Festival Opening
Tuesday - August 3, 8:00 pm

James Ehnes, Violin
Key - Star Spangled Banner
Dvorak - Carnival overture, op. 92
Dvorak - Violin Concerto, op. 53, A minor
Schumann - Symphony no. 3, op. 97, E-flat major (Rhenish)

This concert is sponsored by OC & Pat Boldt

Program 1

Carnival Overture, Op. 92
Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904)

Composed in 1891.
Premiered on April 28, 1892 in Prague, conducted by the composer.

In his study of the composer, John Clapham indicated that Dvorák intended the triptych of overtures he composed in 1892 and originally titled Nature, Love and Life to represent “three aspects of the life-force’s manifestations, a force which the composer designated ‘Nature,’ and which not only served to create and sustain life, but also, in its negative phase, could destroy it.” More specifically, Otakar Sourek noted that they depicted “the solemn silence of a summer night, a gay whirl of life and living, and the passion of great love.” Dvorák linked the three works by employing a motto theme representing Nature that appears in all of them, and he further pointed up their relationship by, at first, giving them a common opus number. He had difficulty settling on titles for the individual movements, however, arriving at the names In Nature’s Realm, Carnival and Othello (and three separate opus numbers) only after much consideration. The cycle was written between March 1891 and January 1892 in Prague and at the composer’s country home in Vysoká; Carnival was sketched during July and August, and completed on September 12th.

While he was composing these works, Dvorák was invited by Mrs. Jeanette Thurber to take up residence in the United States and become director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, an offer that he accepted to begin the following year. The joint premieres of the overtures, under the composer’s direction in Prague on April 28, 1892, therefore became part of his farewell concert in that city. Appropriately, he next conducted them at his first New York appearance, in Carnegie Hall on October 21st, a program that also included America sung by a chorus of 300 voices, Anton Seidl directing Liszt’s Tasso, and a new setting of the Te Deum, written specially for the occasion by Dvorák — all of which was prefaced with a stretch of grand oratory delivered by one Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson on the subject of “The New World of Columbus,” who, it was remarked, had thoughtfully discovered the continent exactly four centuries before the composer’s arrival. A great success was proclaimed for the evening and the honored visitor alike.

Dvorák said that the Carnival Overture was meant to depict “a lonely, contemplative wanderer reaching at twilight a city where a festival is in full swing. On every side is heard the clangor of instruments, mingled with shouts of joy and the unrestrained hilarity of the people giving vent to their feelings in songs and dances.” Dvorák evoked this scene with brilliant music given in the most rousing sonorities of the orchestra. Into the basic sonata plan of the piece, he inserted, at the beginning of the development section, a haunting and wistful paragraph led by the English horn and flute to portray, he said, “a pair of straying lovers,” the wanderer apparently having found a companion. Following this tender, contrasting episode, the festive music returns and mounts to a spirited coda to conclude the Overture.

Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53
Antonín Dvorák

Composed in 1879; revised in 1880 and 1882.
Premiered on October 14, 1883 in Prague, with Frantisek Ondrícek as soloist and Maric Anger conducting.

When the popularity of his 1878 Slavonic Dances rocketed Dvorák to international fame, he suddenly found himself welcome in the most august musical company. Liszt, the renowned Viennese critic Hanslick, Brahms — who had recommended the young composer to his publisher Simrock — and the violinist Joseph Joachim were among his new friends. Joachim premiered Brahms’ Violin Concerto in January 1879, and Dvorák, perhaps under its influence and certainly spurred on by Simrock, decided to try a similar composition of his own. As a trial for the larger work, he composed the short Mazurek, Op. 49 for solo violin and orchestra in February 1879. He brought the Concerto to his desk in July, and by September, he was able to send the first version of the score to Joachim for his criticism.

Joseph Joachim, perhaps the most distinguished violinist of the time in Europe and, in that age of fustian virtuosi, one of the few dedicated to the highest musical standards, had been performing Dvorák’s recent chamber music with his ensemble. His advocacy of the Sextet (Op. 48) and the E-flat Quartet (Op. 51) did much to establish the composer’s reputation in Vienna and elsewhere. Joachim had been of inestimable help to Brahms during the composition of his Violin Concerto in 1878, and he offered similar assistance to Dvorák. Though Dvorák had studied the violin and performed in the orchestra of the Czech National Theater from 1866 to 1873, he welcomed Joachim’s advice on the finer points of string technique and concerto composition. Unfortunately, Joachim could not generate much enthusiasm for the new work, and he invited Dvorák to Berlin to discuss his suggestions for its improvement. After Dvorák made the journey, he wrote to Simrock on May 9, 1880, “At Mr. Joachim’s suggestion I have revised the whole Concerto, leaving not a single bar untouched. I have kept the main themes and added a few new ones, but the whole conception of the work is different; harmonies, rhythms, orchestration are all changed.”

The revision was dutifully dispatched to Joachim, who, reluctant to again express his disappointment, did not mention the Concerto for two full years. Finally, on August 14, 1882, he sent Dvorák a letter of lukewarm praise in which he wrote that, though he (Joachim) had made the solo part more practicable, he still considered the work not ready for public performance. Once more, he asked the composer to come to Berlin for a conference. This second evaluation included a run-through of the score by Joachim and the student orchestra of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, following which Dvorák made a large cut in the finale and, again, retouched the solo part.

Joachim was still dissatisfied. In the Concerto’s structure, Dvorák had joined together the first two movements. Joachim thought that they should be separated, but the composer remained adamant on the work’s form. The score was completed with the intention that Joachim would give the premiere in November, but he did not play it on that occasion or any other. The honor of the first performance fell instead to Frantisek Ondrícek the following year, when Dvorák’s intuition about the work’s form and content were proven correct. The Concerto was immediately successful and has remained one of his most popular scores.

Dvorák composed his Violin Concerto during the first flowering of his representative Czech style. His biographer Otakar Sourek wrote, “The national character of Dvorák’s music became strongly marked when he began to make his appeal outside his own country, and felt impelled to emphasize his national origins and characteristics. This was about the beginning of 1878.” In this Concerto, Dvorák was influenced by several facets of the Czech personality — the blending of sadness and determination in the first movement, the tenderness of the second and the boisterous peasant joy of the finale. The main theme group of the Concerto’s first movement comprises a bold, almost tragic, opening statement, a lamenting phrase with a prominent triplet rhythm presented by the soloist and (after a repetition of the first two motives) a lyrical woodwind strain above a simple string accompaniment. These three motives are treated at some length before the smoothly flowing second theme is introduced as a duet for oboe and solo violin. The development section is a challenging exercise in broken chords for the soloist. The recapitulation is greatly truncated, and brings back only the lamenting theme from the exposition. A delicate woodwind chorale leads without pause to the second movement, a song of sweet nostalgia sung by the soloist. The bucolic mood is twice interrupted by stern proclamations from the orchestra. The finale is a scintillating rondo whose main theme resembles the fiery Czech dance, the furiant.

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 97, “Rhenish”
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Composed in 1850.
Premiered on February 6, 1851 in Düsseldorf, conducted by the composer.

Robert Schumann arrived in Düsseldorf on September 2, 1850 to assume his new duties as conductor of the local orchestra and choral society. He seemed pleased with the situation: the musical forces were skilled enough to present an annual music festival that had been conducted by such luminaries as Mendelssohn; Schumann’s home life with his beloved wife, Clara, was happy; he had been composing a steady stream of new music for nearly two decades; and his position offered him the chance to live in the heart of the Rhineland, on the legendary river itself, a region for which he had harbored great fondness throughout his life. During the three months following his move to Düsseldorf, he wrote two important works — the Cello Concerto and the “Rhenish” Symphony.
The immediate inspiration for the Symphony came from the Schumanns’ visit to Cologne on September 29, 1850. The city and its great cathedral, still incomplete centuries after its inception, made such a powerful impression on the composer that he determined to write a work which, he said, “mirrors here and there something of Rhenish life.” Though he provided only the fourth of the Symphony’s five movements with a programmatic title, the second and last movements probably reflect the spirit and style of peasant dances, while the first shows the confidence and joy Schumann felt in his new surroundings and the third the deep contentment he found in living close to the Rhine. The fourth movement was originally titled, “In the character of an accompaniment to a solemn ceremony,” though Schumann later deleted the heading, saying that “the general impression of a work of art is more effective [than a specific extra-musical reference].” This great movement, which stands at the pinnacle of Schumann’s symphonic achievement, grew from the ritual that the composer observed at the Cologne Cathedral on November 12, 1850, when Archbishop von Geissel was elevated to the rank of Cardinal. So overwhelmed was Schumann with the magnificent service in that great church that he produced what English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey later dubbed “one of the finest pieces of ecclesiastical polyphony since Bach.” Schumann, who revered and studied Bach’s music for all of his life, would have been immensely pleased with Tovey’s evaluation.
The opening movement of Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony launches without introduction into its main theme. This striding melody, characterized by its buoyant syncopations and bright vitality, precedes a vigorous scalar motive and a lyrical second theme, all of which are combined with considerable craft in one of Schumann’s most elaborate developmental sections. The second movement, notable for its rich harmonic palette and its two-trio structure, resembles a slow Ländler, the peasant dance that was the forerunner of the waltz. The brief third movement, only 54 measures long, is a songful interlude similar in spirit to the many mood paintings that abound in Schumann’s works for solo piano. The penultimate movement is the composer’s depiction of the majestic ceremony in Cologne Cathedral. Its mystical atmosphere is as much the product of its exquisite sonority — horns and bassoons enhanced by the noble voices of the trombones, heard here for the first time in the Symphony — as of its strict contrapuntal style. The finale exudes the aura of a folk festival, as though Schumann had left the misty Gothic interior of the Cathedral to find a sun-lit square filled with carnival revelers immediately outside. At the climax of the movement, the Cathedral music again bursts forth from the winds and brass, and the work closes with an energetic coda alluding to the theme of the first movement.