Program Notes for October 2 Concert
by Michael Allsen

This Longview Symphony Orchestra season begins in the grandest manner, with Handel’s very last orchestral work, the Music for the Royal Fireworks. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great American composer Samuel Barber, we then play one of Barber’s most familiar works, the moving Adagio for Strings. The first half closes with an early work by Bartók, his rhythmically intense Romanian Folk Dances. Our featured soloist is the (very!) young violinist Shannon Lee, who was born in Canada, but grew up not far from here, in Plano, Texas. At this program she plays one of the great Romantic masterworks for her instrument, the Brahms Violin Concerto.

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Music for the Royal Fireworks, HWV 351

Handel composed this work for an outdoor event on April 27, 1749. The edition heard here is by Anthony Baines and Charles Mackerras and was last performed by the Longview Symphony in 1989. Duration 21 minutes.

In 1748, England and France signed the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, ending what came to be known as the War of Austrian Succession. There is no need here to go into the complex causes of this conflict, but after eight years of this costly and eventually pointless war, which involved most of the nations of Europe and stretched around the world, any treaty was generally welcome—even one that agreed mostly to return to the prewar status. Both the treaty and King George II’s motives in concluding it were viewed with some suspicion in England, though, and six months later the English royal party sought to prop up the king by staging the largest fireworks display ever seen in England. This event to celebrate the peace and the king was centered on a huge pavilion erected in London’s Green Park to house the fireworks. Though several thousand people attended, this propaganda event backfired badly: the show took place in pouring rain, and at one point, a huge bas-relief of George II fell off the pavilion, and half of the structure collapsed and caught fire.

Though it didn’t do much to bolster the king’s image, we do have some wonderful music written for the event. By 1749 Handel was the Grand Old Man of English Music and was a natural choice to compose music for such an important royal event. George II was fairly specific in his instructions, asking that the music be scored for “naught but martial instruments” with “no fidles.” The original performance was for a huge wind band: 24 oboes, 12 bassoons, 9 trumpets, 9 horns, contrabassoon, serpent, 3 sets of timpani, and several field drums (and possibly as many as 40 string players, despite the king’s prohibition of “fidles”). The English public loved Handel, and excitement about the new music was so high that some 12,000 people paid to attend a dress rehearsal of the Music for the Royal Fireworks a few days in advance of the event. Clearly such a gargantuan band could not be used for many other performances, and when Handel reused the Fireworks music a few months later for an indoor performance benefitting London’s Foundling Hospital, he scaled back to a much smaller group of wind players and strings.

The suite begins with an elegant and pompous French-style Ouverture—an entry-piece that opens with a stately Adagio in which trumpets and horns are pitted against one another in an appropriately “martial” manner. The Allegro body of the movement has much more lively contrapuntal writing, with a wonderfully active bass line that must have sounded magnificent on 12 bassoons, contrabassoon, and serpent! The Bourrée that follows is a bright French dance with much lighter scoring. The movement titled La Paix (Peace) is a relaxed pastoral 12/8 siciliana with particularly lovely writing for the horns. La Réjouissance (rejoicing) is much more martial in character, with trumpets and drums returning in full force, with equally forceful replies from the horns. Handel closes with a pair of graceful Menuets, the first a reserved minor-key dance that begins with strings alone, and the second a much grander ceremonial affair for the full ensemble.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Adagio for Strings, Op.11

Barber composed this work in 1936 as the second movement of his String Quartet and rearranged it for string orchestra in 1937. The first performance was given in New York City on November 5, 1938. It was last played by the Longview Symphony in 2005. Duration 8 minutes.

In 1937, when the venerable conductor Arturo Toscanini was organizing the group that was to become the NBC Symphony Orchestra, he expressed an interest in programming new music by American composers. His colleague Artur Rodzinski suggested the young Samuel Barber. Toscanini contacted Barber and Barber promptly sent two new works: his First Essay for Orchestra, and an arrangement for string orchestra of the Adagio movement of his String Quartet. Barber waited through the orchestra’s first season for a reply and when the scores were finally returned without comment, he began dejectedly to look for a new orchestra to play them. In the summer of 1938, Barber was in Italy with his partner Gian-Carlo Menotti. Menotti suggested a visit to the Toscaninis at their summer villa, but Barber refused to go. When Toscanini asked why Barber had not come, Menotti offered a weak excuse about Barber being ill. Toscanini replied: “Oh, he’s perfectly well; he’s just angry with me, but he has no reason to be. I’m going to do both of his pieces.” (It seems that Toscanini had already memorized the scores—he did not ask for them again until the day before the concert!) Both works were successful at their November 1938 premiere, and Toscanini recorded both soon afterwards with the NBC Orchestra.

The Adagio for Strings has come to have an association with tragedy—particularly with great public events of death and mourning—that Barber never really intended. It was played directly after the radio announcement of President Roosevelt’s death in 1945, and similarly after the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Most recently it was played in Poland last April to mark the death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and several leading political and military figures in a plane crash. (In my case, I can well remember performing in an orchestra concert a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when the Adagio was played at the beginning—to devastating emotional effect—as a tribute to the victims.) Because of these associations, it has also been used in film and television to underscore tragic moments—most notably in Platoon and The Elephant Man, but also in many other scores. It has also appeared in pop music, as in the introduction to rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs’ 1997 tribute to a murdered friend, I’ll Be Missing You. Shortly after Barber’s death, composer Ned Rorem said of the Adagio: “If Barber, twenty-five years old when it was completed, later reached higher, he never reached deeper into the heart.”

It is the stark simplicity of this music that makes it so effective. A simple diatonic melody builds gradually from its quiet beginning through thickening texture, canonic imitation and increasing dissonance to an emotional climax as the violins reach their highest register. After this peak, there is a brief return to the opening texture and a quiet conclusion that dies away to nothingness.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
Romanian Folk Dances, BB 76

Bartók composed his Romanian Folk Dances in 1915 as a work for solo piano. He later arranged this brief suite for violin and piano, and in 1917 produced the version for small “salon” orchestra heard here, which was last played in Longview in 1999. Duration 6 minutes.

Bartók spent much of his early career as a folksong collector, traveling the back roads of Romania, Transylvania, and his native Hungary with primitive recording equipment and music manuscript paper, often in collaboration with his friend and colleague Zoltán Kodály. Bartók and Kodály both published ethnomusicological articles and books based on their research, and in both cases the music they collected had a profound influence on their own compositions. In 1904, Bartók wrote enthusiastically to his sister: “Now I have a new plan: to collect the finest Hungarian folksongs and to raise them, [by] adding the best possible piano accompaniments, to the level of art-song.” In the years before and during the First World War, he published dozens of songs and piano pieces—the latter mostly intended for piano students—based on folk material.

The concentrated little suite known as the Romanian Folk Dances was published in 1915, but he had collected most of the tunes upon which it was based in 1910 and 1912, during visits to Romanian communities living in Eastern Hungary. In the hyper-nationalistic period at the beginning of the Great War, Bartók and Kodály were actually drafted to continue their collecting as a patriotic duty, collecting songs from Hungarian soldiers. Bartók’s interests were broader, however, and he continued to publish and arrange music from across eastern Europe, sometimes raising the ire of Hungarian nationalists. When he published the Romanian Folk Dances he was bitterly attacked by critics in Budapest for “abandoning the music of Hungary.” These sour notes aside, this set of vivacious musical miniatures—in all of its various versions—remains one of Bartók’s most popular early works.

This is a suite of seven short dances, some of them lasting well under a minute. Joc cu bâtǎ (Stick dance) is a strident Transylvanian dance tune with strongly accented rhythms. Brâul (Sash dance) is a quirky dance begun by the viola and picked up by the entire ensemble. Pe loc means “In one spot”—an intricate stamping dance done in place: here carried by piccolo above a mysterious drone, before coming to an inconclusive end. Buciumeana (Horn dance) is a more lyrical Transylvanian melody that passes from a solo line to the entire string orchestra. Poargǎ româneascǎ (Romanian polka) is a vigorous tune that accompanies a traditional children’s game—a much more rhythmically intricate affair than the more familiar German and Polish polkas. This leads seamlessly into the final two dances, a pair of tiny movements titled Mǎrunțel (Fast dance). In the last, the music moves continually faster until a seemingly exhausted collapse.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77

Brahms composed this, his only violin concerto, in the summer of 1878 and it was first performed at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig on January 1, 1879 with the composer conducting. Joseph Joachim, to whom it is dedicated, played the solo part at the premiere. The Longview Symphony performed it in 1995 with soloist Michelle Makarski. Duration 40 minutes.

“One enjoys getting hot fingers playing it, because it’s worth it!”
– Joseph Joachim

In the summer of 1878, Brahms retired to the town of Pörtschach in southern Austria to work on his Violin Concerto. (Pörtschach apparently provided a fine creative environment for the composer—he had completed his second symphony there during the previous summer.) The concerto was dedicated to his friend and colleague, violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), and the concerto was, in a limited sense, a collaboration between composer and soloist. Brahms and Joachim first met in 1853, beginning a lifelong friendship and musical association. When he had completed the first three movements in August of 1878, he sent a copy of the solo violin part to Joachim with a letter:

“After copying it, I am not sure what you can do with a mere solo part. Of course, I would like you to make corrections; I had intended to leave you no excuse whatsoever—neither that the music is too good, nor that it isn’t worth the trouble. Now, I would be satisfied if you write a letter to me or perhaps mark the music: difficult, awkward, impossible, etc. I have just started the fourth movement, so you can overrule the awkward passages at once.”

Joachim promptly replied with a marked copy of the part and a letter of his own:

“It is a great, sincere joy for me that you are writing a violin concerto (even one in four movements!). I immediately studied what you sent to me, and you will note a few remarks and notes for changes, but without the score, one cannot appreciate it. Most of it can be executed and some parts have a quite original violinistic flair. I cannot say whether everything can be played with ease in a hot concert hall until I have tried out the whole.”

Brahms incorporated several of Joachim’s suggestions into the final version of the score, and rather than providing a cadenza for the first movement, he used one written by Joachim.

The Violin Concerto stands as one of the largest and most challenging works in the solo violin repertoire. While his projected fourth movement was not included in the final form of the concerto (Brahms successfully used a four-movement design three years later in his second piano concerto.), the concerto’s traditional three-movement design nevertheless has symphonic proportions. Indeed, there are several close ties between the Violin Concerto and the Symphony No. 2, written a year earlier (and in the same key). Brahms also makes several subtle references to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, which is also in D major. The concerto, written with the talents of Joachim in mind, presents formidable challenges for the soloist. One violinist, Bronislaw Huberman, referred to the work—only half- jokingly—as “...a concerto for violin against orchestra—and the violin wins!”

The orchestral introduction to the first movement (Allegro non troppo) presents nearly all of the movement’s thematic material in a single dramatic phrase. Musical material is disengaged from this phrase—like single strands from a larger thread—as the movement continues. The violin’s opening music presents a fiery variant of a melody fully introduced later in the movement above the orchestra’s presentation of the lyrical main theme. Throughout the movement, Brahms restlessly develops his themes, even in the short coda that follows the cadenza.

The second movement (Adagio) presents a theme and several variations, a form that interested Brahms throughout his life. The theme is presented by the oboe and then picked up by the soloist in variations that exhaustively develop the theme and its component parts. There is an abrupt contrast between the reserved F major close of this movement and the spirited opening of the rondo-form finale in D major. The main theme of the third movement (Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace) is presented immediately by the violin: a Hungarian-flavored melody spiced with double stops. A second section, presenting a stormy dotted figure, drifts gradually back to a restatement of the main melody. A more lyrical central episode, which refers subtly to the opening melody, gives way to a restatement of the second section. The movement closes with a long and dramatic coda, in which both soloist and orchestra develop the main theme.

Program notes ©2010 by J. Michael Allsen