Masterworks 2: Lewis Plays Brahms Program Notes

WILLIAM GRANT STILL

• Born May 11, 1895 in Woodville, Mississippi;
• died December 3, 1978 in Los Angeles.

SERENADE FOR ORCHESTRA

• First performed in 1957 by the Great Falls High School Orchestra in Great Falls, Montana.
• These concerts mark the first performances of this piece by the Des Moines Symphony.

(Duration: ca. 8 minutes)

William Grant Still, whom Nicolas Slonimsky in his authoritative Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians called “The Dean of Afro-American Composers,” was born in Woodville, Mississippi on May 11, 1895. His father, the town bandmaster and a music teacher at Alabama A&M, died when the boy was an infant, and the family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where his mother, a graduate of Atlanta University, taught high school. In Little Rock, she married an opera buff, and he introduced young William to the great voices of the day on records and encouraged his interest in playing the violin. At the age of sixteen, Still matriculated as a medical student at Wilberforce University in Ohio, but he soon switched to music. He taught himself to play the reed instruments, and left school to perform in dance bands in the Columbus area and work for a brief period as an arranger for the great blues writer W.C. Handy. He returned to Wilberforce, graduated in 1915, married later that year, and then resumed playing in dance and theater orchestras.

 In 1917, Still entered Oberlin College but he interrupted his studies the following year to serve in the Navy during World War I, first as a mess attendant and later as a violinist in officers’ clubs. He went back to Oberlin after his service duty and stayed there until 1921, when he moved to New York to join the orchestra of the Noble Sissle–Eubie Blake revue Shuffle Along as an oboist. While on tour in Boston with the show, Still studied with George Chadwick, then President of the New England Conservatory, who was so impressed with his talent that he provided his lessons free of charge. Back in New York, Still studied with Edgard Varèse and ran the Black Swan Recording Company for a period in the mid-1920s. He tried composing in Varèse’s modernistic idiom, but soon abandoned that dissonant style in favor of a more traditional manner.

 Still’s work was recognized as early as 1928, when he received the Harmon Award for the most significant contribution to Black culture in America. His Afro-American Symphony of 1930 was premiered by Howard Hanson and the Rochester Philharmonic (the first such work by a Black composer played by a leading American orchestra) and heard thereafter in performances in Europe and South America. Unable to make a living from his concert compositions, however, Still worked as an arranger and orchestrator of music for radio, for Broadway shows, and for Paul Whiteman, Artie Shaw and other popular bandleaders. A 1934 Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to cut back on his commercial activities and write his first opera, Blue Steel, which incorporated jazz and spirituals. He continued to compose large-scale orchestral, instrumental and vocal works in his distinctive idiom during the following years, and after moving to Los Angeles in 1934, he supplemented that activity by arranging music for films (including Frank Capra’s 1937 film Lost Horizon) and later for television (Perry Mason, Gunsmoke). Still continued to hold an important place in American music until his death in Los Angeles in 1978.

 Still received many awards for his work: seven honorary degrees; commissions from CBS, New York World’s Fair, League of Composers, Cleveland Orchestra and other important cultural organizations; the Phi Beta Sigma Award; a citation from ASCAP noting his “extraordinary contributions” to music and his “greatness, both as an artist and as a human being”; and the Freedom Foundation Award. Not only was his music performed by most of the major American orchestras, but he was also the first Black musician to conduct one of those ensembles (Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1936) and a major symphony in a southern state (New Orleans Philharmonic in 1955). In 1945, Leopold Stokowski called William Grant Still “one of our great American composers. He has made a real contribution to music.”

 Still composed his Serenade for Orchestra in 1957 on a commission from the Great Falls High School Orchestra in Great Falls, Montana, which prides itself on an award-winning music program that was established in 1896. The gentle mood and lyrical style of Still’s Serenade perfectly embody the Italian source of the work’s title — music to be heard in the evening (“sera”).

The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, harp and the usual strings consisting of first violins, second violins, violas, violoncellos and double basses.

JEAN SIBELIUS

• Born December 8, 1865 in Hämeenlinna, Finland;
• died September 20, 1957 in Järvenpää, Finland.

SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN E-FLAT MAJOR, OP. 82

• First performed on December 8, 1915 in Helsinki, conducted by the composer.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony on October 15 & 16, 1977 with Yuri Krasnapolsky conducting. One subsequent performance occurred on April 5 & 6, 1994 with Joseph Giunta conducting.

(Duration: ca. 32 minutes)

For the three years after he issued his brooding Fourth Symphony in 1911, Sibelius was largely concerned with writing program music: The Dryad, Scènes historiques, The Bard, The Océanides, Rakastava. He even considered composing a ballet titled King Fjalar at that time, but ultimately rejected the idea. As early as 1912, he envisioned a successor to the Fourth Symphony, but did not have any concrete ideas for the work until shortly before he left for a visit to the United States in May 1914 to conduct some of his compositions at the Norfolk (Connecticut) Music Festival. (The Océanides was commissioned for the occasion.) He returned to Finland in July; World War I erupted on the Continent the next month. In September, he described his mood over the terrifying political events as emotionally “in a deep dale,” but added, “I already begin to see dimly the mountain I shall certainly ascend.... God opens the door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.” He could not begin work on the piece immediately, however. One of his main sources of income — performance royalties from his German publisher, Breitkopf und Härtel — was severely diminished because of the war-time turmoil, and he was forced to churn out a stream of songs and piano miniatures and to undertake tours to Gothenburg, Oslo and Bergen to pay the household bills.

 Early in 1915, Sibelius learned that a national celebration was planned for his fiftieth birthday (December 8), and that the government was commissioning from him a new symphony for the festive concert in Helsinki. He withdrew into the isolation of his country home at Järvenpää, thirty miles north of Helsinki (today a lovely museum to the composer), to devote himself to the gestating work, and admitted to his diary, “I love this life so infinitely, and feel that it must stamp everything that I compose.” He had to rush to finish the work for the concert in December, even making changes in the parts during the final rehearsal, but the Symphony was presented as the centerpiece of the tribute to the man the program described as “Finland’s greatest son.” Sibelius’ birthday was a veritable national holiday, and he was lionized with speeches, telegrams, banquets, greetings and gifts. The Fifth Symphony met with universal acclaim, and the concert had to be given three additional times during the following weeks to satisfy the demand to hear this newest creation of the country’s most famous musician.

Theorists have long debated whether Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony is in three or four movements; even the composer himself left contradictory evidence on the matter. The contention centers on the first two sections, a broad essay in leisurely tempo and a spirited scherzo, played without pause and related thematically. The opening portion is in a sort of truncated sonata form, though it is of less interest to discern its structural divisions than to follow the long arches of musical tension–and–release that Sibelius built through manipulation of the fragmentary, germinal theme presented at the beginning by the horns. The scherzogrows seamlessly from the music of the first section. At first dance-like and even playful, it accumulates dynamic energy as it unfolds, ending with a whirling torrent of sound. The following Andante, formally a theme and variations, is predominantly tranquil in mood, though punctuated by several piquant jabs of dissonance. “There are frequent moments in the music of Sibelius,” wrote Charles O’Connell of the Symphony’s finale, “when one hears almost inevitably the beat and whir of wings invisible, and this strange and characteristic effect almost always presages something magnificently portentous. We have it here.” The second theme is a bell-tone motive led by the horns that serves as background to the woodwinds’ long melodic lines. The whirring theme returns, after which the bell motive is treated in ostinato fashion, repeated over and over, building toward a climax until it seems about to burst from its own excitement — which it does. The forward motion stops abruptly, and the Symphony ends with six stentorian chords, separated by silence, proclaimed by the full orchestra.

 The score calls for flutes, clarinets, oboes, and bassoons in pairs, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and the usual strings.

JOHANNES BRAHMS

• Born May 7, 1833 in Hamburg;
• died April 3, 1897 in Vienna.

VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MAJOR, OP. 77

• First performed on New Year's Day 1879 in Leipzig, conducted by the composer with Joseph Joachim as soloist.
• First performed by the Des Moines Symphony on January 13, 1952 with Frank Noyes conducting and Szymon Goldberg as soloist. Seven subsequent performances occurred, most recently on October 29 & 30, 2016 with Joseph Giunta conducting and Vadim Gluzman as soloist.

(Duration: ca. 44 minutes)

“The healthy and ruddy colors of his skin indicated a love of nature and a habit of being in the open air in all kinds of weather; his thick straight hair of brownish color came nearly down to his shoulders. His clothes and boots were not of exactly the latest pattern, nor did they fit particularly well, but his linen was spotless.... [There was a] kindliness in his eyes ... with now and then a roguish twinkle in them which corresponded to a quality in his nature which would perhaps be best described as good-natured sarcasm.” So wrote Sir George Henschel, the singer and conductor who became the first Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, of his friend Johannes Brahms at the time of the composition of his Violin Concerto, when Brahms, at 45, was coming into the full efflorescence of his talent and fame. The twenty-year gestation of the First Symphony had finally ended in 1876, and the Second Symphony came easily only a year later. He was occupied with many songs and important chamber works during the mid-1870s, and the two greatest of his concertos, the B-flat for Piano and the D Major for Violin, were both conceived in 1878. Both works were ignited by the delicious experience of his first trip to Italy in April of that year, though the Piano Concerto was soon laid aside when the Violin Concerto became his main focus during the following summer. After the Italian trip, he returned to the idyllic Austrian village of Pörtschach (site of the composition of the Second Symphony the previous year), where he composed the Violin Concerto for his old friend and musical ally, Joseph Joachim.

 The first movement is constructed on the lines of the Classical concerto form, with an extended orchestral introduction presenting much of the movement’s main thematic material before the entry of the soloist. The last theme, a dramatic strain in stern dotted rhythms, ushers in the soloist, who plays an extended passage as transition to the second exposition of the themes. This initial solo entry is unsettled and anxious in mood and serves to heighten the serene majesty of the main theme when it is sung by the violin upon its reappearance. A melody not heard in the orchestral introduction, limpid and almost a waltz, is given out by the soloist to serve as the second theme. The vigorous dotted-rhythm figure returns to close the exposition, with the development continuing the agitated aura of this closing theme. The recapitulation begins on a heroic wave of sound spread through the entire orchestra. After the return of the themes, the bridge to the coda is made by the soloist’s cadenza. With another traversal of the main theme and a series of dignified cadential figures, this grand movement comes to an end.

 The rapturous second movement is based on a theme that the composer Max Bruch said was derived from a Bohemian folk song. The melody, intoned by the oboe, is initially presented in the colorful sonorities of wind choir without strings. After the violin’s entry, the soloist is seldom confined to the exact notes of the theme, but rather weaves a rich embroidery around their melodic shape. The central section of the movement is cast in darker hues and employs the full range of the violin in its sweet arpeggios. The opening melody returns in the plangent tones of the oboe accompanied by the widely spaced chords of the violinist. The finale, an invigorating dance of a Roma character, is cast in rondo form, with a scintillating tune in double stops as the recurring theme.

 The score calls for flutes, clarinets, oboes, and bassoons in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and the usual strings.