Manitoba Chamber Orchestra
Karl Stobbe, Concertmaster
Westminster United Church
28 May 2008

Marc-André Hamelin, piano

 

André Prévost (1934-2001)
Scherzo

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)
Concerto for piano and strings

Mr. Hamelin

Intermission
Refreshments are available upstairs in the concert hall.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
String quartet, no. 15, in D minor
‘Death and the Maiden’ — arr. Gustav Mahler

1. Allegro
2. Andante con moto
3. Scherzo: allegro molto
4. Presto

Season sponsor / The Great-West Life Assurance Company
Print media sponsor / Winnipeg Free Press
Radio media sponsors / CBC Radio Two 98.3,
CBC Radio One 990 and Golden West Radio
Chamber Chatter sponsor / PricewaterhouseCoopers
Electronic media sponsor / Shaw Cable

 

Marc-André Hamelin

Montréal native Marc-André Hamelin is internationally renowned for his musical virtuosity and refined pianism.

The summer of 2007 finds Mr. Hamelin making his debut with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood for Beethoven’s Emperor concerto and debuting at the Mostly Mozart Festival performing Mozart’s Piano concerto (k453), plus performing a late-night recital of Mozart and Schumann at the Kaplan Penthouse. Mr. Hamelin also opens the Grant Park Music Festival with Brahms Piano concerto no. 2, repeats Mozart k453 for the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, and makes his annual recital appearance to close The International Keyboard Festival in New York City.

Highlights of the 2007/08 season include recital debuts at Lincoln Center, in Chicago and in Boston, and he returns in recital to many US and Mexican cities. He also makes special appearances in chamber music of Ravel, Schnittke, and Shostakovich with Midori and friends at Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center.

Orchestral performances include Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand with Carl St. Clair and the Pacific Symphony, Saint Saëns Piano concerto no. 5 with the Quebec Symphony and Yoav Talmi, Messaien’s Turangalila with the Toronto Symphony and Peter Oundjian, and the Gershwin Piano concerto with the National Arts Center Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The 2006/07 season included the world premiere of Kevin Volans’s Piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. Marc-André also performed Mendelssohn’s Piano concerto no. 1 with Sir Neville Marriner and the Montreal Symphony.

Under exclusive contract with Hyperion Records, Mr. Hamelin’s latest recording, a two-disc set of Haydn piano sonatas, was released in April 2007 to sweeping critical acclaim. In December 2006, Mr. Hamelin was awarded the Preis der Deutsche Schallplattenkritik, in special acknowledgement of his complete body of recorded works. Mr. Hamelin’s double album of the complete Chopin-Godowsky Etudes won the 2000 Gramophone Instrumental Award. In 2001, with a double nomination for the epic Busoni Concerto with the CBSO under Mark Elder and the Chopin-Godowsky, Mr. Hamelin was the only classical artist to play live at the Grammy Awards.

In 2005 Mr. Hamelin was honoured to be made an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec.

Scherzo
André Prévost

The Québécois Andre Prévost was one of Canada’s foremost composers, receiving the Canadian Music Council Medal in 1977 and becoming an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1986. He studied at the Montreal Conservatoire from 1951 to 1959, upon graduation winning the composition prize for his first orchestral work, Poème de l’Infini. A period of study in France followed, first with Messiaen and then Dutilleux. The Scherzo, his second work for orchestra, dates from the beginning of this sojourn.

Also during this time, Prévost began to forge his humanistic outlook toward composing. As he expressed it later in life: “I simply can’t prevent my spiritual concerns from surfacing in my music. The world I see fascinates me, and when I compose music, I am writing what I see and feel about the universe…”

Technically, his works employed a wide range of 20th century methods, including free atonality, serialism and mathematical modeling like that found in Xenakis. However, he saw himself as “neither a radical nor a traditionalist,” and eschewed fixed schemata and deterministic compositional procedures; rather, he cultivated a flexible approach to these tools, applying them according to the logic of any given composition, and lending each a personal and individual sound.

The Scherzo for string orchestra exemplifies this approach, merging a neo-classical outlook (the form is roughly a sonata-rondo) with freely-applied 12-tone harmonies. If one were to associate a single word with the work, it might be ‘jagged;’ the piece is forceful and energetic, motivated by a decisive rhythmic drive and densely clustered sonorities. This main character is suspended just twice, giving way each time to mysterious, sometimes other-worldly solo interludes — expressive, yes, but strange and remote, and set against shivering orchestral textures.

Concerto for piano and strings
Alfred Schnittke

In the late 1960s, and continuing through the following decade, Schnittke developed a new way of composing that juxtaposed various styles within single works. The one-movement Concerto for piano and strings, composed in 1979, is a mature example of this technique, known simply as ‘polystylism.’ The concerto features both tonal and twelve-tone melodies, conventional three-note chords and dense clusters, and recent and ancient musics, including Russian Orthodox chant, a quote from Beethoven, some slightly creepy jazz and a downright diabolical waltz, all held together in a form which combines variation and sonata procedures. Despite this laundry list, the concerto never approaches pastiche; indeed, it is not only unified but profound. That said, its compendious nature does afford the critic numerous places to grab hold. The spiritual journey of the individual, the oppression of totalitarianism or of society generally, cosmic dualism — these are all valid standpoints from which to view the work.

For the present writer, the most intriguing aspect of the piece is its treatment of time. That this is an important factor is made explicit not only through the recurring sound-image of tolling bells, but also by a tick-tocking figure that presents itself near the end of the piece. Additionally, the concerto presents the widest possible play of time and event: there are, on the one hand, passages that seem suspended or even stuck and, on the other, moments so cataclysmic that it feels like the entirety of creation is crashing in on one moment. Echoes also feature prominently, either presented explicitly as repeated notes that slowly lose volume, or metaphorically, as in the case of the Beethoven quote. This is in fact a quote of a quote: the concerto recalls a passage from Shostakovich’s Sonata for viola and piano of 1975 (his last work), which in turn recalls the Moonlight sonata.

Finally there is the unusual take on variation form. The piece begins with an ethereal, nearly atemporal introduction, and then launches directly into the first variation — the theme appears only at the end. Some critics couch this anomaly in a natural metaphor, with the theme growing out of its variations; others offer up a journey, with the theme a spiritual goal attained through the distillation of the partial truths of the variations.

But what if time has simply reversed itself? Something akin to this notion can be found in Schnittke’s ideas about shadow-worlds and shadow-sounds (Schattenklänge, a word of his own invention). In describing his ballet Peer Gynt, the composer stated that, “the music [is] the shadow of the movement, and at the same time the movement [is] the shadow of the music… This particular feeling of the non-synchronicity of the two processes is for me very important.” From there, it requires only a small step to infer an ambidirectional causality, and with it a shadow world where the future affects the past, and the past echoes the future.

Aside from the form, there is at least one other hint of this idea in the concerto. In the final section, the full orchestra more than once plays a massive crescendo on one note, which cuts off abruptly when it reaches its maximum intensity. One might produce a similar sound by recording the strike of a gong, and then threading the tape backwards.

Death and the Maiden
Franz Schubert (arr. Mahler)

Schubert wrote his D minor string quartet in 1824, at the age of 27. He had contracted syphilis the year before, and likely knew the general outlines of his fate; he would not have a long and happy life, so if he was to prove himself the equal of Beethoven he had to do it immediately. And this he did, composing masterpiece after masterpiece at a staggering pace, culminating in the ferocious productivity of his last year.

The D minor quartet gets its descriptive title, ‘Death and the Maiden,’ from one of Schubert’s own songs, composed in 1817. As with the Trout quintet and the Wanderer Fantasy, the song thus recalled provides the theme for a set of variations, which then serves as the emotional centre of the instrumental work. The original Death and the Maiden is a mini-drama, playing out in less time than it will take you to read these notes. It opens with a somber introduction in minor, played by the piano alone, and featuring dactylic metre (one long note followed by two short ones). This is Death, coming silently upon its victim. In the second section, the maiden, startled, becomes aware of the skeletal figure, and pleads breathlessly for it to pass her by, but without much hope. She sings her last words to a short descending scale, and then, resignedly, she repeats the gesture at lower pitch. Death responds, chanting its dactyls on a monotone, professing friendship: come, come and sleep. The piano ends what it began, but now in major.

Revisiting this song seven years later, Schubert must have felt a personal stake. He opens the work with a gesture of defiance, but the game is already up — the whole song is right there in the first four bars. The 2nd violin and the viola play the maiden’s last words — Geh! … rühr’n mich nicht an! (Go! … touch me not!”); just as in the song, this descending scale fragment is repeated immediately at lower pitch. These words of resistance are surrounded on all sides, however, as the first violin and cello imprison them with one repeated tone — Death, unmoving.

The opposition between repeated notes on the one hand and scale fragments on the other is central to the entire work. Running parallel is another controlling conflict, a struggle between the downward motion of the opening, and a countering upward motion, introduced soon after. These two oppositions imbue every movement, continuing to the very last utterance. In the finale, and in the prestissimo coda especially, the rising scale finally gains ascendancy, being stated not as a fragment, but in its full length, in major, and then repeated, at a higher pitch — a complete and utter reversal of fortune. But there is no triumph over death; the minor reasserts itself, and again it is the initial gesture (twice as high, twice as fast) that is the final gesture.

During his lifetime, Schubert earned his reputation as a composer of domestic music, mainly songs or short keyboard pieces. It was only long after his death, as more of his instrumental works became publicly available, that he finally took his place beside Beethoven. Among the posthumous works, the present quartet was one of the earliest to be published (in 1831). As with his arrangement of Beethoven’s quartet in F minor, op. 95 (Serioso), Mahler’s 1894 version of Death and the Maiden is no more than a transcription, with the double basses shadowing the ‘celli an octave lower. Thus the quartet is presented tonight essentially as Schubert wrote it — just bigger, and darker.

 

 

MCO's 2007/08 season is sponsored by The Great-West Life Assurance Company.
Support has been received from Media sponsors The Winnipeg Free Press, CBC Radio One 990,
CBC Radio Two 98.3, Golden West Radio & Shaw Cable. MCO's Chamber Chatter newsletter
is sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Heartstrings gala
sponsor: Mackenzie Financial Corporation.

© 2007 Manitoba Chamber Orchestra