June 9 Program Notes
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Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)
Variaciones Concertantes, Op. 23

Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera began piano study at age seven, entered the Williams Conservatory at age 12, and graduated from the National Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aires at age 22. At the time of his graduation, he was already seen as a rising star in Argentine music. He began collecting favorable reviews at age 18, prizes at 19, and at age 21 saw his ballet Panambi produced at the Teatro Colon with Juan Jose Castro conducting.

Buenos Aires was an exceedingly cosmopolitan city, featuring numerous opportunities for Ginastera to expand his musical horizons. Two organizations–the Grupo Renovacion Musica, and the Conciertos de Nueva Musica–devoted themselves to the cause of new music, and there was no shortage of concerts featuring vibrant and challenging works. Among his early influences were Franck, Faure, Debussy, and Stravinsky.

Aaron Copland, who played a critical role in Ginastera’s career, summed up the young composer’s achievements in an article for Modern Music.

"Ginastera has a natural flair for writing brilliantly effective sure-fire music of the French persuasion. Sometimes it acquires an increased charm through a well-placed use of local melodic phraseology. He also possesses an unusual knack for bright sounding orchestration. Later, Ginastera may become more ambitious, and learn to look inside himself for deeper sources, but already, no account of music in the Argentine is complete without mention of his name."

Much of Ginastera’s early work was folk-based: Panambi, Danzas Argentinas, and the ballet Estancia to name a few. But his approach to folk music transformed itself through his career. In the instance of Variaciones Concertantes, he had absorbed the folk traditions without further need to quote them. Contemporary technique is married to national influence.

Said Ginastera of the work, "These variations have a subjective Argentine character. Instead of using folkloric material, the composer achieves an Argentine atmosphere through the employment of original thematic and rhythmic elements." As he further pointed out, "Any work of talent, as has always happened in the history of the arts, is in the final analysis ‘national.’"

Variaciones Concertantes was commissioned by the Asociacion Amigos de la Musica of Buenos Aires, and received its first performance in that city, with Igor Markevitch conducting, on June 2, 1953. Markevitch, throughout the rest of his career, used this score as a mandatory text in his conducting classes at the Salzburg Festival. The work’s American premiere took place on December 21, 1953, with Antal Dorati conducting the Minneapolis Symphony.

Rhythmically powerful, intense, lyrically expressive, with a wide range of color, texture, and mood, the work is written in the form of a theme with 11 variations, with each variation spotlighting a different soloist. Celebrated author and broadcaster Gilbert Chase, a friend of Ginastera’s, describes the variations this way: "Some are in the decorative or ornamental style of variation, while others, as the composer himself says, ‘are written in the modern form of metamorphosis, which consists of taking motives from the principal theme and constructing out of them a new theme."

The movements, played without interruption, are as follows: Theme for cello and harp; Interlude for strings; Variazone giocosa for flute; Variazone in modo di scherzo for clarinet; Variazone drammatica for viola; Variazone canonica for oboe and bassoon; Variazone ritmica for trumpet and trombone; Variazone in modo di moto perpetuo for violin; Variazone pastorale for French horn; interlude for winds; reprise of theme for double bass; final variation in rondo form for orchestra.

While many of Ginastera’s works have entered the international repertory, this work carries with it particular eminence. W. Stuart Pope, Ginastera’s publisher at Boosey & Hawks, confirms as much in his own opinion of the work: "When I arrived in this country I knew nothing [of Ginastera’s work] but the early ballets, which I had heard on a recording only. The work that most impressed me was the Variaciones Concertantes, which had immediately struck me as one of the strongest pieces of the century; it still does."

Philip Glass (b. 1937)
Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra

Philip Glass, one of the most influential American composers of our era, began playing the violin at age six, and remained musically active throughout his early years. By the time he was 23, he had studied composition with Darius Milhaud, Vincent Persichetti, and William Bergsma.

It wasn’t until he began study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, however, that he found the distinctive voice we immediately recognize as his. He had been asked by a filmmaker to transcribe some music of Ravi Shankar, and the experience led him away from his previous serial, atonal essays, and toward the incorporation of Eastern techniques in his work.

 His significant output includes the seminal opera Einstein on the Beach, five symphonies, numerous string quartets and solo piano works, and film scores for Koyaanisqatsi, Kundun, La Belle et la Bete, and Dracula among many others.

This evening’s piece was commissioned by timpanist Jonathan Haas as a solo concerto. Ten years from the original commissioning the work was completed, with the addition of a second timpanist. The work received its premiere with the American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein conducting.

Haas describes the work as "purely American, heroic in nature and derivation." Glass’ signature repeating figures move along swiftly in the first movement, demanding swift tuning changes from the soloists in its rapid development.

The second movement shifts frequently from major to minor keys, allowing the timpani to sound at times forbidding, at times ebullient. The slow movement closes with the two soloists restating the initial theme in subdued fashion.

The work closes in a wild, athletic dance-like movement, characterized by wry metrical shifts and a general sense of wit. The work builds to a thunderous conclusion.

 

Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994)
Concerto for Orchestra

I. Intrada. Allegro maestoso.
II. Capriccio notturno e Arioso. Vivace.
III. Passacaglia, Toccata e Chorale. Andante con moto. Allegro giusto. Presto.

Witold Lutoslawski, one of the 20th century’s most influential composers, and widely regarded as the greatest of modern Polish composers, was born into an intellectual, politically active, and musically vibrant family. His father, Jozef, was a fierce defender of Polish autonomy against Bolshevik Russia, his uncle was an influential literary critic, and the extended family included poets, priests, editors, and engineers.

In addition to his political activities Jozef was also a musician, who, according to Witold, played Beethoven and Chopin "very musically." By 1919, Lutoslawski was begging his mother for piano lessons and he and his brother Henryk would play games in which they pretended they were composers. By age nine, Lutoslawski had written his first piano piece.

Coming from such an intellectually demanding background, it isn’t surprising that Lutoslawski first enrolled at Warsaw University as a mathematics student. At the same time, he was pursuing compositional studies at the Warsaw Conservatory with Witold Maliszewski. Drawn in two directions he abandoned math in 1933, and turned all of his attention to music.

According to Steven Stucky’s exhaustive and insightful "Lutoslawski and his Music," the composer’s early influences were Debussy, Ravel and, particularly, Stravinsky, whose influence in his early works Lutoslawski considered "obvious." In 1939, Lutoslawski’s Symphonic Variations received its premiere, prompting conductor Grzegroz Fitelberg to reportedly exclaim, "Listen, this is a real master! You have to be born a musician to write this way!"

As gifted and adventurous as Lutoslawski was, however, his style underwent a dramatic change in the post-war years. Poland was dominated by ties to the Soviet Communist Party, and like many other composers of that era, Lutoslawski endured severe criticism of his excessively "formalist" works. In a conference held in August 1949, Poland’s vice minister of culture, Wlodzimierz Sokorski established guidelines for musical composition asserting that music must "express socialist content in a national form." Lutoslawski’s first symphony earned the dubious distinction of being the first eminent work to be officially condemned.

No longer able to support himself by writing music according to his desires, Lutoslawski turned to writing children’s songs and radio pieces: generally utilitarian works, much of it folk-oriented. Toward the end of this middle period in his development, however, he did write one work of enormous significance, the "Concerto for Orchestra", considered by Stucky to be the greatest achievement in Polish music of the post-war years.

Witold Rowicki had requested the composer to write a work for the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, and Lutoslawski began composing the concerto in 1950. The work premiered on November 26, 1954, with Rowicki conducting, and the performance received an enthusiastic reception from audiences and critics alike. Stefan Jarocincki, of the Przeglad Kulturalny, held that the work once and for all established Lutoslawski as the country’s leading composer.

In this work, Lutoslawski is still appropriating folk influences, but the original material is transformed radically. Like two sides of the same coin, the folk content is sufficiently "national" (defusing political attack) and at the same time innovative, ambitious, and personal.

The folk sources are Masovian in origin. Written in three movements, appended with Baroque titles, the work begins with an Intrada, built on a pedal-point of F-sharp: a deep, sustained note handled by bassoons and double basses. The movement, in seven sections, gathers in intensity as it proceeds, with the initial pedal-point re-entering in the highest reaches of the orchestra.

The Capriccio moves along in rapid, scurrying, whispering figures. A stark, "primitive" melody in the brass, set against staccato strings, provides the centerpiece of the Arioso.

The final movement, the elaborate climax of the work, unifies the materials from the previous movements. Written as a series of variations on an eight-measure theme, the movement offers a wealth of change in dynamics, tempo, and texture, before drawing to a close in a coda of great momentum and power.