Program Notes: Brahms Symphony No. 3

BRAHMS SYMPHONY NO. 3

PERFORMED BY YOUR COLORADO SYMPHONY

JUN MÄRKL, conductor

STEFAN JACKIW, violin

Friday, May 10, 2024 at 7:30pm

Saturday, May 11, 2024 at 7:30pm

Sunday, May 12, 2024 at 1:00pm

Boettcher Concert Hall

SMYTH

PROKOFIEV

BRAHMS

Prelude to Act II “On the Cliffs of Cornwall” from The Wreckers

Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63

I. Allegro moderato

II. Andante assai

III. Allegro; ben marcato

— INTERMISSION —

Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90

I. Allegro con brio

II. Andante

III. Poco allegretto

IV. Allegro

CONCERT RUN TIME IS APPROXIMATELY 1 HOUR AND 40 MINUTES. INCLUDING A 20 MINUTE INTERMISSION.

FIRST TIME TO THE SYMPHONY? SEE PAGE 19 OF THIS PROGRAM FOR FAQ’S TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE GREAT!

Saturday’S concert iS dedicated to drS. VeSna JeV toVic-todoroVic and Slobodan todoroVic Sunday’S concert iS dedicated to rebecca Pyle

PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

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JUN MÄRKL, conductor

Jun Märkl is a highly respected interpreter of core Germanic repertoire and has become renown for his refined and idiomatic explorations of the French Impressionists. He currently serves as Music Director of the Taiwan National Symphony Orchestra, he has been appointed Music Director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and is the newly appointed Chief Conductor of the Residentie Orchestra of The Hague, Netherlands. He serves as Principal Guest Conductor of the Oregon Symphony.

Märkl’s expertise in the world of opera and long historical relationships with the state operas of Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Berlin, the Semperoper Dresden, the Metropolitan Opera of New York, San Francisco Opera and New National Theatre in Tokyo have been complemented over the past many decades by his orchestral music directorships of the Orchestre National de Lyon, the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, he Basque National Orchestra and the Malaysia Philharmonic. Märkl regularly guest conducts the leading orchestras of North America, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Europe and has conducted many of the world’s most prestigious orchestras including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, NHK Tokyo, and many others. Mr. Märkl also has an extensive discography of more than 55 recordings.

In recognition of his achievements in France, he was honoured in 2012 with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

He studied in Munich with Sergiu Celibidache, at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.

Mr. Märkl is highly dedicated to work with young musicians: for many years he worked as Principal Conductor at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo and the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. He teaches as a Guest Professor at the Kunitachi College of Music Tokyo and he recently founded the National Youth Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan.

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STEFAN JACKIW, violin

Stefan Jackiw is one of America’s foremost violinists, captivating audiences with playing that combines poetry and purity with impeccable technique. Hailed for playing of “uncommon musical substance” that is “striking for its intelligence and sensitivity” (Boston Globe), Jackiw has appeared as a soloist with the Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco symphony orchestras, among others.

Following his summer performance with the New York Philharmonic, Jackiw opens the 2023-24 season returning to the orchestra to perform the Barber Concerto with Jaap van Zweden. His season also includes a quadruple World Premiere of new works at Roulette, and his return to Asia with the Taiwan Philharmonic and the China National Symphony. In the spring, the Junction Trio will make their Carnegie Hall debut with the New York premiere of John Zorn’s Philosophical Investigations. He was also recently invited to perform and curate a series of programs at the Edinburgh Festival (‘Stefan Jackiw and Friends’).

During the 2022-23 season, Jackiw returned to the Cleveland Orchestra to perform Britten’s Violin Concerto with Thomas Søndergård, and to the Vancouver Symphony to perform Brahms with Otto Tausk. He also appeared at the 92NY with cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Daniil Trifonov, and he embarked on a multi-city Junction Trio tour that included the group’s Celebrity Series of Boston debut, alongside performances in New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, and more. His European dates included his return to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with the Residentie Orkest, as well as appearances with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony, and the Sinfónica de Galicia. Other recent highlights include his performance of Mozart’s violin Concerto no. 5 with Alan Gilbert and the Boston Symphony, his return to Carnegie Hall to perform Bach with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and performances with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and Alan Gilbert, and with Orchestre National de Lyon under Nikolaj Znaider.

Jackiw recently performed a new violin concerto, written for him by Conrad Tao and premiered by the Atlanta Symphony and Baltimore Symphony. He has also premiered David Fulmer’s concerto Jauchzende Bögen with Matthias Pintscher and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen at the Heidelberger Frühling.

Jackiw tours frequently with his musical partners, pianist Conrad Tao and cellist Jay Campbell, as part of the Junction Trio. He also enjoys collaborating with pianist Jeremy Denk with whom he has toured the complete Ives Violin Sonatas, which the pair recorded for future release on Nonesuch Records. In 2019, he recorded Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Inon Barnatan, Alisa Weilerstein, Alan Gilbert and Academy St. Martin in the Fields.

Jackiw has performed in numerous major festivals and concert halls around the world, including the Aspen Music Festival, Ravinia Festival, Caramoor International Music Festival,

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Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the Philharmonie de Paris, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Celebrity Series of Boston, and the Washington Performing Arts Society.

Born to physicist parents of Korean and Ukrainian descent, Stefan Jackiw began playing the violin at the age of four. His teachers have included Zinaida Gilels, Michèle Auclair, and Donald Weilerstein. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University, as well as an Artist Diploma from the New England Conservatory, and is the recipient of a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. Jackiw plays a violin made in 1705 by Vincenzo Ruggieri. He lives in New York City.

CLASSICS PROGRAM NOTES

ETHEL SMYTH (1858-1944)

“On the Cliffs of Cornwall,” Prelude to Act II of The Wreckers

Ethel Smyth was born on April 22, 1858 in London, and died on May 8, 1944 in Woking, Surrey. Her opera The Wreckers was composed in 1902-1904 and premiered on November 11, 1906 at the Neues Theater in Leipzig, conducted by Richard Hagel. The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings. Duration is about 8 minutes. This is the premiere performance by the orchestra.

Ethel Smyth, born in London in 1858 into a high-ranking military family, was the most recognized English woman composer of her time, an advocate for female musicians and women’s rights, a militant suffragette, and a published author. Smyth was introduced to classical music when she was twelve by a governess who had studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, then the most highly regarded music school in the world, but her straightlaced father, who believed that music was not a fit profession for a proper woman in Victorian England, would not permit his daughter to make it her career until a military comrade of his, who was also a published composer, convinced the Major-General of Ethel’s talent. She went to Leipzig in 1877 but, disappointed with both staff and students at the Conservatory, undertook private study with the Austrian composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg, a close friend of Brahms (his wife had studied piano with him), through whom she also met such music notables as Grieg, Joachim, Tchaikovsky and Clara Schumann. Smyth remained in Germany until 1888, composing songs, piano pieces and chamber music that received numerous performances, notably her String Quintet, Op.1 and Violin Sonata at the famed Leipzig Gewandhaus. After settling again in London, Smyth turned to more ambitious genres, successfully premiering her Serenade for Orchestra and Antony and Cleopatra Overture at the Crystal Palace in 1890 and a Mass in D three years later. She devoted herself to composing three operas during the following decade,

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all premiered in Germany. Der Wald (“The Forest”) was first performed in Mainz in 1902 and presented by the Metropolitan Opera the following year (it remained the only opera by a female composer staged there until Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin in 2016), but she won her greatest acclaim with The Wreckers, premiered in Leipzig in 1906.

In 1910, Smyth, always strong-willed and outspoken, met the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst and devoted the next two years to the campaign, writing some music for the movement (her March of the Women became its anthem) and serving two months at Holloway Prison with 108 other women for their militant activities. (They tried to break a window in every politician’s home who did not support their right to vote. It took until 1928 before British women were fully enfranchised, eight years later than in the United States.) Smyth continued to compose until volunteering for medical work in France during World War I, where she realized that she was losing her hearing. After the war, she conducted occasionally and composed as much as her waning faculty allowed, but turned increasingly to writing essays and memoirs, including a two-volume autobiography in 1919. She gave up composing completely by 1930, fourteen years before her death in Woking, Surrey, thirty miles southwest of London.

Ethel Smyth enjoyed an unprecedented success for an English woman musician — honorary doctorates from Durham and Oxford universities, recognition as a Dame of the British Empire in 1922, the first female composer to receive that honor — but it was won by her grit, selfconfidence, tenacity and the quality of her music.

The Wreckers, the third of Smyth’s six operas, had its source in a walking holiday she took in Cornwall in 1886, when the local villagers intrigued her with stories of their ancestors luring ships upon the rocky coast by extinguishing or misplacing coastal beacons so they could plunder the cargo after the vessels crashed. She took the subject up in earnest in 1902, when she collaborated on a libretto with a close friend, the American writer Henry Brewster (whose proposal of marriage she once refused because, she explained, it would interfere with her work). They created a dark story that was well suited to the hard life in the barren Cornish countryside. The villagers, abetted by Pascoe, the local preacher, bemoan the recent lack of wrecked ships because someone has been setting fires to warn sailors away from the coast. They vow to find the traitor. Mark, a young fisherman, is in love with Thirza, Pascoe’s wife, and his affections are returned. They both detest the local mercenary practice and are responsible for setting the warnings. When they are discovered, the villagers pass their harsh sentence — chained together in a sea cave to await the deadly tide that will inevitably fill it.

On the Cliffs of Cornwall, the Prelude to Act II, is a remarkable tonal evocation of the sea — the wave-shape phrases of strings and harp mirroring the never-quiet ocean, the horns’ subtle suggestion of a distant foghorn, the flute’s imitation of a sea bird’s cry, an expansive theme rising from the low strings implying infinite horizons. These thematic elements are given quietly at the start but are woven together in a finely crafted development that reaches a climax near the center of the piece. The tempest subsides and the sea, as it always does, passes back into a restless quiet.

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SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63

Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in Sontzovka, Russia, and died on March 5, 1953 in Moscow. He composed his Second Violin Concerto in 1935; Robert Soetens was the soloist at the premiere, on December 1, 1935 with the Madrid Symphony Orchestra conducted by Enrique Arbós. The score calls for woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, percussion and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes. The orchestra last performed this piece March 17-18, 2017, with conductor Marcelo Lehninger and violinst Vadim Gluzman.

When Prokofiev returned to Russia late in 1933 after his long residency in the West, full of allegiance to the socialist cause, he dedicated his art to fulfillment of the dream of the Revolution. In his brief Autobiography of 1946 he wrote, “It is the duty of the composer, like the poet, the sculptor or the painter, to serve his fellow men, to beautify human life and point the way to a radiant future. Such is the immutable code as I see it.” Once back in his homeland, Prokofiev wasted no time in putting into practice his theory of creating music that would communicate simply and directly to listeners, and within three years, he wrote some of his most enduringly popular scores: Lt. Kijé, Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf — and the Second Violin Concerto. The commission for the Concerto came from a group of admirers of the Belgian violinist Robert Soetens just at the time Prokofiev was considering such a work, and the proposal was accepted quickly. The Second Concerto is music of warmth and lyricism, with barely more than a hint of the spiky harmonies, motoric rhythms and diablerie that marked many of his earlier works. Gerald Abraham assessed, “Prokofiev’s formula for turning himself into a Soviet composer was to emphasize the lyric side of his nature at the expense of the witty and the grotesque and the brilliant sides.” Edward Downes thought this Concerto should be labeled neo-Romantic “or even neo-Mendelssohn.” It was an immediate success at its premiere in Madrid in 1935, and so moved the Boston audience when Jascha Heifetz first played it in America two years later that many wept openly at the sentiment of the slow movement. Heifetz called it one of the half-dozen greatest concerted works ever written for the violin, grouping it with the examples of the form by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Elgar.

The Concerto’s direct lyrical expression and clean formal lines are evident from its first gesture. The slightly melancholy main theme, built around a simple triadic configuration, is presented simply by the unaccompanied violin. The orchestra takes over the melody, allowing the soloist to apply to it some figurative arabesques which serve as the transition to the second subject. This theme, one of Prokofiev’s greatest melodic inspirations, is sung by the violin above a quiet, undulating accompaniment in the strings. The development section, an elaboration of the two main themes, achieves a masterful balance of virtuosity, thematic manipulation and lyricism. The recapitulation is begun by cellos and basses, and continues with the second theme high into the soloist’s range. A brief coda, based on the main theme, brings the movement to a hushed, mysterious close. The second movement is one of the most rapt, transcendent inspirations of 20th-century music, and, like the opening movement, is unabashedly romantic and filled with a haunting emotion. The finale is in the traditional rondo form. Its theme is an ebullient dance melody that exudes some of the fiery spirit of a Romani fiddler.

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JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)

Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90

Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833 in Hamburg, and died on April 3, 1897 in Vienna. He began his Third Symphony in 1882, and completed the score between May and October of the following year. The Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Hans Richter gave the premiere on December 2, 1883. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs plus contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. Chris Dragon

Brahms had reached the not inconsiderable age of 43 before he unveiled his First Symphony. The Second Symphony followed within eighteen months, and the musical world was prepared for a steady stream of similar masterworks from his pen. However, it was to be another six years before he undertook his Third Symphony, though he did produce the Academic Festival and Tragic Overtures, Violin Concerto and Second Piano Concerto during that time. When he got around to the new symphony, he was nearing fifty, and had just recovered from a spell of feeling that he was “too old” for creative work, even informing his publisher, Simrock, that he would be sending him nothing more. It seems likely — though such matters always remained in the shadows where Brahms was concerned — that his creative juices were stirred anew by a sudden infatuation with “a pretty Rhineland girl.” This was Hermine Spiess, a talented contralto who was 26 when Brahms first met her in January 1883 at the home of friends. (Brahms was fifty.) A cordial, admiring friendship sprang up between the two, but this affair, like every other one in Brahms’ life in which a respectable woman was involved, never grew any deeper. He used to declare, perhaps only half in jest, that he lived his life by two principles, “and one of them is never to attempt either an opera or a marriage.” Perhaps what he really needed was a muse rather than a wife. At any rate, Brahms spent the summer of 1883 not at his usual haunts in the Austrian hills and lakes, but at the German spa of Wiesbaden, which just happened to be the home of Hermine. Work went well on the new symphony, and it was completed before he returned to Vienna in October.

The two bold opening chords that begin the Third Symphony juxtapose bright F major and a somber chromatic harmony in the opposing moods of light and shadow that course throughout the work. The main theme comes from the strings “like a bolt from Jove,” according to former New York Times critic Olin Downes; the pastoral second subject is sung softly by the clarinet. The development section is brief but includes elaborations of most of the exposition’s motives before the movement is rounded out by a full recapitulation of the earlier materials and a long coda based on the main theme. A folk-like theme appears in the low woodwinds and low strings to open the Andante; the central section is a Slavic-sounding plaint intoned by clarinet and bassoon. The ternary-form third movement (A–B–A) utilizes the warmest tone colors of the orchestra. The finale begins with a sinuous theme of brooding character. A chantlike processional derived from the Slavic theme of the second movement provides contrast. Further thematic material is introduced (one theme is arch-shaped; the other, more rhythmically vigorous) and well examined. The central section fuses the functions of development and recapitulation. There is a sense of struggle passed as the Symphony draws to its close, and the work ends with the ghost of the opening movement’s main theme infused with a sunset glow.

©2024 Dr. Richard E. Rodda