Pictures at an Exhibition
As featured the August 10, 2020 episode of “Monday Night at the Symphony” on WRR 101. This broadcast is our September 20, 2011 performance from the Meyerson Symphony Center with guest Anton Nel, piano.
Program
August 10, 2020
The Dallas Winds – Jerry Junkin, conductor & artistic director
“Pictures at an Exhibition” – September 20, 2011
SERGE PROKOFIEV: Athletic Festival March, Op. 69, No. 1
IGOR STRAVINSKY: Concerto for Piano and Wind Orchestra
– Anton Nel, piano
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN: Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 2 (for the Left Hand)
– Anton Nel, piano
MODESTE MUSSORGSKY: Pictures At An Exhibition
JOHN PHILIP SOUSA: Hands Across The Sea
Program Notes
Mikhail Glinka
(June 1, 1804-February 15, 1857)
Born almost two generations before the best-known Russian composers, Mikhail Glinka was the first Russian composer to win widespread recognition in his own county. At a time when the tsarist court imported European—particularly French and Italian—painters, sculptors, and composers by the cartload, Glinka not only won acclaim, but laid the foundation for all the Russian composers who came after him—particularly Alexander Borodin, Modeste Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Glinka began his musical studies at the age of 13, but went into the foreign service upon graduation, only composing music on the side, as a hobby. It wasn’t until 1830, when his physician recommended he visit a warmer climate, that he traveled to Italy, where he soaked up a lot of sun and all the leading music of the day.
After three years in Italy, Glinka returned to Russia, determined to take his music seriously and write in a distinctly Russian style, employing the minor keys and dissonant harmonies he had heard in folk music as a child.
Russlan and Ludmilla was Glinka’s second opera. Music historians tell us, with perfectly straight faces, that Glinka’s friend, the poet Konstantin Bakhturin, concocted the opera’s plot in about fifteen minutes, while drunk. He based it on a story by Alexander Pushekin, but went wildly astray. The resulting libretto was an incomprehensible mess, but the music was wonderful. The overture you will hear tonight saves all the good parts and lets the rest of the opera die unmourned.
Sergei Prokofiev
(April 27, 1891-March 5, 1953)
Sergei Prokofiev’s career as a composer seems to have taken the typical 20th century Russian composer’s story and turned it on its head. His earliest works, dating from 1902-1904, were a series of compositions for piano that employed all the challenging rhythms and dissonant harmonies of the modern era. As he gained fame as a composer, his music became more conventional in form and harmony, as this evening’s sparkling Athletic Festival March, Op. 69 proves.
Likewise, while many of his contemporaries labored to maintain an independent artistic voice under the new Soviet state, Prokofiev left Russia to live in the United States and Europe in 1918. He returned to his native land to live permanently in 1936, under the regime of Josef Stalin, when some of his contemporaries were attempting to escape to the West.
Prokofiev made a number of overtures to Soviet officials in the years before his return to Russia. He made concert appearances, brought his family to visit, and wrote music glorifying the Soviet lifestyle—all attempts to convince the government that he was not some Western spy or capitalist troublemaker. He wrote Athletic Festival March—which conjures images of glowingly
healthy Soviet youth making a triumphant entrance to a national sporting event akin to the Olympics—in 1935, using familiar themes from traditional Russian music, and keeping the dissonance to a minimum. Stalin apparently liked it, because Prokofiev was given permission to return to Russia in 1936.
Igor Stravinsky
(June 17, 1882-April 6, 1971)
Igor Stravinsky is considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Although he is best-remembered today for the ballets he composed for Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes—The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring—he explored a wide range of musical styles and forms over the course of his long career. In his early years he studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and his first compositions were influenced by the Russian folk music and nationalistic fervor of Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers of his generation. In later years, Stravinsky wrote in a broader, neo-classical style. Late in his career he explored the whole range of musical expression, including the 12-tone scale of Arnold Schoenberg.
In line with his experimental spirit, Stravinsky wrote for a variety of instrumental ensembles, from the conventional orchestra with strings, to percussion-heavy ensembles, small ensembles, and larger-than-normal orchestral ensembles. In his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, written in 1924, Stravinsky turned to the European tradition of “Harmonie music,” or wind ensemble music.
Harmonie music dates back to the mid-1700s, when European aristocrats included small ensembles of oboes, horns, bassoons and clarinets among their court musicians. Such familiar works as Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, and Mozart’s Serenade No. 10: Gran Partita were written for Harmonie music wind ensembles.
Stravinsky saw the wind ensemble as simply a different voice for the orchestra and said of this concerto, “Strings and piano—a sound scraped and a sound struck—do not sound well together. Piano and wind—sound struck and blown—do.”
Alexander Scriabin
(January 6, 1872—April 27, 1915)
In only 43 short years, Alexander Scriabin lived a life of extremes: from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union; from lyric tonalism to harsh atonality; from popular acclaim to critical scorn and obscurity. As a student, he rubbed elbows with some of his country’s most beloved romantic composers, including Sergei Rachmaninoff and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. As a teacher, he influenced the next generation of great Russian composers, including Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev.
Born while his father was still a university student, Scriabin lost his mother when he was only a year old. Growing up in a household of adults, young Alexander opted for the arts early, presenting amateur plays, operas, and puppet shows and attempting to conduct the other children of his circle in a youth orchestra—an effort that led to tears and tantrums all around.
Fascinated with the mechanics of the piano, he began building his own at an early age, and would sometimes give away “spare” pianos to friends. A piano prodigy despite having quite small hands, Scriabin reportedly injured his right hand in 1892, while trying to prove to his fellow piano students that he could make the stretch of more than an octave. His doctor warned that he might never play piano again. It was during this time that he wrote the Prelude and Nocturne for Left Hand Alone, Op. 9. In time he made a full recovery.
He died in 1915 of blood poisoning from an infected pimple.
Modeste Mussorgsky
(March 21, 1839—March 28, 1881)
Modeste Mussorgsky is one of best known and most beloved of the Russian classical composers. Born into a land-owning, aristocratic family, he was also introduced at an early age to Russian folklore, and the fairy tales that were more popular with the peasant classes. This dual affiliation with high and low society marked much of his life. His father, the aristocrat, sent young Modeste off to a prestigious military academy when he was only ten years old. His mother, who came from a much less socially prominent family, was an accomplished pianist, who gave him his first musical training. He was, by all accounts, a very
intelligent young man, with a lively curiosity about a broad range of subjects. Very few of the things he was avid to learn about were taught at the military academy, where his grades languished.
By 1852, while still in school, he had begun composing. In 1856 he was assigned to one of Russia’s most prestigious military units as a second lieutenant, but he had a better reputation as an entertaining pianist than for military rigor. In 1858, when his family lost most of its fortune, Mussorgsky left the military and got a job as a civil servant in the Ministry of Communication, but treated it very much as just a day job—the sort of work he could do to support himself without much effort while he immersed himself in his music. He met other young composers, including Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and drew on his background in Russian folklore to help create music that captured the spirit and flavor of Russian culture.
By 1866 Mussorgsky had found his voice as a composer, and over the next few years wrote many of the works we still know and love today, including Night on Bald Mountain, and his opera, Boris Godunov.
He met artist and architect Victor Hartmann in 1870. Hartmann was a proponent of an elaborate Russian folk style of architecture, as opposed to the more formal European style popular with the aristocracy. When Hartmann died suddenly of an aneurysm in 1873, Mussorgsky was devastated.
He wrote Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874 as a tribute to his late friend, remembering some of the works he had seen in a gallery exhibit. Pictures began as a work for solo piano, and was not published until 1886, after Mussorgsky’s own death. In 1922 French composer Maurice Ravel transcribed the work for orchestra. For tonight’s performance, composer and arranger Merlin Patterson went back Mussorgsky’s original piano work and re-imagined the instrumentation for wind ensemble.
John Philip Sousa
(November 6, 1854—March 6, 1932)
Historians may call Stephen Foster the “Father of American Music” but John Philip Sousa was America’s first serious classical composer. Sousa served as a musical ambassador for the United States, gaining fame around the world as “The March King.” Not “The British March King,” or the “Austrian March King,” mind you. Kenneth J. Alford and Josef Wagner only aspired to the greatness that was Sousa. Sousa was the undisputed, internationally recognized March King. Period.
Sousa began his musical education when he was six. He apparently settled on a musical career early on because his father apprenticed him to the United States Marine Band at age thirteen so young Sousa wouldn’t run away to join a circus band. He served out his apprenticeship with the Marines, then joined a series of theatrical orchestras, where he learned to conduct. In 1880 he returned to become the conductor of the “President’s Own” Marine Band, serving under five different presidents. In 1892 he left to form his own civilian wind ensemble, and rapidly scaled the heights of popular music to become the first American superstar.
Over the next 39 years, until Sousa’s death, the Sousa Band toured America nearly every year, traveled to Europe at least three times, and once toured all around the world, with stops in England, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii before returning to the mainland United States—all in the age of railroad and steamship travel.
Hands Across the Sea was written in 1899, a year before Sousa took his band on its first European tour. He did not dedicate the march to any one particular country, but rather, “to all of America’s friends abroad.”
–Program notes by Gigi Sherrell Norwood