Alderley Edge Symphony Orchestra March 2019
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Capriccio Italien, Op. 45 (1880)
A host of composers wrote musical postcards from holidays in Italy, including Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Elgar, Richard Strauss and Tchaikovsky. The latter visited Rome in 1879 with his brother, following a less happy tour two years earlier to escape his calamitously ill-advised marriage and memories of a suicide attempt. Though he was scornful of Italian music, he pored over the works of Raphael (likening him to Mozart) and Michelangelo (Beethoven). The next January, he composed the Capriccio Italien within a week.
The fifteen-minute fantasy is an attractive tapestry of variously authentic folk tunes which had been encountered on holiday, though Tchaikovsky escaped Strauss' fate of being sued for plagiarism (the German carelessly used Funiculi Funicula in his tone poem Aus Italien without realising it was in fact a recently written song). Of the work's principal themes, only the opening bugle call (recalled from barracks adjacent to Tchaikovsky's hotel) and the closing tarantella have been formally identified as authentic. Between them lie a wealth of sparkling themes, most memorably an airy dance punctuated by bells and tambourines, which could plausibly have been lifted straight from a street band.
Dmitry Kabalevsky (1904-1987): Violin Concerto in C Major Op. 48 (1948)
1. Allegro molto
2. Andante cantabile
3. Vivace giocoso
Growing up in St Petersburg, a city which prided itself on its high culture, the young Kabalevsky was a brilliant polymath, excelling in mathematics, poetry, art and music. In later years, he became an enthusiastic Party member and a vocal establishment musical figure, fully embracing the aesthetic of music reflecting state policy and providing vocal support to officially sanctioned music education schemes. Unlike Shostakovich, his music is generally well mannered and easy on the ear, tending to look over his shoulder to the comfortingly familiar harmonies of a bygone age. The Violin Concerto, in the ultimate comfort-food key of C major, toed the Party line following the 1948 decree which condemned decadent modern 'formalism' and urged composers to write in a musical language readily accessible to the working man. The Concerto is therefore sunny and full of easily whistleable tunes.
The classically formed Allegro molto's sharp rhythms lilt along right from the opening trumpet summons, its march-like tread never wavering far from the path well-travelled. A momentarily unsettled Andante cantabile slow movement follows, in which a skittish dotted rhythm jumps around against a backdrop of a yearning string theme. The Vivace giocoso finale restores an air of light-hearted (almost circus) whimsy, with off-beats, drum rolls and comedy trumpet grace-notes seeing the concerto romp breathlessly to a vigorous conclusion.
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943): Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 (1940)
1. Non-allegro
2. Andante con moto (Tempo di valse)
3. Lento assai – Allegro vivace – Lento assai. Come prima – Allegro vivace
The Symphonic Dances are a world away from the unabashed Romanticism of Rachmaninov's famous earlier works, such as his much loved second piano concerto and symphony. His last years saw him pursue an exhausting series of tours as virtuosic piano soloist, including the UK in 1939-40, before his death from metastatic melanoma. After a long hiatus following the lukewarm receptions to his third symphony and fourth piano concerto, and the popular smirking at his work for its sentimentally retrospective tendencies, his final word in composition would prove to be his Symphonic Dances. Another constant concern was his daughter Tatania, living in Paris, who having “Managed to obtain a French passport and a driver’s license," grumbled Rachmaninov, "worries me no less than the war. I never felt she had any talent for driving”.
Originally entitled the Fantastic Dances, and with its three movements headed 'Noon', 'Twilight' and 'Midnight', the Symphonic Dances were composed in a flurry of inspiration in New York in summer 1940, with Eugene Ormandy's Philadelphia Orchestra in mind for the premiere. The work represents a summation of his late style, incorporating the melodic generosity of his earlier writing along with a modernist slant which looks Prokofiev squarely in the bespectacled eye. In this regard, the first movement, marked Non-allegro, features an extended folktune solo for the alto saxophone, a relative newcomer to the orchestra. A sense of tightly-sprung energy pervades the music, built from a three-note motif, despite the often chamber-like scoring. The movement's coda also features a deeply personal quotation from the composer's first symphony, the disastrous premiere of which had left him with such deep psychological scars that he had destroyed all copies of it (or so he thought – a copy turned up in Leningrad some years later). This reference would, in Rachmaninov's mind, have been the only trace of the symphony,
The Andante con moto second movement is a waltz, in place of the composer's trademark dreamy slow movement. It is anxiously melancholic in its unsettled, often spectral atmosphere. This is a lopsided and macabre waltz, rather than elegant genre of Strauss, punctuated by aggressive brass outbursts. The Finale uses both the Dies Irae (as had his second symphony and piano concerto) and an opposing theme lifted from his own All Night Vigil, accompanied by the word 'Alliluya' in the score. In quoting from his past and nodding to the future with the music's hints of jazz, Rachmaninov surely saw the Symphonic Dances as his last word, leaving the words 'I thank thee, Lord' at the bottom of the page.