Program Notes "Remembrance", Sunday, November 2 Concert at 2pm

Capriccio Italien 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)

Capriccio Italien was first performed on December 18, 1880, in Moscow by the Orchestra of the Imperial Russian Musical Society with Nikolai Rubinstein conducting.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s late thirties were marked with misfortune and grief. In 1877, he separated from Antonina Miliukova after a mere six weeks of being married, and his father passed away in January 1880, less than one year after the twenty-fifth anniversary of his mother’s death. Depressed and eager to escape Russia’s harsh winter, Tchaikovsky travelled to Rome with his brother, Modest. The composer had been to Italy twice before and was one of his favorite destinations; however, on this particular visit, the brothers happened to be visiting Rome during Carnival. Inspired by the sights and sounds of the festival, he began composing Capriccio Italien, drawing from the street music surrounding them and the collections of music he studied while in the city. The piece begins with one of the very sounds that Tchaikovsky heard every morning in his hotel: a bugle call that came from the barracks next to the hotel. Tchaikovsky was confident that his Capriccio Italien would be successful, as indicated in a letter written to Nadezhda von Meck, his longtime friend and devoted patron: “It will be effective, thanks to its delightful tunes, some of which were chosen from collections, and some of which I heard myself on the streets.” Indeed, he was correct, as the piece was performed again in the same month due to popular demand.

Symphony No. 3, The Sunday Symphony 

William Grant Still (1895 - 1978)

Symphony No. 3 was first performed on February 12, 1984, by the North Arkansas Symphony Orchestra with Carlton R. Woods conducting during the William Grant Still Festival.

Many new symphonic works during the mid-twentieth century explored increased levels of dissonance, aleatoricism, and the avant-garde, exemplified by composers such as John Cage, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is for this reason that William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 3 stands as an important contrast within this mid-century period of Western classical music. Despite commissions for new works and funding to support orchestras drying up in post-war America, and inspired by his deep religious fervor, in 1958, Still composed The Sunday Symphony. This symphony portrays the spiritual rituals on Sunday for a worshiper of God. As with his other symphonies, the symphony is programmatic, and this is reflected in the differing moods of four movements: “The Awakening - Moderately fast,” “Prayer - Very slowly,” Relaxation - Gaily,” and “Day’s End and a New Beginning - Resolutely.” The Sunday Symphony was Still’s last symphony and, sadly, the only one he never heard performed by a live ensemble.

Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)

Soloist, Taige Wang, piano

Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor was first performed on October 25, 1875, in The Boston Music Hall with Hans von Bülow as the soloist and Benjamin Johnson Lang conducting.

The story of Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto is a favorite among music historians, and it is one of self-belief and triumph in the face of dismissal. On Christmas Eve, having completed his first piano concerto, Tchaikovsky visited the piano player Nikolai Rubinstein, who at the time was among Russia's most prominent pianists and revered conductors, in the hopes of having the piano concerto become part of the standard piano repertoire. Tchaikovsky sat down at the piano and played his concerto to Rubinstein. However, Rubinstein’s response to the piece was, to put it mildly, not as Tchaikovsky had hoped:

I stood up and asked, "Well?" Then a torrent poured from Nikolay Grigoryevich's [Rubinstein’s] mouth, gentle at first, then more and more growing into the sound of a Jupiter Tonans. It turned out that my concerto was worthless and unplayable; passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself was bad, vulgar; in places I had stolen from other composers; only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away or completely rewritten... I left the room without a word and went upstairs. In my agitation and rage I could not say a thing. Presently R. enjoined me, and seeing how upset I was he asked me into one of the distant rooms. There he repeated that my concerto was impossible, pointed out many places where it would have to be completely revised, and said that if within a limited time I reworked the concerto according to his demands, then he would do me the honor of playing my thing at his concert. "I shall not alter a single note," I answered, "I shall publish the work exactly as it is!"

And that is exactly what Tchaikovsky did.

Tchaikovsky then approached the German pianist, Hans von Bülow, who was about to embark on a tour of the United States, to perform the piece. It is for this reason that the actual premiere of the concerto took place not in Russia or anywhere else in Europe, but in this very city, in The Boston Music Hall, the original home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra until 1900. It has also been suggested by historians that, knowing the debut performance would be in a concert hall far away from Russia, Tchaikovsky would be spared from any public humiliation should Rubinstein have been correct in his assessment of the work. To the delight of Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein was wrong. The concerto received enthusiastic praise from the audiences at the Boston premiere, and it was insisted that Bülow repeat the concerto's finale.

Tchaikovsky's wish for the piano concerto to enter the piano repertoire came true. The concerto has received countless performances across the world from pianists and orchestras throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with recordings of the concerto made by Sviatoslav Richter with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in 1962, Claudio Arrau with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1979, and Lang Lang with the Chicago Symphony in 2014.

~ James Heazlewood-Dale