17INCONCERT16 OCTOBER 2016

NASHVILLE SYMPHONY VASSILY SINAISKY, conductorINON BARNATAN, piano

SAMUEL BARBER Essay No. 2, Op. 17

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Concerto No. 24 for Piano and Orchestra in C minor, K. 491

I. AllegroII. LarghettoIII. Allegretto

Inon Barnatan, piano

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PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKYManfred Symphony, Op. 58

Lento lugubre — Moderato con moto — AndanteVivace con spiritoPastorale: Andante con motoAllegro con fuoco

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Mozart & Tchaikovsky

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SAMUEL BARBER

Composed: 1942First performance: April 16, 1942, with Bruno Walter conducting the New York Philharmonic First Nashville Symphony performance: November 29 & 30, 1965, with music director Willis PageEstimated length: c. 10 minutes

Essay No. 2, Op. 17

Born on March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania; died on January 23, 1981, in New York City

The Adagio for Strings has become so well-known that it tends to eclipse everything

else Samuel Barber composed. But this great American composer was no one-hit wonder. Barber’s days as a prodigy at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia foreshadowed a brilliant career, and he soon made good on that promise. In his 20s, he produced a series of compositions that established him internationally — including the First String Quartet, whose slow movement he reworked for string orchestra in 1938 in response to Arturo Toscanini’s request for new pieces to perform with his fledgling NBC Symphony Radio Orchestra. In this form, as the Adagio for Strings, Barber’s brand of American Romanticism attracted enormous attention when Toscanini premiered it on his legendary broadcast of November 5, 1938.

That broadcast also included Barber’s First Essay for Orchestra (Op. 12), which explored a new single-movement format for a concert piece. As Barber’s stock rose, so did the request for new works, and in 1942 he returned to this formal experiment to fulfill a commission from Bruno Walter marking the centennial of the New York Philharmonic. The result was the Second Essay for Orchestra, in which Barber drew on musical ideas he had put aside while crafting his Violin Concerto in 1939 — a work featured in last

month’s Nashville Symphony programs. The title “Essay for Orchestra” implies an

analogy with the literary prose essay and its tightly argued sequence of ideas and reflections. Yet despite the affinity for literature that Barber showed in several other works, the Second Essay has a self-contained, abstract musical structure. The only discernible extrinsic influence, remarked Barber, is the fact that the piece “was written in wartime.” (He would soon go on to serve in the Army Air Corps.)

TONIGHT’S CONCERTAT A GLANCE

SAMUEL BARBER Essay No. 2

• A prodigy who composed his first piece at age 7, Samuel Barber is best known for his Adagio for Strings, which was performed by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Radio Orchestra in a national broadcast on Nov. 8, 1938, catapulting Barber to widespread fame.

• Essay No. 2 was a follow-up to Barber’s first Essay, also featured on that celebrated NBC broadcast. Written in the early years of World War II, the second Essay was commissioned by conductor Bruno Walter in honor of the New York Philharmonic’s centennial and received its premiere at Carnegie Hall.

• Though the piece has no underlying narrative, Barber acknowledged that the presence of the war influenced his writing. The same year that his Essay No. 2 premiered, he would go on to serve as a corporal in the Army Air Corps. Though written in a single movement, the work consists of distinct but connected sections, each conveying a different mood. In this way, it resembles a condensed symphony.

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY Manfred Symphony

• Written between his Fourth and Fifth symphonies, Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony is based on Lord Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred, about a tortured nobleman living in the Alps. Byron wrote the poem after fleeing to Switzerland following a scandal. Nearly seven decades later, composer Mily Balakirev suggested that Tchaikovsky write a work based on the poem. Initially uninterested, the younger composer changed his mind after vacationing in the Swiss Alps.

• Tchaikovsky became consumed by composing the Manfred Symphony, yielding a work of great drama and imagination. “Never in my life have I tried so hard and become so weary from my work,” he wrote.

• Later, however, the composer rejected the piece, writing, “This is a repulsive work, and I hate it, except for the first movement…. With my publisher’s consent, I intend shortly to destroy the three remaining movements…and then turn this long-winded symphony into a symphonic poem.” Fortunately, that never happened, and the Manfred Symphony as Tchaikovsky originally wrote it builds to a stunning climax, with a finale of tremendous power.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Piano Concerto No. 24

• Like Barber, Mozart was a prodigy, displaying his talents first on piano at age 5, and then later on violin. He would, of course, go on to fame as a composer, in part through the more than 20 piano concertos he composed as a showcase for his talents at the keyboard.

• Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 is unique in that it was just one of two he composed in a minor key — in this case, C minor. He wrote the work in 1786, around the same time he was composing Le nozze di Figaro, and it is believed that the concerto premiered shortly before that hugely successful opera opened at Vienna’s Burgtheater.

• Music historians frequently view this concerto as an influence on Beethoven, in part because the music reveals the kind of depth and passion typical of the Romantic style that would emerge in the 19th century. The story goes that Beethoven once said of Mozart’s music that he’d “never be able to do anything like that” — and the power of this particular work seems evident in Beethoven’s decision to write both his Third Piano Concerto and his celebrated Fifth Symphony in the key of C minor.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Barber’s unabashedly lyrical style set him at odds with the modernist developments that many of his peers regarded as the proper way to compose. Yet the Second Essay displays a structural concision and economic use of thematic material that the most sober-minded modernist might begrudgingly admire. Within its brief span, Barber achieves a musical metamorphosis of a few basic thematic elements. The score’s interconnected sections echo aspects of a highly condensed, multi-movement symphony — another structural “trick” that was practiced by that great modernist pioneer, Arnold Schoenberg. The Second Essay comprises distinctly contrasting moods, yet each is carefully evolved from what has come before.

A broadly meandering first theme, heard first on the flute and then passed among the other woodwinds, unfolds against a deep shadow cast by low brass and bass drum. Its tranquility briefly darkens, and then the theme becomes more expansive. The timpani add a rhythmic motif, and a second theme is elaborated,using elements of the first. Barber’s art of transition, which includes a sure sense of how to pace the addition of orchestral colors is masterful: the

WITHIN THE BRIEF SPAN OF HIS ESSAY NO. 2, BARBER ACHIEVES A MUSICAL METAMORPHOSIS OF A FEW BASIC THEMATIC ELEMENTS.

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WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Composed: 1786First performance: Likely April 7, 1786, in Vienna, with Mozart as the soloistFirst Nashville Symphony performance: These are the orchestra’s first performancesEstimated length: 30 minutes

Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491

Born on January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria; died on December 5, 1791, in Vienna

Mozart’s historical position sometimes seems to obscure the truly innovative character

of his art. The popular image of “innovation,” after all, tends to focus on a radical rethinking of conventions typically associated with Beethoven. Yet it was Beethoven who was the successor to Mozart’s own trail-blazing achievements in the realm of the Classical piano concerto.

Several of Mozart’s mature works — particularly such masterpieces of his Vienna decade as the K. 491 Piano Concerto in C minor — explore uncharted territory with such depth and passion that they seem to foreshadow the Romantic revolution to come. It’s because of the very success of that revolution that we tend to perceive a work like this Concerto as a harbinger of “Beethovenian struggle” rather than the ineffably moving achievement it represents on its own terms. The British scholar Arthur Hutchings excellently conveyed this point in his classic Companion to Mozart’s Piano Concertos: “If we are to know

Mozart as he was, is, and always will be, we must trust our eyes and ears to reveal a wonder far greater than the miniature Beethoven which romantic faith wants us to create.”

Certainly, the young Beethoven was aware of what a singular creation the C minor Concerto was. A frequently recounted bit of lore depicts Beethoven confessing to one of his keyboard rivals, Johann Baptist Cramer, that “we’ll never be able to do anything like that!” Regardless of the anecdote’s authenticity, there can be no doubt that the aura, and even the opening theme of Mozart’s dark-hued work, haunted Beethoven as he was conceiving his own C minor Concerto (his Third).

Ironically, the anxiety Beethoven allegedly expressed anticipates what his own work would later trigger in such symphonic successors as Brahms. But Beethoven so successfully made the key of C minor his own — it’s also the key of his Fifth Symphony — that it can be difficult to resist associating Mozart’s voice with Beethoven’s own. In any case, K. 491 stands out within Mozart’s own body of work because it is the second of only two piano concertos for which he chose the minor mode for his home key. In the previous year, he had composed his first minor-key keyboard concerto, the dramatic Concerto in D minor. Mozart entered K. 491 into his personal catalogue of works on March 24, 1786, just a little over a month before his hit opera Le nozze di Figaro opened in Vienna.

For several years, Mozart had been intriguing his Viennese audience with his newly minted piano concertos. They were the centerpiece of programs which billed the composer in the role of soloist as well. In K. 491 Mozart felt inspired to undertake one of his most ambitious efforts in this medium. Its premiere also marked the last concert of his regular series of concerto-based programs at the Burgtheater, where Figaro would be staged.

The opening Allegro is conceived on the large scale. Along with his choice of somber C

minor, Mozart gives his main opening theme a restless, chromatically angular character (initially scored for unison strings). Even more, the music’s passions are unassuaged by catharsis; instead of expressing storminess, Mozart guides us into a nocturnal realm, with an inescapable gravitational pull back to the minor despite his exquisitely designed, lyrical escapes into the major. The music suggests a vortex of relentless but quiet desperation. (Later, in The Magic Flute, Mozart would choose C minor for the mysterious, old-fashioned chorale of the Armed Men, as Tamino and Pamina, waiting to undergo their initiation, are still encircled by night.)

After a lengthy orchestral prelude, the soloist quietly enters with an entirely new theme. But the opening music continually reasserts itself — at times with the most haunting eloquence. Mozart’s orchestration and dynamic shadings are especially important here in bringing new twists to the concerto’s convention of reprising the main theme at strategic moments. He scores for his fullest complement of woodwinds to date in his concertos, using these colors with great sensitivity to detail. So, too, the piano part betrays the symphonic intricacy of the composer’s thinking. After the cadenza (the composer’s original does not survive),

perspective grows larger as the full ensemble develops the emotional scope, while the timpani’s rhythm introduces hints of war. A sudden chord jolts the music into another, scherzo-like direction, beginning with an initially lighthearted, faster-paced fugal section. The counterpoint intensifies and thickens as Barber weaves the earlier themes together and then prepares for a bold coda, in

which the hesitations of the opening music are cast aside in triumphal, stately assertions.

The Second Essay is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons (2nd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

Mozart weaves the solo part into the coda, which brings the movement to a quiet but unresolved close.

The Allegro’s rich complexity is followed by a Larghetto of disarming simplicity. The rounding of its main theme, given by solo piano at the start, is so simple, in fact, as to seem Sphinx-like — a da Vincian smile. The shadows of the opening movement return in the central C-minor section, while Mozart’s woodwind writing in this movement (and the finale) enriches the concertante fabric.

The Allegretto, deemed by Hutchings to be Mozart’s “finest essay in variation form and also his best concerto finale,” restores the march prototype that had been missing from the opening movement, where Mozart so often uses it in his other concertos. Even with his trumpet-and-drums scoring, the music retains a peculiar, dark quality in this set of eight variations (most of them actually double variations). Mozart presses the tonality further than in his D-minor concerto. While that earlier work takes a brightly confident turn into the major in its final pages, here Mozart stays true to the tragic course of C minor right to the very end.

In addition to solo piano, the Piano Concerto in C minor calls for flute; pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets; timpani; and strings.

Composed: 1885First performance: March 23, 1886, in Moscow, with Max Erdmannsdörfer conducting First Nashville Symphony performance: October 17 & 18, 2003, at TPAC with guest conductor Enrique Arturo Diemecke Estimated length: 55 minutes

Manfred Symphony in B minor, Op. 58

Born on May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia; died on November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg, Russia

Set in the “higher Alps,” Lord Byron’s closet drama Manfred (1817) depicts the

quintessentially alienated “Byronic hero.” Its minimal plot centers on the dilemma and interior life of the title character, a tragic outsider. Resembling an amalgam of Hamlet, Faust, and Eugene Onegin, Manfred suffers from self-loathing and sexual guilt over the death of his sister Astarte. He refuses conventional penitence and instead resolves to meet his fate as “my own destroyer.”

Tchaikovsky had initially resisted a suggestion by his former mentor, Mily Balakirev, to compose a programmatic treatment of this scenario. He even scoffed at the clichés of program music that he imagined the plot line would inevitably call for. Yet during a trip away from Russia, Tchaikovsky found himself intensely moved by a close reading of Byron’s dramatic poem. Appropriately

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

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with Manfred pause to introduce the hesitant, melancholy music representing the ill-fated Astarte. The scoring here evokes a sense of fragile, fleeting memory, which then becomes more impassioned before it quietly fades. In a dramatic stroke, Tchaikovsky compresses conventional sonata structure and plunges directly into a truncated recapitulation following this enormous exposition. This structural rerouting emphasizes Manfred’s inability to develop beyond his cursed state of obsessive brooding. Instead, his music rises to a frightening climax and then fragments, bringing the movement to a shattering close.

With its pointillist, chromatically flickering textures, the Scherzo (also in B minor) takes us outside Manfred’s consciousness to depict a world of fantastical spirits. The trio, featuring a balletic, ingratiating cantabile melody, introduces the Witch of the Alps — one of the spirits Manfred interrogates in his search for peace. Byron describes her as appearing in the sunbow of a waterfall. Yet into this soundscape Manfred’s music ominously intrudes, like a passing cloud. Unlike in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, in which the beloved is the idée fixe, Manfred himself plays that role as the main recurrent musical idea in Tchaikovsky’s score. (Berlioz, who had composed the Byron-inspired Harold in Italy, had also been approached by Balakirev and his associates back in the 1860s, when they first thought up the Manfred project.)

The G-major Andante appears as another counterpart, with its pastoral sounds suggesting the naïve, peaceful, ordinary life from which Manfred is estranged. A lilting tune is interrupted by atmospheric sound effects: bird imitations, hunter calls, and bells. Manfred’s appearance here — roughly at the movement’s midpoint — produces an even more disquieting effect than it did in the Scherzo, though the ordered tranquility returns to balance out the movement.

The finale is Manfred’s longest and most overtly “narrative” movement. Here, Manfred descends to the infernal palace of the evil conjurer Arimanes for a séance in which he is granted a vision of Astarte. Furious, rabid textures evoke a bacchanal among the companions of Arimanes (not present in Byron’s

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Tchaikovsky casts Manfred as a “symphony in four scenes,” taking a notably experimental

approach in the two outer movements. The first movement presents a sweeping portrait of Manfred wandering in the Alps, haunted by his memories of Astarte. Bassoons and bass clarinet intone a dirge-like motif: the first in a series of musical ideas associated with the titular anti-hero. Tchaikovsky’s score features elaborate, virtuoso orchestration and sound effects — for example, he asks the horns to play with “pavillons en l’air,” with the bells raised upward, for a ferocious climactic passage. With this outburst, we securely reach the symphony’s home key of B minor. This is the dark tonality Tchaikovsky also chose for his “Overture-Fantasy” Romeo and Juliet and would later use for his last symphony, the Pathétique.

Only after the movement has reached its midpoint does the series of ideas associated

text) before Manfred appears on the scene. Using another precedent from Berlioz (in the finale of the Symphonie fantastique), Tchaikovsky builds up an orgiastic double fugue from the first two themes heard in this movement.

After the fugue is spent, a giant recapitulation of music from the first movement recalls Astarte and the implacable anguish of Manfred, culminating in an abrupt cutoff. Tchaikovsky then transforms the indeterminate ending of his Byronic source into a theatrical apotheosis, complete with redemptive organ chords and ecclesial cadences. (Byron had pointedly refused to “save” his hero in the source text.) While the bass intones a variant of the Dies irae chant associated with death, an allusion to the Faustian “eternal feminine”

enough, he was vacationing in the (Byronic) Alpine setting of Davos, where he was visiting the dying young violinist Yosif Kotek. Tchaikovsky had once been in love with Kotek, who was the inspiration behind his Violin Concerto. The sense of lost love that permeates Byron’s text may have suddenly resonated for him — as did, perhaps, the forbidden nature of the implied incestuous union between Manfred and Astarte.

In a fever of inspiration, Tchaikovsky undertook what was his most complex symphonic score up to that point. “Never in my life have I tried so hard and become so weary from my work,” he wrote, remarking that his obsessive involvement made him resemble the hero. Tchaikovsky completed the Manfred Symphony in 1885. Then, changing his mind in a way characteristic of this intensely self-critical composer, Tchaikovsky renounced all but the first movement. Widely diverging opinions about Manfred have mirrored the composer’s ambivalence ever since. Yet this neglected, unnumbered symphony — written between his Fourth and Fifth symphonies — contains some of Tchaikovsky’s most imaginative and theatrical musical fantasy.

resounds on high, allowing Manfred his final peace and a gentle fade-away in B major. In his Pathétique Symphony, Tchaikovsky would later revoke this optimistic requiem with a tragic reversal that offers no way out.

The Manfred Symphony is scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, harmonium, and strings.

— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com.

TCHAIKOVSKY TRANSFORMS THE INDETERMINATE ENDING OF HIS BYRONIC SOURCE INTO A THEATRICAL APOTHEOSIS, COMPLETE WITH

REDEMPTIVE ORGAN CHORDS AND ECCLESIAL CADENCES.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

One of the great Russian

conductors schooled in the tradition of Musin and Kondrashin, Vassily Sinaisky is known for his interpretations of Russian, German,

and English repertoire. Sinaisky’s international career began in 1973, when he won the Gold Medal at the prestigious Karajan Competition in Berlin. His early work with Kirill Kondrashin at the Moscow Philharmonic and with Ilya Musin at the Leningrad Conservatoire provided him with an incomparable grounding. Soon after his success at the Karajan Competition, he was appointed Chief Conductor of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, a post he held from 1976 to 1987. He then became Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic, leading numerous high-profile projects with the orchestra both in Russia and on tour.

In the 2016/17 season Sinaisky will conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra twice in Birmingham and on tour to China. Other conducting engagements this season include the BBC Philharmonic, Dresden Philharmonic, the SWR Stuttgart on tour, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, Helsinki Philharmonic, Russian National Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, New Japan Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Taiwan Philharmonic, and Nashville Symphony.

Sinaisky’s recordings include a set of the symphonies of Franz Schmidt for Naxos with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, as well as many with the BBC Philharmonic, including works by Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. His most recent recording is of the Tchaikovsky and Grieg Concerti with Denis Kozhukhin and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin for Pentatone. A noted and influential teacher, Sinaisky holds the position of Professor of Conducting at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire.

VASSILY SINAISKYconductor

INON BARNATANpiano

Celebrated for his poetic sensibility,

probing intellect, and consummate artistry, Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan is embarking on his third and final season

as the inaugural Artist-in-Association of the New York Philharmonic, appearing as soloist in subscription concerts, taking part in regular chamber performances, and acting as ambassador for the orchestra. In the 2016/17 season, he debuts with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under the baton of New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert, as well as with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, and the Seattle Symphony. Other highlights include concerto performances in Japan, Hong Kong, and Australia; the complete Beethoven concerto cycle in Marseille; and several concerts at London’s Wigmore Hall.

A recipient of both the Avery Fisher Career Grant and Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, Barnatan has performed extensively with many of the world’s foremost orchestras, including those of Cleveland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; the Royal Stockholm Symphony Orchestra; and the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon. Passionate about contemporary music, in recent seasons the pianist has premiered new pieces composed for him by Matthias Pintscher, Sebastian Currier, and Avner Dorman.

“A born Schubertian,” according to Gramophone, Barnatan has released critically acclaimed recordings on Avie and Bridge of the Austrian composer’s solo piano works, as well as the collection Darknesse Visible, which scored a coveted place on The New York Times’ Best of 2012 list. Last October, the pianist released Rachmaninov & Chopin: Cello Sonatas on Decca Classics with Alisa Weilerstein, which earned rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

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