Program Notes

Cobb Symphony Orchestra, 2008-2009 Season, Masterworks Concert #2
Program Notes by Michaelene Gorney

This second concert of the Cobb Symphony Orchestra Masterworks series is one of continuing discovery:  in music which honors a master of the tango; in music by the acknowledged Master of the Classical period; and in Tchaikovsky’s magnificent Fourth Symphony, whose treasures continue to reveal themselves, even after 130 years.

Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960) began writing Last Round (1996) upon hearing of a stroke suffered by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), tango composer, world musician, and player of the bandoneón, an accordian-like instrument with keyboard which originated in Germany in the 19^th century and was transported by immigrants to Argentina, where it became essential to the tango orchestra.  Golijov lauds Piazzolla's playing, in which “The eroticism of legs and torsos in the dance was reduced to the intricate patterns of his virtuoso fingers…The macho attitude of the tangueros was reflected in his pose on stage.”  The title Last Round “is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar, the metaphor for an imaginary chance for Piazzolla's spirit to fight one more time (he used to get into fistfights throughout his life). The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneon. The first movement represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh…But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other, separated by the focal bass, with violins and violas standing up as in the traditional tango orchestras. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.ⁱ

Golijov holds commissions and awards from classical soloists and ensembles world-wide.  A recording of his opera Ainadamar (2003), with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under the direction of friend and supporter Robert Spano, won two Grammy awards.  A “world” composer in his own right, Golijov grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina, studied in La Plata, in Israel, and in Pennsylvania with Pulitzer Prize winning composer George Crumb.  His collaborations with other artists - Romanian gypsy and Mexican rock bands, Indian tabla players, Argentine musicians, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppolla, director Peter Sellars, playwright David H. Hwang, artist Gronk, and moreⁱⁱ - reveal the universality and humanity of the arts, and the excellence that pervades, and blurs the boundaries of, artistic genres.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) is the only "great" composer who is equally famous for instrumental works as well as operas.  His operas and his Requiem alone would have made any composer's reputation; add to these his symphonies, concerti, and chamber music, and one is confronted with an unsurpassed accomplishment of quality and quantity.  Mozart settled in Vienna in 1781, abandoning the security (and servitude) of a court position in Salzburg to become a virtuoso composer in the glittering capital of the Hapsburgs, the musical center of Europe.  As an entrepreneur, Mozart was clearly ahead of his time.  In an age when some composers still spent their whole lives in service to royalty, Mozart took a calculated risk and lost.  At first, he prospered in Vienna, presenting a series of successful public concerts.  But the need for artistic growth led to declining interest from his audience, unwilling as they were to be drawn into the challenge of bolder, more personal works, works which today are routinely performed.  Supremely gifted though he was, Mozart died bankrupt and alone.  Yet his legacy remains in hundreds of works that reflect not hardship, but the sheer joy of creativity. 

Mozart was not known to have written an oboe concerto until 1920, when Bernhard Paumgartner, then director of the Salzburg Mozarteum archives, discovered orchestral parts for an oboe concerto, and recognized the music as that of the familiar Flute Concerto in D major.  The Oboe Concerto in C Major, K. 314, was written in 1777 for Salzburg oboist Giuseppe Ferlendis, shortly before the composer quit his job as concertmaster to the Archbishop of Salzburg in order to tour Europe as an independent musician.  Friedrich Ramm, a Mannheim oboist to whom Mozart also gave the score, became “quite crazy with it” and his repeated playings made it “a great sensation.”  In 1783, Anton Meyer, oboist of the Esterháza orchestra, offered Mozart three ducats for the piece and parts were sent to him.  After that, the Oboe Concerto was lost, but it appears that the work was revived as a flute concerto during the winter of 1777-78 when it was re-arranged to fulfill a flute commission.ⁱⁱⁱ As challenging as the Oboe Concerto may be for modern players, no doubt it was more difficult for oboists of Mozart’s day, when the instrument was commonly supplied with top joints in order to cope with the higher pitches demanded by Italian opera, chamber and church music.^iv The three movements of the Oboe Concerto follow the traditional fast-slow-fast arrangement.  The first movement is unconventionally marked Allegro aperto, or “open allegro”; the second movement would easily suffice as an opera aria (as would so many of the composer’s slow movements); and the bouncing finale actually previews an aria from Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio of five years later.^v

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky^vi (1840-1893) became a student of Anton Rubenstein at the “advanced” age of 21, applied himself diligently to music, and by the age of 26 had won a composition award and become professor of harmony at the Moscow Conservatory.  He later worked as a music critic and reporter.  Even so, life as a musician was not without financial risk.  Tchaikovsky’s economic stability was a direct result of gifts from Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow whom he never met, even when they lived in the same city.  Their association began in 1876, shortly before the composer began working on Symphony No. 4.  Tchaikovsky may have had difficulties of other kinds - he was often depressed and sometimes suicidal - but financial independence and an unshakable confidence in his own abilities allowed him to seriously pursue composition.  As Nicolas Slonimsky writes, “every new work sustained his faith in his destiny as a composer."^vii

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Opus 36, was written from 1877 to 1878, and represents a particularly trying time in the composer’s life.  A sketch of the work was completed by the time of his formal engagement to Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, a former Moscow Conservatory student who pursued him obsessively.  Not an unwilling partner, Tchaikovsky imagined that marriage would provide a relaxing life away from the daily rigors of teaching and quell the rumors, however true, of his homosexuality.  But after a few weeks of marital reality, Tchaikovsky fled Moscow.  Soon after returning for the fall session at the Conservatory, he attempted suicide by immersing himself in the Moscow River, hoping to freeze to death or to contract pneumonia.  Instead, he was rescued by a passerby, granted a leave from teaching, and travelled to Switzerland for a “rest cure.”  It was in Switzerland that Symphony No. 4 was completed.  One can only surmise how much of this work is colored by Tchaikovsky’s normally melancholy character and how much by the events of this period.  In a letter to von Meck, to whom the Symphony is dedicated, he described the motif which opens the first movement as “the kernel, the quintessence, the chief thought of the whole symphony.  This is Fate, the fatal power which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness from gaining the goal, which jealously provides that peace and comfort do not prevail, that the sky is not free from clouds - a might that swings, like the sword of Damocles, constantly over the head, that poisons continually the soul.  This might is overpowering and invincible.  There is nothing to do but submit and vainly to complain."^viii

The dramatic motive which opens Symphony No. 4 is incredibly simple yet unforgettable - one need hear only the first few repeated notes to know that this is Tchaikovsky’s 4^th!  In this simplicity Tchaikovsky becomes a master of restraint, letting the music evolve into a series of syncopated chords, then silencing them.  As the opening subsides, an animated melody “in movimento di Valse” is introduced by the strings.  But the light-hearted Valse becomes anxious and frantic, and any attempt at joy is dispersed by the opening motive.  Dwelling on the idea of Fate in relation to Symphony No. 4 might seem unduly prosaic were it not for the fact that Tchaikovsky actually intended such a program.  For this he was treated with silence and criticism from his peers (“ballet music,” one called it derisively^ix), who were uncomfortable with such overt emotion within a formal symphony, one in which the music is imbued with a program and not just inspired by it, as with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the “Pastoral.”  But here Tchaikovsky builds on a tradition already begun by Hector Berlioz in his autobiographical Symphonie Fantastique of 1830 and by Franz Liszt in his symphonic poems (Les Preludes, Prometheus), paving the way for greater acceptance of the programmatic tone poems of Richard Strauss. 

The second movement begins with a lyrical melody “in mode di canzona,” simply stated by the oboe against a light instrumental backdrop.  Tchaikovsky engages the larger ensemble for a more impassioned theme, presented first by lush strings, with motives derived from both melodies providing variation and counterpoint.  Each contrasting section leads smoothly and skillfully into yet another magical reiteration of the opening melody.  Pizzicato strings set the tone for the third movement, a lively scherzo whose trio section, heralded by the oboe, features subdued winds and brasses.  The fourth movement, an allegro con fuoco, (“with fire”), reminds us again of the composer’s “indefatiguable Fate,"^x but also of the pleasures to be gleaned from life.  Heard in this movement is the Russian folk melody, “Vo Pole Beryioza Stoyala” (“In the Field Stood a Birch Tree”).