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Violinist Rachel Barton Pine leads the orchestra in the second half for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  In a special appearance, Ms. Pine’s daughter Silvia Pine will also join to perform Vivaldi’s Double Violin Concerto in A minor.  The show opens with Missy Mazzoli’s atmospheric Orbiting Spheres and Brahms’s Symphony No. 3, the only remaining Brahms symphony yet to be conducted by music director Lawrence Loh.

 

 


PROGRAM

MAZZOLI: Orbiting Spheres
BRAHMS: Symphony No.3 in F major, Op. 90
VIVALDI: Four Seasons, Op. 8 No. 1-4
VIVALDI: Concerto for 2 Violins in A minor, RV 522


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PROGRAM NOTES

At our last concert, we celebrated the Danube River. Tonight, it’s the Rhine that runs through the center of our program.

            In 1850, Robert Schumann, inspired by his move to Dusseldorf (and, even more, by visiting the Cologne Cathedral), wrote his Third Symphony (“The Rhenish”) to celebrate the Rhine and its environs. Years later, his protégé Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) took a trip to a spa on the Rhine—and was inspired to compose his Symphony No. 3 in F (1883). At first, this might seem like little more than coincidence. But ...

At our last concert, we celebrated the Danube River. Tonight, it’s the Rhine that runs through the center of our program.

            In 1850, Robert Schumann, inspired by his move to Dusseldorf (and, even more, by visiting the Cologne Cathedral), wrote his Third Symphony (“The Rhenish”) to celebrate the Rhine and its environs. Years later, his protégé Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) took a trip to a spa on the Rhine—and was inspired to compose his Symphony No. 3 in F (1883). At first, this might seem like little more than coincidence. But Brahms’s decision to interweave the two symphonies by lifting his first theme from “The Rhenish” points to a profound connection.

It’s actually no surprise that the two symphonies are linked. Brahms, after all, was still deeply entangled with the Schumann family. Robert had been Brahms’s mentor—and Brahms had long been in love with Robert’s composer-pianist wife Clara. True, Brahms’s relationship with Clara was apparently never consummated; but their attachment was passionate and profound, on both the personal and artistic levels. And even well after Robert died, he was a continuing presence in what remained a triangular relationship: Brahms and Clara devoted endless time to editing Robert’s music and making sure that it remained in the public eye.

It’s no surprise, either, that while both symphonies are arguably fueled by love for Clara, their tones are radically different. Robert’s Third is upbeat, bright, ebullient; Brahms’s is dark and anguished from the opening, which, as conductor Larry Loh puts it, “has a turbulence and rhythmic angst that carry all the way into the finale.” More than any of Brahms’s other symphonies, the Third gives a sense that we’re witnessing some deep autobiographical secrets.

The Third stands out from the other three Brahms symphonies in further ways, too. It’s the most compact of the four. And it’s the only one that ends quietly—without the despair of the Tchaikovsky Sixth, certainly, but without the heroic uplift that marks the other three. In fact, all the movements of the Third end quietly. Then, too, there’s far more thematic integration here than there is in its siblings, a stronger sense of a larger organic whole. But while, in the end, it is the least extroverted, it’s only in the third movement—which was taken up for songs by Frank Sinatra and Carlos Santana/Dave Matthews—that the music relaxes. And even here, despite what Larry calls its “predictable lilt,” the mood is slightly unsettled, with “the angst primarily in the harmonic and melodic leaning.”

            The Four Seasons, a set of four three-movement violin concertos composed around 1715 by Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), is radically different. It’s outgoing where the Brahms is inward; it’s constantly bursting with new musical ideas where the Brahms concentrates on developing a limited store of material; it’s ornate and virtuosic where the Brahms is austere. Most important, though, the Vivaldi is a pre-eminent example of program music (instrumental music that tells a story or describes something visual), a musical technique that Brahms studiously avoided.

Thus, whatever the psychological insights of Brahms’s Rhine journey, it doesn’t reflect the natural beauties of the river. The Four Seasons, in contrast, is saturated with natural descriptions. Indeed, while it’s not the first piece of program music in the standard repertoire, it’s hard to think of anything in the canon that is more vividly graphic, from the chirping birds that open “Spring “and the barking dog in the next movement, on to the shivering winds of “Winter.”  It’s so copious in its musical imitation that, for its first publication in 1725, Vivaldi added a sonnet to each concerto, guiding performers and listeners with a verbal report of the events that the music describes,

You can, of course, enjoy the music without knowing precisely what it represents. But tonight’s soloist Rachel Barton Pine (who will also be conducting this half of the concert), believes that “telling the audience the stories of the music right before they hear it—not in a pre-concert talk or in written program notes, but right there before each Season—increases their enjoyment of the listening experience, because then they can truly follow along to every detail. It’s just that much more fun. Even listeners who are super-familiar with the music don’t necessarily remember all of those details exactly.”

And what can we expect in terms of performance style? Rachel is perhaps best known as a champion of 19th and 20th-century music, both the most famous repertoire and less familiar works by composers from underrepresented groups, so we might expect an old-fashioned romantic reading. But she describes herself as a musical equivalent of a “foodie,” and her interests are vast, ranging from Medieval music to contemporary classical and heavy metal. And when it comes to Baroque music, her historical understanding is deep. “I’ve been playing baroque violin since I was 14. I think at the time, in the 90s, I was the only teenager in the US actually playing a baroque violin.”

That long association, however, does not lead to dogma or rigidity: she’s happy, for instance, to play The Four Seasons with a small group of players, one on a part, or with a full symphonic string section. Still, “The main thing for me is to bring it as close as possible to the historically informed aesthetic.” And why do that? “It’s not,” she says, “about being somehow authentic or historic for its own sake. That’s an empty argument. It’s about bringing the music most fully to life, which for me means getting as close to that aesthetic as possible.”

What does this involve in practice? Much of that has to do with the special sound quality  of Baroque music. For instance, Baroque bows provide a “a whole different palette of colors and articulation. These days a lot of modern players own baroque bows, and I’ll be bringing a dozen of my own for other players to use if they wish—as well as wooden mutes which give a very different sound than the rubber and plastic mutes currently popular.  I’m also going to have the violins across from each other on the stage, to accommodate these wonderful antiphonal moments.” In addition, there will be a theorbo (a long-necked member of the lute family) in the continuo section. Expect to hear Vivaldi with a kaleidoscopic range of timbres.

As a kind of an encore, we’ll be treated to Vivaldi’s Concerto in A Minor for Two Violins (c. 1711), in which Rachel will be joined by her 12-year-old daughter Sylvia Pine. Rachel points out, with a smile, that that this contributes yet a different aspect of “historical performance”—since (at least now), Sylvia is more or less the same age as the students at the Pio Ospedale della Pietà orphanage for whom Vivaldi wrote so much of his music.

If anything, our opener, Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) by Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980), is even more kaleidoscopic than The Four Seasons—and even further from the hermetic style championed by the Brahms Third. Mahler is famous for his claim that “A symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything.” And it’s clear that Mazzoli—an increasingly prolific composer who recently finished a stint as the Chicago Symphony’s Mead Composer-in-Residence—shares this eclectic spirit, even though her music sounds nothing like Mahler’s.
As I said when I reviewed the first recording of the piece: Even without knowing the title of her work, even without knowing that it’s intended (as the composer puts it) to be “music in the shape of a solar system,” even without knowing that in the course of its development “the ensemble [is transformed] into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space,” you’d recognize that this is all-embracing music with an extensive reach.

While Sinfonia is not entirely calm, much of it is contemplative, as its interweaving ideas, swirling and echoing, move back and forth across vast distances. And like many of Mazzoli’s scores, it reveals an astonishing timbral imagination, as she calls on harmonicas, spring coil, boombox, synthesizer, and lion’s roar (a drumhead or similar surface—you can make one with a washtub—which vibrates when a cord is pulled through it). It’s a perfect introduction to this varied concert—as well as an appetizer for our next Masterworks Concert, February 17, which will feature another musical response to our solar system, Holst’s The Planets.

Peter J. Rabinowitz

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


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