Although music has often been described as a universal language, the way that it has been created, performed, and appreciated throughout history has been largely determined by geography, ethnicity, and social status. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, owing to large-scale immigration, the dissemination of sound recordings, and, most recently, the internet, the boundaries between music made by different people in the world have become extremely porous. 

Vivian Fung’s personal identity is as deeply layered as her music. Though her parents are Chinese, her central Canadian upbringing offered her scant contact with others who shared her ethnicity. The cultural milieu in which she immersed herself and excelled was Western classical music; her training culminated in a doctorate in composition from one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories, The Juilliard School. While her initial paucity of exposure to Chinese heritage was something she came to think of as a deficit, rediscovering Chinese traditional music inspired her Pizzicato (2001), recorded by the Ying Quartet, as well as her 2010-11 vocal composition Yunnan Folk Songs, given its première by Chicago’s Fulcrum Point New Music Project. It also led her to explore other Asian music, in particular music from Vietnam and the Indonesian islands Java and Bali. She has performed with Javanese and Balinese gamelan groups based in New York City and has also made several trips to Indonesia to study this music first hand. These experiences have left an indelible imprint on many of her compositions.

The Violin Concerto’s  genesis dates back to the première of her 2009 Piano Concerto, the first of her compositions to be commissioned and given its première by Metropolis Ensemble. For that performance, violinist Kristin Lee served as the concertmaster and at the time expressed interest in having Fung compose a concerto for her. In 2010, Lee accompanied Fung on a trip to Bali to gain a deeper understanding of the music that was so central to Fung’s compositional vocabulary. The intensely lyrical concerto that Fung ultimately composed for Lee shortly after their return directly resulted from that shared experience. The Violin Concerto is presented in one continuous movement with clearly audible boundaries between its various sections. The concerto begins serenely, the violin soloist hovering rhapsodically over bird-like sonorities in the strings. The next section is fast and propulsive, with the soloist still in the foreground, its initial rhythmic restlessness eventually settling into a thirteen-beat groove. This is soon followed by a less rhythmically driven passage dominated by ghost-like harmonics. This leads into another fast section filled with virtuoso violin pyrotechnics that eventually burst into a fiery, unaccompanied cadenza. Before the return of the orchestra, the violin soars to an extraordinary high note to which Fung affixes the instruction, “Play like a rock star.” What then ensues is perhaps the most harmonically dense passage of the entire composition; various tonalities collide as they vie for the listener’s attention. Amidst this polytonality, the violin soloist quotes a very famous Javanese folk-song that often opens gamelan performances, Puspawarna (Javanese for “kinds of flowers”), interrupted by various sections in the orchestra that reinvent this folk-song in very un-Javanese ways. Ultimately, however, the concerto returns to its initial tranquility, ending in much the same way as it began.

Credit – Frank J. Oteri

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Heather Schmidt’s unique dual talents as a pianist and composer have garnered praise from the press, describing her as “a brilliant virtuoso pianist”, “poised and utterly musical”, “a great artist”, and “as much a pianist in the professional sense as she is a composer”.

Her acclaim in both her native country of Canada and on the international musical scene comes from her many successes as a virtuoso soloist and composer including performances, broadcasts, commissions and awards in Canada, the United States, Russia, Finland, Iceland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, England, Cyprus, Mexico, Brazil, and the British West Indies.

Heather began studies in piano and composition at the age of 4, and composition at the age of 5. She pursued double majors in piano performance and composition throughout her musical education. She studied at Juilliard in New York City and at Indiana University, where, at age 21, she became the youngest student to receive a Doctor of Music degree.

Since these formative years she has received numerous accolades, including a nomination for the prestigious “Juno” award, the Canadian equivalent of the “Grammy”, in the category of “Best Classical Composition.” As a virtuoso soloist, she received First Place in the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, and First Place, the Audience Choice Award, and the Maestro’s Choice Millennium Foundation Award at the Canadian Concerto Competition. Composition awards include three consecutive Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) Awards, SOCAN Composer Awards, the Zwilich Prize in the International League of Women Composers Competition, the Juilliard Composers Competition, and the Dean’s Composition Prize at Indiana University.

As a virtuoso pianist, Heather excels in both traditional and contemporary repertoire, offering audiences her unique perspective on the standard repertoire of the past, her own works, and the works of other living composers. In addition to her solo recitals, she regularly performs as a guest soloist with orchestras, including exciting performances of her own six piano concertos. She is also a sensitive and much in demand chamber musician, especially well known for her long-time collaboration with Canadian cellist Shauna Rolston.

Heather’s performances and performances of her compositions have not been restricted to concert halls, and also include numerous television and recordings appearances. The first televised performance occurred when she was only 8 years of age. More recently, she appeared on the BRAVO Classical Now Series. Her most recent recordings include: Nebula, a CD of her piano performances of her own solo piano compositions on CMC Centrediscs; a CD of solo piano works by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel for the NAXOS label; “Shimmer”, a solo piano CD of works by various composers from Baroque through contemporary eras; and “Icicles of Fire”, a CD of works she composed and performs with cellist Shauna Rolston.

Heather’s extensive catalogue of concert music compositions includes works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestras as well as for vocal/choral genres. She has received commissions from prestigious sources such as the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation, WDR (Westdeutsches Rundfunk in Germany), the Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and the Harvard Musical Association.

At age 19, she was asked to write the required competition work for the 1995 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Since then this work that has been performed throughout North America and Europe. Ms. Schmidt has also composed imposed test pieces for other major competitions, including the CBC Young Performer’s Competition (Chaconne, 1999), the Ester Honens International Piano Competition (Nebula, 2006), and the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Piano Competition (Night Rainbow, 2007). She has held numerous composer residencies, including a long-term residency with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra.

As a composer of film, television and video games, Heather’s recent projects include Empire of the Sharks for SyFy channel, Jurassic School for Netflix, Break-Up Nightmare for Lifetime TV, Elvis Lives for AXS TV, the independent comedy feature How to Get Rid of a Body and Still Be Friends, and the video game Homesick.

In addition to being the composer, Heather also wrote and directed two short films – Midnight Violin, for BRAVO TV in Canada funded by BravoFACT, and The Uninvited Ghost. Heather is also the creator and co-executive producer of Animal Planet’s 2016 TV series Life at Vet U.

Heather’s creative interests have recently expanded to writing. In August 2018, she signed with literary manager Jeff Portnoy of Bellevue Productions as a screenwriter for film and TV. She also has aspirations as a writer of picture books and Young Adult novels.

Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Heather holds dual Canadian and American citizenship. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and her pets.

A huge animal lover, she has many rescues — three dogs, three cats, a pigeon and a horse (plus a few fish!). In 2016, she launched a nonprofit 501c3 dog rescue called Hollywood Huskies, which in its first two years has rescued over 120 dogs. In January 2018, she opened a sister not-for-profit husky rescue in her hometown of Calgary called Halo Husky Haven.

We’re thrilled to feature Heather’s Lunar Reflections as part of our October 19th concert.

Of all the great music composed in England during the past hundred years, few works have been either so popular or as enduring as Gustav Holst’s The Planets, yet with the exception of an important composition for strings, the St. Paul’s Suite, Holst’s music has vanished from the orchestral repertoire. How could this be? A composer with so much imagination and technical mastery must have written more than one major orchestral work, surely?

Well, yes and no. A great talent and a great spirit, Gustav Holst worked appallingly hard for all of his adolescence and the first twenty years of his adult life in the effort to make ends meet while he learnt how to compose as he wished. The scion of a family of professional musicians whose vocation went back for generations, Holst intended to be a concert pianist as his father had been before him, but severe nerve damage from a combination of practicing too much and semi-starvation left him permanently disabled. In 1893 Holst was accepted as a student at the Royal College of Music and nearly starved until he won an open scholarship in composition in 1895. Over the next few years Holst taught himself the trombone, in the rather naive hope that he could earn a living — to his delight, he did, becoming a trombonist in the Carl Rosa Opera Company and in the Scottish Orchestra. In 1903 Holst was offered a teaching position in the James Allen Girls’ School and gave up the trombone; two years later he became the Music Director of St. Paul’s Girls’ School as well; in 1907 he became Music Director at Morley College, holding all three positions until 1920. He learnt to compose in his spare time, slowly gaining experience and technical skill. His music began to make an impression in the London concert-halls, though much of his work was for chorus and orchestra, which rather limited its likelihood of performance on a regular basis. At about this time Holst acquired a close friend in Ralph Vaughan Williams and a patron for special events in H. Balfour Gardiner.

Holst’s increasing powers as a composer were reflected in the progression of works that occupied every moment of his spare time from 1905 to the onset of the First World War. A Somerset Rhapsody of 1910 marked the beginning of his real maturity, followed by the first group of hymns from the Rig Veda, and Beni Mora in 1912 and the Cloud Messenger in 1913. The Planets (1914-1916) and the Hymn of Jesus (1920) represented Holst at the very peak of his career.

Sadly, after that peak, there was a sharp falling away. Holst, searching for a new economy in his writing, began to pare his work down; deleting all unnecessary notes, he found a new austerity in his art that exactly captured within its reticulations all that he wished to express. His new music was intellectually rigorous, icily aloof, brilliantly executed. For the next ten years Holst devoted himself to writing in this new style, though audiences actively disliked it. The last years of his life were marked by a return to his warmer earlier style, but ill health interrupted his plans. His works from 1920 on are only rarely played to the present day. They are simply too forbidding.

As a composer, Gustav Holst was both a dreamer and a pragmatist. The inspirations for his compositions were often intuitive, even peculiar at first glance, yet somehow he always managed to make them work. His idea for The Planets came from a casual curiosity about astrology which simply grew. In 1914 he wrote, “As a rule I only study things that suggest music to me, that’s why I worried at Sanskrit (for the ‘Rig Veda’ hymns). Then recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely.”

Holst completed the first movement, Mars, in the summer of 1914 (coincidental, yet appropriate), Venus and Jupiter in the autumn, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune during 1915, and Mercury in 1916, the orchestration following apace. Written for a huge orchestra (with chorus), The Planets is nonetheless a work of great subtlety and elegance, even in its most ferocious moments.  The work was first played at a private performance in September 1918 by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra as a special gift to the composer by Balfour Gardiner. The first public performance took place on February 27th, 1919, to the beginnings of great acclaim.

The seven movements really require little in the way of explanation. The first, Mars, the Bringer of War, opens with a real sense of menace and soon builds to a frenzy of martial ferocity. The second movement, Venus, the Bringer of Peace, commences in a mood of cool serenity, into which a human warmth begins to obtrude. Mercury, the Winged Messenger, is in the form of an especially fleet scherzo with a wonderfully evocative trio. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, is arguably the best known and the most popular of all of the Planets, from its rollicking opening to its Elgarian central section. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age, was Holst’s personal favourite among the seven movements — the combination of suffering and menace creating an unforgettable effect. Uranus, the Magician, occupies the same ground as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the first Nachtmusik from Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. A brilliantly grotesque dance, wonderfully orchestrated, the movement ends with a sudden stillness which suggests the unwinking stillness of the night sky. The last movement, Neptune, the Mystic, though very quiet could well be the real core of the whole work. Uncanny, unforgettable, Neptune offers perhaps Holst’s personal glimpse into the infinite.

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Astor Piazzolla was fabulously talented, and that wealth of talent caused him some confusion as he tried to decide on a career path. Very early, he learned to play the bandoneón, the accordion-like instrument that uses buttons rather than a keyboard, and he became a virtuoso on it. He gave concerts, wrote film scores, and formed his own bands before a desire for wider expression drove him to the study of classical music. In 1954, he received a grant to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and it was that great teacher who advised him to follow his passion for the tango as the source for his own music.

Piazzolla returned to Argentina and gradually evolved his own style, one that combines the tango, jazz, and classical music. In his hands, the tango, which had deteriorated into a soft, popular form, was revitalized. Piazzolla transformed this folk dance into music capable of a variety of expression and sharply contrasted moods; his tangos are by turn fiery, melancholy, passionate, tense, violent, lyric, and always driven by an endless supply of rhythmic energy.

The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires is an unusual collection of individual tangos that form a remarkable whole. Its title (in Spanish, Las cuatro estaciones porteñas) needs to be understood carefully: cuatro estaciones is clear enough; it evokes The Four Seasons of Vivaldi. But the meaning of porteña (or porteño) is more elusive: it means “port” area, and it specifically has come to refer to the port area of Buenos Aires, where the tango was born. By extension, porteñas has come to mean anyone or anything native to Buenos Aires. And so a general translation of the title might be The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.

Las cuatro estaciones porteñas consists of four tangos that Piazzolla originally wrote for the small ensemble he led in Buenos Aires: violin, piano, electric guitar, bass, and bandoneón. Each tango depicts a different season in Buenos Aires, and Piazzolla wrote them over a period of time. The first, Summer (in Spanish, Verano porteño), dates from 1964, and the others followed over the next few years: Autumn (Otoño porteño) in 1969, and Spring (Primavera porteña) and Winter (Invierno porteño) in 1970. Piazzolla sometimes performed them as a group, and The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires

— by turns slinky, seductive, powerful, and haunting —

has become immensely popular. This music has been arranged for a variety of instruments, and it has become particularly famous in an arrangement by Leonid Desyatnikov for solo violin and string orchestra.

In this version, it becomes a sort of twentieth century Argentinian counterpart to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and those two works are sometimes performed together — like we will doing! 

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The Four Seasons (Italian: “Le quattro stagioni”) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written in approximately 1720 and were published in 1725 (Amsterdam), together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (“The Contest Between Harmony and Invention”).

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi’s works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music — music with a narrative element.

Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:

Spring (Concerto No. 1 in E Major)

               Allegro

Spring has arrived with joy

Welcomed by the birds with happy songs,

And the brooks, amidst gentle breezes, 

Murmur sweetly as they flow.

The sky is caped in black, and

Thunder and lightning herald a storm

When they fall silent, the birds

Take up again their delightful songs.

                Largo e pianissimo sempre

And in the pleasant, blossom-filled meadow,

To the gentle murmur of leaves and plants,

The goatherd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.

               Allegro

To the merry sounds of a rustic bagpipe,

Nymphs and shepherds dance in their beloved spot

When Spring appears in splendour.

Summer (Concerto No. 2 in G Minor)

               Allegro non molto

Under the merciless sun of the season

Languishes man and flock, the pine tree burns.

The cuckoo begins to sing and at once 

Join in the turtledove and the goldfinch.

A gentle breeze blows, but Boreas

Is roused to combat suddenly with his neighbour,

And the shepherd weeps because overhead 

Hangs the fearsome storm, and his destiny. 

               Adagio

His tired limbs are robbed of rest 

By his fear of the lightning and the frightful thunder

And by the flies and hornets in furious swarms.

               Presto

Alas, his fears come true: 

There is thunder and lightning in the heavens

And the hail cuts down the tall ears of grain.

Autumn (Concerto No. 3 in F Major)

               Allegro

The peasant celebrates with dancing and singing

The pleasure of the rich harvest,

And full of the liquor of Bacchus

They end their merrymaking with a sleep.

               Adagio molto

All are made to leave off dancing and singing

By the air which, now mild, gives pleasure

And by the season, which invites many

To find their pleasure in a sweet sleep.

               Allegro

The hunters set out at dawn, off to the hunt,

With horns and guns and dogs they venture out.

The beast flees and they are close on its trail.

Already terrified and wearied by the great noise

Of the guns and dogs, and wounded as well 

It tries feebly to escape, but is bested and dies.

Winter (Concerto No. 4 in F Minor)

              Allegro non molto

Frozen and shivering in the icy snow,

In the severe blasts of a terrible wind

To run stamping one’s feet each moment,

One’s teeth chattering through the cold.

               Largo

To spend quiet and happy times by the fire

While outside the rain soaks everyone.

               Allegro

To walk on the ice with tentative steps, 

Going carefully for fear of falling. 

To go in haste, slide, and fall down to the ground,

To go again on the ice and run,

In case the ice cracks and opens.

To hear leaving their iron-gated house Sirocco,

Boreas, and all the winds in battle—

This is winter, but it brings joy.

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Credit – Betsy Schwarm

While reading through your Opening Night program you may have noticed that we did a spotlight on one of our musicians. You know Brian Unverricht as a member of our trombone section and you may know that he does pre-concert chats for many of our concerts. If you have never attended a pre-concert chat we highly recommend it. In the lobby at TCU Place, Brian takes the time to dive into the music you are about to hear that evening. It is way more in-depth than we could ever go with our program notes, and he has a unique perspective as someone who plays, teaches, and enjoys the music he is talking about.

 

We asked Brian several questions so we could let you know more about him. His answers were so great we thought we should share them all. When we originally sent Brian these questions, we knew Brian had been a member of the SSO on and off for about 50 years. We were pretty close to the right number!

 

Brian: First of all, I haven’t been part of the SSO for 50 years, having missed the following seasons:
– 68-69 to go to school in the US
– 72-75 living in Australia and PEI
– 81-84 teaching in Germany DND schools
– 90-91 graduate school
Looks like I missed 9 seasons, meaning I first joined 52 years ago and have participated in 43 seasons.

SSO: What year did you join the SSO?

Brian: I joined for the 67-68 season, my first concert was Nov 12, 1967 in the Phys Ed gym on campus. The season ended with the gala performance of Orff’s Carmina Burana on April 1, 1968 to open the Centennial Auditorium.

We have the program in our archives and have uploaded a scan here.
On the program during Brian’s first SSO appearance:

Sunday, November 12, 1967 at 3:00pm University Gymnasium

First Concert – 1967-68 Season

David Kaplan, conductor

• • • • Overture: La Clemenza di Titto (K. 621) W.A. Mozart
      • Three Pieces for Orchestra (1961) Jean Papineau-Couture (SSO commission by Cosmopolitan Club of Saskatoon)
        • Prélude
        • Choral
        • Mouvement Perpétuel
      • Five Pieces for Strings (Op. 44/4) Paul Hindemith
        • Langsam (Slow)
        • Langsam – Schnell (Quick)
        • Lebhaft (Lively)
        • Sehr langsam (Very slow)
        • Lebhaft
      • Concerto No. 2 in B-flat for Piano and Orchestra (Op. 19) Ludwig van Beethoven

Marina Mdivani, piano

• • • • Allegro con brio
      • Adagio
      • Molto allegro

SSO: Do you remember the feeling of playing in your first SSO concert?

Brian: I was somewhat overwhelmed at the first rehearsals, but pleased to be part of the orchestra, and just a little nervous before the concert. The actual concert went very well.

SSO: Before being awarded a position, had you played with the SSO as an extra?

Brian: That first year David Kaplan simply rounded me up from music theory class and invited me to participate.

SSO: What is the best advice you have ever received in your career?

Brian: Strive to be an all-round musician, as there is something to be learned from every genre and every excellent player/singer/conductor no matter what. I especially remember attending a cello masterclass with Janos Starker early in my Sydney days. I only went because my girlfriend wanted to go, but I may have learned more about performing than she did!

SSO: Who do you consider to be your mentors and inspirations?

Brian: I’ve had many – from my very first piano lessons with my grandma to masterclasses and conducting seminars. My main influence and mentor was my private trombone teacher in Sydney, Australia. Baden McCarron played with the other SSO (Sydney Symphony Orchestra), and I studied with him in his studio out in his back yard.

SSO: What’s one of your favourite memories of playing with the SSO?

Brian: My first highlight that helped set everything in motion was opening the auditorium. I was entranced by the power and variety of Orff’s music and the spectacular setting of the auditorium – quite an improvement over the gym.

SSO: What is your favourite piece of music that you have performed with the SSO?

Brian: I have so many it’s impossible to choose one. There have been innumerable great works of music over the years.

SSO: Most memorable overall concert program?

Brian: Carmina Burana

SSO: Any prominent rehearsal memories?

Brian: Originally we rehearsed in Convo hall every Monday night. Having an actual rehearsal space made such a positive difference. There have been struggles with musical techniques and struggles with conductors, but in the end, it’s the music that counts.

SSO: Favourite guest artist?

Brian: European opera singer Jon Vickers, originally from Prince Albert.

 

SSO: Whose names stand out in a positive light in your history with the SSO?

Brian: Certainly David Kaplan for me, personally, as he got me started in the SSO. He was a unique character (to say the least) in class and all musical endeavours – quite a role model. Over the years I have enjoyed making music with an incredible variety of orchestral buddies.

SSO: Why did you choose your instrument and what do you love about it?

Brian: A town band was formed in Grenfell when I was in grade 9. At first I selected the baritone horn, but tried a trombone a couple of years later at band camp and loved the glissando effects, so I used money from my paper route to buy my first trombone. Some say the trombone is the “voice of God”, and that may be a slight exaggeration, but I do love the expressive possibilities from classical to avant garde to jazz to Klezmer, both serious and comic.

SSO: What do you enjoy most about creating and providing the pre-concert chats?

Brian: I have always been interested in the structure, format, and theory behind the music and really enjoy searching out composer information – their priorities, techniques, historical placement, personal lives. At every concert I learn something new.

SSO: What projects are you working on outside of your work with the SSO?

Brian: I perform with several other music groups, arrange music on Finale, strive to hit a golf ball straight, and keep a garden in my back yard.

SSO: What is your favourite non-musical pastime?

Brian: Travel – and this always includes a multitude of culturally related activities.

 

 

It was Victor Herbert, the composer of Babes in Toyland and Naughty Marietta, who inspired Dvořák to write the most beloved cello concerto in the repertory. We owe this historical curiosity, along with some of Dvořák’s most popular music, to Jeannette M. Thurber, the wife of a New York wholesale grocer, who exhausted her husband’s millions establishing an English-language opera company that folded and a National Conservatory of Music that flourished long enough to entice Dvořák to settle temporarily in the New World. The composer agreed to serve as director of her school for $15,000, and when he arrived in 1892, Victor Herbert was the head of the cello department. Herbert, who had come to the United States from Vienna only six years before, was highly regarded as a cellist, conductor, and composer, though he hadn’t yet written the first of the forty operettas that would make him enormously popular.

In 1892, Dvořák was as famous as any composer alive. Taking on an administrative title and a heavy teaching schedule was probably an unfortunate waste of his time and talents, although the music Dvořák wrote in this country includes some of his best: a string quartet and a string quintet (both titled American) composed in Spillville, Iowa; the New World Symphony; and this cello concerto.

For several years Dvořák had been unmoved by a request from his friend Hanuš Wihan, the cellist of the Bohemian Quartet, to write a cello concerto. During his second year at the National Conservatory, Dvořák attended the premiere of Victor Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto, given by the New York Philharmonic on March 9, 1894. It is difficult today to know why this long-forgotten score made such a deep impression on him, for Herbert was hardly an overwhelming or influential talent. But Dvořák enthusiastically applauded Herbert’s concerto, and he heard something in it that made him think, for the first time, that there was important music to be written for solo cello and orchestra. This concerto would prove to be the last major symphonic work of his career.

On April 28, 1894, Dvořák signed a new two-year contract with the conservatory. After spending the summer holiday in Bohemia, he returned to New York on November 1; a week later he began this concerto. While he was writing the second movement, he received word that his sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzová (with whom he had once been in love), was seriously ill. As a tribute to her, he quoted at length one of her favorite melodies, “Kéž duch můj sám” (Leave me alone), the first of his Four Songs, op. 82. He completed the concerto on February 9 (his son Otakar’s tenth birthday), at 11:30 in the morning.

After the premiere of the New World Symphony in 1893, Dvořák said, “I know that if I had not seen America I never would have written my new symphony.” The cello concerto shows no such outward signs of the composer’s American experience—it doesn’t imitate the rhythms and melodies of the native music he heard in the United States—and has often been accepted as an early warning sign of his 2 homesickness. In fact, once Dvořák returned to Bohemia for the summer of 1895, with his new concerto in his bags, he realized that he couldn’t leave his homeland again; in August he wrote to Mrs. Thurber asking to be released from his contract. Since he had already contributed so much to American music, including a symphony as popular as any ever written, she could not refuse. The unveiling of the cello concerto, the last of Dvořák’s American products, belongs to the final chapter of his life: the premiere was given in London in March 1896, with the composer conducting. (The first American performance was not given until December.)

The literature for solo cello and orchestra isn’t extensive. At best, Dvořák can’t have known more than the single concertos by Haydn (a second was discovered in 1961) and Schumann, the first of Saint-Saëns’ two, and Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations for cello and orchestra. (He also knew the Triple Concerto by Beethoven and the Double Concerto by Brahms.) Dvořák had written one long-winded cello concerto in his youth and later said he thought little of the cello as a solo instrument (“High up it sounds nasal, and low down it growls”). Now, with little previous inclination and few useful models, Dvořák gave the form its finest example. Brahms is reported to have said, “Why on earth didn’t I know that one could write a cello concerto like this? Had I known, I would have written one long ago.”

The first movement of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto is as impressive as anything in the composer’s output. The music is long and expansive. The orchestral exposition commits the textbook sin of traveling to a foreign key for the second subject — a luxury traditionally saved for the soloist — but Dvořák’s theme is so magnificent (Donald Tovey called it “one of the most beautiful passages ever written for the horn”) that it can justify the risk. Dvořák later admitted the melody meant a great deal to him. Once the soloist enters, the music grows richer and more fanciful. The development section dissolves into simple lyricism. By the recapitulation, Dvořák is writing his own rules: he bypasses his first theme and goes straight for the big horn melody, as if he couldn’t wait to hear it again. The movement is all the stronger for its daring and unconventional architecture.

Dvořák’s progress on the slow movement was sidetracked by the memory of Josefina, and, as a result, the music he wrote is interrupted midway by the poignant song she loved. The depth of his feeling for her, often debated and sometimes denied, is painfully clear. Josefina died soon after Dvořák permanently returned to Bohemia, and, hearing the news, he took this jaunty rondo finale down from the shelf and added a long, contemplative coda as a memorial. The concerto still ends in high spirits, but it’s no longer the same piece Dvořák took home from the New World.

Dvořák began his cello concerto in New York on November 8, 1894; he completed the score on February 9, 1895 (at 11:30 A.M.), revised the ending that June, and conducted the first performance, with Leo Stern as soloist, on March 19, 1896, in London. Performance time is approximately forty minutes.

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I shall never write a symphony!

Brahms famously declared in 1872. “You can’t have any idea what it’s like to hear such a giant marching behind you.” The giant was Beethoven, of course, and although his music provided essential inspiration for Brahms, it also set such a high standard that the younger composer found it easy to discount his own creations as negligible in comparison.

Four more years passed before Brahms would finally sign off on his First Symphony. But once he had conquered his compositional demons he moved ahead forcefully. Three symphonies followed that first effort in relatively short order: the Second in 1877, the Third in 1882–83, and the Fourth in 1884–85. Each is a masterpiece and each displays a markedly different character. The First is burly and powerful, flexing its muscles in Promethean exertion; the Second is sunny and bucolic; and the Third, while introspective and idyllic on the whole, mixes in a hefty dose of heroism. With his Symphony No.4, Brahms achieves a work of almost mystical transcendence born of opposing emotions: melancholy and joy, severity and rhapsody, solemnity and exhilaration.

Clara Schumann recognized this play of duality already in the first movement, observing

It is as though one lay in springtime among the blossoming flowers,

and joy and sorrow filled one’s soul in turn.

Brahms was well aware of his distinct achievement in this work. He composed it during two summer vacations at Mürzzuschlag in the Styrian Alps — the first two movements in the summer of 1884, the second two in the summer of 1885. On many occasions he was known to suggest that his compositions reflected the places in which they were written, and in this case he wrote from Mürzzuschlag to the conductor Hans von Bülow that his symphony-in-progress “tastes of the climate here; the cherries are hardly sweet here — you wouldn’t eat them!” Brahms was given to disparaging his works—in fact, he once described this symphony as “another set of polkas and waltzes” — but in this case he perfectly evoked the bittersweet quality that pervades many of the Fourth Symphony’s pages.

Although it is cast in the same classical four-movement plan as his earlier symphonies, Brahms’ Fourth seems more tightly unified throughout its duration (largely through repeated insistence on the interval of the third, especially the minor third), and its movements accordingly proceed with a sense of cumulative power. The opening movement (Allegro non troppo) is soaring and intense, and the second (Andante moderato) is by turns agitated and serene. The Allegro giocoso represents the first time Brahms included a real scherzo in a symphony, quite a contrast to the lighter, even wistful allegretto intermezzos that had served as the third movements of his first three. And for his finale, Brahms unleashes a gigantic passacaglia, a neo-Baroque structure in which an eight-measure progression (here derived from the last movement of Bach’s Cantata No. 150) is subjected to 32 variations of widely varying character.

As soon as he completed the work, Brahms sent copies to several of his trusted friends and was miffed when they all responded with concern over this or that. His confidante Elisabet von Herzogenberg insisted that she respected the piece, but she allowed of the first movement that “at worst it seems to me as if a great master had made an almost extravagant display of his skill!” His friend Max Kalbeck suggested Brahms throw away the third movement entirely, use the finale as a free-standing piece, and compose two new movements to replace them. The composer did not cave in, but he anticipated the symphony’s premiere with mounting apprehension. His music had long been criticized as “too intellectual,” and Brahms knew that his Fourth Symphony was at least as rigorous as anything he had previously composed. To his amazement, the symphony proved a success at its premiere and audience enthusiasm only increased in subsequent performances.

Here Brahms’ great masterwork played by your SSO on our Opening Night!

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