Musical Surprises
March 2, 2012

Rachel Barton Pine, violin
Joel Levine, conductor

FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Symphony No. 94 in G major, Surprise, Hob. I: 94

SERGEI SERGEIEVICH PROKOFIEV
Lieutenant Kijé Suite

JOHN PAUL CORIGLIANO
Chaconne from The Red Violin

MAURICE RAVEL
Tzigane, Rapsodie de concert, for Violin and Orchestra

Born: Almost certainly on March 31, 1732, since he was baptized on April 1, in Rohrau, Lower Austria
Died: May 31, 1809, in Vienna
Work composed: 1791
Work premiered: March 23, 1792, at the Hanover Square Concert Rooms in London, with Haydn leading from the pianoforte
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. In Haydn’s day a keyboard instrument would also have been included in the ensemble.

In 1790, Franz Joseph Haydn’s employer of nearly three decades, Prince Nicholas Esterházy, died and was succeeded by his son. As the new prince did not much care for music, he granted Europe’s most admired composer a pension of a thousand florins a year; and though he kept Haydn on staff as his musical director, he made it clear that no particular duties—or even attendance—would be required. For the first time in many years, Haydn was free to explore.

On learning of the changes at the Esterházy court, the impresario Johann Peter Salomon (a German expatriate in England) presented himself at Haydn’s doorstep, presumably introducing himself with the words, “I am Salomon of London and I have come to fetch you. Tomorrow we will arrange an accord.” The accord was reached, whereby Haydn would be richly rewarded for numerous compositions, publication deals, and income from a benefit concert. Following his first voyage aboard a ship, Haydn arrived in London on January 1, 1791. He returned to Vienna in the summer of 1792, having enjoyed his time in England so much that he happily accepted a second invitation to visit London, in 1794-95.

For these two residencies Haydn wrote 12 symphonies (Nos. 93 through 104) that ever since have been dubbed the “London” or the “Salomon” symphonies. The works exhibit enormous diversity, and the set as a whole represents the apex of his symphonic achievement. The Surprise Symphony was written during the first of the residencies, and from the moment of its premiere it has been one of its composer’s most popular symphonies. That is due in part to the famous surprise alluded to in the title, which occurs in the second movement. In fact, this work is full of surprises throughout—in quirky turns of melodies, in unanticipated sidesteps of harmony, in ambiguities concerning rhythms, in unaccustomed juxtapositions of harmonic regions to yield cunning deviations from boilerplate structures common to many Classical symphonies.

The first surprise comes at the very beginning. Haydn typically opens his late symphonies with a slow introduction. Some are grand and others brooding, but they are nearly always richly voiced calls-to-attention that would have invited audiences to settle in before the tempo shifted to allegro to launch the movement’s sonata-form proceedings. But here the symphony begins not with a bang but rather with a whimper: a choir of double-reed instruments softly exhaling a gentle gesture. This prelude comes to no definitive conclusion; instead, the violins simply break into a skipping melody in fleet 6/8 meter, a melody that, in characteristic Haydn fashion, winds about a bit before revealing for sure what it’s tonic key is to be.

The second movement is a set of variations based on the simplest tune imaginable. One could imagine it as a folk-song, but it seems to have been of Haydn’s own devising; nonetheless, he would quote it as if it were a folk song in his oratorio The Seasons (1799-1801), where he revisits it as a tune a farmer whistles while plowing a field. The movement begins with a simple presentation of the melody, played piano and semplice (“simply”) by the strings alone. Just when they seem to have crossed the boundary to inane repetitiveness, Haydn delivers his titular surprise. Listeners who don’t know what Haydn’s surprise is should skip the accompanying sidebar, as we don’t want to spoil it. Following the surprise, Haydn rounds out his tune and then continues on through a series of four beautifully worked-out variations, each of which elaborates the theme through the imposition of a specific rhythmic-melodic gesture, orchestral sonority, and general character.

A quick minuet-and-trio follows, the minuet’s initial pomposity yielding to considerably gentler writing for strings and winds, the trio (again revealing Haydn’s penchant for slight harmonic obfuscation) providing a lightly scored interlude for strings alone. The Finale offers unadulterated delight as it dashes through its rapid paces. Perky it is, full of springing intervals, tripping rhythmic figures, and sudden contrasts of dynamics. Perhaps this piece would be better called the Surprises Symphony.

Sergei Sergeievich Prokofiev

Lieutenant Kijé Suite (1933/34)

Born: April 11 (old style/23 (new style), 1891, in Sontsovka, Ekaterinoslav district, Ukraine
Died: March 5, 1953, in Moscow
Work composed: 1933; he adapted the music into the Suite in 1934.
Work premiered: The film Poruchik Kizhe (“Lieutenant Kijé”) received its premiere screening on March 7, 1934, in Moscow, with Prokofiev’s recorded soundtrack having been conducted by Isaak Osipovich Dunayevsky. The greatly adapted Suite was first given in a radio broadcast by the Moscow Radio Orchestra on December 31, 1934.
Instrumentation: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, tenor saxophone, bass drum, military drum, triangle, cymbals, tamborine, sleigh bells, and strings

At the end of World War One most of Europe breathed a sigh of relief, but in Russia tough times eroded into general anarchy, paving the way for the Russian Revolution. Sergei Prokofiev, who had already gained a reputation as a composer and pianist, seems not to have liked what he saw brewing and he slipped away just ahead of the Revolution, departing from Petrograd for an 18-day journey across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, and then sailed on to Japan, Honolulu, and San Francisco. From there he continued cross-country to New York, where he arrived in September 1918. New York would be his base, more or less, for the next several years, after which he moved to Paris in 1923. That was the place to be just then if you were on the cutting edge of the arts, and Prokofiev cultivated important friendships during his decade there. Still, by 1932 his steps began turning homeward to what in the meantime had become the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was very interesting in having him back, international star that he was, and a sort of courtship went on for a few years, with the composer and his native land assessing what each could provide for the other. In the spring of 1936 Prokofiev settled in Moscow for good. His artistic experiments continued in the Soviet Union, but they did so in the shadow of his more politically acceptable efforts in Socialist-Realist style.
He must have wondered over the years if his decision had been for the best. There is no question that great and important masterpieces resulted from this second half of his career, and his mature assurance of style practically guarantees compositional refinement in these later works. Nonetheless, it is in his pre-Soviet oeuvre that Prokofiev-the-experimenter makes his most dependable appearances.

In the course of the mutual feeling-out that went on between Prokofiev and the Soviet Union, national cultural officials went out of their way to show the composer how welcome he would be. In late 1932, he was invited to provide the music for a film under development by the Belgoskino (Belorussian) film company, a project he would work out in tandem with director Alexander Feinzimmer and screenwriter Yury Tynyanov. (Tynyanov had already tried out his tale in an aborted silent film project and in a short story published in 1928.) “I was much pleased when the Belgoskino Studios asked me to write the music for the film Lieutenant Kijé,” Prokofiev wrote in his “short autobiography” of 1941. “This gave me a welcome opportunity to try my hand if not at Soviet subject matter than at music for Soviet audiences, and for the mass audience at that.”

Set in the czarist court of the late 18th century, the scenario tells an amusing, Gogol-style tale involving bureaucracy run amok. Somebody pinches a courtier’s backside, the courtier screams, and thus is the czar awakened from his slumber. An investigation of blame leads to a certain Poruchik Kizhe (“Lieutenant Kijé”), who, it turns out, doesn’t really exist. His name is actually a clerical error, created when a bureaucrat inscribed the name Poruchik Kizhe where he should have written Poruchiki-zhe (“… several lieutenants”). The mistake cannot be admitted, so the non-existent Lieutenant Kijé is pretend-flogged and sent to Siberia. When the true malefactor confesses, Lieutenant Kijé returns to Moscow in a sleigh, is made a general, gets married, and dies under unlikely circumstances. Notwithstanding some genuinely well-wrought scenes, the film’s overall tempo is strikingly slow. Lieutenant Kijé would not become a cinematic classic status, despite its initial popularity. It was screened even outside Russia, purveyed in England as The Tsar Wants to Sleep and in France as Le Lieutenant Nantes.
Intent on demonstrating its appreciation of Prokofiev, the All-Union Committee of Radio and Film Affairs aired some radio concerts that were intended to familiarize Soviet listeners with Prokofiev’s music. The first of these took place in April and May 1934, and on December 31 listeners were treated to the premiere of the five-movement concert suite Prokofiev crafted from his film score, played by the Moscow Radio Orchestra.

Born: February 16, 1938 in New York City
Currently living: In New York City
Work composed: 1997
Work premiered: November 25, 1997, with Robert Spano conducting the San Francisco Symphony and violinist Joshua Bell
Instrumentation: Three flutes (second and third doubling piccolo, third also doubling alto flute), two oboes, two clarinets in B-flat (second doubling E-flat clarinet, clarinet in A, and bass clarinet), two bassoons (second doubling contrabassoon), four horns, two trumpets (first optionally doubling piccolo trumpet), two trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, crotales, xylophone, vibraphone, chimes, bell tree, two small metal plates, triangle, suspended cymbal, ride cymbal, tamtam, slapstick, ratchet, tamborine, wood block, temple block, snare drum, two tenor drums, roto-toms, tom-toms, piano (doubling celesta), harp, and strings, in addition to the solo violin

John Corigliano is one of the most respected and highly honored of American composers, a recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (1991) and two Grammy awards for best classical composition (1991 and 1996), and since 1991 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Metropolitan Opera’s production of his opera The Ghosts of Versailles (1987) represented the first time in two decades that the company presented a new work it had commissioned. His Symphony No. 1, with its subsequent choral incarnation, Of Rage and Remembrance, has been acknowledged as one of the most compelling artistic statements related to the AIDS crisis. His Symphony No. 2, which followed in 2000, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2001. His first film score, for Altered States (1980), was nominated for an Academy Award and his second, Revolution (1985), received Great Britain’s Anthony Asquith Award for distinguished film composition.
In March 2000, Corigliano won an Academy Award for The Red Violin, his third film score, music that included the concert work played in this concert. The Oscar was not the only distinction accorded to Corigliano’s music for The Red Violin; it also won the Canadian Genie Award for best film score, the Quebec Jutra Award, and the German Critic’s Prize. In 1992, Musical America named Corigliano its first Composer of the Year, and in 2002 he was honored with the Gold Medal of The National Arts Club in New York City.

Corigliano was born into a musical family; his father (also named John Corigliano) served from 1943 to 1966 as Concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. He studied with Otto Luening at Columbia University and Vittorio Giannini at the Manhattan School of Music; became enmeshed in the New York radio scene; was involved briefly as a record producer for Columbia Masterworks; and worked for nearly a decade with Leonard Bernstein on the CBS broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts. Following an early period during which his music—as he has described it—was a “tense, histrionic outgrowth of the ‘clean’ American sound of Barber, Copland, Harris, and Schuman,” he proceeded to embrace a style in which Romantic grandeur can rub elbows with an unmistakably modernist musical vocabulary.

Eventually Corigliano would craft his film score for The Red Violin into a full-length Violin Concerto, of which the Chaconne stands as the first movement. Writing about the Violin Concerto as a whole, Corigliano stated: “My childhood years were punctuated by snatches of the great concertos being practiced by my father, as well as scales and technical exercises he used to keep in shape. Every year, he played a concerto with the Philharmonic (as well as in other venues), and I vividly remember the solo preparation, violin and piano rehearsals, orchestral rehearsals and the final tension-filled concerts (where I would sit backstage in the Carnegie Hall green room, listening to my father over a small speaker breathlessly playing the work in my head and listening to make sure everything came out all right). It is no wonder that the concerto form, and the violin concerto in particular, has a deep place in my heart. I have written a half-dozen concerti, but this is my first one for my first love, the violin. … Because [my father] inspired it, it is dedicated to his memory.

The film, directed by François Girard (and featuring the violinist Joshua Bell in the soundtrack), is constructed as a series of episodes that track the picaresque peregrinations of a magnificent violin crafted by a 17th-century Cremonese master. The fictional and highly romantic tale weaves through three centuries and five countries—Italy, Austria, England, China, Canada—as the instrument wends its way to a Montreal auction house. Such a journey calls for a multiplicity of musical styles, and Corigliano’s score revealed his chameleonic ability to evoke distinct musical cultures and absorb them into an overarching style of his own, at the same time providing an important concert work for the violin, an instrument that has been central to his life.

 Maurice Ravel  (1875-1937)

Tzigane, Rapsodie de concert, for Violin and Orchestra (1924)

Born: March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrenees, France
Died: December 28, 1937, in Paris
Work composed: 1924, originally for violin and piano, but arranged by the composer by that July for violin and orchestra
Work premiered: In its original version, on April 26, 1924, at Aeolian Hall in London, by violinist Jelly d’Arányi and pianist Henri Gil-Marchex; the orchestral version on November 30, 1924, in Paris, by Ms. d’Arányi, with Gabriel Pierné conducting the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne
Work dedicated: To Jelly d’Arányi
Instrumentation: Two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, to clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, triangle, bell on F-sharp, suspended cymbal, celesta, harp, and strings

Ravel composed his Tzigane for a violinist whose name surfaces today less than one might expect given the number of musical headlines she made during her heyday. Jelly d’Arányi—or, to give her full Hungarian handle, Jelly Eva Arányi de Hunyadvar—was born in 1893 in Budapest, into a family of violinistic distinction. Her great uncle was Joseph Joachim, the leading violinist of the Schumann-Brahms circle, and her older sister was Adila Fachiri, a recital partner of the musical analyst Donald Francis Tovey (with whom she recorded one of Beethoven’s violin sonatas). Both the Arányi sisters were violin pupils of the legendary Jenö Hubay at the Music Academy of Budapest, and both emigrated to London as young adults and took British citizenship.

The Arányi sisters often appeared as a duo. The widely held opinion was that Jelly was the better all-round violinist but that Adila brought sufficient passion to her presentation to make up for technical shortcomings. Jelly became especially famous for her interpretations of contemporary music, and she was honored with the dedications of not only Ravel’s Tzigane but also Bartók’s two violin-and-piano sonatas and Vaughan Williams’ Concerto Accademico (1924-25). As a team the sisters played the premiere of Gustav Holst’s Concerto for Two Violins (1930), which was dedicated to them jointly.

The most curious chapter of the Jelly d’Arányi tale came in March 1933, when she arranged a séance during which (she reported) the spirit of Robert Schumann appeared to her and Adila, asking Jelly to recover the Violin Concerto he had composed in 1853, just before he was institutionalized—a work of which she insisted she was entirely ignorant. Uncle Joseph Joachim’s ghost then coalesced and fortuitously revealed that Schumann had given the manuscript to Joachim, who had deposited it in the Prussian State Library but forbidden its publication until a hundred years after the composer’s death (i.e., 1956). For some reason, Jelly had not yet followed up on this information when, four years later, Yehudi Menuhin came into possession of the score and announced that he would be premiering the Schumann Concerto in San Francisco. At that point Jelly pounced, claiming very publicly that the mandate she had received during the séance gave her the right of first performance. In the end, the German government insisted that a German play the premiere—the Nazis, having recently outlawed the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto for being Jewish, needed a “great Romantic concerto” to take its place in the repertoire—so the honors went to Georg Kulenkampff and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1937. Someone must make a movie of all this.
Jelly d’Arányi was a passionate champion of Ravel, who was impressed with her interpretation of his Sonata for Violin and Cello when he heard her play it with the cellist Hans Kindler at a private musicale in London in 1922. When the formal concert was over, Ravel asked her to play a gypsy piece—and then another and another until 5 o’clock in the morning. The experience left a huge impression on Ravel, and two years later we find him writing to the violinist: “Would you have the time to come to Paris in 2 or 3 weeks? If so, I would like to speak to you about Tzigane, which I am writing specially for you [and] which will be dedicated to you …. This Tzigane must be a piece of great virtuosity. Certain passages can produce brilliant effects, provided that it is possible to perform them—which I’m not always sure of.”

Indeed it is filled with technical challenges—multiple stops, rapid-fire harmonics and pizzicatos, swooping glissandos, and all manner of other violinistic derring-do. While he was working on the piece, Ravel summoned his violinist-friend Hélène Jourdan-Morhange: “Come quickly with your violin and the 24 Caprices by Paganini.” She recounted: “It was the time when he was writing Tzigane, that violinist’s minefield. He thought Paganini might be able to suggest to him some unsuspected obstacles, but I can safely say Ravel was the more devilish of he two!”

—JMK