B E E T H O V E N S E V E N

Saturday, January 20, 2018 • 7:30 p.m. • Mark C. Smith Concert Hall • Von Braun Center

Elini Vähälä, violinGregory Vajda, Music Director and Conductor • Huntsville Symphony Orchestra

J O H A N N E S B R A H M S ( 1 8 3 3 – 1 8 9 7 )

VA R I AT I O N S O N A T H E M E B Y H AY D N , op. 56a

A L B A N B E R G ( 1 8 8 5 – 1 9 3 5 )

V I O L I N C O N C E R T O I. Andante—AllegrettoII. Allegro—Adagio

Elina Vähälä, violin

I N T E R M I S S I O N

L U D W I G VA N B E E T H O V E N ( 1 7 7 0 – 1 8 2 7 )S Y M P H O N Y N O . 7 I N A M A J O R , op. 92

I. Poco sostenuto—Vivace II. Allegretto III. Presto—Assai meno prestoIV. Allegro con brio

C O N C E R T S P O N S O R Regions Bank

G U E S T A R T I S T S P O N S O R Jodi Stephens

56 • HSO SEASON 63 • FALL

Saturday, January 20, 2018 • 7:30 p.m. • Mark C. Smith Concert Hall • Von Braun Center

Elini Vähälä, violinGregory Vajda, Music Director and Conductor • Huntsville Symphony Orchestra

P R O G R A M N O T E SB R A H M SV A R I A T I O N S O N A T H E M E B Y H A Y D N , op. 56a

In 1873, the forty-year-old Johannes Brahms was a well-known pianist and choral conductor and an established composer of chamber music and piano pieces, but he had to date produced only a small amount of music for the orchestra. He was still prone to endless waffling on tiny details of orchestration in works such as the great German Requiem. Though few composers equal Brahms’ mastery of elements of craft such as harmony, polyphony, and development, Brahms lacked a certain confidence in writing for the orchestra and had not been in any hurry to remedy the matter.

His close friend and colleague, Joseph Joachim, a violin virtuoso with long practical experience in the orchestra, had laughed out loud at the scoring of Brahms’ D minor Piano Concerto before proceeding to suggest revisions to the manuscript. At last determined to sharpen his skills, Brahms devised a self-improvement project: he would create a set of variations for two pianos while simultaneously crafting an orchestral version of the same piece.

For his subject he chose the “St. Antoni Chorale,” a quaint, measured melody from a dusty folio of music for military band. The tune was at the time attributed to Joseph Haydn. Brahms seems to have doubted Haydn’s authorship; while modern scholarship confirms that skepticism, the title stuck and continues in print today. Surely the combination of “Haydn” and Brahms did not hurt sheet music sales in Vienna. The prospects of “Variations on a Theme Not by Haydn” seem less certain.

Brahms excelled at composing variations and took special delight in the genre. He had the benefit of examples by Mozart, Beethoven, and others to draw from and was also inspired by Baroque grounds and passacaglias. Here he presents the theme much as he found it, scored for wind band with light supporting pizzicati from the low strings. No violins or violas are heard until the first variation. Afterward, the chief technique in this piece is to use the underlying bass and harmonic structure to support a series of ideas constructed in collage from bits and pieces of the original material.

This approach carries us through a variety of moods, from the gypsy flair of the second variation to the restrained nobility of the fourth, the sparkling Italian humor of the fifth, and the lyrical tranquility of the seventh. An extended finale employs layers of canon and other polyphonic devices to build suspense over a stolid bass, until at last the theme returns in majestic, emphatic declamation. [ca. 19’]

B E R GV I O L I N C O N C E R T O

One of the charges often leveled at the music of the Second Viennese School is that it is too cerebral and alienating to audiences. The use of “artificial” tone rows, it is sometimes said, creates an interesting but unrelatable musical language. Schoenberg, Webern, and Alban Berg, the triad at the nucleus of dodecaphony, were acutely aware of these criticisms. Berg, in particular, sought to integrate serialist methods with other musical currents washing over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. His most ambitious efforts to that end were his operas Wozzeck and Lulu, the latter remaining unfinished at his death in part because he had been working in earnest on the Violin Concerto, his last completed work and among his most celebrated compositions.

Berg was born in Vienna in 1885. He came to the study of music relatively late, beginning around age fifteen. His gifts in composition were remarkable enough to attract the attention of Schoenberg, who mentored him between 1906 and 1911. Berg’s Piano Sonata, op. 1 (1908), is considered one of the most auspicious debut works in the history of music, combining fine control of detail with a unified large-scale structure in an original idiom. Wozzeck, informed by Berg’s wartime experience in the Austro-Hungarian military, brought him substantial success in the 1920s—but he was distrusted by the Nazis as a star pupil of the much-maligned Jew Schoenberg, making life increasingly difficult for him. Berg would not live to see the full extent of Hitler’s madness; the composer died suddenly in 1935 from an infected insect bite on his back.

The Violin Concerto was a lucrative commission from the Russian-American violinist Louis Krasner, a rising star. “Think of what it would mean,” he said in approaching the composer early in 1935, “if a new Alban Berg concerto should succeed in demolishing the antagonism of the ‘ceberal, no emotion’ cliché!” His interest piqued, Berg was soon busy with drafts and was able to complete the work in a few months’ time. He did not wholly subscribe to Webern’s view that modern music had “given up tonality just as a ripe apple falls from the tree,” and seems to have considered serialism as a fruitful tool rather than a complete aesthetic. Krasner had probably sensed this attitude after hearing Wozzeck, and must have shared the sentiment. Furthermore, Berg was moved by the recent death from polio of the teenage daughter of Alma Mahler. The Violin Concerto bears the cryptic dedication, “to the memory of an angel,” and its unusual structure is said to convey the passage from life to death.

The tone row around which the music is based contains all twelve chromatic pitches, but its order is not random. It outlines several major and minor triads and part of a whole-tone scale, implying an angular tonality. The work consists of two movements, each divided into two parts: the first begins with an Andante in sonata-allegro form, and proceeds to a dance-like Allegretto in which a country folk tune is recounted in Mahlerian fashion; in the second movement, a fiery cadenza dissolves into a set of variations on a tranquil, chorale-like melody.

Barcelona hosted the premiere in 1936, with Krasner as soloist. Webern was invited to conduct but declined for unknown reasons. Over eighty years later, the Violin Concerto remains Berg’s most-performed concert work, admired for its artful blend of serialist theory and late-Romantic gesture, and the distinctive, dynamic voice given to the soloist. [ca. 26’]

HSO SEASON 63 • FALL • 57

G U E S T A R T I S T

E L I N A VÄ H Ä L ÄV I O L I N

• Appearances with Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, and at the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies

• Tours throughout the UK, Germany, Korea, China, North and South America• Faculty, Hochschüle für Musik, Karlsruhe; founding member, Finnish Cultural Foundation

Violin Academy

B E E T H O V E NS Y M P H O N Y N O . 7 I N A M A J O R , op. 92

Wagner spoke of Beethoven’s Seventh in glowing terms, calling it “the apotheosis of the dance.” It is certainly the most overtly celebratory of the nine. While the Third may have begun life as a tribute to Napoleon, the Seventh was a commemoration of his defeat. It was written for a University of Vienna concert to benefit wounded veterans, where it was premiered on December 8, 1813. Beethoven conducted energetically, though by that time his deafness was nearly total. In the orchestra were many of Vienna’s musical luminaries, including Ludwig Spohr, Antonio Salieri, and the guitar virtuoso Giuliani on cello.

The Poco sostenuto introduction, a feature borrowed from Haydn and present also in Beethoven’s First, Second, and Fourth symphonies, is lengthy and elaborate but not without purpose. It contains the seeds of several elements which take on greater meaning as the symphony unfolds. Interplay between tonal centers separated by the interval of a third is introduced straightaway, a defining trait of the exuberant scherzo movement to come. The woodwinds tease the characteristic rhythm which will drive the famous Allegretto and is also the pulse of the “St. Antoni Chorale” heard in this evening’s Brahms—in the language of scansion, it is a dactyl (say, “BEE-tho-ven”) plus a spondee (“Mo-zart”).

The swinging, dizzying vigor of the first movement is challenged by an unstable inverted minor chord from the winds as the second movement opens. This blast of cold air announces a somber cortege built from simple, persuasive materials, increasingly elaborated through filigree and harmonic contrast. Melody in the conventional sense is present only in the barest of outlines. This brooding Allegretto has come to symbolize Beethoven’s personality in the minds of many listeners, if only in caricature, and the piece is heard often in film and television to underscore slow-burning dramatic tension.

Fecundity and mirth return in the third movement, a charming, jubilant, and expansive scherzo which gives us the composer at his very sunniest, and contains marvelous outdoorsy writing for horns and woodwinds. The finale, boisterous and bold, features a principal theme recalling country fiddle-tricks and may have been inspired by an Irish song arranged by Beethoven some years earlier; it is not widely known that Beethoven produced dozens of parlor arrangements of folk songs from the British Isles, but the influence of that music is clearly felt here.

Beethoven rarely said kind things about his own major works without some qualification, but he considered the Symphony No. 7 to be one of his most successful compositions. While some contemporaries found its relentless rhythms and wild moods disorderly, it is a prototype of the philosophy declared by Mahler nearly a century later: “A symphony should contain the whole world.” [ca. 40’]

Pictured: Regions Bank City President, Ron Poteat, and HSO Music Director and Conductor, Gregory Vajda

H S O S E A S O N 6 2 | S P R I N G | 7 3

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58 • HSO SEASON 63 • FALL