Program Notes: October 12, 2003
Fourth Annual Beethoven Benefit Bash
on October 12th at 5:00pm
Despite its popularity, the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is perhaps his bleakest musical utterance. Four times in the movement we escape the opening "fate" music for a more positive world, and four times we are pulled back into darkness, the third time pausing briefly for an agonizing oboe lament. The popularity of this movement probably stems, in part, from the sheer power of its fast pace and tight construction, and perhaps also from the fact that its famous opening, originally meant to represent "Fate knocking at the Door," came to spell "Victory" for the Allies in World War II (since three shorts and a long indicate "V" in Morse Code). In any case, the later movements chart a very different course. The second movement offers brief glimpses of future glory by introducing brass instruments into its mainly pastoral setting. In the third, the "fate" motive returns with march-like resolve, leading us eventually to the ecstatic finale, for which Beethoven added piccolo and trombones; here, the "fate" motive is repeatedly recalled in a celebratory, sometimes religious mode. Beethoven began his Fifth Symphony in 1806, but did not complete it until 1808, when it was performed in a mammoth concert of mostly new music, including his Fourth Concerto, Sixth Symphony, movements from his Mass in C, solo improvisation, and (because somehow this wasn't enough) his large-scale Choral Fantasy, which he put together at the last minute to round out the evening.
Liszt, for all his accessibility -- which many insist was no more than pandering -- was among the most experimental composers of the nineteenth century. There are many signposts of his questing nature in the Second Concerto, which, like so many of his mature works, went through a long gestation period (1839-1861, first performed in 1857). Thus, a single theme permeates the whole work, and that theme is based on a "poetic" harmonic move deriving from Liszt's forward-looking experiments in that dimension. Through the many guises that theme takes, the concerto unfolds as a single movement that lays out a full panoply of moods and tempos within its various episodes, ranging from dramatic to ravishingly lyrical, and through which we can discern the background of a more conventional set of movements. As in his First Concerto, Liszt tends to favor soloistic work from the orchestra over massive tutti effects, giving much of the work an intimate chamber feel.
Jonathan D. Kramer's Rewind: A Semi-Suiteis a retrospective look back at the composer's evolving style, which, as he puts it, "chronicles my gradual acceptance of vernacular musical styles. The first movement, "Cincy in C," was originally written for the hundredth anniversary of the Cincinnati Symphony (1994), which was itself retrospective in its self-borrowings. The second, "An Old Tune," is based on a 1970s piano work. With the final two movements we "Fast Forward" into the present, with the third movement ("Blues Period") stemming from his 1998 "Surreality Check" and the finale being newly composed in what the composer calls a "pops-concert idiom." As the title suggests, the work embodies a fluctuating ambivalence between popular and modern tendencies.
-- Raymond Knapp
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