FEBRUARY 2, 3

Concerts of Thursday, February 2, 2023 8:00 PM

Friday, February 3, 2023 8:00 PM

NATHALIE STUTZMANN, conductor

EDGAR MOREAU, cello

Thursday’s concert is dedicated to

PATRICK & SUSIE VIGUERIE

in honor of their extraordinary support of the 2021/22 Annual Fund. SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891–1953)

Sinfonia concertante for Cello and Orchestra, Op.

125 (1951) 37 MINS

I. Andante

II. Allegro giusto

III. Andante con moto — Allegretto — Allegro marcato Edgar Moreau, cello INTERMISSION 20 MINS

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906–1975) Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 (1937) 50 MINS

I. Moderato

II. Allegretto

III. Largo

IV. Allegro non troppo

The use of cameras or recording devices during the concert is strictly prohibited. Please be kind to those around you and silence your mobile phone and other hand-held devices.

by Noel Morris

Program Annotator

Sinfonia concertante for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 125 First ASO performances: In addition to the solo cello, Sinfonia concertante March 21–24, 1974 is scored for two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two Robert Shaw, conductor oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two Lynn Harrell, cello trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, Most recent celeste and strings. ASO performances: A Living Nightmare September 21–23, 1989 Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich were products of a tumultuous age. Born fifteen years Yoel Levi, conductor Christopher Rex, cello apart, they shared many of the same teachers, all of whom knew something about upheaval. Changing with the times, their school, the St. Petersburg Conservatory, was renamed the Petrograd Conservatory, then the Leningrad Conservatory, and finally the N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov St. Petersburg State Conservatory. The people within its walls endured food scarcity, unheated rooms, revolutions, civil war, and a Nazi siege, not to mention the purges being wrought by their own government. In his 2010 book, historian Norman Naimark drew PROKOFIEV ESTATE comparisons between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, stating that “both [men] chewed up the lives of human beings in the name of a transformative vision of Utopia. Both destroyed their countries and societies, as well as vast numbers of people inside and outside their own states. Both, in the end, were genocidaires.” Stalin’s scourge was as random as it was widespread. Between 1932–1933, he removed a bountiful grain harvest, causing the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. (The United Nations later placed the death toll of this famine, known as the Holodomor, at seven to ten million.) He rounded up and slaughtered countless Russians, too. “In some cases, a quota was established for the number to be executed, the number to be arrested,” said Naimark. “Some officials overfulfilled as a way of showing their exuberance.” Using terror as his instrument, Stalin seeded Soviet society with paranoia, encouraging friends and family members to turn on one another. Through it all, the Party required that art be “easily understood” and serve to educate the worker about the joys of Soviet life. Creatives who failed to comply could face charges of spying or treason. The punishment was imprisonment or death.

Prokofiev Sinfonia Concertante

In the days after the Bolsheviks came to power, the revolutionaries-

turned-statesmen had a problem: how to gain legitimacy. As they worked to invent a new form of government, they began to recognize the importance of soft power—gaining leverage through economic or cultural assets. Already, Russia’s best composers were living in the West. Rachmaninov had gone into exile. Stravinsky was the toast of Paris. Only Prokofiev was unsettled. Living in Europe, he was struggling as a composer. His music was edgy and experimental—which had not won him allies—and he was forced to make a living as a pianist. In 1924, he became a Christian Scientist, which seems to have prompted a shift toward the more tuneful style of Peter and the Wolf (1936) and Romeo and Juliet (1938). It was a style that naturally aligned with Soviet dictates on art. Over ten years, Moscow courted him with concerts, unrestricted access between East and West, and a handsome apartment. Most importantly, the Party gave him lots of work as a composer. Out of convenience, he moved his family back to Russia. Then in 1938, Party officials seized his travel documents, closing his door to the West forever. World War II brought a different kind of misery to the Soviet people. Hitler’s army laid siege to Leningrad. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation, and millions of Russian Jews were deported to Nazi camps. The war did offer some respite from Stalin’s social engineering—he was too occupied with military matters to attack composers. That changed in 1948. On February 10 of that year, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a decree rebuking Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Aram Khachaturian, among others, for committing the “crime of formalism.” Facing public condemnation for their “renunciation of the basic principles of classical music,” they lost concert engagements, and many of their works were banned.

Prokofiev lost his pension and fell into financial straits—but he did have friends. One of them was the brilliant and rather rebellious young cello virtuoso Mstislav Rostropovich. They had met in 1947 when Rostropovich played Prokofiev’s 1938 Cello Concerto. (The piece had been sorely neglected, and the composer was grateful for the performance.) It inspired him to write a Cello Sonata for the twentyyear-old “Slava.” In 1951, Prokofiev received 20,000 rubles to write a three-movement work. For this, he leaned on his friend for technical advice and repurposed material from the 1938 Cello Concerto for his Second Cello Concerto. After its premiere, Prokofiev withdrew the score and expanded the role of the orchestra, rechristening the

piece Sinfonia concertante or Symphony Concerto. By this time, Prokofiev’s health was in decline. He had suffered chronic headaches, dizziness, and nausea since 1945. Nevertheless, he threw himself into new projects and left many unfinished at his death, including another piece for Slava. Sadly, Prokofiev never again stepped out from the shadow of Joseph Stalin; both men died on March 5, 1953. With the passing of the tyrant, all the prominent Russian musicians, all the news coverage, and all the flowers that could be mustered were diverted to a grand state funeral. Prokofiev’s family held a small service, draping the composer’s casket in paper flowers.

Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 Symphony No. 5 is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celeste and strings. A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism

Dmitri Shostakovich was 15 years younger than Prokofiev and much quicker to run afoul of Stalin. While Prokofiev had had a life in the West, Shostakovich was only 11 when the Bolsheviks seized power. He entered the Petrograd Conservatory two years later. By the time he was 19, his First Symphony was being performed by Russia’s premier orchestras. Shostakovich became a poster child for Soviet art, bolstered by a heavy workload of commissions. By the time he was 24, a friend had noted that he was looking gaunt and worn out. What the world didn’t know was that young Shostakovich, beyond the multitude of concerts and public appearances, had begun a project for himself, an opera called Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Basing the piece on a Party-approved satirical novella, he drafted a potent score framing a super-charged story of love, sex, and murder. The show premiered on January 22, 1934, and was among the most successful launches in opera history. Night after night, Leningrad audiences packed the house. Soon it opened in Moscow and within two years, had made its way to the United States, Europe and South America. By January of 1936, there were two separate productions of Lady Macbeth running in Moscow alone. That’s when Stalin entered the picture. On January 26, he arrived at the Bolshoi Theater to see the show and walked out mid-performance.

First ASO performance: November 15, 1955 Henry Sopkin, conductor Most recent ASO performances: January 28–February 1, 2020 Karina Canellakis, conductor ADOBE STOCK

Days later, the state-run newspaper, Pravda, published a blistering article about Shostakovich titled “Muddle Instead of Music.” Overnight, musicians across the Soviet Union dropped him from their programs; colleagues stopped speaking to him, and people crossed the street to avoid him. Just as his wife, Nina, was expecting their first child, the composer’s income fell 75 percent. But Shostakovich was not entirely contrite. He threw himself into writing his Fourth Symphony—a marvelous and terrifying piece of music that went into rehearsal with the Leningrad Philharmonic later that year. Under pressure from a skittish music community, the composer withdrew the piece and stowed it away, keeping it hidden for the next 25 years. “He was scared of the Gulag,” said Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Music Director Nathalie Stutzmann. “His suitcase was packed in case they came for him in the night. He was scared for his whole family and made a public declaration to serve the regime and be a good composer, and praise Stalin.” At the same time, Shostakovich desperately needed to stage a comeback, and he did it with the Fifth Symphony. Smacking his predicament right on the nose, he subtitled his new piece “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism.” It was a brilliant solution to a sticky problem—and a sticky problem for many a musician. Is the Fifth Symphony an act of contrition or is it an act of defiance? Or is it both? Ultimately, the way a conductor hears the symphony informs her interpretation. “The Fifth Symphony was his way of finding firmer ground,” said Stutzmann. “Officially, it appears and sounds for the Stalinists, and it was a triumphant success. Shostakovich had ‘reformed.’” Still, “the non-partisans in the audience got the real message,” she said. “The sadness, stress, anxiousness, and depression of the first movement. The caricature of a march in the second movement. The deeply moving third movement, which clearly is a requiem for the dead victims of Stalin.

“The final movement sounds triumphant, but whose triumph? One can easily understand it’s a rush against the power; it’s a victory scream for liberty!” The Leningrad Philharmonic gave the first performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 on November 21, 1937, and the audience went wild. The authorities uplifted Shostakovich as a reformed citizen. And Dmitri Shostakovich lived to write another day.

NATHALIE STUTZMANN, CONDUCTOR See biography on page 7 EDGAR MOREAU, CELLO

Born in 1994, Edgar Moreau began playing the cello at the age of four. He studied with Philippe Muller at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and later continued at the Kronberg Academy under the guidance of Frans Helmerson. At the age of 11 he made his debut with the Teatro Regio Orchestra in Torino, playing Dvořák’s Cello Concerto.

Moreau performs with world-renowned orchestras such as the Roma Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Filarmonica della Scala, London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony,

Philadelphia Orchestra, Montreal Symphony, among others. He has collaborated with acclaimed conductors including Gustavo Dudamel, Valery Gergiev, Francois-Xavier Roth, Tugan Sokhiev, Manfred Honeck, Lahav Shani, Mikko Franck, Jakub Hrůša, Alain Altinoglu, Pablo-Heras Casado, Susanna Mälkki Vasily Petrenko, Jukka- Pekka Saraste, and Lionel Bringuier. Moreau is a recipient of many musical awards, including the Academie Maurice Ravel Prize 2011, and the Banque Populaire Foundation, and First Prize in the 2014 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, among others. Edgar Moreau plays on a David Tecchler cello from 1711. His bow was made by Dominique Peccatte.