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Conductor Roderick Cox is setting the musical world afire. He makes his anticipated NWS debut in an energetic program that mimics his dynamic talent. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is an urgent account of destiny and a creative outburst of extreme force. When Esa-Pekka Salonen premiered Helix, it was hailed as exuberant, dazzlingly colorful and a funnel of energy and suspense. Grammy Award-winning artist Zuill Bailey performs fellow cellist Victor Herbert’s enchanting Second
Concerto. 

Program

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Helix for Orchestra (2005)
Approximate duration: 9 minutes

Esa-Pekka Salonen was Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1992 to 2009, and he began the same role at the San Francisco Symphony in 2020, succeeding Michael Tilson Thomas. In the tradition of Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein, Salonen is one of the few musicians to sustain a career as both a conductor and a composer at the highest level, as seen in the Grawemeyer Award he earned for his 2009 Violin Concerto and his three-year stint as the Composer-in-Residence for the New York Philharmonic.

Mr. Salonen wrote the following note:

I decided to compose a celebratory and direct overture-like piece, which would nevertheless be very rigidly structured, and based on essentially one continuous process. The form of Helix can indeed be described as a spiral or a coil; or more academically a curve that lies on a cone and makes a constant angle with the straight lines parallel to the base of the cone.

The process of Helix is basically that of a nine-minute accelerando. The tempo gets faster, but the note values of the phrases become correspondingly longer. Therefore only the material’s relation to the pulse changes, not necessarily the impression of speed itself. Hence the spiral metaphor: the material (which consists essentially of two different phrases) is being pushed through constantly narrowing concentric circles until the music reaches a point where it has to stop as it has nowhere to go.

The musical expression changes quite drastically in the course of these nine minutes: the idyllic, almost pastoral opening phrase for piccolo and contra-bassoon returns much later in the horns and trumpets, fortissimo, surrounded by a very busy tutti orchestra. The closing section shows the material in an almost manic light.

                — Esa-Pekka Salonen

Victor Herbert

Concerto No. 2 in E minor for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 30 (1894)
Approximate duration: 24 minutes

The composer and cellist Victor Herbert, born into an English and Irish family, spent his childhood in London and Germany, and he began his career playing cello in European orchestras while also composing on the side, including showpieces for his own instrument. At 27 he and his new bride, an opera singer, sailed to New York, where they both had jobs waiting at the Metropolitan Opera: she would sing the title role in the first Aida on American soil, and he would be the orchestra’s principal cellist. Herbert soon became a fixture of New York’s concert life, joining the New York String Quartet, conducting summer concerts of light fare, and teaching at the newly formed National Conservatory of Music, where Dvořák soon arrived to serve as the school’s director. A few months after the New York Philharmonic premiered Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”), they were back in Carnegie Hall for the premiere of Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto, with the composer as soloist. The fame that Herbert achieved in future decades as a composer of light operettas and festive band music has obscured his significant talents as a composer of traditional concert music.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1877-78)
Approximate duration: 44 minutes

In July of 1877 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky hastily married Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, a union fraught with troubles, including a suicide attempt and mental breakdown by Tchaikovsky. On the advice of friends and doctors, he separated permanently from Antonina after three months of marriage. Another woman entered Tchaikovsky’s life around the same time as his wife, and this relationship proved much healthier. The wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck paid Tchaikovsky a generous stipend from 1877 to 1890. He came to consider von Meck “my dearest friend,” as he expressed in the dedication of his Fourth Symphony.

Tchaikovsky began the Symphony in the spring of 1877, during the bizarre buildup to his marriage, and he finished the work while recuperating in Italy and Switzerland over the winter. In a letter to von Meck, Tchaikovsky outlined the Symphony’s underlying program, especially the central importance of “Fate, the inexorable power that hampers our search for happiness.” Following the model of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s “fate” motto announces itself at the outset. Whereas Beethoven subjected his initial kernel to continual variation, Tchaikovsky reserved his motto for carefully timed reprisals, snapping awareness back to fate’s inescapable force. After the slow introduction, the substantial first movement takes up a searing new melody full of tense descents.

Tchaikovsky’s Italian tempo heading for the second movement indicates that this music, moving at a gentle walking pace, is constructed in the manner of a song. A solo oboe delivers the first statement of the innocent, folk-like theme. The Scherzo third movement follows as a kinetic study on the string technique of plucking, or pizzicato.

Again, observing the model of Beethoven’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s minor-key “fate” Symphony closes with a finale in the affirmative major key. The movement quotes a Russian folk song, “In the Meadow there Stood a Birch Tree,” building increasing urgency until a return of the dramatic “fate” theme. A return of the fiery music from the start of the movement burns away any lingering uncertainty, and the Symphony ends triumphantly.

-- © 2022 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.