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Program notes

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Violin Concerto in D major, op 77 (1878)

Brahms wrote his demanding Violin Concerto during the summer of 1878.  He spent three consecutive summers, from 1877 to 1879, in the picturesque village of Pörtschach on Lake Wörth in Lower Austria, where, he said, the surroundings were so rich in melodies that he had “to be careful not to step on them.”  During those relaxing summers there he composed such great works as this Violin Concerto, his Symphony No. 2, and his Piano Concerto No. 2.

Brahms did not play the violin and only had an abstract idea of what would be considered demanding from the perspective of a performer.  As a result, in August 1878, he sent a copy of the draft of his concerto to his close friend, the great violinist Joseph Joachim, saying, “I really do not know what you will make of the solo part alone.  It was my intention, of course, that you should correct it, not sparing the quality of composition, and that if you thought it not worth scoring that you should say so.  I shall be satisfied if you mark those parts which are difficult, awkward, or impossible to play.”  Joachim initially made notes of the problems he found in the concerto and the places where he felt Brahms needed to spend more time with the work.  He wrote, “There is a lot of really good violin music in it, but whether it can be played with comfort in a hot concert hall remains to be seen.”  Further consultations followed, and Brahms made revisions even after the first performance, which he gave with Joachim, to whom he dedicated the concerto, and who played it at a concert of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on January 1, 1879.  When he finally published the work that October, Brahms had revised the concerto again and had incorporated the fingerings, bowings and a cadenza Joachim had created for it.  He did not, however, follow Joachim’s advice when it came to making passages less difficult.

A music critic of the time, reminiscing later about the first performance, remembered that the first movement was too “modern” for the audience, but that the public had enjoyed the second movement and had been sincerely enthusiastic about the third.  However, another critic thought that Joachim was either badly prepared for the first performance or indisposed that day and that Brahms seemed somewhat agitated or disturbed.  A few months later, Brahms noted that Joachim’s performances of the concerto were improving, and before the year’s end, the violinist wrote to the composer that he could even play it by heart.

The concerto is now considered among the four greatest violin concerti of the 19th  century, along with those of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, yet when the concerto was new, the public thought it too severe, violinists resisted it, and many preferred Max Bruch’s lighter concerti.  The great conductor Hans von Bülow declared Brahms had not composed a concerto for violin but “a concerto against the violin.”   The Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate, whose opinion Brahms solicited, refused to play it because its only good melody, he said, was not even given to the violin but rather to the oboe solo at the beginning of the slow movement.  Tchaikovsky, whose Violin Concerto also had great difficulty in making its way into the standard repertoire, liked Brahms personally but did not care much for his music.  He wrote in a letter to a friend that the concerto “lacks poetry.  Brahms’s [technical] mastery overwhelms his inspiration.”  Despite all this early opposition, all the great violinists of the generation after Joachim, Ysaÿe, Enesco, Busch, Thibaud and Kreisler (who wrote his own cadenzas) embraced the concerto and included it in their concerts.  Over time, the concerto gained its present honored place in the standard repertoire despite its difficulties. 

Constructed generally in the classical tradition of Mozart and Beethoven’s concerti in terms of its structure, this concerto also feels akin to the Romantic concerti of such composers as Mendelssohn and Bruch.  But in this work, unlike in most of the other Romantic concerti that often figure more as “display” pieces, Brahms has written a concerto in a technique similar to that which Mozart used in his piano concerti.  As the critic Jonathan Kramer so accurately put it, Brahms creates a “dramatic opposition between two forces: soloist and orchestra.”  This salient feature of the work makes the violin a peer with the orchestra and gives it a special quality rarely found in violin concerti. 

The first movement, Allegro non troppo, is idyllic.  Although Brahms does not introduce the violin until quite a long time after the beginning, when it has a lengthy section, it weaves in and out around the melodic lines of the orchestra in an unusual and memorable way.  Rhythmic variety and subtlety abounds in this richly expressive movement.  The second movement, Adagio, starts with the beautiful oboe melody that Sarasate, as violinist, envied.  It has a lyric tenderness, although the violin never plays more than the first few notes of that very special opening melody; instead, the violin line either decorates the opening line or reacts to it.  The energetic rondo third movement, Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace, has a brilliant Hungarian Gypsy dance flair which is devilishly demanding for the soloist.  In this movement the violin and the orchestra share the theme equally, cooperating completely.

Brahms is known to have sketched and then discarded a scherzo movement that was to come between the slow movement and the finale and would have given the concerto a fourth movement.  Theorists conjecture that he may have used it in his Piano Concerto No. 2, which he was working on at the same time as the Violin Concerto.

Brahms orchestrated the Violin Concerto for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.

- Susan Halpern

Susan Halpern is a nationally renowned annotator, whose notes appear in concert halls from Honolulu to Carnegie Hall.

Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel)

Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was written 1874 as a memorial tribute for the Russian painter, architect and designer Victor Hartman, who had died a year earlier.  The work was inspired by a posthumous exhibition in St. Petersburg of Hartman's work . Originally written for the piano, Pictures went unpublished until shortly after Mussorgsky's death in 1881.  There is no record of the piece being performed during Mussorgsky's lifetime; there is also no indication that Mussorgsky considered the cycle as a potential orchestral work.  The first recorded public performance took place in November of 1891, when an orchestrated version by Michael Touschmaloff (a student of Rimsky-Korsakov's) was presented in St. Petersburg.  Since that time, literally dozens of orchestrations and transcriptions have followed, the most noteworthy being the orchestrations of Sir Henry Wood, Maurice Ravel, Leopold Stokowski, Walter Goehr, Segei Gorchakov and (more recently) Vladimir Askenazy.  Of these, Ravel's 1922 orchestration may still be referred to as definitive.  Since many of Ravel's orchestral works began as piano pieces, the process of orchestral transcription was one with which he was intimately familiar.  Additionally, he held Mussorgsky's creative imagination in high regard.  Although Pictures at an Exhibition was conceived as a piano work, it has assumed its eminent place in the repertoire as an orchestral piece.

Of the many works which Mussorgsky saw at the 1874 Hartman Exhibition, he wrote musical portraits of ten.  Between these ten "pictures" are interspersed five Promenades, each representing Mussorgsky as he strolls through the exhibition.  Descriptive explanations of the work's titles have been provided by the work's dedicatee, Vladimir Stassov (the organizer of the Hartman exhibition) in the preface to the first edition.   They are reproduced here with additional comment where necessary.

Promenade - "The composer stumps around the Exhibition ("in modo russico").  He does not hurry, but observes attentively".  He suddenly comes upon the first picture:

Gnomus - "A drawing representing a small gnome walking awkwardly on deformed legs".  Hartman's drawing was a design for a toy nutcracker.

Promenade - A slower, more introspective version of the Promenade, leading to:

Il vecchio castello - "A medieval castle before which stands a singing troubadour".  This is a song without words based on an hypnotic siciliano rhythm.  Ravel's use of the saxophone for the melody and muted strings for the accompaniment enhance the piece's melancholy air.

Promenade - A return to the affirmative character of the opening Promenade, dissolving into:

Tuileries (Dispute among children at play) - "A walk in the gardens of the Tuileries with a group of children and their governesses".  The piece is set in ABA form: childish taunts dissolve into mock contrition during a scolding, only to resume again.

Bydlo - "A wagon on enormous wheels drawn by oxen".  In the original, Mussorgsky begins the piece fortissimo; in Ravel's orchestration (based on Rimsky-Korsakov's edition of the piano version), the lumbering cart appears, pianissimo, in the distance, the dynamic growing louder as the cart approaches and passes us, and then dying out as the cart fades into the horizon.

Promenade - Written in d minor and marked tranquillo, the brooding intensity of this Promenade is interrupted by:

The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks - "A picture by Hartman for the setting of a scene in the ballet Trilby".  Hartman designed the sets and costumes for this St. Petersburg ballet in 1871.  In a number of the scenes, the dancers were enclosed in egg-shell suits and wore helmets in the form of canaries heads.

Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle - "Two men: one rich, one poor".  Goldenberg blusters in fortissimo, while Schumyle chatters and trembles.  When their music is combined, they yammer at each other.  The "discussion" ends with four emphatic notes, the rich man squashing the poor man like a bug.

Limoges: Le marché; La grande nouvelle (The market; The Big News) - "Old women arguing furiously in the market-place in Limoges".  The uproar builds to a ferocious pitch, which is interrupted by:

Catacombs - "Hartman's picture represented the artist himself looking at the catacombs in Paris by the light of a lantern".  The picture reveals a cage full of skulls, and Mussorgsky's musical portrait reflects this horrific sight through harsh, awe-inspiring chords.  The final bar is linked to:

Cum Mortuis in lingua mortua (With the dead in a dead language) -   Another version of the Promenade.  Mussorgsky wrote the following note in the manuscript: "The creative spirit of Hartman leads me to the skulls and invokes them: the skulls begin to glow faintly".

The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba-Yaga) - "Hartman's drawing represented a clock in the form of Baba Yaga's Hut on Hen's Legs; Mussorgsky has added the ride of Baba Yaga in her mortar".  In Russian folklore, Baba Yaga was a witch who used to go hunting in a red-hot mortar which she rode through the air with a pestle.  Her wild ride leads straight to:

The Knight's Gate (in the Ancient Capital, Kiev) - "Hartman's drawing represented his project for a gate in the city of Kiev in the massive old Russian style, with a cupola in the form of a Slavonic helmet".  Hartman considered his plans for this archway to be his masterpiece; unfortunately, the gate was never built.  Mussorgsky's setting fully realizes the grandeur of his friend's design.  It also makes reference, through the use of bell sounds and a Russian Orthodox hymn, to Kiev's standing as the birthplace of Russian Christianity.  The Promenade theme, which to this point has depicted the composer as an observer, makes its appearance; Mussorgsky himself is now metaphorically drawn into one of Hartman's pictures, a final, fond embrace for a dear friend.

- Anthony Princiotti

Anthony Princiotti is the Rudolph Schiller Music Director of the New Hampshire Philharmonic