Feel every soul-stirring note

Giancarlo Castro D’Addona (b. 1980) 
Encuentro Obertura Festiva (2022) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: First Oregon Symphony Performance 

Instrumentation: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings

Estimated Duration: 8 minutes 

Festive overtures make up a small but delectable sub-genre of the orchestral repertory. Probably the best known of the bunch is the Academic Festival Overture, an exuberant and surprisingly freewheeling affair constructed from a handful of familiar tunes, written by Johannes Brahms in response to his having been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau in 1879. Brahms even threw in parts for cymbals and triangle – rare bling in a composer noted for a conservative approach to orchestration.

It should be no surprise that the Encuentro Obertura Festiva, written for Gustavo Dudamel’s Encuentros Orchestra of young musicians drawn from around the world, glitters with glee and seethes with propulsive dance rhythms. “It includes festive fanfares and a melodic theme of a joyful character that is presented and developed throughout the entire piece in different styles and rhythms,” writes Portland-based Venezuelan-Italian composer Giancarlo Castro D’Addona, whose works have been performed by ensembles as diverse as the Philadelphia Orchestra, United States Marine Band, Giovanile Sinfonia Band Trentino, and – of particular interest to Oregon Symphony patrons – the string ensemble of the Portland Youth Philharmonic. D’Addona adds that his materials are meant “to represent not only the Venezuelan roots of the composer, Dudamel, and some members of the orchestra, but also the musical heritage of the orchestra members from other countries who comprise this ensemble.” Thus, it is as diverse as it is snappy, this dazzling tour de force of orchestral legerdemain.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) 
Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23 (1875) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: David Zinman led Simon Trpčeski and the Oregon Symphony on October 16-18, 2021, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: solo piano, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 32 minutes  

There’s a weirdly entertaining gallery of A-list performers who rejected new pieces that were bound for eventual repertory status. Violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini dropped Berlioz’s Harold in Italy because the solo viola part wasn’t splashy enough. Rodolphe Kreutzer so disliked Beethoven’s Op. 47 “Kreutzer” Violin Sonata that he flatly refused to play it. The pianist Paul Wittgenstein commissioned the Fourth Piano Concerto from Prokofiev, but never fathomed the piece well enough to risk a public performance.  

The case of pianist Nikolai Rubinstein is slightly different. He didn’t actually reject Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. What he did, alas, was worse: he dissed it savagely, and right to Tchaikovsky’s face. Rubinstein condemned the concerto as “worthless and unplayable,” as Tchaikovsky wailed to his sympatico patroness Nadezdha von Meck. “Passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself was bad, vulgar; in places I had stolen from other composers; only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away or completely rewritten.”  

Ouch. One can easily envision a parallel universe in which Tchaikovsky burned the manuscript in the light of the next full moon. In our space-time continuum, however, Tchaikovsky offered the concerto to the acidic German pianist Hans von Bülow, who gave the premiere in Boston during his 1875 American tour. The audience loved it. The critics hated it. According to one account, the trombones played so atrociously that von Bülow yelled at them to go to hell right during the performance. (Nota bene: it wasn’t the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They hadn’t been invented yet.) Things got a lot better in New York, better still in Moscow, and after a few editorial nips and tucks, the piece was well on the path to its coronation as concerto royalty. And Rubinstein, to his everlasting credit, came around handsomely as a staunch champion. 

Like that other monumental Tchaikovsky concerto – the one in D minor for violin – the B-flat minor piano concerto opens with an expansive theme that is given a lavish presentation, then is never heard again. Or at least that’s what we’re supposed to think. A bit of analytical sleuthing reveals that the celebrated ‘big tune’ (a.k.a. Tonight We Love) is actually the motivic seed of the materials to follow, however hidden amidst all that grandeur. Less hidden, although not necessarily apparent to modern listeners, is that a number of the concerto’s themes have their origins in Ukrainian, French, and Russian folk songs.

After the melting lyricism of the middle movement, the propulsive finale offers up another vintage Tchaikovskian practice: the elevation of a subsidiary lyrical theme to blazing headline status at the movement’s climax, rather like those backstage movies in which the ingenue goes out there a chorus girl but comes back a star. (Rachmaninoff took ownership of that felicitous technique in his own ultra-popular piano concertos.)  

A perennial entry on ‘I-never-want-to-hear-that-thing-again’ lists, the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto is one of those works that, like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, isn’t nearly as overfamiliar as it’s made out to be, especially once you get past Tonight We Love. A heartfelt fusion of the symphonic and virtuoso styles, it has earned its place as a monarch amongst concertos, a masterpiece to be celebrated, cherished, and heard again and again.

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) 
⁠Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Alexander Liebreich led the Oregon Symphony on January 11-13, 2020, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: piccolo, three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion, two harps, organ, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 33 minutes  

Program music came into its own during the 19th century. The Romantics found in music an ideal medium for delineating character, painting landscapes, exploring history and mythology, and interpreting literary themes. They knew perfectly well that abstract music can’t tell a story, per se. You need words for that. But music can amplify extra-musical ideas, acquiring a significance far beyond the mere notes on the page. 

Even relatively chaste Romantics such as Felix Mendelssohn dabbled in programmatic orchestral music with such works as The Fair Melusine, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and Hebrides Overture, even if he shied away from such charged terms as ‘tone poem’ or ‘symphonic poem.’ It took Franz Liszt, a full-blown all-bells-ringing Romantic, to invest fully in the symphonic poem as a viable alternative to abstract symphonic composition. Liszt’s orchestral fantasies embark on abundant flights of imagination and can offer sonic thrills and chills galore, but most suffer from structural deficiencies that have limited their audience appeal. Ace commentator Sir Donald Francis Tovey skewered one particular Liszt symphonic poem by describing it as a series of introductions that introduce the next introduction, until the last introduction introduces the conclusion. 

When the young Richard Strauss set about claiming a place amongst composers of symphonic poems, he was determined to avoid the deficiencies of the Lisztian model and create works that held together musically on their own merits. For that he could consult Tchaikovsky’s superb achievements – especially Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet – as master classes in how to portray literary elements while maintaining full symphonic integrity. His early Macbeth fell a bit short of the ideal, but with the 1888 Don Juan, Strauss hit his stride. Death and Transfiguration and Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks soon followed, in 1889 and 1895 respectively.  

It’s one thing to write a symphonic poem about the sea, or a fictional character, or your Aunt Penny. Basing it on an abstruse philosophical tome is an entirely different kettle of fish. One would think it couldn’t be done. But Strauss did it. Which isn’t to say that he set Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1883 Thus Spake Zarathustra to music line by line, or even page by page. Music can’t do that, and Strauss wasn’t about to try. He explained that it was his intent “to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific … [it] is intended as my homage to the genius of Nietzsche, which found its greatest exemplification in his book Thus Spake Zarathustra.”  

All well and good, but portraying ‘the evolution of the human race’ in music? That seems farfetched, even overconfident. Yet Strauss pulled it off. With evolutionary development as his guiding brief, Strauss fashioned a grand rainbow of music out of figures that represent important themes in Nietzsche’s work. Thus Spake Zarathustra is structured as a continuous whole, internally divided into nine parts –  an Introduction plus eight sections, each corresponding to a chapter in Nietzsche. 

The book opens with philosopher-guru Zarathustra (Zoroaster) addressing the rising sun, and Strauss follows suit with one of music’s greatest opening sunrises: a prolonged ultra-low bass note, three ghostly notes in solo trumpet (C-G-C), then two crashing chords, one major, one minor. Modern listeners will likely flash on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, given the film’s splendid use of this music to underpin critical junctures along humanity’s journey to its ultimate destiny. As it happens, Strauss intended his sunrise to symbolize Nietzsche’s duality between humanity and the natural world. Kubrick chose wisely. 

2001 comes to a decisive conclusion with an unforgettable vision of humanity’s evolutionary breakthrough, but even after eight sections that range from somber hymns to ecstatic dances, Strauss follows Nietzsche by avoiding a clear resolution. An utterly uninhibited waltz climaxes in twelve strokes of a bell that signal midnight, followed by a slow meltdown into ethereal alternations of C Major and B Major that symbolize the timeless duality between nature and the human spirit. And there it ends, with three barely audible C-naturals that temper resolution with ambiguity.