Concert Series IV, 2014-2015 Season
Festive Overture, Op. 96
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
The default image of Shostakovich is of a tortured soul, negotiating the deadly, cultural politics of Soviet Russia. This image is the truth, but not the whole truth. As a young man, Shostakovich was exceptionally brilliant, possessed of extraordinary musical gifts and a lively wit. He was interested in a wide variety of musical styles and genres, and was an enthusiastic experimentalist. In later life he never recovered the wild experimentation of his twenties, but frenzied high spirits are a hallmark of his style throughout his life—sometimes they are bitterly ironic, but sometimes they seem quite uncomplicated. One theory has it that Shostakovich’s creative process involved a lifelong alternation between relatively light and almost unbearably heavy works. This overture is uncomplicatedly light. It is an exhilarating sequence of brass fanfares, a carnival theme in the woodwinds, and a flowing melody for cellos and horn. It is also an example of his capacity to turn out high-quality music in a matter of days, being written on hasty commission in 1954 (a year after Stalin died) for a concert commemorating the anniversary of the October Revolution. Biographical evidence as well as the good cheer of this piece suggest that Shostakovich wholeheartedly supported the ideals of this revolution, but the overture serves quite happily as an opener for all kinds of festive occasions.
Piano Concerto
Vineet Shende (1972- )
For the very first time in its history, the Midcoast Symphony has commissioned a work and will be giving its world premiere in this concert. Vineet Shende, Associate Professor of Music at Bowdoin College, has written this piece for George Lopez and the orchestra in honor of our twenty-five years of existence, and we are honored and delighted to bring it to you. The anniversary has prompted Shende to think about the last twenty-five years of his own life, which take him back to his college years in Grinnell, Iowa. Thus the work begins with a musical picture of an iridescent orange flock of monarch butterflies clustering on a tree on campus. Bits of this picture keep showing up in different instruments as the movement progresses.
The second, slow, movement also begins with orange, in this case the warm orange of a Maine sunrise. The brightening of the light is suggested by the increase in the numbers and kinds of instruments used; this increase also reflects the orchestra’s growth in size and range over its lifetime. The third movement, a “rollicking scherzo,” as the composer calls it, brings us up to the present with our large and accomplished orchestra and the growth of Shende’s family to include two children. The bits of tune are quite simple, but the way they appear and disappear, as well as the infectious rhythm, may bring both happy children and the orchestra’s bright future to mind.
The Planets
Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
Although Gustav Holst studied at the Royal College of Music under British establishment figures like Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry (whose music survives today mainly in mainstream Protestant hymnbooks), his chief compositional influence was his peer Ralph Vaughan Williams (born in 1872). These two men shared with many late-nineteenth-century composers on the cultural “fringes” of Europe—that is, the parts neither German nor Germanified—the conviction that the folk tunes of their native land were the key to music that could best resist absorption into the German mainstream. Vaughan Williams actually collected songs. Holst did not, but the English folk song movement, which was also associated with an enthusiasm for amateur music making and a quasi-socialist political worldview, is important in understanding Holst’s context. (A.S. Byatt’s 2009 novel The Children’s Book offers a vivid account of this general milieu, if you’re interested.) Along with this immersion in the spirit of England, but equally in tune with his times, was Holst’s fascination with “Oriental” (or quasi-Eastern) mysticism. He was very interested in Hindu philosophy, even to the point of learning some Sanskrit and writing some works related to Hindu literature; in addition, his stepmother was a Madame-Blavatsky-following theosophist.
Both the English folk song movement and exotic mysticism are evident in The Planets. The former is most obvious in “Jupiter,” whose big tunes, played in unison between the strings and brass, seem to figure the god as a stout English squire striding through his fields in wellies with a brace of hounds at his heels. (Holst himself referred to the main tune as “a musical embodiment of ceremonial jollity.”) The latter is most evident in “Neptune”: not only does the title “Neptune, the Mystic” indicate this, but the fragmentary and ethereal melodies and the extraordinarily gossamer orchestration suggest an incorporeal world of pure spirit. However, “Venus,” “Saturn,” and “Uranus” all have elements that point in the same direction.
The Planets is a relatively early work in Holst’s output. It was written between 1914 and 1916, and given a couple of partial private premieres before its first complete public performance in 1920. It was immediately and hugely popular, both with the usual concert-going crowd and with a broader audience. Holst himself moved away from the style and preoccupations of this work almost as soon as it was finished, but in a sense the success of The Planets dogged him for the remainder of his years, as every new work was judged against this one. The work has continued to be a staple of the popular-classical repertory, and has made it into the actually-popular realm with versions and references by Led Zeppelin; Emerson, Lake and Powell; and Manfred Mann among many others. There are numerous brass and concert band versions, and even without actual quotations, one can hear clear references to it in John Williams’ score for Star Wars, for example.
The work is neither a programmatic description of the physical planets, nor of the Classical gods after whom they are named. Rather it is an exploration of the astrological characters of the planets, albeit not in normal astrological order. Musicologist Richard Greene further suggests that the astrological meaning (which is indubitable, since we know which astrological manual Holst was consulting) is only a metaphor for the psychological journey enacted by the music, from the extreme physicality—even brutality—of “Mars” to the other-worldly spirituality of “Neptune.” Regardless of the underlying story, in many ways the most striking musical feature of this work is the way Holst deploys the orchestra. His original scoring is for a gargantuan ensemble—two sets of timpani, two harps, ten different percussion instruments not including the timpani, and so forth. We are doing a somewhat reduced version, but even so, the colours are really the point of this music, which does not treat the material like a Beethoven symphony would, changing and developing it and making the music move palpably toward a goal. Rather Holst’s material tends to be repeated without much structural change and not to give a clear sense of beginning-ness, middle-ness and end-ness. As a listener you simply inhabit the musical scenery Holst has laid out for you, rather than anticipating what might come next and why. The enduring popularity of this piece suggests that Holst was really on to something about how we like to listen, whether or not we care about the astrological solar system.
© Mary Hunter