rachmaninoff symphony no. 3 | program notes

SOUNDINGS 2015-2016 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG PROGRAM 1

MASTERWORKS • 2015-2016RACHMANINOFF SYMPHONY NO. 3

COLORADO SYMPHONY ANDREW LITTON, conductor

DENIS KOZHUKHIM, piano

Friday, November 6, 2015 at 7:30 pmSaturday, November 7, 2015 at 7:30 pmSunday, November 8, 2015 at 1:00 pmBoettcher Concert Hall

KABALEVSKY Overture to Colas Breugnon, Op. 24

PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 Andantino — Allegretto Scherzo: Vivace Intermezzo: Allegro moderato Finale: Allegro tempestoso

— INTERMISSION —

RACHMANINOFF Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44 Lento — Allegro moderato Adagio ma non troppo — Allegro vivace — Tempo come prima Allegro

This weekend of concerTs is graTefully dedicaTed To BoB and cynThia Benson

friday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To col. and Mrs. PhiliP Beaver saTurday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To JiM and deBBie sPhall

sunday’s concerT is graTefully dedicaTed To celesTe and Jack grynBerg

PROGRAM 2 SOUNDINGS 2015-2016 | COLORADOSYMPHONY.ORG

ANDREW LITTON, conductor

Colorado Symphony Music Director Andrew Litton is the newly appointed Music Director of the New York City Ballet. Mr. Litton also serves as Bergen Philharmonic Music Director Laureate, Artistic Director of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest, and Conductor Laureate of Britain’s Bournemouth. He guest conducts the world’s leading orchestras and opera companies, and has a discography of over 120 recordings with awards including America’s Grammy, France’s Diapason d’Or, and many other honors. Besides his Grammy®-winning Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast with Bryn Terfel

and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, he also recorded the complete symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, a Dallas Mahler cycle, and many Gershwin recordings as both conductor and pianist. Mr. Litton is a graduate of the Fieldston School, New York, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard in piano and conducting. The youngest-ever winner of the BBC International Conductors Competition, he served as Assistant Conductor at Teatro alla Scala and Exxon/Arts Endowment Assistant Conductor for the National Symphony under Rostropovich. His many honors in addition to Norway’s Order of Merit include an honorary Doctorate from the University of Bournemouth, Yale University’s Sanford Medal, and the Elgar Society Medal. An accomplished pianist, Litton often conducts from the keyboard and enjoys performing chamber music with his orchestra colleagues. For further information, visit www.andrewlitton.com.

DENIS KOZHUKHIN, piano

Denis Kozhukhin was launched onto the international scene after winning First Prize in the 2010 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels at the age of 23. His playing is characterised by an extraordinary technical mastery balanced by a sharp intelligence, calm maturity and wisdom. Kozhukhin has that rare and special gift of creating an immediate and compelling emotional connection with his audience. In the 2015/16 season, Kozhukhin performs with orchestras including the Orchestre National de France/Yamada, Pittsburgh Symphony/Noseda, Philharmonia/Weilserstein,

Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR/Shokhakimov, Brussels Philharmonic/ Denève and Netherlands Radio Philharmonic/Märkl. As a recitalist and chamber musician, highlights of this season and beyond include returns to the Concertgebouw’s Master Pianists Series, Cologne Philharmonie, Wigmore Hall, Auditorium du Louvre in Paris and London’s International Piano Series, as well as debuts at the Lucerne Festival, Vienna Konzerthaus and the Boston Celebrity Series. Following the 2013 release of his debut recording with Onyx Classics of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7 and 8, Kozhukhin released his recording of Haydn Sonatas in September, 2014. Born in Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, in 1986 into a family of musicians, Kozhukhin began his piano studies at the age of four with his mother. As a boy, he attended the Balakirev School of Music where he studied under Natalia Fish. From 2000 to 2007, Kozhukhin was a pupil at the Reina Sofía School of Music in Madrid learning with Dimitri Bashkirov and Claudio Martinez-Mehner.

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESDMITRI KABALEVSKY (1904-1987): Overture to Colas Breugnon, The Master of Clamecy, Op. 24Dmitri Kabalevsky was born on December 30, 1904 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and died on February 14, 1987 in Moscow. He composed his opera Colas Breugnon in 1935-1937. It was premiered on February 22, 1938 in Leningrad, conducted by Boris Khaikin. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 5 minutes. Last performed by the orchestra on September 12-14, 2003, with Marin Alsop conducting.

The 1937 three-act opera Colas Breugnon, generally acknowledged to be Soviet composer Dmitri Kabalevsky’s masterpiece, was based on a novel by the distinguished French man of letters and music Romain Rolland. Rolland, trained as a musicologist, wrote biographies of Beethoven, Handel, Michelangelo, Tolstoy and Gandhi, won the Nobel Prize in 1915 for his ten-volume musical novel Jean-Christophe, and was active and influential as a teacher and administrator in French musical life from the turn of the 20th century until his death in 1944. His novel Colas Breugnon, The Master of Clamecy (Rolland was born in the Burgundian village of Clamecy) is the imaginary diary covering one year in the life of the title character, a 16th-century master woodcarver. Colas’ chronicle recounts the people and events that touch him during that year — a shrewish wife, an early and still-longed-for lover, a granddaughter, a notary and a curate, as well as a grape harvest, a plague and a peasant uprising — and his philosophy of humor and resilience in the face of difficulty and crisis. “The force of Rolland’s book is not in the narrative, of which there is none to speak,” noted the composer. “Its vigor is in the strength of its characters, first of all in the person of its hero, Colas, in the folk spirit which the whole book breathes, in its great life-asserting optimism, in that love of life with which Rolland has filled every page. It is through these features that Rolland’s book is so near and comprehensible to us.... These are the features that my librettist and I strove to preserve in the opera.” The novel enjoyed amazing popularity in Russia, having run through 120 editions in that country even before Kabalevsky adopted it for his opera. The spirit of wit, bonhomie and youthful vigor pervading the sparkling Overture to Colas Breugnon confirms the comments of the critic Lev Danilevich following the opera’s premiere: “It conveys the fundamental idea of Rolland’s story: a man who is master of his happiness, who boldly walks through life and reshapes it,

overthrowing all obstacles in his way.”

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MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESSERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953): Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in Sontsovka, Russia, and died on March 4, 1953 in Moscow. He composed his G minor Piano Concerto during the winter of 1912-1913, and was soloist in the premiere on September 5, 1913 at Pavlovsk, a summer resort near St. Petersburg; A.P. Aslanov conducted. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Last performance was on September 29, 30, and October 1, 2006, with Joyce Yang as the soloist and Jeffrey Kahane on the podium.

Politics was not the only revolution brewing in Russia in the 1910s. A brash, arrogant student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory was helping to forge a new musical language at the same time, with a forceful assault concentrated on that most hallowed of Romantic instruments, the piano. Prokofiev’s iconoclastic views of modern music engendered his piano style, one that broke from the Romantic, lyrical, virtuoso manner of Chopin and Liszt to create a new sound for a new age. Harold Schonberg, in his excellent volume on The Great Pianists, wrote of Prokofiev’s pianism, “Young Sergei Prokofiev, the pianist of steel, came raging out of Russia, playing his own music and startling the world with his vigor, his exuberance, his wild rhythm, his disdain for the trappings of Romanticism. Gone were romantic color, wide-spaced arpeggios, inner voices, pretty melodies. Prokofiev at the piano attacked the music with a controlled fury, blasting out savage and complicated rhythms, giving or asking no mercy. He decided that the piano was a percussive instrument, and there’s no use trying to disguise the fact that it had hammers.... The anti-Romantic age was under way.”

Prokofiev’s steely piano style was the perfect match for his athletic compositions and his strutting personality. The polite audience of gentry at the summertime premiere of the Second Piano Concerto in 1913 in the fashionable resort of Pavlosk, near St. Petersburg, was “puzzled” by the “mercilessly dissonant combinations,” according to one reviewer. The listeners, disdaining the decorum that they were convinced the young composer had already shattered, greeted the work with a sonorous round of hisses and catcalls. Prokofiev responded with his own characteristic rejoinder: he sat down and thundered through one of his noisiest solo works as an encore. It was not long, however, before his playing and his music gained a wide audience, the fascination and innate musicality of his style sweeping away all initial reservations.

The Second Piano Concerto is a work “full of splinters,” as Prokofiev wrote to Igor Stravinsky. Through its handling of rhythm, melody and harmony, it achieves a quality of galvanic dynamism unknown in the music of the preceding century. The soloist presents the principal theme of the opening movement; a saucy melody in quicker tempo provides contrast. The formal development and recapitulation of the principal theme are combined into an enormous solo cadenza before the orchestra is recalled to provide a coda. The quiet ending section mirrors the opening measures, bringing the movement round full circle. Prokofiev cited the brief but brilliant Scherzo as an example of his “motoric” style, and this movement, is, indeed, a dashing display of perpetual motion. The soloist, in a mighty exhibition of technique and endurance, plays continuously in octaves without a single beat of rest or one long note throughout the entire movement. The slower third movement is in Prokofiev’s best nose-thumbing, wrong-note idiom. The opening and closing sections of this movement make much use of a chugging bass ostinato, with the middle section given over to music of a more gentle character. The finale is a dazzling showcase for the soloist. The lightning-flash opening section returns to finish the


MASTERWORKS PROGRAM NOTESmovement, but in between are themes of contrasting character in which the soloist frequently charges forth alone, the orchestra sitting silently amid the pianistic fireworks. In his Second Concerto, Prokofiev created a daring, virtuoso tour-de-force of pianism that remains as vibrant

and exciting today as when it aroused its first hearers in the waning days of Imperial Russia.

oSERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943): Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44Sergei Rachmaninoff was born on April 1, 1873 in Oneg (near Novgorod), Russia, and died on March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills, California. He composed his Symphony No. 3 in 1935-1936; it was premiered on November 6, 1936 in Philadelphia, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp and strings. Duration is about 37 minutes. The Symphony No. 3 was last performed on May 21-23, 2004, with Jeffrey Kahane conducting the orchestra.

Following the burst of creative activity between 1895 and 1910 that brought forth three piano concertos, two symphonies, two operas, a symphonic poem and the “choral symphony” The Bells, Sergei Rachmaninoff did not issue another work for orchestra until the Fourth Piano Concerto of 1927. After being forced from his beloved Russian homeland by the 1917 Revolution, he established a career as a pianist and conductor in Europe and the United States whose enormous success almost completely prohibited composition. His return to the orchestral idiom with the Fourth Concerto was poorly received (he revised the score extensively in 1941), and it took him until 1934 to gather enough courage to try again. That attempt — the splendid Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini — met with exceptional acclaim, and encouraged him to undertake a long-delayed successor to the Second Symphony of 1907. The Third Symphony was begun on June 18, 1935 at his Swiss villa, “Senar,” on Lake Lucerne, not far from “Triebschen,” the house in which Wagner lived from 1866 to 1872. (“Senar” was named for SErgei and his wife, NAtalyia, Rachmaninoff.) Though he had to spend three weeks taking the waters at Baden-Baden for his rheumatism in July, he finished the first movement by August 22nd and the second movement a month later. By then, however, it was time for him to again begin his strenuous annual international tours, and the Symphony had to await its completion until June 1936. It was finished exactly three decades after the Second Symphony.

As do his two earlier works in the genre, Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony opens with a motto theme that returns in later movements. The motto, here presented immediately in unison by clarinet, muted horn and cellos, is a small-interval phrase derived from the style of ecclesiastical chant. A few measures of vigorous orchestral warming-up introduce the movement’s main theme, a doleful plaint issued by the double reeds. The second theme is a lovely, lyrical strain, initiated by the cellos, which gives testimony that Rachmaninoff retained his wonderful sense of melodic invention throughout his life. (He was 63 when he finished the score.) Following a development section of considerable ingenuity and rhythmic energy, the two principal themes are recalled in the recapitulation. The motto theme returns quietly in


the trumpet and bass trombone and then in the pizzicato strings to bring the movement to a subdued close.

The second of the Symphony’s three movements combines elements of both a traditional Adagio and a Scherzo. The motto theme in a bardic setting for horn accompanied by strummed harp chords is heard to open the movement. The solo violin gives out the principal theme of the Adagio, a languid melody in triplet rhythms; the flute presents a graceful complementary idea that ends with a cadential trill. These two motives are elaborated until a sudden change of tempo and the introduction of a bustling rhythmic figure usher in the Scherzo section of the movement. An abbreviated recall of the music of the opening Adagio rounds out the movement, to which the motto theme played by pizzicato strings serves as a tiny musical benediction.

The finale is a virtuosic tour-de-force for orchestra. (The work was written for Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra.) The main theme, presented by violins and violas, is a motive of martial vigor; the contrasting second theme, given by the strings doubled by harp (Rachmaninoff demonstrated a remarkable skill in orchestrating for percussion, celesta and harp in this work), is chordal in shape and lyrical in style. The center of the movement is a thorough working-out of the melodic materials, beginning with a fugal treatment of the main theme. As a bridge to the recapitulation, Rachmaninoff employed the Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”), the ancient chant from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead that courses like a grim musical marker through the Isle of the Dead (1907), Paganini Rhapsody (1934), Second Symphony, Third Symphony and Symphonic Dances (1940). This evocative traditional tune as well as the Symphony’s motto theme are woven into the recapitulation of the movement’s earlier motives. A brilliant coda brings the work to an exhilarating close.

©2015 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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rachmaninoff symphony no. 3 | program notes

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