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NASHVILLE SYMPHONY GIANCARLO GUERRERO, conductorARABELLA STEINBACHER, violin

SILVESTRE REVUELTASSensemayá

ERICH KORNGOLD Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35

Moderato nobileRomance: AndanteFinale: Allegro assai vivace

Arabella Steinbacher, violin

INTERMISSION

SERGEI PROKOFIEV Suite from Lieutenant Kijé, Op. 60

I. The Birth of KijéII. RomanceIII. Kijé’s WeddingIV. TroikaV. The Burial of Kijé

LEONARD BERNSTEINSymphonic Suite from On the Waterfront

FRIDAY & SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 & 30, AT 8 PM

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54 JANUARY 2016

TONIGHT’S CONCERTAT A GLANCE

SILVESTRE REVUELTAS Sensemayá

• Silvestre Revueltas was one of Mexico’s most prominent 20th-century composers. He served as assistant conductor for the Mexico Symphony Orchestra and during his lifetime forged friendships with both Aaron Copland and celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. He also composed for the screen, writing the scores to such early Mexican films as Night of the Mayas. Inspired by Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén’s poem about the ritual killing of a snake, his intensely driving 1938 piece Sensemayá is influenced at least in part by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

ERICH KORNGOLD Violin Concerto in D Major

• Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold launched his career at the age of 13, when the Vienna Court Opera performed his ballet Der Schneeman (The Snowman). He’s best known to American audiences through his many film scores from the golden age of Hollywood, among them The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk, both starring Errol Flynn. In fact, Korngold’s work in the movie industry wound up hurting his reputation as a “serious” composer of concert music.

• When the war broke out in Europe, Korngold was working in the U.S. and brought his family over, gaining U.S. citizenship in 1943. Before long, he’d set aside film scoring to focus again on concert music. His Violin Concerto, which remains one of his best-known pieces, featured the legendary soloist Jascha Heifetz at the premiere in 1947. The music draws liberally from material that Korngold had originally written for films, including the Hollywood classics Another Dawn, The Prince and the Pauper, Juarez, and Deception.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV Suite from Lieutenant Kijé

• Celebrated for Peter and the Wolf and other great concert pieces, Sergei Prokofiev also wrote for films in his native Russia. His score for the 1933 movie Lieutenant Kijé — one of the first Soviet features to use sound — was also his first important work after returning to his homeland following a 15-year absence. The satirical movie, about a fictional soldier brought into existence by a bureaucratic error, provided a platform for Prokofiev to write music with a broad public appeal. A melody from the second movement, “Romance,” was adapted by Sting for his song “Russians.”

LEONARD BERNSTEIN Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront

• Leonard Bernstein’s score for the 1954 film On the Waterfront is the composer’s only piece written specifically for the movies. Though Elia Kazan’s film remains one of the classics of American cinema, the composer’s experience was frustrating, as his work was adapted to meet the needs of the onscreen action.

NICOLÁS GUILLÉN

ERROL FLYNN IN THE ADVENTURES OF

ROBIN HOOD

POSTER FOR LIEUTENANT KIJÉ

MARLON BRANDO IN ON THE WATERFRONT

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SILVESTRE REVUELTAS

Composed: 1937-38First performance: December 15, 1938, in Mexico City, with the composer conducting First Nashville Symphony performance: February 4-6, 1982, with guest conductor Enrique Bátiz.Estimated length: 7 minutes

Sensemayá

Born on December 31, 1899, in Santiago Papasquiaro in Durango, Mexico; died on October 5, 1940, in Mexico City

In an article for The New York Times which appeared on May 9, 1937, Aaron Copland wrote

that many of the works of Silvestre Revueltas “leave one with an impression similar to that one receives from the bustling life of the typical Mexican fiesta. Revueltas takes his simple tunes…and uses them with all the elaborate paraphernalia available to the composer who is thoroughly aware of the modern movement in music.”

It was just around this time that Revueltas was composing the first version of Sensemayá, which has become his best-known concert piece from his small catalogue. The following year he reworked this brief but intensely vibrant tone poem from its original scoring for chamber orchestra into a version for a vastly expanded orchestra, and this is the version we hear.

Born less than a year before Copland, Revueltas shared some political and artistic ideals with the American, who had befriended his Mexican peer during a trip south of the border in 1932. Revueltas, in turn, spent some time in the United States. Both composers sought reach out to contemporary audiences by incorporating vernacular traits of their respective countries into concert music.

In 1937 Revueltas also headed to Spain to fight for the Leftists against Franco in the Civil War; he then returned to an increasingly desperate existence in Mexico City, where he would die prematurely within a few years, weakened by alcoholism. His artistic circle also included the muralist Diego Rivera and other revolutionary figures. This was the context in which Revueltas composed Sensemayá, only seven years after he had written his first work for orchestra.

Sensemayá takes its inspiration from a poem of the same name by the Afro-Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén. Significantly, Revueltas first encountered the poem on a radio broadcast of the poet reading his work. The poem, which makes powerful use of repetitive and onomatopoetic effects, depicts the ritual capture and killing of a snake and alludes to Afro-Caribbean religious practices.

REVUELTAS SHARED POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC IDEALS WITH AARON COPLAND, WHOM HE’D BEFRIENDED IN 1932.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

The remarkable rhythmic character of Guillén’s poem gave Revueltas his starting point for

the asymmetrical, obsessively repeated rhythmic motifs that throb and pulsate through Sensemayá. Beginning with barely audible, subterranean trills from the bass clarinet and a pattern laid out by the percussion, Revueltas successively adds layers to his soundscape.

Parts of Sensemayá are reminiscent of the brutalist primitivism of Stravinsky’s , but the overall tone is recognizably different. Roberto Kolb Neuhaus, an authority on the composer, writes: “Whereas the muralists depicted the people through themes of epic grandeur that tended to reduce expressions to a single generic characterization…Revueltas sought to discover the innermost soul of these people, their joy as well as their frustration, their hope as well as their pessimistic irony. The resulting music is one of a highly personal nature, far from the more generic nationalistic music composed by his contemporaries.”

Sensemayá is scored for 2 piccolos, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 3 percussionists, piano, and strings.

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ERICH KORNGOLD

Composed: 1945First performance: February 15, 1947, with Jascha Heifetz as the soloist and Vladimir Golschmann conducting the St. Louis Symphony. First Nashville Symphony performance: October 17 & 18, 2003, with guest conductor Enrique Diemecke and soloist Vadim Gluzman.Estimated length: 25 minutes

Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35

Born on May 29, 1897, in Brünn (then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, currently Brno in the Czech Republic); died on November 29, 1957, in Hollywood, California

Being the son of Vienna’s leading music critic might have been intimidating to someone

less gifted, but it didn’t impede Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who raised the bar for child prodigy composers. He began to compose at age 8 and was only 13 when his ballet Der Schneeman (“The Snowman”) was given its premiere at the Vienna Opera. Gustav Mahler — no pushover in matters of musical judgment — was so impressed that he recommended a mentor for the jaw-droppingly gifted youngster. Decades later, long after the elder composer’s death, Korngold would dedicate his Violin Concerto to Mahler’s still-living widow, Alma.

Korngold composed both lush big works and intimate chamber pieces, but he gained particular attention for his operas. In 1920 Korngold fever broke out when his first full-length opera, Die Tote Stadt (“The Dead City”), written in his signature late-Romantic, fin-de-siècle idiom, generated so much buzz that a fierce bidding war was conducted over which opera house in Germany would have the glory of premiering it.

Korngold’s career path took a dramatic turn in the 1930s as he pursued the new opportunities afforded by composing for the film industry. In 1929 he had collaborated with Max Reinhardt,

a mover and shaker in the theater world, on a much-touted adaptation of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Die Fledermaus in Berlin. Reinhardt talked Korngold into joining him in Hollywood, where he wanted his colleague to arrange Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental score to A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Reinhardt’s new film version of the play (in which James Cagney plays Bottom and Mickey Rooney is a giddy-voiced Puck).

Korngold tried to have it all by leading a bi-continental existence, split between Old World Vienna and sunny California. He happened to be in Hollywood, working on his score for The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn, when the Nazis annexed his homeland of Austria. Fortunately, the composer was able to arrange for his family to join him in California, which then became his new home. Until the end of World War II his focus was on writing film scores for Warner Brothers.

Korngold longed to reclaim his position as a “classical” composer and would abandon the screen after Deception, the 1946 film starring Bette Davis. He began to work with classical forms again, drawing on the musical inspiration he had been channeling into films. The Violin Concerto, in fact, mines melodies from several of his film scores. Polish violinist Bronisław Huberman, founder of the Israel Philharmonic, encouraged Korngold to write the Violin Concerto in the summer of 1945. The two hoped this would be the work that marked Korngold’s concert hall comeback. By now, however, he had become typecast as a Hollywood artist. Korngold’s “serious” music, by contrast, was frequently derided as passé. When Jascha Heifetz began introducing the new Violin Concerto, one of the meanest quips appeared in the New York Sun, where critic Irving Kolodin sneered that the score was “more corn than gold.”

Ironically, even as he was enduring a sequence of rejections in his final decade, Korngold had already become an important figure in American musical culture (though one without wide name recognition), thanks to the success of the films he worked on and his influence with his fellow movie composers. In recent decades, both his film scores and his “classical music” — particularly the Violin Concerto and the opera Die Tote Stadt — have been positively reappraised.

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KORNGOLD LONGED TO RECLAIM HIS POSITION AS A “CLASSICAL” COMPOSER AND ABANDONED THE SCREEN IN 1946.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV

Composed: 1933-34 First performance: December 21, 1934, on a radio broadcast from Moscow.First Nashville Symphony performance: January 16 & 17, 1961, with Music Director Willis Page.Estimated length: 20 minutes

Suite from Lieutenant Kijé, Op. 60

Born on April 23, 1891, in Sontsovka, Ukraine (part of the Russian Empire at the time); died on March 5, 1953, in Moscow

In the mid-1930s, Sergei Prokofiev was embarking on his first collaboration with a film

studio in Leningrad. The Russian composer had been in exile since the Bolshevik Revolution and was at the time based in Paris. But the homesick Prokofiev had been rethinking his lifestyle in the West and was preparing to make the transition back to his homeland — now the Soviet Union under Stalin. Prokofiev had already had one of his earlier scores censured by Soviet bureaucrats, but he did not foresee the extent to which the dictator’s cultural policies would later directly impact his life.

Like Revueltas and Copland, Prokofiev grew increasingly concerned about being accessible to the everyday listener. The score he wrote for Lieutenant Kijé — one of the first Soviet feature films to use sound — manifests this shift in artistic philosophy, and the suite Prokofiev derived from it has become one of his best-loved works. “What we need above all is great music — that is, music that will be in keeping both in conception and technical execution with the grandeur of the epoch,” the composer later wrote in an article for a Soviet magazine. “[Such music] must be melodious; moreover, the melody must be simple and comprehensible, without being repetitive or trivial.”

The “new simplicity” was the label Prokofiev suggested for this style of audience-friendly music, intended to extend its appeal to listeners not necessarily familiar with the concert tradition.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

The Violin Concerto makes no pretensions to innovation, but showcases Korngold’s high

level of craftsmanship, winning lyricism, and confident orchestration. The soloist greets us at once, without introduction, and traces a widely spanning theme, which was originally used in the film Another Dawn. Its yearning expansiveness neatly contrasts with the virtuosically choreographed music that serves as a transition passage. Another tune tenderly weaves the violin line in and out of the larger ensemble. (Its source is the period film Juarez, which featured Bette Davis as the wife of the 19th-century puppet ruler of Mexico, Maximilian I.) Following the cadenza, Korngold fills out the recapitulation with sparkling orchestral filigree.

The middle movement, a Romance, calls for gorgeous, soulful playing from the soloist, drawing on material that raids yet another film, the Oscar-winning Anthony Adverse. Here, in the music’s songful character, it’s possible to sense not just Korngold’s desire to return to concert music, but a sublimation of his frustrated opera career as well. The forthright expression of passions that became verboten in avant-garde circles in the postwar years was still allowed, after all, in the movies. The interlude in the middle of the movement apparently has no film origin and represents a more purely “abstract” invention.

Korngold supplies a counterweight to the first two movements’ elevated lyricism with the rhythmic romping of the finale. This dashing rondo rounds off the Concerto in an attitude of exuberant extroversion, showing that the composer has absorbed something of the sensibility of his adopted home.

In addition to solo violin, the Concerto is scored for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons (2nd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, and strings.

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His pursuit of this style would soon lead to Romeo and Juliet, the film score for Alexander Nevsky, and other “blockbuster” works that remain among his most famous. As for Lieutenant Kijé, the commission came from Yury Tynyanov, a writer heading the studio’s screenwriting department who had been impressed by the directness of Prokofiev’s First Symphony (known as the “Classical”), from 1918.

Tynyanov had initially authored the satirical Lieutenant Kijé as a novella, drawing on an actual historical incident from the reign of Russian Tsar Paul I. The titular lieutenant doesn’t actually exist but is a name inadvertently entered into a list of personnel through a clerical error. Orders from the Tsar regarding the phantom Lieutenant Kijé force his staff to pretend he is a real flesh-and-blood soldier — even to the point of sending him to Siberia and then pardoning him — since they are petrified of revealing their mistake.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Prokofiev’s five-part suite is not a mere series of cuts from the score; in fact, he expanded

some sections which appear on the soundtrack as very short cues. They follow the narrative order of the film, starting with an offstage fanfare and then a piccolo-accented march for the “Birth of Kijé.” The imaginary hero is associated with the theme entrusted to flute and tenor saxophone (a sonic stand-in for Kijé). The “Romance” (which includes a tune reused by Sting on his debut solo album) provides a soulful, tuneful interlude before “Kijé’s Wedding,” a sham ceremony enacted with proper pomp by the Tsar’s followers. The especially famous “Troika” depicts the rollicking of some drunken officers as they ride in a sleigh in search of Kijé. When the Tsar is told that his trusted lieutenant has “died” and therefore cannot be promoted, he orders a grand state funeral, followed by “Kijé’s Burial,” a musical summing-up of a life that was never actually lived

In addition to solo violin, the Concerto is scored for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons (2nd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, and strings.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Composed: 1954 (the film score) and 1955 (the symphonic suite) First performance: August 11, 1955, at the Tanglewood Summer Festival, with Leonard Bernstein leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra.First Nashville Symphony performance: October 23 & 24, 1998, with Music Director Kenneth Schermerhorn.Estimated length: 22 minutes

Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront

Born on August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts; died on October 14, 1990, in New York City

R anked No. 8 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best American movies of all

time, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront also has a spot on the AFI’s list of the top film scores in American cinema, at No. 22. Framed as a film noirish take on a noble individual’s brave crusade against a violent status quo, On the Waterfront tells the story of dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) and his defiance of the thuggish union boss who controls operations on the waterfront.

Leonard Bernstein wrote the score during a three-month sojourn in Hollywood in 1954. “The whole picture is what counts; and the composer must see it not as a composer but as a man of the theater,” he wrote in 1954, reflecting on his experience in Hollywood. This adventure turned out to be not only Bernstein’s first but also his last venture into film music per se: an anomaly in the otherwise naturally gregarious and collaborative Bernstein’s career. (Other film scores featuring his music are adapted from preexisting compositions.)

This makes sense, given the frustration he describes in witnessing a carefully constructed set piece for his score turned into a musical non-sequitur during a last-minute dubbing session: “Kazan decided he just couldn’t give up that

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“THE WHOLE PICTURE IS WHAT COUNTS; AND THE COMPOSER MUST SEE IT NOT AS A COMPOSER BUT AS A MAN OF THE THEATER,” BERNSTEIN WROTE IN 1954, REFLECTING ON HIS EXPERIENCE IN HOLLYWOOD.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

While the score comprises several distinct sections, biographer Humphrey Burton

observes that the result is less a “suite” of varied episodes than a tone poem drawing on the technique of thematic transformation Franz Liszt pioneered in his tone poems. Even without knowing the film — and this is a film you definitely want to know — it’s easy to follow the progress of these transformations, thanks to the distinctive profile and expressive coloring of Bernstein’s thematic material, beginning with the solo horn’s theme (originally heard during the opening credit sequence).

Touches of mournful blues allude to the lonely city — Kazan’s film is set amid the rundown dockyards of Hoboken — while its violence is evoked by some of Bernstein’s most aggressive harmonic and rhythmic gestures. Here, he uses his “jazz mode” to convey nightmarish brutality rather than big-city exuberance.

At the Suite’s emotional center, Bernstein elaborates music from the unforgettable rooftop scene between the young lovers, Terry and Edie (played by Eva Marie Saint). Its main theme, a variant of the horn solo associated with Terry, takes shape as a characteristically yearning, widely spaced melody — a type that recurs in Bernstein’s most sweepingly lyrical vein. (This melody is a cousin to “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide, for example.) After the violent music resurfaces, Bernstein supplants it with his most glorious transformation yet of Terry’s theme and an ode to his defiant endurance.

The Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 timpanists, percussion (bass drum, chimes, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drums, tam-tams, triangle, tuned drums, vibraphone, wood block, xylophone), harp, piano, and strings.

— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com.

ineffably sacred grunt which Brando emits at the end [of the tender rooftop love scene],” meaning that Bernstein’s “Tristan-ish” climax (as he put it) was replaced by a slow fade-out.

The problem in general, Bernstein pointed out, is that “it is musically unsatisfactory for a composer to write a score whose chief merit ought to be its unobtrusiveness.” Ruing the experience of the cutting room, he described how the film composer “sits by, protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting, be it with heavy heart, the inevitable loss of a good part of his score. Everyone tries to comfort him. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’ ”

Which is exactly what Bernstein did the following summer, crafting an independent concert work that develops the principal ideas from his film score into a neatly integrated musical experience. Besides Hollywood’s ruthless treatment of composers, Bernstein felt burned for political reasons as well. When the film swept the Academy Awards with eight wins, his music was overlooked, stoking the composer’s conviction that he had been deliberately snubbed.

There was still another political angle underlying Bernstein’s feelings here. The anti-union On the Waterfront is often discussed as director Kazan’s response to his censure by fellow artists for “naming names” during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s.

To drastically simplify the situation: because Kazan had given testimony identifying members of the Communist Party in the infamous hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 — in the process destroying the careers of some of his colleagues in the film industry — he set off a wave of bitter resentment that continued for the rest of his life. The decidedly leftist Bernstein was thus initially reluctant to collaborate with the director.

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ABOUT THE SOLOISTARABELLA STEINBACHER, violin

Since her international

breakthrough in March 2004 with the Orchestre

Philharmonique de Radio France under Sir Neville Mariner, Arabella Steinbacher has become known as one of the leading violinists worldwide. Her diverse repertoire includes more than 30 concertos for violin.

This season, she continues her collaboration with Festival Strings Lucerne as principal guest artist. As a CARE ambassador, she continually supports people in need. In 2015, she was nominated Artist of the Year for the Gramophone Magazine Award.

The 2015/16 season includes performances with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and a concert at Beethovenfest Bonn with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. Other highlights of this season include her debut with Los Angeles Philharmonic at Hollywood Bowl, her performance of both of Prokofiev’s violin concertos with RSB Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, and a collaboration

with WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne at the Dresden Music Festival.

In June 2015, Steinbacher’s latest album, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky – Violin Concertos, with Orchestre Philharmonique de la Suisse Romande and Charles Dutoit, was released by the label Pentatone Classics. Since recording exclusively for Pentatone in 2009, she has published a number of albums demonstrating her musical variety. In 2009 her first CD, with the RSB Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, won her the ECHO Klassik Award.

Steinbacher has appeared with the leading international orchestras including New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C., and Orchestra National de France.

Born in Munich in 1981, Steinbacher began studying violin at age 3. At 9, she became the youngest violin student of Ana Chumachenko at the Munich Academy of Music. She received further musical inspiration and guidance from Ivry Gitlis. She currently plays the “Booth” Stradivari (1716) generously loaned by the Nippon Music Foundation.

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