JULY 9, 2013 @ 7:30 PM
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Eric Wyrick, violin
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)
Overture to Cambiale di matrimonio, (1810)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Romance for Violin & Orchestra No. 2, in F major, Op. 50, (1798)
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No. 44 in E minor, ‘Trauer’, Hob. 1:44, (1770-71)
Allegro con brio
Menuetto (Allegretto) & Trio
Adagio
Finale: Presto
INTERMISSION
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93)
Serenade for Strings in C major, Op. 48, (1880)
Pezzo in forma di sonatina: Andante non troppo—Allegro moderato
Valse: Moderato — Tempo di valse
Élégie: Larghetto elegiaco
Finale (Tema russo): Andante — Allegro con spirito
WQXR HOST: Terrance McKnight
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Program Notes for 9 July 2013 Naumburg Orchestral Concert
GIOACCHINO ROSSINI
Overture to La Camdiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Market)
Born February 29, 1792, in Pesaro, Italy
Died November 13, 1868, in Paris
Duration: approximately 6 minutes
Composed: 1810
First Performance: November 3, 1810
Orpheus Recording: Deutsche Grammophon Catalog #445569 (1985) and #47750123 (1994)
The astonishing career of Gioacchino Rossini was launched on November 3, 1810, when his opera La Cambiale di matrimonio, which he called “a comic farce,” was performed for the first time. He had actually composed another opera when he was only about sixteen, but that one was not to reach the stage until 1812. This one act opera was commissioned for production in Venice in a simple commercial theater where an inexperienced composer, he said, “could show his inborn imagination (if heaven had granted it to him) and technique (if he had mastered it).” Rossini at eighteen clearly had a good supply of both imagination and technique, which he went on to exercise by composing some three dozen more operas during the next nineteen years. After that he retired from the theater, and during the remaining thirty-nine years of his life, he composed only a few religious pieces and a large number of sophisticated, tiny trifles.
The plot of La Cambiale di matrimonio is a more or less stock love triangle, with two suitors—one young and handsome and the other old but rich—vying for a young girl’s hand in marriage. As has often been the case in the theater, the overture was the last thing to be composed, and when he ran out of time in which to write it, Rossini simply took one that he had composed as a student exercise in 1809 and used that as his curtain raiser. It is a slight piece, perhaps, but it is an astonishing one for a sixteen-year-old boy to have written, and in 1817 he used this Overture again, to open his twenty-third opera, the serious and dramatic Adelaide di Borgogna.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Romance No. 2 in F Major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 50
Born December 1770, in Bonn
Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna
Duration: approximately 9 minutes
Composed: 1798
First Performance: November 1798
Orpheus Recording: Deutsche Grammophon Catalog #44992328 (1996)
Beethoven attempted a violin concerto in C major in the early 1790s, while still living in Bonn. He abandoned that concerto midway through the first movement, but he might have gotten far enough to plan a slow movement in F major. He completed just such a movement—a Romance—in 1798, and secured a performance that November. By the time his publisher accepted it in 1805, Beethoven had already issued a Romance in G major (Opus 40), so this earlier work became the Romance No. 2 with a higher opus number.
The year of its publication was the same in which Beethoven completed his second symphony, saw the premiere of his only opera Fidelio, and wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he outlines his increasing frustration at his growing deafness. But that despair is not heard in this slightly earlier and extremely lyrical work in which the “singing” quality of the solo violin is reinforced by the Adagio cantabile tempo marking. One of Beethoven’s most popular works, it contains a rich harmonic vocabulary and an expressive ballad-like melodious style.
FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Symphony No. 44 in E Minor, Trauer
Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Lower Austria
Died May 31, 1809, in Vienna
Duration: approximately 22 minutes
Composed: c. 1772
Orpheus Recording: Deutsche Grammophon Catalog #41536525 (1985)
The German literary and artistic movement called Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) came to fruition in the early 1770s. It was identified with an urgent, exaggerated, highly emotional manner of expression. Though the movement was most readily associated with poetry, literature, and painting, it is generally thought to have been the source of numerous stormy, minor-key works that also cropped up in the more abstract field of music.
During this period, Haydn composed several dark, turbulent minor-key symphonies that are credited as being “storm and stress” symphonies. His Symphony No. 44 in E Minor is often considered one of the finest among them. Haydn allegedly gave the work its subtitle, Trauer (Mourning), and scholar H.C. Robbins-Landon recalls the apocryphal tale that the composer wished to have its treasured slow movement played at his funeral. (If so, the request was duly ignored and Mozart’s Requiem was sung at a major memorial service held two weeks after the composer’s death in Vienna.)
In various ways, the E-Minor Symphony also blends symphonic form with traditions in music associated with the bygone Baroque era. Influences from Baroque music live on in the steady underlying pulse so characteristic of Haydn’s music and in the thematic economy and tight formal design of all four movements. For the most part, one or two thematic ideas dominate each movement, progressing to a halfway point, where they are further developed and then brought back in their original state.
The opening sonata form is energized by a power, leaping unison theme and much passagework involving running-scale patterns. A plaintive minuet carries the label “canon at the octave,” indicating that the bass line chases the melody, imitating its tune like a round. In the lovely ornamental slow movement the winds are mostly silent, entering mainly to bring the closing phrase of each section to a cadence. Thus the strings have free reign to spin out most of Haydn’s silken melody line. And the ravishing interlude created by this movement is abruptly ended by the Symphony’s urgent, intense finale, which largely concentrates on a single theme.
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48
Born May 7, 1840, in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Russia
Died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg
Duration: approximately 25 minutes
Composed: 1880
First Performance: October 30, 1881, in St. Petersburg
Orpheus Recording: Deutsche Grammophon Catalog # 4230602 (1990)
Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings was composed concurrently with the most unlikely of bedfellows: the 1812 Overture. Tchaikovsky wrote of the two works, “The overture will be very showy and noisy, but will have no artistic merit because I wrote it without warmth and without love. But the Serenade, on the contrary, I wrote from inner compulsion. This is a piece from the heart.” The Serenade is indeed one of the most introspective and sublime works from the composer’s output, and it owes much of its character to the influence of Mozart and other early idols. The title Serenade, the instrumentation, and the nature of the material (especially the first movement) all recall a simple, elegant Classicism.
The first movement’s chorale introduction is the most overtly “antique” feature of the piece, establishing a theme starting with the descending notes C-B-A. The Sonatina suggested by the movement title commences with a homophonic theme in C major, although it is the later secondary theme in G major that steals the spotlight with its scampering 16th notes. The movement concludes with a return to the initial chorale material. The following waltz is a delightful palette-cleanser after the austere chorale, with Tchaikovsky showing off that musical facet that confirms him one of the pre-eminent dance composers of all time. The Élégie returns to the “antique” aesthetic with another chorale introduction and parallel motion between the outer voices, although a heartbreaking melody is introduced that is more native to Tchaikovsky’s own Romantic style. The Finale offers yet again a slow introduction, this time cleverly arriving at a theme of C-B-A, transformed now into the seed of a rollicking “Russian” theme. A final coda quotes the initial chorale, driving home the thematic unity of the piece, and then concludes with a last look at the fast version of the theme.
Notes on the Rossini by Leonard Burkat.
Notes on the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky by Aaron Grad.
Notes on the Haydn by Carl Cunningham.