Oklahoma City Philharmonic, CLASSICS 1: Sept. 13, 2009
IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
Suite from The Firebird (1945 Version)
I. Introduction–Prelude and Dance of the Firebird–Variations (Firebird) (Tempo giusto)
II. Pantomime I (L’istesso tempo)
III. Pas de deux: Firebird and Ivan Tsarevich (Adagio–Allegretto–Adagio)
IV. Pantomime II (Vivo–Moderato)
V. Scherzo: Dance of the Princesses (Allegretto)
VI. Pantomime III (Lento)
VII. Rondo (Khorovod) (Moderato–Più mosso–Moderato–Poco più mosso–Più mosso–Lento)
VIII. Infernal Dance (Vivo–Presto–Andante)
IX. Lullaby (Firebird) (Andante)
X. Final Hymn (Lento maestoso–Allegro non troppo–Maestoso–Molto pesante)
ANTONIN DVORÁK (1841-1904)
Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 (1894-95)
I. Allegro
II. Adagio, ma non troppo
III. Finale: Allegro moderato
Steven Isserlis, cello
Suite from The Firebird (1945 Version)
Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky
Born: June 5 (old style)/17 (new style), 1882 in Oranienbaum, now Lomonosov, near St. Petersburg, Russia
Died: April 6, 1971 in New York City
Work composed: Between November 1909 and May 18, 1910, dedicated “to my dear friend Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov” (the composer’s son); the concert suite heard here was made in 1945, completed that June
Work premiered: The original ballet was unveiled June 25, 1910, in a staged production of the Ballets Russes at the Paris Opéra, with Gabriel Pierné conducting. The 1945 “ballet suite for orchestra” was premiered October 24, 1945 in a staged production by Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, with choreography by Adolph Bolm, sets by Marc Chagall, and Jascha Horenstein conducting
Instrumentation: Two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, tambourine, cymbals, triangle, xylophone), harp, piano, and strings
As musicians go, Igor Stravinsky was a rather late bloomer. He didn’t begin piano lessons until he was nine, but these were soon supplemented by private tutoring in harmony and counterpoint. His parents supported his musical inclinations, all the more laudable since they knew what their teenager was getting into. (His father was a bass singer at the opera houses of Kiev and, later, St. Petersburg; his mother was an accomplished amateur pianist.) As it happened, one of his friends at school was the son of the celebrated composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. When Stravinsky’s father died, in 1902, Rimsky-Korsakov became a mentor, both personal and musical, to the aspiring composer. By 1907, Stravinsky (already 25 years old) was ready to bestow an opus number on one of his compositions, a Symphony in E-flat, which he dedicated to his great teacher. A year later Rimsky-Korsakov died, but his star pupil was ready to strike out on his own.
Stravinsky’s breakthrough to fame arrived when he embarked on a string of collaborations with the ballet impresario Sergei (a.k.a. Serge) Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes, launched in Paris in 1909, became quickly identified with the cutting edge of the European arts scene. Stravinsky’s first Diaghilev project was modest: a pair of Chopin orchestrations for the 1909 Ballets Russes production of Les Sylphides. The production was a success, but some critics complained that the troupe’s choreographic and scenic novelty was not matched by its conservative musical score. Diaghilev set about addressing this by commissioning new ballet scores, of which the very first was Stravinsky’s Firebird, premiered in 1910. Thus began a collaboration that gave rise to some of the most irreplaceable items in the history of Modernist stage music: Petrushka (premiered in 1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), The Nightingale (1914), Pulcinella (1920), Mavra (1922), Reynard (1922), The Wedding (1923), Oedipus Rex (1927), and Apollo (1928).
The Ballets Russes made a specialty of pieces that were inspired by Russian folklore—primeval Russian history being a cultural obsession of the moment—and The Firebird was perfectly suited to the company’s designs. The tale involves the dashing Prince Ivan (Ivan Tsarevich), who finds himself one night wandering through the garden of King Kashchei, an evil monarch whose power resides in a magic egg, which he guards in an elegant box. In Kashchei’s garden, the Prince captures a Firebird, which pleads for its life; the Prince agrees to spare it if it gives him one of its magic tail-feathers, which it consents to do. Thus armed, the Prince continues through his evening and happens upon 13 enchanted princesses. The most beautiful of them catches his eye and (acting under Kashchei’s spell) lures him to a spot where Kashchei’s demonic guards can ensnare him. But before he can be put under a spell himself, the Prince uses the magic tail-feather to summon the Firebird, which reveals the secret of the magic egg from which Kashchei derives his power. The Prince locates and smashes the egg, breaking the web of evil enchantment, and goes off to marry the newly liberated beautiful Princess, with whom, of course, he will live happily ever after.
A French critic reported his experience of hearing Stravinsky play through his work-in-progress in St. Petersburg: “The composer, young, slim, and uncommunicative, with vague meditative eyes, and lips set firm in an energetic looking face, was at the piano. But the moment he began to play, the modest and dimly lit dwelling glowed with a dazzling radiance. By the end of the first scene, I was conquered: by the last, I was lost in admiration. The manuscript on the music-rest, scored over with fine pencillings, revealed a masterpiece.”
The ballet was so successful that Stravinsky derived a concert suite from its lavish score, in 1911. It demanded the same immense orchestra the ballet had, and it remains one of music’s great showpieces of orchestration, a remarkable tour-de-force for a 28-year-old composer. Within a few years World War One wielded a tempering influence on the symphonic opulence of the pre-War era, and in 1919 Stravinsky accordingly issued another suite, this one considerably shorter and employing a less extravagant orchestra. Eventually he grew to feel the suite was too short, and in 1945 he created yet another Firebird Suite—the one heard in this concert—which maintains the more manageable forces while reinstating a good deal of music from the original score that the 1919 Suite had eliminated. The 1919 Suite had by that time staked its popularity in the concert hall, which it has not relinquished to this day. Stravinsky, however, steadfastly expressed a preference for the 1945 version, which was the score used by George Balanchine for his famous New York City Ballet production of The Firebird, introduced in 1950.
—James M. Keller
Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 (1894-95)
Antonín Dvorák
Born: September 8, 1841 in Mühlhausen (Nelahozeves), Bohemia
Died: May 1, 1904 in Prague
Work composed: Between November 8, 1894 and February 9, 1895, in New York City; revision of the finale completed in Bohemia on June 11, 1895
Work dedicated: To the cellist Hanuš Wihan
Work premiered: March 19, 1896, at the Queen’s Hall, London, with cellist Leo Stern and with the composer conducting the Philharmonic Society
Instrumentation: Two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings, in addition to the solo cello
Antonín Dvorák’s first professional steps were as a violist in a dance orchestra in Prague. The ensemble prospered, and in 1862 its members formed the founding core of the Provisional Theatre orchestra. Dvorák would play principal viola in the Provisional Theatre orchestra for nine years, in which capacity he sat directly beneath the batons of such composer-conductors as Bedrich Smetana and Richard Wagner.
During those early years Dvorák also honed his skills as a composer, and by 1871 he felt compelled to leave the orchestra and devote himself to composing full-time. Five times during the 1870s he was awarded the Austrian State Stipendium, a grant to assist young, poor, gifted musicians, which exactly defined his status at the time. These grants proved to be a godsend to the young Dvorák; if he had not received this critical support he might well have given up trying to be a composer. Nonetheless, even his mature masterpieces were slow to make their way into the international repertoire, embraced in England and America sooner than in the rest of Europe. Except for the Symphony From the New World, the Carnival Overture, and the Slavonic Dances, Dvorák remained little played outside his native land until practically the middle of the 20th century.
In 1891 Dvorák received a communication from Jeannette Thurber, a Paris-trained American musician who was now a New York philanthropist bent on raising American musical pedagogy to European standards. To this end she had founded the National Conservatory of Music in New York, incorporated by special act of Congress in 1891, and she set about persuading Dvorák to serve as its director. She succeeded, and the following year Dvorák and
A Musical Cipher
Dvorák enjoyed a long and happy marriage to Anna Cermáková, whom he wed in 1873. She had not been his first love; several years before he had experienced a serious infatuation for one of her elder sisters, Josefina, who had been taking piano lessons from him at the time. Absolutely nothing romantic came of that early attraction (which in case seems to have been strictly one-way), and Josefina and Antonín spent 30 years as affectionate and entirely platonic in-laws.
While the Dvoráks were living in New York, Josefina’s health began to decline precipitously; and, indeed, she would die on May 27, 1895, just a month after they returned to Prague from their American sojourn. It appears that Dvorák worked a tribute to the dying Josefina into his Cello Concerto by incorporating into the slow movement a slightly altered quotation from his song “Lasst mich allein” (“Leave Me Alone,” Op. 82, No. 1), which Dvorák’s biographer Otakar Sourek maintained was a particular favorite of Josefina’s.
It was upon learning of Josefina’s death that Dvorák crafted the coda at the concerto’s end, describing it thus: “The Finale closes gradually diminuendo, like a sigh, with reminiscences of the first and second movements—the solo dies down to pp, then swells again, and the last bars are taken up by the orchestra and the whole concludes in a stormy mood.”
—JMK
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his family moved to New York. He would remain until 1895 (though spending summer vacations elsewhere, most notably in the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa), building the school’s curriculum and faculty, appearing as a guest conductor, and composing such masterworks as his String Quartet in F major (Op. 96, the
American), his String Quintet in E-flat major, his Symphony
From the New World, and (in his final year in the United States) his Cello Concerto.
This grand and noble work was first heard when Dvorák played through it privately in August 1895 with his close friend Hanuš Wihan, an eminent cellist and the work’s dedicatee. Wihan suggested a few technical alterations, which the composer incorporated; but Dvorák rejected as superfluous Wihan’s idea of inserting a large-scale solo cadenza in the finale (to the cellist’s distress, since he had spend considerable care crafting one that incorporated material from the earlier movements). Dvorrák took the precaution of spelling out his position in a letter he wrote to his publisher early that October: “I shall only give you my work if you promise not to allow anybody to make any changes—my friend Wihan not excepted—without my knowledge and consent, and this includes the cadenza which Wihan has added to the last movement. … I told Wihan straight away when he showed it to me that it was impossible to stick bits on like that. The finale closes gradually diminuendo, like a sigh—with reminiscences of the first and second movements--the solo dies down to pianissimo—then swells again and the last bars are taken up by the orchestra and the whole concludes in stormy mood. That was my idea and I cannot depart from it.” Feathers were apparently ruffled enough that Dvorák enlisted a different cellist, Leo Stern, for the premiere (in London), as well as for the first Prague performance. But a truce was soon struck, and within a few years Wihan began performing this piece, too, including, on one occasion in Budapest, with Dvorák conducting—and with no cadenza.
Among the admirers of this concerto was none other than Johannes Brahms, to whom Dvorák had owed an important measure of his early success. Although he survived the premiere of Dvorák’s concerto by little more than a year, Brahms remained interested in new scores until the very end. He invited the cellist Robert Hausmann to call at his apartment, where the two played together through the new work. When they finished, Brahms rendered the work an unrivalled compliment by exclaiming, “If I had known that such a cello concerto as that could be written, I would have tried to compose one myself!”
—James M. Keller