Concert IV, 2024-2025 Season

Ethereal Weaves of Air

Allegro furioso, from Sinfonietta no. 1                                               

Coleridge Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004)

Born in Winston-Salem NC to a musician mother, who named him after the African-British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor (whose Ballade this orchestra played in March), Coleridge Taylor Perkinson was clearly destined to be a composer. He was educated at the Manhattan School of Music and Princeton, and studied conducting at the Salzburg Mozarteum. He composed music for ballets, theatre and movies, many songs and choral pieces, and several pieces for orchestra, including two Sinfoniettas.  Tonight’s selection is the last movement of the first. Perkinson was equally comfortable in both classical and jazz styles, and this perpetual-motion Allegro furioso for strings combines a Baroque texture with jazzy syncopation.

Symphony no. 83 “La Poule”                                                             

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Haydn is often known as the “Father of the Symphony” which is only partly true. He is certainly the first composer whose symphonies remain in the repertory today, and probably the one whose symphonic output is both so large (107 symphonies, written between 1759 and 1795), charts such an extraordinary evolutionary path, and has been so influential on so many later composers. So even if other composers planted the seed of the genre, Haydn was the one who adopted it and raised it to the adulthood it has enjoyed ever since.

Haydn’s earliest 80 or so symphonies were written as more or less occasional entertainment for his employers, the Princes Eszterhazy and their entourages. The Eszterhazy establishment boasted an orchestra with some extraordinary players, and they served as a laboratory for Haydn’s endless experiments. Until the early 1780s, most of Haydn’s music was officially the property of the palace, so he did not have the option of making money from its publication. (Even so, pirate editions circulated round Europe, making money for their circulators, but not for Haydn). In 1781, Haydn was sufficiently famous that he could renegotiate his contract and offer his symphonies (and much else) to publishers. Hence the “Paris” symphonies, of which “La Poule” is one, which were written in Eszterháza, but for the grander orchestras of Paris.

Almost none of the nicknames for Haydn’s symphonies (the London, the Schoolmaster, the Drumroll, etc.) originated with Haydn. Some of them relate to a place, some to a now-hard-to-reconsruct allusion, and some to an actual musical feature. La Poule is one of the latter. “Poule” is French for hen, and in the first movement there are two ideas that easily evoke a chicken pecking at the ground. Both are in the first movement. One is the twitchy repeated-note idea that pervades the opening theme, and then comes to prominence in the oboe. The other is the second main idea, played by the strings. Over a tick-tock accompaniment in the second violins, the first violins peck at each note of the new tune.

The second movement explores several musical topics— the simple, almost hymn-like theme of the opening, the idea of elaborating that theme, the notion of sudden disruption (wait for it!), and then the musical representation of waiting while nothing happens. These ideas play with and against each other throughout. Haydn’s Minuets (often placed third, as here) range from courtly politesse to stomping country dances. This one can be heard as a courtly version of the stomp. The last movement is essentially a jig (2 big beats, each divided into three faster ones), and finishes this symphony, which started sternly in the minor, with a cheerful major-key romp.

Symphony no. 5                                                                                 

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Although Prokofiev began playing with elements of this symphony as early as 1934, it was actually written in 1944-45. By this time, Prokofiev had been  back in the Soviet Union for seven years, and had been awarded the Stalin Prize and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and was, like Shostakovich, accorded privileges not available to most people. One of these was a summer place in a retreat in Ivanovo; Prokofiev got a glassed-in terrace overlooking a pond, while Shostakovich, there at the same time, got a former henhouse. Prokofiev wrote the symphony first as a piano draft, encouraged by Dmitry Kabalevsky, and then praised by Shostakovich, among others.

Prokofiev himself conducted the first performance in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, in January 1945 and it was an instant success, both with the public and with the Soviet arbiters of taste. Musicologist Simon Morrison quotes pianist Sviatoslav Richter as describing the scene in almost religious terms: “The hall was probably lit as usual, but when Prokofiev stood up, it seemed as though the light poured down on him from on high. He stood there, like a monument on a pedestal.”  Following on this success, Serge Koussevitzky, the legendary conductor of the Boston Symphony, active proponent of Russian music, and longtime friend and patron of Prokofiev (who had played his piano concertos with the Boston Symphony in the 1920s and 30s) performed it in Boston later the same year.

The symphony nods to Shostakovich’s Fifth, which was composed seven years earlier. That is a work that many have interpreted as a complex response to the terrifying Soviet control of artistic production, and the devastating consequences that come with being excluded from the company of the “approved.” In 1944 Prokofiev had not been censored in the way that Shostakovich had been, though four years later, both composers were accused of “formalism” and “modernism.” In their respective Fifth symphonies, both composers use familiar “topics” — march, waltz, sentimental song, circus music — and structure their works in relatively familiar ways. Both composers use dissonance generously, but largely remain within a tonal framework (that is, listeners can mostly hear that a particular note feels like “home”). But Prokofiev has an unabashedly romantic side that is much rarer in Shostakovich. The sweeping tune in the first movement, and the lyrical moments of the third, slow, movement are very typical of this side of Prokofiev. And even the madcap circus of the second movement Scherzo, with its frenzied echoes of waltzes and its grotesquely mechanical moments lacks (to my ear at least) the bite of similar movements in Shostakovich.

© Mary Hunter 2024