Program Notes: Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody

PROGRAM MASON BATES Garages of the Valley SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43

Joyce Yang, piano

INTERMISSION WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 JOYCE YANG

Molto allegro

Andante

Friday, October 12 | 8PM Sunday, October 14 | 2PM

Menuetto: Allegretto

Allegro assai

RACHMANINOFF’S RHAPSODY A Jacobs Masterworks Concert

conductor Edo de Waart Bio on pg. 15

piano Joyce Yang Bio on pg. 16

This concert is made possible, in part, through the generosity of Haeyoung Tang.

The approximate running time for this concert, including All performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall

22

PERFORM A NCES MAGAZINE

intermission, is one hour and forty minutes.

S AN DIEG O SYM P H O N Y O RC H ES T RA 2 0 1 8-1 9 S E A S ON O C TO B E R 20 1 8

PROGRAM NOTES | RACHMANINOFF’S RHAPSODY – OCTOBER 12 & 14

ABOUT THE MUSIC Garages of the Valley MASON BATES Born January 23, 1977, Richmond, Virginia Mason Bates began composing as a boy in Virginia, where he studied with the legendary Dika Newlin, one of Schoenberg’s final students (and one of his few female students). Bates attended Columbia University-Juilliard School, where he studied with John Corigliano, and later earned a Ph.D. in composition at Berkeley.

Since completing his studies, he has been based in the San Francisco Bay area, where he composes, works as a DJ, curates concerts and has worked to fuse traditional classical music, electronics and club music. Already a prolific composer, he has served as composerin-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has premiered and recorded a number of his works. In 2015 Bates was the first composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and in 2017 Musical America named him Composer of the Year.

Composed in 2014, Garages of the Valley was a joint commission of the Toronto Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. It is scored for what might almost be a classical orchestra – woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets and strings – but to this Bates has added a large percussion section that contributes to the music’s high energy level. The composer has supplied a program note: Much of the Digital Age was dreamed up in the most low-tech of spaces. The garages that dot the landscape of Silicon Valley housed the visionaries behind Apple, Hewlett Packard, Intel and Google. The imagined music of these tech workshops begins hyper-kinetically yet sporadically, filled with false starts. It soon flashes into a quicksilver world of out exotic textures and tunings that is informed by the music of Frenchman Gérard Grisey (whose imaginative orchestrations sound electronic but are completely unplugged). The exhilarating finale reflects the infectious optimism of the great inventors of our time, who conjured new worlds within the bright Valley’s dark garages.

-Mason Bates n

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 SERGE RACHMANINOFF Born April 1, 1873, Semyonovo Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills In the spring of 1934 Rachmaninoff – then 61 – and his wife moved into a villa they had just purchased on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. They were delighted by the house, its opulent size, and its view across the beautiful lake Rachmaninoff was especially touched to find a surprise waiting for him there: the Steinway Company of New York had delivered a brand-new piano to the villa.

S A N D I EG O SYMPHONY ORC HESTRA 2018-19 SE ASON O C TO B E R 20 1 8

Rachmaninoff spent the summer gardening and landscaping, and he also composed: between July 3 and August 24 he wrote a set of variations for piano and orchestra on what is doubtless the mostvaried theme in the history of music, the last of Niccolò Paganini’s Twenty-Four Caprices for Solo Violin. Paganini had written that devilish tune, full of rhythmic spring and chromatic tension, in 1820, and he himself had followed it with twelve variations. That theme has haunted composers ever since. In the nineteenth century, Liszt (Transcendental Etudes), Schumann (Twelve Etudes de Concert) and Brahms (the two sets of Paganini Variations) all wrote variations on it, and they have been followed in the twentieth century by Witold Lutosławksi, Boris Blacher and George Rochberg. There may be more to come – this theme appears to be inexhaustible.

Rachmaninoff described his new work to a friend as being “about the length of a piano concerto…the thing’s rather difficult,” but he had trouble deciding on a name. At first he was going to call it Symphonic Variations on a Theme by Paganini and then thought about Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra in the Form of Variations on a Theme by Paganini. In the end he settled on the simpler Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a title that places the focus on melody and somewhat disguises the ingenious variation-technique at the center of this music. The first performance, with the composer as soloist, took place in Baltimore on November 7, 1934, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. Pleased and somewhat surprised by the success of this music with the public, Rachmaninoff observed drily: “It somehow looks suspicious that the Rhapsody has had such an immediate success with everybody.”

The Rhapsody has a surprising beginning: a brief orchestral flourish – containing hints of the theme – leads to the first variation, which is presented before the theme itself is heard. This gruff and hardedged variation, which Rachmaninoff marks Precedente, is in fact the bass-line for Paganini’s theme, which is then presented in its original form by both violin sections in unison. Some of the variations last a matter of minutes, while others whip past almost before we know it.

(Several of the variations are as short as nineteen seconds.) The 24 variations are sharply contrasted, in both character and tempo, and the fun of this music lies not just in the bravura writing for piano but in hearing Paganini’s theme sound so different in each variation. In three of them, Rachmaninoff incorporates the old plainsong tune Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), used by Berlioz, Saint-Saëns and many others, including Rachmaninoff, for whom this grim theme was a virtual obsession. Here it appears in the piano part in the seventh and tenth variations, and eventually it drives the work to its climax in the final variation. Perhaps the most famous of Rachmaninoff’s variations, though, is the eighteenth, in which Paganini’s theme is inverted and transformed into a moonlit lovesong. The piano states this variation in its simplest form, and then strings take it up and turn it into a soaring nocturne. This variation has haunted many Hollywood composers, and Rachmaninoff himself noted wryly that he had written this variation specifically as a gift “for my agent.”

From here on, the tempo picks up, and the final six variations accelerate to a monumental climax: the excitement builds, the Dies Irae is stamped out by the full orchestra, and suddenly – like a puff of smoke – the Rhapsody vanishes before us on two quick strokes of sound. n

P ERFO RM AN C ES MAG A Z I N E

23

PROGRAM NOTES | RACHMANINOFF’S RHAPSODY – OCTOBER 12 & 14 Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg Died December 5, 1791, Vienna The dismal events that befell Mozart during the summer of 1788 are well-known: the death of an infant daughter, the poverty that drove the family into ever-shabbier dwellings, the demands of creditors and Mozart’s own pathetic pleas to friends for financial assistance tell the tale. Mozart was too great an artist to let the events of his life seep into his art, and his three final symphonies, composed that summer, are miracles of beauty and strength and repose. Yet the Symphony in G minor, completed on July 25, is unlike any other music Mozart wrote. It is full of troubled and tense moments that do seem to spring from those “dark thoughts” that Mozart confessed had afflicted him in these months, and some biographers have been quick to discover in this symphony a mirror of Mozart’s mental state during this period. But such speculation, however tantalizing, tells us nothing about the music itself, and we should not allow it to deflect our attention: two centuries after it was written, the Symphony No. 40 remains one of the most powerful works ever written.

The most striking feature of this music is its intensity. The symphony is in G minor, the key Mozart reserved for his darkest and most deeply-felt music, and he accentuates harmonic tension with unexpected key shifts and the striking chromatic grind of his themes. Further, he unifies the symphony with unusual rhythmic patterns and intervals (the last three movements, for example, all begin with the upward leap of a fourth). Yet Mozart achieves this intensity with an utter economy of means, even to the point of eliminating the martial sound of trumpets and timpani from the orchestra in favor of a more subdued palette of instrumental color.

The beginning of the Allegro molto instantly establishes the character and daring of this music: over throbbing divided violas, violins sing the dark, pulsing main idea. Note carefully the first three notes of their theme: this three-note figure will saturate the movement, knitting it together rhythmically and pushing the music constantly forward. The second idea – divided smoothly between strings and woodwinds – is lyric, but Mozart quickly springs another surprise, moving through the remote key of F-sharp minor into the development. The music will make its way back to G minor, but such harmonic surprises – always achieved effortlessly – produce the many changes of shade and temperament at the heart of this symphony.

The Andante, in E-flat Major and also in sonata-form, brings little peace. Mozart’s themes may be graceful, but his chromatic treatment of them and surprising accents give this music a sense of poised unease. The third movement is the expected minuet, but no one will ever dance to this music. Mozart goes back to G minor and drives the music forward, with dissonances stinging off the terraced string entrances; the delicate trio section, with its long lines and beautiful writing for winds, brings the symphony’s one interlude of peace.

This will not be the conventional rondo-finale, built on dance rhythms and high spirits: it too is in sonata form, and it matches the mood and complexity of the first movement. The opening of the development, with its striking shift of gears, remains – two centuries later – a surprise; the development itself features complex contrapuntal interweaving of the voices. Rather than opting for the expected “happy” ending, Mozart stays in G minor throughout (something almost unknown in music of the classical period) and finally drives this movement to a close in which the symphony’s tensions – thematic, harmonic and emotional – are never fully resolved.

This symphony exists in two versions. In its original form, the symphony had no part for clarinets, but there is a second version, made by Mozart himself, that adds two clarinets and revises the oboes’ parts, giving some of their music to the clarinets. This version was probably made for performances of the Symphony in G minor on April 16-17, 1791, at concerts put on by the Tonkünstler-Societät in Vienna. This was nearly three years after the symphony had been composed (and only eight months before Mozart’s death), and it was probably the only time he ever heard one of his final three symphonies. At the present concert, the revised version – with clarinets – is performed. n - Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Performance History

by Dr. Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist Garages of the Valley, by Mason Bates, is being given its first San Diego Symphony performance at these concerts. In contrast, the ever-popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

by Rachmaninoff is being heard at these concerts for its fourteenth outing. Byron Janis was the soloist when it was first performed here during the 1963-64 season, when Earl Bernard Murray conducted. Most recently, Jahja Ling led the performance during the 2014-15 season, when Lola Astanova was the soloist.

It is notable that relatively few performances have been given by this orchestra of Mozart symphonies. His “Great G minor” Symphony No. 40 (K. 550) was first played on San Diego Symphony concerts during the 1981-82 season, conducted

by David Atherton, who repeated it three seasons later. Yoav Talmi led it during the 1991-92 season, and Vladimir Feltsman conducted it during the 1995-96 season. 13 years later, Michael Christie programmed it for his Season 2007-08 appearance.

The current performances of the “Great G minor” Symphony, the middle work of the composer's incredible final trilogy (as differentiated from the much earlier “Little G minor” Symphony, No. 25, K. 183), are the first to be given of this work since then. n

Marked Allegro assai (“Very fast”), the finale opens with the violins’ graceful leap upward and the full orchestra’s explosive response.

24

PERFORM A NCES MAGAZINE

S AN DIEG O SYM P H O N Y O RC H ES T RA 2 0 1 8-1 9 S E A S ON O C TO B E R 20 1 8