By Aaron Grad

Octet [1923, revised 1952]

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Born June 5, 1882 near St. Petersburg
Died April 6, 1971 in New York

For flute, clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, trombone and bass trombone. Approximately 14 minutes.

Stravinsky and his family moved to Biarritz in 1921, a French resort town with a large Russian émigré population. He began the Octet for wind instruments there in 1922, prompted by “a dream, in which I saw myself in a small room surrounded by a small group of instrumentalists playing some attractive music.” He completed the piece in Paris, and made his official conducting debut with the work on October 18, 1923 – not in the “small room” of his dream, but in the massive Paris Opera House. The influential conductor and patron Serge Koussevitzky had organized the concert, but Stravinsky still had a bad taste from Koussevitzky’s premiere of Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1921. Stravinsky’s music was increasingly pure and clean, developing into what we now call his Neoclassical style, and he wanted that precision matched with dry, exacting conducting. As he wrote in a 1924 article, “My [Octet] is not an ‘emotive’ work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves.”

The most notable of those “objective elements” were the classical structures Stravinsky employed. The first movement plays with Sonata form, beginning with a flowing introduction and moving to a sharp-tongued, driving Allegro. The central Theme and Variations movement takes up another Classical device; in this case, Stravinsky wrote the Waltz variation first, and then worked backward to extract a theme. The finale follows the angular flute solo, and takes off with Bach-tinged linear counterpoint.

Stravinsky made slight revisions to the Octet in 1952, allowing him to secure a U.S. copyright. By that point, he had spent three decades expanding upon the crystalline sound he dreamed up for the Octet, confounding those who kept expecting a return to the ritualistic bombast of The Rite of Spring. He was also by then married to the Octet’s secret dedicatee, Vera de Bosset, his lover since 1921. That is the irony of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism: He claims dispassion, yet his music boils with the exuberance of a man recklessly in love.

Concerto No. 1 in G Minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 26 [1868]

MAX BRUCH

Born January 6, 1838 in Cologne, Germany
Died October 2, 1920 in Berlin, Germany

For solo violin and orchestra consisting of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings. Approximately 24 minutes.

CORE Musicians: Liang Ping How, Violin I; Laura Frautschi, Violin II; Daniel Panner, Viola; Susannah Chapman, Cello; Donald Palma, Bass; Susan Palma Nidel, Flute; Matthew Dine, Oboe; David Singer, Clarinet; Harry Searing, Bassoon; Chris Komer, Horn; Louis Hanzlik, Trumpet; John Ostrowski, Timpani.

Max Bruch received his earliest musical training from his mother, a singer, and began composing at age nine. From his breakthrough opera, completed in 1858, to the many vocal and choral works he wrote until his death in 1920, Bruch earned a reputation as a first-rate composer of music to be sung. Now, however, he is remembered almost exclusively for a single composition, the First Violin Concerto, along with a handful of other concerted orchestral scores, such as the Scottish Fantasy for violin and Kol Nidrei for cello.

Bruch’s famous concerto brings his vocal knack to the violin, an instrument that, in his estimation, “can sing a melody better than a piano — and melody is the soul of music.” The work was his largest to date, and the form confounded him; he even considered calling it a fantasy rather than a concerto, owing to its dreamy and open-ended first movement. He began the work in 1864, and conducted the premiere in 1866, but he was not satisfied until he reworked the score with suggestions from the virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim (who would later help Brahms shape his violin concerto, too). Joachim debuted the authoritative version in 1868, and the concerto spread quickly into the hands of the leading violin soloists, never waning in popularity since.

Unlike a typical concerto, with its meatiest music concentrated in the first movement, Bruch’s structure begins with a free-rangingPrelude full of improvised-sounding solo declamations. There were precedents for these cadenza-like flourishes — notably Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto — but the expected course was for the movement to then proceed through a typical concerto structure. Bruch’s adventurous departure instead delivers the central Adagio movement directly out of the unresolved tension of the Prelude, bringing sweet relief in a touching melody in E-flat major. The Allegro energico finale makes a clever entrance by continuing the slow movement’s final E-flat sonority, gradually migrating keys and building tension until the violin makes a triumphant entrance with the first chord of its romping G-major theme. That music shows Bruch’s deft handling of virtuosic material, but the showstopper is the lyrical second theme, one of the great “songs without words” in all of music.

Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36 [1802]                                                                                  

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born December 1770 in Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827 in Vienna

For orchestra consisting of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings. Approximately 32 minutes.

CORE Musicians: Richard Rood, Violin I; Eriko Sato, Violin II; Mark Holloway, Viola; Melissa Meell, Cello; Jordan Frazier, Bass; Susan Palma Nidel, Flute; Stephen Taylor, Oboe; Alan Kay, Clarinet; Frank Morelli, Bassoon; Lawrence Di Bello, Horn; Carl Albach, Trumpet; John Ostrowski, Timpani.

Beethoven initially shied away from the two forms most closely associated with his teacher Haydn, the symphony and the string quartet. He finally wrote his first quartets, the set of six grouped as Opus 18, between 1798 and 1800. As for symphonies, he made an attempt in 1795–96 (after hearing Haydn’s London symphonies), but he did not complete his first until 1800. He took up his Second Symphony in 1801, and finished it the next year while living in Heiligenstadt, outside of Vienna. Beethoven had hoped that time in the country might slow his encroaching deafness and improve his spirits, but by the end of his stay he was in a nearly suicidal state of despair. That fall he wrote the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” an unsent letter to his brothers that was found among his papers after his death. He included this description of his tormented life that year:

If I approach near to people a hot terror seizes upon me, and I fear being exposed to the danger that my condition might be noticed. Thus it has been during the last six months which I have spent in the country. … What a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended me life—it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

Beethoven re-entered life in Vienna, and soon received a boost in the form of an opera commission. His new association with the Theater an der Wien prompted a concert on April 5, 1803, at which he conducted the premiere of the Second Symphony, performed the Third Piano Concerto as soloist, debuted the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives, and reprised his First Symphony.

Despite the circumstances of its creation, the Second Symphony is a lively and jovial work. It marks a high point in Beethoven’s early Classical style, moving past the long shadow of Haydn that informs the First Symphony. The opening movement begins with a meaty introduction, filled with shifting rhythms, moody harmonies and surprising horn blasts. The Allegro con brio section begins, conversely, with the barest trace of a melody in the lower strings, but it surges to music of an even wilder nature, pounding with offbeat accents and extreme dynamic contrasts. Whereas Haydn loved the elegant dichotomy of forte and piano intensities, Beethoven asks repeatedly for the even louder fortissimo and even softer pianissimo dynamics, moving beyond tidy Classical style into the more volatile spectrum we associate with Romantic music.

 The Larghetto contrasts the adventurous opening movement with music that is serene, tuneful and unabashedly beautiful. The third movement is Beethoven’s first symphonic Scherzo, a form he would use (whether named as such or not) in all but one of his subsequent symphonies. This was another extension of Haydn’s style, who had earlier cemented the Minuet’s place in symphonic form, and who had also experimented with quicker Scherzos in a few works. The Allegro molto finale scurries by with all the humor, grace and infectious energy that marked the best of 18th-century Viennese style. Satisfying his debt to the past and defying his deafness, Beethoven’s Second Symphony cleared the path for the monumental symphonies to come.

 © 2009 Aaron Grad.

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