Thursday March 18, 2010


Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Edward Gardner, conductor; Leila Josefowicz, violin
Modest Moussorgsky: Night on Bald Mountain

Sergei Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Opus 19 (1/8-9/10)
Also, Charley talks with Barbara Hamilton Primus and Paul Primus about the Colorado Chamber Players Bach concerts this weekend.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Contrapuncti 1 & 11 from The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080 7:34
Colorao Chamber Players (Paul Primus and David Waldman, violins; Barbara Hamilton Primus, viola; Judith McIntyre, cello)
Johann Sebastian Bach (arr.Dmitry Sitkovetsky): Aria and Variations 8, 11 & 25 from Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 10:15
Colorao Chamber Players (Paul Primus, violin; Barbara Hamilton Primus, viola; Judith McIntyre, cello)
KVOD Performance Studio 3/17/10 MS


Modest Moussorgsky (1839-1881): Night on Bald Mountain

Notorious for leaving works unfinished, Moussorgsky was also loathe to abandon good material. The music now known as Night on Bald Mountain popped up in various guises for over twenty years and only emerged fully after the composer's death.
On Christmas Day, 1858 Moussorgsky announced plans to make an opera of Gogol's St. John's Eve. Less than two years later, he spoke of a commission for incidental music to a play called The Witches by his old army buddy Baron Georgy Mengden. The music for both these projects, if he ever wrote any of it at all, is lost. Parts of the Bald Mountain music appeared in his unfinished opera Salammbô of 1864.
Something concrete finally surfaced on June 23, 1867 (St. John's Eve), when Moussorgsky completed an orchestral fantasy titled St. John's Night on Bare Mountain. ``I wrote it quickly,'' he said, ``straight away in full score without preliminary drafts, in twelve days. It seethed within me, and I worked day and night, hardly knowing what was happening within me. And now I see in my sinful prank an independent Russian product, free from German profundity and routine.''
Based on the legend of the witches' sabbath on St. John's Eve at Mt. Triglav near Kiev, the music, said Moussorgsky, is ``a very graphic depiction of a Witches' Sabbath provided by the testimony of a woman on trial, who was accused of being a witch and had confessed love pranks with Satan himself to the court. The poor lunatic was burnt. All this occurred in the Sixteenth Century. From this description I stored up the construction of the Sabbath.''
Accordingly, Moussorgsky prefaced the score with the program: ``Subterranean din of unearthly voices. Appearance of the Spirits of Darkness, followed by that of the god Tchernobog. Glorification of the Black God, the Black Mass. Witches' Revels. At the height of the orgies, there is heard from afar the bell of a little church in the village. The spirits of Darkness disperse. Daybreak.''
St. John's Night on Bare Mountain was never performed during Moussorgsky's lifetime. In 1871 he added a chorus to form ``The Sacrifice of the Black Goat on the Bald Mountain,'' a portion of the opera-ballet Mlada, a collaboration with Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin. It, too, was never performed.
In 1877 the same music was reworked as an intermezzo titled ``Dream Vision of the Peasant Lad'' from the comic opera Sorochintsy Fair. It was this version that Rimsky-Korsakov arranged and titled Night on Bald Mountain for a St. Petersburg performance on October 27, 1886. Moussorgsky's original 1867 version wasn't published until 1968.
It was also Rimsky-Korsakov who compounded the confusion by insisting that the Bald Mountain music originated as a piece for piano and orchestra, along the lines of Liszt's Totentanz. As Moussorgsky's biographer, M.D. Calvocoressi, puts it, ``there is good reason to believe that it never existed outside Rimsky-Korsakov's notoriously faulty memory.''
There was yet another version of the Bald Mountain music. In 1878, on a concert tour of the Ukraine, Crimea and towns along the Don and the Volga, Moussorgsky played piano transcriptions of his orchestral music, including ``a musical picture from a new comic opera, Sorochintsy Fair.'' It was the very same Bald Mountain music.
Rimsky Korsakov's orchestration of the work calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, a bell in D, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, harp and strings.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Opus 19
I. Andantino
II. Scherzo: Vivacissimo
III. Moderato; Allegro moderato

Early in 1915 Prokofiev sketched an opening melody for a one-movement violin concertino. ``I often regretted,'' he later recalled, ``that other work prevented me from returning to the pensive opening'' of the piece.
His chance came two years later, when he spent the summer at a country house near Petrograd reading Kant and Schopenhauer and turning his early sketch into a full three-movement violin concerto. A pianist, Prokofiev sought advice in writing for the violin from the Polish violinist Paul Kochanski, who was scheduled to play the premiere the following November. But World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution intervened, and the planned performance was postponed.
Indeed, the first performance didn't take place until October 18, 1923 in Paris. By then Prokofiev had left Russia, toured the United States and made his way to Paris, where Serge Koussevitzky offered to conduct the work. Several soloists, including Bronislaw Huberman, had refused to play it, so the concertmaster Marcel Darrieux was engaged. He ``did quite well with it,'' according to the composer.
Modernists criticized the work for not being complex enough. Georges Auric accused it of ``Mendelssohnism.'' A year later Joseph Szigeti took up the Concerto, playing it all over Europe, and its entry into the standard repertory was assured.
Biographer Israel Nestyev writes of the ``unusual sequence'' of the Concerto's three movements, ``the first and third are predominantly tender and melodic, while the second...is a fast, grotesque, and mocking scherzo....Unexpectedly for Prokofiev's music, a tenderly melodious, lyrical theme predominates in the first movement (and is restated in the finale). It is almost impossible to find in any of Prokofiev's early works a melody so simple and clear, so soulful and warm.''
In the second movement, says Nestyev, ``the whole gamut of scherzo-like moods and images'' is presented. ```Perpetuum mobile' and sparkling, sometimes mischievous humour predominate....In the third movement serene lyricism once again prevails....Just as in the beginning, the violin sings in a full voice of the beautiful and lofty feelings of man.''
The score calls for solo violin, piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, tuba, timpani, side drum, tambourine, harp and strings.