The Spokane Symphony’s former Assistant Conductor Shira Samuels-Shragg leads this program, which opens with a lighthearted contemporary work written in 19th-century style, Quinn Mason’s Toast of the Town Overture. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of many composers who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s to escape the Nazis—to the enormous benefit of American music. In Korngold’s case, he found a congenial home in Hollywood, writing film scores. Violinist Gabrielle Després joins us to play his greatest concert work, the 1946 Violin Concerto, a piece whose themes were drawn from Korngold’s movie scores. To close, we have the finest of Dvořák’s symphonies, the Symphony No. 7, written as a tribute to his mentor, Johannes Brahms.

Quinn Mason

Born: March 23, 1996, in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Toast of the Town Overture

• Composed: 2016-2020.
• Premiere: The work had a virtual premiere in April 2021, played by the Nevada All State orchestra, Bruce Walker conducting. Its live premiere was on June 20, 2021, by the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic, conducted by James Ross.
• Duration: 8:00.

This rousing overture channels the style of 19th-century comic opera.

Background

The exciting young composer and conductor Quinn Mason grew up in Dallas and credits his early interest in orchestral music and composition to a young people’s concert by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which he attended at age ten. There, he heard Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, which he calls “a great introduction to the orchestra, and for me, the beginning of a love affair continues today.” To date, his music has been commissioned and performed by well over 160 orchestras nationwide. Mason’s style is thoroughly approachable and sometimes even nostalgic. This is certainly the case in his Toast of the Town Overture, which he calls “a festive and fun overture to an operetta that doesn’t exist.”

What You’ll Hear

Mason says this piece “is designed in the style of light operetta, comparable to Gilbert and Sullivan or Offenbach overtures.” Toast of the Town is an enjoyable mashup of styles from 19th-century comic opera, beginning with a nervous, expectant string figure; above this, Mason presents a series of tunes from his phantom operetta: a pompous duo for horn and tuba, a slightly woozy dialogue between the strings and woodwinds, moderated by the triangle and a twittering piccolo, and eventually, a rather melancholy “love theme.” All of these ideas return at the end, before a fine brassy coda.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Born: May 29, 1897, Brno, Czech Republic.

Died: November 29, 1957, Los Angeles, California.

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, Op.35

• Composed: Korngold completed his Violin Concerto in 1946, though most of it is nearly ten years older. The score is dedicated to Alma Mahler-Werfel, widow of Gustav Mahler, who had been Korngold’s childhood mentor.
• Premiere: February 15, 1947, with violinist Jascha Heifetz and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
• Duration: 24:00.

Most of the themes of this grand romantic violin concerto come from Korngold’s movie scores.

Background

Korngold, born in Bohemia but raised in Vienna, began composing as a child. His father, an influential music critic, gave him access to the greatest musicians in Vienna. Young Korngold was a prodigy, and when he was age nine, Gustav Mahler hailed him as a genius. Through the 1920s, he maintained a career as both a conductor and a composer, and his 1920 opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City”) was particularly successful. By the 1930s, life for a Jewish artist in Austria was becoming increasingly hazardous, and in 1934, he accepted an offer to come to Hollywood to work on a film score. He spent the rest of his life there and would write nearly two dozen film scores, mostly for the Warner Brothers studio. Korngold’s bold, thoroughly romantic style made him a natural for swashbuckling Errol Flynn adventures like Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and The Sea Hawk (1940). He returned increasingly to concert music after the war—he had vowed never to write anything but film scores until Hitler was defeated.

In early 2005, I was able to consult with John Waxman, son of Korngold’s colleague Franz Waxman, and Kathrin Korngold Hubbard, Korngold’s granddaughter, on the complicated genesis of his most popular concert work, the Violin Concerto. The initial suggestion that Korngold write a violin concerto came from Franz Waxman, and he was at work on the piece in 1937-38. Kathrin Korngold Hubbard notes that in 1938, there was a “tryout” performance by violinist Robert Pollack, a family friend, who was not able to play this difficult piece effectively. Disappointed by the performance and tied up with work on Robin Hood, Korngold set the score aside. In 1945, with the war over, he set to work again on the concerto when he began to rewrite it for the virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. It would not be Huberman who performed it for the first time, however, but Jascha Heifetz. According to John Waxman, this resulted from a dinner party at his father’s Hollywood home that included the Korngolds, Rudolph Polk, and his wife. Polk—Heifetz’s manager and a fine violinist in his own right—asked Korngold why he had never written a violin concerto. The subject was quickly dropped, but later that evening, as the men and women went to separate rooms, Luzi Korngold revealed the story to Mrs. Polk. Polk phoned Korngold the very next day to request the score for Heifetz, and Heifetz himself phoned Korngold the day after that, asking permission to play the work’s premiere. The two worked together on the final version—at Heifetz’s insistence, making the concerto even more difficult! In her biography of Korngold, Luzi Korngold notes that when Huberman visited them afterward, the composer told him: “Huberman, I haven’t been unfaithful yet, I’m not engaged…but I have flirted.” Huberman graciously offered to play the concerto after Heifetz’s premiere—but died in 1947 before he could perform it. The world premiere concert in St. Louis in 1947 also included a virtuoso work written for Heifetz by Franz Waxman, the Carmen Fantasy. Regarding the premiere, Korngold wrote:

“In spite of its demand for virtuosity in the finale, the work with its many melodic and lyric episodes was contemplated rather for a Caruso of the violin than for a Paganini. It is needless to say how delighted I am to have my concerto performed by Caruso and Paganini in one person: Jascha Heifetz.”

What You’ll Hear

Though it was written in the 1930s and 1940s, the Violin Concerto is a work of pure turn-of-the-century Viennese romanticism. It also draws on themes from several of his film scores. The first movement’s (Moderato nobile) contemplative opening theme—heard first in the violin and then in full orchestra—appeared in his 1937 score for Another Dawn. A lighter transition leads to a lyrical second idea, a lush idea that appeared as a love theme in the film Juarez (1939). (It’s possible that, in this case, the borrowing went the other direction—that this music may have been borrowed from the then-shelved violin concerto.) After an extended solo cadenza in the middle, the movement ends with a rather free development of the two main ideas. The second movement (Romanze: Andante) continues in the same lyrical style. This movement shares much of its musical raw material with Korngold’s Oscar-winning score to Anthony Adverse (1936). The violin introduces the main theme through a gauzy accompaniment of strings and harp. There are a few more playful moments, but the wistful mood is otherwise constant through this quiet movement. The finale (Allegro assai vivace) is a set of variations on a theme used in his score to The Prince and the Pauper (1937). There is actually a lot more “Paganini” than “Caruso” in this movement: this is mostly wry and lighthearted music that allows the violin to shine in brilliant technical passages, ending in a humorous coda.

Antonín Dvořák

Born: September 8, 1841, Nelahozeves, Czech Republic.

Died: May 1, 1904, Prague, Czech Republic.

Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70            

• Composed: 1884-85.
• Premiere: Dvořák conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the premiere on March 17, 1885.
• Duration: 36:00.

Unlike many of his earlier works, Dvořák’s seventh symphony, aside from its lively scherzo, largely avoids Bohemian folk styles. Instead, this work pays musical tribute to his friend and champion, Johannes Brahms.

Background

In December 1884, Dvořák wrote to a friend: “I am now busy with the new symphony (for London), and wherever I go, I have no thought for anything but my work, which much be such as to move the world—God grant that it be so!” He was describing the composition of his seventh symphony, generally considered to be his finest symphonic work. Earlier that year, he made the first of eight successful visits to England. British audiences adored his music, and shortly after arriving, he was named an honorary member of the London Philharmonic Society. This honor came with a commission for a new symphony. Though this was his major reason for writing the Symphony No.7, there were also several other factors at work. Dvořák had been deeply moved by the premiere of Brahms’s third symphony in 1883, and it is clear that he wanted to respond musically to this work by his mentor and friend; his letters and diaries from this period speak of wanting to live up to Brahms’s confidence in him and to produce a work of similar depth. There are even musical clues that, in some sense the Symphony No.7 is a “symphony about Brahms”—its musical forms, its intense thematic development, and the rhythmic quirks of the third and fourth movements all pay tribute to Dvořák’s mentor. What is put in the background of this work—aside from the third movement—are the Czech musical styles that played such an important part in his Slavonic Dances and earlier symphonies. It seems that though Dvořák remained a strong Bohemian patriot, he was trying to break out of the nationalist mold he had created in so much of his earlier music.

The symphony’s reception in London was everything Dvořák could have hoped for, and after a few revisions, he sent it off to his publisher Simrock. In his long years of struggle for recognition, the contract with Simrock, acquired with the help of Brahms, had been a blessing, though Simrock had also profited enormously by publishing popular pieces like the Slavonic Dances. Now, he was finally in a position to bargain: Simrock offered 3000 marks for the symphony, but Dvořák stood his ground until the publisher doubled his price. The score was published by Simrock in 1885 as Symphony No.2. Its present numbering—No.7—reflects its actual place in the composition of Dvořák’s symphonies.

What You’ll Hear

The first movement (Allegro maestoso) begins with a brooding melody in the low strings that is the basis for several later ideas. A horn call and a woodwind passage announce a contrasting major-key melody played by the flute and clarinet. After a short but intense development section, Dvořák recapitulates the main ideas, though in reverse order: the second theme returns first in a flowing clarinet solo before he finally returns to the tragic mood of the opening. A melancholy clarinet solo above pizzicato strings opens the second movement (Poco adagio). This is answered by the strings and other solo woodwinds, building to a related idea that critic Donald Tovey once called “one of the profoundest in any symphony since Beethoven.” A final, more pastoral theme is introduced by the horns. All three melodies find their way into the development before Dvořák restates them and ends the movement with a final statement of the opening idea, now in the oboe above string tremolos, and a quiet epilogue.

While the second movement probably shows Dvorák at his most “Brahmsian,” the scherzo (Vivace) looks back to his Bohemian roots. The opening dance has the feel of a furiant, a fast Czech folk dance much used by Dvořák. However, he introduces one of Brahms’s favorite rhythmic devices, pitting a triple-meter melody against a duple-meter accompaniment. The central trio changes the character briefly, with solo woodwinds above, before the opening mood returns. There is one more brief, slow episode before he closes with a furious coda. The finale (Allegro) begins with a long, moody introduction that builds intensity until Dvořák introduces a forceful, off-beat main idea. From this point, the movement has an unstoppable rhythmic energy. There are occasional breaks in the intensity, but the mood remains tempestuous throughout, culminating in a fierce coda.

_____

Program notes ©2024 by J. Michael Allsen