Yefim Bronfman Plays Bartók

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

Carlos Kalmar, conductor
Yefim Bronfman, piano

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Symphony No. 1 in D major

Vital Stats

Composer: Born Mar. 31, 1732, Rohrau, Lower Austria; died May 31, 1809, Vienna

Work composed: 1757-9

World premiere: Nov. 25, 1759

Oregon Symphony premiere: Feb. 7, 1993, with Ching-Hsin Hsu conducting

Most recent Oregon Symphony performances: At the concerts of Feb. 7-9, 1993

Instrumentation: 2 oboes, bassoon, 2 horns, harpsichord and strings

Estimated duration: 11 minutes

It may be an exaggeration to say that Franz Joseph Haydn invented the symphony, but not much of one. What Haydn did was perfect the emerging symphonic format, and in the 100+ symphonies he composed, he left a legacy from which later composers developed their own symphonic styles, from Mozart and Beethoven to Brahms and Mahler.

Before the Classical period (c. 1750-1810), there were works written for instrumental ensembles (Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Orchestral Suites and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, to name a few). However, these compositions, although written for medium-sized ensembles, are not symphonies, nor would anyone mistake them for such. The symphony evolved in tandem with a new kind of ensemble: the Classical orchestra.

The appeal of a Classical symphony is architectural: A typical Classical symphony has the clean lines, symmetry and balance of a well-designed building. These qualities are the essence of all Classical music. Nowhere are proportion and balance more evident than in a Haydn symphony. Everything, from phrases to key relationships, creates an overall effect of symmetrical perfection, and, in Haydn’s case, also rich ornaments and sparkling humor.

The numbers assigned to Haydn’s symphonies often bear no relation to when they were written. According to scholars, however, the symphony labeled as “No. 1” is definitely the first symphony Haydn composed. He wrote this and approximately a dozen others for his first employer, Ferdinand Maximilian Franz, Count Morzin. Before Count Morzin hired Haydn to be the music director for the private orchestra at his summer palace in Bohemia, Haydn had spent the previous eight years scraping by as a freelance music teacher.

Most of Haydn’s symphonies from this early period are in three movements (fast-slow-fast) and utilize the form and style of Italian operatic overtures and instrumental church music.

BÉLA BARTÓK
Piano Concerto No. 2

Vital Stats

Composer:  Born Mar. 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania); died Sept. 26, 1945, New York City

Work composed: Begun in October 1930; completed on Oct. 9, 1931.

World premiere: Jan. 23, 1933. Hans Rosbaud conducted the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra with Bartók at the piano.

Oregon Symphony premiere: Jan. 31, 1982, with Kazuyoshi Akimaya conducting; Joseph Kalichstein, piano soloist

Most recent Oregon Symphony performances: At the concerts of Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1982

Instrumentation: Solo piano, 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, triangle and strings

Estimated duration: 28 minutes

In program notes for a 1937 concert, Béla Bartók wrote: “I wanted my Second Concerto … to be a kind of antithesis to the First, easier in its orchestra part and more lucid in structure. This is the purpose and at the same time the reason for the more conventional and simpler treatment of most of the themes.”

When speaking of Bartók, the words “conventional” and “simpler” must be understood in context. This concerto contains many of the relentless, irregular rhythms that characterize much of Bartók’s music, and the spiky fragments of melody are derived from indigenous Hungarian folk styles based on non-Western scales. Within this sound-world, “conventional” and “simpler” refer to the way in which Bartók uses his materials, like a painter selecting shades of color from his palette.

This concerto employs Bartók’s “arch” structure, in which the outer movements have a symmetrical connection to one another; Bartók used this configuration most famously in his Concerto for Orchestra. In the Piano Concerto No. 2, the two outer movements frame a slower middle section.
In the opening Allegro, a solo trumpet sounds the concluding fanfare from Stravinsky’s Firebird, which becomes the basis for rhythmic and melodic development throughout the movement. Here Bartók uses only winds, brass and percussion, which highlight the flash and brilliance of the solo piano.

The Adagio – Presto – Adagio draws from a different color palette. An ethereal diaphonous mist wafts out of the strings and the pensive, questioning nature of the solo melody is punctuated by quiet rumbles from the timpani. A contrasting middle section stirs up tumult and apprehension. The soloist spins a fragment of melody around and around, like water flowing down a drain, while tremolo strings and short bursts of wind heighten the anxiety level.

Bartók pulls out all the stops for the finale. For the first time in the concerto, he uses the full orchestra. The exuberance of the first movement and the disquiet of the second come together in a wild torrent of sound. With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to attribute a prophetic subtext to this music; a week after Bartók premiered the Piano Concerto No. 2, in what would be his last appearance in Germany, Hitler became chancellor.

CHARLES IVES
Three Places in New England

Vital Stats

Composer: Born Oct. 20, 1874, Danbury, CT; died May 19, 1954, New York City

Work composed: c.1908-14. The version for full orchestra was completed in 1913-14; in 1929, Ives revised it for chamber orchestra at the request of conductor Nicholas Slonimsky. There were further revisions for both chamber orchestra (1933-35) and a restoration of the full orchestra score by Ives scholar James Sinclair (1976).

World premiere: Nicholas Slonimsky led his Chamber Orchestra of Boston on Jan. 10, 1931, in New York City’s Town Hall. Ives funded the concert himself; it was the first complete performance of any of his orchestral works.

Oregon Symphony premiere: Feb. 23, 1976, with Lawrence Leighton Smith conducting

Most recent Oregon Symphony performances: At the concerts of Feb. 23-24, 1976

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, gong, snare drum, piano and strings

Estimated duration: 31 minutes

In the mid-1940s, Aaron Copland wrote, “It will be a long time before we take the full measure of Charles Ives.” Copland’s assessment of Ives was prescient. More than 50 years after his death, even for audiences who have experienced music far more radical and less listenable than Ives’, he continues to challenge and astonish us.

Ives’ inimitable style, which combines bursts of violent colors and rhythms with gentler passages, layered with fragments of recognizable tunes but rarely a conventional melody, shocked friends and colleagues. One day in 1912, Ives played excerpts of Three Places in New England (St.-Gaudens and Putnam’s Camp) for Max Smith, music critic for the New York Press. When Ives finished, Smith exclaimed: “These were awful! How can you like horrible sounds like that?”

Conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, however, appreciated Ives’ unique approach. In his autobiography Perfect Pitch, Slonimsky described his first reaction to Three Places: “As I looked over the score, I experienced a strange, but unmistakable, feeling that I was looking at a work of genius.”

The Saint-Gaudens in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)

Ives included this poem, which he wrote, with his musical commemoration of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ memorial to Civil War Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, an all-black unit featured in the 1989 film “Glory”:

Moving, – Marching – Faces of Souls!
Marked with generations of pain,
Part-freers of a Destiny,
Slowly, restlessly-swaying us on with you
Towards other Freedom! ... You images of a Divine Law
Carved in the shadow of a saddened heart –
Never light abandoned –
Of an age and of a nation
Above and beyond that compelling mass
Rises the drum-beat of the common-heart
In the silence of a strange and
Sounding afterglow
Moving – Marching – Faces of Souls!

Putnam's Camp

Ives wrote the following program notes:

Near Redding Center, Conn., is a small park preserved as a Revolutionary Memorial; for here General Israel Putnam’s soldiers had their winter quarters in 1778-1779 …Once upon a “4th of July,” some time ago, so the story goes, a child went here on a picnic ... As he rests on the hillside of laurels and hickories the tunes of the band and the songs of the children grow fainter and fainter … over the trees on the crest of the hill he sees a tall woman standing. She reminds him of a picture he has of the Goddess Liberty, – but the face is sorrowful – she is pleading with the soldiers not to forget their “cause” and the great sacrifices they have made for it. But they march out of camp with fife and drum to a popular tune of the day. Suddenly, a new national note is heard. Putnam is coming over the hills from the center, – the soldiers turn back and cheer. – The little boy awakes, he hears the children’s songs and runs down past the monument to “listen to the band” and join in the games and dances.

The Housatonic at Stockbridge

Ives included the following words on an early draft of this movement:

In this music, inspired by a poem by Robert Underwood Johnson, Ives captures a memory of a “Sunday morning walk that Mrs. Ives and I took the summer we were married [1908], in the meadows along the [Housatonic] river, and heard the distant singing from the church. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and the elm trees are something that one would always remember.”

Ives also included excerpts from Johnson’s poem in the score:

Contented river! In thy dreamy realm –
The cloudy willow and the plumy elm …
Thou beautiful! From every dreamy hill
What eye but wanders with thee at thy will ...
Contented river!
And yet over-shy
To mask thy beauty from the eager eye;
Hast thou a thought to hide from field and town?
In some deep current of the sunlit brown ...
Ah! There's a sensitive ripple, and the swift
Red leaves – September's firstlings – faster adrift
Wouldst thou away!
I also of much resting have a fear
Let me thy companion be
By fall and shallow to the Adventurous sea!”

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Symphony No. 104 in D major, "London"

Vital Stats

Composer: Born Mar. 31, 1732, Rohrau, Lower Austria; died May 31, 1809, Vienna

Work composed: 1795, on a commission for Giovanni Battista Viotti’s Opera Concerts

World premiere:  Haydn conducted this symphony and other works of his on May 4, 1795, at the King’s Theatre in London.

Oregon Symphony premiere: Mar. 2, 1953, with James Sample conducting

Most recent Oregon Symphony performances: Oct. 6-7, 1975, with Lawrence Leighton Smith conducting

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings

Estimated duration: 29 minutes

It is easy to forget that Haydn was considered innovative in his time, because today his symphonies epitomize Classical symphonic sound and structure. Of Haydn’s 100+ symphonies, those he wrote during his sojourn in London, Nos. 93-104, exemplify his total mastery of symphonic form and style.

Tonight’s program showcases Haydn’s first and last symphonies. Interestingly, both are written in the same key, D major. In the almost 40 years between writing his first and last symphonies, Haydn both mastered and moved beyond issues of form and structure. The three-movement format of his early symphonies had grown to four, and for this, his final symphony, Haydn also added a slow introduction. Symphony No. 104, known as the “London” because it was one of a dozen Haydn wrote in that city during the 1790s, displays a depth of emotion that foreshadows Beethoven’s innovations of the early 19th century.

One could interpret the weighty introduction in D minor as Haydn’s portrayal of the almost 30 years he spent as court composer to Prince Nicholas Esterház, and the transition to the light lilting first movement (in D major) as Haydn reveling in his freedom from 29 years of patronage. The bouncing melody of the minuet is irrepressibly joyful, and the Finale: Spiritoso lives up to its name as it contrasts a lively rhythmic Croatian folk song with sophisticated, ebullient counterpoint.

Haydn premiered the “London” Symphony at a benefit concert for himself in 1795. In his notebook, Haydn wrote, “the whole company was thoroughly pleased and so was I.” The audience’s rapturous reception was welcome, as were the 4,000 gulden Haydn earned from the box office.

Two days later, a critic for the Morning Chronicle wrote, “It is with pleasure that we inform the public that genius is not so totally neglected as some are too often apt to confirm.” The critic went on to describe the new symphony as full of “richness, and majesty, in all its parts, [which] is thought by some of the best judges to surpass all his other compositions … for fifty years to come Musical Composers would be little better than imitators of Haydn; and would do little more than pour water on his leaves.”

© Elizabeth Schwartz 2009

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

Haydn: Symphony No. 1
Patrick Gallois-Sinfonia Finlandia
Naxos 8557571  OR
Adam Fischer: Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra
Nimbus 5426

Bartok: Piano Concerto No. 2
Yefim Bronfman-Piano
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Los Angeles Philharmonic
Sony Classical 89732

Ives: Three Places in New England
Christoph von Dohnanyi-Cleveland Orchestra
Decca 466745  OR
James Sinclair-Malmo Symphony
Naxos 8559353

Haydn: Symphony No. 104
Sir Colin Davis-Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra 
Philips 442611  OR
Sir Thomas Beecham-Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
EMI Classics 85513

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