CELEBRATIONS — Jan­u­ary 28, 2012

Danzón No. 2
Arturo Márquez
b.Álamos,Sonora,Mexico/ Decem­ber 20, 1950

Márquez stud­ied in his native coun­try, then in Paris and Cal­i­for­nia. He has received numer­ous grants and awards from the Mex­i­can and French gov­ern­ments, and his music has been per­formed and recorded world­wide by a vari­ety of cham­ber ensem­bles, sym­phony orches­tras and soloists. To date he has com­posed four exam­ples of the danzón, a ball­room dance that orig­i­nated in Cubaand remains pop­u­lar in Mex­ico. The sul­try, excit­ing and vividly col­or­ful No. 2, which dates from 1994, was com­mis­sioned by the National Autonomous Uni­ver­sity of Mex­ico. It was pre­miered in Mex­ico City by the Orches­tra Filar­mon­ica de la UNAM, under the direc­tion of Fran­cisco Savin. Márquez was inspired to com­pose it after vis­it­ing a ball­room inVer­acruz. It has proven so pop­u­lar that it has come to be known as “Mexico’s sec­ond national anthem.”

 

Vio­lin Con­certo in A Minor, Op. 82
Alexan­der Glazunov
b.St. Petersburg,Russia/ August 10, 1865; d.Paris,France/ March 21, 1936

Glazunov is an impor­tant tran­si­tional fig­ure in Russ­ian music, link­ing the folk-based style of the late nine­teenth cen­tury with the more cos­mopoli­tan schools of the twen­ti­eth. He was the stu­dent and pro­tégé of Niko­lay Rimsky‑Korsakov, one of the most promi­nent com­posers who took Russ­ian folk music as the root and pat­tern for con­cert works and operas. In his even­tual posi­tion as direc­tor of the St. Peters­burg Con­ser­va­tory, he taught many sig­nif­i­cant Russ­ian musi­cians, Sergey Prokofiev and Dmitry Shostakovich among them. He found some of his pupils’ music bewil­der­ing, but the sup­port he gave them rarely wavered.

Dis­tressed by the changes brought about by the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion, Glazunov stuck it out for a decade before leav­in­gRus­si­ain 1928. Set­tling inParis, he toured the world as a con­duc­tor and con­tin­ued to com­pose, but with­out his pre­vi­ous energy and flair. Home­sick­ness and a feel­ing of being left behind by musi­cal devel­op­ments gave his latter-day works a tired, col­or­less quality.

His ear­lier works are his best, includ­ing the melo­di­ous, gor­geously scored bal­lets Ray­monda and The Sea­sons. Another is this con­certo, his most fre­quently per­formed piece. He com­posed it in 1904. It is ded­i­cated to, and was pre­miered by, the great Hun­gar­ian soloist Leopold Auer, the teacher of Heifetz, Mil­stein, Elman, and other out­stand­ing violinists.

Fol­low­ing a for­mal struc­ture insti­gated by Franz Liszt, whom Glazunov admired deeply, the con­certo is cast in a sin­gle move­ment. The first two sec­tions share an atmos­phere of restrained melan­choly, tem­pered by sweet­ness and a warm degree of expres­sive­ness. A tax­ing solo cadenza acts as a bridge to a fes­tive finale filled with vir­tu­oso fire­works and sparkling orchestration.

 

Sym­phony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64
Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky
b. Kamsko-Votkinsk,Russia/ May 7, 1840; d.St. Petersburg,Russia/ Novem­ber 6, 1893

Ten years passed between the cre­ation of Tchaikovsky’s fourth and fifth sym­phonies. He com­pleted No. 5 in August 1888, and con­ducted the first per­for­mance him­self inSt. Peters­bur­gon Novem­ber 17, 1888. It earned lit­tle favor on that occa­sion – per­haps due to his mid­dling gifts as a con­duc­tor – but it quickly found great success.

As he had done with Sym­phony No. 4, he based No. 5 on a recur­ring musi­cal theme that rep­re­sented his out­look on life at that time. By then, his atti­tude to the cruel con­cept of fate that he felt gov­erned his life had soft­ened some­what, pos­si­bly due to a rebirth in reli­gious feel­ing. He now referred to it by the less intim­i­dat­ing name “providence.”

Reflect­ing this shift, the Fifth Symphony’s “prov­i­dence” theme is much less aggres­sive that its harsh, brass-dominated coun­ter­part in Sym­phony No. 4. It appears in the open­ing bars, intoned qui­etly and soberly by the clar­inets. Where the Fourth Symphony’s “fate” theme is heard only in the first and last move­ments, and remains unchanged from one appear­ance to the next, the Fifth’s “prov­i­dence” theme plays a role in each of the four move­ments. Its char­ac­ter also evolves to reflect the emo­tional pro­gres­sion of the music.

After the intro­duc­tion, the open­ing move­ment con­trasts rest­less striv­ing, rep­re­sented in the first theme, a march-like vari­ant of the motto, with a sec­ond sub­ject whose heart­felt yearn­ing is expressed with max­i­mum elo­quence by the strings. The sec­ond move­ment can only be described as a pas­sion­ate love-idyll. Its sweep­ing, swelling rap­tures are twice inter­rupted, with a newly devel­oped sense of force­ful­ness, by the “prov­i­dence” theme. The sec­ond occur­rence makes a par­tic­u­larly dev­as­tat­ing impact.

Next comes a typ­i­cally ele­gant Tchaikovsky waltz. He based it on a pop­u­lar song he heard being sung by a boy in the street dur­ing a visit toFlorence,Italy. The sole blem­ish on its courtly façade is pro­vided by a brief, almost casual appear­ance of “prov­i­dence,” just before the end. Thus soft­ened, the once-gloomy theme sounds ripe for transfiguration.

It stands proudly on dis­play in the slow-tempo intro­duc­tion to the finale, where it is heard in a major key for the first time. The finale proper emerges swiftly out of the final bars of this pas­sage. It is one of Tchaikovsky’s most joy­ous and ener­getic sym­phonic move­ments, strongly col­ored with the hearty fla­vors and danc­ing rhythms of Russ­ian folk music. Brass fan­fares and a thun­der­ous tim­pani roll her­ald a pause for breath (no applause, please!). Its trans­for­ma­tion com­plete, “prov­i­dence” passes by in a sturdy pro­ces­sional, before a whirl­wind coda con­cludes the symphony.

Pro­gram Notes byDon Ander­son© 2011