Two concertos, one big finale
BY JUDITH REYNOLDS
SPECIAL TO THE HERALD
Two monumental works on the San Juan Symphony program this weekend shimmer with light and darkness. Like castle gates, the works will conclude a splendid 31st season.
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D. Major, Op. 35 and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra are edifices unto themselves. Constructed with complex scaffolding and brimming with emotion, each work contains heartbreaking beauty, sadness and ultimately, celebration.
Music Director and Conductor Thomas Heuser, soloist Jennifer Frautschi and the orchestra musicians have prepared a highly ambitious program to end the season. Tchaikovsky’s virtuosic work is the ultimate of Romantic music. Bartók’s mid-20th century concerto was written and performed at the end of his life. Both are commemorative works that explain the emotional depth and grandeur of each.
When Tchaikovsky completed his violin concerto in 1878, it emerged from a period of inner torment. A year before, he had foolishly entered into a marriage contract that was doomed to failure. It lasted less than three months, the details of which can be found in any biography – acrimony, irrational behavior, a suicide attempt and the composer’s gradual return to his creative life. At the bottom of despair, Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron, Madame Nadezdha von Meck: “My heart is full. It thirsts to put itself out in music.”
And so he did. Before the final divorce decree, Tchaikovsky returned to and completed two works-in-progress, the Fourth Symphony and the opera “Eugene Onegin.” (Treat yourself and see The MET Live in HD streamed performance on April 22, at Fort Lewis College).
In a fever of activity, Tchaikovsky sketched the violin concerto in eleven days. Two weeks later, he completed the orchestration. Inspired partly by popular showpieces of the
See FINALE, 4C
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era, particularly Edouard Lalo’s 1874 “Symphonie Espagnol,” Tchaikovsky pushed every technical boundary. He dedicated the work to Russia’s leading violinist, Leopold Auer, who immediately deemed the concerto unplayable, too difficult even for him. Other musicians concurred, but in time Adolf Davidovich Brodsky, a gifted 30-yearold violinist, stepped forward. In 1881, three years after completing the concerto, the world premiere finally took place in Vienna.
The 40-minute work is full of exciting contrasts, blazingly fast passages, quietly lyrical moments, echoes of folk tunes and dances. Throughout, the solo violin streams through clouds of technically difficult writing. At the pre-concert lecture last Wednesday at the Durango Arts Center, Heuser paid tribute to violinist Jennifer Frautschi, whose dramatic style apparently inspired the concert’s title: Full Throttle with Frautschi.
Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned in 1943 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Conductor Serge Koussevitsky. His wife, Natalie, had died the previous year, and Koussevitsky witnessed Bartók’s painful struggle with leukemia. The commission gave the 60-year-old composer new-found purpose, and he completed the work in three months.
Like all concertos, Bartók’s embraces a form that pairs and balances an orchestra with the concept of a soloist.
In this case, varying instruments or more fully, whole sections of the orchestra become soloists.
The first movement is cloaked in mystery until fireworks of assorted colors, ending with a billowing brass section.
The second movement presents playful pairings between various instruments and in the middle a beautiful brass chorale. The third movement contains the heart of the commission, an elegy, a memory song dedicated to Koussevitsky’s late wife. The big fourth movement brims with quotations from Hungarian folk tunes and echoes of the mysterious opening. The final movement is pure, restless energy.
All year, Heuser and company have presented innovative programs, stirring music and a dramatic reminder of what it means to be human.
Thanks are in order.
