Location: Morris Performing Arts Center (574) 235-9190

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Russian Easter Overture, Op. 36

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov was born in Tikhvin, Russia in 1844 and died in Lyubensk in 1908. He composed this work in 1888 and led the first performance in St. Petersburg the same year. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

Easter was called “The Bright Holiday” in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russia, where the Christian holiday had joined, not replaced, the pagan celebrations of the rebirth of nature that preceded it. To the traditional themes of awe, serenity, and joy found in Western Easter music, Rimsky wanted to add a sense of sheer merriment, too: “The transition from the gloomy and mysterious evening of Passion Saturday,” he wrote, “to the unbridled pagan-religious merry-making on the morn of Easter Sunday is what I was eager to reproduce in my Overture.”

The work takes most of its themes from a collection of Russian Orthodox canticles called the Obikhod. We hear the first of these (“Let God arise”) in the woodwind chant that opens the work. Rimsky said that the slow, mysterious introduction that follows was inspired by Isaiah’s prophecy of the coming resurrection. The brief, luminous music of the transition to the Allegro is a musical depiction of the passage in St. Mark, “And, entering into the sepulcher, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment, and they were afraid. And he saith to them, ‘Be not afraid; ye seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He is risen.’”

As the Allegro begins, the music carries on with St. Mark: “And the joyful tidings were spread abroad all over the world, and they who hated Him fled before Him, vanishing like smoke.” By the end, the composer wrote, “‘Resurrexit!’ sings the choir of angels in heaven to the sound of the archangels’ trumpets and the fluttering of the wings of the seraphim. ‘Resurrexit!’ sing the priests in the temples, in the midst of clouds of incense, by the light of innumerable candles, to the chiming of triumphant bells.

Leonard Bernstein
West Side Story: Symphonic Dances

Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918 and died in New York City in 1990. He composed West Side Story in 1957, and extracted the Symphonic Dances in 1960. The work was first performed in 1961 by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Lukas Foss. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 4 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, alto saxophone, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celeste, and strings.

Leonard Bernstein was one of those rare musical geniuses who excelled at every musical discipline: a performer, composer, conductor and teacher, he was also a musical ambassador-at-large with the uncanny ability to make everyone he met excited about music. When friends suggested to him that he compose a “serious” musical he was absolutely the right man for the job, for jazz and popular music ran as deeply in his blood as any other kind. Many classical composers (such as Copland, Milhaud, Stravinsky) had used elements of jazz in their works, and some popular composers (such as Gershwin) up-sized their music to fit the concert hall. None were as at home in both worlds as Bernstein, and West Side Story is his masterpiece

The musical updates the Romeo and Juliet story to the warfare of 1950s New York street gangs. Its mastery over popular melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic styles is total: here is swing, bop, cool jazz, Latin music, ballads, and up-tempo jive. All are seamlessly integrated by a man who knew his classical procedures and who used them to give the work the kind of cohesion you’d expect from an opera by Mozart. Note how both the dangerous music of the Prologue and the love song “Maria,” as different as they are, spring from the same melodic interval, the tritone. This kind of thematic unity is what separates West Side Story from the musicals of the past, and the reason why it is so effective even today.

(It’s worth noting that the tritone, otherwise known as the augmented fourth or diminished fifth, is considered to be a wildly dissonant interval—it was actually referred to as Diabolus in musica—“the Devil in music”—and forbidden in church music for centuries. That Bernstein could use it as the first two notes of a love song—and a brilliant one at that—is another testament to the man’s musical genius and certainly to his audacity. If you listen for them, you’ll hear tritones all over the place in the music of West Side Story.

The Symphonic Dances form a microcosm of the plot. The Prologue sets the stage for the gangs’ bitter rivalry. “Somewhere,” which follows, is a dream of peace and friendship, while the Scherzo continues with a vision of open space and sunshine. The Mambo breaks the spell with the competition and aggressiveness that are the gangs’ reality. In the softer Cha-Cha the lovers Tony and Maria meet. The “Cool” Fugue is all about the tension created by barely-controlled anger. The Rumble brings the death of the two gang leaders, and as Tony’s body is carried off in the Finale, there is still a search for that elusive “Somewhere.

Sergei Rachmaninov
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 30

Sergei Rachmaninov was born at Semyonovo, Russia in 1873 and died in Beverly Hills, California in 1943. He composed this concerto in 1909 and was the soloist at the first performance given by the New York Symphony under the direction of Walter Damrosch. The score calls for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

If one were willing to stretch a point, one could lay the genesis of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto to the composer’s desire for a car.

The year was 1909, and Sergei Rachmaninov was preparing for his first tour of the United States, where he was to appear as soloist playing his own works in a grueling itinerary. The proceeds, of course, would support himself and his family, but what he really wanted to do was to buy one of those newfangled automobiles. Although they scared the horses, Rachmaninov was fascinated by the monstrous machines and fancied himself tooling around the countryside in one.

Rachmaninov had misgivings about coming to America, for it seemed that every American he had ever met wanted to talk about nothing but business, which bored him. His opinion did not change much after his arrival; in the middle of his tour he wrote home: “I am weary of America and I have had more than enough of it . . . the audiences are remarkably cold, spoiled by the guest performances of first-class artists. Those audiences always seek something extraordinary, something different from the last guest soloist. Their newspapers always remark on how many times the artist was recalled to take a bow, and for the large public this is the yardstick of your talent, if you please.” Oddly enough, Rachmaninov later settled in the United States; he had fled the Russian Revolution, in which all his property had been confiscated.

The Third Piano Concerto was the new piece Rachmaninov needed for his tour, and he barely finished it in time. In fact he had no time to practice the solo part, so he brought a practice keyboard with him on the ship. During the voyage he practiced diligently—and silently—and by the time he reached New York he had it learned.

The piano opens the Concerto with a theme that is heard, in various guises, in all three movements. As the movement unfolds the piano becomes more and more dominant until a huge cadenza is reached. This is the weighty core of the movement;  all that is required afterward is a brief coda.

The Intermezzo—a much larger movement than the title implies—is full of melodies derived from the Concerto’s first theme. Into this body of slow music Rachmaninov cleverly inserts a little scherzo, again with music related to the opening theme.

The driving, turbocharged Finale follows without pause. It is interrupted by a scherzando and a lento, after which Rachmaninov motors to the end vivacissimo