Jupiter Rising SoNA
February 16, 2025
Walton Arts Center
Paul Haas, conductor
Russian Rag (2011)
Elena Kats-Chernin
b November 4, 1957 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan
“Ragtimes are such fun to write and they have a somewhat dark melancholy,” writes Uzbekistan native Elena Kats-Chernin. She’s absolutely right about that.
Consider Scott Joplin’s “Heliotrope Bouquet” or, closer to our own time, William Bolcom’s “Graceful Ghost” or William Albright’s “The Dream
Rags,” all of them tinged in various shades of blue.
Originally for piano, and now transcribed for a variety of ensembles, Russian Rag is currently Kats-Chernin’s most popular composition. “Russian music often has a melancholic quality, and I was brought up on Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. I rarely write in major keys, it seems and Russian Rag is no exception; however, it concludes optimistically on a major chord.”
Tenebrae (2002)
Osvaldo Golijov b December 5, 1960 in La Plata, Argentina
It means darkness. The Christian rite of Tenebrae involves the gradual extinguishing of candles over the three days preceding Easter; the process ends when all the light is gone.
Osvaldo Golijov is not the first composer to write music associated with Tenebrae. The great French Baroque composer François Couperin “le Grand” gave us “Trois Leçons de Ténèbres” in 1714, three deeply meditative choral works written for the Abbey of Longchamp. These are quoted in Golijov’s 2002 Tenebrae, originally written for soprano, clarinet, and string quartet, and later adapted for strings.
Golijov has told us that he “wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new
planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it ‘from afar,’ the music would probably offer a ‘beautiful’ surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain.”
Trombone Concerto (1924)
Launy Grøndahl
b June 30, 1886 in Copenhagen, Denmark d January 21, 1960 Copenhagen, Denmark
Launy Grøndahl belongs to a select company of major-league conductors who were composers on the side, a list that includes Grøndahl’s contemporaries Otto Klemperer, Felix Weingartner, and Wilhelm Furtwängler. Grøndahl is best remembered for his 31 years at the helm of the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, from its founding in 1925 until 1956, with which he left posterity superlative
recordings of Carl Nielsen’s symphonies, among other goodies.
Grøndahl’s catalog includes numerous orchestral and chamber works, but only the Trombone Concerto, a product of the years immediately following his formal training, has remained in the international repertory. It is indeed one of the few trombone concertos with a distinctly Romantic vibe, the vast majority of the instrument’s works having been composed from the mid-20th century onwards.
The concerto is by and large structured traditionally—a sonataform first movement, three-part second movement, and a rondo to conclude—but it is in no way reactionary. The orchestration is unusual in that it sports a prominent part for the piano, used with extraordinary effectiveness in the second movement, and Grøndahl’s harmonic language often reflects the influences of his teacher Carl Nielsen as well as contemporaries such as Maurice Ravel. One particularly modernist aspect is a notable economy of means; it makes its points neatly and concisely and eschews the prolixity so
characteristic of late Romanticism. Both of the first two movements limit themselves to two clearly delineated themes each, and the finale’s final introduction refers back to the first movement’s primary theme.
Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, “Jupiter” (1788)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart b January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria d December 5, 1791 in Vienna, Austria
Much of our first-hand documentation regarding Wolfgang Mozart’s life and times comes from his extraordinary correspondence with friends, colleagues, and above all his father Leopold. Alas, the letters slowed after Leopold died in 1787, then during the summer of 1788 they almost stopped altogether. That’s just when Mozart was composing a triptych of symphonies—39, 40, and 41—that would prove to be his last. So we don’t know very much about their gestation, except that Wolfgang wrote all three within a
span of two months, a compositional speed record if ever there were. Nor do we know why Mozart wrote the symphonies, although he might have been planning a brief tour that didn’t pan out. And contrary to those sad little stories that he went to his grave without having heard them performed, the odds are good-toexcellent that he heard at least two, if not all three of them, well before December 1791 rolled around.
The “Jupiter” provides a prime example of what is sometimes called the “Festive C Major Symphony,” all ablaze with fanfares, trumpets, and drums. But it covers a wide range of moods and emotions. In the glittering opening movement Mozart even tosses in a cute little bunny-rabbit tune that he had written as an ‘insertion aria’ for Pasquale Anfossi’s recent comic opera Le gelosie fortunate
The suavely elegant second movement offers rounded melodic contours and courtly pauses before
giving way to a dramatic middle section, after which the elegant punctilio resumes. Even if the third movement is superficially an orthodox Minuet and Trio, it has a tomboy edge to it, athletic, spunky, bordering on rowdy. Only during its Trio does it take on the demure composure of your basic Classical minuet.
And then, the finale. Mozart’s study of Baroque counterpoint came to fruition in a dazzling tour de force that threads a number of followthe-leader imitative passages into its overall tapestry. Mozart withholds his biggest surprise for the very end: he lines up all of the movement’s melodies and, as it were with a flick of a finger, sets them charging along a steeplechase to a riotously thrilling close, one of the most celebrated endings in all symphonic music.