Program notes by J. Michael Allsen 

Our 81st season opens with a brilliant little overture by Dmitri Kabalevsky, his Colas Breugnon.  Then pianist Mackenzie Melemed joins the Spokane Symphony for Amy Beach’s romantic Piano Concerto. To close, we have several evocative selections from one of the greatest 20th-century ballet scores, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. 

The 1938 opera Colas Breugnon tells the story of a peasant looking back on a mischievous and enjoyable life. The opera’s bubbly overture is a musical portrait of the irrepressible main character, filled with good humor and country dancing. 

Dmitri Kabalevsky
Born: December 30, 1904, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Died: February 14, 1987, Moscow, Russia. 

Colas Breugnon Overture, Op. 24 

• Composed: 1936-1938. 
• Premiere: The opera Colas Breugnon was first produced in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on February 22, 1938. 
• Duration: 5:00. 

Background
Dmitri Kabalevsky was one of the leading composers of the old Soviet Union and worked comfortably for his entire career in the restrictive atmosphere of Soviet music. Kabalevsky’s musical style was never even remotely “modernist” and suited perfectly the ideal that music should be uplifting and in service of the people. A loyal member of the Communist Party, he enthusiastically supported Soviet musical policies and held several important political positions and editorships. (Unlike his contemporaries, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, he never ran into trouble with musical authorities.) Interested in the cause of education, Kabalevsky also helped to formulate the Soviet music education system; he wrote dozens of works for children’s choir and, later in his career, influential books on teaching music. As a composer, he was also known for his six operas—rarely produced today, but nearly all were very successful in the Soviet Union.  His first opera, Colas Breugnon, was based upon a 1919 novel by Romain Rolland in the form of reminiscences of a 16th-century Burgundian peasant, looking back on a life well-lived and enjoyed with gusto. Rolland granted Kabalevsky the rights to use the novel but was disappointed by how it was turned into a libretto. Kabalevsky worked over a span of three decades revising the opera, eventually premiering a new version in 1970 that won him the prestigious Lenin Prize, though its lively 1938 overture remained unchanged.

What You’ll Hear
Though the opera is seldom heard in America, the brief Colas Breugnon Overture has long been a favorite concert-opener. It is a musical portrait of the opera’s irrepressible main character, beginning with a flourish and launching immediately into a manic, strongly accented main theme. Kabalevsky introduces a second, more weighty idea, and a slightly more serious central section. Towards the end, there is a wry little country dance episode before the lively coda.

This work, the first piano concerto published by an American woman, was written by the remarkable Amy Beach. Beach faced career restrictions imposed by her parents, her husband, and society at large. Yet in her own time, she became one of America’s most celebrated early 20th-century composers. 

Amy Beach
Born: September 5, 1867, Henniker, New Hampshire.
Died: December 27, 1944. New York City. 

Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, Op. 45 

• Composed: 1898-99.
• Premiere: April 7, 1900, the composer as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Wilhem Gericke.
• Duration: 27:00. 

Background
Amy Beach was born Amy Marcy Cheney, the only child of an upper-class New Hampshire family. Phenomenally talented even as a child, she was a piano prodigy with perfect pitch who could improvise countermelodies at age two. She was composing waltzes for piano at age four. She continued piano studies, though her parents strongly discouraged a professional career in music. Nevertheless, she persisted, and at age 17, Amy Cheney made a high-profile debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, playing Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2. The next year, she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a physician 24 years her senior. At his insistence, she gave up private teaching and severely limited her solo performances. However, Dr. Beach encouraged her to compose—with the condition that she publish works under the name “Mrs. H.H.A. Beach”—but he forbade a private tutor, and she was largely self-taught in composition. She became one of America’s most best-known composers, with the successful premiere of her Mass in E-flat Major in Boston in 1892 and the debut of her “Gaelic” Symphony in 1896—the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She also was soloist in the premiere of her Piano Concerto in 1900. In the meantime, Beach also published a host of popular smaller works: chamber music, sacred and secular music, choral pieces, and dozens of art songs. Following the death of her husband in 1910, and of her mother a few months later, Beach spent the next few years in Germany, touring as a piano soloist under her own name.  (When she returned to America in 1914, she also returned to “Mrs. H.H.A. Beach” as a professional name for the rest of her life.) Beach is unique among American women composers of the early 20th century in that she was never really forgotten: she was celebrated throughout her long career, both as a composer and as a pianist. 

What You’ll Hear
Though the initial critical reception to the Piano Concerto was chilly, Beach successfully championed the work in later performances in Germany and the United States. She described the broad opening movement (Allegro moderato) as “serious in character, piano and orchestra vying with each other in the development of the two principal themes, of which the second is songlike in character.” The exposition of this material is unhurried, and both themes are developed extensively. The lush second theme is from one of her songs, Jeune fille et jeune fleur (1887), a heartbreaking poem about a man who is burying his daughter. The Scherzo (Perpetuum mobile) [perpetual motion] is based upon a second song, Empress of the Night (1891), which sets a poem by her husband. Beach notes that the Scherzo “bears the subtitle perpetuum mobile and consists of a piquant etude rhythm unbroken throughout the piano part, set against an orchestral background that sings the melody in the stringed instruments.” The “perpetual motion” is all in the piano part from the original song—which does indeed sound a bit like a relentless piano etude, until it breaks into a cadenza and at the very end, a series of trills and a joyful final flourish. The slow movement (Largo) is based upon another setting of a poem by her husband, Twilight (1887). In this case, the turbulent original song is transformed into a doleful lament that rises to an impassioned peak, before a quiet transition into the finale. The final movement, which is marked Allegro con scioltezza (literally, Allegro “with ease.”) is a rondo, with the rather relaxed and flowing main theme introduced by the solo part. This alternates with contrasting material featuring flashy piano writing, until near the end, where there is a return of the third movement’s lament. The lament is abruptly cut short by a brilliant return of the main idea and a triumphant coda. Several writers have insisted that there is a programmatic element to the concerto: that it represents Beach’s ultimately triumphant struggle against the restrictions imposed by her parents and her husband. If this was indeed the case, she never openly spoke of it. 

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, based upon the Shakespeare tragedy, is among the finest ballet scores of the 20th century. Here we play a set of selections from this great work. 

Sergei Prokofiev
Born: April 23, 1891, Sontsivka, Ukraine.
Died: March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia. 

 Selections from Romeo and Juliet, Suites I and II, Opp. 64bis and 64ter 

• Composed: 1934-35. 
• Premiere: The first concert performance of the full score took place in Moscow in October of 1935. The ballet was not staged until 1938, with a production in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and it was finally performed in Russia in 1940, with a production by the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). 
• Duration: ca.38 

Background
There is little doubt these days that Romeo and Juliet stands as Prokofiev’s most enduring ballet score. For several years, however, this enormous work was a victim of Soviet artistic politics.  The original idea for this full-scale romantic ballet on Romeo and Juliet seems to have come from Sergei Radlov, an influential Leningrad opera director who had collaborated on Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges. The “story-ballet” Romeo and Juliet was to have been produced at Leningrad’s Academic Theater, but at the end of 1934 the theater underwent a sudden change of administration. Sergei Kirov, the Party boss of Leningrad, was assassinated, undoubtedly at Stalin’s order, and in an incongruous move, the Soviet authorities renamed the Academic Theater to honor this “Socialist martyr.” The new Kirov Theater was tightly controlled by the Soviet artistic bureaucracy, and Radlov—whose views had long been considered suspiciously avant garde—fell out of favor with the authorities. Hopes for producing Romeo and Juliet in Leningrad evaporated, and Prokofiev began working with the Bolshoi ballet in Moscow.  The score was completed in 1935 and played at the Bolshoi, whose directors pronounced the music “undanceable” and canceled the planned production. At least part of the problem was the story line, which had been twisted at Radlov’s suggestion, so that a suicidal Romeo arrived at Juliet’s tomb just a minute after she woke up, thus providing the most famous of all tragedies with a happy ending! 

Despite these disappointments, Prokofiev continued to work on the ballet, fixing the sappy ending, and extracting two orchestral suites from the score. The concert suites he extracted from the ballet were enormously popular inside the Soviet Union, and in Europe and the United States. In late 1938, the Kirov Ballet finally agreed to produce Romeo and Juliet. Their change of heart seems to have been inspired in part by the success of the suites, but also by some embarrassment over the fact that a non-Soviet company (in Czechoslovakia) had actually staged the ballet in 1938. The Kirov’s lavish production in 1940 was a huge success, and the ballet finally found a secure place in the Russian repertoire—the critics hailed Romeo and Juliet as a triumph of Soviet art, and hailed Prokofiev the ballet composer as the first worthy successor to Tchaikovsky. 

What You’ll Hear
Movements from the ballet are often mixed and matched, as at this program. Montagues and Capulets begins with solemn music from Act I of the ballet, which accompanies the duke as he forbids fighting between the two families. The main theme, however, is the accompaniment to the dance of the Capulet knights in Act II—a threatening march theme with a ponderous trombone accompaniment. A contrasting middle section, with a lovely flute solo, is Juliet’s more graceful version of this same music. Juliet the Young Girl is a portrait of Juliet from Act I—the mood of this music shifts constantly between quick and flirtatious to quiet and introspective. Masks depicts Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio—all of them masked—sneaking into the Capulets’ ball. It is a quiet march with appropriately stealthy music from solo clarinet and trumpet. Romeo and Juliet: Balcony Scene is unadulterated Romanticism from beginning to end.  All is hushed at the beginning as muted violins and harp set the stage. Much of this quiet but passionate movement is a dialogue, with themes representing the two lovers presented alternately in strings and woodwinds. The music moves towards a gentle peak at the beginning but subsides to a whisper at the end.  

The Dance comes from a peasant festival at the beginning of Act II. Here, five couples dance to music of unceasing motion and wry humor that continues even in a more romantic central passage. Romeo and Juliet Before Parting is wistful and unhurried music, accompanying the lovers’ passionate conversation. Here Prokofiev presents a whole series of brief themes but never allows the melancholy mood to break. The Death of Tybalt is a complete contrast, dominated by the brasses and blazing string lines. Here, Prokofiev brings together many of the significant moments of Act II: the duel, Tybalt’s death, and the funeral procession. Romeo at Juliet’s Grave is the music that accompanies Romeo’s visit to the sleeping Juliet, who he thinks is dead. It opens with astringent string lines and begins a slow funeral procession. It builds inexorably towards a deep cry of anguish and closes in mood of profound resignation as Romeo kisses her one last time, drinks his poison and dies next to Juliet’s sleeping body.   

Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!
Here’s to my love. (Drinking) O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die. 

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Program notes ©2026 by J. Michael Allsen