For our first Masterworks program, the Spokane Symphony welcomes guest pianist Awadagin Pratt, who performs on two works, beginning with a new piece written for him by Jessie Montgomery. Mr. Pratt then plays the fourth and most lyrical of Bach’s keyboard concertos. Framing these pieces are an exuberant opera overture by Glinka and a moving minimalist work by Max Richter. To close, we have Tchaikovsky’s great Symphony No. 5, the composer’s ultimately triumphant struggle with Fate.

 

Mikhail Glinka

Born: June 1, 1804. Novospasskoe, Russia.
Died: February 15, 1857, Berlin, Germany.

 Overture to “Ruslan and Ludmilla”

• Composed: completed in 1842.
• Premiere: December 9, 1842 at the Bolshoi Theater in St. Petersburg.
• Duration: 5:00.

This exuberant orchestral curtain-raiser was the opening of Glinka’s Russian nationalist masterpiece, the opera Ruslan and Ludmilla.

Background
Glinka, widely viewed as the founding father of Russian musical nationalism, is primarily known today through two operas. The first of these, A Life for the Czar (1836), was a success both for its incorporation of elements from Russian folk music and its contemporary plot, which resonated with burgeoning Russian political nationalism. For his second opera, Glinka turned to an epic poem by Pushkin. Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmilla had secured his reputation when it was published in 1818 and was widely known in Russian literary circles. The poem is a fairy-tale recreation of ancient Slavic epics: in this case, an extremely complicated version of the “sleeping beauty” legend. Glinka had originally planned to work with the poet to create a libretto, but Pushkin died in a duel before he could collaborate on the opera. Glinka brought in a team of no fewer than five librettists, who turned Pushkin’s already convoluted storyline into an even more complicated series of tableaux. The confusing plot probably contributed to a rather lukewarm response at the premiere performance. Ruslan and Ludmilla soon caught on, however, and became a recognized symbol of Russian music: the opera was performed over 300 times in St. Petersburg alone over the next half century and was widely heard in other Russian cities. European and American audiences were a bit slower to accept the work (it was not performed in the US until 1942), but it is still heard occasionally today.

What You’ll Hear
Though the opera Ruslan and Ludmilla is rarely heard on today’s stages, its brilliant little overture has become a staple of the orchestral repertoire. The overture is set in classical sonata form. The opening melodies, accompanied by furious violin lines, are borrowed from the opera’s final victory scene. The contrasting theme, played by violas, cellos, and bassoons, is borrowed from a battlefield aria sung by the hero Ruslan in the second act. Near the end, the trombones—as usual, relegated to the role of orchestral Bad Guy—play a descending whole-tone scale associated with the evil dwarf Chernomor, but this is soon drowned out in general rejoicing.

 

Jessie Montgomery

Born: December 8, 1981, New York City.

Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra

• Composed: 2022.
• Premiere: March 27, 2022, by Awadagin Pratt and the Hilton Head (SC) Symphony Orchestra. Rounds was commissioned by the Art of the Piano Foundation for Mr. Pratt. It was co-commissioned by a consortium of nine American orchestras.
• Duration: 15:00.

Composer Jessie Montgomery is also prominent as a violinist, educator, and advocate for broader representation of Black and Latinx musicians in classical music. Her Grammy-winning composition Rounds was written in 2022 for Mr. Pratt.

Background
Composer and violinist Jessie Montgomery grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and credits the neighborhood’s unique artistic atmosphere and the musical, artistic, and activist activities of her own family for fostering a career that “merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy.” After her musical studies at the Third Street Music School Settlement, the Juilliard School, and Princeton University, Montgomery remains active both as a performer and composer. As a violinist, she has performed with the PUBLIQuartet, the Providence Quartet, the Catalyst Quartet, the Silkroad Ensemble, the Sphinx Virtuosi, and her own ensemble. Since she was a teenager, Montgomery has been involved with the Sphinx Organization, devoted to fostering diversity in classical music performance, which specifically promotes the development of young African-American and Latinx string players. She has gained an impressive number of credits as a composer, with commissions for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many others.

What You’ll Hear
Earlier this year, Rounds won a Grammy Award for best classical composition. Montgomery provides the following description of the piece:

Rounds for solo piano and string orchestra is inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines :

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
(Text © T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd.)

“In addition to this inspiration, while working on the piece, I became fascinated by fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales) and also delved into the work of contemporary biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber, who writes about the interdependency of all beings. Weber explores how every living organism has a rhythm that interacts and impacts all of the living things around it, resulting in a multitude of outcomes.

“Like Eliot in Four Quartets, beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment. I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work – action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift.

“Structurally, with these concepts in mind, I set the form of the work as a rondo, within a rondo, within a rondo. The five major sections are a rondo; section “A” is also a rondo in itself; and the cadenza – which is partially improvised by the soloist – breaks the pattern, yet, contains within it, the overall form of the work.

“To help share some of this with the performers, I’ve included the following poetic performance note at the start of the score:

“Inspired by the constancy, the rhythms, and duality of life, in order of relevance to form:
Rondine – AKA Swifts (like a sparrow) flying in circles patterns
Playing with opposites – dark/light; stagnant/swift
Fractals – infinite design

“I am grateful to my friend Awadagin Pratt for his collaborative spirit and ingenuity in helping to usher my first work for solo piano into the world.

The classical rondo form is relatively easy to follow in this piece. The main idea is a swirling line that travels from the piano to the strings and back. There is a contrasting episode that moves from ethereal, quiet music to more impassioned playing before a return of the main idea. A second contrasting section begins with a hushed and peaceful piano melody above a repeating string ostinato, which eventually gives way to a solo piano cadenza. (At one point during this solo episode, Pratt draws delicate harp-like music from the instrument by plucking the strings.) The piece ends with a final return to the main idea and, following a robust slap from the basses, a dramatic upward-sweeping flourish.

 

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Born: March 31, 1685, Eisenach, Germany.
Died: July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Germany. 

Keyboard Concerto No. 4 in A Major, BWV 1055

• Composed: Bach probably composed this work in 1721-23 as a concerto for oboe d’amore. While the original concerto has not survived, it was reworked as a keyboard concerto sometime before 1739.
• Premiere: It was undoubtedly heard for the first time in 1739 or shortly afterward in Leipzig. 
• Duration: 15:00.

This keyboard concerto, written for Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, an amateur concert society, was adapted from an earlier concerto for oboe d’amore. It is set in the traditional three-movement form of the baroque concerto.

Background
In 1729, after six intensely busy years as the Kantor at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, Bach turned once more to secular music and took up an additional position as director of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum. The Collegium was a group of some of Leipzig’s finest singers and instrumentalists that gave a series of weekly concerts—really open rehearsals or “reading sessions”—at a local coffee house. Though no formal record of their concerts has survived, it is obvious that much of the music was by Bach himself. This was an opportunity to perform his earlier instrumental concertos and chamber works, many of which dated from his years as Kapellmeister to the court of Cöthen (1717-1723). It was also a chance to compose pieces that would have been inappropriate for the staid Thomaskirche, such as his well-known “Coffee Cantata” (Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211)—one of Bach’s few essays in musical comedy. In 1738 or early 1739, Bach compiled a manuscript containing seven harpsichord concertos and the beginning of an eighth. These were probably pieces written for the Collegium as well, performed by Bach or possibly by one of his sons. He stepped away from the Collegium for a time in 1737-39, and these concertos would have been the perfect reintroduction to Leipzig’s secular music scene.

Keyboard (or “Clavier”) concertos were relatively rare in Bach’s time—the harpsichord was a standard part of the continuo group that improvised the harmonic foundation for baroque music, but it was not considered a solo instrument for concertos. That Bach, one of the great organists and harpsichordists of his age, should have wanted to take a solo role is hardly surprising, and in 1721, he wrote what is arguably the first keyboard concerto, the Brandenburg Concerto No.5. In this concerto grosso, the solo group includes violin, flute, and a fully written-out part for the harpsichord—including an astonishing four-minute solo cadenza in the opening movement. The later Leipzig concertos are mostly arrangements of earlier violin concertos from Cöthen, with the solo line transformed into an idiomatic keyboard part.  One of the most famous of these, for example, the Concerto No.3 in D Major, is adapted from the earlier E Major violin concerto. The concerto heard here, No.4 in A Major, was probably based on a now-lost concerto for oboe d’amore.

What You’ll Hear
The Concerto No.4 is in three movements. As usual in baroque concertos, the soloist plays in both tutti and solo sections, though here we have a keyboard part that is freed from its usual supporting continuo role. Probably because of its original scoring for oboe d’amore, the solo part has a more lyrical quality than in some of Bach’s other keyboard concertos, particularly in the last two movements. The opening Allegro begins with a lively ritornello—a passage that repeats throughout—for soloist and orchestra, laying out themes that are developed by the solo part in the course of the movement. The second movement (Larghetto) has some elements of the chaconne in the gently pulsing string background, providing a simple accompaniment to the solo part’s lyrical, almost improvisatory lines. The final movement (Allegro ma non tanto) combines a pair of ideas. The first is a relaxed dance-style ritornello that supports flashy ornamentation from the keyboard, and the second is a gentler idea that hints at the newly fashionable galant style.

 

Max Richter

Born: March 22, 1966, Hamelin, Germany.

On the Nature of Daylight

• Composed: 2003.
• Premiere: It was recorded as part of Richter’s 2004 album The Blue Notebooks.
• Duration: 6:00

This quietly intense minimalist work was originally intended as a protest against the Gulf War. It has since been used frequently in television and film scores.

Background
Pianist and composer Max Richter was born in what was then West Germany, but his parents emigrated to Britain while he was a child. After training at the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and studying with composer Luciano Berio, Richter has gone on to a successful multifaceted career, scoring for films and television, working as a producer, and issuing several successful recordings of his own music.

Richter’s best-known work, On the Nature of Daylight, was written in 2003 as part of his album The Blue Notebooks, which he describes as a musical protest against the build-up to the first Gulf War. He calls this work “an attempt to make a kind of luminous music out of the darkest possible materials. The piece is structured as a sort of palindrome. It has all sorts of internal geometrical symmetries, which come from my studies of Renaissance music. I’m very fond of those kinds of practices.” If this work sounds familiar to you, it has been used in many film and television scores: Shutter Island (2010), Disconnect (2012), Arrival (2016), The Handmaid’s Tale (2021), The Last of Us (2023), and nearly 20 others!

What You’ll Hear
On the Nature of Daylight is in a minimalist style and proceeds by adding layers to the simple repeating progression played at the beginning by the low strings. Richter then lays on a flowing line from the second violins and, later, a soaring and serene line from the first violins. The violin parts introduce subtle variations on their repeated melodies before the piece ends quietly.

 

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Born: May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia.
Died: November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64

• Composed: Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony was composed in 1888 at the composer’s summer retreat in Frolovskoe.
• Premiere: Tchaikovsky conducted the first performance in St. Petersburg on November 17, 1888.
• Duration: 47:00.

“Should not a symphony reveal those wordless urges that hide in the heart, which ask so earnestly for expression?”  – Tchaikovsky

This symphony, written after a long period of depression and self-doubt, starts in a very dark place, but is ultimately triumphant.

Background
Over ten years passed between the time Tchaikovsky completed his fourth symphony and the composition of his fifth—a decade of deep self-doubt and insecurity. During much of this period, Tchaikovsky was haunted by guilt over the ending of his brief and disastrous marriage and by upheaval in almost every area of his professional and private life. This turmoil is the very fabric of the Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin, both of which were completed in 1878, but these works seem to have exhausted Tchaikovsky’s creative resources. Much of the next ten years were spent in seclusion or traveling throughout Europe. Although he continued to compose during this time, few of the works he produced had the energy of his earlier music. It was not until 1885 and afterward, with the enthusiastic admiration of the Czar, the increased popularity of his works in Russia, and an enormously successful tour of Europe in 1887, that Tchaikovsky began to recover from this emotional crisis.

In May 1888, Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother, afraid he had “written himself out,” but added a hopeful note that he was beginning work on a new symphony. A month later, he wrote to his confidante Nadejda von Meck and made an almost apologetic reference to the work. The premiere, which he conducted in November, was quite successful, but his continuing self-doubt is shown in another letter to Madame von Meck:

… I have come to the conclusion that [the fifth symphony] is a failure. There is something repellent, something superfluous, patchy, and insecure, which the public instinctively recognizes. It was obvious to me that the ovations I received were prompted more by my earlier work and that the Symphony itself did not really please the audience. This realization brings a sharp twinge of dissatisfaction with myself. Am I really played out, as they say? Can I merely repeat and ring the changes on my earlier idiom? Last night, I looked through our symphony [the fourth]. What a difference! How immeasurably superior it is! It is very sad!

It was not until the following year, after a superb performance of the new symphony in Hamburg and amid glowing reports of its success elsewhere, that Tchaikovsky himself began to express some satisfaction with the work. Although the Fifth Symphony does not have an explicit program, it is apparent from Tchaikovsky’s writings that both this work and the Fourth Symphony have Fate as their central idea. However, the musical realization of this idea is very different in the two works. In the fourth symphony, the motive associated with Fate is resoundingly announced by the brasses and plays an adversarial role throughout the work—it is as if, in 1878, that Fate was something against which Tchaikovsky felt a need to struggle. However, his relationship with Fate in the Fifth Symphony is more resigned, even relaxed. Tchaikovsky biographer John Warrack has suggested that, in both works, the figure of Fate “is referring to his central emotional problem, his homosexuality.” It is relatively certain that, by 1888, Tchaikovsky had come to terms with it. Although he still felt guilt pangs, his acceptance was accompanied by a deepening religious conviction and renewed confidence. A clear sense of this cautious self-assurance comes through in the symphony’s triumphant finale.

What You’ll Hear
The symphony opens with a slow introduction (Andante), quietly stating the motto that provides the dramatic background of the entire work—the motive that Tchaikovsky identified as “Fate.”  The clarinet and bassoon introduce the main idea of the movement’s body (Allegro con anima), a minor-key theme that Tchaikovsky may have derived from a Polish folk song. Strings introduce a contrasting group of ideas, which are much more lyrical in nature. The movement is worked out rather conventionally in sonata form, but the music is expressive throughout, creating moods of yearning, sadness, and emotional turmoil.

The second movement (Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza) is based upon one of Tchaikovsky’s most beautiful and expressive melodies, sung by a solo horn above a light background of strings. There are gentle answers by clarinet and oboe, and a change of mood. This central section builds gradually towards a climax:  a statement of the Fate motive by the brass. He returns once more to the lyrical mood of the opening, but at the end, the mood is shattered again by the return of Fate.

Tchaikovsky’s waltz (Valse: Allegro moderato) is set in a three-part form—two principal sections enclosing a contrasting section or trio. In this movement, the main theme was inspired by a Florentine street melody he had heard some years earlier. The trio takes on a lighter character, dominated by a quick 16th-note melody passed among the strings and woodwinds. After a reworked version of the main idea, Tchaikovsky adds a coda, which includes an ominous statement of the Fate motive by the clarinet and bassoon. Here, it is fitted into the triple meter of the waltz, but it seems no less forbidding.

The introduction to the last movement (Andante maestoso) presents the motto in a major key, now transformed from something frightening into a triumphant march. The body of the movement (Allegro vivace) returns to the E minor of the beginning of the symphony. The first group of themes are generally quite forceful, while the second group, dominated by solo woodwinds, seem more hesitant. The Fate motive rounds off the exposition and pervades this movement as a whole, finally set in an extended coda. At the end, there is a surprise—the main Allegro theme of the first movement returns in the closing bars, transformed, like the Fate motive, into something exultant and optimistic. This ending appeals for an explanation:  the dark feelings of the beginning (guilt? shame? self-doubt?) have now been assimilated or overcome;  the music has come full circle, and the spirit is victorious.

_____

Program notes ©2024 by J. Michael Allsen