SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY A JACOBS MASTERWORKS CONCERT October 17, 18 and 19, 2014

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60 Adagio - Allegro vivace Adagio Allegro vivace Allegro ma non troppo

INTERMISSION

SERGE PROKOFIEV

Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 Andantino Scherzo: Vivace Moderato Finale: Allegro tempestoso Vadym Kholodenko, piano

PIOTR ILYCH TCHAIKOVSKY “Waltz” and “Polonaise” from Eugene Onegin, Op. 24

PROGRAM NOTES: Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Born December 16, 1770, Bonn Died March 26, 1827, Vienna Beethoven had many reasons to accept, in 1800, a commission for a ballet score based on the Prometheus myth: he had long wanted to write a work for the stage, the ballet would be created by the distinguished ballet-master Salvatore Vigano, and frequent performances would mean increased income for the composer. Doubtless the Prometheus story itself, with its tale of a hero bringing enlightenment to mankind, appealed to the young composer. He began work on the score during the second half of 1800, shortly after the premiere of the First Symphony and at the same time he was writing the Spring Sonata. The Creatures of Prometheus had its first performance at the Burgtheater on March 28, 1801, and – despite some critical carping about the suitability of Beethoven’s music for dancing – the ballet had a reasonable success: it was performed over 20 times during the next two seasons. Beethoven published the overture in 1804, and it quickly became one of his most frequently performed works, but the score to the rest of the ballet, which consists of 16 separate numbers, was not published until long after his death. The Overture is extremely concise (it lasts barely five minutes) and powerful; it is easy to understand why this music was performed so frequently. Massive chords open the slow introduction, which leads without pause into the Allegro molto con brio. As that marking suggests, this goes at a blistering pace, introduced quietly by a moto perpetuo theme in the first violins. Woodwinds in pairs announce the bubbling second subject, by turns staccato and syncopated. Part of the reason for the conciseness of this overture is the fact that it has no development section: Beethoven simply introduces his ideas, recapitulates them and the Overture hurtles to its close.

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Over the second half of 1803, Beethoven composed his Third Symphony, the Eroica, and that white-hot symphony redefined what music might be. No longer was it a polite entertainment form – now it became a vehicle for the most serious and dramatic expression. Even as he was revising the Eroica, Beethoven began to have ideas for a new symphony, of similar scope and set in C minor, and he made some sketches for it. But he set these plans aside to take on another musical project based on the idea of heroism, the opera Leonore (later renamed Fidelio). Leonore occupied Beethoven for

nearly two years, and it was not until 1806 that he had seen the opera through its premiere and revision. In the summer of 1806 Beethoven accompanied his patron Prince Karl Lichnowsky to the prince’s summer palace at Troppau in Silesia. That September, composer and prince paid a visit to the nearby castle of another nobleman, Count Franz von Oppersdorff. The count was a musical enthusiast almost without equal: he maintained a private orchestra at his castle and would hire new staff for the castle only if they played an instrument and could also play in his orchestra. During that visit, the orchestra performed Beethoven’s Second Symphony, and the count commissioned a new symphony from the composer. For his symphony Beethoven would receive 500 florins, and in return Oppersdorff would get the dedication, the first performance and exclusive rights to the music for six months. Beethoven returned to Lichnowsky’s palace and set to work on the symphony, but he did not use his sketches for a symphony in C minor. Instead, he composed his Fourth Symphony from completely new material. Beethoven’s business dealings could sometimes be slippery, and so they were now. The composer got his 500 florins, but all Oppersdorff got in return was the dedication; Beethoven went ahead and had the Fourth Symphony premiered in Vienna on March 7, 1807, at a private concert that also saw the premiere of the Coriolan Overture and the Fourth Piano Concerto. Only after the Fourth Symphony had been premiered did Beethoven return to the sketches for a symphony in C minor he had made right after completing the Eroica. We know it today as the Symphony No. 5 in C minor, begun before but completed after the Fourth Symphony. The Fourth Symphony has inevitably been overshadowed by the titanic symphonies on either side of it, a relationship best captured in Schumann’s oft-quoted description of the Fourth as “a slender Greek maiden between two Nordic giants.” The Fourth does seem at first a relaxation, a retreat from the path blazed by the Eroica. Some have been ready to consider the Fourth a regression, and others have specifically identified the influence of Haydn on it: the symphony opens with the sort of slow introduction Haydn often used, it has a minuet for its third movement and it employs the smallest orchestra of any Beethoven symphony (it has only one flute part). But Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is only superficially Haydnesque, and we need to be careful not to underestimate this music; the Fourth has a concentrated structure and enough energy that it achieves some of the same things as the Fifth, though without the darkness at the heart of that mighty symphony. The originality of the Fourth Symphony is evident from its first instant: the key signature may say B-flat Major, but the symphony opens in B-flat minor. Everything about this Adagio introduction feels strange. Not only is it in the wrong key, but soon it seems to be in no clear key at all. It is hard to make out any thematic material or direction. And the pace of this uncertainty is very slow. In his study

of Beethoven’s symphonies, Richard Osborne quotes Carl Maria von Weber’s derisive review of this opening: “Every quarter of an hour we hear three or four notes. It is exciting!” Yet Beethoven knows what he’s about, and he does the same thing in the introduction to his String Quartet in C Major, Opus 59, No. 3, written at exactly the same time: both works begin in a tonal fog, but those mists blow away with the arrival of the main body of the movement, marked Allegro vivace in both symphony and quartet. That transition is done beautifully in the Fourth Symphony. As the music approaches the Allegro vivace, huge chords lash it forward, and when the main theme leaps out brightly, we recognize it as simply a speeded-up version of the slow introduction. That shape, so tentative at the very beginning, takes a variety of hard-edged forms in the main body of the movement: it becomes the second theme as well, presented by bassoon and other solo woodwinds, and it also forms an accompaniment figure, chirping along happily in the background. This is a substantial movement (much longer than the first movement of the Fifth), and it drives to a powerful close. The Adagio may be just as original. It opens not with a theme but with an accompaniment: the second violins’ dotted rhythms (outlining the interval of a fourth) will tap into our consciousness all the way through this movement. First violins sing the main theme, which Beethoven takes care to mark cantabile. Hector Berlioz’s comments on this melody may seem a little over the top, but they do speak to its air of great calm: “the being who wrote such a marvel of inspiration as this movement was not a man. Such must be the song of the Archangel Michael as he contemplates the world’s uprising to the threshold of the empyrean.” The second subject, of Italianate ease, arrives in the solo clarinet and preserves some of this same atmosphere. Throughout, Beethoven continually reminds the orchestra to play not just cantabile but also espressivo, dolce and legato. At the close, solo timpani very quietly taps out the movement’s accompaniment rhythm one final time before the movement concludes on two surprisingly fierce chords. Beethoven may have marked the third movement Minuetto, but that was a misjudgment. This is in every way a scherzo: its outer sections are full of rough edges and blistering energy, and its witty trio is built on a rustic woodwind tune spiced with saucy interjections from the violins. This movement has an unusual structure: Beethoven brings the trio back for a second appearance (the structure is ABABA) and drives it to a fun close – two horns attempt a fanfare of their own but are cut off when Beethoven brings down the guillotine blade of the full orchestra. Out of that emphatic ending, the finale bursts to life, and it goes like a rocket. This movement may be in sonata form, but it feels like a perpetual-motion with a basic pulse of racing sixteenth-notes that hardly ever lets up. There is some relaxed secondary material along the way, but even this is at high speed, and finally the movement races to a grand pause. Out of that silence Beethoven slows the

movement almost to a crawl (the perpetual-motion theme feels as if it has become stuck in glue), then suddenly releases it, and lower strings rush the Symphony to its conclusion.

Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 SERGE PROKOFIEV Born April 23, 1891, Sontsovka Died March 5, 1953, Moscow It is hard to believe that this concerto – one of the most difficult ever written for the piano – is the work of a music student. Prokofiev was still a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory when he completed it in April 1913, the same month he turned 22. His energetic First Piano Concerto had created something of a furor at its premiere in 1912 – Alexander Glazunov described it as “a harmful trend” – and now the young composer set out to write music with more substance. Per Prokofiev: “The charges of surface brilliance and a certain ‘soccer’ quality in the First led me to strive for greater depth of content in the Second.” Prokofiev himself was the soloist at the premiere of the Second Piano Concerto, which took place at Pavlovsk, a resort town near St. Petersburg, on September 5, 1913. The young composer should have seen trouble coming. The audience at Pavlovsk was made up in large part of people on vacation, and they came expecting the sort of lighter fare usually heard on summer series. Instead, they got their ears scorched. The critic Vyacheslav Karatïgin described the audience as “frozen with fright, hair standing on end.” They hissed the music and began to drift out during the performance so that by the end only a fraction of the original audience remained. These, though, were vocal enough. One critic quoted them: “To the devil with all this futurist music! We came here to enjoy ourselves. The cats at home can make music like this!” Another critic described the concerto as “a cacophony of sounds that has nothing in common with civilized music.” Prokofiev’s reaction was utterly characteristic: he returned to the stage, faced the jeering audience, bowed deeply, and sat down and played an equally abrasive encore. Prokofiev left the score and parts to the Second Piano Concerto behind in Russia when he fled the Communist Revolution in 1917. In his absence, mobs broke into his apartment in Moscow, set it afire and burned everything in it, including all the material for the concerto. Prokofiev was faced with having to recreate a now-vanished piece of music, and in 1923 – while living near Oberammagau in the Bavarian Alps – he gathered his sketches and reproduced the concerto. How closely the recreation resembles the original can never be known, but Prokofiev felt that the intervening ten years had made him a better composer and that the new version was an improvement. Prokofiev was soloist and Koussevitzky the conductor at the premiere of the revised version in Paris on May 8, 1924.

The Second Piano Concerto has an unusual form: two big outer movements frame two shorter inner movements. The solo piano part is perfectly suited to Prokofiev’s own virtues as a pianist, combining a steely brilliance one moment with a seductive lyricism the next. The first movement gets off to a deceptive beginning, with an almost dreamy first subject played in quiet octaves by the piano; only a web of soft dissonances in the accompaniment suggests the complexity ahead. The second section, marked Allegretto, opens with a jaunty, staccato idea for the pianist, and these lead into one of the most gargantuan, knuckle-busting cadenzas ever conceived – this cadenza in effect serves as the development section of the first movement. It begins quietly at first but grows in complexity and power (some of it is written on three staves) until it reaches a grand climax marked both triple forte and precipitato. The orchestra makes a powerful, brassy return, and the movement trails off to an unexpectedly quiet conclusion. After the massive first movement, the second whips past in barely two minutes. This is a blistering perpetual-motion for the soloist, who plays a steady rush of sixteenths right through to the sudden, emphatic final chord. Prokofiev titled the third movement Intermezzo, but rather than being a quiet interlude it gets off to a massive beginning: the steady slog of great chords marked pesante, like the lumbering gait of some primordial beast, gives way to a quiet interlude. The return of the opening material feels mechanistic, and the pianist decorates this with brilliant runs. The marking of the finale movement, Allegro tempestoso, gives some indication of its character. The violent beginning, glittering in its color and athleticism, leads to the violas’ rocking ostinato and a more reflective interlude for piano. Once again, Prokofiev offers the soloist a huge and challenging cadenza before the furies of the opening return and the Second Piano Concerto rips to a conclusion that will seem nearly as savage to contemporary listeners as it did to that unsuspecting first audience just over a century ago.

“Waltz” and “Polonaise” from Eugene Onegin, Op. 24 PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Born May 7, 1840, Votkinsk Died November 6, 1893, St. Petersburg Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin came from a crucial moment in his life, and in fact the opera helped shape his life. In May 1877, at just the point Tchaikovsky had completed the first three movements of his Fourth Symphony, he read through Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin (1833) and began to sketch a libretto for an opera based on it. Pushkin’s novel tells of the innocent country girl Tatiana who is smitten with the handsome fop Onegin; she pours out her passion and hopes in a letter to him, only to have the arrogant young man dismiss her out of hand the next day. An unrelated

duel soon follows in which Onegin kills his best friend Lensky and then takes himself away for several years. He returns to find the country girl Tatiana now a beautiful woman married to a prince in St. Petersburg; he confronts her and pours out the love he now feels for her. Tatiana still feels that passion but has sufficient command of herself to dismiss him, and the opera concludes as she walks out on Onegin. It was while Tchaikovsky was sketching the scene in which Tatiana writes the letter to Onegin confessing her love that he himself received a letter with a fateful confession of love. One of his former students, a young woman he could not remember, wrote him a similar letter, confessing her love for him and proposing marriage. Tchaikovsky at first turned her away as gently as he could, but – struck by the parallels with the opera and by Onegin’s heartless dismissal of Tatiana’s declaration – he came to feel that he should not make the same mistake. And so he made a much more serious one, agreeing to marry the young woman. Their marriage in July 1877 was a disaster, and Tchaikovsky quickly abandoned his wife and collapsed emotionally. In the shattered aftermath of his marriage he fled to Western Europe, where he completed both the Fourth Symphony and the opera. Tchaikovsky realized that Pushkin’s novel did not offer the dramatic events that an opera seemed to demand, and so he instead referred to Eugene Onegin as “lyrical scenes” (though subsequent critical reaction is that it is without question Tchaikovsky’s finest opera). What Eugene Onegin does offer, however, is ample opportunity for social gatherings and the opulent dances that Tchaikovsky loved. The Waltz comes from the ball that celebrates Tatiana’s birthday at the beginning of Act II; it is in the course of this ball that Lensky becomes jealous of Onegin’s attentions to his fiancée Olga and challenges him to the fateful duel. The Waltz begins quietly: a soft timpani roll and hints of a waltz-tune prepare us for the moment when that waltz breaks out. The long middle section is calmer (the opening waltz puts in a distant – and very effective – appearance here) before the waltz returns in all its splendor and powers its way to the knock-out close. The Polonaise comes from the beginning of the Third (and final) Act. The setting is the elegant St. Petersburg home of Prince Gremin (husband of Tatiana), and the Polonaise begins the magnificent ball at which the confrontation between Tatiana and Onegin will occur. Blazing trumpet fanfares open the Polonaise, which quickly begins to dance along tightly-dotted rhythms. The music, full of energy and dash (it is invariably described as “swaggering”) rushes straight into its central episode, with delicate writing for woodwinds and a soaring cello melody. Gradually the music picks up energy, resumes the opening dance and drives straight to the resounding final chords. -Program notes by Eric Bromberger

WHY THIS PROGRAM?

Jahja Ling noted, “I have never conducted the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto before. It has been overshadowed by the Third Concerto, which is much more popular. Our soloist selected the piece to play here, and I am glad that he chose this, not heard here for over 20 years...” As for the Beethoven, he pointed out that it is not performed as often as some of the composer's other symphonies, but it contains a “great mixture of joy as well as a mellow attitude. The opening, though, is pure power, typical Beethoven, and the last movement has it, too, before the coda. The Overture I have chosen is a great partner to the Symphony, both performed before the intermission. It is more reminiscent of the classical era compositions of Haydn and Mozart.” The two popular Tchaikovsky excerpts, he said, are especially effective after the Prokofiev, and end the program with their characteristic Russian melodic components, as well as energy. Arthur Bennett Lipkin conducted the Beethoven Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus during the 1960-61 season, its first presentation by the San Diego Symphony. Since then, the orchestra has played it six times. During his tenure, David Atherton programmed it three times over a six-year period! Beethoven's Fourth Symphony was introduced to San Diego audiences when Robert Shaw led its first performance here in 1958. This performance is the orchestra's tenth programming of the work. Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto was first played at these concerts by Garrick Ohlsson, under the direction of Peter Eros, during the 1974-75 season. This program presents its fourth hearing here, its first since Vladimir Feltsmann played it under Yoav Talmi's direction during the season of 1993-94. The popular orchestral excerpts from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin were introduced here under the direction of Fabien Sevitzky in 1952, and one or the other or both together (as in these current concerts), were played frequently through the years, especially during the summer seasons. -Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist