Tuesday October 27, 2009

Charley talks with Littleton Symphony music director Jurgen de Lemos about their Halloween concert Saturday.
Colorado Music Festival Orchestra
Michael Christie, conductor
Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op.67 34:53 (7/11/08)
Also, Charley talks with Boulder Philharmonic music director Michael Butterman about their opening night concert Friday.
Alberto Ginastera: Four Dances from Estancia 14:07
Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra/ Michael Butterman, conductor
NCA (3/21/09)
And, Charley anticipates Lang Lang's appearance with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra this Friday.
Johannes Brahms: Intermezzo in F minor & Romance in F major from Six Pieces, Op.118
Lang Lang, piano
Telarc 80524 10-11 6:49


Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67
I. Allegro con brio
II. Andante con moto
III. Scherzo: Allegro
IV. Allegro

“So often heard,” Robert Schumann wrote of the Fifth Symphony, “it still exercises its power over all ages, just as those great phenomena of nature that, no matter how often they recur, fill us with awe and wonder. This Symphony will go on centuries hence, as long as the world and world's music endure.”
According to Beethoven's biographer, Alexander Thayer, “this wondrous work was no sudden inspiration. Themes for (three of the movements) are found in sketchbooks belonging, at the very latest, to the years 1800 and 1801.” After interrupting himself to write the Fourth Symphony, Beethoven finished the Fifth in the spring of 1808.
Beethoven conducted the first performance at a typically massive all-Beethoven concert in Vienna on December 22, 1808. Besides the Fifth, the program included the Sixth Symphony, the concert aria Ah, Perfido, two movements from the Mass in C major, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy. One listener complained: “There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing--and still more of a loud....Many a failure in the performance vexed our patience in the highest degree.”
“In spite of several faults which I could not prevent,” said Beethoven, “the public received everything most enthusiastically.” Critic Amadeus Wendt wrote: “Beethoven's music inspires in its listeners awe, fear, horror, pain, and that exquisite nostalgia that is the soul of romanticism.” E.T.A. Hoffmann called the Fifth “one of the most important works of the master whose position in the first rank of composers of instrumental music can now be denied by no one....It is a concept of genius, executed with profound deliberation, which in a very high degree brings the romantic content of the music to expression.”
In 1830, Mendelssohn played the first movement on the piano for Goethe, who said: “It is tremendous--quite crazy--one is almost afraid the house will collapse; and imagine how it must sound in the orchestra!” Of the celebrated four notes that begin the movement, Beethoven is supposed to have said: “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” Much has been made of this remark, most of it nonsense. Pointing to the same four notes in the Fourth Piano Concerto, theorist Heinrich Schenker wondered, “Was this another door on which Fate knocked or was someone else knocking at the same door?” By coincidence, the rhythm of the four notes corresponds to the Morse code for the letter “V.” That, coupled with Winston Churchill's “V for Victory” gesture, inspired the BBC to use the phrase as a signature during World War II.
Sir Donald Francis Tovey compared the second movement to Shakespeare's heroines, for “the same courage, the same beauty of goodness, and the same humor.” Berlioz claimed that the third movement produces “the inexplicable emotion that one experiences under the magnetic gaze of certain individuals.” With the finale, writes George Grove, “all the noisy elements at Beethoven's command in those simpler days (burst) like a thunder-clap into the major key and into a triumphal march.”
The Symphony is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani and strings.
Biographer Maynard Solomon notes the Symphony’s “unheralded rhythmic concentration, economy of thematic material, and startling innovations—-the oboe cadenza in the first movement, the addition of piccolo and double bassoon to the winds, the ‘spectral’ effects of the double basses in the scherzo and trio, the trombones in the finale, the return of material from the scherzo in the finale.” For Paul Henry Lang, the Fifth is “the consummate example of symphonic logic.”