Thursday October 22, 2009

Charley anticipates pianist Olga Kern's appearance with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra this weekend during the Orchestra's Rachmaninoff Festival.
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Polichinelle in F sharp minor, Op.3 No. 4
Olga Kern, piano
KVOD Performance Studio NCA 091907 MS
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Serenade, Op.3 No.5
Olga Kern, piano
Harmonia Mundi 907399 Track 8 3:03
Dan Drayer talks with pianist Olga Kern about her personal connection with Rachmaninoff.
Colorado Symphony Orchestra
James Gaffigan, conductor
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 2 in D major, Opus 36 (5/15-17/09)
Also, Charley talks with Denver Philharmonic conductor laureate Horst Buchholz about their concert tomorrow, and with violinist Ignace Jang about his appearance with the Littleton Symphony Orchestra tomorrow.
Claude Debussy: La plus que lente
Ignace Jang, violin; Shirin Pancaroğlu, harp
Doublemoon 0009 Track 2 5:36



Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 2 in D major,
Opus 36
I. Adagio molto; Allegro con brio
II. Larghetto
III. Scherzo: Allegro
IV. Allegro molto

Sketches for the Second Symphony date from as early as 1800. Most of the work was done during the summer and fall of 1802, about the time that Beethoven realized the “roaring” in his ears would lead to total deafness.
The first performance took place in Vienna on April 5, 1803. It was a typically mammoth all-Beethoven concert. Besides the Second Symphony, the program included the First Symphony, the Third Piano Concerto and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives.
Rehearsals began at eight that same morning. According to an eyewitness, “it was a terrible rehearsal, and at half past two everybody was exhausted and more or less dissatisfied. Prince Karl Lichnowsky (one of Beethoven’s patrons)…had sent for bread and butter, cold meat and wine, in large baskets. He pleasantly asked all to help themselves, and this was done with both hands, the result being that good nature was restored again.”
After the premiere, the Second Symphony was criticized for its “striving for the new and surprising.” A Leipzig performance a year later moved one reviewer to describe the work as “a gross enormity, an immense wounded snake, unwilling to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, though bleeding to death, furiously beats about with its tail in the finale.” But for Hector Berlioz, “in this symphony, everything is noble, energetic, proud.”
In his book on the Beethoven symphonies, George Grove wrote: “The Second Symphony is a great advance on the First….The advance is more in dimensions and style, and in the wonderful fire and force of the treatment, than in any really new ideas, such as its author afterwards introduced and are specially connected in our minds with the name of Beethoven….The first movement is distinctly of the old world, though carried out with a spirit, vigor, and effect, and occasionally with a caprice, which are nowhere surpassed, if indeed they are equaled, by Haydn and Mozart. Nor is there anything in the extraordinary grace, beauty, and finish of the Larghetto to alter this…nor in the Finale, grotesque and strong as much of it is: it is all still of the old world, till we come to the Coda, and that, indeed, is distinctly of the other order.”
Grove regards the Second Symphony as “the culminating point of the old pre-Revolution world, the world of Haydn and Mozart; it was the farthest point to which Beethoven could go before he burst into that wonderful new region into which no man had before penetrated, of which no man had even dreamed, but which is now one of our dearest possessions, and will always be known by his immortal name.”