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Program Notes By Mark Eliot Jacobs

Igor StravinskyConcerto in E-flat (Dumbarton Oaks) (1937–38)

Instrumentation: 1 flute, 1 clarinet, 1 bassoon, 2 horns, 3 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos, 2 double basses

Duration: about 12 minutes

Stylistic trends in the Western art music often seem to be reactions and counter-reactions to previous styles. No sooner do composers

take up a distinctive stylistic philosophy than a contrasting style is established. The music of the period between the two World Wars makes for a good study of this development. Music of the early 20th century was in large part a reaction to the emotional extravagance of the 19th century romantics. Experimental and more dissonant—even atonal—the early 20th century gave listeners many new, unexpected, and even occasionally unwelcome musical experiences. A notable example is Stravinsky’s musical score for the ballet Le Sacre du Prin-temps (1913).

Compositions written between the World Wars were often re-actions to that early 20th century reaction against romanticism as well as to romanticism itself. Works espousing this style are typical-ly labeled “Neoclassical.” This music seeks to reestablish a musical aesthetic associated with the ancient Classical world of Greece and Rome. The musical inspiration for Neoclassicism is typically that of the 17th Century, more Baroque or Rococo than Classical. For this reason, it is sometimes referred to as “Neo-Baroque.”

For Stravinsky’s 1938 E-flat Concerto, J. S. Bach’s six Branden-burg concertos were a major influence. Stravinsky said of his own concerto,

I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Con-certos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do himself.

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In three short movements, the concerto is about as long as a Bach concerto grosso. In the baroque era, the concerto grosso (“big con-certo”) was a work in which musical material is shared between a small group of soloists (the concertino) and the full orchestra (the rip-ieno.) In Stravinsky’s concerto, all of the instruments fill the roles of both groups in a dynamic dance of distribution. The movements are played without pause. The compositional method is that of motivic development of short themes in a contrapuntal texture. There are fugato sections near the end of both of the outer movements. Even though the formal compositional manner of Bach is clearly heard in the piece, it is undeniable that the music’s substance is distinctly Stravinsky’s very own.

The E-flat concerto, best known to concert audiences as the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto was composed under the 1937 commission of U.S. diplomat Robert Wood Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss of Washington, D.C. for a celebration of their 30th wedding anniversa-ry the following year. Stravinsky visited the Bliss’s Dumbarton Oaks estate in 1937 early on in the compositional process of the concerto.

It had a private premier in May 1938 under the baton of French composer Nadia Boulanger in the music room of Dumbarton Oaks.

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Stravinsky was too ill to attend. The public premiere, conducted by Stravinsky, took place in Paris in June of the same year. In Septem-ber of 1939, Stravinsky immigrated to the United States, delivering lectures at Harvard University in the 1939–1940 academic year. He ultimately moved to Los Angeles, where he died in 1971. In 1987, he was posthumously awarded a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. He is buried on San Michele Island in the Lagoon of Venice, Italy.

Igor StravinskyConcerto for Piano & Wind Instruments

(1923–24, rev. 1950)Instrumentation: 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets,

2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and double bass section

Duration: about 20 minutes

Stravinsky composed the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments between the summer of 1923 and April 1923 (with a revision in

1950). He planned it to be a vehicle for his own piano-playing and premiered it as piano soloist in May 1924 under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky in Paris. He would play it over 40 times in the first five years of its existence. Stravinsky made his British radio debut in a performance of the concerto in June of 1927 with the Wireless Sym-phony Orchestra, the precursor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Stravinsky had been interested in the sound of winds without strings since 1920’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. The sound of winds alone was an important aspect of symphonic music going back to Debussy. As for the combination of winds and piano, Stravinsky said,

Strings and piano, a sound scraped, and a sound struck, do not sound well together. Piano and winds, sounds struck and blown, do.

Like the Dumbarton Oaks concerto, the Concerto for Piano and Winds—his very first concerto—borrows from and reimagines its model. The model for the present work is the baroque solo concerto with a scenario of three movements: fast-slow-fast. Much of the de-velopmental interest of the concerto derives from a kind of conver-sation between the solo piano and the winds in which motives are shaped and re-shaped.

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The slow cloud-shadowed winds-only introduction of the first movement is interrupted by the solo piano bringing in the fast and fiery percussive main material of the movement which dominates un-til its slow and dramatic ending. This is reminiscent of the baroque French overture form.

Like with much great music, the considerable profundity of the second movement derives from its sheer simplicity. One can occa-sionally hear an echo of the air from Bach’s third orchestral suite, a melody which was also the basis for the British rock band Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale (1967). One also starts to hear traces of American Jazz and Ragtime. There is a cadenza followed by a more animated section. After another brief cadenza, we are led directly into the finale.

The third movement is a juggernaut propelling us through time and space, until the point when everything stops, and the concerto seems to start over with new rhythmic parameters—a kind of fore-shortened recapitulation. Soon, however everything recoalesces, and the movement finds its end.

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Franz SchubertSymphony in C major, “The Great” (1825–26)

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings

Duration: about 48 minutes

Schubert died at the age of 31 and none of his symphonies were published in

his lifetime. Some were published as late as 50 years after the composer’s death. As a result, there have been several symphonic numbering systems by various editors. Brahms edited the Great C major Symphony as number 7, but as more symphonies appeared, it was changed to numbers 8, 9, and even 10. The desig-nation “Great” is based in part on something that Schubert wrote in a letter, and also to differentiate it from Schubert’s other C major symphony which is nicknamed the “Little” C major Symphony. Since some things are best left to musicologists, let’s just leave it as the Great C major Symphony.

For the symphony Schubert received a 100-florin honorarium and a reading from the Gesellschaft der Musicfreunde in Vienna. Discus-sions of a future performance were postponed due to the length and complexity of the work.

After Schubert’s death, Robert Schumann found the score for the Great C major among the composer’s things in the possession of his brother Ferdinand. Schuman sent the score off to the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. It was premiered there, with several cuts, under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn in March of 1839. As an attestation of the symphony’s true greatness, an excerpt from Schumann’s review written in 1840:

beside sheer musical mastery of the technique of composi-tion is life in every fiber, color in the finest shadings, mean-

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ing everywhere, the acutest etching of detail, and all flooded with a Romanticism which we have encountered elsewhere in Franz Schubert. And this heavenly length, like a fat novel in four volumes by Jean Paul—never-ending, and if only that the reader may go on creating in the same vein afterwards.

It is a work painted on a grand canvas. Many early listeners had trouble wrapping their ears around its unprecedentedly grand time scale, but modern listeners—steeped in the music of Mahler, Strauss, and Shostakovich—are equal to the challenge.

All the movements of the symphony are in some version of sona-ta form. The first movement begins with a heroic slow introduction with the first statement of the main C major theme in the horns. The theme is taken up and elaborated by the winds and then the strings. An emphatic statement of the theme in the brass and strings alternates with answers in the winds. In the fulness of time, we arrive at the Allegro ma non troppo. Here the main theme meets a secondary theme in E minor and a closing theme in G major. The development explores the themes in various keys and transformations until the triumphant return of the themes in C major brings the movement to a close.

The tragic second movement begins with a march. A more lyrical melody provides contrast. The C major Scherzo is the shortest move-ment of the symphony. It provides cheerful contrast to the sad second movement while building anticipation for the finale.

The deceptive simplicity of the Finale belies its energetic gran-deur. Structural balance in this and the other movements is achieved while maintaining the balance of the whole. Schubert makes it seem so easy!

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