Mahler’s “Titan”

Carlos Kalmar, conductor
Elina Vähälä, violin

MAGNUS LINDBERG
Purcell Variation from Bright Cecilia: Variations on a Theme by Purcell

Vital Stats

Composer: Born June 27, 1958, Helsinki, Finland

Work composed: 2002, one of seven variations from seven different composers commissioned by BBC Music Magazine to celebrate its 10th anniversary

World premiere: Leonard Slatkin conducted Bright Cecilia with the BBC Symphony Orchestra  on Sept. 14, 2002, at Royal Albert Hall in London.

Oregon Symphony premiere: At these concerts

Instrumentation: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, crotales, tam tam, bass drum, tubular bells, metal plate and strings

Estimated duration: 3 minutes

Magnus Lindberg is the most acclaimed contemporary Finnish composer working today. He began composing at age 17, and his music includes influences from Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Igor Stravinsky and Lindberg’s countryman Jean Sibelius, along with aspects of progressive rock and free jazz.

Lindberg excels at writing for large ensembles. “The orchestra is my instrument,” he declared. “With it I can best express my musical ideas.” In his earlier works, Lindberg emphasized rhythm, timbre and harmony over melody, but his more recent compositions have showcased melodies that emerge out of dense harmonic textures. About melodies, Lindberg has stated, “My music is full of melodies, all right; they’re by-products of harmony.”

Tonight’s work is one of a set of variations written by seven different composers on the same theme, taken from English Baroque composer Henry Purcell’s 1692 Ode to St. Cecilia. Purcell’s homage to the patron saint of music was set to texts by Nicholas Brady, an English cleric and poet, including the movement “Thou Tun’st This World,” the subject of all seven variations. The text, “Thou tun’st this World below, the Spheres above/Who in the Heavenly Round to their own Music move,” implies creative license for wide-ranging interpretation. Lindberg’s version envelops Purcell’s intimate Baroque style inside a Phil Specter-esque wall of sound, with brasses predominating. One reviewer described it as Lindberg’s version of Mussorgsky’s “Great Gate of Kiev,” from Pictures at an Exhibition, dubbing it the “Great Gate of Purcell.”

BENJAMIN BRITTEN
Violin Concerto, Op. 15

Vital Stats

Composer: Born Nov. 22, 1913, Lowestoft, England; died Dec. 4, 1976, Aldeburgh, England

Work composed: 1938-9, revised 1950, 1954 and 1965; dedicated to Henry Boys

World premiere: John Barbirolli led violinist Antonio Brosa and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on Mar. 28, 1940.

Oregon Symphony premiere: At these concerts

Instrumentation: solo violin, 3 flutes (2 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (one doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, glockenspiel, side drum, tenor drum, triangle, harp  and strings

Estimated duration: 32 minutes

In 1936, Benjamin Britten traveled to Barcelona with violinist Antonio Brosa to perform his Suite for Violin and Piano. Not long afterward, the Spanish Civil War broke out. Britten was an ardent pacifist and had a number of friends who fought on behalf of the Spanish Republicans. Although he left no specific comments about non-musical influences or inspirations for his Violin Concerto, it seems clear that this concerto is Britten’s response to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.

Britten finished the concerto a month after Germany invaded Poland, in the autumn of 1939. Begun during one war and completed at the outset of another, Britten wrote, “It’s at times like these that work is so important, that humans can think of other things than blowing each other up.”

The concerto contains several significant musical features. It begins with a distinctive rhythmic motif in the timpani, and this fragment recurs and intensifies throughout the first movement. This may be Britten’s homage to Beethoven, who began his own violin concerto in a similar manner.

Britten also took inspiration from the outstanding musicianship of his friend Brosa. Many of the concerto’s melodies are flavored with Iberian passion. The usual structure of a concerto, in which fast outer movements frame a slower, more intimate central section, is reversed here. The Vivace crackles with barely contained explosive energy, while the outer movements, particularly the Passacaglia, are in places infused with a heaviness that suggests the utter futility of war.

Olin Downes praised Britten’s Violin Concerto in the New York Times as “something that has the flavor of genuine novelty in the violin concerto form,” while another critic observed, “At its best … it is personal, heartfelt, communicative.”

GUSTAV MAHLER
Symphony No. 1 in D major, "Titan"

Vital Stats

Composer:  Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, [now Kaliště, Jihlava in the Czech Republic], Bohemia; died May 18, 1911, Vienna

Work composed: 1884-8, revised 1893-6

World premiere: Mahler conducted the Budapest Philharmonic in Budapest, Hungary, on Nov. 20, 1889.

Oregon Symphony premiere: Nov. 8, 1948, with Werner Janssen conducting

Most recent Oregon Symphony performances: Feb. 26-28, 2000, with James DePreist conducting

Instrumentation: 4 flutes (three doubling piccolo), 4 oboes (one doubling English horn), 4 clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), 7 horns, 5 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, 2 sets of timpani, bass drum, cymbals, gong, triangle, harp and strings

Estimated duration: 56 minutes

Like many composers, Mahler was both drawn to and wary of the notion of program music. He wrestled with the idea of linking his musical ideas with an extra-musical program, fearing his music would not be taken seriously. At the same time, the attraction of an underlying narrative as a unifying structure held great appeal for Mahler. At the time he was composing his first symphony, Mahler was so ambivalent about the inclusion of a program that he called it a symphonic poem. Its overall narrative describes, in Mahler’s words, “a strong, heroic man, his life and sufferings, his battles and defeat at the hands of Fate.”

The argument for the Symphony No. 1 as program music is strengthened by the fact that much of its musical material was borrowed from other sources. In the first two movements, Mahler used melodies from two of his songs as the basis for elaborate thematic development. In the third movement, he set the folk song “Brother Martin,” known to most audiences as “Frère Jacques,” in a somber minor key. In the final movement Mahler goes even further afield in his borrowings, taking material from Liszt’s Dante Symphony and Wagner’s Parsifal.

Mahler explained his rationale for appropriating so much previously composed material when he commented to a friend, “Composing is like playing with building blocks, where new buildings are created again and again, using the same blocks.” Another more practical reason might have been the fact that Mahler could only compose during the summers. Mahler made his living primarily as a conductor, and his demanding schedule did not provide him time to write during the concert season. Finally, despite Mahler’s ambivalence about associating his music with a specific program, Mahler himself provided one to the music critic Ludwig Karpath.

Audiences of Mahler’s time were most disturbed by the third movement, with its ghostly reworking of a children’s folksong in the tempo of a funeral march. Mahler indicated this music was full of “biting irony,” in which “all the coarseness, the mirth and the banality of the world are heard in the sound of a Bohemian village band, together with the hero’s terrible cries of pain.” The loutish parody of the village band, complete with oom-pahs, mingles with music taken from another of Mahler’s Wayfarer songs, “Die zwei blauen Augen” (“Your Two Blue Eyes”), which resembles a melody from Jewish liturgy. Viennese audiences, notoriously anti-Semitic, likely also reacted negatively to the Jewish sound of this movement.

In the finale, according to Mahler’s narrative: “The hero is exposed to the most fearful combats and to all the sorrows of the world. He and his triumphant motifs are hit on the head again and again by Destiny. …Only when he has triumphed over death, and when all the glorious memories of youth have returned with themes from the first movement, does he get the upper hand, and there is a great victorious chorale!”

Destiny intervenes with pounding brasses and timpani, full of portentous Sturm und Drang, but a triumphant brass choir hints at the hero’s ultimate victory, even as he continues to struggle with the overwhelming forces bent on his destruction. Finally the chorale bursts forth (some listeners have discerned traces of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah in it) and concludes the symphony, with the horns standing to play their final notes.
 “It’s the most spontaneous and daringly composed of my works,” said Mahler of his first symphony. “Naively, I imagined that it … would have … immediate appeal. … How great was my surprise and disappointment when it turned out quite differently. In Budapest, where I first performed it, my friends avoided me afterwards … I went about like a leper and an outlaw.”         

Both critics and audiences reacted negatively, with one critic deriding it as a parody of a symphony. The influential Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick was equally harsh. “The new symphony is the kind of music which for me is not music,” he wrote. Subsequent performances, even after Mahler’s substantial revisions to the symphony, provoked equally strong reactions. More than 10 years after its premiere, another critic described the audience after Mahler’s first symphony: “There were startled faces all around, and some hissing was heard.”

© 2010 Elizabeth Schwartz

Program Notes by Elizabeth Schwartz

Elizabeth Schwartz is a Portland-based free-lance writer, researcher and musician. In addition annotating programs for the Oregon Symphony and other ensembles, she has also contributed to NPR’s Performance Today (now heard on American Public Media). Schwartz also co-hosts The Portland Yiddish Hour, heard at 10 a.m. Sundays on KBOO 90.7 FM. Email: schwartzelizabeth@yahoo.com.

Recommended Recordings by Michael Parsons

Lindberg: Purcell Variation
Christopher Russell-Orange County High School Symphony Orchestra
MMC 2176

Britten: Violin Concerto
Janine Jansen-Violin
Paavo Jarvi-London Symphony Orchestra
Decca 1328102 
OR
Daniel Hope-Violin
Paul Watkins-BBC Symphony Orchestra
Warner Classics 60291

Mahler: Symphony No. 1
Leonard Bernstein-Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Deutsche Grammophon 427303 
OR
Bernard Haitink-Chicago Symphony
CSO Resound 901902

These selected recordings are available at Classical Millennium, located at 3144 E. Burnside in Portland.