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NASHVILLE SYMPHONY GIANCARLO GUERRERO, conductorANNE AKIKO MEYERS, violin

GIOVANNI GABRIELISonata Pian’ e Forte for Double Brass Quintet

LEONARD BERNSTEINSerenade (after Plato’s “Symposium”) for Solo Violin, Harp, Percussion and Strings Phaedras - Pausanias: Lento - Allegro Aristophanes: Allegretto Eryximachus: Presto Agathon: Adagio Socrates - Alcibiades: Molto tenuto - Allegro molto vivaceAnne Akiko Meyers, violin

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DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHSymphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93 I. Moderato II. Allegro III. Allegretto IV. Andante - Allegro

Guerrero Conducts BernsteinFEATURING ANNE AKIKO MEYERS

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Anne Akiko Meyers’ appearance is made possible in part by Allis Dale and John Gillmor.

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AT A GLANCE

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICHSymphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93

• As a composer living and working during the height of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union, Dmitri Shostakovich periodically found himself the subject of public condemnation by the authorities. He managed to rehabilitate his reputation with his Symphony No. 5 and his Symphony No. 7, but the threat of censure continued to loom over him.

• Composed in the postwar years, his Symphony No. 10 received its premiere in 1953, just a few years after another public denunciation at the hands of the authorities. Fortunately, it was a great success — and both its creation and its reception were greatly influenced by the death of Josef Stalin earlier that year.

• The Tenth is considered by many to be Shostakovich’s greatest symphony, with music of great urgency. The sprawling opening movement begins quietly, mounting in intensity and volume, with striking contrasts as flute and clarinet emerge from the full ensemble to carry the main themes. The influence of Gustav Mahler can be heard here, while the second movement has been viewed by some listeners as a sonic portrait of Stalin in all his brutality.

LEONARD BERNSTEINSerenade (after Plato’s Symposium)

• Italian composer Giovanni Gabrielli was one of the most influential musicians of the late 16th century. An organist at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, he specialized in writing music for vocal and instrumental choirs where the performers were divided into groups and performed from different locations within the basilica.

• Sonata pian’ e forte is an instrumental example of Gabrieli’s “polychoral” style. In this case, the piece is performed by two brass quintets: one grouping of three trumpets, horn, and trombone, and another grouping of two horns, trombone, bass trombone, and tuba.

GIOVANNI GABRIELISonata pian’ e forte

• Part of Leonard Bernstein’s enduring appeal comes from his ability to move between popular mediums like the Broadway stage and more serious contexts like orchestral music. Written around the same time as his score for On the Waterfront and his stage adaptation of Candide, Serenade is an example of Bernstein’s intellectual side.

• Orchestrated entirely for strings, Serenade functions as a violin concerto, with a solo part originally written for Isaac Stern. For these performances, the violin part will be played by Anne Akiko Meyers, who will help bring to life the composer’s interpretation of Plato’s dialogue.

• Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton suggested that the piece encapsulates the composer’s own multifaceted personality: “grand and noble in the first movement, childlike in the second, boisterous and playful in the third, serenely calm and tender in the fourth, a doom-laden prophet, and then a jazzy iconoclast in the finale.”

GIOVANNI GABRIELI

Composed: 1597First performance: No known date, though it would have been performed during grand public ceremonies at Saint Mark’s Basilica in VeniceFirst Nashville Symphony performance: These are the orchestra’s first performances.Estimated length: 4 minutes

Sonata pian’ e forte

Born in the early- to mid-1550s in Venice; died on August 12, 1612 in Venice

The Italian city-state of Venice was a flourishing center for music in the High Renaissance, in

large part thanks to the hugely influential work of Giovanni Gabrieli. Active as both a composer and organist at St. Mark’s Basilica, Gabrieli had taken on his position there in 1585, a full century before the births of J.S. Bach and Handel; he was also continuing a family tradition, since his uncle Andrea had left his own mark performing the same functions.

In 1567 Gabrieli issued one of the most influential publications in music history: Sacrae symphoniae, a large-scale anthology of “sacred symphonies” encompassing both vocal and instrumental pieces that displayed a range of adventurous composition in the Venetian polychoral style of divided choirs (known as cori spezzati). Gabrieli scored these works for textures of 6 to 16 parts. The recently introduced technology of printing enhanced the anthology’s impact.

Venice had become the crucible for an exciting period of change in ideas about the function of music — ideas that reached a pinnacle in compositions specifically written for St. Mark’s Basilica. The stylistic signature of Venetian music perfected by Gabrieli involved the partition of vocal and/or instrument choirs into varied groups, which performed from different locations within the vast Byzantine-Gothic architecture of

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The Gabrieli fanfare that we hear showcases this polychoral technique as applied to

instruments alone. While instrumentalists were often used to accompany singers, Gabrieli also experimented with using them independently, sometimes even specifying the exact instrumentation he had in mind. In either case, the antiphonal disposition of the musical architecture results in a kind of early-music surround-sound. Separating and then combining his choirs allowed Gabrieli to use instrumental weights and registers to further conjure an illusion of space — comparable to the development of dramatic visual perspective perfected by the Italian Renaissance painters.

The modern arrangement that we hear “translates” the instrumentation of Gabrieli’s published score into contemporary instruments. The Sonata pian’ e forte originally called for a first choir of cornet and three trombones (two alto, one tenor) and a second choir of “violin” (actually in the viola’s range) and three trombones (two tenor, one bass).

The term “sonata” in this context indicates an instrumental piece “sounded” (the literal meaning of sonata) in a sacred space. Eventually the sonata would shed its ecclesiastical connotations and connote a purely secular instrumental work.

Another of Gabrieli’s key innovations was to publish indications of the intended contrasts of soft and loud — hence the “pian’ e forte” of the Sonata pian’ e forte. These dynamic markings are reinforced by having the two instrumental choirs play separately (piano) and then join together for a combined mass of sound (forte) in each of the Sonata’s sections.

This modern scoring calls for two brass quintets: 3 trumpets, horn, and trombone (choir 1) and 2 horns, trombone, bass trombone, and tuba (choir 2).

St. Mark’s. The result was a revolutionary focus on the spatial-acoustic characteristics of music, a development encouraged by the remarkably reverberant setting.

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LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Composed: 1953-54First performance: September 12, 1954, in Venice, with the composer conducting the Israel Philharmonic and soloist Isaac SternFirst Nashville Symphony performance: May 7 & 8, 2004, with soloist Robert McDuffie and music director Kenneth SchermerhornEstimated length: 30 minutes

Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium)

Born on August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts; died on October 14, 1990, in New York City

More than a quarter-century after Leonard Bernstein’s death, his enormous effect

on the music world and beyond remains very much present. It was in 1943, as a 25-year-old musician, that Bernstein was catapulted to international fame by a pair of career-changing events that occurred within a few months of each other. One was his dramatically unexpected debut conducting the New York Philharmonic (filling in last minute for an ailing Bruno Walter). The second was an invitation by choreographer Jerome Robbins to write the score for a new one-act ballet, Fancy Free. When it premiered in April 1944 at the old Metropolitan Opera House, the ballet was an instant critical and commercial hit.

These successes were just the start: they helped pave the way for the emergence of the multitalented phenomenon known as “Leonard Bernstein.” Precisely because of his superabundance of gifts that matched his omnivorous curiosity, Bernstein faced the dilemma throughout his career of deciding how best to allocate his time among composing, conducting, performing as a pianist, teaching, mentoring, writing, and engaging in political activism. Even in the field of composition he was split between focusing on the more popular medium of the Broadway stage and writing

in the “highbrow” tradition of symphonic and operatic music.

Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium), from the same year, is an example of his most “erudite” work for the concert hall; many commentators rank it among Bernstein’s finest contributions to the repertoire. The piece is tied chronologically to one of Bernstein’s Broadway stage works: Candide, his remarkably innovative though initially ill-fated collaboration with playwright Lillian Hellman (and others). Candide was a musical theater adaptation of Voltaire’s satire of human folly, with sly digs at the contemporary repressive political climate of the 1950s — which also happened to be an immensely fertile creative period for Bernstein. (Appropriately, a number of revivals have been scheduled for the coming season.)

During the summer of 1954, while at Martha’s Vineyard, Bernstein worked on Serenade and the problematic Candide — aficionados can detect certain thematic echoes between the two. A few years before, he had promised to write a violin concerto for Isaac Stern, which became Serenade, fulfilling a delayed commission from the foundation established by his late mentor Serge Koussevitzky. The composer noted that the piece was inspired by a rereading of Plato’s Symposium, one of the ancient Greek philosopher’s most influential dialogues. The Symposium follows the characteristic Platonic literary model of a dramatic dialogue — in this case, among seven participants: the philosopher Socrates, the tragic poet Agathon, the comic playwright Aristophanes, the aristocrat Phaedrus, the legal expert (and lover of Agathon) Pausanias, the physician Eryximachus, and the statesman and general Alcibiades. The topic selected for each of the speakers is love: what it means, what is its true nature, what are its effects on the human soul.

Bernstein essentially fuses the principle of the violin concerto, with its solo “protagonist,”

with aspects of program music and even, perhaps, of a dramatic symphony. Like his idol Mahler, Bernstein was deeply sensitive to literature and at the same time wary of having his musical statements fixed too literally and simplistically to a specific “program.” Another reference point is Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also Sprach

Zarathustra — like Serenade, it is an orchestral work loosely inspired by a philosophical text and features a prominent part for solo violin.

The five-movement Serenade, Bernstein wrote, mimics Plato’s dialogue in the sense that it presents “a series of related statements in praise of love, and generally follows the Platonic form through the succession of speakers at the banquet.” (Bernstein takes some license in what he chooses to focus on from the dialogue.) “The ‘relatedness’ of the movements does not depend on common thematic material,” he added, “but rather on a system whereby each movement evolves out of elements in the preceding one” — an interesting musical translation of Plato’s literary technique of segueing from one interpretation of love to a vastly different one as each speaker takes the floor.

Serenade accordingly traverses a wide variety of moods and classical forms across its five movements, beginning with a slow fugato introduced by the solo violin, which represents Phaedrus opening the symposium with “a lyrical oration in praise of Eros, the god of love,” according to Bernstein. A sonata-form Allegro follows, corresponding to the speech by Pausanias on “the duality of lover and beloved.” The second movement, a charming Allegretto, relates to Aristophanes’ curious myth of the “androgyne” — a primal human who was split into two by jealous Zeus, with each half ever after seeking its lost other. (Fans of the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch will be familiar with this tale of the “origin of love.”) The very brief, scherzo-like Presto third movement — another fugato — is given to Erixymachus, who “speaks of bodily harmony as a scientific model for the workings of love-patterns…[its music] born of a blend of mystery and humor.”

Serenade’s emotional center comes with the speech of Agathon, here represented by a radiant Adagio evoking the transcendent power of love in “a simple three-part song.” Two figures dominate the lengthy fifth movement. In a weighty slow introduction drawing from the central part of the Adagio, Socrates “describes his visit to the seer Diotima, quoting her speech on the demonology of love.” With the rhythmically exciting Allegro, “an extended rondo ranging in spirit from agitation through jiglike dance music to joyful celebration,” Alcibiades makes a drunken interruption to describe the effects Socrates has

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

had on him.Humphrey Burton, one of Bernstein’s most

perceptive biographers, also likened the music of Serenade to an implicit portrait of the artist himself, in all his contradictions: “grand and noble in the first movement, childlike in the second, boisterous and playful in the third, serenely calm and tender in the fourth, a doom-laden prophet, and then a jazzy iconoclast in the finale.”

In addition to solo violin, Serenade is scored for an ensemble of strings, harp, and percussion.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

Composed: 1946-53First performance: December 17, 1953, with Yevgeny Mravinsky leading the Leningrad Philharmonic First Nashville Symphony performance: February 28-March 1, 2008, with guest conductor David Alan MillerEstimated length: 50 minutes

Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93

Born on September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg, Russia; died on August 9, 1975, in Moscow

On January 28, 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich woke up to read perhaps the most notorious

music review of the 20th century: a stern condemnation of his music published in the official Soviet newspaper Pravda.

Never mind that the work it attacked (Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) was a runaway hit. The Pravda article committed character assassination, claiming that the 29-year-old composer had made a splash because his music “tickles the perverted taste of the bourgeois.”

Shostakovich was a prodigy composer, and his career had been on a fast track since his teenage years. But now, without exaggeration, his artistic choice became a matter of life and death:

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one false step — as far as Stalin’s thought police were concerned — might easily have resulted in a trip to the gulag, if not a death sentence. Shostakovich managed to reinstate himself into good graces with his Fifth Symphony, which had been interpreted as a paradigm of the artist bowing obediently to the Communist Party’s “just criticism” (a naive interpretation which failed to detect that score’s ironic subtexts).

But the genre of the symphony in general remained a potentially dangerous undertaking. That’s because the symphony was equated with making a large public statement — the musical equivalent of an ambitious mural commissioned for a library or government building. Shostakovich had received a further boost in status with the overwhelming success of his Seventh Symphony (Leningrad), but another denunciation followed after the war, in 1948. The stakes for the Tenth, the composer’s first symphony since that humiliating event, thus resembled those for the Fifth.

Once again, Shostakovich was vindicated by a successful reception. The ambiguity of the symphony’s overall journey did elicit official consternation in some quarters, even leading to a debate held at the Union of Composers several months after the premiere. Biographer Laurel Faye writes that this time, a significant contingent had grown “impatient with the dogmatic intransigence and parochial aesthetic formulas of the guardians of ideological orthodoxy.” The champions of the Tenth Symphony praised Shostakovich’s new work for “its stunning mastery and invigorating originality, rallying support for a more accommodating view of the diverse needs and tastes of the Soviet listener.”

The great change that had happened in the interim was the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. (Shostakovich’s older contemporary, Sergei Prokofiev, happened to die within hours of the dictator.) Although Shostakovich may

The Tenth’s quiet beginning, low in the strings, belies the vast span of its opening movement,

which is nearly the length of the last two movements combined. An air of uncertainty, even dislocation, slowly builds. One of Shostakovich’s strategies in this movement is his telling use of contrasts between the full ensemble and solo passages — the two main themes first appear in solo clarinet and flute, respectively. As the movement progresses toward a massive climax, the beginning hesitations are swept away, only to return in a deeply moving coda. Echoes of late Mahler — an idol of Shostakovich’s — pervade the score, as in the dueting piccolos that drift into silence, a possible reminiscence of a parallel moment in Mahler’s Ninth.

The surprisingly brief Scherzo is often cited as an instance of Shostakovich attacking Stalin head on in a savage portrait of brutal vulgarity, its sound and fury all the more shocking in the wake of the preceding movement’s dissolution. Whether

such dissident messages were actually intended by the composer — and the debate still rages on to this day — the musical imagery of furiously repeated rhythms and an implacable chase is impossible to miss. (There’s a marvelous heavy metal transcription of this movement played by the virtuoso electric guitarist Connor Gallagher on YouTube.)

A schizoid quality comes to the fore in the nervous gestures of the brooding third movement. Beginning with a striking rhythm sounded first in the violins, here Shostakovich demonstrably does encode an extra-musical reference: his own initials, DSCH, which, by the conventional German transliteration of notes, spells the motif D-E-flat-C-B (a “signature” that will continue to appear in several other works by Shostakovich as well). A feminine counterpart to this occurs in a new motif sounded by the horn, which has been deciphered as an inscription of the name of one of Shostakovich’s students (Elmira Nazirova), a muse-like symbol of youth and hope for the composer at this time. This recurs a dozen times throughout the movement.

The final movement rouses from a state of introspection into a headlong rush that seems to cheerfully brush aside weightier concerns. The DSCH motif now becomes an aggressive presence, but its “victory” raises questions. Shostakovich’s contemporary Marina Sabinina described its insistent repetitions as “mechanical” and “lifeless but persistent, as if the composer had seen himself, with terror and revulsion, as a puppet,” so that instead of a portrait of Stalin, the Tenth ultimately involves a self-portrait of a composer who had been as “arbitrarily manipulated” as Petrushka.

The Tenth Symphony is scored for a large orchestra consisting of piccolo, 2 flutes (2nd doubling 2nd piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling E-flat clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

ANNE AKIKO MEYERSviolin

ABOUT THE ARTIST

A best-selling recording artist

who has released 34 albums, Anne Akiko Meyers is known for her passionate performances,

purity of sound, deeply poetic interpretations, innovative programming, and commitment to commissioning new works. Recent return engagements include the Cartagena Music Festival to perform Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico to perform the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, the Beethoven Festival in Warsaw to perform the Szymanowski Concerto No.1 and a headlining appearance at the “Last Night of the Proms” in Krakow.

In 2017, Meyers will perform the world premiere of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Fantasia, written for her, with the Kansas City Symphony conducted by Michael Stern. Scheduled for release next year, her forthcoming release Fantasia: The Fantasy Album will feature the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Kristjan Järvi.

Meyers appeared in a PBS broadcast special and on a Naxos DVD featuring the world premiere of Samuel Jones’ Violin Concerto with the All-Star Orchestra led by Gerard Schwarz and the French premiere of Mason Bates’ Violin Concerto with Leonard Slatkin and the Orchestre de Lyon. A champion of living composers, she has actively added new works to the violin repertoire by commissioning and premiering works by Mason Bates, Jakub Ciupinski, John Corigliano, Jennifer Higdon, Wynton Marsalis, Arvo Pärt, Joseph Schwantner, and others.

Meyers has collaborated with a diverse array of artists, including jazz icons Chris Botti and Wynton Marsalis, avant-garde musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, electronic music pioneer Isao Tomita, and the pop acts Il Divo and Michael Bolton. She performed the national anthem in front of 42,000 fans at Safeco Field in Seattle, appeared twice on The Tonight Show, and was featured in a segment on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

have sketched parts of the work before this, the dictator’s death became a creative catalyst and liberated his imagination. Some of the Soviet officials at the time tried to make the Tenth conform to the old codes of Socialist Realism (whereby “pessimism” was discouraged), proclaiming the notion that the new work represented “an optimistic tragedy, infused with a firm belief in the victory of bright, life-affirming forces.”

Sixty-four years later, and in a new political climate that views the arts as a threat, the Tenth’s urgent and yet ambiguous vision remains as compelling as ever. Regarded by many Shostakovich aficionados to be his supreme symphonic achievement, it transcends the political factors that were involved in its conception.

SIXTY-FOUR YEARS LATER, AND IN A NEW POLITICAL CLIMATE THAT VIEWS THE ARTS AS A THREAT, THE TENTH’S URGENT AND YET AMBIGUOUS VISION REMAINS AS COMPELLING AS EVER.