St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Concert by the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra (USA)


Soloist: Benjamin Hochman (piano)
Conductor: Leon Botstein


PROGRAMME:
Bohuslav Martinů
Memorial to Lidice (Památník Lidicím) for orchestra, H. 296

Béla Bartók
Piano Concerto No. 3 in E Major, BB 127

Aaron Copland
Symphony No. 3


Founded in 1860, Bard is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences. The campus, a fusion of two historic riverfront estates, is located in the Hudson Valley. The College offers the bachelor of arts degree with concentrations in more than 40 academic programs in four divisions: Arts, Languages and Literature, Science, Mathematics and Computing, Social Studies and a five-year B.A./B.S. degree in economics and finance. Through a five-year program with The Bard College Conservatory of Music, students earn a B.Music degree and a B.A. in a field other than music.
The Bard College Conservatory of Music, founded in 2005 as a distinctive five-year, double-degree program within Bard College, has a world-class faculty that includes soprano Dawn Upshaw, pianist Peter Serkin, and violinists Weigang Li and Ida Kavafian, to name just a few. Students are recruited from all over the world, including China, Canada, Malaysia, Korea, Australia, Ukraine, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Germany, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico and the United States.
The Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, which in the past four years has performed twice at Lincoln Center in New York, at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, and in Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjing, Guangzhou and Wuhan during a three-week concert tour of Asia, consists of 90 gifted students.
Following the Bard Conservatory Orchestra’s performance at Sanders Theatre in May 2011, critic David Griesinger wrote: “From the first notes it was obvious that these young players understood what was to come… This was easily the most moving performance of this amazing piece [Shostakovich Symphony No. 5] that I have heard. Special credit goes, of course, to Botstein, but he had the help of some magnificent playing…”
For additional information about the Conservatory and its graduate programs, please visit www.bard.edu/conservatory.

 

Tonight’s program is made up of works written in the United States during, or immediately after, World War II. We shall hear works by two immigrant composers from Central Europe and one native New Yorker. The three had little contact with one another yet were connected through a common patron, Serge Koussevitzky, the Russian-born conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who commissioned major works from all of them. Bartók, Martinů and Copland (in their sixties, fifties, and forties, respectively) all entered a new phase of their careers in those years, each turning, in his own way, towards a pure, refined style based on classical models while at the same time expressing themselves in an intensely personal manner.

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) composed Memorial to Lidice, H. 296 in 1943. Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s right-hand man in occupied Czechoslovakia, was assassinated on May 27, 1942. As a retaliation, Hitler ordered the execution of more than a thousand men and women in Prague and Brno, and had the entire village of Lidice, near Prague, wiped out: the entire population was shot or deported to concentration camps. Every single building in the village was destroyed. Historian Derek Sayer has written, citing a Nazi report: “Perhaps 20,000 man-hours were put in by around 100 workers between 11 June and 3 July to obliterate all traces of the settlement.”
News of the Lidice massacre reached Bohuslav Martinů in the United States where he had emigrated from France after the outbreak of World War II. A year later, Martinů became one of 17 composers commissioned by the League of Composers to “give musical expression to some particular incident in the history of this war.”
Understandably, he chose to commemorate a tragedy that had taken place not far from where he was born. Some of the thematic material in this short orchestral elegy was symbolic of Martinů’s homeland or the war. At the opening we hear a characteristic figure from the St. Wenceslas chorale, an icon of Czech national identity. One of the later passages comes from an earlier patriotic work by Martinů, the Field Mass, written to honor the volunteers of the Czechoslovak Army fighting the Nazi invasion. And towards the end of the piece, Martinů quotes the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (a motif famously used by the BBC in its wartime broadcasts.)

Béla Bartók (1881–1945) wrote his first two piano concertos for himself and played the solo parts of both works at the premieres. The third concerto, composed when he was already gravely ill, was intended for his second wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory Bartók, and we know he thought about this concerto as a vehicle that would provide Ditta with some income after his death.
We can find no trace of such gloomy thoughts in the concerto itself. The work’s tone is lyrical and graceful throughout, the structure is of Mozartian clarity, and the whole composition is characterized by a lightness of touch that is rare in Bartók.
The Third Concerto (1945) opens with a peaceful theme played by the pianist with both hands in unison against a rocking accompaniment in the strings. Bartók adheres to traditional sonata form with a “scherzando” (playful) second theme, an expansive though relatively short development section and a regular recapitulation.
The second movement Adagio religioso is Bartók’s personal response to the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, the “Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to Deity in the Lydian Mode.” A quiet chorale melody, played by the piano, is surrounded by solemn interludes on the strings. Then suddenly the tempo becomes faster and eerie noises begin to appear. This intermezzo ends as suddenly as it began; the chorale returns in the woodwind, interwoven with a new piano part that sounds almost like a two-part invention by J. S. Bach, with a few brief cadenzas interspersed.
The cheerful main theme of the finale is derived from Hungarian folk music. The movement is cast in rondo form, with fugal episodes that again pay homage to Bach. At the time of Bartók’s death, the final 17 bars of this movement were left unorchestrated; this accounts for little more than 10 seconds of music. Bartók’s friend and compatriot, composer Tibor Serly, completed the orchestration.
Following her husband’s death, Ditta was in no condition to play the premiere of the concerto; this honor went to another Bartók student from Hungary, György Sándor. Ditta, who returned to Hungary in 1946, did not perform the concerto until many years later.

Not too many major 20th-century composers remained faithful to the traditional four-movement symphony. Some thought that the genre had outlived its usefulness, others turned to it only occasionally, and only a handful continued to regard it as a viable means of self-expression. Nevertheless, two countries provided particularly fertile soil for symphonies: the Soviet Union, where Myaskovsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev worked; and the United States, where Roy Harris, Walter Piston and William Schuman became leading figures in one of the most vigorous symphonic schools anywhere in the world.
Coping with the complex demands of symphonic form was the ultimate challenge for an American composer in the 1940s. Several major orchestras and conductors above all, the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky expressed interest in such works.
Aaron Copland (1900–1990), widely recognized as the foremost American composer of his time, could not remain indifferent to this trend. In his ballets and shorter instrumental works, Copland had found a personal style that he now decided to harness for the symphonic medium. Copland’s first two symphonies, the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924) and the Short Symphony (1933), were brilliant early works. Yet, while they showed remarkable maturity and innovation, they were not necessarily the best candidates for the pantheon of American symphonies, if only because of their avant-garde tendencies. The Third Symphony (1944–1946) was destined to become the Great American Symphony.
The originality of the Third lies, to a significant degree, in Copland’s personal approach to symphonic form. In most classical symphonies, transitions play an important role, both connecting and separating the various thematic areas. Copland almost entirely did away with such musical “cement” and derived practically every measure in his 40-minute symphony from a small number of motifs.
The symphony begins with a motif made up of fourths and fifths played by violins, clarinets, and solo flute. Through repeats, and changes of orchestration and rhythm, an original musical form is created that, as Copland pointed out, has nothing to do with traditional sonata form. Instead, it is a variation of a more modern design that we might call a “rise-and-fall” form, with both tempo and dynamics gradually intensifying and then becoming more subdued.
While scherzo-like in many ways, the second movement is not a typical scherzo. Scherzos do not usually have introductions. This one, however, starts with a fanfare, and only gradually does an actual scherzo theme grow out of this fanfare. A gentle trio section follows, whose songlike theme suggests the inspiration of folk music. The trio melody is followed by an episode in which the orchestral piano takes center stage. The short recapitulation of the scherzo’s main section includes a triple-forte restatement of the soft and gentle quasi-folk tune of the trio.
The theme of third movement, Andantino quasi allegretto, undergoes some exciting transformations as its tempo increases and its character changes from tender to energetic. The end of the movement is again soft and lyrical.
The finale, the longest movement in the symphony, is based on one of Copland’s best-known short compositions, Fanfare for the Common Man, incorporated here in its entirety. Upon hearing this familiar fanfare, we realize that its perfect fourths and fifths are the same intervals we have been hearing all along; thus, it becomes clear, retrospectively, that the entire symphony is based on the same material as the fanfare. The form of the movement remotely resembles a rondo, with the fanfare theme consistently recurring (albeit in different orchestrations and on different dynamic levels). Between the appearances of the fanfare theme, we hear a succession of lively dance tunes full of jazzy syncopations, with occasional dramatic interruptions. One particularly arresting moment occurs about two-thirds through the movement, when a violent fortissimo dissonance brings the music to a momentary halt, followed by the sound of a single piccolo. The symphony ends, in the composer’s own words, “on a massive restatement of the opening phrase with which the entire work began.”
One of the earliest champions of Copland’s Third Symphony was Leonard Bernstein who, however, felt that the ending needed to be shortened, and proceeded to delete ten measures from the concluding section. Copland was not happy at first but went along with the change anyway, and the cut version has become the standard form in which the symphony has been performed over the years. Our performances have restored those ten measures so we may hear the symphony the way Copland first wrote it.
Peter Laki, Bard College


BCCOM


BCB


Smolny

Age category 6+

Any use or copying of site materials, design elements or layout is forbidden without the permission of the rightholder.
user_nameExit