PMF Program Notes - August 11, 2005

Program 5

Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra
Eduard Tubin (1905-1982)

Composed in 1948.
Premiered on July 19, 1948 in Rockport, Maine by Ludvig Juht and pianist Sofia Stumberg; orchestral version premiered on March 8, 1957 in Bogota, Colombia, conducted by Olav Roots with Manuel Verdeguer as soloist.

Eduard Tubin became one of Estonia’s leading musical figures during the brief time between the wars — 1918 to 1940 — that his native land lived free from Russian domination. Tubin was born in 1905 into a music-loving family in Kallaste, near Lake Peipus (on whose frozen surface Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod repelled the invading Teutonic Knights in 1242); Eduard learned violin, flute and balalaika as a boy. He began playing with the village band and making his first attempts at composition when he was ten, showing such musical promise that his father sold a calf at the local market to buy his son a piano. Tubin entered the Teachers College in nearby Tartu in 1920, playing in the school’s orchestra and occasionally being allowed to conduct its choir. In 1924, he went on to the Tartu Higher School of Music, where he studied composition with Heino Eller; his earliest preserved compositions, songs and piano pieces, date from 1925. Tubin conducted the Tartu Male Choir and taught at Nõo, a Tartu suburb, while continuing his studies, and he won a job as an accompanist and conductor at Tartu’s Vanemuine Theater after graduating in 1930. He built a solid reputation as an opera, ballet, concert and choral conductor during the following years, and began gaining notice for his compositions with his Second Symphony of 1937. He met Bartók and Kodály on a trip to Budapest in 1938, and was encouraged by them to research the folk music of his own country and consider incorporating its influence into his creative language; two years of field study of indigenous music resulted in Kratt (“The Goblin”), one of the first Estonian ballets.

After Estonia was again occupied by Russian troops, in 1940, Tubin was appointed to the faculty of the Tartu Music School and head conductor at the Vanemuine, and sent to Leningrad to be indoctrinated into Soviet musical life. He continued his work as well as possible during the war (he barely escaped injury when the theater was bombed during a performance of Kratt in early 1944), but he fled to Sweden with thousands of his compatriots just before the Soviets overran Tallinn in September 1944; Stockholm remained his home for the rest of his life. Soon after he arrived, Tubin helped organize the Stockholm Estonian YMCA Male Choir with some of his fellow exiles, and conducted the ensemble until 1959. In 1945, he accepted a position working in the archives of the historic Drottningholm Royal Court Theater that allowed him sufficient time to compose, and he thereafter devoted himself largely to creative work until his death in Stockholm in 1982, completing ten symphonies, concertos for violin, double bass, piano and balalaika, numerous independent orchestral compositions, two operas (whose premieres he returned to Estonia to supervise in 1969 and 1979), chamber works, choral numbers and piano pieces, many imbued with the spirit and sound of Estonian folk music. His importance in the musical life of his adopted country was recognized with the prestigious Atterberg Prize and membership in the Royal Swedish Music Academy. Familiarity with Tubin’s music remained largely confined to the Baltic countries until 1979, when the Estonian conductor Neeme Järvi began presenting his works internationally and recording them on a series of acclaimed releases.

Tubin composed his Double Bass Concerto in 1948 on a commission from the Estonian-born virtuoso Ludvig Juht (1894-1957), who played in the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1935 until his death and appeared frequently as a soloist. The Concerto comprises three movements, played without pause. The opening Allegro con moto is in two large structural chapters, each containing one section for the soloist and one for the orchestra. The main theme of the first section is presented by the bass above an anxious, syncopated accompaniment. Theme and accompaniment are given a feverish development in the following interlude, allowing the orchestra to unleash a power that is necessarily restrained when playing with the soloist. The movement’s second formal section begins with a more lyrical, slightly exotic melody in the bass, and gathers intensity as it leads to another intense orchestral episode. The central Andante is based on a broad, melancholy strain presented by the bass; a nervous, dotted-rhythm motive provides contrast. After the trombones recall the melancholy strain and the orchestra works it into a powerful climax, the soloist is allotted a difficult and lengthy cadenza as a bridge to the last movement. The tentative ideas that begin the finale, a brilliant showpiece for the virtuoso bassist, soon develop into a march-like theme, which is combined with transformations of the Andante melody as the movement unfolds.

Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

Composed in 1936.
Premiered on January 21, 1937 in Basle, conducted by Paul Sacher.

Bartók first met the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher in the summer of 1929, when they were both in Basle for performances by the International Society for Contemporary Music. In 1945, shortly after Bartók died, Sacher wrote this vivid description of his Hungarian colleague: “Whoever met Bartók, thinking of the rhythmic strength of his work, was surprised by his slight, delicate figure. He had the outward appearance of a fine-nerved scholar. Possessed of fanatical will and pitiless severity, and propelled by an ardent spirit, he affected inaccessibility and was reservedly polite. His being breathed light and brightness; his eyes burned with a noble fire.”

Bartók returned frequently and gladly to Basle, and he developed important associations in the city. The Basle chapter of the ISCM commissioned the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion from him in 1937. A year later, when the rise of the Nazis to power made life unendurable for him in Budapest (during the summer of 1937 he and Kodály, who had done more to unearth the treasury of Hungarian folksong than anyone else in that country’s history, were accused by Nazi sympathizers in the press of an “insufficiency of nationalism”), one of his greatest fears was that the manuscripts of some of his recent works would be destroyed in the imminent hostilities. He cataloged several of them, including his original score for the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and sent them to his friend and hostess in Basle, Mrs. Oscar Müller-Widmann, who guarded them until the end of the War. In the summer of 1939, Sacher, realizing the toll the political upheaval in Hungary was taking on Bartók’s creativity, put at his disposal a chalet at Saanen in the massif of Gruyère, near Fribourg in Switzerland, and commissioned him to write a new work for his chamber orchestra in Basle. Within just two weeks, Bartók had completed the Divertimento for Strings.

When Paul Sacher founded the Basle Chamber Orchestra in 1926, one of his purposes was to foster the performance of new music. To that end, he commissioned works from Stravinsky, Honegger, Strauss, Hindemith and other modern masters, and presented them for the first time on his concert series. In 1936, in honor of the orchestra’s tenth anniversary, he asked Bartók to write a piece, and Bartók responded with what has come to be regarded as one the greatest works of the 20th century — the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Though Bartók gave the celesta nominal prominence, he treated it as an equal to the other keyboard and percussion instruments, which include side drum with and without snares, cymbals, gong, bass drum, timpani, xylophone, harp and piano.

The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta draws on two of Bartók’s most characteristic compositional traits: the rigorous integration of form and the folksong inspiration of themes, harmonies and rhythmic devices. The first movement is a dense, chromatic fugue whose main subject shows the short, arch-shaped phrases, inflected modality and frequent returns to a central pitch encountered in the Hungarian peasant songs and dances to whose study Bartók devoted so many years of his life. This fugue, a modern revival of that most tightly integrated of all musical forms, is built entirely from its opening motive, undeflected by counter-subjects or episodes. The music starts quietly in the violas (on the note A), expands in tonal and dynamic range until it reaches a climax at the movement’s mid-point (on E-flat), and then recedes to its mysterious origin. (Careful listening reveals that the motive has a rising shape in the movement’s first half, and a descending one in the denouement.) As with many of the works of Bartók’s maturity, the movement shows an overall symmetry of form, coming to a center point and reversing its progress, mirror-like, to move to the end. One critic has compared this music’s structure to the opening and closing of a fan.

Bartók’s penchant for structural integration informs the thematic material of the second movement, a sonata form whose chromatic opening melody is derived from the fugue subject. The movement’s second theme, begun by the violins after a silence (a technique Bartók borrowed from Mozart), is built from a skipping motive in dotted rhythms. The development is richly contrapuntal (including a fugato section), enlivened by frequent meter changes and intriguing in its dialogue-antiphonal exchanges.

Filled with undefined twitterings and vague rustlings, the following Adagio is one of Bartók’s finest “night music” pieces, described by Lawrence Gilman as a “mystical nocturne, elemental and earth-born.” Like the opening fugue, it, too, is symmetrical in form (A–B–C–B–A), with each section demarcated by a tiny recall of the fugue theme. The “A” section contains high-pitched taps on the xylophone, timpani slides and a snapping, elaborately decorated melody from the viola. “B” is based on a winding melody suspended high in the violins, supported by a tremulous accompaniment in the low strings and rippling figurations from the celesta, harp and piano. The central, “C” section, during which the movement’s climax is achieved, employs a wide-ranging motive in a steady rhythmic gait. Of this intense, introspective movement John McCabe wrote, “Formally ... it demands a fast developmental follow-up, but emotionally one feels one would like to go away and not be disturbed for a while, to think about the implications of this haunting music.”

The finale, like the folk dances that Bartók knew so well, is built in several sections. After a few bars of preludial strumming, the vigorous main theme, yet another variant of the fugue subject, is presented by the violins and violas. This opening theme returns, in rondo fashion, throughout the movement to enclose the various formal episodes. The closing pages contain several tempo changes, coy and flirtatious in nature, before a brief, vivacious return of the opening theme brings this modern masterwork to its finish.

Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

Composed in 1915; revised in 1916, 1918 and 1919.
Premiered on December 8, 1915 in Helsinki, conducted by Robert Kajanus.

For the three years after he issued his brooding Fourth Symphony in 1911, Sibelius was largely concerned with writing program music: The Dryad, Scènes historiques, The Bard, The Océanides, Rakastava. He even considered composing a ballet titled King Fjalar at that time, but rejected the idea: “I cannot become a prolific writer. It would mean killing all my reputation and my art. I have made my name in the world by straightforward means. I must go on in the same way. Perhaps I am too much of a hypochondriac, but I cannot waste on a few ballet steps a motif that would be excellently suited to symphonic composition.” As early as 1912, he envisioned a successor to the Fourth Symphony, but did not have any concrete ideas for the work until shortly before he left for a visit to the United States in May 1914 to conduct some of his compositions at the Norfolk (Connecticut) Music Festival. (The Océanides was commissioned for the occasion.) He returned to Finland in July; war erupted on the Continent the next month. In September, he described his mood over the terrifying political events as emotionally “in a deep dale,” but added, “I already begin to see dimly the mountain I shall certainly ascend.... God opens the door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.” He could not begin work on the piece immediately, however. One of his main sources of income — performance royalties from his German publisher, Breitkopf und Härtel — was severely diminished because of the war-time turmoil, and he was forced to churn out a stream of songs and piano miniatures and to undertake tours to Gothenburg, Oslo and Bergen to pay the household bills.

Early in 1915, Sibelius learned that a national celebration was planned for his fiftieth birthday (December 8th), and that the government was commissioning from him a new symphony for the festive concert in Helsinki. He withdrew into the isolation of his country home at Järvenpää, devoted himself to the gestating work, and admitted to his diary, “I love this life so infinitely, and feel that it must stamp everything that I compose.” He had to rush to finish the work for the concert in December, even making changes in the parts during the final rehearsal, but the Symphony was presented as the centerpiece of the tribute to the man the program described as “Finland’s greatest son.” Sibelius’ birthday was a virtual national holiday, and he was lionized with speeches, telegrams, banquets, greetings and gifts; the Fifth Symphony, conducted by the composer’s close friend and artistic champion Robert Kajanus, met with great acclaim. The concert, which also included The Océanides and the two Violin Serenades, was given three additional times during the following weeks.

Though the Fifth Symphony pleased its first audience, it did not completely please its composer. Sibelius regarded it as one of his most important scores, and he expended enormous effort on polishing the work during the four years after its premiere. He first returned to the piece in 1916 with “a view to [its] still greater concentration in form and content.” This version, intended for a Stockholm performance in 1917 which was cancelled because of the deteriorating political situation, was first presented under Sibelius’ direction in Helsinki on December 14, 1916. Sibelius again took up the score in 1918, despite the miserable times spread throughout the country by the civil war that erupted in Finland in the wake of the Russian Revolution: the composer’s isolated home was broken into twice by combatants searching for weapons (Sibelius played piano during the episode to calm his family); his brother, a physician, was killed in the hostilities. Convinced by friends to move to the relative safety of Helsinki, Sibelius continued the Symphony’s revision, noting on May 20, 1918, “[It is] in a new form, practically composed anew; I work at it daily.” (The Sixth and Seventh Symphonies were first mooted that same year.) The Symphony No. 5 achieved its definitive form the following year, and was first heard in that version on November 24, 1919 in Helsinki; Sibelius conducted.

While working on the final revision of the Fifth Symphony, Sibelius wrote that the ending was “triumphal,” a description that seemed to invite programmatic interpretations of the score. When asked to be more specific, however, he said, “I do not wish to give a reasoned exposition of the essence of the Symphony. I have expressed my opinion in my works. I should like, however, to emphasize a point that I consider essential: the directly symphonic [i.e., abstract] is the compelling vein that goes through the whole. This in contrast to its being a depiction.” For the London premiere in 1921, he asked that a note appear in the printed program stating, “The composer desires his work to be regarded as absolute music, having no direct poetic basis.” Though no specific story or program can be reconciled with the Fifth Symphony, it is impossible to deny the life-giving, heroic optimism with which it ends, especially when compared with the introspective Symphony No. 4, so it is understandable that some critics and listeners heard here an affirmation of the human spirit at a time when the First World War was threatening the very foundations of Western culture. Time has not diminished the work’s overwhelming emotional impact.

Theorists have long debated whether Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony is in three or four movements; even the composer himself left contradictory evidence on the matter. The contention centers on the first two sections, a broad essay in leisurely tempo and a spirited scherzo, played without pause and related thematically. The opening portion is in a sort of truncated sonata form, though it is of less interest to discern its structural divisions than to follow the long arches of musical tension and release that Sibelius built through his masterful manipulation of the fragmentary, germinal theme presented at the beginning by the horns. The scherzo grows seamlessly from the music of the first section. At first dance-like and even playful, it accumulates dynamic energy as it unfolds, ending with a whirling torrent of sound. The following Andante, formally a theme and variations, is predominantly tranquil in mood, though punctuated by several piquant jabs of dissonance. “There are frequent moments in the music of Sibelius,” wrote Charles O’Connell about the Symphony’s finale, “when one hears almost inevitably the beat and whir of wings invisible, and this strange and characteristic effect almost always presages something magnificently portentous. We have it here.” The second theme is a bell-tone motive led by the horns that serves as background to the woodwinds’ long melodic lines. The whirring theme returns, after which the bell motive is treated in ostinato fashion, repeated over and over, building toward a climax until it seems about to burst from its own excitement — which it does. The forward motion abruptly stops, and the work ends with six stentorian chords, separated by silence, proclaimed by the full orchestra. “[This] is in many ways the most nobly imagined and nobly eloquent page that Sibelius has given us,” wrote Lawrence Gilman.