2010
Mimir Chamber Music Festival Program Notes
Mimir Chamber Music Festival 3:00 PM Sunday July 11, 2010 Pepsico Recital Hall at TCU Fort Worth, Texas
Program notes by Stephen Seleny
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
Sergei Rachmaninov attempted to write a string quartet twice, and each time he completed only two movements. Clearly his natural instincts and musical talents drew him toward the piano – of which instrument he was a master of the first order – and toward piano concertos and orchestral compositions. He wrote some intimate songs, a superb sonata for cello and piano, and other smaller works -- but it seems that the intimate scale of the sting quartet did not suite his taste. Indeed, Rachmaninov was a full-blooded Romantic, one of the last representatives of that epoch.
Rachmaninov came from a musical family. At age 16 he won the Gold Medal of the Moscow Conservatory. By that time he was a wonderful pianist and also a budding composer, recognized by his peers as a superb talent. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
The music of Dmitri Shostakovich is tart and acrid. It is full of biting humor and when it speaks to the heart it does so with a curious, bitter tone. Shostakovich was a prolific composer. He wrote 15 symphonies, numerous concertos, and stage works. He also penned 15 string quartets, but only one quintet with piano. It is probably the chamber music of Shostakovich that best reveals his innermost feelings, because in this medium he could escape, to a limited degree at least, the ever-critical eyes of Soviet authorities. By any measure, Shostakovich is a controversial composer. His technical genius allowed him to write on the grandest scale with the smallest of motifs. That his music is consistently of high quality and always of interest is also undeniable. However, what he meant with his music is a topic of heated debate. It must be noted that although Shostakovich was not Jewish, he was influenced by Jewish music and quite often incorporated its sad melodies and sarcastic dance tunes into his compositions. Many of those who knew him best also experienced firsthand the terror of Stalin and the calculated cruelties of communism – musicians like Vladimir Ashkenazy and Mstislav Rostropovich. For them, Shostakovich’s grotesque scherzos, painful distortions, and occasional premeditated numbness (bordering on intensely expressive emptiness) are scathing depictions of his inhuman environment and portraits of people who made his life miserable. For others – mostly (perhaps typically and naïvely) American scholars – this is nonsense, because they believe that Shostakovich was a dedicated servant of the communist state. One can draw all kinds of conclusions from these contradictory stances, but this is not the appropriate place to do so. The writer of these notes – a young student of music at that time – had only one occasion to observe Shostakovich, from a respectful distance, at a reception held in his honor. It was strikingly memorable that during that occasion, full of merriment, a smile never crossed his stone-frozen, harsh-edged face. One only needs to read Testimony, the quasi-memoirs actually written by Solomon Volkov, to glimpse what Yehudi Menuhin called “tragic horror of a trapped genius”, and to understand that just about everything Shostakovich composed had both an official and a hidden meaning.
Shostakovich wrote with lightning speed. “I think long: I write fast”, as quoted by his son Maxim, an excellent musician himself. This Concertino was written for Maxim in 1954 when he was still a student at the Moscow Conservatory. Although this is not one of Shostakovich’s truly significant compositions, it is a mature work. It is immediately engaging, beginning with an introductory dialogue between the two pianos, followed by a virtuoso part with an easy melody. The slow introductory music returns in the middle and again just before the end, but the entire lighthearted concertino is dominated by the fast, engaging material introduced at the beginning.
György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Vivace: capriccioso
György Ligeti was a very complex man, one of the strangest characters in 20th century music. The general public knows him as the composer of music used in the soundtracks for some spectacular movies, including Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, in the world of professional music he is a prototypical “experimenter”, who in spite of many brilliant creations did not settle into a single signature style. The writer of these notes can attest to the universally recognized fact that Ligeti had a brilliant mind. We were colleagues – students at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest from 1945 to 1956. Although I did not know him well (but then, who did?), I can recall many conversations – more precisely, torrents of words and ideas from him – that left me, and all those present, with a spinning head. Had he wished, Ligeti could have been a brilliant mathematician, or pursued just about any other intellectual field. He was a restless soul, impossible to satisfy, understanding that any musical or non-musical idea included its own question that could have more than one potential “solution”.
During those years he was under the influence of the music of Béla Bartók – all of us at the Academy were. Yet it was also the time when Bartók’s Third, Fourth, and Fifth Quartets were banned by the Stalinist authorities as “decadent”. But then, Andrei Zhdanov, the official theoretician of Stalin, declared to the delight of his master that even Brahms was a decadent enemy of the people because he was incapable of writing a single melody! So for Bartók to also be considered “decadent” by such super morons might be considered an odd kind of high praise. I will not waste words describing how much Ligeti hated such oppressive political ideas. When he (and I) escaped Hungary after the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he went to Cologne Germany, to join the group of experimenters that included Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. After our escape, we lost contact as our ways and lives parted, but I know that he had just as stormy a relationship with that group as he had with the Stalinist – and before that the fascist – authorities in Hungary (Ligeti was deported and his father and brother died at the hands of the fascists.) For instance, while at Cologne, as an intellectual exercise, he analyzed and tore apart one of the works of Boulez to demonstrate, to the composer’s annoyance, that Boulez did not follow his own stated theory in that composition. Needless to say, this was not a good way to make friends, though to Boulez’s credit, he not only forgave Ligeti, he also became a champion of his music.
I recall these events to demonstrate that the diversity of Ligeti’s music cannot be categorized as a single kind of music. He is not a modernist, he is not a serialist, his music is neither atonal or tonal; he is not this or that. He is none of these and all of them. He hated unifying theories of composition because he instantly and instinctively rejected their binding constrictions. To me he was a prime example of the ultimate “free soul”, a post-modern man who was willing to pay a very heavy price for his freedom.
Antonin Dvořák’s chamber music technique contrasts markedly with his symphonic style. His symphonies were guided by the classical tradition of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. In chamber music his own nature shines through more clearly, because in this medium – for whatever reason - he felt less restricted and freer to explore his own ideas. He was very comfortable with chamber music writing for he knew it from the inside as a fine player of the viola and the piano – in fact for a time, he earned his living by playing viola. Dvořák wrote fifty-two chamber works – a very significant part of his output. He produced them throughout his creative life, and most of these marvelous gems are strongly influenced by Bohemian folklore.
It would be superfluous to write a detailed analysis of these six movements. This is music of immediate appeal; the quickly changing moods engage the interest of the audience constantly, and need no verbal explanations. It is a favorite of performers. Nothing proves this statement more than the fact that none other than Johannes Brahms proofread the composition’s manuscript out of respect for his friend, Dvořák.
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