The Cleveland OrchestraFranz Welser-Möst, Artist Director
About the Music Last Round Variaciones Concertantes Symphony No. 1
The particular pieces that Franz Welser-Möst has chosen for this concert offer a variety of twists on expectations, juxtaposing new and old components within each piece and across the evening. The concert begins with something of a tango. Written by Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov, the opening work is performed with two string ensembles and begins our concert with a festive flare. Golijov created this piece a decade ago as a homage to and in celebration of the music of Astor Piazzolla. Golijov’s more recent rise to international fame as a composer — including his much-praised opera Ainadamar — makes this work seem especially poignant and interesting now.
This evening’s concert continues in an Argentinean vein, with a relatively new work from the second half of the 20th century, written by Alberto Ginastera. In this concerto, the composer utilizes a much older musical format, the concertante, to create a work not for just one soloist but with starring roles for instruments throughout the orchestra.
Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, which concludes this concert, was startlingly strange to audiences who heard its first performances over a century ago. Written for a very large orchestra, it features strong contrasts — loud and soft, small and large, a very familiar child’s melody turned melancholy, and sudden outbursts of emotions — before bursting forth to a joyously triumphant ending. Even for those familiar with Mahler’s later works, this first symphony’s power and newness feels fresh and invigorating today.
Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960)
Composed 1996; first performed in London in 1996.
Scoring: two string orchestras and double-bass.
Performance time: about 10 minutes
The composer has provided the following remarks and background about this work Astor Piazzola, the last great Tango composer, was at the peak of his creativity when a stroke killed him. He left us in 1992, in the words of the old tango, “without saying goodbye,” and that day the musical face of Buenos Aires was abruptly frozen. The creation of that face had started a hundred years earlier from the unlikely combination of African rhythms underlying gauchos’ couplets, sung in the style of Sicilian canzonettas over an accompanying Andalucian guitar. As the years passed, all converged towards the bandoneon, a small accordion-like instrument without keyboard that was invented in Germany in the 19th century to serve as a portable church organ and which, after finding its true home in the bordellos of the Buenos Aires slums in the 1920s, went back to Europe to conquer high society Paris in the 1930s. Since then, it has reigned as the essential instrument for any Tango ensemble.
Piazzolla’s bandoneon was able to condense all the symbols of tango. The eroticism of legs and torsos in the dance was reduced to the intricate patterns of his virtuoso fingers (a simple C-major scale in the bandoneon zigzags so much as to leave an inexperienced player’s fingers tangled). The melancholy of the singer’s voice was transposed to the breathing of the bandoneon’s continuous opening and closing.
I composed Last Round in 1996, prompted by Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman. They heard a sketch of the second movement, which I had written in 1991 after hearing the news of Piazzolla’s stroke, and encouraged me to finish it and write another movement to complement it. The title is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar, and the piece represents an imaginary chance for Piazzolla’s spirit to fight one more time (he used to get into fistfights throughout his life).
The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneon. The first movement represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh (it is actually a fantasy over the refrain of the song “My Beloved Buenos Aires” composed by the legendary Carlos Gardel in the 1930s). But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other, separated by the focal bass. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern. —Osvaldo Golijov
Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)
Composed 1953; first performed on June 2, 1953, in Buenos Aires under the direction of Igor Markevitch.
Scoring: 2 flutes (second doubling piccolo), oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, harp, and strings
Performance time: about 20 minutes.
Alberto Ginastera wrote prolifically in all major musical genres, including three operas as well as numerous orchestral, vocal, and chamber works. In doing so, he became one of the best-known South American composers of the 20th century. Like a number of other 20th-century composers, Ginastera drew on the folk music traditions of his native land — in this case, Argentina — to compose music that was international in outlook and modern in spirit. Yet this did not simply mean borrowing folk melodies and arranging them for orchestral instruments. Rather, Ginastera developed an individual style that freely (and selectively) incorporates elements of folk music into a classical context.
Ginastera’s Variaciones concertantes, created in 1953, has found an enduring place in the symphonic repertory due to its brilliant orchestration and its simple yet highly ingenious formal construction. The variation form allows considerable diversity and contrast, while the unity of the work is guaranteed by reliance on a single theme or melody. Ginastera combined that idea with the concerto principle, assigning each variation to a different solo instrument or instruments. Because no single “soloist” is the focus for the entire piece, he used the term concertante, which implies an alternation between symphonic passages with groups of solo instruments.
Variaciones concertantes opens with a sonority that has come to be called Ginastera’s “symbolic chord.” It is the sequence produced by the open strings of the guitar, an instrument of primary importance to almost all Spanish-speaking musicians. It provides a natural starting point for the music, and Ginastera used it as a kind of personal signature in a number of his works. In Variaciones concertantes, the “symbolic chord” is played by the harp right at the outset, before a solo cello joins in to play the main theme.
The sections that follow, all clearly identified in the score, include a brief “Interlude for Strings,” followed by nine variations. The first two — “Cheerful Variation” for flute and “Scherzo-Variation” for clarinet — are lively and rhythmically active; the “Dramatic Variation” for viola, in an extremely slow tempo, is an impassioned instrumental recitative. The “Canonic Variation” for oboe and bassoon is also in slow tempo, but it turns the main theme into an expressive duet between the two woodwind instruments. A “Rhythmic Variation” for trumpet and trombone follows, in which the tempo speeds up and the theme is treated with rhythmic intricacies of different kinds. The solo violin then plays a “Variation in Perpetual Motion,” which, true to its name, is a virtuoso showpiece through and through. In a slow tempo, the horn follows with a “Pastoral Variation.”
A short “Interlude” for winds — the counterpart of the earlier string interlude — leads to the reprise of the theme in its original form. This time, however, the double-bass replaces the cello as the melody’s instrument. (The “symbolic chord” in the harp remains unchanged.) The final variation is in the form of a rondo for orchestra, uniting the entire ensemble in a folk-like finale of lively orchestral colors and a high level of rhythmic intensity. —Peter Laki
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Composed 1885-89; first performed on November 20, 1889, in Budapest, conducted by Mahler.
Scoring (1906-07 revision): 4 flutes (third and fourth doubling piccolo), 4 oboes (third doubling english horn),
4 clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet and e-flat clarinet, fourth doubling e-flat clarinet), 3 bassoons (third
doubling contrabassoon), 7 horns (plus two more optional horns for the ending of the symphony), 4 trumpets,
3 trombones, tuba, 2 sets of timpani, percussion (triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam), harp, and strings.
Performance time: about 50 minutes.
During his lifetime the majority of Mahler’s fame and fortune came from his great skill as a conductor. Following a few short years of apprenticeship among the provincial opera houses of Europe, he quickly emerged as one of the foremost conductors of his time — and eventually became music director of the Vienna Opera and Vienna Philharmonic, and then chief conductor in New York at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
It took the world far longer to accept Mahler’s genius as a composer. Indeed, a number of his late works were not premiered until after his death — and it was well into the second half of the 20th century before his symphonies became standard fare at concerts throughout the world.
The First Symphony is a product of Mahler’s “wandering years” as a young composer. Like the hero of his first great song cycle, Songs of a Wayfarer, he was himself a “wayfarer” in the 1880s, moving from city to city and from conducting job to conducting job until finally, in 1888, he landed his first important post as director of the Royal Opera in Budapest at the age of 28.
Mahler’s outward success as a conductor, however, did not translate into understanding for his First Symphony, which was especially poorly received at its early performances. Audiences in Budapest (1889), Hamburg and Weimar (1893), and Vienna (1900) were equally bewildered by what they heard as total musical chaos and an unacceptable mixture of conflicting emotions and ideas. This may be surprising to us today, given the great popularity of Mahler’s music in our time, but 100 years ago Mahler’s departures from classical form were too great — or too unexpected — for his contemporaries to grasp hold of immediately.
At the first performance, this work was given under the title “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts” (with five movements grouped together into two halves). This title alluded to the existence of a literary or dramatic inspiration, but Mahler did not reveal the source. When the symphony was performed again in 1893, Mahler gave it a new title, “Titan,” after a novel by a German Romantic writer named Jean Paul (1763-1825). After 1896, however, he removed the title and arranged the movements as we know them today (eliminating one). And, in fact, the real “story” in this symphony is how far Mahler went in expanding conventional symphonic forms to produce a complex and monumental work.
The symphony’s first movement utilizes the basic melody of one of Mahler’s early songs, from his “Songs of a Wayfarer” group. This song, “Ging heut’ morgens übers Feld” (“I Walked This Morning Through the Field”), depicts a happy summer morning with flowers blooming and birds singing. From this, and other writings by Mahler about the symphony, we understand that the entire movement can be seen to describe the gradual awakening of spring. We hear the musical interval of a perfect fourth (Mahler called it “a sound of nature” in the score) — and everything grows out of this one interval, like a tree from a small seed. Even the call of the cuckoo bird, evoked by the clarinet, is a perfect fourth (even though real cuckoos sing an interval closer to a third).
The second movement is based on the Austrian country dance called the Ländler, and is one of many Mahlerian movements inspired by this type of dance. A simple tune, rather unassuming in itself, is played with great rhythmic energy, and is soon taken up by the full orchestra, with a large brass section comprising seven horns and four trumpets, and with a tempo marking “Wild.”
Mahler called the third movement by several different titles, including “À la pompes funèbres” (“In the Manner of a Funeral March”) and “Funeral March in Callot’s Manner.” The immediate inspiration came from a then-popular woodcut by Moritz Schwind called The Huntsman’s Funeral, in which the hunter is buried by the animals of the forest. The first audiences had much trouble with this movement’s somewhat odd structure and form, but they certainly recognized the popular “Frère Jacques” melody. The “alienation” of this familiar tune played here in the minor mode yields a spicy mixture of humor, tragedy, mystery, and irony.
This grotesque funeral march evolves into an openly parodistic section whose unabashedly schmaltzy themes, played by oboes and trumpets, are reminiscent of Eastern European Jewish klezmer folk music. The melodies of two more of Mahler’s Wayfarer songs (“By the Road Stands a Linden Tree” and “My Sweetheart’s Two Blue Eyes”) are juxtaposed against this material, creating an interesting atmosphere of contrast that is at times painfully nostalgic. A more subdued recapitulation of the “Frère Jacques” tune and the klezmer material ends this unusual movement.
The fourth movement finale, which follows the funeral march without a pause, is the longest and most complex movement in the symphony. Like the last movements of many earlier symphonies, it represents a progression from tragedy to triumph, but here the contrasts between the various emotions are exceptionally polarized. The fabric of this movement includes a lyrical second theme that — as in several of Mahler’s later symphonies — seems to introduce us to a completely different world. There are also exuberant climaxes followed by relapses into despair, plus numerous recurrences of materials from the first movement. Finally, the work ends in a radiant D-major coda proclaiming a final victory.
—program notes by Peter Laki
copyright © The Cleveland Orchestra
Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent writer and lecturer on classical music. He is a contributing writer to The Cleveland Orchestra’s program books.