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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
October 19-20-21, 2018
93rd Season / Subscription Concert No.2
Michael Allsen
The eminent conductor Tania Miller leads this
Madison Symphony Orchestra program, which opens with a work
whose premiere she directed in 2014, Home, by her Canadian
countryman Michael Oesterle. This is a brisk work of shifting
moods reflecting the immigrant experience, particularly the
composer’s own experiences as an immigrant to Canada. Also
making his debut with the orchestra is cellist Zuill
Bailey, who plays the profound Elgar Cello Concerto. We
close with Tchaikovsky’s powerful fifth symphony, a deeply
emotional work dominated by the forbidding theme of Fate.
Michael Oesterle (b. 1968)
Home
This work was composed
in 2014, as the final movement of Oesterle’s symphony New
World. It was premiered
in May of that year by the Victoria Symphony, directed by
Tania Miller. Duration 22:00.
Composer Michael Oesterle was born in Ulm,
Germany, but immigrated to Canada in 1982. He studied music at the
University of British Columbia and Princeton University, and
since 1996 has lived in Montréal. Oesterle’s works have been
commissioned and performed throughout Canada and the world.
He has wide-ranging interests as a composer and performer
(electric guitar), and was a founding member of the
Montréal-based Ensemble KORE, devoted to performance of
contemporary music. As a composer, has produced both concert
works for orchestra and chamber ensembles, as well as
collaborations with dancers and choreographers,
video/installation artists, animators, and painters.
In 2012-14 Oesterle served as
composer-in-residence with the Victoria Symphony in British
Columbia. His major project was the composition of a
four-movement symphony titled New World. According to
the composer, it was partly autobiographical: “The piece is an
homage to the great geographical ebb and flow of humanity we
know as the immigrant experience. I wrote it through the
filter of my personal impressions as an immigrant, and with
the realization of a subject that is humbling in its breadth.”
The first movement, Crossings (premiered
September 2012) suggested the anxiety, confusion, and
curiosity of a young immigrant child. Of Hope and Refuge (May 2013) was
based upon both a teenager’s struggle to fit in, and the hopes
and dreams parents in a new country invest in their children.
A slow movement, The Golden Door (January, 2014), is
more wistful and sad—the experience of many older immigrants.
The final movement, Home, is the longest and
most complex of the four, reflects the composer’s own
complicated feelings about the immigrant experience. The
piece is filled with shifts of mood, and there are also
flashes of anger—as he was composing the movement at home in
Montréal, the separatist Parti
Québécois, then in power in Québec, had introduced a
“charter of values” widely criticized as anti-immigrant.
Oesterle was relieved when the party was voted out of power
in April 2014. The composer provides the following
description of the piece:
“Home begins
with an almost mechanical atmosphere, an atmosphere of
potential, of work, like a methodical search through an attic
or basement: the kind of assembly and sorting that comes with
a major shift in life, a reconsideration of personal space and
time. The music overflows into a series of moods, like someone
reflecting on a box of memorabilia, postcards, photos, old
maps. The moods shift rapidly from sentimental to somber, even
angry at times, but always return to the search that might
answer the question of home, of identity. Finally, there is a
humorous resignation, a happy dance to an old record, leading
to a grand sense of being overwhelmed by the inevitability of
time and the realization that there is no answer to the
question of home, no return: but that the beauty of the
question is, in itself, transcendent.”
Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Concerto for Cello and
Orchestra in E minor, Op.85
Elgar’s cello concerto
was composed during the summer of 1919, and was first
performed on October 27, 1919 in London. The composer
conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at the premiere, and
Felix Salmond was the soloist. It has been performed three
times previously by the Madison Symphony Orchestra, with
Shauna Rolston (1994), Lynn Harrell (2000), and Alban
Gerhardt (2008). Duration 30:00.
The period at the
end of the first world war was a time of pain and creativity
for Englishman Edward Elgar. The war years were especially
hard for him, as Elgar owed much of his success as a composer
to German conductors and German audiences—a politically
disastrous admission to make—and many of his close friends,
both English and German, were lost in the war. The final blow
came in late 1919 and early 1920, when his beloved wife Alice
grew ill and died. His activities as a composer had always
been interspersed with bouts of depression, but in 1918 and
1919 he had what was to be his final great burst of creative
energy, producing several chamber works and his fine Cello Concerto. These
wartime works turn away from the Edwardian grandiosity of the
Enigma Variations,
his symphonies and the Pomp
and Circumstance marches, toward a more introspective
and profoundly sad character.
The Cello Concerto—his
last large orchestral work—was completed in August of 1919 and
was dedicated to his friends Sidney and Frances Colvin,
longtime friends of the Elgars. In June, he wrote to Sidney
Colvin: “...I am frantically busy writing & have nearly
completed a Concerto for Violoncello—a real large work & I
think good &
alive... Would Frances & you allow me to put on the title
page simply ‘to Sidney and Frances Colvin’? Your friendship is
such a real & precious thing to me that I should like to
leave some record of it; I cannot say whether the music is
worthy of you both (or either!), but our three names will be
in print together even if the music is dull & of the kind
which perisheth.”
The concerto is
sad but never dull, and has hardly perished: it has remained
one of the standard solo works for cello. Though the style of
the music is clearly Romantic, Elgar chose a highly individual
four-movement form. The opening movement, set very loosely in
sonata form, begins with a brief passage for solo cello (Andante). Elgar
introduces and develops two broad themes in the body this
movement (Moderato):
a legato phrase heard first in the strings, and slightly
livelier theme introduced by the clarinet. After a free
recapitulation, Elgar launches directly into the second
movement. This scherzo (Allegro
molto) begins with a slow, introspective passage, but
gradually builds up steam and quickens tempo, to introduce a
quick-footed, and slightly sinister main theme in the cello.
The third movement (Adagio)
is the heart of this concerto. Elgar lays out a long,
thoroughly Romantic melody in the solo cello, and gently
develops it over the course of the movement. As in the first
movement, he ends in a tentative way, in this case a brief
solo recitative, leading into the next, and final movement.
The finale (Allegro ma
non troppo) is set in a free rondo form, but before
things really get rolling, there is a brief cello cadenza that
recalls the mood of the very beginning of the concerto. Though
the rondo is traditionally a light form, there is an
underlying mood of pessimism in the main theme and the
contrasting sections, particularly in a slow passage for the
cello. Near the end, Elgar brings back reminiscences from the
first and third movement. The concerto comes to an abrupt
close with a final statement of the rondo theme.
Peter Ilyich
Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Symphony No.5 in E
minor, Op.64
Tchaikovsky’s fifth
symphony was composed in 1888 at the composer’s summer
retreat in Frolovskoe. He conducted the first performance in
St. Petersburg on November 17, 1888. The symphony has been
performed on seven previous subscription concerts, beginning
in 1936. Our most recent performance was in 2009. Duration
47:00.
“Should not a
symphony reveal those wordless urges that hide in the heart,
which ask so earnestly for expression?” - Tchaikovsky
Over ten years passed between the time
Tchaikovsky completed his fourth symphony and the composition
of his fifth—a decade of deep self-doubt and insecurity.
During much of this period, Tchaikovsky was bedeviled by guilt
over the ending of his brief and disastrous marriage, and by
upheaval in almost every area of his professional and private
life. This turmoil is the very fabric of the fourth symphony
and the opera Eugene
Onegin, both of which were completed in 1878, but these
works seem to have exhausted Tchaikovsky’s creative resources.
Much of the next ten years was spent in seclusion or
travelling throughout Europe. Although he continued to compose
during this time, few of the works he produced had the energy
of his earlier music. It was not until 1885 and afterwards,
with the enthusiastic admiration of the Czar, increased
popularity of his works in Russia, and an enormously
successful tour of Europe in 1887 that Tchaikovsky began to
recover from this emotional crisis.
In May of 1888, Tchaikovsky wrote to his
brother with fears he had “written himself out,” but added a
hopeful note that he was beginning work on a new symphony. A
month later, he wrote to his confidante Nadejda von Meck, and made an almost
apologetic reference to the work. The premiere, which he
conducted in November, was relatively successful, but his
continuing self-doubt is shown in another letter to Madame von
Meck:
“... I have come
to the conclusion that [the fifth symphony] is a failure.
There is something repellent, something superfluous, patchy
and insecure, which the public instinctively recognizes. It
was obvious to me that the ovations I received were prompted
more by my earlier work, and that the Symphony itself did not
really please the audience. This realization brings a sharp
twinge of dissatisfaction with myself. Am I really played out,
as they say? Can I merely repeat and ring the changes on my
earlier idiom? Last night, I looked through our symphony [the
fourth]. What a difference! How immeasurably superior it is!
It is very sad!”
It was not until the following year, after
a superb performance of the new symphony in Hamburg, and amid
glowing reports of its success elsewhere, that Tchaikovsky
himself began to express some satisfaction with the work.
Although the fifth symphony does not have an explicit program,
it is apparent from Tchaikovsky’s writings that both this work
and the fourth symphony have Fate as their central idea.
However, the musical realization of this idea is very
different in the two works. In the fourth symphony, the motive
associated with Fate is resoundingly announced by the brasses
and plays an adversarial role throughout the work—it is as if,
in 1878, that Fate was something against which Tchaikovsky
felt a need to struggle. However, his relationship with Fate
in the fifth symphony is more resigned, even relaxed.
Tchaikovsky biographer John Warrack has suggested that, in
both works, the figure of Fate “... is referring to his
central emotional problem, his homosexuality.” It is
relatively certain that, by 1888, Tchaikovsky had come to
terms with it. Although he still felt guilt pangs, his
acceptance was accompanied by a deepening religious conviction
and renewed confidence. A clear sense of this cautious
self-assurance comes through in the symphony’s triumphant
finale.
The symphony opens with a slow introduction
(Andante), quietly
stating the motto that provides the dramatic background of the
entire work—the motive that Tchaikovsky identified as “Fate.”
The clarinet and bassoon introduce the main idea of the
movement’s body (Allegro
con anima), an E minor theme that Tchaikovsky may have
derived from a Polish folk song. Strings introduce a
contrasting group of ideas, which are much more lyrical in
nature. The movement is worked out rather conventionally in
sonata form, but the music is expressive throughout, creating
moods of yearning, sadness, and emotional turmoil.
The second movement (Andante cantabile, con
alcuna licenza) is based upon one of Tchaikovsky’s most
beautiful and expressive melodies, sung by solo horn above a
light background of strings. There are gentle answers by
clarinet and oboe, and a change of mood. This central section
builds gradually towards a climax: a statement of the Fate
motive by the brass. He returns once more to the lyrical mood
of the opening, but at the end, the mood is shattered again by
the return of Fate.
Tchaikovsky’s waltz (Valse: Allegro moderato)
is set in a three-part form—two principal sections enclosing a
contrasting section or trio. In this movement, the main theme
was inspiired by a Florentine street melody he had heard some
years earlier. The trio takes on a lighter character,
dominated by a quick 16th-note melody passed among the strings
and woodwinds. After a reworked version of the main idea,
Tchaikovsky adds a coda, which includes an ominous statement
of the Fate motive by the clarinet and bassoon. Here, it is
fitted into the triple meter of the waltz, but it seems no
less forbidding.
The introduction to the last movement (Andante maestoso)
presents the motto in a major key, now transformed from
something frightening into a triumphant march. The body of the
movement (Allegro vivace)
returns to the E minor of the beginning of the symphony. The
first group of themes are generally quite forceful, while the
second group, dominated by solo woodwinds, seem more hesitant.
The Fate motive rounds off the exposition, and pervades this
movement as whole, finally set in an extended coda. At the
end, there is a surprise—the main Allegro theme of the
first movement returns in the closing bars, transformed, like
the Fate motive, into something exultant and optimistic. This
ending appeals for a programmatic explanation: the dark
feelings of the beginning (guilt? shame? self-doubt?), have
now been assimilated or overcome; the music has come full
circle and the spirit is victorious.
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