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PROGRAM

Performed on April 22 , 2017 at Course Hinds Theater
Lawrence Loh conducting
Hector Berlioz
Béatrice and Bénédict: Overture

Performed on September 27, 2014 at Course Hinds Theater
Lawrence Loh, conducting
Michael Torke
Javelin

 

Performed on September 27, 2014 at Course Hinds Theater
Stefan Jackiw, violin; Lawrence Loh conducting
Serge Prokofiev
Violin Concerto No.2, op.63, G minor

 

Performed on September 27, 2014 at Course Hinds Theater
Lianne Coble, soprano; Barbara Rearick, mezzo-soprano; Noah Baetge, tenor; Jeremy Galyon, bass; Lawrence Loh conducting
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No.5, op.67, C minor

PROGRAM NOTES

Our first work tonight serves a double function, launching the 2014-15 season and welcoming Lawrence Loh as Music Director Designate of Symphoria. And what better piece for those purposes than Javelin? This eight-minute dazzler was composed in 1994 by Michael Torke (b. 1961) both to open the 1996 Olympics and to honor the 50th anniversary of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. As Loh puts it, it’s a “celebratory” piece with “lots of intricate rhythms” that “shows off all the sections of the orchestra.” It’s also a tremendously upbeat work. Its sparkling chatter explodes like champagne bubbles; and if its big tune ...

Our first work tonight serves a double function, launching the 2014-15 season and welcoming Lawrence Loh as Music Director Designate of Symphoria. And what better piece for those purposes than Javelin? This eight-minute dazzler was composed in 1994 by Michael Torke (b. 1961) both to open the 1996 Olympics and to honor the 50th anniversary of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. As Loh puts it, it’s a “celebratory” piece with “lots of intricate rhythms” that “shows off all the sections of the orchestra.” It’s also a tremendously upbeat work. Its sparkling chatter explodes like champagne bubbles; and if its big tune reminds you of Holst’s “Jupiter” filtered through ET—well, Torke readily admits the John Williams influence.

Javelin may serve a third function as well. Throughout the season, we’ll be highlighting “connections” of various sorts—and beginning the concert with Javelin and ending it with the Symphony No. 5 by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) points out some musical continuity over nearly two centuries. At first glance, perhaps, the two pieces seem radically different. The Torke is hip, up-to-date, with a strong dose of American minimalism and pop; the Beethoven is perhaps the most canonical monument of European classical music. Then, too, Torke avoids the kind of Big Statement we often associate with the Fifth. But both rely on what Loh calls “continuous propulsion.” More specifically, both make their points through the sophisticated way their short rhythmic ideas bounce around the orchestra. Both require absolute alertness from the orchestra—and total control from the conductor.

Thus, while the Fifth might seem like safe repertoire, it actually puts the players in what Loh calls a “vulnerable” position. Because of that “continuous propulsion” and that mosaic of rhythmic ideas, “everyone has to be on the same wavelength.” Any faltering will, as in Javelin, be immediately evident. So will any wavering of concentration. Although the Beethoven is in four movements (the third and fourth of which are connected), the composer, Loh points out, “gives us the tools to make a huge arc from the beginning of first movement to end of finale.” Only by sustaining the arc can it generate “maximum power.”

The Fifth is no easier for a conductor. You can play it “a million different ways,” says Loh, who points out that the challenges emerge at the very beginning with the fermatas at the end of the first phrases, the familiar da-da-da-DUUHs. “How do you handle them? Do you make a break after the fermata? Do you have orchestra hold it? How many bows do they take?” So if there are a million ways to play the Fifth, what can we expect tonight? No spoilers here—one advantage of live performances over recordings is that you never know what will happen. Given Loh’s emphasis on “continuous propulsion” and “maximum power,” though, it’s unlikely that tonight’s Fifth will lumber under the weight of the work’s tradition of monumentality.

The main work between the Torke and the Beethoven is the Violin Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, op. 63, by Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), which could hardly be more different. Composed in 1935, more or less contemporaneously with the composer’s Romeo and Juliet, it’s often considered one of Prokofiev’s gentler, more lyrical works, sharing the bitter-sweetness of the ballet. But it was written during a period of relentless travel, and our soloist Stefan Jackiw sees it as “very dark and menacing, even nihilistic. It’s in the standard three-movement form, but the outer movements make the performer and the listeners feel like they’re losing their sense of grounding and stability.” Examples? You might expect the concerto to begin with an orchestral statement—this one begins with the violin alone. More important, the opening material throws us off kilter rhythmically. Although the movement is written in 4/4 time, Jackiw points out that the “the building block of the entire movement”—the opening figure—“is in a group of five beats rather than three or four. And since there’s nothing else happening in the first measures—it’s just the solo violin playing this unaccompanied theme—there’s nothing to give us any frame of reference, to let us know where the strong beat actually is.” As a result, the concerto starts out with a “sense of instability and discomfort.” Jackiw doesn’t deny the “moments of incredible beauty and lyricism on the surface of the first movement” but notes that “if you listen to the underlying harmonies provided by the orchestra, there’s always a tinge of acidity or sourness, as if someone’s twisting the knife under the cover.” The movement ends with the opening material, decorated with orchestral pizzicatos “that sound almost like a guillotine falling. There’s something deadly about the idea that we went through this entire dramatic movement and ended up exactly where we started. All in vain—none of it had actually mattered.”

The finale creates a similar sense of dislocation. Jackiw compares it to Ravel’s La Valse (1920). “La Valse comments on the decadence and moral bankruptcy of that period in Europe. And it decays and degenerates into this crazy, out-of-control, perverse semblance of a waltz. Prokofiev’s third movement is a bit like that. Most of it has a kind of three-beat pattern reminiscent of a waltz, but it degenerates into a coda that alternates 5/8 and 7/8. These are rhythmically unstable and uncomfortable meters: it’s sort of like dancing around the stability of that waltz figure, but always short-changing us or adding an extra little bit. So again, we get the idea of something spiraling out of control and going into chaos.”

The central movement, more soothing, contains what Jackiw considers some of “the most beautiful, songful music ever written for the solo violin. It’s one of my favorite things to play. It’s so beautiful, at times so pure and innocent, which is all the more heartbreaking, considering the context, surrounded on either side by darkness. But even in the second movement there are periods where the lyricism disappears and you have stabs of an icy dagger, reminding you that everything is not okay.”

Loh sees the middle movement of Prokofiev as a lament—and the concerto is preceded tonight by another lament written nearly two centuries earlier: the Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). This lament is more immediate and more personal for Symphoria and its audience, since it’s being played in memory of violist Chrissy Albright, who died suddenly in August. An appreciation of Chrissy and her contribution to our community can be found on page

Peter J. Rabinowitz
prabinowitz@ExperienceSymphoria.org


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