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Schubert’s mysterious Unfinished Symphony begins the concert, and after intermission,  Natasha Paremski, fresh from her victorious performance at our 2019 Rachmaninoff Festival returns to Syracuse to share the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with you.

 

 

 


PROGRAM

SCHUBERT: Symphony, D.759, B minor (Unfinished)
TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 1

 


 

Natasha’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra can be pre-viewed below.

 

All programs and artists subject to change.

PROGRAM NOTES

Our final concert of the season offers two of the most beloved works in the
repertoire—although, strangely, neither has shown up on a Symphoria concert until now. We
open with the Symphony No. 8 in B Minor (“Unfinished”) by Franz Schubert (1797–1828).

Composed in 1822, it was lost for decades until the manuscript was discovered, well after
Schubert’s death, in the study of one of his friends. Endless attempts to explain why it was left
unfinished have perhaps distracted us from what we do know: composed two years before the
Beethoven Ninth, the “...

Our final concert of the season offers two of the most beloved works in the
repertoire—although, strangely, neither has shown up on a Symphoria concert until now. We
open with the Symphony No. 8 in B Minor (“Unfinished”) by Franz Schubert (1797–1828).

Composed in 1822, it was lost for decades until the manuscript was discovered, well after
Schubert’s death, in the study of one of his friends. Endless attempts to explain why it was left
unfinished have perhaps distracted us from what we do know: composed two years before the
Beethoven Ninth, the “Unfinished” is the first of the great unambiguously romantic symphonies;
and even in this two-movement form, it stands as a complete musical experience. It’s a dark
work in the then-unusual key of B Minor, with a lot of attention to bass lines, a wide dynamic
range (arresting use of the ppp marking), and strikingly prominent and imaginative use of the
trombones (rarely deployed in symphonies up to that point). Certainly, it’s not hard to hear
Schubert’s health issues (he’d just been diagnosed with syphilis) in this score. For all its
shadows, though, the “Unfinished” remains, as always with Schubert, breathtaking in its melodic
beauty.

If there’s any other nineteenth-century composer who can match Schubert for the ability
to spin out seductive melodic beauty, it’s Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)—and almost
since it was written, his Piano Concerto No. 1 has been a favorite with listeners. In fact, if you
ask a regular concert-goer to hum the first tune from a romantic piano concerto that comes to
mind, chances are it will be the one that launches this work. The appearance of such a
consummate hit in Moscow in 1875 was something of a jolt, though, since it seems to have come
out of nowhere. At the time, there was virtually no significant tradition of Russian piano music
on which to build—Tchaikovsky’s predecessors, even Glinka and Balakirev, had hardly made a
dent in the international repertoire. (After Tchaikovsky, however, the situation changed, and his
heirs—Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Medtner, Prokofiev, and others—came to dominate the piano
repertoire from the 1890s onward.)

I said the concerto has been popular almost since it was written. In fact, like the Schubert
“Unfinished,” it might well have disappeared. When he finished composing the work,
Tchaikovsky went to the famed pianist Nikolai Rubinstein for his reactions, only to be told (as
the composer later described the conversation) that it was “worthless and unplayable; passages
were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself
was bad, vulgar.” Tchaikovsky was notoriously self-critical, perfectly capable of destroying a
score under critical pressure (in fact, he’d destroyed his opera Voyevode just a few years earlier).
This time, however, he held his ground and sought the support of pianist-conductor Hans von
Bülow, who took the First on his American tour to great acclaim. And it’s been heard regularly
ever since. (For the record, Rubinstein eventually saw the error of his ways, and took up the
concerto; after Rubinstein’s death, Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Trio in his honor, titling it “To
the Memory of a Great Artist.”)

Why has the concerto caught on so well? In the words of tonight’s pianist, Natasha
Paremski, “It’s a sprawling Russian novel of a journey—everything you’d ever want from a
musical experience.” “Everything” is the right term: starting with that famous opening theme
(which, oddly, never returns after the introduction), it’s got a wealth of melodic invention (some
based on Russian folk music, and one passage in the second movement taken from a French
chanson), rhythmic energy, and harmonic imagination, all bound up in ear-sizzling virtuosity. It
even includes, Natasha insists, “One of the first appearances of a jazz style. In the second
movement, in the middle section, there’s a short piano cadenza right before the chanson. To me
it is pure modern New York jazz, with the kind of rhythm, texture, and harmony you hear in
pianists like Oscar Peterson. It’s years ahead of Gershwin” (whose two Rhapsodies, by the way,
Natasha will be playing in what we hope will be our first Masterworks concert in Crouse Hinds
Hall next January). Given the concerto’s richness, I ask, does she have a favorite moment?
Natasha doesn’t hesitate: “Every bit. It’s a perfect piece.”

And yet, you can play even a perfect piece too often, and Natasha certainly feels that she
“overplayed” this concerto, a central part of her repertoire since she started learning it at the age
of thirteen. “I got too close to it. Some of the ingenuity was escaping me, the freshness. That has
a tendency to happen with some things.” So she dropped it for a few years to give herself “a
much needed break.” This concert, luckily for us, marks her return to the piece. “It’s nice to step
away and come back after a hard reset, where you feel like it’s a brand new piece—where you,
as a performer, are surprised by the melodic turns and the harmonic resolutions. The people who
have been my greatest influence have always said, ‘You have to play as if you’re making it up.
You have to be surprised by what you’re doing.’ That’s when the audience picks up on that
surprise as well.” Which brings us back to the season’s motto: even in a work at the center of the
repertoire, Expect the Unexpected.

Peter J. Rabinowitz
Have any comments or questions? Please write to me at prabinowitz@ExperienceSymphoria.org


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