Conductor's Corner

What is it about Vivaldi's Four Seasons that has made it the most recorded piece of music ever, and one of the most instantly recognized works worldwide? Well... the great tunes I suppose is the simple answer. Vivaldi very frequently wrote wonderful melodies, but in The Four Seasons his melodic invention was perfectly married to the sonnets and programmatic ideas he was trying to convey. When the Spring Concerto begins we are instantly transported to flowers blooming and birds happily singing, even when the piece is performed in the bleak midwinter. The ferocity of the storm music in Summer is unmistakable. Vivaldi's music doesn't have the same intellectual gravity and contrapuntal complexity that Bach's does. But at his best, Vivaldi's music transports us like no other.



The foil to Vivaldi's extremely famous music is the unjustly unknown Virtuous Wife suite of Purcell. Written in 1679, the same year that the composer became choirmaster and composer at Westminster Abbey, Thomas D'Urfey's play is a silly farce that by today is exclusively of academic interest. But Purcell's music is as light and elegant as we have come to expect from this composer's more famous works.

Sir Ernest Macmillan's Sketches are by turns sombre and enthusiastic arrangements of Quebec folksongs, written in the 1920's by the Toronto composer commonly referred to as the "Dean of Canadian Composers". His contibutions to the growth of Toronto's cultural life are enourmous, not only by his compositions but also his many years as Toronto Symphony Conductor and Royal Conservatory Principal. It's a joy for us to play this Canadian classic.

I have very often enjoyed programs in which the similarities between the works are obscure or not apparent. This program is certainly one of those; not only is the instrumentation completely different, but the ethos of the works is apparently very different also. Under the influence and precedent of Mozart’s Wind Serenades, Beethoven’s Octet has a more of a backward-looking feel to it, than any other of his well-known late works. It seems to have not much in common with Tchaikovsky’s brooding, passionate Souvenir de Florence. However, I have often programmed the two composers together, as they share a common energy, one could almost say aggressivity. Though cloaked in the Enlightenment form of the Wind Serenade, Beethoven’s work is unmistakably his, with its repeated and obsessive accents, virtuoso horn flourishes, and lightning-quick third movement.

Souvenir de Florence may have been inspired by the composer’s Tuscan sojourn but sorry to tell you, I hear nothing particularly Italian about it. It’s as Russian as any other Tchaikovsky work, serious, intense, and emotionally intense. It begins with a minor 9th chord spread throughout the strings, but all 4 notes of the chord played at once by the first violins. A minor 9th chord was a shrieking dissonance in Tchaikovsky’s day, and although our 21st-century ears know it as a normal jazz chord, it still strikes as an extraordinarily rich way to begin a piece. The contour of the first three notes of this theme, repeated very frequently throughout the movement, is the same as the contour of the second theme which is first introduced 2 minutes later. Listen carefully; the only difference between the two themes are the intervals between the notes, which make it sound minor (intense and tortured) the first time, and major (joyous and carefree) the second time. Towards the end of the movement as a transition from the major to minor versions, Tchaikovsky changes the intervals gradually and makes this connection very clear to the listener. This is a sophisticated expression of compositional unity, and I find it to be an impressive demonstration of his skills as a composer, which are all too often underrated.



OR



I hope you enjoy this program of intense and expressive nineteenth-century music!

The turn of the twentieth century is a fascinating period in European History. It was a time when progress of all kinds raced forward at an unprecedented speed. The automobile, telegraph, telephone, submarine and airplane were all invented in this period. An anonymous patent clerk named Albert Einstein quietly published an academic paper that would change our view of the universe and make nuclear weapons possible. It was also a time when European political hegemony, through its colonies, was at its apex. The sun (literally) never set on the British Empire, and Germany and Italy were politically unified for the first time in centuries. The intellectual and cultural life of the continent was in a frenzy of creativity.



At the same time, lurking beneath the surface of a sophisticated and highly mannered society was the sense that all was not well. Charles Darwin had dealt a major blow to Christianity by challenging the literal truth of the Bible. Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead. Into this instability stepped Sigmund Freud, who proposed that rather than being noble and civilized creatures, our actions are motivated by our basest desires, and even the most elevated of us has a subconscious that ferments disturbed and unstable thoughts. In the early nineteenth century Goethe’s great novel Werther had a protagonist who committed suicide, and this prompted a wave of suicides among young people, including the heir to the Austrian throne. Frankenstein and Dracula were also hugely popular creations of this era. The tension inherent in the zeitgeist, and the inarguable rational logic of the military establishments of the great powers, swept Europe into World War I, a massively bloody conflict...fought for no really good reason.



The arts both reflected and influenced these trends. Different artists responded in different ways. Debussy’s evocative and non-traditional use of harmonies created a completely new sensibility; he somehow translated the mood of Impressionist painting into music, and created a radical new approach and way of thinking and feeling about sound and harmony. Gustav Mahler continued in the path of his Germanic predecessors into ever-increasing harmonic complexity, and wore his heart on his sleeve with a sincerity hardly seen before or since. Not long before the First World War, Arnold Schoenberg took a step into the abyss and abandoned tonal harmony altogether, which in retrospect began a process that changed the public’s relationship to concert music in ways he could never have forseen.



It’s my great joy to present to you this concert on Nov. 28 and 29, our first of the new season, which explores some of the masterpieces of this era, music filled with emotion, and some of the most significant ever written. In the coming weeks I’ll have comments on the individual pieces that we’ll be playing. I hope you’ll join us in our journey into this music, with its sensibility so different from our own, yet which still has the power to move us.