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Beethoven's Echo
April 29, 2017, 7pm Broadmoor Community Church April 30, 2017, 2:30pm First Christian Church |
Michael Torke Ash
Sergei Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, op. 19 Jacob Klock, violin Robert Schumann Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, op. 97 “Rhenish” Pre-concert lecture 45 minutes prior to each concert with Don Th. Jaeger, Conductor Following on our Revolutionaries program at the beginning of the season, the Chamber Orchestra explores pieces inspired by Beethoven. Local favorite violinist and our Concertmaster, Jacob Klock, gives a knockout performance of Prokofiev’s landmark First Violin Concerto, while shades of Beethoven’s Fifth are clearly heard in Michael Torke’s Ash, and our season ends in triumph with Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, which was modeled on Beethoven’s Eroica and Pastoral Symphonies.
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Colorado native Jacob Klock was six years old when he received a VHS copy of Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” for Christmas. Inspired by the music featured in the film, he told his parents he wanted to learn the violin and began taking lessons in March 1992. Jacob first worked with the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs in 2004-07 as Assistant Concertmaster and currently serves as Concertmaster, a position he has held since 2010. He has regularly been featured as soloist with the group during that time. Jacob is also a member of the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, and joined local string quartet Hausmusik in 2014. Venturing into the non-classical realm, he has played fiddle with Colorado Springs alt-country outfit, Joe Johnson & The Colorado Wildfire since 2012. Jacob enjoys all genres of music past and present, from traditional to experimental, and is an avid collector of records and scores. His favorite composers include J.S. Bach, Brahms, Mahler, and Bartók. Jacob currently lives on the west side of Colorado Springs with his wife Heather, and his three children, Ivy, Ella, and Arlo.
PROGRAM NOTES BY MARK ARNEST
Concert Overview: The shadow Beethoven cast over his fellow composers lasted a generation: They had to come to terms with both his stylistic innovations and his deeply serious idea of the composer’s cultural role. The young Schumann looked at Beethoven sideways, agreeing on the composer’s vital cultural role, but building his larger works in a radically anti-Beethovenian way. It was only in his 30s, in such works as the Rhenish symphony, that he confronted Beethoven head-on.
But Beethoven’s influence did not end with Schumann’s generation. Not only were Beethoven’s sonatas among Prokofiev’s earliest musical memories; even as a fully developed composer, he studied Beethoven’s string quartets before embarking on his own Op. 50 quartet: “I came to understand and greatly admire his quartet technique,” wrote Prokofiev with admirable understatement. And in Ash, minimalist composer Michael Torke explicitly takes Beethoven as his model: Tim Rutherford-Johnson has written that the piece’s “entire fifteen minutes is effectively a collage of gestures from the last movements of imagined Beethoven symphonies.”
Overview: Michael Torke
Born September 22, 1961, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Work Composed: 1988
Why It Matters: Classicism fuses with minimalism as this piece simultaneously looks forwards and backwards.
With the spread in the late 1970s of minimalism – a radical simplification of concert music – composers broke free of the atonality of 1960s and ’70s, creating music that was accessible to large audiences while still being recognizably contemporary. Michael Torke – pronounced TOR-kee – is one of the most successful “second wave” minimalists.
K. Robert Schwarz, a scholar of musical minimalism, called Torke “a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral palette makes him the Ravel of his generation.” In Ash, the resemblance is distinctly more of Stravinsky than Ravel, because Torke’s references to classical models bring him very close to Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism. But while Stravinsky harked back to Haydn and Mozart, studiously avoiding any resemblance to Beethoven, Torke all but wallows in Beethovenian gestures.
Ash is the fifth and final piece in the series Color Music. (Torke is a synesthete, meaning that specific sonorities are associated in his mind with specific colors.) Unlike the other movements – Ecstatic Orange, Bright Blue Music, Green, and Purple – it does not call for a large orchestra. However, it is the set’s longest composition.
The piece is full of hustle and bustle, with a kaleidoscopic effect created by the rhythmic dislocation of pithy motives. This effect is compounded by sly, distorted references to earlier compositions – Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and especially Beethoven’s Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth symphonies – strewn throughout the piece.
Torke has written of Ash:
In trying to find a clear and recognizable language to write this piece, I have chosen some of the most basic, functionally tonal means: tonics and dominants in F minor, a modulation to the relative major (A-flat), and a three-part form which, through a retransition, recapitulates back to F minor. What I offer is not invention of new “words” or a new language but a new way to make sentences and paragraphs in a common, much-used existing language. I can create a more compelling musical argument with these means because, to my ears, potential rhetoric seems to fall out from such highly functional chords as tonics and dominants more than certain fixed sonorities and Pop chords that I have used before. My musical argument is dependent on a feeling of cause and effect, both on a local level where one chord releases the tension from a previous chord and on the larger structural level where a section is forced to follow a previous section by a coercive modulation. The orchestration does not seek color for its own sake, as decoration is not a high priority, but the instruments combine and double each other to create an insistent ensemble from beginning to end. Only occasionally, as in the middle A-flat section, do three woodwind instruments play alone for a short while to break the inertia of the ensemble forging its course together.
Overview: Serge Prokofiev
Born April 23, 1891, Krasne, Ukraine; died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia
Work Composed: 1915, 1917
Why It Matters: A rarely-heard masterpiece that violinist Joseph Szigeti called “unique in the whole body of Prokofiev’s output.”
The year 1917 – one of the most turbulent in Russian history – turned out to be Prokofiev’s most productive year. He composed his first and still best-known symphony, the “Classical,” the Piano Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4, and the remarkable Visions Fugitives for piano; and he began the Piano Concerto No. 3, now a staple of the repertory, and the cantata “Seven, They Are Seven.”
And he finally completed his Violin Concerto No. 1. “Its first theme had been composed for a concertino in the beginning of 1915 and I had often regretted that other work had prevented me from returning to its ‘meditative opening,’” he later wrote. “Gradually, by the summer of 1917, the concertino had grown into a concerto, and during the summer of 1917 I completed the score.”
In his autobiography, Prokofiev described four basic lines along which his work developed: The classical, dating from early childhood listening to his mother play Beethoven sonatas; the modern, beginning with his meeting Sergei Taneyev, where the older composer reproached him for his crude harmonies; the toccata, “traceable perhaps to Schumann’s Toccata which made a powerful impression on me when I first heard it”; and the lyrical, for which he cites this concerto as an early example.
“This line was not noticed until much later,” he wrote; “For a long time I was given no credit for any lyric gift whatever, and for want of encouragement it developed slowly. But as time went on I gave more and more attention to this aspect of my work.”
The concerto is symphonic in scope, with the violin and orchestra beautifully integrated. The first movement’s four sections are reminiscent of sonata form. The opening theme is marked sognando (“dreaming”), and part of its serpentine charm is the ease with which Prokofiev moves the violin back and forth from melody to accompanying arabesques. The contrasting second theme is marked narrante (“narrated”); Prokofiev told violinist David Oistrakh to “play it as though you're trying to convince someone of something.” Violinist Joseph Szigeti, one of the concerto’s first performers, wrote that the concerto fascinated him “by its mixture of fairy‑tale naïveté and daring savagery in lay‑out and texture,” and that savagery is evident in the the toccata-like third section. The movement ends with a ravishing restatement of the opening theme, now given to the flute and piccolo.
The scherzo bubbles with charm and vivacity, always moving but never arriving. The finale begins quietly and slowly builds, but the climax is not loud: The concerto ends with a final, rhapsodic restatement of the first movement’s opening theme.
The concerto wasn’t premiered until 1922. Musical tastes were evolving quickly, and the concerto was not received as enthusiastically as it deserved: It was more conservative than the music for which Prokofiev was best known, and composer Georges Auric insulted the work by calling it “Mendelssohnian.” (Put-down or not, it’s apt, especially with regard to the brilliantly lucid orchestration, an uncommon trait in Prokofiev’s work.) The increasingly cool reception in Western countries of Prokofiev’s music – not modern enough for the avant-garde, while nevertheless too modern for traditionalists – was a factor in his 1936 decision to return to the Soviet Union.
Overview: Robert Schumann
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany; died July 29, 1856, Endenich, Germany
Work Composed: 1850
Why It Matters: Schumann’s final symphony embodies a lifetime of experience.
In September 1850, the Schumann family moved to Düsseldorf where Robert had been named Municipal Music Director. His first months there were the last truly happy time in his life, before stress and – finally – insanity left him confined to the asylum where he would spend the last two-and-a-half years of his life.
There are no foreshadowings of madness in the “Rhenish” symphony: It all but overflows with optimism and exuberance. It was inspired by a visit to the Rhineland – including Cologne, where the famous cathedral astonished Schumann. Inspired by what he’d seen, he composed with his customary speed, beginning the symphony on November 2nd and completing it December 9th.
Despite its numbering as the third of four, this symphony was the last one Schumann composed; the symphony known as No. 4 was originally composed in 1841, but not published until 1851, after some revisions.
The Rhenish symphony has connections to two Beethoven symphonies: The Eroica, with which it shares the key of E-flat and a generally heroic character; and the Pastorale, with which it shares a second movement that depicts moving water (a stream in Beethoven, the Rhine river in Schumann), an unusual five-movement structure, and the fact that some of the movements originally had poetic titles, though Schumann thought better of this idea and removed them before publication.
Few symphonies open as brilliantly as this one, with its exuberantly bright, swinging first theme. The movement unfolds with the logic of an improvisation, with unexpected turns that somehow lead smoothly from one moment to the next. The pensive second theme merely interrupts the prevailing high spirits.
The development section is long, and its kaleidoscopic sequences – in which Schumann repeats similar blocks of music in different keys – show more of Schubert’s influence than Beethoven’s. Near the end of this section, a brilliant distortion of the main theme in the French horns begins the journey to the recapitulation. Schumann intensifies the beginning of this climactic section by using an unexpected form of the tonic chord. The coda is brief but celebratory.
The second movement was originally entitled “Morning on the Rhine” – a much friendlier but also less awe-inspiring image of the river than Wagner’s portrayal three years later in the prelude to Das Rheingold. The third movement is the symphony’s most typically Schumannesque, with a simple innocence reminiscent of the middle movement of Schumann’s piano concerto.
The fourth movement, originally entitled “In the character of a procession for a solemn ceremony,” was inspired by Schumann’s hearing of the installation of a new Cardinal at the Cologne Cathedral. Schumann scholar John Daverio calls it “Schumann’s more compelling homage to the stile antico” – the Baroque style of Bach and Handel that Schumann deeply admired. It was not part of Schumann’s original sketches, but was an inspired addition, without which the symphony’s otherwise relentless high spirits might have just been too much. The finale brings back these high spirits, but with a rhythmic feel very different than in the first movement.
The Rhenish Symphony was one of only a handful of Schumann’s works to receive widespread acclaim during his lifetime. Schumann handles the thematic connections masterfully, creating a whole that’s subtly unified underneath the the surface’s variety; but Schumann wanted these connections to be felt rather than explicitly heard, and said of the symphony that “popular elements should prevail.” Daverio writes that the work’s undisputed success lies “in its nearly ideal fusion of these ‘popular elements’ with the demands of high art.”
Concert Overview: The shadow Beethoven cast over his fellow composers lasted a generation: They had to come to terms with both his stylistic innovations and his deeply serious idea of the composer’s cultural role. The young Schumann looked at Beethoven sideways, agreeing on the composer’s vital cultural role, but building his larger works in a radically anti-Beethovenian way. It was only in his 30s, in such works as the Rhenish symphony, that he confronted Beethoven head-on.
But Beethoven’s influence did not end with Schumann’s generation. Not only were Beethoven’s sonatas among Prokofiev’s earliest musical memories; even as a fully developed composer, he studied Beethoven’s string quartets before embarking on his own Op. 50 quartet: “I came to understand and greatly admire his quartet technique,” wrote Prokofiev with admirable understatement. And in Ash, minimalist composer Michael Torke explicitly takes Beethoven as his model: Tim Rutherford-Johnson has written that the piece’s “entire fifteen minutes is effectively a collage of gestures from the last movements of imagined Beethoven symphonies.”
Overview: Michael Torke
Born September 22, 1961, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Work Composed: 1988
Why It Matters: Classicism fuses with minimalism as this piece simultaneously looks forwards and backwards.
With the spread in the late 1970s of minimalism – a radical simplification of concert music – composers broke free of the atonality of 1960s and ’70s, creating music that was accessible to large audiences while still being recognizably contemporary. Michael Torke – pronounced TOR-kee – is one of the most successful “second wave” minimalists.
K. Robert Schwarz, a scholar of musical minimalism, called Torke “a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral palette makes him the Ravel of his generation.” In Ash, the resemblance is distinctly more of Stravinsky than Ravel, because Torke’s references to classical models bring him very close to Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism. But while Stravinsky harked back to Haydn and Mozart, studiously avoiding any resemblance to Beethoven, Torke all but wallows in Beethovenian gestures.
Ash is the fifth and final piece in the series Color Music. (Torke is a synesthete, meaning that specific sonorities are associated in his mind with specific colors.) Unlike the other movements – Ecstatic Orange, Bright Blue Music, Green, and Purple – it does not call for a large orchestra. However, it is the set’s longest composition.
The piece is full of hustle and bustle, with a kaleidoscopic effect created by the rhythmic dislocation of pithy motives. This effect is compounded by sly, distorted references to earlier compositions – Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and especially Beethoven’s Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth symphonies – strewn throughout the piece.
Torke has written of Ash:
In trying to find a clear and recognizable language to write this piece, I have chosen some of the most basic, functionally tonal means: tonics and dominants in F minor, a modulation to the relative major (A-flat), and a three-part form which, through a retransition, recapitulates back to F minor. What I offer is not invention of new “words” or a new language but a new way to make sentences and paragraphs in a common, much-used existing language. I can create a more compelling musical argument with these means because, to my ears, potential rhetoric seems to fall out from such highly functional chords as tonics and dominants more than certain fixed sonorities and Pop chords that I have used before. My musical argument is dependent on a feeling of cause and effect, both on a local level where one chord releases the tension from a previous chord and on the larger structural level where a section is forced to follow a previous section by a coercive modulation. The orchestration does not seek color for its own sake, as decoration is not a high priority, but the instruments combine and double each other to create an insistent ensemble from beginning to end. Only occasionally, as in the middle A-flat section, do three woodwind instruments play alone for a short while to break the inertia of the ensemble forging its course together.
Overview: Serge Prokofiev
Born April 23, 1891, Krasne, Ukraine; died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia
Work Composed: 1915, 1917
Why It Matters: A rarely-heard masterpiece that violinist Joseph Szigeti called “unique in the whole body of Prokofiev’s output.”
The year 1917 – one of the most turbulent in Russian history – turned out to be Prokofiev’s most productive year. He composed his first and still best-known symphony, the “Classical,” the Piano Sonatas Nos. 3 and 4, and the remarkable Visions Fugitives for piano; and he began the Piano Concerto No. 3, now a staple of the repertory, and the cantata “Seven, They Are Seven.”
And he finally completed his Violin Concerto No. 1. “Its first theme had been composed for a concertino in the beginning of 1915 and I had often regretted that other work had prevented me from returning to its ‘meditative opening,’” he later wrote. “Gradually, by the summer of 1917, the concertino had grown into a concerto, and during the summer of 1917 I completed the score.”
In his autobiography, Prokofiev described four basic lines along which his work developed: The classical, dating from early childhood listening to his mother play Beethoven sonatas; the modern, beginning with his meeting Sergei Taneyev, where the older composer reproached him for his crude harmonies; the toccata, “traceable perhaps to Schumann’s Toccata which made a powerful impression on me when I first heard it”; and the lyrical, for which he cites this concerto as an early example.
“This line was not noticed until much later,” he wrote; “For a long time I was given no credit for any lyric gift whatever, and for want of encouragement it developed slowly. But as time went on I gave more and more attention to this aspect of my work.”
The concerto is symphonic in scope, with the violin and orchestra beautifully integrated. The first movement’s four sections are reminiscent of sonata form. The opening theme is marked sognando (“dreaming”), and part of its serpentine charm is the ease with which Prokofiev moves the violin back and forth from melody to accompanying arabesques. The contrasting second theme is marked narrante (“narrated”); Prokofiev told violinist David Oistrakh to “play it as though you're trying to convince someone of something.” Violinist Joseph Szigeti, one of the concerto’s first performers, wrote that the concerto fascinated him “by its mixture of fairy‑tale naïveté and daring savagery in lay‑out and texture,” and that savagery is evident in the the toccata-like third section. The movement ends with a ravishing restatement of the opening theme, now given to the flute and piccolo.
The scherzo bubbles with charm and vivacity, always moving but never arriving. The finale begins quietly and slowly builds, but the climax is not loud: The concerto ends with a final, rhapsodic restatement of the first movement’s opening theme.
The concerto wasn’t premiered until 1922. Musical tastes were evolving quickly, and the concerto was not received as enthusiastically as it deserved: It was more conservative than the music for which Prokofiev was best known, and composer Georges Auric insulted the work by calling it “Mendelssohnian.” (Put-down or not, it’s apt, especially with regard to the brilliantly lucid orchestration, an uncommon trait in Prokofiev’s work.) The increasingly cool reception in Western countries of Prokofiev’s music – not modern enough for the avant-garde, while nevertheless too modern for traditionalists – was a factor in his 1936 decision to return to the Soviet Union.
Overview: Robert Schumann
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany; died July 29, 1856, Endenich, Germany
Work Composed: 1850
Why It Matters: Schumann’s final symphony embodies a lifetime of experience.
In September 1850, the Schumann family moved to Düsseldorf where Robert had been named Municipal Music Director. His first months there were the last truly happy time in his life, before stress and – finally – insanity left him confined to the asylum where he would spend the last two-and-a-half years of his life.
There are no foreshadowings of madness in the “Rhenish” symphony: It all but overflows with optimism and exuberance. It was inspired by a visit to the Rhineland – including Cologne, where the famous cathedral astonished Schumann. Inspired by what he’d seen, he composed with his customary speed, beginning the symphony on November 2nd and completing it December 9th.
Despite its numbering as the third of four, this symphony was the last one Schumann composed; the symphony known as No. 4 was originally composed in 1841, but not published until 1851, after some revisions.
The Rhenish symphony has connections to two Beethoven symphonies: The Eroica, with which it shares the key of E-flat and a generally heroic character; and the Pastorale, with which it shares a second movement that depicts moving water (a stream in Beethoven, the Rhine river in Schumann), an unusual five-movement structure, and the fact that some of the movements originally had poetic titles, though Schumann thought better of this idea and removed them before publication.
Few symphonies open as brilliantly as this one, with its exuberantly bright, swinging first theme. The movement unfolds with the logic of an improvisation, with unexpected turns that somehow lead smoothly from one moment to the next. The pensive second theme merely interrupts the prevailing high spirits.
The development section is long, and its kaleidoscopic sequences – in which Schumann repeats similar blocks of music in different keys – show more of Schubert’s influence than Beethoven’s. Near the end of this section, a brilliant distortion of the main theme in the French horns begins the journey to the recapitulation. Schumann intensifies the beginning of this climactic section by using an unexpected form of the tonic chord. The coda is brief but celebratory.
The second movement was originally entitled “Morning on the Rhine” – a much friendlier but also less awe-inspiring image of the river than Wagner’s portrayal three years later in the prelude to Das Rheingold. The third movement is the symphony’s most typically Schumannesque, with a simple innocence reminiscent of the middle movement of Schumann’s piano concerto.
The fourth movement, originally entitled “In the character of a procession for a solemn ceremony,” was inspired by Schumann’s hearing of the installation of a new Cardinal at the Cologne Cathedral. Schumann scholar John Daverio calls it “Schumann’s more compelling homage to the stile antico” – the Baroque style of Bach and Handel that Schumann deeply admired. It was not part of Schumann’s original sketches, but was an inspired addition, without which the symphony’s otherwise relentless high spirits might have just been too much. The finale brings back these high spirits, but with a rhythmic feel very different than in the first movement.
The Rhenish Symphony was one of only a handful of Schumann’s works to receive widespread acclaim during his lifetime. Schumann handles the thematic connections masterfully, creating a whole that’s subtly unified underneath the the surface’s variety; but Schumann wanted these connections to be felt rather than explicitly heard, and said of the symphony that “popular elements should prevail.” Daverio writes that the work’s undisputed success lies “in its nearly ideal fusion of these ‘popular elements’ with the demands of high art.”
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