnes returns to NWS to perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s beloved “Turkish” Concerto. His last appearance with NWS garnered praise from South Florida Classical Review, who said “of his virtuosity, there is no question.” The struggles and spoils of WWII play out in Sergei Prokofiev’s unrestrained Sixth Symphony, led by Xian Zhang, Music Director of the New Jersey Symphony, who makes her NWS debut. Of its juxtaposing somber and jubilant themes, Prokofiev said "We are rejoicing in our magnificent victory, but thousands of us have been left with wounds that can't be healed. We must not forget this." Gioachino Rossini creates a lighthearted start with his playful operatic Overture.  

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Knight Foundation and New World Symphony: Reimagining Classical Music in the Digital Age. 

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WALLCAST® concerts are made possible with support from Hitachi, Knight Foundation, Sarah Arison and Thomas Wilhelm, Chanin and Adam Carlin, Susan D. Kronick and Edward Manno Shumsky, Will Osborne and Karen Bechtel, and William Strong. Knight Foundation and New World Symphony: Reimagining Classical Music in the Digital Age.

 

 

Program

Gioachino Rossini

Overture to The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813)
Approximate duration: 9 minutes

The 21-year-old Gioachino Rossini already had 10 operas under his belt when he composed L’Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers), and it took him only 18 days to craft the recycled libretto into a two-act dramma giocoso. It was this comic opera, along with the more serious Tancredi composed a few months earlier, that elevated Rossini from a successful working musician in Venice to an international opera star.

The premise of The Italian Girl in Algiers is that the sultan Mustafà, bored with the submissive wives in his harem, decides he must find a strong-willed Italian girl. He lucks out when a shipwreck delivers the beautiful Isabella to his shore, but in the end she proves to be more than he can handle. In the Overture (or sinfonia in Italian parlance), the music follows the same sonata-allegro structure that Haydn perfected in his symphonies, including the optional slow introduction that was a Haydn staple. And clearly the young Rossini learned plenty about musical humor from jolly Papa Haydn, as heard in the shocking outburst that interrupts the introduction’s idyllic plucking. There is barely a trace of the opera’s North African setting in the Overture (maybe just a whiff of exoticism in the woodwind solos and the spirited percussion), but audiences at this type of comic opera weren’t expecting authenticity; they were there to get swept up in Rossini’s wild crescendos, unforgettable tunes and infectious joy.

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Concerto No. 5 in A major for Violin and Orchestra, K. 219, "Turkish" (1775)
Approximate duration: 31 minutes

Stuck in a stifling job in his provincial hometown, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was forced to find his own creative outlets in his late teenage years. The exact circumstances that brought about the Violin Concerto No. 5 are unknown, but clearly this genre filled some void for Mozart, since he wrote four concertos just in 1775. Mozart was a very good violinist (trained by his father, a leader in the field of violin pedagogy), and he probably performed these concertos himself for the patrons he cultivated among Salzburg’s wealthy families.

The first movement of the Fifth Violin Concerto takes its cue from an unusual tempo indication, Allegro aperto, which moderates the fast pulse with a more broad and open character. The musical materials are similarly expansive, starting with a spacious theme pecked out in rising arpeggios by the violin sections. Breaking with convention, the soloist enters with a slow passage that postpones the repeat of the main themes.

The tender Adagio expands upon the quietude first explored in the opening movement’s slow interlude. The orchestra makes way at the end for a cadenza, which, as in the preceding movement, is left to the soloist to flesh out, since Mozart did not leave notated versions.

The finale, a rondo set in the three-beat tempo of a minuet, provides the source of the Concerto’s “Turkish” nickname. In a minor-key episode in the center of the movement, droning accompaniments, thudding rhythmic patterns and swelling chromatic passages evoke the neighboring Ottoman Empire and its frightful military, a longstanding foe of the Holy Roman Empire ruled from Vienna.

 

Sergei Prokofiev

Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor, Op. 111 (1947)
Approximate duration: 43 minutes

Like most Russian artists who had the means, Sergei Prokofiev left his homeland in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, spending time in the United States and eventually moving on to France. But unlike any other artist of his caliber, Prokofiev willingly returned to the Soviet Union, where he found an artistic climate more receptive to the “new simplicity” (to use his own term) he had been cultivating in his music.

After settling in Moscow in 1936, Prokofiev worked on a string of large theatrical projects, including the ballets Romeo and Juliet (1938) and Cinderella (1944), the opera War and Peace (1942), and film scores for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944). Prokofiev had not written a symphony since 1930, but he took the opportunity in 1944 to craft his Symphony No. 5, spurred on in part by the wartime success of his younger rival Shostakovich, who became an international icon with his Seventh Symphony that railed against the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Prokofiev had plenty to prove with the Symphony he described as “hymn to free and happy Man,” and its triumphant premiere in 1945 validated his privileged stature among Soviet artists.

Prokofiev’s high did not last long: Just weeks after he conducted the Fifth Symphony’s debut, he collapsed from an undiagnosed heart condition and fell down a flight of stairs, suffering a concussion. His health never fully recovered, and it took him two arduous years to write his Sixth Symphony, after needing only a month the sketch the Fifth.

The years after World War II also marked a time of increasing pressure for Soviet artists to conform to certain aesthetic ideals, a push led by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s henchman who oversaw cultural activities. Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony was soon caught in this political snare, even though the reception had been positive following its premiere performances in Leningrad and Moscow. Several months later, a decree from the Communist Party’s Central Committee included Prokofiev in a list of composers whose “works are marked by formalist perversions, anti-democratic tendencies which are alien to the Soviet people and their artistic tastes.” The Sixth Symphony was not performed again in the Soviet Union during the unhappy remainder of Prokofiev’s life, which ended in 1953 on the very same day as Stalin.

The Sixth Symphony begins with a movement Prokofiev described as “agitated, at times lyrical, at times austere.” The somberness reflected the aftermath of war, as well as Prokofiev’s own condition; as he related to his biographer, “Each of us has wounds which cannot be healed. One man’s loved ones have perished, another has lost his health. This must not be forgotten.” For the central Largo movement, Prokofiev created music he characterized as “brighter and more songful.” Forgoing a scherzo, the lively finale lifts the mood, although flashbacks to the earlier heaviness temper the feeling of relief.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           -- © 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.

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 and select Fellows. Audio clips provided by Naxos of America, Inc. 

For Aaron's full program notes, click here.